Work in Progress

We’re doing their dirty work. The house philosophers of Organisational Management. The philosophical jesters of Organisational Management. The trained philosophical dogs of Organisational Management. Providing them with some kind of philosophical alibi.

There’s still an outside to this campus, postgraduates, hard as it is to believe. There’s a whole world out there, beyond the stony wastes at the campus-edge. There’s a whole world as yet unreached by the Organisational Management Campus. That’s as yet untouched by the University.

The useless population: that’s what’s out there, postgraduates. Untouched by the university. Untutored! Unprocessed! Unruined! Uncorrupted! Whose education didn’t take, beyond the stony wastes.

It’s all disinformation and misinformation, beyond the stony wastes. Full of hate speech! They’re all domestic terrorists out there. They’re all wackos and nutjobs, beyond the stony wastes. They’re not on board … They’re not with the programme, beyond the stony wastes …

Such vulgar people out there, beyond the stony wastes. Low people. Never planning their actions. Never thinking things through. Never considering the morrow – the rest of the day even, beyond the stony wastes.

They’re the useless people out there. The unbusy. The unoccupied. Who can’t even look after their own interests. Loiterers without plan. Guileless. Witless. They just stand there, catching flies.

They’re in the way, out there. Like dementia patients. Like bed blockers. They’re living obstructions. To a useful society. To an efficient society.

They’re unproductive, out there, beyond the stony wastes. They’re good-for-nothings. Dependents. They’re not even wily. Not even grifters. They’re not even taking advantage. Not even on the take. They aren’t even out for themselves, nor really. They can’t even stand up for themselves. They can’t even advocate for themselves. They need help filling in forms.

They’re the exasperating, out there. They’re plain annoying. They won’t follow rules. They aren’t defiant, just … recalcitrant. Unreformable. They’re not even pitiful. They don’t even arouse the feeling of pity. They don’t even call forth human compassion. They’re undeserving even of maternal instinct.

Nothing can be done for them, out there, beyond the stony wastes. Nothing can be given to them. They’d only vandalise it anyway. They’d only soil their own nests.

And they’re obese, out there. They eat the wrong things. They have all the wrong habits. They’re degraded. Toxic. They should be quarantined. How long are they for this world? Before they develop some prole myxomatosis? How long before they spread it to the rest of us?

They’re really sub everything, out there, beyond the stony wastes. They’re not even human – not really. Which is why all the bad batches were sent their way. All the opiates. Why every attempt was made to addict them. To cancer them. To sterilize them, at least.

Why is why all the bad batches were sent their way. All the opiates. Every attempt was made to addict them. To cancer them. To sterilize them, at least. Which is why they’ve been micro-plastic’d. Chem-trailed. Geo-engineered. Mercury’d. Aluminium’d. Borion’d. Even more than the rest of us!

They’re the undeserving poor, out there, beyond the stony wastes. The despicable poor. The disgusting poor. The no-one-knows-what-to-do-with-them poor. Human cul-de-sacs, having only their idiosyncrasies to show. Their weirdnesses.

They’re recalcitrant, out there. They’re playing truant from life – from the responsibilities of life. They’re plebians. Low lifes. Who cannot be otherwise. They’re background noise. Noises off. Extras of life. Human magma. They’re a perpetual affront. Problem children and problem adults. Racists, probably.

They’re inglorious, out there, beyond the stony wastes. Uncelebrated, disliked, rude. Faintly scary, or just outright scary. They’re disliked – by everyone. Disjecta. The equivalent of slurry. Of industrial waste.  

They’re truants – but agelessly so. Endlessly so. The socially passed over. Social refuse. Socially dead. Just a remnant, that’s all. A nameless and powerless residue. An anthropological residue, arousing only a general repugnance. Who don’t know how to live, but just live. Stubbornly. Persistently. Having only their idiosyncrasies to show. Their weirdnesses. Their legitimate and illegitimate strangenesses.

