Work in Progress

This is the period of the incubation. If we close our eyes, something may come. Remember that scene in Stalker, where they sit outside the Room. They just sit there. In the puddles. Waiting for what?

We should just wait. Wait until the sense of what we’re waiting for is worn away. Until waiting just becomes intransitive. Down here, in the bowels of the earth …

Can’t we just sink down, among the humus? Can’t we just lie down in the mud?

There is no mud. Just the bricks of the tunnel.


Couldn’t we just die? Couldn’t we just die down here? Couldn’t our lives just drain out? Like when you let blood run out of a vein.

Haven’t we lived too long? Isn’t it worth just getting it over with? Letting it all be done. Letting the logic run its course.

Livia wanted to bury us in her tomb, that’s all.


The bunker – Organisational Management bunker – that’s what we’re going to find. With Organisational Management Hitler.


One of us is definitely going to be murdered. We’ll just be picked off one by one by the Bug.

I want to be picked off. I’ve got a thing for giant insects. I need a giant insect in my life.


Is there an anti-Bug – a principle of goodness?

I think the Bug is the anti-Bug. AKA the philosophy child. AKA the postgraduate messiah. At the same time as being the Bug. It’s complex.

Don’t be complicated. The Bug is Organisational Management Hitler, and that’s all.


Are we going to uncover the Bug’s lair? Is the Bug holed up here with Bug-Himmler and Bug Goering?


Do you know anything about the Bug, Gazelle? So you haven’t encountered the Bug in your Susan Taubes studies? Did Susan Taubes write anything about the Bug? What would she write, if you could write anything?


I see the Bug as like the creature in Kafka’s burrow.

Don’t be literary.


Bug! Where are you? Show yourself, principle of evil! Object of paragraduate sex rituals! Reveal yourself! Black hand! Secret stirrer!

I think we might be in Kafka’s burrow.

Or in Homer’s Hell.

The descent is very literary, apparently.

No one’s interested in literature anymore.


I don’t think the earth’s going to save us.

I was just hoping the earth would bury us. And all our mistakes. The mistake of our lives.


Livia wanted to lead us into the darkness. The truth isn’t about light anymore. Heidegger knew that.


It’s not about illuminating the darkness. About opening the darkness in the darkness. Like another dark dimension. It’s about the meta earth. The deeper earth.

It’s about what’s hidden. About what shows itself only as it retreats. The night that plunges more deeply into the night, and so on.

 You only ever see the hindquarters of God – AKA being, for Heidegger. The Truth is ahead of us, tunnelling down and down, like some giant mole.


There’s just the earth, that’s all. The thick earth. The heavy earth. That doesn’t mean anything. That’s tired of meaning. Of all the theories – all the philosophers. That’s seen out all the burnt-out ideologies.

The earth’s the only thing that’s real. It’s not good, it’s not evil. it just is, all around us. Above us, below us. There’s an earth-sky. And the earth earth. This tunnel is the only thing that’s preventing us from being crushed.

But I’d like to be crushed. I’d like the tunnel to collapse. I’d like it all to fall in. For the bricks to crumble. For the architecture to fail.


An incursion of the earth – that’s what I want. To bury us. Would that be a quick way to die, do you think? Would we be crushed all at once? Or would death take longer, like in an earthquake, when you can still hear cries from the ruins days later?


We’d swallow the earth, wouldn’t we? The earth would fill our mouths. It wouldn’t be possible to say anything – not anymore.


*Obliteration – that’s what I want. Never to have existed! Never to have been born! Never to have been conceived. But never for our parents to have been born. And their parents! Our whole bloodlines!

For there to have been nothing else but earth. For all that there has ever been to have been earth. Just earth, and nothing besides. No life – no human life, or any life.


We have to go under for the new humanity to appear. And we have to go under the earth. We have to be buried by earth …

Descent.

Does this count as team building? As a kind of away day? Would Organisational Management approve?


The dark side of the campus. Of the moon. The dark underside. The underearth.


Katabasis is a journey inward.

I don’t want to go inward. I hate inward. There’s nothing worse than introspection. I can’t stand the inside of my head. My entire life is a way of avoiding what’s inside my head.


