Work in Progress

We saw through it all – the ordinary world, Cicero knew that. We weren’t just good little nihilists. We didn’t live in their world, the good little nihilists.

This was an island in a great chaotic sea, that’s all: that’s what we knew. This island Earth. This island world. And beyond, the great Futility. The night. Which laughs at what we do. Laughs because it doesn’t laugh. Mocks us because it doesn’t mock us. Roars in its silence …

 

We saw through the world, Cicero knew that. Meetings. Offices. The usual politenesses. Our smiles were always the smiles of the outside. Our laughter came from all the way from the Outside. And when we drank, it was only to regain our relation to the Outside. Only to channel the forces of the Outside. It was put them to work – to the opposite of work.

That was our anarchy. The anarchy in all things, which was our anarchy, too. Which was the anarchy in our hearts. Releasing us from Pomposity. From High Seriousness. From all the usual alibis and excuses.

We’d died to the world, the false world. We’d seen through the fakery. We lived outside this world, within it. We lived in the larger world – the larger non-world. We lived in recurrence. In the indeterminable. In the beginningless and endless.

They’ll never know what you know, Cicero said of her academic colleagues. They’re not close to it, like you are. The secret of life is known only by those who’ve seen to the world. Who’ve died to it and come back. Who went beyond it, but had to come back.

There are those who know the world as a game, Cicero says. Who laugh at it: the whole world as a game. Who’ve learnt the lesson: that it’s all a game, a great game. That the Madness is greater than we are. That things just Happen, and we can’t do much about it. That the Contingency is greater than anything we might impose. That it towers over us: our powerlessness. The fact that we can do very little. That we’re dwarfed. Towered over …

And yet, we also know that the contingent has no ultimate reason for being the way it is. There’s no ultimate reason for anything. So you can’t complain, can’t mourn. It’s not all about the ur-trauma. About the withdrawal of the ground. About the absence of Necessity. About the great Indifference … the great Nullity … the great Void … threatening to devour everything.

Life is lived in midst of this. Forgetting the great Powers. The terrifying Sublimities. Forgetting all about the Storm of it all.

That we could laugh forever at the killing joke. At the arbitrariness of our fate. At the fact that what happens is in nobody’s hands. Even the rulers of this world. The great Planlessness. The great Randomness. The great Meaninglessness.

Man thinks and God laughs. We laugh – and laugh at ourselves thinking. Wasn’t that it, our philosophy. Our laughing philosophy?

Our lectures.

The sense that these are the last human-born students, pretty much. And certainly the last humanities students.

Homo sapiens, or whoever will be, will only be born artificially from now on. In artificial wombs. There’ll be no mothers and fathers. Homo borg genesis will be born from machines and raised by machines.

And they’ve been preparing for years. We’re already robots, really. The great robotization is ongoing. The change, when it comes, will only be a matter of degree. They’re only be completing what they’ve already begun.

 

Our lectures.

The last words of philosophy. The last words, before the last audience of unaltered humans. To the last unaltered members of homo sapiens. Before the synth takeover. Before the new Creation, the fake creation.

Before the great hollowing out. Before the great gutting. Before we were to be made receptables of the dead, of demons. Before we circuitised. Before we’re filled with molecular machines. Before our colonisation by neurotech.

 

Our lectures.

The great cull is probably taking place before us. Their genes are probably being eneg-edited as they sit there. Their frontal cortices are being dismantled. They’re probably being sterilized before our eyes. At any moment they’re going to morph into zombies.

Our lectures.

We were raw. Sometimes, words strained. Sometimes,  voices trembling. Sometimes, drops in volume. Whispers. The students had to lean in … Students were all but confidants. At other times, build. Break out. Crescendoes. Great peaks …

Were the students moved? Were the students stirred?

 

Our lectures.

Pure pathos. Half remembered quotations. Citations ‘from memory’. Sudden … accelerations. Decelerations. Hushed speech. Exhortations. Enconiums. Horatory stuff.

 

Our lectures.

Following our notes at first. Following our slides. And then? Putting aside our notes. Turning off our slides. Extemporising. Letting words come.

An opening out. A widening. Our words, reaching the Open. Our words, sun-touched. Sun-dazzled. Light breaking across them.

A shimmering across the surface of our words. Like light on water. A lambency. A coruscation. Light – brilliance. A sparking across.

We said the words and the light came. The light dazzled. The light sparkled.

The breath of God over the waters. And our words were the waters. Trembling under God. Our words, laid out. Quivering with light.

 

Our lectures.

A calmness. Of which we were incapable in any other sphere of life. Lapidary. Sentences, short, unfussy, simply following from one another. A logic that wasn’t even ours.

