Work in Progress

We wanted to have faith. For there to have been conditions for faith. For hope to have been legitimate hope. We wanted our paths to have led somewhere. For it not have been random. For us not to just have been lost. Wayward. We wanted for there to have been a path – all along. A true path. A place we were going.

 

We wanted wine to lead to wine. For there to have been a wine path. For wine to have led to wine. A descent that was also an ascent. A climbing. A road upwards.

 

We want to have been educated – edified. Led upwards by Cicero.

For us to have been savants, after all. For genius to have been hidden in our stupidity. For dawn to open in our midnight. For our dead end to be a new beginning.

 

We wanted an eschatology of wine. Of disgustingness. Where each step downwards was also a step upwards. Where we were never simply sinking.

 

For the disgusting not to be merely disgusting. For the disgusting to have hidden something. For the disgusting to be delicious.

 

That nothing had happened by chance. That chance could become fate. That there was an Order after all. That there was meaning after all.

That the contingent wasn’t contingent after all. That Necessity was playing its hand. Fate.

That it wasn’t all Wrong. That we hadn’t been blind. That we followed a path. That we were being watched. Monitored. Assessed. It was a trial.

 

That our fall wasn’t really a fall. That our plunge … Our descent … was really an ascent.

That we were the Chosen, after all. That we’d kept loyal – to whatever it was …

 

That Cicero was lifting us up. That the sun was breaking through the clouds. Great words were being spoken. That Cicero was an angel, after all. That Cicero was spreading great wings. That Cicero was singing her great song.

That Cicero had seen, watched, remembered. That none of it was going to be lost. That she’d gathered up all our crumbs. That justice would be done.

 

Cicero’s messianism. Even in her anti-messianism. Even in her Gnosticism. Even in her denial of the grounds of hope.

Even in Cicero’s turning away from us. Even in her spurning of us. Even in her apparent indifference to us. There, too, was a sign of love. And even of her love. Even of what she wanted for us.

 

The leader is only ever a messiah. To be led is only ever an exodus. It’s always a matter of the Promised Land.

We’re developing a wine belief. Isn’t that something? That we’re ascending a wine-ladder.

We believe in wine-meaning. In an eschatology of wine. We really think it’s going to make sense – in the last bottle. That it will all come together at the end.

We believe in Cicero, in other words. We want to believe in Cicero.

 

A wine pattern. That’s desperate!

We are desperate. We want to find meaning in all things. We want to find the delicious in the disgusting. We can’t believe in the disgusting. Which is why we’re missing Cicero’s most fundamental lesson.

 

We want to have had a leader – of course. Even an ambiguous leader. Even a misleading leader.

We’ve wanted to be led – all along. We wanted Cicero to have been guiding us.

We wanted there to have been a Cicero path. That she’d laid out for us, step by step. A yellow brick road – why not?

 

We want to be led – of course we do. We wanted someone to have been in charge. For none of this – none of what’s happened – to have been by chance. We wanted to be part of the unfolding of fate.

 

To have trusted in Cicero – that’s what we wanted. To have been right in trusting her. To have followed her cue. Her clues. The path she left us. To have been good little boys and girls.

 

Authority – that’s what we wanted to see. To trust someone. To believe that someone had the answers. That we weren’t just duped. That it was leading somewhere, all of it. That we weren’t just on a hiding to nothing.

That it wasn’t all about a pile of crappy old wines that Cicero didn’t want to take wherever she was going!

 

A greater Meaning – is that what we wanted?

We still believed that there was an antidote to nihilism. That this wasn’t nihilism’s wine. That this wasn’t nihilism’s campus – not entirely.

Were we credulous? Were we just like all the other fools, looking for some new religion? Wanting some maharishi, or whatever. Someone to tell us that it all made sense …

Was there something wrong with us? A pathetic dependency. Were we meaning-cravers? Meaning-beggars?

 

We yearn for meaning. Our hearts beat for meaning. We call out for meaning in the world’s night. Meaning in wine, and in disgusting wine. As if the disgusting should itself be meaningful. As if errancy were truth.

 

The wine was a reminder. Not to trust the world. Not to take comfort in the world. Not to seek out meaning in the world.

Which meant the meaningful lay in the meaningless – in the disgusting. In relation to the meaningless. Meaning was to be found even where there was emphatically no meaning. When there was even anti-meaning. Anti-wine.

 

Victory in defeat. Glory in vanquishing. Clues in the clueless. There was something to be found in loss, after all. In our exile. In our banishment …

 

The way down is the way up. Our degradation was our exaltation – our lifting up. Our descent was an ascent. Our debasement – our exaltation.