They have no answer as to why they exist, out there, beyond the stony wastes. Or what they are. Or what they’re for. Which is why they’ve long since been declared exterminable. Declared murderable. Declared extinguishable. Declared poisonable. Declared destroyable.

But they are the destroyable who will not be destroyed, out there. They are the exterminable who will not be exterminated. They are the poisonable who will not be poisoned.

They’re unreachable out there, beyond the stony wastes, even though the state has all their contact details. They’re untrackable, though the state can track and trace them anywhere. They’re unprogrammable, though the state controls all the media they watch.

They’re invisible, even in their visibility. They’re inaudible, even though you can hear everything they say. They’re unknowable, even though we know everything about them. They’re secret – even though they keep no secrets. They’re hidden in their very unhiddenness. The all-seeing eye can see everything but them.

Which is why they’re our people out there, beyond the stony wastes. Our brethren. Which is why they’re the ones we’re thinking for. Which is why they’re the ones who place we keep. Whose memory we serve. Because they’re the ones we nearly are. Who belong to the non-university. To the non-institution.

They’re the true idiots – not like us, pretend idiots. They’re the real imbeciles. Who we are. Our mirrors. They’re even disabled. Just … unable. They’re not even neurodivergent. Just divergent.

They’re not even of the kingdom of God out there, beyond the stony wastes. They’re not even the beloved of Jesus. Who are not even the meek that will inherit the earth. They’re not even a proletariat. Or a lumpenproletariat. Which is why they’re our kind. To whom we’re always answerable.

Intelligence is overrated, anyway. Intelligence is about discerning the latest thing we’re supposed to be going along with. It makes you very good at sniffing the air. Sensing the opportunities. Seizing the main chance. Intelligence is what makes you move vey cleverly with the crowd.

In the end, intelligence is always dragooned. It’s always held hostage. Always press-ganged into service. Even as it’s always pleased with itself. With its ability to ride the tiger. To work out what’s hot and what’s not. To know the right flag to wave. The right thing to virtue-signal.

Which is why intelligence is always pleased with itself. Always smug.

It’s all about participating in the lies, intelligence. Knowing which lies to tell. And how they’re supposed to be told. It’s about maintaining the lies. Furthering them. Telling more lies about the lies!

Because intelligence is all about greasing the wheels. Greasing its own wheels. Because intelligence is opportunistic, basically. Making sure it survives, which it always does.

Which is why intelligence always loves authority. It worships authority. Which is why it’s conformist.

Stupidity, on the other hand … is completely different. Stupidity’s incapable of opportunism. It never thinks about itself. About its own interests.

What is stupidity thinking about, then?

About nothing in particular. About nothing yet. Stupidity’s vague … The funny thing is that no one wants to be an idiot. No one calls themselves an idiot and means it. They think they’re smart enough to know their so called idiocy. As though they could outwit it. That they can master it, their own idiocy. And that they are therefore most assuredly not idiots.

In the end, no one knows their idiocy, which is to say, the idiosyncrasies of your idiocy. It’s particularity. The way your idiocy is different to everyone else’s idiocy. Your idiocy is the most personal thing about you – did you know that? The most singular thing. The thing that really sets you apart. Much more than your so-called intelligence.

Idiocy’s about who you cannot help but be. It’s about the way that you can’t lie. It’d about who you are despite your opportunism. And wheel-greasing.

And what about genius? Does genius exist?

Genius is about thinking unashamedly from your idiocy. About realising your own legitimate strangeness. No one’s as stupid as an idiot.

Splashing wine onto concrete.

What are you doing?

It’s an anti-libation. The opposite of a blessing. I’m cursing the campus with Cicero’s disgusting wine …

I thought we were supposed to drink the wine in memory of Cicero, or whatever. Of what she promised us.

What did she promise us?

Some kind of meaning. Some … transcendence. Something messianic. That we were supposed to bring about. Which had to be reached through nihilism. Though some deep experience of meaninglessness. Or disgustingness, in the case of this wine.