We spoke through the horror. Calmly. Quietly.

 

Our lectures.

Moments of calm in our teaching. Of stillness spreading around us. When we achieved a kind of simplicity. A limpidity. When we laid everything out, in a series of declarative sentences. Anaphorically. In a wisdom of despair – achieved despair.

That we’d reached an open grove of speech. That what we were saying was an opening. A widening. That we’d reached the sky. That we stood before the sky. A moment of grace … A reprieve in speech … That, for a time, the sentence was suspended.

That’s where our lecturing led. To … blessed moments. To happiness in speech To small utopias, where speech wandered into truth. Into illumination. Where we let speech receive light from above. From transcendence.

A kind of testimony. The way they were spoken. The way speech stood up. Stretched itself upwards. In its plainless. In spoken simplicity. Without technical terms. Without terms of the art. Without jargon.

 

Our lectures.

No, it wasn’t about our speech. It wasn’t what we said. It’s what spoke through us. What used us. What spoke by way of us. What was allowed to come to Earth. As though we were lightning rods. The light flashed down. A kind of … revelation. But of what? What was being shown?

 

Our lectures.

Did the students sense it? Did it Awaken them? Did they have a sense of light? Of a light from above? Did they have a sense of being led somewhere?

 

Our lectures.

And we had the common touch.

We didn’t close our eyes and pretend we were at Oxford. We didn’t speak to our students as though they were scholar-princes-and-princesses of yore.

We took questions. We listened. We read the room. Took the temperature – the spiritual temperature.

None of this was to be over their heads. None of this was to be as if to no one, to the open air, to ghosts of the academic past. We were addressing them and only them. They were the audience we wanted to reach.  

Looking out at them. At their faces. Reading their eyes. Did they follow? Were they involved? Would they rather be somewhere else? Were they daydreaming? Woolgathering? Thinking about other things?

The effort to regain their attention. To say something shocking. Moving. Hilarious. Something – anything so as not to lose them. So as to deserve their focus.

Relating to them – them. Speaking to them. Making all of it real – about something real. Something vital. Something important. Making them feel it: the Seriousness. Of the topic. Of our discussion. Making them remember this lecture. This encounter. Now. Right here …

An urgency. A matter of life of death. Of utmost importance. That something would be missed if you hadn’t attended. If you haven’t been present here. Today …  

To reach them. To think with them. Together. To draw them into thinking – your thinking, the class’s thinking. To think collectively. To think now, here …

 

Our lectures.

Our … intuitions. Flashes of insight. Sparks – of what? Mini-revelations. That we’d say without understanding what we said, like savants.

We’d reach a plane. A threshold. Just by talking. Just by talking into the air.

 

Our lectures.

How did we find our way to what we said? We didn’t know. Like we were undergoing hypnosis – or some counter-hypnosis. Like we were waking up – or falling asleep: which? Like we were lucid dreaming.

The truth of the world spoke through us. Echoed through us. Reverberated through our voices. Thickened them. Like some kind of Sprachgesang to invisible music.

We spoke … we said things … We were spoken. A kind of ventriloquy. A kind of thrown voice. But from where was the voice thrown? Philosophy itself? Philosophy – speaking through us?

Philosophy, innocent: speaking through us. Philosophy, amnesiac. Philosophy, stranded. Left behind.

Philosophy, marooned speaking through us. Wandering without itself, without its memories. And speaking through us.

Why did philosophy fall to us? Why were we the ones to receive it? Of all people? Because we were truly of our times. Because we were most truly of our times. Because we knew the world’s dereliction, and philosophy’s dereliction in the world.

Because we ourselves had been marooned. Deserted. Because we ourselves were lost in the world. In a perfect idiocy.

The truest word, which means the most abandoned word. The lost word, which is also the found word. The last testimony. The last message of philosophy. And so in its final hours, philosophy could say itself, speak itself, coincide with itself. Sum itself up. Through us. And before our students. With Cicero listening.

Wasn’t that what Cicero was waiting for? To receive a message from philosophy – a last message. To hear philosophy’s last words. It’s last will and testament. Before it just blinked out, in disgust. Before it disappeared into the world’s night.

Our lectures.

All our lives in what we said. Our misspent lives! Our derailed lives! Our displaced lives! Our humiliated lives! Our resentful lives! Our lives outside!

 

Our lectures.

Delivered from a life lived. Suffered. From hopelessness – long misery.

And from the joy of being allowed to speak. Unleashed. From the joy of being employed and away from the dreadful world out there!

What we’d waited to say. What we’d always wanted to say.

Our whole lives, offered up. Spoken.

 

Our lectures.

