Work in Progress

This is our pilgrimage, to the Organisational Management Christmas party. This is our anti-pilgrimage.

A journey to a distant place, in search of new meaning, of a higher good: that’s a pilgrimage. To search for wholeness, for personal transformation. To undertake an act of penance. A break from daily life …

And this? A journey, yes, but in rejection of new meaning – fake meaning. Of Organisational Management meaning. A search for wholeness? For the greater whole, rather; beyond the fake whole of the Organisational Management campus. Beyond the imitation whole. A search for personal transformation, in an act of penance? For a way to resist the transformation, rather. To remain unmanageable.

 

Across the campus. Across the campus pavement.

We should hang ourselves! Leave our bodies swinging from some lamppost. From some surveillance tower. Our philosopher’s bodies. Because this is where they killed philosophy …

Come on – we’re not exactly philosophers, are we? Just because we work in a Philosophical Studies. I mean, it’s not as if we’ve thought great thoughts. Or are thinking them. Or will think them.

The only hope is to deepen the farce. To deepen the nihilistic fall.

A new life! Our new Organisational Management lives! That’s what we’re marching towards. Our new future!

We’re crossing the campus to acclimatise ourselves. To get used to the idea of the Organisational Management move. To let the idea of the Organisational Management move settle in our souls.

 

We’re crossing the Organisational Management campus. Their campus. The enemy campus.

Where we will be held prisoners, like the children of Israel in Egypt. Where we’ll be exiled, as by the rivers of Babylon … Where we’ll sing our philosophical psalms.

 

We’re taking the long way round – of course we are. The scenic route. We need to accustom ourselves to our new world. To the new campus!

 

This is our campus journey, we philosophers. We last philosophers. We unhappy few. In the cold! In snow flurries! Practically dying of exposure! Fare forward, voyagers!

Late, we’re going to be late.

Of course we’re going to be late. We have to be late. The least thing we could is to be late!

The dilatory … is our milieu. We’re pacing ourselves. Waiting.

Waiting for what? For Godot? For oblivion?

We’re waiting for waiting … There is a question of philosophical honour.

 

We will appear at the Organisational Management party when we choose to appear. We’re not slaves of the Organisational Managers – not yet. We’re not here to follow their orders. We won’t be whipped into line!

We’ll roll in drunk in our time. Sweetly drunk. Singing drunk. They’ll see us as … unmanageable. Unconquerable. Not rebellious in any obvious sense. Not opposing our will to theirs. Not butting heads. Not opposing our wills to theirs.

A sweet refusal. A merry refusal. A Christmas refusal: that’s what we’re going for.

Come on, they’ll just think we’re just full of Christmas spirit. That we had one too many out of Christmas cheer.

Sure, we’re full of Christmas spirit! Full of the spirit of the feast! Of the carnival! Of the suspension of work!

 

We’re actually coming to the party – surely that’s something. We’re showing good will! Extending the olive branch! It’s in the spirit of cooperation! Even collaboration!

We’re making an effort. Left our homes! Braved the Newcastle winter! We’ve left the coast. Travelled inland. Ridden the Metro. Made an effort …

We’ve torn ourselves away from our Russian film watching. We could have been inside, watching Hard to be a God or the thousandth time. Pondering My Car, Khrushtalev! for the millionth time.

Or just drinking – drinking! Looking out at the snow instead of being in the snow. Look out at the whirling flakes.

Our kind … So ill-fitting. So maladjusted.

Why did we appear? What’s our use? What are we for? Attitudes like ours … The thoughts that we have …

Why do we only want to destroy, destroy? How can that be our role: to dream of destruction? To crave destruction?

Our pathologies. Our maladies. Our disturbances. Our fantasies …

 

We’re a type that only appears at the end, as a sign of the end. Of the sickness of the end.

Our kind … our type … Harbingers. Preparers.

 

This excess energy … This extra darkness … this force of negativity … but what’s it for? What are we for?

What’s wrong with a time that produces people like us?

 

Dreamers of disaster: why are they needed? Living death drives.

 

Will we find out what we’re for? Will there be a special role for us that we’ll discover at the end?