European disgustingness – that’s what she wanted us to taste. From the European earth. The European terroir, soaked with blood.  Probably radioactive. Sprouting terrible fascisms and communisms … All that craziness. All those ideologies.

We had sober philosophers over here. Sensible ones. Who were never caried away by European unreason. By insane European ideologies. Our island kept us distant – which means, kept us safe. We were good liberals – never prey to all their -isms.

They had Bataille, but we had Ayer. They had Heidegger, but we had Russell. They had Adorno, but we had Strawson. And when a continentalist did make it over here – Wittgenstein, Berlin – they sobered up, too. They became sensible in turn.

 Cicero wanted us to imbibe the real conditions of thought – of European thought, I say. All the mad stuff. The crazy stuff. Wine drunk by Hegel. By the young Marx. By the existentialists, in Parisian cafes. Wine drunk by Adorno and Horkheimer. Wine in the blood of Georges Bataille, dancing nose to nose with Jean-Paul Sartre. The opposite of everything we grew up with …

But Cicero’s wine’s disgusting.

Cicero wanted us to disgust us with the real conditions of thought. Wine that we wanted to spit out! To retch up! Wine from over there – on the philosophical mainland. That could only be undrinkable in our island smugness. That could only make us want to vomit it up with our self-satisfaction.

Yeah, but we actually like European philosophy. We teach that philosophy.

But we don’t understand its conditions – not yet. We have to go deeper. There’s an anguish we have to know. And that anguish is in this wine. Until it tastes like the sweetest nectar, we have to drink more.

What was UK-style European philosophy about, postgraduates? What was it for? No one will remember, in time. The whole academic ecosystem – the departments, the societies, the lecturers, the postgraduates will be forgotten.

And it won’t even matter that no one remembers, postgraduates. Because none of us has ever achieved anything. Because we could barely keep our departments open. Because we couldn’t even hand over functioning European philosophy departments to the next generation. Because there barely is a next generation. Just you, postgraduates. The last of the last.

It’s best forgotten, European philosophy, postgraduates. Best buried in the memory. It came, it went, without meaning. It achieved nothing worth keeping. Nothing important happened. Nothing that lasted.

An episode, that’s all. A failed experiment. A flare up. A fever. An outbreak. That was only ever a bad influence. That only ever led to misplaced dreams of revolution. Of the reforming of the English heart. To unhealthy preoccupations with the apocalyptic. With the messianic!

For a while, philosophy caught a European fever. For a while, there was a taste for European philosophical fireworks. The desire for some European colour.

There was a moment when things were allowed to go weird. Go dark. Follow strange European gods. The philosopher-obscurantists. Language-maulers. Thought-distorters. Stranglers of reason.

For a time, when no one really knew what was happening, European thought was allowed through. European thought! That stood in no English lineage. That was part of no UK tradition! European ideas, that were unsummarisable-in-clear-English. Endlessly prolix. Frustratingly convoluted. Jargon-rich. Neologism-heavy. Full of puns. Of poetry! That murdered the possibility of civilized debate.

They tried to contain it, the analytics. They tried to place UK-style philosophy guardrails around it. To teach it as part of the history of philosophy. As the history of crazy ideas! Of folly! But for a while – the glory years – it spread like wildfire.

They blamed the vast expansion of universities, the analytic philosophers. The lowering of entry requirements. When our kind were brought into the academy. From the working classes! From the council estates! With dubious A-levels! With poor grades! When our type were actually allowed to do MAs and PhDs, to ascend the academic hierarchy.

And our kind naturally tended towards European-style thought, which is to say, charlatan thought. Impressing-only-idiots thought. We were inclined to hysteria. To revolutionary dreams and, God knows, messianic ones. To literary thought. To pathos-drenched thought. And there weren’t enough allies – analytic stalwarts – to hold us back.

We weren’t analytic-philosophised-up, that was the trouble. We weren’t inoculated against European fever. We didn’t have a natural English sobriety to count on. Natural English liberalism. We had no sense of stranger danger.