You could philosophise very deeply down here.

Don’t start.

Have we reached German depths, do you think? Have we reached Russian depths? What about Indian depths? Vedic depths?


We’re not even that deep underground. God.


What should we take? Have you got anything we could take?

Just the usual disgusting wine.


Are we in Plato’s cave, do you think? We’re in the opposite of Plato’s cave! This is the descent to truth. The truth is buried nowadays. It isn’t there, blazing above the surface. We have to go deep, don’t you understand that? The truth is hidden.


I’m hungry. We should have brought a picnic.

There are no picnics in the katabasis.


You don’t even need to descend, Gazelle. You don’t need to go deeply into yourself. You’ve already found your buried treasure. We’re still looking. We’re still trying to find out what kind of philosophers we are.

And Helmut’s perpetually descending, right? Heidegger’s very into depth. It’s all about the concealed and the hidden.

Do you have depths, do you think Furio? What about you, Driss? Are you deep people? We hate the world – that’s something. We’ve been contorted – buckled – that’s what Livia used to say. Like the buckling of the Earth’s crust that produced the Alps.


We could start a whole new life underground. We could set up camp here, couldn’t we? Escape Organisational Management capture. Work for the revolution down here, in secret. Basically become the paragraduates. What a future.


The descent – we’re becoming who we are, or something. We’re coming to ourselves. we should shed all our world affectations. Do we have any world affectations? Do we have any of them left? It’s a purging. And a purifying.

We’re going for a walk in a tunnel – that’s all.  


Whose idea was this descent? Why do we believe in these things? Why do we think that everything would change if we only did this that? Like, the vastness of our denial is stunning. Our fantasy lives.

And it’s not as if we aren’t ceaselessly reminded of the utter irrelevance of our dreams. It’s not that we don’t come up against it again and again? Why will we never learn?


A descent into face. Farcically.

Even deepening the farce has become farcical. Like a meta farce.

What else could it be?


Think of life above ground, postgraduates. Life not in the eternal darkness. Non tunnel life! Non descent life! What’s the opposite of katabasis? Think of the sun pouring down. Think of baring your solar anuses, or whatever it is you kids get up to. Think of exposing your hairy parts to the sun.

Think of the campus summer, postgraduates. Let it warm your hearts.

The idling summer, postgraduates: think of that. Weeks without mooring. Weeks of summer voyage. Summer languor. Summer luxuriance. The great summer stretching of limbs.

Draw strength from it, postgraduates: the inexhaustible summer! The summer that you can never 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 the untwisting of things. Of the idling of summer.

Think of the summer of hope – of idled hope, postgraduates. Of idled work. Of idled reading – and writing. Of work without work – about unpicking the stitches. Untying the knots.

Think of the summer release.

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 summer time seems to lose all direction, postgraduates. When summertime 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. Of the air turned runny.

Think of passing through the summer’s eye, postgraduates. Through the summer mirror. Think of stepping across the summer threshold.

Study that hovers, postgraduates. Study that is there in the air. Study above. Study that is a staring into a space. Without softly-focused eyes. A softly focused head!

Gliding study. Circling study.

And thinks of breaks from study, very much part of study, postgraduates. Taking the summer air. Walking the campus, for air. Watching the groundsmen getting the lawns ready for graduation. Replanting plants. Tidying it up, the campus. Installing the sign, Mercia University, in six foot letters, as a backdrop for photos.

And walking into town, for air. To look through vinyl at Beatdown Records. To buy a snack at Marks and Spencers.

And didn’t we even go to the coast? Didn’t we even walk on Longsands. Walk at Blyth. Walk at Seaton Sluice. And didn’t we go out for drinks in the evenings? To the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley? Or to catch a film at the Star and Shadow?

Think of the joy of summer, postgraduates. Vaster than us. Vaster than we are. And to be lost, in that vastness. To be part of that vastness. And to offer up our work to that vastness. And to work in the name of vastness. That is more than you. And above you. And below you. The warm sky and the warm earth. Think of summer’s eternal youth, postgraduates. Its perennial faith. Its perpetual beginning, that’s never exhausted, that’s forever ahead. Its secret childhood, that hasn’t happened yet.

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.