 

A psychological shift has occurred. There’s been a change in the spiritual climate of the world.

 

And philosophy’s only made it worse. Philosophy’s only given us a vocabulary.

Yet what we express isn’t philosophy. We express it through philosophy, it’s true, but it’s not philosophy. We’re using philosophy to do something else.

What for? Religious purposes? Apocalyptic purposes? To express our peculiar … personalities? Our living fever …

 

There’s a reason for this. There’s a reason for us.

There’s a language we can speak. That philosophy gave us. That our philosophical training gave us. Even a fluency …

 

There are words, phrases. Whole philosophies. That we’re ransacking. That we’re selling for parts.

 

We indulge it in each other. We multiply it in each other. It’s accelerated. Given wings. Made to echo.

 

Our living fever … Which we have in common. Which we share.

 

What were we brought to Newcastle to do? What would Cicero have us do?

All the positivity … is revolting. That’s what we want to say. We can’t stand the … positivity. We can’t bear it, the … positivity. What it was supposed to mean. It sickens us. All positivity is…. Hypocrisy. Is a lie.

All upbeatness. All words of encouragement …  Unbearable! All good cheer. Nauseating! All non-depression. All non-despair. Flaunting itself! Dancing, pretty much! Shameless!

 

Listen to these people talk. The way they speak. Move. Their bearing.

It’s an offense. It’s disgusting. It’s aberrant. How can they bear themselves? How can they go on? How can they be like this? How can they survive, from moment to moment? How does all this go on? This lie? This exuberance? This can-do. This yes I can.

It’s the worst nihilism. Much worse than we are. Than anything we could do.

At lest we’re truthful. At least we don’t try to cover it over with lies. Which is why there’s some integrity to us, after all. It’s like they’re drunk – permanently. Like they’ll never come down. Like they’ll never have to come down.

Because of some gift of temperament. Because of some natural mood. Because of some … hormones. Some luck of physiology. Of genetic inheritance.

We know that we’re fake. We know it’s all fake. But what good does that do us? At least they can live in good cheer. At least they can go on, happily. As for us … You’d have thought we could do something with all this truth. That we could make something of it: what’s been shown to us.

Whereas, in fact, it leaves us with nothing. It gives us nothing. It deprives us of everything. It reduces us to nothing. Destroys us. Wears us away. There’s nothing we can do with it. We can’t make it into … anything.

Except literature … Maybe that.

The Work … is that what it’s about: our failure? Are you trying to make good on what’s been revealed? To write something about it? With it? Are you trying to do something with our despair?

What hubris! A despair work! Cunning! There’s something sly about it. An attempt to outwit stupidity. To pull intelligence out of the hat of idiocy … at the last moment. In the final hour.

You opportunist!

To write about your failure is still a way of failing.

No, it isn’t.

No – it isn’t. A cunning plan: to make a literary success of where you failed as a philosopher. It’s brilliant …. A masterstroke …

But it’s stupidity’s brilliance. It’s failure’s masterstroke.

Of course, it’s a betrayal of philosophy. I mean, using philosophy for literary purposes. Tell us, is that what you always had in mind? Were you really a kind of literary spy in the house of philosophy? All along? Did you always harbour literary dreams?

That meant you never were a philosopher, not really. And it means that you never really felt your failure as a philosopher, which is worse. Because writing about that failure would be your literary success.

Cunning! Fiendish! What a plan! What resourcefulness! Brilliant! What a manoeuvre! All along, you were an insincere failure. You never really believed in your failure. You thought you could turn it all into some Beckett play, some Bernhard monologue.

Your philosophical sojourn. Your passing-through philosophy. When it was all about literature and nothing other than literature – all along!

And what are we left with, those around you? What are we all about? We’re bit players in your drama. We’re background characters. Flat characters. Nobodies and nothings in your literary concoction.

I’ll tell you what the work is: to write the book, then die. To draw a line under it all.

How about writing the book, then living.

Because I can’t stand the shame No more shame, The shame of being human – Deleuze writes about that.

 

You want to finish the Work. To complete the Work. As if you have done with your own stupidity. And you’ll never have done with that.