From a lectern – from on high? No! From the pit. From the pit of our lives. From our desperation. From our cast-off-ness. From our being outside. Words that could only be speaking by those who’d been Outside.

 

Our lectures.

Our suicidalism, carried over from our years of whoring. Barely concealing it.

 

Our lectures.

Proving to ourselves that we actually knew things. That we’d actually absorbed something. That we weren’t no marks. That we weren’t the idiots we’d been, pre-PhDs. That we’d picked up things along the way.

All those years of reading! All those evenings, all those weekends! All that reading on commutes!

Our lectures, proving that we knew stuff. That we weren’t idiots. That we knew more than they did, the students.

Now we could be wing-spreaders. Soarers. High altituders. Looking out over all. Seeing all. Surveying all.

We had the big picture. We knew the topography. The mountains. The valleys. The history of thought wasn’t unknown to us. It wasn’t actually terra incognita.

 

That the lectures were a seeking. All of them. It wasn’t about what we knew, what we’d found, but what we sought.

Our lectures were Desire, spoke Desire. Spoke yearning. Held themselves out into Yearning. Spread vast sails …

 

All we had to say – and more. Because the real lectures began after we’d said what we had to say. Only then … only after we’d said everything we thought we could, could we begin.

Our lectures.

All our lives in what we said. Our misspent lives! Our derailed lives! Our displaced lives! Our humiliated lives! Our resentful lives! Our lives outside!

 

Our lectures.

Delivered from a life lived. Suffered. From hopelessness – long misery.

And from the joy of being allowed to speak. Unleashed. From the joy of being employed and away from the dreadful world out there!

What we’d waited to say. What we’d always wanted to say.

Our whole lives, offered up. Spoken.

 

Our lectures.

From a lectern – from on high? No! From the pit. From the pit of our lives. From our desperation. From our cast-off-ness. From our being outside. Words that could only be speaking by those who’d been Outside.

 

Our lectures.

Our suicidalism, carried over from our years of whoring. Barely concealing it.

 

Our lectures.

Proving to ourselves that we actually knew things. That we’d actually absorbed something. That we weren’t no marks. That we weren’t the idiots we’d been, pre-PhDs. That we’d picked up things along the way.

All those years of reading! All those evenings, all those weekends! All that reading on commutes!

Our lectures, proving that we knew stuff. That we weren’t idiots. That we knew more than they did, the students.

Now we could be wing-spreaders. Soarers. High altituders. Looking out over all. Seeing all. Surveying all.

We had the big picture. We knew the topography. The mountains. The valleys. The history of thought wasn’t unknown to us. It wasn’t actually terra incognita.

 

That the lectures were a seeking. All of them. It wasn’t about what we knew, what we’d found, but what we sought.

Our lectures were Desire, spoke Desire. Spoke yearning. Held themselves out into Yearning. Spread vast sails …

 

All we had to say – and more. Because the real lectures began after we’d said what we had to say. Only then … only after we’d said everything we thought we could, could we begin.

Our lectures.

At long last! After so many years of service teaching! Of seminar teaching for other people’s lectures. Of paid-by-the-hour teaching. Of holding ourselves back. Of never speaking our own minds. Of never giving our own takes on things. And now …

Our years of never being allowed to speak, and now being allowed to speak. Our sense of never having had the floor, and now having the floor.

Let off the leash. Unmanacled. Muzzles taken off – now what? What were we going to say?

 

Our lectures.

What happens when the subaltern speaks? When our kind found ourselves at the lectern? When the differend was suspended? When we had people to listen? An audience! For the first time!

What happens when we were allowed to pace the stage? To wield marker pen on whiteboard? To turn on and off the visualiser? To flick from PowerPoint slide to slide? To turn the house lights off and on?

 

Our lectures.

What now, when been let loose in a Russell group university? With Russell Group students! Who actually showed basic literacy. Who could sit at a desk.

What was to happen now we were to lecture. To profess. We were being trusted with the students of the wealthy. With our positions. Our lectureships. What a marvel!

What could we do? What would we do with our freedom?

 

Our lectures.

Surfacing. Coming up from our years of obscurity. Stepping into daylight after years in the darkness. Stepping up to the podium.

To be listened to. To be heard. Isn’t this always what we wanted? To put our view of things across. To do it better than the lecturers we’d seen over the years. Than all the lecturers we’d lectured for! That we’d provided seminars for!

Our chance at last: to be in charge of a room of students. To be guiding them, a room of students. To be lifting them up, a room of students.

 

Our lectures.

Now we had people to listen to us. Students who had to listen to us.

We had an audience. Students were listening. Notetaking!

And Cicero, herself listening. Cicero pacing up and down outside the lecture room, listening in.

