Work in Progress

Didn’t Cicero hint sometimes about her Tractatus? It was in numbered points, very precise, she said sometimes. It’s written in the form of a poem, a bit like Lucretius, she said at other times. It’s written by a whole universe of heteronyms, in many volumes: didn’t she say that, too?

 

She considered it a very Jewish work, her magnum opus – that’s what she said. It was a product of her secret Judaism, which none of us could understand.

It was a passengenwerk, she said. A collection of fragments. Which she’d selected itself!

But when she disappeared, the work must have gone with her.

 

Her magnum opus was her life: I heard her say that. Her magnum opus was us – that’s what I heard her say. Was our department. And she left when it was essentially complete.

 

We were her work. This department.

 

Cicero’s life was her magnum opus. The philosophy embodied in her life. The philosophy that was her life, understood in the right way. And even in her disappearance, interpreted in the right way.

And in her wine, interpreted in the right way – that’s what I think.

 

The Ciceronian life. The dimensions of that life. The perversions of that life. The magnificence of that life. The foolishness of that life. There should be biographies of Cicero – plural! Rival biographies. At odds biographies.

 

Chapter twenty-six: tight perms. Chapter twenty-seven: whippets.

 

Cicero philosophised in life, rather than treatises. She philosophised in gestures. Like the Organisational Management move itself. Like her disappearance.

Yes, that was her philosophy. Everything was there for those who could understand it.

 

You were her magnum opus, Shiva. Don’t you see that?

 

And now her wine is all we have left of her. Drink this in memory of her, and so on.

Cicero hoped all these ides would volatilise inside us. Would gain their own strange life. Would open their eyes inside us.

And spawn some UK variety of European thought! Some native variety of continentalism!

Some amalgam of council estate and Heidegger. Of Sunderland in general and Jewish philosophical modernism!

And what happened?

 

Couldn’t Cicero see we were helpless? That we had no savant’s gifts. No high IQs. That no intellectual miracle could be expected of us.

Who were only ever good at turning upon themselves! Upon each other! At piss taking and self-derision!

 

Only when we drank, only then could we lose our impostor’s syndrome. Our acquired underconfidence. Only then did we come into glorious intellectual life. Did the philosophical heavenly fire reach us. Burn inside us.

Drunk: that’s when our philosophy would come alive. Our philosophical method. Which obtained only as banter philosophy. As piss taking philosophy. It was dialogical, in its own way, Cicero said. Socratic, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Merriment philosophy. As much pathos as philosophy, As much nonsense as sense. Turning all of philosophy into a gigantic joke.

Not philosophy as it had ever been known. Pataphysics, instead. Palavering. Persiflage.

Raised above our stations, in some ghastly experiment. Through some attempt at social engineering. In some mad quality and diversity initiative!

Scraped from our council estates from our shuttered up towns, from our regions in decline.

Lifted into a world of which we could make no sense. That only bewildered us. That set standards impossible for us to reach.

Well-meaning left-liberals wanted to get out type in. To effect social change! To bring about social justice! When really we should have been left in our place.

All because we’d read some books! Because we became excited at ideas! There’s a natural hierarchy. Why things are as they are. As they have been. It’s not by chance. Now we have to live our lives in perpetual intimidation.

You want to free me from Organisational Management. But what you don’t realise is that I’m nothing other than Organisational Management. I’m O.M.s dream. O.M. can still dream up someone like me.

We know all about taste, postgraduates. How it’s about receptors in the mouth. Which work very closely with receptors in the nose. With smell, postgraduates.

There’s a whole science to it, postgraduates. Taste buds respond to the five modes of chemical stimuli: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. The nasal receptor neurons express different chemical signatures. And these become electrical signals which hare sent to the brain.

Taste and smell are brought together in the orbitofrontal cortex to give the sensation of flavour. The brain works out whether what we are eating or drinking is delicious or disgusting. That’s the way we work out what foods and drink are nutritious. Tasting good, smell good, is a reward stimulus. Bad food is aversive. And bad wine!

What’s incubating in the earth – the deep earth? What’s gathering there? What secret? What treasure? What’s been forgotten there? What’s remembering itself there?

What’s coming to itself, underground? What’s stretching its arms?

Something wicked? Some golem of the depths? Some shadow in the depths?

 

The idiot depths. The stupid depths. The depths no sun has ever reached. Touched.

Deep chthonic stupidity. Depthless stupidity. Idiocy of the earth. Itself, only itself.

 

Truculence of the earth. The withholding earth. The sulking earth. The earth turned aside. The shy earth.

The covering its face earth. The hiding from the light earth. The burying itself in itself earth. The staying in darkness earth.

 

The earth that will not serve. Not them – not the organisational managers. The shifting earth – that will let the buildings topple.

 

The tomb earth. The buried earth. The sinking beneath all things earth. The sinking deeper earth. The quagmire earth.

 

The carry it all away earth. The bear it all to nothing earth.

The earth in error. In errancy.

 

The can’t build on it earth. The can’t tame it earth. The can’t pave it over earth.

 

The black earth. The colour-darker-than-black earth. The absorbed-all-light-into-it earth. The earth of the darkest wines, the blackest wines. The deepest wines!

The black wines of the black earth. The darker-than-black wine of the darkest earth.

 

The silencing earth. The earth we want to pull over our heads. The burying us earth. The earth beneath which we’ll sleep. The earth that will fill our mouths. The earth that will cover our eyes. The deader than us earth. The earth that’s all abyss – that’s all void.

They’re destroying the humanities from the inside out. They did it with philosophy. They unleashed analytic philosophy like a virus. They’ve gutted philosophy – real philosophy. It was systematic.

