Work in Progress

Think of summer on the campus, postgraduates. Warm yourselves with thoughts of the height of the Newcastle summer, on the Mercia campus.

Think of teeshirt weather. Short-sleeve weather. Even the postgraduates from the Middle East, wandering in short sleeves. Even postgraduates from India, coatless in the Newcastle summertime.

Think of the twenty-hour days, at the height of summer. Think of twenty hours’ worth of light.

Think of summer optimism, postgraduates. Of summer plans. Of the great summer casting-off, after the last meetings, the Boards of Examiners; the Board of Studies.

Think of summer relief. Gone, the terms’ pressure. Gone, the need to mark. To run seminars. Gone, the need to go to training. The need for method class. Gone, the duty of attending guest speakers’ talks. Of having to ask questions, having to look clever. No more duties.

Think of your summer studies, postgraduates. Of your summer reading. Were you going to tackle The Science of Logic this year? The entirety of Kierkegaard, including the sermons? Was it to be an Aristotle’s Metaphysics summer?

Think of summer writing, postgraduates. Of climbing into summer’s cockpit. Of the aim to complete a great arc of work. A javelin-throw of work. Because summer is the time for utter work. For entire work. For being lost in work, all of you. Everything you are. Of work become a summer gesture.

Think of summer thoughts, postgraduates. Summer ideas! That seem to float upwards. That seem to rise into the sky, like fire balloons. Summer thoughts, rising. Summer ideas, rising. But casually. Neglectfully. Without paying any attention to themselves. Without trying. Without effort.

Think of summer peace, postgraduates. Of the summer spell, cast over all things. The summer trance. The summer stillness. With no undergraduates about. Corridors, uncrowded. Empty foyers. Quiet paths. Campus car-parks, empty of cars.

Think of the paradisical campus, postgraduates. Of the campus as Paradise. The campus before the term-time Fall. Think of the innocent campus. The sinless campus. When you can all but walk with God in the cool of the evenings.

Where it’s no longer about productivity. About the frantic scrabble to finish work. When there are no more panic-bursts. No more crazed heart-thumping. No near heart attacks from study.

Expansiveness, instead. Air, instead. And summer air – warm air. The opposite of our Organisational Management winter! The opposite of our White-Witch winter!

When you could open the windows of your work, postgraduates. When you could let your work breathe. Let it rise, like bread. When you could knead the air into your work – the summer air. When your work warms up, becomes elastic – when it can be stretched. Opened.

When your work expands, postgraduates. When work isn’t about just this or that. When work’s about everything. The All. Hen panta. When work is an exodus, an opening out, and nothing more.

Deep summer – think of that, postgraduates. Summer within summer. Summer furled in summer, as in a bud. Whorling open. Blooming open. An opening you with it. Think of summer, expanding in you, postgraduates. Expanding you. Until you become summer giants. Until you can cross the campus in a single step …

We’d be wiped out soon, that’s what we’ve always believed, postgraduates. We’d be put out of our misery soon. Some apocalypse or another would do for us.

It couldn’t be allowed to go on, our being in the academy, could it? A kind of equilibrium would find itself again, the error would be corrected. The typo erased.

We’d disappear, postgraduates. We’d vanish, just like that. Just disappear. And things would be righted. Would default back to normal. Order would be restored.

Our time would have passed, postgraduates. The whole anomaly of our being in the academy. It’d be history – and forgotten very quickly. Just – buried, as it should be. No one should remember!

A phase, nothing more. An experiment gone wrong. We held the line. We kept our posts. We did our duty, when philosophy needed us – even us.

Sure, we’d have made mistakes. Sure, we were well-intentioned. With laudable aims. We were delighted to have even been asked. To have felt the call. To have felt that we – even we – could serve philosophy.

But the whole sorry episode should be forgotten. Should be left to oblivion. The whole of our being in philosophy. Of our serving in Livia’s philosophy department.

Philosophy: how did that word fall to us, postgraduates? Under what circumstances could we have the temerity to call ourselves philosophers?

Philosophy was only ever a name for desire, that’s all. A calling. A vocation – can we call it that? A question.

The question of philosophy, postgraduates. The question as philosophy. The question that asks us – in our stupidity; in our lack. In everything that disqualifies us to be philosophers.