This wasn’t to be just another European philosophy department, Cicero said. It wasn’t just to be about expounding the thoughts of thinkers much greater than we were. About passing on the tradition. It wasn’t about being representatives of the European thought, in our way, however worthy or unworthy we felt ourselves to be. It wasn’t about the honour of carrying forward the continental philosophy torch in the UK … That’s not why she recruited us!

There can no more philosophy, European or otherwise, Cicero said. No one can believe in philosophy, not anymore. Just like no one can believe in God.  Philosophy’s over. That way of reading and writing – no; no more. And we were the people who know it.

Apocalyptic hope – that’s the only thing available now: that’s our teaching, Cicero said. Hope for the apocalypse – and what passes through the apocalypse, including philosophy. Only hope for total change, preceded by total destruction – of philosophy. Where you can’t even hope for your own survival, let alone philosophy’s.

Apocalyptic energies – that’s what we had to harness in our teaching, Cicero said. Wild energies, unpredictable energies, impossible to contain. Horror and joy, mixed up. The fury of destruction that is also the fury of creation. The end and the beginning – both at once. Never ending. Never beginning.

We have to turn Gnostic – fully Gnostic, Cicero said. We have to be unsparing. Teach the students to hate everything. And that self-hatred is part of everything. Teach them the hatred of all things for themselves. Their shame. Their self-disgust. For existing, just that. For the very fact that they are.

The hatred of air for air, Cicero said. Of earth for earth. Of water for water. That’s what we were to teach our students. The atheism of air, of water, of the earth. And their own atheism, which is the heart of their mediocrity.

Teach them to hate their own nihilism, just as the universe hates its own nihilism, Cicero said. Teach them that they’re lost in the coils of their evil, just as the universe is lost in the coiling of its evil.

We had an instinct for escape – for exodus, Cicero said. We shared an instinctive horror at the world – of the conditions of our lives. Of the conditions that produced us – our kind. We have a desire for self-sabotage. For negative freedom.

We knew the importance of tactical failure, Cicero said. Of ineffectiveness. We were living examples of deliberate delinquency. Of self-decompletion. Of the displacing of ends from means, of the decoupling of potentiality from act. Strategic weakness was our forte.

That’s what Cicero saw in us. Which she couldn’t see in herself! Which she didn’t have herself! Which is why she scoured the world to find us. Which is why she combed the conferences. Visited lesser universities. Former polytechnic-universities. Looking, always looking, for the right look of desperation. Of total world-despair.

We learnt the syllabus, Cicero’s syllabus. Her war machine syllabus – that’s what she called it. We’re equipping our students to understand the new wars – the invisible wars, she said. The electromagnetic wars. The psychotronic weaponry wars – the applied behavioural science wars, the neuro-linguistic programming wars.

We’re teaching them about techniques of cognitive infiltration, Cicero said. About neuroweaponry. About existential weaponry – about the deliberate collapse of meaning, culture and social bonds. About the deliberate inculcation of free floating anxiety. About the conditions for mass hypnosis.

We’re helping our students to grasp the general technocratic agenda, Cicero said. The implantation of a global, full spectrum dominance control system. Of the seizure of the global commons: of food, water, energy, supply chain, money, mobility, private property.

We’re teaching them about politocracy and corporatism, Cicero said. About the transition from government to governance. About pathocracy, kleptocracy, cryptocracy, managerialism, corporate concentration, public/ private partnerships, about regulatory agency capture.

We’re helping them trace all the coercion cascades, from the Bank of International Settlements down, through NGOs, through state governments: Cicero said. And we’re helping them see the war between the giants, the war in the clouds between the central banks and the commercial banks.

We’re instructing them about strategic financial collapse, Cicero said. About the controlled economic takedown. About the end of mercantilism and the rise of techno-feudalism. About the new monetary system, and the destruction of independent business.

We’re trying to make see what’s happening all around them, Cicero said. The depopulation agendas. Iatrocide. Stealth sterilization. Kill-boxing and Skinner-boxing. The great poisoning of rood and water.

We’re showing them how to live in this brave new world, Cicero insisted. Which is why we were doing the opposite of normalisation – of compliance tests and behavioural training. It’s why we were struggling against the dimunition of critical thought, of the curtailment of the thinking process. Let alone moral debasement! Let alone compulsory positivity!

We’re turning them into anarchists, Cicero said. Subversives. Free thinkers. We teach whole modules on counterlogic. On guerrilla ontology. On practical surrealism. On the systematic derangement of the senses. On microdosing. On the uses of hardcore pornography. On UFOlogy as a science.