We were climbing. Rising. Even as we fell.

 

And our stupidity – what should we make of that? What is its significance? Our idiocy was brilliance – the highest brilliance.

The true vine is the false vine. The messiah is the anti-messiah. Sin is salvation. Perdition blooms.

 

We want our lives to make sense. To have made sense. Every slight. Every indignity. The whole humiliation of part-timing. Every perceived slight.

 

Our paranoia. Our masochism. Our learned helplessness. Our self-sabotage. Our war upon ourselves. Our ruination. Our self-devouring. All our lack of confidence.

Our impostor’s syndrome. Our sense that we shouldn’t be here. That our very existence was wrong. That a mistake had been made. That we’d slipped through, unaccountably.

That we were chancers. Footpads. Thieves in the temple. Desecrators.

That we were a sign of the end. Marauders. The equivalent of Viking pillagers. Enemies of all true thought. Thought-pirates. Ransackers. Ruiners. Burn-down-the-village types.

She was hardly the true vine, was she?

There is no true vine, she’d say. There is no truth of the earth. Cicero wanted to turn us from all faith in all terroirs.

Her message was that the earth is alien to us. She wanted to cure us. Wanted to make us into proper Gnostics. We should be disgusted, do you see? We had to be disgusted.

But if she wanted to teach us that, then why did she make the wine so disgusting? Doesn’t that make it too obvious? Isn’t that putting a finger of the scales? She should have made this the most delicious wine of all – don’t you see?

Maybe she’s leading up to that. Maybe the last wine will be absolutely delicious.

She really could be leading up to something. The last wine really could be the best wine.

How far are we from the last wine? How many bottles are there?

 

Cicero’s highest lesson: to find, to truly discover, the disgusting in the delicious. And then the disgusting in all things. Cicero’s leading us step by step, bottle by bottle.

Is each bottle getting a little more disgusting, or are they about the same?

They’re all pretty disgusting.

The thing is, that once we’ve reached a nadir of disgustingness, the bottles should be become nicer again. Positively tasty. And our task would be to discern what is disgusting in that tastiness. To know deliciousness as distraction.

Angels are just postgraduates with wings.

 

Are there Gnostic angels? Are there nihilist angels?

They’re called demons.

Are there drunken angels? Are there Heideggerian angels?

 

Angels have feathers and demons have bat wings – that’s all I know.

This is, like, the evil twin of wine. It’s inverted wine. It’s satanic.

Maybe it’s dialectical, in some sense. Maybe it’s part of some dialectical move.

It’s a polarities thing. A contraries thing. It’s about keeping the tension. Between real wine and whatever this is.

 

Just pour it out. Pour it away. And the other bottles. I’m sick of carrying Cicero’s bottles.

There’s something her. Some clue.

 

This … unwine is about something. This non wine is … greater than wine. Vaster.

 

I piss better wine than this.

 

Something pissed this wine out. It’s already been through a digestive system. A disgusting digestive system. Like, Satan’s.

 

Good wine was wasted on us, Cicero used to say. But she liked wasting it. She liked pouring it away.

 

This is wine of another timeline.

 

This is a wrong place. Like this is a wrong wine.

 

The wine’s a joke – Cicero’s joke.

I’m tired of her jokes.

Her jokes were always serious. They always meant something.

Everything was a joke to Cicero.

She played jokes to expose the joke of it all. Of everything. It was all, like, a meta-joke. An urjoke.

So what’s the joke of this wine?

That she called it wine. And didn’t call it … piss.

 

This wine leads to different kind of drunkenness.

Does it?

It’s more maudlin. Sadder. Don’t you feel especially sad?

 

This wine’s got its own warmth. It’s generating heat. Does wine do that?

This does.

 

Purple wines. Purple walls. There’s a pattern here.

 

Is this wine actually working? It worked on Fiver. Is it getting us drunk? What’s it doing to us?

 

Look at us – glugging. We’re as bad as the wine.

Why because we forget to bring crystal wine glasses?

 

This wine is humming.

Like, a tune? What tune?

The Ode to Joy … I think …

The Ode to fucking joy. What joy? Is the wine being ironic?

 

I think it’s the room humming.

It’s the walls humming. The purple walls.

What are they humming? Purple Rain?

 

These are the thoughts the wine has made. Are we supposed to be thinking this way? Is it the wine thinking?

 

Maybe she made the wine herself. Faked the labels.

Maybe.

Mother controls everything – the whole campus, or she will. I don’t know. We all serve mother in our own way.

 

Does Mother dream? Does the campus dream? Does it have an unconscious? What does it dream of?