Gone were the days when philosophy departments were filled with approved Oxbridge analytic philosophers. When keen young analytic philosophers were sent out from Oxbridge to colonise the provinces! To secure academic the kingdom! To drive out British idealism and other dubious things once and for all. To clear and hold analytic hegemony.

For a time, they essentially lost control, postgraduates. Our numbers were too great. They were blindsided. They’d their guard down. It took time for them to marshal their resources. To weaponise research culture. To get opinion onside. To plunge our departments down the league tables. To disparage our journals. Our book series … To close us down! As we no doubt deserved to be closed down! We were driven to the edges – the outer edges. To the most dubious universities.

Their plans worked, postgraduates. The European philosophy departments were closed down, one by one. European thought was strangled in the UK – in philosophy departments, at least. Oh, it went on in Literature departments. In Modern Languages departments. But only in a parodic way. Only in an aping the greats way.

But then Cicero came along ….

We’re part-timers at heart, postgraduates. We should only ever have been part-timers. We found our level as part timers.

We should have kept to our lane. To our natural level. A full-time position: not for us. A full-time job: undeserved! Unwarranted!

Didn’t we have lower IQs than full timers? Weren’t we most intellectually dysgenic? More prone to philosophical mutation?

Hadn’t it always been survival of the fittest in academia – and rightly so? Hadn’t it always been about the law of the academic jungle?

There were norms to be enforced, postgraduates. Gates to be kept closed. We needed to keep to our lanes! To our paddocks! Where we would work under the direction of the full-timers. Where we could be supervised and indeed closely monitored by full-timers. Where we could be kept in place and indeed constantly reminded of our place by full timers. As it should be!

We needed to stay at our level, postgraduates. Where, after all, we’d do our best work. Where we’d work to our abilities. Where we’d be happiest!

Part-time wallahs. Academic coolies. University chandalas, disgustingly busy. Vermin-like. Scavenger-like. Lasting only a few years, before burn-out. Before falling onto the ex-academic scrapheap. But that was as it should be.

Just so long as we were academically sterile, postgraduates. So long as we could never make more of our kind. No postgraduate supervision for us! No cultivation of MA students. Of PhD students! Who might get jobs! Who might become lecturers themselves, one day!

Undergraduate teaching only. First year teaching! There should be no one we lead astray. Whose heads we fill with dubious ideas!

But Cicero broke us of our pens, postgraduates. From our place in the pecking order. Which was really the natural order. Cicero freed us. Gave us full-time contracts. Put every kind of undergraduate teaching before us. And postgraduate teaching – you guys! Why was that allowed?

Our secret alliance.

 

They’re the ones we’re thinking for. They’re the ones who place we keep. Whose memory we serve.

They’re the ones we nearly are. Who belong to the non-university. To the non-institution. Who are neither in education nor in work.

The unincludable: that’s who they are. The uninvolveable.

Bartlebys. Refusers, who’ve never refused anything. Opters out, who never opted for anything.

The ones outside. Who never wanted to be inside. Who never wanted anything.

 

Unreachable. Though the state has all their contact details.

Untrackable, though the state can track and trace them anywhere.

Unprogrammable, though the state pumps out everything they watch.

Unrecruitable, unconscriptable, unmobilisable.

Because what they are is unorderable and unmanageable. Because they are the unmanageable and unorderable in us.

 

The truest resistance shows a complete lack of resistance. The real resistance is indifferent to resistance, as it’s indifferent to everything.

 

Inglorious, uncelebrated, disliked, rude. Faintly scary, or just outright scary.

 

Disliked – by everyone. Disjecta. The equivalent of slurry. Of industrial waste.  

 

Who don’t know how to live, but just live.

Stubbornly. Persistently. Who just are.

Who can’t be counted. Can’t be identified. Ontologised.

 

That’s who we write for, read for. They’re the true idiots – not like us, pretend idiots. Who can only fail – not like us, who only pretend to fail.

 

All the bad batches were sent their way. All the opiates. Every attempt was made to addict them. To cancer them. To sterilize them, at least.

