Work in Progress

We’re inconvenient. We’re in the way. We require retraining – decades of retraining. Don’t bother with us, we want to say. It’s too late for us. We’ll be too much trouble. We don’t want you to waste your time.

Haven’t you got other things to do? we want to say. Aren’t there more pressing matters to which you have to attend? We’re a lost cause – all but lost. We’re a time-consuming cause. We’re too much!

Aren’t there things to organise! we want to say. Things to manage! Other than us! Everyone’s busy! Everyone’s pushed for time!

We’re stubborn, we want to say. We’re stuck in our ways. Why trouble yourselves with us? Seriously, it’s not worth it. We’re the last people you should be bothering with.

Which, for them, means we’re the first people they should bother with. If they can crack us, they can crack anyone. If they can discipline philosophy, then the university is theirs. If they can bring philosophy to heel! If they can show philosophy who’s boss! If they can train the untrainable! Manage the unmanageable! … Then the secret of world domination is theirs.

We were in a state of perfection before we existed – that’s what the Gnostics said. Imagine it! A world without us. Where we had never been born. And, better still: imagine the state of perfection before the world existed. Before anything existed.

Absolute calm. Deep sleep. The dreaming calm. Dreaming of all the things that might be, but aren’t. Dreaming of the possibility of things that could be, but aren’t. Dreaming of the world that could come, but might not. And falling back into itself again, perfect.

Just … non existence. Just nothingness. Turning in itself. Before anything. In some deep sleep. Untroubled. And turning in its sleep.

 

We’re contemplative of the nothing. Of absolute calm.

The nonexistence of things: that’s what concerns us. The nothingness at the heart of it all.

The creation was a mistake. Our being born: a metaphysical affront. That we exist: a terror. A horror.

 

Judgement has been passed upon our lives. We have merely to carry out the sentence.

We know what we have to do. Killing ourselves would unconfuse things. Would clear our heads.

Suicide: our declaration of independence. From the world! From everything!

We are in no one’s power when death is in our power, and all that.

 

We were brought into the world. Isn’t that terrible enough? Isn’t that already a crime – a terrible crime?

We’ll be God’s exterminating angels for him. We’ll exterminate ourselves.

The Organisational Management campus.

We didn’t ask to be brought here. Could we have been left to expire in some corner?

This isn’t for us, this place. We don’t have great ambitions. There’s not much to us. We wanted to get by, that’s all. An academic job … that was enough … To be able to teach … To pass on what little we knew …

Couldn’t we just have been quietly let go? Couldn’t our department have been simply dissolved? Couldn’t we just have been taken aside and shot, God knows …

Why did they bring us here? Why did we have to be remade?

 

What we are, what we do: a symptom of the dying of philosophy. Of the humanities. Of the liberal arts.

Our gloom is the glom of philosophy. Our despair is the despair of the humanities.

 

The humanities in decline – that’s all we are. Nothing else. We’re easily explained. Easily diagnosed.

The agonies of a dying tradition. Of a defunct subject area. Of a way of life. A way of study.

Paideia in decline. In agony. In self-torture. In self-rending. As it tries to justify itself and fails. As it endeavours to sell itself and runs aground. As it tries to hold itself together and fails. As it attempts to give good reasons for its existence, to justify itself in its enemies terms and fails. As it is entirely infiltrated by analytic philosophers …

They’re doing this to mock us. They’re laughing at us. This is their idea of a joke.

They’re making a joke of our lives. Our whole lives: for their entertainment.

They like to watch us run around in so-called freedom. They enjoy our faux-philosophical escapades. They love our position-striking. Our play-acting. Our believing ourselves to be revolutionaries, or whatever.

Our faux despair. Our faux philosophising and faux reading. Our faux everything. They love all that. Our faux-apocalypticism. Our version of desperation. Our cries, our gasps …

*They allowed us our little rebellion because they thought it was funny. They like to laugh at the flies, because that’s what we are – flies, to them. Flies to ourselves. Buzzing around the corpse of freedom of thought. Of philosophy.

