Work in Progress

Hasn’t analytic philosophy spread to Germany now. Isn’t it spreading across Scandinavia? North American’s gone – obviously. So is Australia. There are a few holdouts mainland France, for example. In India. China! They tried to import analytic philosophy to China, and they failed! Hilarious! They rejected it, the Chinese. Of course they did! But the pressure’s on. They’ll conquer China in time …

Haven’t they made in-roads into Africa? Aren’t they scratching logical notation on Ghanian blackboards?

The car park.

You haven’t even got a car. How do you manage, without a car? I suppose you have philosophical objections to cars. And business. And general prosperity.

It’s just resentment, anyway.

Why? I can’t even drive.

Exactly – that’s part of it. You won’t equip yourself for a normal life. Like normal people. You think you’re special. Which just means that you’re especially incompetent. Don’t deign to function in the world. To be normal. To act like a responsible grow up.

Is that what you are, a responsible grown up?

You don’t even have a smartphone, do you?

It’s resistance.

What a joke.

You can’t use cash in this carpark. You have to have the app.

You let me pick you up, didn’t you? You didn’t walk here. You’re content to be otherworldly. Looked after. You think you’re always going to be looked after. You’re dependent, right. Not much of a turn on, is it?

A big car makes me feel all girly and looked after.

Really?

What if – what if that? Your parents should have taken care of you better. Prepared you.

I’ve done okay, haven’t I?

Anyway, I’m skint.

Skint … You’ll never be a good provider, will you?

You’re so quiet today. When you should be apologising.

Apologising for what?

For it being so cold. For bring me out here.

It was your idea.

It was yours. Let’s go for a walk, you said. Let’s get some air, you said. Let’s fill our lungs. And now we’re dying of exposure. Well, I am.


Aren’t you scared someone will recognise you out here? Expose our torrid affair? Our affairlete, anyway.

I want it exposed. I want the world to know. I don’t care. Anyway, who’d be out on a day like this?

We’re sports. We’re stunts. We’re experiments – stupidity’s experiments. We’re mutants of ignorance.


How could she inflict us upon philosophy, Livia? How could she do this to philosophy? Why did she want to be so cruel to philosophy? What had philosophy ever wanted to do to her?

A doubled up laughter. A laughter at laughter. That attained … what?


Last laughter. A laughter that knew the folly of all things, and of everything that tried to rise above folly! A laughter that knew the folly of rising above folly. Of all dreams of transcendence. Of all the substitutes for religion. Even our religion without religion. Even our religion of the empty sky. Of shattered immanence. Even out religion of the void – only the void.

Dear, dear Boner. The idiot’s idiot. An actual, workaday idiot, who somehow stumbled into philosophy. Who somehow got a philosophy PhD.

How was that possible? Can you somehow end up with a philosophy Ph.D.? Like a tattoo, after a drunken night out? Like a Las Vegas wedding?


What’s the opposite of a consigliere? That’s you, Boner.


Boner is here to make even the idiots look less idiotic.


Boner’s stupid questions. The play of Boner’s idiocies. Like a family dog. Amusing us because his stupidities are even greater than ours.


A clown’s clown. An idiot’s idiot. A fool’s fool. The jester’s jester, right. Village idiot of the year.

Every department needs one. Just for a point of contrast. To make us feel somewhat better about ourselves. Or as a mirror in which to see ourselves, reflected back.


The farce’s farce. What the farce watches to amuse itself.


Even the comic relief need comic relief. Even the slapstickers enjoy slapstick.


I think Boner was sent from the future to save us.

From what? Intelligence?


Dear, sweet Hardon – where would we be without your questions?


Questions, always questions, hard boy. An inquiring mind! Always eager to learn!


Fuck stick. Mr Stiffie. Tentpole Tudor. Morning Wood. Every day’s a school day. Love truncheon. Donkey schlong. King Dong.

The postwar humanities horn of plenty.