Unless you could show stupidity as something else. Is that possible? Unless you can turn your stupidity into literature. It’s a masterstroke. I don’t know whether to … punch you in the nose, or embrace you.

You’ve found a way out. A literary escape route. The Work … I see it now. What it was all about … Hope, in the final hour. At the very end. Right here … hope. That you could make good on it all.

I never would have thought it. Believed it possible. I never thought you had it in you. It’s admirable, in its way. Or it’s disgusting. I’m not sure which. You were a pretender, all along. A fake philosopher. A charlatan.

 

The Work – so we’re all imprisoned in your work. We’re all being channelled into your Work. We’re all locked up. This will be a scene, wont it: us saying we’ll all be imprisoned. Us saying, this will be a scene.

What literary resourcefulness! What a literary trick! What literary cunning! Infinite resourceful! Literary genius!

But will your book be any good? A book made of our despair. That is driven by our despair. That runs on despair. That is a despair engine. A despair machine.

And you’re a despair impressario. I’ll bet your recording this conversation. I’ll bet if we shook you down, we’d find some recording device. Your phone with its mic on. Or are you remembering it all? Through some trick. You’ll come to a bad end, trickster. You won’t be able to live with yourself, trickster.

 

Looking through the notebook. These are things that we’ve been saying. Boys, we have a traitor in our midst. A member of the secret police. Is that what you are, X? Are you writing reports about us. But who could be interested? Do they think we’re some kind of secret society?

Don’t flatter yourselves. Who’s this for? What are you writing for?

These are your red pills. This is how you’re escaping from the Matrix. From the false world. Literature is gnosis, for you. These notes … these records you’re keeping. Who for? Posterity?

Do you think there’ll be anyone to read them? Do you think there’ll be a future in which anyone reads?

The pointlessness of it. This literary recording. Are you keeping a diary? Who keeps diaries? Is this for something? Are you planning to write it up? But for who? For what purpose? Who would want to read such things? You, in the future? To reflect on the follows of your youth. But you’re hardly young anymore.

What’s it matter? We’ll all go mad in the end.

 

Was your philosophical gloom was always false gloom? Your philosophical despair? You always had a card up your sleeve. You always had a final trick to play. You always had hope.  

 

Judas! Who would publish this anyway, your literary shit? Who would want to read it? This isn’t a country for this sort of thing. Do you think this is postwar Austria, or something? Eurodoom doesn’t sell, does it? The Anglophone world doesn’t go in for this sort of thing.

 

You’re always been looking at yourself at one remove. You’re an actor. Looking at us from afar. Never really with us.

We’ve give our lives to this. We’ve ruined ourselves. And you … you’re going to be the Great Survivor. The literary survivor. Make literary gold out of philosophical dross.

You’re a tourist. You were a passenger all along. And I thought you were one of us! And so did Cicero! That’s why she made you Head of Philosophy, because she thought you were one of us.

Unless she’d worked it out … unless she thought .. Perhaps Cicero employed you for this reason: she wanted some literary immortality. She saw a literary type in you. She saw a writer – a literary writer She wanted someone to tell the story of the demise of philosophy at N.U.

She saw someone to tell her own story. To celebrate her. She wanted to enjoy some literary immortality.

But of course there is the question of getting published. Of you being able to et this out there at all. There is the question of whether you can write.

 

Literature: that’s your consolation. Well, its pathetic. Literary fiction…

This isn’t going to win any prizes. It probably isn’t even going to be reviewed. Who could make sense of it. It doesn’t sound very establishment literary fiction, does it? You’ll be lucky to get it published. Oh, maybe you’ll publish it yourself. Through Lulu, or whatever. And sell, like, zero copies. Give is a copy each, and that can be our testimony.

 

It’s an amusing idea, I admit it … A record has been kept … Our … world won’t just disappear into oblivion. It’s a kind of intellectual history, in its way. An anti-intellectual history. An account of an obscure pseudo-intellectual backwater. Of a culture of let’s-pretend-we’re Europeans.

