Work in Progress

You’re in a frivolous mood today.

Sure I am. I’m feeling flighty. Do you like me flighty? Actually, I irritate myself when I’m flightly. I was kinda hoping you could tether me down. Do you ever get like that, when you can’t even concentrate? When your mind’s everywhere at once? I’ll bet you don’t.

Make me serious … Tell me about serious things, philosopher. Turn my attention to what’s actually worthwhile. Actually, I should be practising my German … for my upcoming trip … Did I tell you about that? I’ll bet you don’t even speak German.

I read it.

But you don’t speak it, and that’s the difference. Anyway, my Germany trip is the natural break. The way we’ll come to an end. How about that? A break … that’s what we’ll need. It’ll be quite natural. We should really round things off, don’t you think?

Maybe you’ll meet a German.

Maybe I will. A German Helmut. A strapping lad … properly virile, not like you.

Would we despise ourselves if we knew how we’d turn out? If we knew we’d lose our edge?

What edge?

When we were young we’d go round and set fire to things. And break things. And when we were young PhD students … We were just pleased too be off the streets. Off the fucking dole. We’d never thought of careers. We thought we’d be dead by thirty …

So what happened?

Maybe we’d just get worn out. Our blood thinned. All that whoring for work wasn’t good for us.

But we’re safe now, right? We’re secure. We’ve got jobs.

We can do better than this. We could be better people. Or more interesting people. Or wilder people.

Tell me something Susan Taubes said. Read me some Taubes.

If there is something to be healed, the brokenness is within the world. To ask for the eradication of brokenness as such is to wish the annihilation of the world. To heal the broken relations within the world, requires first that we acknowledge the reality of these relations (instead of fleeing into the imaginary) + then drawing from the tree of life, science, art, wisdom, cultivate + transform them. The powers of creation, of life are also the powers of destruction: every transformation passes through chaos.

That’s weapons grade Taubes. She’s, like, the heart of fucking darkness. Susan Taubes looked so cool. So chic. All intelligence and melancholy and attitude. And she was an émigré – a Mitteleuropean Jew. Whose family had gone through unbelievable suffering. And she killed herself. Fuck. The queen of cool.

We’re overconscious humanities types. We’re the humanities, idling. The humanities, left to do nothing. Left to just lie there, like a pool staring up at the sky. Until … until what?

All the humanities, dreaming. The whole of the humanities, dreaming in us. We’re the humanities ‘ unconscious. We’re the humanities, asleep. All the subjects …

We had a few good years.

Did we?

We were left alone. Left to get on with things. We were under the radar. And now we’re above the radar. We were Noticed. And a Plan had to be made. And now here we are.

Organisational Management, though! Organisational Management!

Some Buddhists actually pray for adversity. They like to test themselves.

So we’re being tested?

We’ll just end up teaching Organisational Management ethics, that’s all.

A test, like I said.

 

To think: Cicero left us to this.

It’s hardly her fault.

She left us. She disappeared. And now look what happened.

Cicero gave us our reputation. Shielded us. From the reality of the institution. From university shennanigans. She was very good at that. It was her Eastern European background. She knew how to negotiate with apparatchiks. Face it, we were spoilt. And now … welcome to reality.

I don’t like reality. I just want to close my eyes and pretend it never happened.

 

Let’s do something wild and unpredictable. Let’s turn suicide bomber, or whatever. Take a few of them out.

But we won’t, will we? We’re housetrained now. We’re housebroken.

If they knew what was in our head … in our heart … We’d burn them up. We’d burn everything up …

 

What’s all our philosophy good for if we can’t stop this?

How long did you think it could last, once Cicero left? The dream is over, right?

And this is what we’ve awoken to? God. I want to go back to sleep.

 

I want something to Happen. I want the roof to cave in. I want the Second Coming – Cicero’s second Coming. Why couldn’t she save us? We need saving.

I feel actual dread. I’m full of dread. I’m all dread. It’s like I’m on some high gravity planet. My limbs are so heavy.

 

Come on, we have something they’ll never have.

Like what?

Despair. A sense of total defeat.

 

It’s like we’re being readied for something …

Yeah, the kill.

 

It’ll be a slow strangulation. They’ll just drain the life out of us, but slowly. We’ll be teaching applied ethics, for all we know. Organisational Management ethics. God!