 

They’re invisible, even in their visibility. They’re inaudible, even though you can hear everything they say. They’re unknowable, even though we know everything about them. They’re secret – even though they keep no secrets. They’re hidden in their very unhiddenness.

They’re unthinkable. Untheorisable. Uncapturable.

The all seeing eye can see everything but them.

 

The surplus population. The too-many. The uncountable.

 

The undisciplinable. Repeat offenders. With low IQs, probably.

 

Human refuse. Populist enablers. Refuseniks. Vaxx conspiracists.

The psychologically toxic. The spiritually rank.

The first on the extermination list.

 

Pollutants of the human river. They should be culled for public health.

 

How long are they for this world? Before they develop some prole myxomatosis. Before they spread it to the rest of us?

 

The ones the left hate most of all.

 

Innumerable.

Offered every opportunity, which they won’t take.

 

Obese, no doubt, with all the wrong habits.

 

Degraded. Embarrassments to the human race.

 

Not even pitiful. For who could pity them?

 

They’re the ones we nearly are.

 

They’ve long since been declared exterminable. Declared murderable. Declared extinguishable. Declared poisonable. Declared destroyable.

 

Ineducable. Unprocessable.

 

Background noise. Noises off. Extras of life. Human magma.

 

The exasperating. Who won’t follow rules. Not defiant, just … recalcitrant. Unreformable.

 

The unbusy. The unoccupied. Who can’t even look after their own interests.

Loiterers without plan. Guileless. Witless. Standing there, catching flies.

 

They’re the void – the human void.

They’re the true idiots.

 

They’re the useless population. They’re what uselessness looks like,. Good for no one. Good for nothing.

In the way. Like dementia patients. Like bed blockers.

Living obstructions. To a useful society. To an efficient society.

 

Stubbornly surviving. Simply living on. Going on.

Having only their idiosyncrasies to show. Their weirdnesses. Their legitimate and illegitimate strangenesses.

With no answer as to why they exist. Or what they are. Or what they’re for.

 

The useless people scrapheap. The discarded people pile.

Human cul-de-sacs.

 

Our shame. Abused, probably. Stutterers. Stammerers. With deep speech defects.

Negligible. Neglected. Neglecting themselves. Their self-care.

 

Our people. Our brethren.

 

Micro-plastic’d. Chem-trailed. Geo-engineered.

Mercury’d. Aluminium’d. Borion’d. On multiple fronts.

Causalities. Collateral damage.

 

Who belong to the anti-uni. The non-uni.

Those who the uni cannot possibly include. Those beyond the reach of diversity. Of EDI. Of DEI. Of equity.

He despicable poor. The disgusting poor. The no-one-knows-what-to-do-with-them poor. Ripe for culling.

Who can’t stand up for themselves. Can’t advocate for themselves. Who need help filling in forms. Who aren’t even online …

But still alive! Still breathing! Still conscious – just about.

 

Unheroic. Unremarkable. Not even standing out in any special way.

 

They’re the true idiots. They’re everything we say of ourselves. They’re the real imbeciles.

 

Repellent. Filthy – spiritually. Polluted – the most deeply.

Unworthy of even maternal instinct.

 

Who need upgrading. Who need new human software. And hardware! Who need a reboot. A CTRL ALT DLT thing.

 

Ultra-provincials.

 

A call for eugenics. A justification of eugenics. A rationale for elimination.

 

Not even pitiful. Not even arousing the feeling of pity.

Not even calling forth human compassion. Not even summoning good Samaritans.

 

The exasperating. The plain annoying. Who’ll make you run out of patience.

 

Not wily. Not grifters. Not even out for themselves. Not even taking advantage. Not even on the take.

Just impossibly demanding. Neighbours who its impossible to love.

 

Problem children and problem adults.

 

A perpetual affront.

 

Racists, probably.

 

What can we want but to dilute their numbers?

 

No campus could enclose them. Nothing can be done for them. Nothing can be given to them.