How will you make us look? Will we be sympathetic characters? You’ll need some plot. You can’t just have us moaning. How would you sell it to a publisher? What’s trending in the publishing word these days? Could you see it on the 3 -for 2 piles? Better prepare your speech prize …

 

Write about your affair. Make it erotic, philosopher. Put some sex in it – that’ll sell. Call it Philosophy in the Bedroom, or whatever. You can write all about your affair. Very racy. You’re seeing Priya for the story? To have something to write about?

 

Are you going to put us reading your notebook into your novel? How tediously postmodern. How self-referential. All these tired literary tricks. It’s all been done!

Everyone’s thoroughly sick of literature. It’s dying out! Even the stuff that wins prizes isn’t literature. Just schlocky literary fiction, which has nothing to do with Literature, capital L. And I’ll bet that’s what you’re trying to write: Literature, with a capital L.

You’re too late for literature, idiot. You need a reading culture, and there isn’t a reading culture anymore, if there ever was. We’re all distracted. We’re all busy. We’ve done out literary reading. Holderlin, Char. The rest of it … forget it.

 

The writer in our midst. Our Homer. Who’s telling our epic. We should do some literary things, for your narrative. Catch trains, or fall in love. Do you see yourself as a Sebald, As a chronicler of intellectual life. At a pivotal time. Like Mann. Or Dostoevsky. Or Woolf.

Hypnotised by our failings. Mesmerised by our inadequacies. Amazed – still amazed – that we’d got nowhere. Only now is it hitting us. Only now are we really experiencing it, since it was hidden for so long.

Only now do have the time, the space, to assess our situation. To look back down our path. To survey the route from whence we came. To take a breather! To pause and take note!

Only now can we really see it, now we have jobs. Now that we have a steady income. Now that we have fixed term contracts. Now uncertainty is held at bay.

Only now can we see what’s been made of us! What we made of ourselves! How we’ve been shaped and have shaped ourselves.

Only now can we make the grim assessment. Can we really see what’s happened, what’s been happening. What we’ve made of ourselves. My God!

Only now do we have the opportunity … scarcely an opportunity. Only now can we be made to face it. Because we have no excuses anymore! We can’t say, it’s because I want a job because we want to go somewhere! Because I’m trying to publish! Because I’m busy with other things!

Only now that we have a job! Only now that we have somewhere to live! That we make a living! Now that we can cover our debts!

Now we have time for rest and recuperation. Now that we have  kind of furlough. Shore leave. We can participate in normal society Pay taxes for the first time. Pay or rent for the first time. Not live on benefits.

Now that we’re no longer regulars at the Job Seeker’s office. Now that we no longer have to queue up to sign on. Now that we’ve emerged into the world. Now that we’re no longer nymphs, no longer larvae. Now we can look at ourselves in the mirror Now we can see ourselves as what we are.

And what do we see? Desperate ones … Stupid ones … And not in a good way. Twisted ones …

The question is what we do with this twistedness? What, with our fucked-up-ness? Where’s it going to take us? Where will it lead us?

Couldn’t they smell the desperation? The fact that we’d do anything – anything for a job. That we’d be fucked by anyone, would fuck anymore. Any humiliation. Any compromise. For a job.

Couldn’t they see that we’d been completely corrupted by our desperation? Completely abased by it.

Couldn’t they see that we were made what we were by our desperation? Which is to say: craven. Pathetic. Unadmirable.

People who’d just sell themselves out. Sell out their pride. Sell out their sense of who it is they were. Who’d travel anywhere for a job. Who’d put up with anything. Who would sign away their soul, more or less.

Pathetic. Abased. Compromised. Couldn’t they see that we’d say, Yes I will to any request. Volunteering for everything. Putting our hands straight up in the air. Available for it all. Simply waiting to be given an opportunity.

Craven. Ingratiating. That’s what we were. Suckers up and brown-nosers. People of no worth, no standards.

 

Talking to the great and the good at conferences. Vying to sit next to them at conference meals.

When we could barely afford the conferences! When we couldn’t feed ourselves at conferences! But we’d paid for a ticket to the conference meal just so we could place ourselves next to some influential person or another. Someone in charge of some Philosophy department or another. So that we’d be a face to them, at least. So they’d know our names at least.