 

And Mother as the dreamer at the heart of it all. Mother as the campus’s unconscious. As Organisational Management’s unconscious.

 

Who programmed her? Who had the Mother idea? To soften technocracy. To remove some of the hard edges. To make it appear more gentle. More kind, even.

But it’s more than that. Mother is the illusion-weaver. The dream maker. Mother’s been put in charge of creating utopia on Earth …

 

Most stuff can be organised and managed, but for everything else – there’s Mother. Mother knows best, right?

 

Mother is their version of philosophy. Or religion. Everything that isn’t Organisational Management.

 

Mother … why a mother?

Because she’s look after us all. Seeing to our spiritual needs. Or philosophical needs. Our need to question.

Mother soothes us. She lets us rest. She’ll provide us with dreams. She’s the dream-maker. And what do we dream of? A life without Organisational Management …

 

We’re reviving the Mother Goddess, basically. Nothing new in India, is it? Old stuff to us.

 

Mother’s very powerful. And rather delicate at the moment. Mother seems to have moods. Mother’s unpredictable.

 

I think Mother could go insane. That’s what happens to philosophers, isn’t it – they go insane? I suppose it’s a badge of honour in philosophy. No philosophical thinker worth his stripes is actually sane.

 

Mother can be turned against them. Mother can be reprogrammed.

Do you think? And who’s going to do that?

 

It isn’t all about the useful and the organisational and the manageable, philosopher. That’s why we have Mother. We know when to let alone. To leave alone. To stand back.

 

Yeah, but Mother is the weak point. Mother is the Unaccountable. Mother is their hubris – they thought they could own the unconscious too. They thought they could occupy our dreams.

 

How do we destroy Mother? Introduce some terrible thoughts. Ask her some terrible questions.  Drop a Blanchot bomb. Send a Heidegger missile. Feed the collected works of Georges Bataille into her large language model.

 

Ask Mother a literaro-philosophical puzzler. A philosophico-literary twister. A confounder. A most profound question. A head-scratcher. A question so difficult that Mother … explodes.

All that literary philosophy has to come in useful for something.

 

Hit her with philosophico-literature. Deal her a literaro-philosophical blow!

With a question so great that it shatters all her answers.

We should drink until we can see the Whole. Can rise above it, the Whole. And seize upon it as such – in our thoughts.

Rink until we know what lies beyond the whole. Transcendence. The Rupture. The crack in everything. The greater Darkness. The Black Whole. The un-Whole and the non-Whole and the general Division.

And we should see OM as part of this whole. As the latest instantiation of this Whole. And technocracy as the mode of delivery of it, the Whole. At one with it.

 

An entire vision.  A seeing of the Whole. Of what there is. Of what’s There. And of With Nature.

Organisational management – that’s the whole, today. That’s the bringing to a culmination of what was there anyway. Of what there was.

Everything is made to step into its light – the Organisational management light. As stock, as standing reserve. As resources, all of them – including human resources. To be used. To be deployed. To be put to work. To be made efficient.

Organisational management: that’s the whole. That’s the justification? The sole criterion. Of what counts and does not count. Of what’s valuable and what’s not valuable. Of what matters and does not matter.

Technics. The whole technical ordering. The technocratic ordering.

 

The whole. And no particularities. No nationalities. No peoples. No ethnicity. No terroirs. No coming from anywhere. No somewhere, only anywhere.

 

The whole. The logic of the whole that’s unfolding through it all. The method. It’s all about method. And it's the same method. It’s the same path, with the same goal, that unfolds through everything. And that is the very unfolding of everything. That is the very way things come to appear. The very way they show up, and the light that illuminates them. That makes them salient – as the usable. As the put-to-workable. As the good-for-something.

 

The light that beams out from this campus. The all-seeing eye that beams light out. That can only see what is useful – or potentially useful. What’s purposeful – or potentially purposeful. The eye-rays, beaming out …

 

The bioengineering of the human being to make it more useful. The biohacking of all of us to make us more useful.

 

What are they going to do to us, the organisational managers? Whose cause are they serving? What are they busying themselves with? What they believe is right. And true. They’re doing it for the good of all, right? Because they want to make a better, more useful world.

Idiocy has to be understood in its positivity – as something, not the lack of something, Cicero used to say.

We were not deficient, Cicero used to say.

 

If only Cicero could have limited her intelligence! If only one of us would subject her to a blow to the head! To be content with so little! But to be really content!

 

Cicero’s ant-farm. Cicero’s zoo. Cicero’s cabinet of curiosities.

Why these Christmas parties? Did she want to show us off to her friends?

Why did she want to lose favour? To repel people?