They’re to become Investigators, Cicero said. Researchers. Taking nothing for granted. Seeing through the lies. We’re liberating our students from years of so-called learning. Setting them free. Countering years of indoctrination. We’re counter-processing.

Philosophy isn’t a dead subject for our students, Cicero told us when we first arrived in Newcastle. It doesn’t sit idly on the page. It’s not about ancestor worship. It’s not about getting Spinoza right. It’s about putting Spinoza to work.

And there was work to be done! Cicero said. But there was also the opposite of work. And that was our role: to embody the opposite of work. To unleash our secret ardency! Our hatreds! Loathings! Our leaps of horror! Our screams in the head! Our abyssal thoughts. Our musings of caged beasts born of caged beasts! Of rats in the maze, begotten by rats in the maze!

We were to draw on our transcendental hatred, Cicero said. Our hatred for the conditions that produced us. That made us. That allowed our kind.

What was needed was a total pathos of teaching, Cicero said. That’s what we embodied

It was like the Magnificent Seven. Like the Seven Samurai. Cicero wanted to recruit a posse. She wanted a gang. So she went out and found us.

And who were we? Doomers. Losers. Off the rails.

All of us, teaching part time. Magellan, business ethics at Bangor University. Ava, the ethics of chemical engineering at Teeside University, for God’s sake. Little Hans and Big Hans, busy with applied ethics at various London universities.

Sven, part-time in the most doomed of the doomed universities. That was closing all its humanities departments. Sven, seeing the last few students through now the full time staff had left. As the university reinvented itself around him as a new media hub …

Barbarossa, practically shaking when Cicero found her. Barbarossa, plagued by academic bullying. By concocted charges of something or other. Because she refused the advances of an older academic. Who swore he’d make sure Barbarossa never worked again in academia.

Barbarossa, now with a stammer. A stutter. But Cicero saw beyond that.

Cecil, teaching TEFL somewhere, Cecil, forgetting he ever did a PhD. Forgetting the papers he spun out so effortlessly from his PhD. Forgetting his legendary early promise. But Cecil saw the advert, by chance. Cecil applied …

And there I’d been, busy with pregnancy cover in Hatfield. Hatfield! Living in Hatfield! A nowhere place! A nothing place! The most dead-ended of dead end unis. In the London suburbs. In the nowhere suburbs.

And Cicero, coming to find us. Cicero,  doing the conferences. Cicero, asking questions: Who should she employ? Who are the best? The brightest? And avoiding the most obviously bright. The most obviously best. Cicero, showing up at obscure symposia at obscure universities, keeping her eye out. Cicero, ready with other criteria. Cicero, encouraging us to apply. Writing to us to apply.

And she employed all of us – the whole shortlist! The whole gamut, who were invited to interview. They gave jobs to the whole shortlist. How did she persuade Newcastle University of that? All of us, in a magnificent swoop. All of us, borne up. Who could have expected that?

And we came to Newcastle, still  full of a desperate intensity! A life-or-death intensity! A desperation! A craving! We came, still in some manic state. After years of living in extremity. After years of part-time teaching. Grinning strangely. Our eyes … The look in our eyes … We were all but frothing at the mouth …

After years of humiliation! Years of privation! On the part time philosophy job market! Paid per course. A pittance per course! And on benefits, otherwise. On the dole, through the summer, through the Easter break, through Christmas. Rolling up to the benefits office to sign on, through summer, through Easter, through Christmas.

On permanent tenterhooks about the teaching we’d be offered. Or whether we’d be offered any teaching at all. And we’d accept anything. Regardless of expertise. Out of sheer desperation! Advanced logic? Sure. Metaphysics, – Analytic Philosophy style. Of course. Advanced Epistemology. Bring it on! We’d wing it. We’d work twenty hours per lecture. Pull al- nighters.

And knowing nothing of rest in busy term time. Of a night’s sleep. Of deep sleep. Of unpanicked REM. Knowing nothing of peace. Of time off. Of empty, open hours. Of wandering. Of contemplation … Of simple sitting … Of just being ….

Every minute, crammed with work. Stuffed with projects. And all at once! Stacked on top of one another! Doing this thing when you were supposed to be doing that thing. And neglecting those things whilst doing that thing.

Productivity – so-called productivity! A whole life, geared to nothing else! Being productive, or feeling guilty about not being productive!

And no romance allowed. No fun allowed. No days off allowed. No staring at the sky allowed. No rest allowed. No unworking hours allowed. Only broken hours, ruined hours, where you can’t work and can’t do anything. Only ill hours, where you only feel guilty about not working.

Hardly the circumstances in which to produce your best work! Hardly the times to turn your dissertation into some magnum opus! Submitting a conference abstract here, hoping to get accepted. Submitting a paper there, a revision of another paper there. Sending our speculative job applications, knowing you hadn’t got a chance.