All but putting ourselves out to be fucked. All but waring a sign around our necks saying, Will fuck for teaching hours. Free blow job for part time hours. For a few hours teaching here or there. A few hours teaching first year seminars, or whatever. Anything!

 

That’s the desperation we come from. And it’s still in us, not far from the surface. Only now it’s joined by resentment that we prostituted ourselves. With delayed anger that we humiliated ourselves. With the knowledge that we let ourselves become the lowest of the low. Pathetic sorts. Base sorts. Crawlers in the mud.

That’s who were, and now we’re angry.

 

Damned, more or less. Buried, more or less.

The bottomless swamp of our indignity. Sucking us in. Drawing us down.

We’ll never rise above what we were. What we had to be (or so we thought.)

It’s pathetic! Ludicrous! That we were so pathetic and ludicrous.

 

Is it any good feeling anger now? When it’s too late for out anger now? When the deed’s been done.

Not that Cicero required anything from us in exchange for our jobs. Not that Cicero ever took advantage. She was amused, we think, at our degradation. She saw what we ‘d become … I think.

Perhaps not. Perhaps she didn’t know how low things had suck.

Cicero liked our working classness. Out autodidacticism. The fact that we’d taught ourselves, basically. The whole of European philosophy. That we weren’t just fools. That our heads weren’t entirely empty.

We had some working class pathos about us. Even some mixed race pathos. Some council house pathos. An exoticism, perhaps. We were raw. We weren’t moderates. We were half drunk on what we read. On Hoelderlin!

That amused Cicero, the fact that we read Holderlin’s poetry. And so passionately! When who were to read Holderlin’s poetry? In facing translation. Which made us think that we could read Holderlin in German, which of course we couldn’t.

And Rene Char! We read Rene Char! In facing translation! What was wrong to us to think we could read Rene Char? That we deserved to read Rene Char? Laughable! Pathetic!

There are certain authors who should remain closed to us: that’s what we felt, which amused Cicero. Certain books. that should have been impossible for us to read. That should have been placed out of our reach. On the highest

 

What … creatures. What specimens. From the outer outer darkness. From outside the university. Wanting nothing other than to enter the university. Wanting only to find their way inside the university. Believing that they had no tolerable life outside the university. And perhaps we were right!

Overeducated. PhD’d. Seriously credentialled.

 

Half alcoholic. With shaking hands. Weak. Weak people. Compromised people. Humbled people. Ludicrous. Capering. Spineless. With nothing admirable about them. Nothing moral.

 

Spiritual hunchbacks – that’s what we’ve become. Scoliosis of the spiritual spine. We can’t stand upright anymore, And nor should we! Nor should we try! We’re too compromised for that. We’re too dead for that. Too reduced.

We don’t have full personalities. That’s what we should try to find now that we have jobs. We need to develop interests. Broaden our personalities. Which have been worn away to nothing. Which are all about work, and only work.

About getting published! About writing things too hard for us! Reading things that are just too difficult!

 

We need to discover the countryside, or something. Nature. We should go out and look at green open spaces. Revel in vistas. Climb hills. Learn to fish, or whatever. Learn to cook! Entertain, in the grand style!  Host dinner parties!

And we’d learn the art of general conversation. Learn to talk on a wide variety of topics. Other than philosophy. Other than our studies.

 

As it is, when people turn to us, with polite interest and ask us about philosophy, we can’t think of anything to say, We stumble over our words. When they turn to us, out of friendly curiosity, and ask us about our own writing we can’t find the words. We just feel hopelessly lost. We can’t sum up what we’ve been doing, or what our interests are.

And when they ask how our work’s going, what we’ve been reading – showing interest in our lives, asking us about what is closest to us, we’re still unable to answer. We’re tongue-tied. Stumblers.

All those years of learning, and for what? All that expensive education, and what for? With what result? Esoterica. A few phrases that mean nothing to anyone. Some imitation thoughts. Some copyists’s thoughts. Some idiot’s thoughts. Some incoherences. Some stumbling. Some word salad.

Some published pages that simply betray our own confusion. The fact that we don’t have ideas of our owns. Discussing thoughts too deep for us. Working with ideas too complex for us. That we   ould barely hold together in our heads.