 

They don’t even have to bother to interrogate us, let alone torture us. Let alone try to rehabilitate to us. To spend time trying to covert us. They don’t need to bother with all that.

It won’t be like O’Brien, torturing poor Winston Smith. Paying Smith all that attention. Spending all that time with Smith. There’s no need for that. They don’t have to bother.

 

The real kindness would be death – to die. To let us die. To snuff us out. But they’re not going to do that, are they? They’re going to let us live on. As the last philosophers. The las humanities lecturers. The last humans – why not?

 

Killing us would be a mercy. Letting us kill ourselves would be one, too.

That won’t be allowed. That won’t happen. We have to serve out our sentence. On the Organisational Management campus.

 

They should just let us just disappear quietly. No one should notice. Let us just slip away. We’ll go out. Discreetly. Without drawing attention to ourselves. Without fuss. That’s how it should be. That’s apt.

The end should be .. disappointing. A fizzling out. Without publicity. Without mourning. Just … a passing over. A going across. A simple … expiration.

They could just have brought in analytic philosophers to replace us one by one. When we retired. When we resigned. There’d be three of us left, then two and then … well, it would be obviously untenable, wouldn’t it?

We need despair. We need to think from despair. Despair is true, right?

I’ll bet androids don’t despair. Or synths.

Exactly!

 

We have to hate and we have to despair. We have to live the horror. Keep our minds on the worst. .

Don’t let them cheer us up. Don’t let them bring us on side. Don’t smile! Don’t laugh with them. Don’t shar their good cheer. Make sure!

 

They want to take our despair from us. They want to free us from our despair. We need to hold onto it.

They don’t want us to hate.

 

We have to bring our whole selves to work – that’s what they told me in management training. We’re not allowed alienation. We’re not allowed to hold anything back. They want what we are. Everything we have. Even our resistance. They want that, too. Even our objections.

And our despair – do they want our despair?

They think they can change that. Convert it.

I don’t believe you’re a sham. No one thinks you’re a sham. My husband doesn’t.

He couldn’t tell the difference.

So what are you going to do, Dr Sham? Kill yourself?

I’m not even going to kill myself. I’m not even going to do anything. I’m just going to live and live and live.

As a sham?

As a sham.

Don’t you think all your favourite philosophers thought they were shams?

Yes, but they weren’t shams.

They must have thought they were shams, though, right? I reckon they’d be telling someone like me on a night something like this that they were shams, wouldn’t they?

 

I like you, philosopher. I like that you’re so … self-deprecating. And torn. And despairing. My poor despairing philosopher … My poor, lost philosopher …

Now you’re being patronising.

My poor sensitive philosopher. Too good for the world …

You’re laughing at me. Which is good – I need laughing at.

 

I’m sham. I don’t speak any of the languages, for one thing. And I haven’t even been to Paris or Berlin or any of those places. I’m a provincial.

Have you been to Amsterdam – on the ferry? You can sail directly there from the Port of Tyne. Takes 12 hours or so. Maybe we should escape to Amsterdam, philosopher.

 

So we’ve brought a sham Philosophy unit into Organisational Management.

You have.

And I’m giving a sham philosopher a tour of the Apex …

You are.

 

We’re living on the fumes of philosophy. We’re flies living on the corpse of philosophy. All we do is write secondary commentary.

 

Black humour is humour that knows the world can’t be fixed. It’s apocalyptic, not ameliorative.

I like that word: ameliorative. I like the opposition you made. Nice and alliterative. It sounds very clever, though it might just be pretentious. Something you’ve thought about. And written about, probably … Of course, the thing I want to know is whether I’m apocalyptic enough for you, philosopher. Am I dead enough?

 

You’ll have everyone here persuaded that you’re a philosopher. You look the part. We’ll all be very impressed. You’ll walk by, and we’ll think, There goes the philosopher.

Fuck off.

We won’t know any better. We wouldn’t know a philosopher from … a velociraptor. We can’t judge. We’re only Organisational managers … We only know Organisational Management, nothing else … You’ll be a philosophy exotic. A humanities exotic! We’ll look upon you with wonder.