And a swirling in the head. And a swarm in the head. And a panic in the head.

Opening an email. We’re sorry, but your work isn’t suitable … We regret to say your article doesn’t fit … Best of luck with your publication plans …

Opening an email. We’re not looking for work on this topic at this time. I’m afraid we’re overwhelmed with articles at present … I hope you will be able to find a suitable place to publish your work elsewhere …

That is, if they even bothered sending emails. If there wasn’t just an eerie silence …

And hating the system, and the unfairness of the system. Despising our dependency upon it, the system. Despising what supposed successes we had in the system. And loathing ourselves and what the system made us. Loathing who we’d become in the system. Work horses. Houseboys. Maids of all work.

And hating the system that forced us to try to succeed on its terms, and only on its terms. Loathing their measures of success and the conditions of success. And loathing the so-called fruits of success.

Loathing the utter mediocrity of full time staff. The utter averageness of them all, the full-time staff. Hating their blitheness, the properly employed academics. For talking about holiday plans. About different kinds of wine. Hating them for their houses and families and being to make their way …

And out for drinks with the full time staff. And being unable to afford a round at drinks with full time staff. And offering to buy a round at drinks with full time staff. Having to save for a week for drinks with full time staff. All the while to become better known by full time staff. To get our faces known by full time staff. To become well-liked by full time staff. To become part of the gang of full time staff. So that they might be able to make a case for our continued appointment, the full time staff.

Which is why we learnt to laugh with full time staff! At their jokes! At their academic anecdotes! Which is why we learnt to feign sympathy with them, the full time staff, when they tell us their minor woes. Of internecine warfare. Of perceived slights, perceived grievances. Of departmental politics. Of subject group politics.

And all the while despising them, the full time staff. All the while, fuelled with despair because they’d be rewarded, and you hadn’t! Drowning in resentment that they had proper jobs and we hadn’t! Sick with resentment that they could think of anything but desperation, which we couldn’t!

And meanwhile, our secret ardency! Our negativism. Our revolutionary dreams. Our craving for a Year Zero that could burn up the world! Our desire for revenge! Our glee for apocalypse! For the destruction of the world and the academic world!

Magnificent hatreds! Loathings! Leaps of horror! Screams in the head! Aabyssal thoughts! Thoughts of caged beasts born of caged beasts! Of rats in the maze, begotten by rats in the maze. Ferocious thoughts! Flarings-up! Fireworks! Blastings and explosions from hatred! Inner skies lit up!

Transcendental hatred. Hating the conditions that produced us. That made us. That allowed our kind. That gave us a so-called chance … Hating the so-called meritocracy. Hating the rigging of the system. The ranking of unis that placed your alma mater at the bottom. That placed all the true continental philosophy departments at the bottom. The ranking of journals that means that nowhere you published would get you a job.

That sense of humiliation. Of being dependent on tossers. Of having to appease wankers with power. Of begging for work. Losing all dignity, all independence. Having to go to moron heads of department, begging bowl in hand …

But Cicero swept us up in her angel’s wings. We were saved, lifted, when we didn’t expect to be. We’d escaped, when we never expected to escape …

Condemned, we thought, to a life on the margins. To scraping by. To a job in the crappiest of former polys at best. In some nowhere town … In some no-place place … To scraping by in Further Education, or something. Wherever. Whatever. At best!

And at worst? … Years passing. Bobbing along the bottom. Scraping by for life … Paid teaching falling away. Dreams of publication, falling away. University affiliation, falling away. Wandering by day, lost in the day. On lonelier and lonelier orbits. Friends, falling away. Peers tired of us, ashamed of us.

On the dole. On benefits. A charity case! A ward of the state! Cut off from all social ties. Turning in on ourselves. Turning in our small circles. Making ourselves ill.

Barely able to assemble our thoughts. Barely able to speak in full sentences. Unable to hold ourselves together. Half catatonic, from disgust. Almost wholly withdrawn, out of horror.

Aliens on this earth. Just turning and turning in despair. Just turning on the axis of despair. Just rotating in despair.

With no one to talk to. No one to communicate with. No one understanding us. No one getting us. No one with our outlook. With our sense of humour.

And if we met someone with whom we had something in common, we’d overwhelmed them with intensity. If we found someone with whom we might share a few things, we’d overburdening them with our despair. Scare them. Say things that scared ourselves. Howl out of the depths of your world-alienation. From the depths of absolute suicidal despair.

Until what? We went mad? We’d hear voices? We’d be infested, or whatever? Until the voices came? Until we were diagnosed. Sectioned. Medicated. Until we became dayroom zombies?