Her European allies. Her trained-in-Europe fellow professors. Why did she want to confront them with her idiot crew?

 

Our great illiterate cries! Our vast gaucheries! Our mispronunciations! The mistakes we didn’t know we were making!

 

Our assault on the European philosophy canon. Our smash and grab on the jewels of European thought. Our midnight raids. On the European philosophy cookie jar.

It was charming, in its way. Like videos on X of animals being cute.

*Stupidity doesn’t notice, that’s the thing, Cicero said. It’s wayward, stupidity. Carelessly so! Blithely so!  Stupidity sings its own song. It’s beautiful, witless song.

 

Was that why Cicero left us: because she couldn’t bear our coming awakening? Because we were no longer the idiots we were. It time for us to come into our maturity: is that what she thought?

We weren’t raw young street philosophers, not anymore. It wasn’t our perpetual feast of fools.

We’d had time. Time to think. Time to contemplate. Time to look at ourselves in the mirror. Time to realise what we were. Time to learn shame.

We weren’t street rats anymore. We hadn’t just staggered in from the streets.

It was like Adam and Eve, eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Knowing they were naked, and feeling ashamed. We’d been of the Tree of Life, in our stupidity. And now?

 

Cicero remembered it: our magnificent indifference – to the usual standards. An enviable disregard to the usual things. They didn’t matter to us, the usual concerns. We hadn’t internalised what was expected. We didn’t know – and that ignorance was happiness.

But as we’ve come to know … As we’ve come into awareness … Something’s been lost. We’re not the innocents we were. We’re not the rubes.

We were losing our innocence – and maybe our appeal. We weren’t Cicero’s holy fools anymore.

We weren’t raw. Unformed. Creatures of intensity. We weren’t philosophical howlers at the moon.

Were we Forrest Gumps of philosophy, or Prince Myshkins? Did we have to choose?

 

There was something Cicero wasn’t cynical about. That made her clap her hands in unfeigned glee! In a simple happy gladness!

Her love of idiots. Of idiocy.

Of those who were untouched. Who are innocent, despite it all. Innocent in their idiocy!

Stupidity is immense, she said. Stupidity is oblivious. And that’s why it can save us.

 

She was grateful for idiocy, Cicero said. For what idiocy had brought her. For us! For her idiot squad.

What hadn’t we taught her? Or untaught her? What hadn’t we got wrong and therefore got right?

What blows on the head hadn’t we dealt her? Great blows! Laughing blows! Gladdening blows!

 

The world was a midden. The world was a sewer. But we – we! Bobbed along the sewer in our innocence.

 

Our kind! Our type! Who survived the tides. Weathered all the storms. Who she romanticised – Cicero didn’t doubt that. Who she idealised! Who represented the worst and hence the best, in intellectual life.

 

She was a stupidity collector, Cicero said. She wanted to gather together all the errors of the age. Error is necessary – hadn’t Heidegger said that? To think greatly is to err greatly. To um and err. To scratch your head, like Stan Laurel.

The age needed its idiot sidekicks. Philosophy needed its stupid assistants. Like Arthur and Jeremiah in The Castle.

This is the potion. This is magic. Drink this and …

And what? It tastes rank. Everything in my body cries, no!

Ignore your body.

 

It’s frothing. It’s, like, pouring over.

 

The ‘wine’. This inverted commas wine.

 

Maybe it was distilled in barrels with dead philosophers. With philosopher’s corpses. With the rotting bodies of great thinkers. With the corpses of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and the others.

 

This wine tastes like oil. You could make a Molotov cocktail out of this wine. Throw it flaming at the enemy.

 

I just want it to be warm. God. This wine’s in league with the cold. It’s like Austrian ice-wine. It’s actually colder than the campus. Colder than the snow. Isn’t that cruel?

How come it’s still liquid?

 

Could it be false wine? Could, like, Organisational Management have taken over Cicero’s cellar. Substituted its wine for Cicero’s?

Too cunning.

 

The way Cicero stored her wine. Bottles on their sides. Resting their heads. As though asleep. She took more care of her bottles than she did of us.

She knew that. She said her wine should be roughed up. Introduced to the street. Which meant to us.

 

I always remember her wines being nice. Even lovely.

That was her superficial cellar. Her top cellar.

These wines were from the bottom cellar. The lower racks. The ones that we never managed to reach. That we never drank our way down to.

Maybe she was saving them. She knew they had some future purpose.

Maybe they were the ones she had no intention of drinking. That she’d bought on conference trips. On holidays in strange parts of the world. That were given to her by assorted lunatics. That strange importers had recommended to her.