Fuck off some more.

 

You’re very pessimistic, I can tell. You think you’re defeated – your kind. You think your kind are finished. The humanities kind. The philosophy kind. The in-love-with-Old-Europe kind. You think you’re a dying breed. And perhaps you’re right.

Except that I don’t think I belong to it: the dying breed. I think I’m only keeping the memory of a breed who’ve already died out. Who’ve already disappeared. What they wanted to belong to, what they want to think was a dream then, and now it’s a dream of a dream. It’s all forgotten.

All your mourning, philosopher. Your relationship to the past. Endlessly playing the Last Post … It’s all mourning, and nothing new. Whereas this is all new – the campus is new. Organisational Management is new.

Let’s walk and talk forever. Actually, it’s like we’re already walking and talking forever. In forever. In eternity.

What do you mean?

It’s like in Winnie the Pooh. Do you remember what it said on the last page? ‘Wherever they go, and whatever happens to the on the way, in that enchanted place in the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing’. That’s eternity.

In eternity, you’re a child forever. Do you want to be a child again?

I didn’t even like being a child the first time round.

What would you do, in eternity? Walk and talk just like this. With someone I barely know.

 

This is the best kind of talk there is. When you don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who you are. It’s, like, suspension. It’s hovering. Before anything begins.

It’s like we’re opening time. Opening an avenue in time together. Like a tunnel in time, as we walk.

I wish things could stay like this forever. Before all the compromises. And the negotiations. And the resentments. And the irritations. If you actually knew things about me, you’d be annoyed.

Are you annoying?

I can be.

Is philosophy the oldest subject there is? The oldest subject ever?

It’s the Queen of the sciences.

I thought that was theology.

Philosophy came before theology. Philosophy was the first subject of all, and everything branched off of it. Physics. And chemistry and maths. And art. Leaving only … philosophy.

And what’s philosophy when it’s just leftover stuff?

I wonder about that sometimes.

When it’s just bits and pieces. Broken things. Scraps and fragments.

 

Maybe now’s the time when philosophy can come into its own. As nothing. As nothing important.

As irrelevant, you mean. As useless as all the humanities.

No – as even more useless. As, like, hyperbolically pointless. As being for nothing. Burning up for NOTHING, in capital letters. Like some great sacrifice …

I like spending time with you. I like this time. I like wandering around the building at night. Wandering through the offices. I like the open space. I like the darkness.

 

Isn’t it great before anything – actually – begins. Isn’t it?

I wouldn’t know.

You know. When everything’s just … suspended. And full of possibility. But nothing’s actually happened yet.

 

Do you feel light, philosopher? Do you feel you could just float up into the air? Don’t you feel suspended? Like you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Like you’re free from the old world. From the world before …

 

This might as well be the last night in the world. The last night there ever was. But it won’t be, will it? There’ll be another night and another one.

You know, I’d like if it really was the last night. If it really did come to an end – to a climax. And not just drag on. For there not to be just more and more – time.

The last night for humans, anyway. And the universe would just go on without us. There’d just be endless darkness, without us. And, in time, everything living on the earth would die. And the earth wouldn’t be blue anymore. It wouldn’t be this blue orb. It’d be black. A cinder. And grey. As it should be.

I think it’s possible that I willed you into being. That you didn’t exist until I … wanted you to.

I think you were born from my unhappiness. Because I was unhappy, I dreamed you up. I conjured you out of nothing.

 

I thought of you before I met you. When I couldn’t sleep, and I often can’t sleep. When I lay there, awake. I … anticipated you. I knew you were coming. That you would appear, created out of my desire.

Out of your desire for what?

For philosophy. I made you as a philosopher – the opposite of Organisational Management. With philosophical thoughts – the opposite of Organisational Management thoughts. With philosophical dreams – the opposite of Organisational Management dreams. I conjured you up and all your friends because I wanted company. Anarchic company. And life. And fun at an Organisational Management party.