Until we move back to our home towns? Back to our parents’ houses? To our childhood bedrooms?  

We’d got away! And now we were back. We’d grown wings! Flown off! Left it all behind! And now, back again. Now walking by your childhood school! Back to where you played as a child …

So educated! So well read! Who’d read so many clever things! Who was so ‘booky’! All that potential! Intelligence! Who did so well as a children! What went wrong? People talking about us … People worried about us as a problem … Back to the parental home … back to be looked after …

Our childhood friends, baffled at what happened. At what went wrong. The parents of our childhood friends, seeing you passing by on the streets, whispering, What happened to X? What went wrong? To think, Y’s back at home with their parents.

How many years did we put into academia! Into the academic dream? What malinvestment! Bad investment! What did we think we’d be? Did we really think we’d find your way in? Didn’t we understand that academia was not for you?  Didn’t we see where it would lead?

Should have trained in IT instead. Should have worked in biotech, or something. And what do you have to show for all our years of study? What’s the result of our years of graft? A bound copy of our PhD dissertation. On the shelf! There it is! The non-magnum-opus!

Letters on the front: Awarded for completion of the degree of doctorate of philosophy. From the university of crapness. Our dissertation! Bound! That was it! That’s what we produced! Three hundred pages of … what? And why?

Some melange of trendy contemporary philosophical issues. Sovereignty. Biopolitics, etc. The usual! The usual usual! More of it! More continental philosophy landfill! More readings of readings of readings! More marginalia in the great works!

Closely printed type. Read only by our supervisors and our examiners. And by no one else! With our dedication page. To my parents, with gratitude. For their support then and now! As they put you up!

And now we can put the word, doctor, before our names: what a joke! I studied for years and all I got was a lousy dissertation and doctor on my debit card. And a clutch of book reviews in the electronic aether. Is that it?

Years of study in a subject that interests no one. That you can barely explain. That no one wants you to explain. That has no part in UK intellectual culture. That qualifies us for nothing – except teaching European philosophy, and where could we do that?

But Cicero saved us. From certain mental illness! Certain suicide! Certain soul death! Certain life murder! Certain fuck up! Certain doom!  

But Cicero swept us up. Cicero scooped up the philosophical undesirables. The philosophical no ones. The seven … what? Seven idiots. Seven mediocres. Seven fuck ups. Seven failures …

What did she see in us, the philosophical world asked itself, and scratched its head. What’s going on at Newcastle? It had a shock and awe element. It had a baffle-the-enemy dimension. It confused everyone.

What’s going on up there? What’s happening? What was Cicero building? What was her game?

Hadn’t Cicero won some respect from the hard to please philosophical community? Hadn’t she shown her philosophical chops, her philosophy acumen, her speculative abilities?

For all that, she was an unknown, an outsider. Who knew that she wanted to build, apparently from scratch, a philosophy department all of her own. Where had Cicero come from? She appeared, seemingly full formed. Fully armed.

There she was, at Newcastle. There she was, willing to put in the committee work, to fill out the forms, to found a new department. What a marvel. A philosophy department, growing from nothing. Growing from nowhere.

Creatio ex nihilo! How was that possible!? Turning the tide in favour of the humanities!? A Newcastle miracle! In the face of everything!?

Cicero came to save us, and save us she did.

Philosophy Subject Group Meeting.

The new term’s looming! We have to think about our teaching. Our post-Cicero teaching. How are we to deliver our courses in the wake of Cicero. Our aims and objectives. The syllabus we’ve specified. We have to remember the mission of the course. Fuck …

Come on, Tom, you’re the leader. You’re the one Cicero chose! Tell us what we’re to do, leader! Lead us, leader! Steer the ship of fools! What’s your strategy? What’s your plan? Give us a sense of direction!

We’ve a whole academic year ahead of us! A whole academic autumn term! All the way to Christmas! Anything might happen!

But this is still the summer, right?

The late summer …

God, this is like a parody of a real academic meeting. A chimp’s fucking tea party …

Contemplating the purple walls.

Why purple? Why's our new accommodation purple? Did anyone ask for them to be painted purple?

Not me.

Was Cicero consulted? Did she have a say in this? 

Who knows?

Someone’s attached to purple, anyway. And all the shades of purple!

Maybe it’s some psychological warfare thing. Some demoralising thing. Maybe purple’s a uniquely depressing colour.

Googling psychological effects of purple.

A blend of a high energy colour, red, and a calming colour, blue. So it can be energising or relaxing, depending.

What about depressing? Does it say anything about depressing?

Toned down hues like lavender are soft and feminine, but darker hues can lead to impatience, frustration and irritability.