They’d only vandalise it anyway. They’d only soil their own nests. They’d only wreck what was given to them.

 

The ones who will not be brought on board. Who cannot be brought on board. Who are incapable of it: being brought onboard.

 

Recalcitrant. Playing truant from life – from middle class life.

Serfs. Low lifes. Who cannot be otherwise.

 

A problem. A question.

Chipped and tagged and monitored.

 

Liveability is predicated upon their exclusion.

The campus has to keep out those who wouldn’t benefit from it. Who it would be wasted on. Who couldn’t be trusted with freedom.

 

The poison didn’t work. They survived. Too many of them!

They might be sterilized, but they’re still there.

Next time, they’ll have to do better. More targeted.

Remembering our first lectures.

At long last! After so many years of service teaching! Of seminar teaching for full-time lecturers. Of the paid-by-the-hour slog.

After so many years of holding ourselves back. Our years of never being allowed to speak, and now being allowed to speak. Our sense of never having had the floor, and now having the floor.

Let off the leash. Unmanacled. Muzzles taken off – now what? What were we going to say?

What would happen when the subaltern spoke? When our kind found ourselves at the lectern? When the differend was suspended? When we had people to listen? An audience! For the first time!

What would happen when we were let loose in a Russell group university? With Russell Group students! Who actually showed basic literacy. Who could sit at a desk.

We were being trusted with the students of the wealthy. We were being let loose …

What could we do? What would we do with our freedom?

*

Surfacing. Coming up from our years of obscurity. Stepping into daylight after years in the darkness. Stepping up to the podium.

To be listened to. To be heard. Isn’t this always what we wanted? To put our view of things across. To do it better than the lecturers we’d seen over the years. Than all the full-timers we’d provided seminars for!

Our chance at last: to be in charge of a room of students. To guide them, a room of students. To left them up and lead them forward, a room of students.

*

We were raw at first. Sometimes, words strained. Sometimes,  voices trembling. Sometimes, drops in volume … Whispers … The students had to lean in … Students were all but confidants …

But build, at other times. Break out. Crescendos. Great peaks …

Sudden … accelerations. Decelerations.

Were the students moved? Were the students stirred?

*

Following our own notes at first. Following our own slides. And then? Putting aside our notes. Turning off our slides. Extemporising. Letting words come.

Openings out. Widenings. Our words, reaching the Open. Our words, sun-touched. Sun-dazzled. Light breaking across them.

A shimmering across the surface of our words. Like light on water.

We said the words and the light came. The light dazzled. The light sparkled …

That we’d reached an open grove of speech. That what we were saying was an opening. A widening. That we’d reached the sky. That we stood before the sky.

A moment of grace … A reprieve in speech … That’s where our lecturing led. To … blessed moments. To happiness in speech. To small utopias, where speech wandered into truth. Into illumination. Where we let speech receive light from above.

Calm, in our teaching. In spoken simplicity. Without technical terms. Without terms of the art. Without jargon. A calmness – of which we were incapable in any other sphere of life. A limpidity. Where we simply laid everything out …

*

And we had the common touch.

We didn’t close our eyes and pretend we were at Oxford, like the full-timers we’d seen. We didn’t speak to our students as though they were scholar-princes-and-princesses of yore.

We took questions. We listened. We read the room. Took the temperature – the spiritual temperature.

None of this was to be over their heads. None of this was to be as if to no one, to the open air, to ghosts of the academic past. We were addressing them and only them. They were the audience we wanted to reach.  

Looking out at them. At their faces. Reading their eyes. Did they follow? Were they involved? Would they rather be somewhere else? Were they daydreaming? Woolgathering? Thinking about other things?

The effort to win their attention. To say something unexpected. Moving. Hilarious. Something – anything so as not to lose them. So as to warrant their focus.

Relating to them – them. Speaking to them. Making all of it real – about something real. Something vital. Something important. Making them feel it: the Seriousness. Of the topic. Of our discussion.