That’s what the humanities should do: rebel. That’s how the humanities should go out: definantly. Sovereignly. Biting off its own tongue, spitting it out.

We should just offer it up, everything we’ve learnt. In a sacrificial bonfire. An auto da fé … The highest meaning of life is just a burning up, right? Is just meaninglessness.

 

A little apocalypse. That’s how the humanities should go out: gloriously. Not just diminishment. Not just administered into nothing.

Philosophy should rise up against its fate, tragically. Gloriously. Just burn upwards.

To what? To God?

God is only a sacrifice, idiot. Just like the stars are sacrifices – a great gratuitous burning. An offering of NOTHING to NOTHING. A fuck you to the universe. Which is really the universe’s fuck you to anything that would make it useful …

 

Just defiance. It’s not about making the case for our existence. Of having to prove ourselves useful. Of having to justify ourselves in their terms, the enemy’s terms.

The very opposite – that’s what needed. A sacrifice. The great for-nothing of the humanities. Raising our supposedly futility to the highest power.

 

We should confuse the enemy! Bewilder Organisational Management! Overturn the Organisational Management tables! Show them what philosophy really means!

Go on – you do it. It could be your one-man show.

We have to put an end to it now: our servitude. Acting like we’ll just do their bidding. If we don’t stop it now, they’ll only make more demands.

We need to make a stand! A last stand! But a stand nonetheless! For ourselves! For our subject area! For Philosophy! For the humanities!

I actually think the world might end tonight. I think the Organisational Management / Philosophy merger is going to break reality. I think it’s so crazy. It’s going to cause some tear in the space-time continuum, or whatever.

 

It’s an omen. Like the birth of a two-headed cow.

An omen of what?

That reality – so called reality – is crazy and out of control.

We knew that.

We didn’t know it. We thought all the craziness would just blow by like some hurricane and leave us alone. We thought we could batten down the hatches and be okay.

So it reached us. So what? What did you think would happen?

 

They hate us without knowing that they hate us. Without realising it. But they have to hate us. Because they’re part of a system that hates us.

The system does the hating. The system wants to destroy us. Which means they can only want to destroy us – of course. It’s their logic. It’s what they’re about.

But it’s a benign hatred. A hatred that doesn’t look like hatred. A hatred dressed as kindness. They’re kind murderers, but murderers nonetheless. The system does all the actual hating, whereas they can appear to be kindness itself – generosity itself.

All the hating’s done for them. All the logic’s working out. And they’re like the smiling figurehead …

 

Come on, they’re welcoming us. This is a meet and greet. To discover areas of synergy. Of mutual research interests. Areas of research overlap. Ways to prepare joint bids. Seek impact.

It’s meeting of minds. A might meld. Bringing Organisational Management and philosophy together …

 

What happened to the idea of philosophical honour?

You made up the idea of philosophical honour.

What about the great martyrs of philosophy? What did they die for?

This is your moment. You can add your name to the great list. Turn berserker. Run amok into the Organisational Management crowd.

 

We’re traitors – of course we are. We’re weak-willed. Weak-minded! We’re stupid – deeply so. Very deeply. We’re the philosophers these times deserve.

Compromisers! Forelock tuggers. Kneelers to power. Betrayers. It’s generations of class based deference. It’s our psychological conditioning.

 

It's dishonour! Compromise! We’ve lost face! Philosophy’s been betrayed.

We should just suicide, all of us. Without question! We should just stab ourselves and collapse! En masse! Like, the last stand of Philosophy. Its last triumph! In uselessness! In sacrifice! Setting itself utterly apart from the world of Organisational Management.

 

A murder-suicide: that’s what you should go for. Take a few of them out …

Come on, they’ll win you over. The Head is pretty charming. Good sense of humour. He’s pretty amiable.

But amiability’s part of the problem. No – it is the problem. Middle-class moderation is the problem. And we’re middle-class, too – which is part of our problem. There’ll be no murder-suicides tonight.

 

What’s the most self-destructive thing that I could do right now? Kill everyone? Run anok? No – kill myself! I’d do it, too, if I had a gun! I’d, like, turn the weapon on myself. Wouldn’t that be something?