Well it's very fucking dark. They're clearly trying to provoke us.

Shades of purple: amethyst, lavender, lilac, mulberry, orchid, plum, puce, pomegranate, wine. And there’s royal purple … Associated with royalty, extravagance and aristocracy … King bloody Charles wore the Purple Robe of Estate after his coronation, apparently …

Would you call this royal purple?

It’s just, like, too much purple. Totally saturated purple. Like, deep purple.

And there’s the Prince connection. He associated purple with the end times, apparently. The pouring of red blood from the heaven, mixed with the sky’s natural blue …

I think purple’s the colour of the endless end times.

Are the purple walls on our side?: that's the question. Is the purple with us or against us? What powers does it represent? Who does it answer to?

The purple … if you pressed your hand against it … if you placed your forehead on it … would you think what it thinks? Would you think with it?

It’s as if the purple was listening. As if the purple was covered in sensors. Purple walls, listening to us as we teach. Absorbing our thoughts. Is it some new smart colour. Some new kind of uni surveillance. Like that stuff they’re putting into fabric.

I don’t believe it. The purple is its own thing.

Really!? Should we should regard the purple as an ally? As on our side? Is it in league with us?

It’s as if the purple itself were thinking. Were counterthinking. It’s as if the purple had its own thoughts: purple thoughts. Glowering thoughts. Purple-in-purple thoughts.

As if the purple were sentient somehow. As if it were philosophising, in its own way. About what? Its purple thoughts. Its deep purple thoughts. Its thoughts of purple-in-purple …

Our purple, so very different to organisational management cream. So different to organisation management magnolia. The organisational management walls don’t think. Or think only organisational management thoughts.

You know what I think: these are anti-smart walls. This is anti-smart purple. Maybe we have allies somewhere. People helping us in secret. Who approve of Philosophy, from afar. In Estates, or something. In Organisational Management itself!

Maybe there’s a counter institution within the intuition. A uni resistance.

But who in Organisational Management would be on our side?

Magellan, looking at the website.

There they all are. A dubious crowd. Professor Sophia Van Leyden. Reading her profile. Probably not her. She looks like a Nazi. Professor Klaus Tugendhat – probably not him.

He looks cool, though.

He looks like an East German terrorist. Like he could be part of Baader Meinhoff. Or star in some Fassbinder film.

It’s the leather jacket. The shades.

He should be called Helmut Omelette. To start a revolution you gave to crack some eggs.

Here’s your beau, Tom. She’s hot. There’s Priya Desai, in her business suit. She has something. Who else?

Fuck looking for supposed allies. Haven’t we got anything better to do? This is supposed to be our Subject Group Meeting. Impose some discipline, Tom! This meeting should have structure! An agenda! There should be bullet points! We need official minutes to send to the uni.

Come on, the uni shouldn’t get to know what we’re thinking about.

Maybe they can hear anyway. Through sensors. Through the purple.

Maybe there’s a mole! Is it you , Tom? Are you sharing our secret with Priya?

Magellan, still on the website.

This guy looks like he’s already homo sapiens 2.0 or whatever.

They’re not homo sapiens anymore. They’re homo borg genesis.

Homo borg what?

It’s a whole new thing. Synths – that’s what they’re called. Synthetic humans. Drawing on the latest advances in synthetic biology. Androids, basically. They’re building them now. There are loads of synths in these deep underground military bases.

Why?

They’re pretty useful. Totally compliant. They’ll do what you tell them – no questioning of orders. With no need for philosophy … for our kind of thought.

Maybe all the organisational managers are synths. Maybe Organisational Management itself is some kind of School of Androids. Like, a university infiltration thing …

Their PhD students look very synth-y. These guys look like clones.

They’re actually wearing Organisational Management uniforms.

They are not!

It’s completely technocratic.

Techno-what?

It was a big thing in the 30s. It’s what Brave New World’s all about. Total control.

So Organisational Management is technocracy?

Reckon.

Run by synths?

Run by academics allied to the synth makers, anyway.

So why do they want Philosophy in their School?

To integrate us, of course. To join the hivemind. They want to hollow out philosophy.

They want to hollow out all the humanities, probably. The entire arts …

But they're starting with us. We're the test case. 

To think: the last free outpost of thought, captured. All the Schools of the university, being taken over, one by one.

But we’re not captured, that’s the thing. Philosophy is like the Nebuchadnezzar in the Matrix. We’re still free. We’re still puttering about, even though we’re in the heart of the beast.

So who’s Neo, if this is the Matrix? Who’s the One?

Cicero was Morpheus, right?

But Cicero fucked off …

Is it you, Tom? Are you the One? Are you the last best hope of humanity?