An empty command, that’s what we’re heeding, postgraduates. A vocation that is simply a revocation of everything else.

What are we waiting for, postgraduates? What do we think Is going to happen? But the waiting’s the thing.

That word, philosophy, postgraduates. What it means to us. That word … that seems to summon us. To call us to it. That word … which we’ve whispered to ourselves in all our hours of desperation. That word … naming the only thing for which we’d live and die.

Of course, we do nothing other than stand open-mouthed, in the clearing of philosophy, postgraduates. We do nothing but gawk as we wait. As look up into the sky, as though waiting for alien abduction.

But don’t we hold its space open it more strongly than anyone, philosophy. Even if our philosophy has no content at all. Even if it’s just questioning. Even if it is for nothing.

Just delusion, postgraduates. Just misprisions. Just befuddlement. And bewitchment. Just delusion. Just persiflage. Just error. Just mistakes, and mistakes upon mistakes. But philosophy nonetheless. The philosophical question, after all.

We hold the philosophical line – but what line, postgraduates? We keep the philosophical faith – but what faith? We stay at our philosophical posts – but what posts? What are we doing? What are we for? Are we awaiting orders? Waiting to be relieved?

There should be warnings about us, postgraduates. Rewards for our capture. Wanted posters. There should be bounty hunters tracking us down even now. Bloodhounds on our trail. They should be following our footprints.

We should be stopped, shouldn’t we? There should be prevention orders. keep away orders! Restraining orders! Non molestation orders! Legal warnings of all kinds. To prevent our criminal trespass on the bounds of philosophy! Our civil trespass! There should be security measures! Surveillance measures!

There’s something wrong with us, just as there’s something right with us, postgraduates. There’s something stupid about us, just as there’s a desire to be something other than stupid.

We’re of the idiot earth, the stupid clay, just as we’re of the spirit that hovers above the earth, postgraduates. We’re atheist, desperately so, just as we’re the most fervent believers. We’re philistines – terrible philistines – but don’t we love like no one else the great European culture that is out of our reach.

Philosophers entirely in lieu of philosophy, postgraduates. Entirely lacking anything that would make us philosophical. Philosophy minus philosophy – but still philosophers. The philosophical hollowing. The philosophical abyss. In which nothing remains but the cry of philosophy. Than the question of philosophy.

There’s still a world outside to this campus, hard as it might be to believe, postgraduates. There’s a whole world out there, beyond the stony wastes at the campus-edge. That’s as yet unreached by the Organisational Management Campus. That’s as yet untouched by the University.

The bewildered of the world. The surplus population. The useless population. More useless than we are!

Redundant humanity. Useless humanity. Useless biomatter. Kept alive, just about. Allowed to live, sort of.

Unalive, in some sense. But undead, too.

Humanity in its defunct mode. Humanity, running on empty.

The disposable population, right. What are they for? What purpose do they serve? None, of course.

Human slurry. Human waste. Human slop, swilling in the human trough.

Who can’t even be bothered to live. Who can even be bothered to be bothered.

Half sterilized, most of them. Hardly breeding. Doing their best to die out. To diminish to nothing.

Unmanageable, in some sense. Not worth bothering with. Beneath the level of manageability. Of organisability. Beneath the organisers’ attention. Undeserving of it.

And in the way. Like dementia patients. Like bed blockers. Like the morbidly obese … Eating the wrong things. Having all the wrong habits.

Degraded, somehow. Toxic. They should be quarantined. Because how long will it be before they develop some prole myxomatosis? How long before they spread it to the rest of us?

And they’re not even wily. Not even grifters. They’re not even on the take. They aren’t even out for themselves, nor really. They’re not gang-banging. They aren’t linked to organised crime, or disorganised crime.

The shipped in. The bewildered of the world. The confused and the baffled. The perpetually staring into the air.

Who can live lives of zero meaning, apparently. Who can cope with purposelessness, supposedly. With meaninglessness.Imagine: we’ve bred people who don’t require meaning!

The inert. On autopilot. Who don’t need to be feared. From whom no civil war will ever come. Who need only to be monitored, passively. Gently surveilled – nothing more.