Before mass higher education had flooded the academy with midwits. Before those midwits became midwit lecturers in turn. The dreadful cycle of diminution. The academic descent …

God made the word so that we could hate it.

And love God?

Love God as the opposite of the Creation.


God has nothing to do with the Creation. God despises the Creation.

You’re a lunatic.


The Creation is God’s going away. Is God’s disappearance. Is God fleeing from everything. From us.

We were encouraged to make great gestures in thought. To issue forth great claims. Without moderation. Without restraint.

Livia wanted to hear categorical statements. Grandiosity. Delusional ravings. General philosophical hyperbole. Absolutism. Fanaticism, even!

We were to range forth across the philosophical landscape. To stomp! To smash! To make our stupid mark, like philosophical King Kings.

We were to see what we could do! Or what we couldn’t do! Mistakes – that’s what she wanted to see. Erring. Great stupidities – not merely minor ones. Nothing finickity, she said. Nothing delicate. What we got wrong we’d have to get Wrong, capital W. We’d have to go entirely off the rails.

Philosophy needed its outsider artists. Its idiot-antinomians. Philosophy needed our crudities and grandiosity. Our distortions and gaucherie.


Where would we lead our students? To make more like us? But they’d never be like us.

They weren’t mongrels, as we were. They weren’t brought up in intellectual crevasses and cracks. They weren’t scrappers. They’d never have to fend for themselves. They weren’t of the proletariat. Or the lumpenproletariat!

They weren’t underlings. They weren’t low caste. Low born. They weren’t impostors in the university. They weren’t vandals. They weren’t running amuck.

They actually deserved to be here. They actually felt confident that they belonged here. or, indeed, somewhere better. They’d only missed getting into Durham by a whisker. Hadn’t the applied for Cambridge! For Oxford! They’d so nearly got into Doxbridge. But not quite!


The university didn’t mind what we taught, not really. The content of modules didn’t matter, so long as there we identifiable aims and objectives. And outcomes! And assessments!

So long as the students graded us well. Gave us good marks on the student surveys. So long as we kept the customers happy. And kept our admin up to date. Filled in the right forms. They’d leave us alone.

And weren’t we entertaining enough to get away with it? Didn’t the students enjoy our working class flights of fancy? Our peasant’s waywardness. Our underdogs’ eccentricities? Didn’t they find their underclass teachers entertaining, in their own way?


We were performing monkeys, essentially. We were the monkeys, and Livia the organ grinder.


It’s not as if anyone cared, not really. It’s not as if anyone expected anything of the humanities. Rich kids’ playground, that’s all. Something for them to busy themselves with in their undergraduate years. Something to keep them amused. Something with which their parents were happy enough. And happy to fund!

With a bit of vestigial prestige. That could maintain the university’s alibi. That would allow the university go on pretending that it was a university, for a while at least.

Livia’s plans. Livia’s calculations. The contradiction she sought. Her Gnosticism, which was never merely a theoretical affair. Her faith – her anti-faith – in the Void. Her desire for the lightning to strike. For some shift to be made.

Her Gnostic Judaism, or whatever. Her desire to force a new kind of messiah. Redemption through stupidity: wasn’t that it? By admitting the stupid into the university. By giving stupidity a position on faculty.

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 posh 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!


She 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. The peasant thing.

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


The peasants’ revolt of our lecturing. The revenge of the colonised.

Our lecturers’ revolution. Giving those poshoes what for. Hitting them with Marx! With Lenin! With Trotsky, for good measure! Teaching only communist philosophers. Our communist romance.


We wanted our revenge on the order of things – the order of the world. We wanted revenge on ourselves. We were outraged that we’d succeeded. And glad that we’d succeeded. And appalled that we succeeded. And relieved that we’d succeeded. That we’d waltzed our way into jobs.


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.


Our rogues’ and rascals’ revolt. The revenge of the miserable provincials!