Work in Progress

What have they done to the snowflake? How did they fuck up even the snowflake? Snow should just be falling softly and gently. Snowflake should just be lying on snowflake, softly and gently. And instead? Grey snowflakes. Grey, greasy snow. Grey snow, lying on grey snow. And kinda melting, kinda not …

They don’t even like the world they’ve made, not really. They couldn’t stand giving up on the world they’ve made, in truth.

They were enthusiastic for it, the whole project, remaking the world. There was money behind it. There was a whole momentum.

All the globalists were for. All the great NGOs. The billionaires and trillionaires!

And it’s their world now. It’s utterly their world. And they’re even tired of it, their world. Which is why they’ve brought us in. for the novelty! For the randomness! For a little bit of welcome chaos.

We’re actually trying to help, philosopher. We’re trying to do good. We have the most noble goals. We want the best things to happen …

All the things we could achieve, if we work together. If there’s a good will. I don’t know why you don’t believe in good will, philosopher.

Can’t you just trust us? Trust the process? We can’t have got things that wrong, can we?

Managing things for the better. Organising things for … equality. And equity. And social justice. All the things you guys want in the humanities.

No one could object but you, philosopher. And really, it’s just stubbornness. Who could object to equality and equity and social justice?

We’re all working together for the good. All things. Not the good capital G, maybe. But the pretty good. For everyone.

Do you believe in these things? In what you’re saying?

We want what you want, philosopher. Our interests are … aligned.


Philosophy is an Organisational Management opportunity. Realise that, philosopher. Organisational Management is advancing on multiple frontiers – why not a philosophical frontier, too?

This is our descent to find the truth. Our excavation. We’re trying to uncover the equivalent of King Tut’s tomb.

Our descent into the realms of the dead. To commune with ghosts.

What ghosts?

The ghosts of the old department. Of the remnants of that department, who went underground out of pure love for philosophy. Because they didn’t want to be compromised.

Some process. The passage through Hell is always part of the hero’s journey. Based on a whole shamanistic thing …

There’s something we’re supposed to uncover. Something buried. Some secret.

The tomb of some philosopher God.

There isn’t any truth down here. Only more … errancy. Only more … erring. Generally going wrong. False trails. Trails petering out.

What have we ever said? What, that’s of any importance? What have we ever meant? What … what …?

Our katabasis. Our harrowing of Hell. We’re hardly harrowing it, are we? And this is hardly Hell.

What’s the message? What are we supposed to have learnt? What’s the take-away? What vision are we going to take back to the surface?

We haven’t given up on the world – that’s the thing. We still have hope. We can’t help it – hoping. That’s why the paragrads are beyond us.

The paragrads that you made up.

Why do they have to make our hearts beat so quickly? Why do they make us feel like this? Why do they have to do these things?

Couldn’t we have been allowed to live for a few years undetected? Unharassed? Why do we have to be on high alert all the time? Does it have to be constant panic stations? Utter screaming horror?

What part-timism did to us. How causal academic labour destroyed us. How the precariat life murdered us. How it drove us to collapse and beyond collapse.

Part time horror. Part time trembling. Part time fear. The part time emergency. The part time panic. The part time living death.

The part time soul-hollowing. The part-time evacuation of the soul. The part time soul-emptying.

What it did to our heads! What it did to our hearts! What it did to our souls! How careless we were of our lives! Of our souls! Of our hearts! How we threw them away: our lives, our souls, our hearts!

Livia’s secret weapon was our stupidity, that’s the thing. Organisational Management can’t reckon on our stupidity.

Our stupidity is the incalculable. Our idiocy is what they could not foresee. We fall outside the usual … incentives. We can’t be bribed in the usual ways. We can’t be flattered. We’re a Problem. We’re an Obstacle. That they want to solve.

We don’t understand our own stupidity, Livia said. We couldn’t understand what we were. What a gift we were. Of course we couldn’t. That was Livia’s genius: to be able to see what we were, as we could not. Livia’s delusion! Ivia’s own stupidity.

My God. Stupidity will save the world … who’d have thought it. So we were superheroes after all. So we had a superpower, which was really the opposite of a superpower. So we really can save the world.

Our idiocy is the hole in this universe – that’s what Livia thought. It might open a wormhole to another universe.

A wormhole of stupidity – quite an achievement.

I thought it was about a black hole. That our stupidity would just suck everything into it.

Our stupidity’s was cosmic, in some sense, Livia thought. More than cosmic! Greater than cosmic!

Our stupidity’s touched upon ur-chaos. Our stupidity’s about the elemental. About the Deep. About chaos primordial. The tohu vavohu.

Are we really that stupid? Are we really that bad at philosophy?

Livia thought so. That’s why she placed her faith in us. Faith – it’s more like an anti-faith.

We’re going to save the world by being unsavable by Organisational Management – that’s what she thought. We’re the least saveable, from the perspective of Organisational Management.

Academia is going to split open. The skies of the university are going to divide. The lightning will strike. The distance between us and the world is great enough now.

We’ve reached it. This is the ultimate point. We’ve reached it. We’ve found it. The extremity. The edge of the … universe. Of everything.

This is the end of Organisational Management. I know it. it’s died inside. It’s been given to death.

Why? How? Because of us?

The dream: that our stupidity was deep enough. That the farce found is limit. That we inverted the world. That the lie did not lie anymore. That the poison did not poison.

Are we holy fools? Are we farcical fools? Fools of the farce. Of the feast of fools? Are we holy idiots?

Is our idiocy sufficient? Does it reach … the ears of God. All our stupid talk. Our stupidity. Our foolishness. Does God hear our stupid talk?

Is our despair real despair? Are we lying in our despair? Is our despair lies, too? Is our despair part of the farce? Must it be?



The dream: that our stupidity was deep enough. That the farce found is limit. That we inverted the world. That the lie did not lie anymore. That the poison did not poison.

Maybe Livia was the liar. The mother of lies. Maybe she was Satan.

The Mysteries of Livia. Of the Leviathan. One of the minor demons. A Gnostic demon. Serving the Gnostic inversion. The reversal of everything. The world turned upside down. The university, upside down. Academia, inverted.

And you’re the most deeply involved, Shiva. You’re the most fucked up of the fuck ups. You’re the deepest into the Livia cult. You’re the one who accepted all her madness.

You thought you were her chosen one. Her special one. You thought you could get out of it by literature. By writing her idiot-ubch, or whatever. You’re more brainwashed than anyone.