NEETS. Neither in education nor employment. Whose schooling didn’t take. Those for whom nothing can be done. Who can’t even look after their own interests.

The socially passed over. Social refuse. Socially dead. Just a remnant, that’s all. A nameless and powerless residue. Who don’t know how to live, but just live. Stubbornly! Persistently!

The equivalent of slurry. Of industrial waste. The human mire! The human morass! Nothing can be given to them that they wouldn’t vandalise. That they wouldn’t sabotage!

They’re not even defiant. Not even dangerous. They have no answer as to why they exist. Or what they are. Or what they’re for.

The real idiots. The real imbeciles. Mildly retarded. Truants – but endlessly so. Agelessly so.

Empty. Persisting, but pointlessly. Detached from all significance.

Awkward. Detached. Idly staring. Just looking on.

Who are never paying attention. Who are never alert. Never watchful.

Unpolished, haphazard. People who just are – superfluously. Unneeded.

The types who should be shunned. Avoided. Who are perpetually unseemly. Mildly retarded. Who should be comical. Even ridiculous. But who never really become laughable.

Unconcerned in some way. Uninterested. Who have fallen out of the world. Our of consensus reality.

Human rumours. Stalled at some threshold. Perpetually not-yet. Senseless … remnants. As of a dead language. A language no one speaks.

Deplorables. Who can barely even dress themselves. Who can’t even enunciate what they say. Whose words you can barely make out.

The kingdom of God that’s forgotten it’s a kingdom of God. The people of Jesus who are not yet the people of Jesus. The proletariat that will never come to itself as a proletariat.

Plebians. Idiots.

Which is why they’re our people out there, beyond the stony wastes, postgraduates. Which is why they’re our kind. To whom we’re always answerable. And whose places we keep.  

And what happened instead?

Our emotionalising – we couldn’t help ourselves! Pathos instead of logic! Appeals to the heart! Prose-poetry philosophising!

Our overinflation. Big picture sweeps – panoramas of the West; far too vast. Epic tales of Absolute Spirit’s unfolding. Of the History of Being. Of Holy History. Of epochal changes. Of epistemic shifts. Of regimes of truth.

Our mad ranging across the philosophical landscape. Stomping! Smashing! Issuing forth vast claims. Categorical statements. Without moderation. Without restraint. Bellowing philosophically, like delusional King Kongs.

Our spurious etymologising. Shifting between languages we barely knew. Parody-Heideggers. Would-be Jacob Taubeses, falling flat. And without knowing it, not really! Blind to it! Caught up in our flights. In our absolute ardency.

Our biographism. Our lives-of-the-philosophers narration. Retelling all the most gaudy tales. All the most sensational! Hölderlin’s madness. Nietzsche’s madness. Bataille, wanking besides his mother’s corpse. Steigler studying philosophy in prison, for bank-robbery. Negri in prison, for urban guerilla terrorism.

Our piling on the pathos – and especially the Nazi pathos. Levinas, jotting down notes for From Existence to Existents in a Nazi labour camp. Husserl, banned from the university library as a Jew (by Heidegger – his own pupil!) Benjamin, suiciding on the day before the chance of escape from Nazi Europe to the USA opened to him.

We moved ourselves! All but made ourselves weep! There were tears all but rolling down our cheeks, with European pathos. With the thought of all the European agonies! Of the immense European suffering! And helping ourselves to it as though it were ours. Scooping it onto our thought-plates. Serving it up, as if it was ours to serve up …

As if presenting and assessing philosophical arguments wasn’t enough! As though calmly weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of philosophical positions didn’t suffice! As though we had no natural thought predators. No analytic philosophers to curb us. To cut us down when we needed it. No one asking for clarity. No one asking to tone down the hyperbole. No one to bring us to heel.

And our resentment. Born of years of part-time teaching. Of our envying hatred of the full-timers where we’d taught. Born from years of working in a system of analytic philosophy hegemony. Of logicism! Of technical philosophy, dull and soulless.

Taking swipes at other philosophy departments in the UK, that no student could understand. Against prominent UK philosophers, that none of our students would know. And against analytic philosophy, of which our students had no conception. In which they had no interest!