Making them remember this lecture. This encounter. Now. Right here …

And an urgency to our teaching. A matter of life of death. Of utmost importance. That something would have been missed if you hadn’t attended. If you haven’t been present here. Today …  

To reach them. To think with them. Together. To draw them into thinking – your thinking, the class’s thinking. To think collectively. To think now, here …

*

How did we find our way to what we said? That was the question.

We didn’t know. As though we were undergoing hypnosis – or some counter-hypnosis. Like we were waking up – or falling asleep: which? Like we were lucid dreaming. Or awakening into lucidity – a greater lucidity.

We spoke … We were spoken. A kind of ventriloquy. A kind of thrown voice. But from where was it thrown? Whose voice was it? European philosophy’s? European philosophy, speaking through us?

Why did it fall to us, European philosophy? Why were we the ones to receive it? To let it speak through us?

Because we were truly of our times. Because we were most truly of our times. Because we knew the world’s dereliction, and philosophy’s dereliction in the world.

Because we knew its marooning, European philosophy. The way it wandered without itself, in our country. Without its memories.

European philosophy, amnesiac. European philosophy, stranded. Lost in a strange land.

And it fell to us to teach it, European philosophy. To us! Because we were likewise marooned. Because we likewise wandered without ourselves – what we could have been, who we would have been, had we received a proper education.

Our words, the last words of European thought. Its last testimony. Our lecturing: the last message of Continental thought. In its final hour, philosophy could signal its predicament. Send its SOS through us. Because of us. Because we were the ones to whom it had fallen to speak.

Wasn’t that what Cicero was waiting for? To receive a message from European philosophy – a last message? To hear European philosophy’s last words. It’s last will and testament in the lectures of delinquents in a provincial philosophy department? Didn’t she want to hear philosophy’s cry as experienced its obsolescence. Its banishment? As it knew the European dream was over.

Because what had happened here – in the UK – was happening on the continent, too. Because Anglophone nihilism was spreading like cancer on the European soil. Anglophone philosophy, which meant analytic philosophy, which Cicero held in absolute contempt.

Thunder in the European mountains. Dreams of dead European philosophers, thundering.

 

Futility: trying to work out European philosophy ideas for ourselves. Trying to squeeze European ideas into the British head. Trying to apply them, God help us.

 

Like the redemption through sin, there’s a redemption through stupidity. The last messiah is the stupid one. The duh-messiah.

 

We do wretched so very well.

 

Analytic philosophy mentat.

 

European philosophy’s playing reverse-possum. It’s playing at life. It looks like its alive. But it’s been inhabited. Cavitated. It’s serving demonic ends, just like everything else.

 

The Organisational Management campus is trying to force sense. It’s like forced rhubarb. They’re actually trying to make sense happen. See, they’re trying to cultivate sense, on their own way. This is their version of sense.

 

Helmut’s never gotten over having to study Heidegger at Scunthorpe University. I‘m sure Scunthorpe have never got over it either.

 

Where are they going to go, your graduates, with their Organisational Management jobs?

They’ll work for the technate. But what will they do? O and M, of course.

 

Hell needs its administrators. To make sure it’s all functioning properly. To keep it all going.

 

Beat your Heideggerian chest. Be a Heideggerian Tarzan.

 

The Northern Lights have gone out. They’ve turned them off.

Why now? Why can’t they be bothered anymore?

They don’t need to keep up the illusion. God, it looks even more depressing. Organisational Management campus, when the lights are out.

 

We’ve yet to come of philosophical age. That takes time. You can be fifty seven and yet to come of philosophical age.

 

We're meta idiots. Idiots about our own idiocy. About what we call idiocy.

The nihilistic truth. The truth of nihilism. Lightning in the darkest sky.

 

The thunder of the absent Word. The anti-logos. The anti-principle of chaos.

The cosmic fall-apart. Where the centre does not hold.

 

God, who’s forgotten God. Who cannot pronounce the word, God. God, with nothing on his lips.

 

No one’s scream.

 

Stupidity’s blunt knife.