 

We’re not even idiot savants. We’re not even holy foots. Show an interest in us and what do you get back? Ask us questions, and what can we say?

What have we been wasting our lives doing? Even we don’t know. Even we don’t have an answer.

Our whole lives, scratching our heads. And what for?

And we don’t know anything else. We can’t converse about anything else. We’re not practical people. We can’t catch our own food. We can’t mend cars, or whatever. We don’t even drive. We don’t know what to do with a car.

We can’t cross-country ski or whatever. We wouldn’t know how to survive out of doors for a night. We’re not outdoors types. We ‘d be lost, completely lost, up on a mountain. We can’t build erect stone walls. We’d die almost as soon as we were lost in the wilderness. We couldn’t grow things in pots in our yards. We don’t even grow things inside.

We can’t cook. We can’t mend things We can’t fix the plumbing. We can’t even drive a nail in the wall. We don’t own power tools. Drills. We don’t have a collection of screws. Or nails. Or a single hammer or a single chisel. Or any of those things. We don’t know how to fix a leak.

We’re clueless. We’re powerless. There are no strange pockets of knowledge that are ours. We’re not clever about anything. God help us when civilization fails.

 

Really, the end of civilization can’t come soon enough. At least our sort will just starve to death. At least there’d be some kind of natural selection.

Of course, what we really need is a Cultural Revolution. Where our kind is sent to the fields. That’s where we should be: in the fields! In the mud! Trying and failing to grow turnips, or whatever. Swedes. We should get allotments. Connect with the soil. Learn how to sow and harvest. Dig for victory.

 

We don’t really know how to make conversation. To show polite interest. To ask things of others. About their lives. Their lives are inconceivable to us. The lives of anyone not involved in the kinds of things we do. Who are not would-be thinkers and would-be writers. Who are not lost in books.

Sometimes, drunk, we can mange a few words. Sometimes, we can offer a drunken monologue. We can extemporise on hopelessness or failure or despair, but that’s about it. And we’re very pleased with ourselves when we do so. We’d actually said something! We’d actually uttered a few words!

 

That’s what happens when we drink: things seem to hold themselves together. Our intellectual lives. Our thoughts. Gain some kind of coherence. Seem to have led somewhere.

We feel all the pathos, when we drink. We discover grandiloquence! Loftiness!

But when we don’t? When we’re hungover, as we usually are? When we stagger about the day? When we teach?

Just crumbs. Fragments of sense.

 

It’s different when we drink. When we’ve had a pint or two at lunchtime. We can rise to a kind of lyricism, in the classroom. Words take flight, in the classroom.

We mark up the whiteboard. We extemporise wildly, in front of our Powerpoint slides. We’re possessed! Lifted! Elevated! For a few minutes. In front of some gullible undergraduates. Who have no interest whatsoever in what we’re saying. Who are busy, laptops open, doing their Xmas shopping, or whatever.

The very fact that we can get by. The fact that we’re not starving. That we don’t live on the streets. That we don’t sofa surf, as we used to do. That we don’t just scrape by. That we aren’t just bouncing along the bottom. The fact that we’re no longer impoverished. That our debts aren’t entirely destroying us.

The fact that we aren’t actually – technically – alcoholics. Not yet, anyway. The fact that we’re not addicted to anything. That we’re not entirely stupefied yet. The fact that our hands are not shaking. The fact that we can still lift a glass to our lips. The fact that we can still focus, just about, on tasks at hand.

The fact that we still have something of promise about us. That thing could turn round for us. That we could mend our ways and become good. That a magnum opus could still be hiding in us somewhere. That we can still dream of waking from our dogmatic slumbers, or whatever.

The fact that we want to change, somehow. The fact that things are still possible for us, after all. Despite everything. Despite ourselves!

The fact that our fates haven’t entirely played themselves out. That we’re still alive! Where there’s hope, there’s breath! Where there’s breath, there’s … what?

We’ll have to drink despair out of us. Deliquesce it. Let it flow away. Turn it into exhilaration. We’re good at that.

We’ve never drunk enough, that’s the problem. To release philosophy. To let it flow through us and away.

 

And our drinking is part of it. Our drinking is necessary.