And our resentment of the academic system in general! Of universities as such! Of institutions in general! Of our social institutions, our political ones! Invocation of outsider thinkers! Of outsider artists!

And resentment of our own students! Of their private school backgrounds. Of their privileged insouciance. Of their chat about skiing holidays. Of their height. The way they were bounding with health.

And all but declaring class war on them all, our students. Talking wildly of revolution. Declaring the impending end of the present form of the world. Making great claims for the revenge of the proletariat and the subproletariat.

Wanting to fill them with doom, our students. With a sense that finitude was all! That death could strike at any moment! That apocalypse was nigh! That civilizational collapse was around the corner! Wouldn’t that shut them up about skiing holidays? About university balls. About riding to hounds!

A sense of danger – that’s what we’d impart. That the whole Truman Show was about to collapse. That it was like seeing the asteroid coming for the dinosaurs. That a horrifying future was about to arrive all at once.

Apocalyptic hope – that’s the only thing available now: that’s what we told them, our students. Hope for the apocalypse – and what passes through the apocalypse! Hope for total change, which can only be preceded by total destruction! Where you can’t even hope for your own survival!

Apocalyptic energies – that’s what you have to harness: that’s what we told our students. It’s all about marshalling wild energies, unpredictable energies, impossible to contain, we said. Where all you can do is to let them be unleashed. Horror and joy, mixed up! The fury of destruction – that is also the fury of creation! The end and the beginning – all mixed up!

Confirming all the worst cliches about European philosophy. All the terrible things analytic philosophers have said about European philosophy. Irrationalism! Appeals to authority! Ancestor worship! Lurid talk of Nazism and fascism and madness and suicide. As if philosophy wasn’t about reason! About logic! About argument!

And Livia, only encouraging our excesses! Only plying us with espressos beforehand. Only telling us how great we were over cocktails at Trillians, after. Only telling us we should go further …

When we should have just stuck to amusing our audience. As though we were children’s entertainers. Anything to keep their attention. Modulating tone. Saying unexpected things. Moving things. Funny things. Using pop-cultural examples to bring to life the more obscure points. Amusing anecdotes from our lives! Slightly risqué stories. And with an air of confidentiality … of letting our charges in on a secret.

When we should have simply ensured that the students graded us well. Gave us good marks on the student surveys. That we could keep our customers amused during their years out of the world. That we could maintain the university’s alibi that there was actually learning going on. That the humanities were more than crowd-pleasing and grade inflation – more than a rich kids’ playground.

But Livia didn’t care about those things. She wasn’t worried about the National Student Survey. About league tables. She didn’t mind about departmental reputation. It wasn’t about securing the future of Philosophy at Mercia.

And sure, although we might idly dream of making Mercia Philosophy’s reputation. Of letting it become the place to study European philosophy – the capital of the north for all things Continental. Of hosting the annual European Philosophy conference in the city. Attracting international attendees. Keynote speakers from the European mainland. All those things!

Wouldn’t we be just as happy to go down with Livia’s ship? To throw ourselves on her funeral pyre? To set the department on fire! To let it burn up to nothing in some mad potlatch. To climb into Livia’s wicker man …

Livia only goaded us, her outsider philosophers. Livia only encouraged us, her idiot-antinomians. It was only about drunken escalation. About crudeness and gaucherie. About our rogues’ and rascals’ revolt. About the revenge of the miserable provincials! About the peasants’ revolt of our lecturing.

Hadn’t we been anticipating lecturing almost all of lives? Wasn’t that what we’d been doing in our part-time years, as we watched the full-time lecturers? Hadn’t we always been taking mental notes of what we should not do while sitting alongside the students, preparing for our seminars?

Clear in our teaching, that’s what we dreamt of being. Speaking simply, without technical terms. Hiding behind no terms of the art. Presuming no deep culture on the part of our audience. No profounds of understanding. Laying it out so even the comprehensive-schooled could follow …

Methodical: that’s what we wanted to be. No trendy bollocks! No theory gobbledygook! No mishmash of names! Of ideas! No bricolage of this and then that and then this. No ill-disciplined leaping about, from oeuvre to oeuvre! From period to period! No scrambling! No scrabbling!