And now Organisational Management is hatching in the humanities’ heart. It’s laid its eggs there, like a parasitic wasp. And the parasites will hatch.

 

It’s like analytic philosophers designed a campus. Like they ordered a campus from analytic philosophy central.

 

Cicero knew the battles we’d fight against analytic philosophy. The internal battles, first of all. The battle against what we were – how we’d been formed. The battle against our UK-ness or Britishness or whatever.

The internal struggle against our home philosophy. Our default philosophy.

Analytic philosophy is the ultimate God is dead philosophy. Where everything is turned over to procedure.

 

Analytic philosophy. Undrunk philosophy. Sober philosophy. Logical busywork. About nothing. With no stakes. No vision. Philosophy for nerds. Philosophy reduced. Compromised. Philosophy for the middle aged.

 

Doubtless, there’s a whole story to tell about analytic philosophy hijack. The way it took over – very deliberately. Charged with a sense of mission. All about clarity! Brevity! Not about writing vast European oeuvres. Not spending half your essay throat-clearing like Jacques Derrida.

Democratic! Scientific! Philosophy done at last on a proper basis! Not all intoxicated. Not all scholarly. Not all history of philosophy.

Philosophy, free of humbug! And nonsense! Liberal philosophy – in the old sense.

 

Natural English clarity. No continental woolliness. No European imprecision. No lure of the -ism. No vast speculative theoretical systems. We’d been cured of that, unlike the damnable continentalists. No speculation! It’s not British!

Forget Whitehead. No one should remember Whitehead.

 

Dalek philosophy.

 

Analytic philosophers are just servants of the Bug, nothing more.

 

Analytic philosophy has met its limit. In us. We’re the resistance. Because we can’t help but be the resistance. We’re the slack. We’re the grit in its eye. Because we can’t be otherwise!

We were never any good at analytic philosophy. We couldn’t be. We lacked the sharpness of mind. The narrowness of focus. We weren’t technical obsessives, like the analytic philosophers. We weren’t logic mad!

 

The amazing analytic philosophy plan – to devour philosophy from the inside. To infiltrate. To take over. And now their takeover is complete, they can reveal themselves as what they really are: Organisational Management.

Their hatred is unfathomable. That’s what they are: haters. That’s what they do: hate. They want to destroy us, that’s all.

They hate the whole created order. They want to bring chaos to order. Their wrecking ball. They’re jealous of us. Jealous of our life. They envy our life. They want it, our life. They want to seize it for themselves. To inhabit it.

The campus is demonic. You should know that. It was built to serve demonic purposes. Can’t you feel it? The evil? Every part of it is defiance. Is a striking against what is good and beautiful. It’s a deliberate desecration. It’s a magic spell.

And by bringing us here … By subjecting Philosophy to this …

What?

 

Worse if they don’t hate us. If none of this was on purpose. That Philosophy was just … collateral damage.

Worse if none of this was planned. That Philosophy had no special place in their operation.

 

They should hate us. The Organisational Management campus should detest us.

Do something! Do something, you fuckers! Nail us up. Crucify us. Make an example of us.

We need pain. We need you to inflict pain. Make it real, this pain. Make it physical. Make it tangible.

Put us in prison, fuckers! Kill us! Take our lives!

You know their type. Middle class, every one of them. Head girl and head boy types, all of them. Eager to please. Keen to do well.

Academia is their horizon. The academic snow globe. They simply do what they’re supposed to.

Passers of exams. Jumpers through hoops. Excelling, in general.

Expecting to be patted on the head. Wanting to be patted on the head. Wanting to tick all the boxes. Appalling.

This is what the system produces. This is what it makes. By the system’s fruit should you judge it. And the fruit are identikit. Pro forma. Standarised models.

They have expectations. God knows. They have ambitions. And aspirations! They really think they’re going somewhere, and that they can actually go somewhere.

They’ve never doubted themselves. Never come against their limits.

They didn’t know that they even had limits.

Accomplished – that’s what they are, in their own way. They’ve achieved things – that’s what they think. Imagine that! They’re going places! Taking steps – giant steps.

They’ll run on their rails. Run in their grooves. Do what they’re supposed to do, and in the usual way, following the usual method.

They’ll think what they’re supposed to think. In the way they’re supposed to thing. Doing what they’re told.

Clever – of course. Clever within the system. Within the rules. They’re players – in the system.

And smug! And pleased with themselves. Good little boys and girls.

And there are sufficient rewards in the system to keep them happy. To keep them incentivised. There are enough drops of dopamine released into their system.

 

With a terrible consensus. A sense of agreement. Homo academicus – entirely diminished. Entirely subservient. Civil servants of thought. With no independence. No autonomy. No independence of mind.
Academic unquestioning. Academic complicity. Academic drones. Academic yes men. Yes women!

 

Academia is the problem. Academia itself is the obstacle. The way it selects for conformity. For obedience. The way it incentivises supporting government narratives. New world order narratives. Big pharma and big ag and big everything else narratives.

 

They think they’re caring. Woolly progressive types left-liberal types. Guardian reader types.

They think they’re doing good. They think they’re helping. Making the world a better place. Working on solutions.

 

They’re unable to attain their idiocy. To reach it. They had never known their failure.

Whereas we … we’re all failure. We’re nothing but failure.

 

They don’t know their mediocrity. They cannot be stupid. Can’t let themselves be idiots.

They’re not even stupid. They don’t even err.

The campus is for something. It’s a model of something. For future … humanity. Or transhumanity, or something. Or synth-humanity. Or synth non-humanity …

This is how we’re going to live. This is how they’re going to make us live.

Either this or death, right? They’ll kill the others, and let a remnant survive here … under their terms and conditions.

And what’s our place going to be? Where’s our place in the great chain of Organisational Management being?