They’d just say you were mentally ill.

Not if I wrote a really boss suicide note, indicting these fuckers. Indicting the Organisational Management move. I’d make the university news.

They’d supress it. They wouldn’t understand it.

I was going to write a book that was just a suicide note. I was going to write it and die.

So what stopped you?

I couldn’t finish it.

Finish it now! Finish it tonight!

 

An act of pure exhilarated despair.

We’re laughing … at ourselves laughing … at ourselves laughing. Our laughter is becoming abyssal in the night.

We’ve swallowed the abyss of the night …

 

We’re laughing at the fact of laughter, that anyone laughs, that anyone has ever laughed.

 

Our comical apocalypse. What’s shown as we laugh all the way to the last night? What shows itself?

 

Moths batter themselves against the window. And we find it funny, that battering. We laugh as we batter ourselves. For wanting to batter ourselves.

 

Our laughing self-torture.

We laugh at our humiliation mechanisms. At our self-degradation machine. We laugh at our auto-ridicule. At our spontaneous foolishness.

 

A cosmic laugher.

The universe, in us, finds itself amusing. The universe understands that it’s told itself a joke. That the creation itself was a joke.

On what? On who?

On the created, of course. On us – all of us.

 

Laughter, instead of the silence of the universe. Laughter, at the silence of the universe. At the great silence. At the great indifference. Laughter, rising.

 

Laughing at our manacles. Laughing at our muzzles.

Why not just kill us? Why do they need so many of us? Why are they letting us live at all? That’s the mystery, right? What do they get from us? I don’t understand it. Haven’t they got the stomach to just murder us?

Maybe they like watching us. Like an ant colony. Like spider-monkeys. Maybe we’re entertaining.

 

We’re, like, a useless population. Allowed to live. Allowed to go on. Teaching useless subjects, uselessly.

Yeah, because they want to experiment on us. To do live gene editing on us, or whatever. To transform us using drone swarms. To do all their nanobollocks.

 

I don’t get what’s in it for them to let us live.

Maybe they can’t stomach mass murder.

I don’t believe it. What stayed their hand?

There’s a plan, only we don’t know it. Maybe it's a slow cull.

This is the last battle. This department is like the Nebuchadnezzar in the Matrix. The last true place. We’re red pilled – very red pilled. We’re the last best hope of humanity.

So who’s Neo? Who’s the One?

Cicero was Morpheus, right?

But Cicero fucked off …

 

The battle’s deep. The frontier runs through the university. Through our School! Through Philosophy! Through us, as philosophers! Through our souls!

 

It’s neuroweaponry. They’re after our brains. Our fontal cortices. They want us stupid – more stupid. They’re attacking the brain with their hydrogels. They busting through the blood brain barrier.

 

Organisation Management is a front. Organisation Management is run by MI6 or something. Or DARPA. Where did it come from, so suddenly? Where did it spring up from? Suspicious, isn’t it, the rise of Organisation Management? The way it’s swallowing up the older disciplines.

The plan: to move the old discipline into the Schools of the new ones. And then hollow out the old disciplines. Hollow out the humanities. That’s how they’ll do it. They know students want to study the Arts. So they’ll hollow out the Arts. They’ll infiltrate the Arts. It’s already happening. And philosophy itself. Philosophers! Students will think they’re studying philosophy, but really … in fact … They’ll think they’re studying the wisdom of the great thinkers, but actually …

 

The sky is where they attack you from. The sky, full of low-flying satellites. Full of direct energy weapon platforms.

The sky is a giant attack vector, that’s all. That’s where the attacks will come from. Nowhere’s safe. Nothing’s safe.

 

The Go command has been given. It’s operational.

 

Acoustics, microwaves, radio frequencies. Beams of light. Fucking unsurvivable …

 

Neuroweapons – they want to take out our brains. They don’t want us to have brains. Bioweapons. Hydrogels in the brain.

It’s attack … on every frontier.

 

Directed evolution – that’s what it’s all about. It’s soft robotics. To hybridise us. To give us new synthetic bodies …

 

They’re GM-ing everything. Including us. It’s the fucking mark of the Beast.

 

The great poisoning, all around us. Poisoned food. Poisoned water. Poisoned air. Poisoned thought.