Involving: that’s what we wanted to be. The art of keeping attention: that’s what we’d practice. No reading from notes. From the lectern. It was a matter of performance. Of liveliness. Of pacing the podium, in full philosophical character.

The seriousness of philosophy: that’s what we were there to embody. The seriousness of European philosophy – of the thought of the Continent, so reviled in UK philosophical circles. Its lucidity. Its importance. The way it could contribute to the most ancient disputes. Weren’t we ambassadors of a kind for the thoughts of old Europe? Weren’t we bound to show its seriousness and its scrupulousness, European thought? The way it could stand up to any analytic scrutiny? The way it was concerned, like all philosophy, with what mattered most?

Remembering our first lectures.

At long last! After so many years of service teaching! Of seminar teaching for full-time lecturers. Of the paid-by-the-hour slog.

After so many years of holding ourselves back. Our years of never being allowed to speak – and now being allowed to speak. Our years of never having had the floor – and now having the floor.

Let off the leash. Let loose in an elite university! With elite students! Not the grade-inflated dunces of mass education, as we were. Not the products of the pile ‘em high, cram ‘em in former polys (our background.)

To be listened to! Heard! Wasn’t that what we always wanted? To surface, after years of obscurity. To step up to the podium after years in the darkness.

Unmanacled. Unmuzzled! And with so much say. With all the lessons of darkness. All that we’d brought from obscurity. This was our hour. This was our resurrection. We’d been unburied. Unforgotten. Somehow, we were to come forward to speak. And years of waiting. Years of mental preparation. Just in case. Because it might one day become possible …

Livia loved the poshness of Mercia students. And she loved putting us before them, the post southern students who came to study with us.

Mercia humanities is virtually a finishing school, Livia noted. There were veritable aristocrats amongst them. To the manor born types, and all that. Old money and very old money! With Kensington Park addresses!

Didn’t she enjoy it, hobnobbing with the youth of the aristocracy? At Open Days. At visit Days? And at graduation, too?

Livia and the upper-class parents. Livia, and the aristocratic parents. Giving her speech at our graduation celebration. How she escaped from the days of communism. How she fell out of favour with the apparatchiks back home. How she escaped with a Chopin record, a book of Nietzsche and not much else.

Addressing them all! Winning their sympathy!

Of course, Livia knew what we felt about the posh. She knew how we loved and hated them, the posh. She knew what a posh southern accent did to us. To the lower class English in general!

The whole thing amused her. The class thing. Our peasant thing.

Our natural deference struggling with our natural defiance. Our automatic reverence at odds with our spontaneous revulsion.

Our issues! Our conflicts! Our ferment! Our sizzling!

Always vexed. Always conflicted. Always reeling. Always troubled.

There was an energy to our working classness. There was a drive to our mixture of class hatred and impostor’s syndrome.

Think of the summer, postgraduates.

All of us should think of summer, postgraduates. We grow old during the academic year. We grow ancient. And then we need to be become young again, at the end of the academic year. We need to find it again, our innocence. Our youth. The youth that you incarnate, postgraduates.

Summer is a dreaming, postgraduates. A recovery. Summer is contemplation.

We all need to lie fallow, postgraduates. We all need Time. We need to go larval. We need slow incubation.

Eternal summer! Weeks and weeks, held into the eternal. Turning there, kept by the eternal. Weeks, lying back beneath summer skies. Watching summer pass over us.

With no one knocking on our office doors. No one phoning us on our office telephones. With but a few postgraduate meetings every now and then.

Summers becalmed, postgraduates. Summers with no breeze, nothing taking us forward. Summers without wind to fill our sails.

And weren’t we glad of it, postgraduates: to be blown like dandelion seeds through the corridors of summer? To hatch into summer, like summer midges?

Weeks and weeks in the eternal, postgraduates. Weeks squared in the eternal. Turning there. Kept by the eternal. Held by the eternal. In eternity’s rhythm.

Trust in summer, postgraduates. That summer was eternal. That the weeks would turn in eternity. How many weeks before the start of the term? Before the start of the new academic year? Infinite weeks. Endless weeks.

Summer, working through us. Summer, thinking. Summer, reading. In us and through us.

And time – the gift of time, postgraduates. Time’s timing. Time’s whiling. The turning of time.