Descent. To reach chthonic rivers. Rivers that pass through the earth. That descend.

Rivers that only we can reach. Flows that only we know about. That catch us up – only us. That steam through all things. Secret currents, to which we are attuned.

We are part of it, somehow. We belong to it, who knows how or why. We’re of it. We’re its ambassadors on earth. We’re its avatars. But only when we drink! Only when we keep up our drinking! Only on our endless nights.

 

Alcoholism – pfff. It’s training. We’re travelling. There’s somewhere we need to get to. And this is our means.

There’s a journey we have to take. Our trial. Our hero’s journey. Our drunken journey. Which begins tonight. And every night.

Our vehicle. On wine’s wings.

 

There’s a capacity for drinking – for great drinking – which we had, according to Cicero.

Positively Eastern European, she called them. Reminded her of home, she said. Are we sure we didn’t have any Hungarian blood in us?

We were like Hungarian peasants, she said. Something of the gypsies that will survive civilization. Though of course, our survival skills had probably been bred out of us. A great shame, Cicero thought.

Yes, philosophy went wrong inside us. Yes, philosophy, passing through us, was sent off course – infinitely off course. Yes, philosophy is no longer doing what it should do, functioning as it ought.

It stops sending signals back to base. Like those Voyager space probes, lost in the Oort Cloud. In the outer darkness.

Philosophy’s gone strange. It’s given itself over to strange purposes. Uses. There have been … mutations. Perversions. In us! Through us! We’ve made it weird, and not in a good way. We’ve deranged it. Send it mad.

Philosophy’s drunk – we got it drunk.

 

What we’ve done in the name of philosophy! The crimes we’re committing in the name of philosophy! What we teach, in the name of philosophy!

We’ve bent and buckled philosophy. We’ve kicked philosophy around. We’ve beaten philosophy – beaten it daily.

Who left it to us? Who entrusted it to us? There’s no one to keep an eye on us. No regulatory board.

The fact that there are no other philosophy departments in the city. And very few in the northeast!

Sure, there are Research Assessment Exercises. But they come once every seven years. But we’re not regarded as research active. And there are teaching inspections – internal ones. Where they get together a bunch of academic staff – non philosophers  to assess philosophy. But would they know?

We’re allowed to do what we like, so long as we meet our module aims and objectives. So long as out forms are in order. Our online documentation. Do we know what we’ve done? Not really.

 

We should be hanged for philosophical crimes! Philosophy itself was handed over to us, and what did we make of it? What have we done?

Unless philosophy wanted this. Unless philosophy had to pass through a period of profound occultation. Of a kind of eclipse.

Unless philosophy needed the moon of our stupidity to block out its sun. Unless philosophy allowed itself to fall into darkness. To forget itself. Its very name.

 

Philosophical studies – that’s what our unit is called. Not Philosophy. They wouldn’t let us have that name: Philosophy. Philosophical Studies. What a watering down. What a compromise.

But they were right, perhaps not to entrust us with the name, Philosophy. Not to call ourselves a Philosophy unit. Philosophical Studies … but even that is too much.

To call ourselves philosophical: doesn’t that go too far? They gave us philosophy. Philosophy was entrusted to us. And what did we do with it? As to village idiots.

The dressing-up box of philosophy. All the outfits of philosophy. That we could try on. And prance about in. And dance about in. And take ourselves to be real philosophers. And real thinkers.

 

My God! Philosophical Studies! Why pretend! But we pretended. We pass ourselves off as philosophers. We dare to present ourselves as philosophers. At open days. At visit days. At graduation. Shaking the hands of graduates and their parents.

Philosophers! As though the students have actually got degrees in philosophy. As if we actually taught them philosophy. As if we were the conduits of Philosophy itself. At a Russell Group university, no less.

What reputational damage! What vandalism! That we were allowed to ride free under the banner of philosophy! That we were allowed to advertise ourselves as legitimate philosophers! In a legitimate philosophy department!

Philosophers: Heidegger, Adorno. Not us. Hannah Arendt, not us. Michelle LeDoeuff, not us. What have we ever thought? What, done? Apes and imitators. Fools and parodists. Caperers. Dancers.