Possibility: that was to be our element. Potentiality – when we were brought back to ourselves. Given to ourselves – all over again.

The summer inside us, postgraduates. The outside within. Our summer. The perfect coincidence of ourselves and the Origin. And the Beginning. And the Inexhaustible.

Stunned summer, like a blow to the head. Summer stunned, reeling, staggering all around us. And we were staggering, too.

Summer stupor. The summer when idiocy could breathe out. Be what it was. When we no longer tried to escape our stupidity. When we accepted it. Merged with it. Became one with it.

Our stupidity, joining the great stupidity. Our idiocy, joining the cosmic idiocy. The idiotic Creation. (And wasn’t God an idiot, too, in the high summer? Hadn’t God always been the perfect idiot, above the high summer sun?)

We wore our summer haloes, we philosophers of summer. We burned with summer Genius, which was indistinguishable from summer idiocy.

We worked, yes, but it was souffle-light, our working. We worked, but our work had air inside it, like kneaded bread. Summer air! Summer lightness!

If we fell asleep in the sun, what then, postgraduates? If we closed our eyes, of what would we dream? Let’s dream those dreams now, in the cold of the Organisational Management campus. Let’s remember them – our dreams. The summer’s dream, when stupidity holds hands with brilliance.

Think of the summer, postgraduates! Warm yourselves with thoughts of the summer!

Think of the end of teaching and the opening out of summer, postgraduates. Think of the final Board of Studies, the final Board of Examiners, and the expansiveness of summer.

Think of summer flight, borne by summer winds, postgraduates. Think of setting sail into the summer, of catching the summer breeze.

Think of the near-empty summer campus, excerpt for a few foreign students, postgraduates. Except for a few academics gathered for summer conferences.

Think of our philosophy accommodation, office doors open, postgraduates. Of wide-open windows. Of the wind-stirred blinds. Of desk fans moving drowsily from side to side.

Think of your summer studies, postgraduates. Of your summer reading. Were you going to tackle The Science of Logic this year? The entirety of Kierkegaard, including the sermons? Were you going to eat your Aristotle greens and finally tackle the Metaphysics? And what were you going to write, this summer? What was going to be your writing project, this summer.

Think of looking back through your notebooks, postgraduates. Of letting your thoughts assemble. Letting them come calmly together, as light poured through them. As warmth buoyed them, lifted them.

Think of summer thoughts, postgraduates. Summer ideas! That seem to float upwards. That seem to rise into the sky, like fire balloons. Summer thoughts, rising. Summer ideas, rising. But casually. Neglectfully. Without paying any attention to themselves. Without trying. Without sweat.

Summer, postgraduates! The opposite of our Organisational Management winter! The opposite of our White-Witch winter. Our Moominland-in-November winter.

Let it burn in your hearts, postgraduates! Let it warm your hearts! The coming summer. The summer that still hasn’t arrived. The summer condition –without beginning and without end.

Draw strength from it: the inexhaustible summer, postgraduates! The summer that you’ll never be able to use up! The summer that never ends! That is always but a dream of summer – the summer of inexhaustible potential. In which great things could be done. No: could be undone. Think of the undoing of things – of all things. Of the idling of summer.

The idling summer, postgraduates: think of that. Weeks without mooring. Those weeks of summer voyage. Summer languor. Summer luxuriance. The great summer stretching of limbs. Under the summer vault!

Think of your eternal youth, postgraduates. Your perennial faith. Your perpetual beginning, that’s never begun, that’s forever ahead. Of your secret childhood, that hasn’t happened yet. That hasn’t been crushed in you.

 Think of the summer of hope – of idled hope, postgraduates. Of idled work. Of idled reading – and writing. Of work without work, which was more about unworking. About unpicking the stitches.  

Not work, but the contemplation of work, postgraduates. Not work, but study detached from work, fallen out of step with work. That remains out of phase with anything productive …

When time seems to lose all direction, postgraduates. When time seemed to sink into itself – lie down. Think of time pools. Of time hazes, like heat over summer roads. Think of the air turned thick. O, postgraduates. Of the air turned runny.

Summon it up inside you, postgraduates: the memory of summer, that is also the expectation of summer. Of the summer to come.