Work in Progress

Do you ever worry about what you’re serving? About where all the money comes from? About who you’re organising and managing for? Whose interests are you serving?: do you ever think about that?

We’re just trying to make the world a better place.

Organisational Management middle management, just following orders.

Now you sound like a conspiracy theorist.

 

You want to find totalitarianism in the absence of totalitarianism. Where there isn’t any totalitarianism.

We’re totally benign. We’re just trying to solve things. To make life easier. And more … equitable. And to treat the Earth properly. And to stop being nasty.

 

You just want something to say no to. And now you have a whole campus to say no to.

 

People will like living here – you’ll see.

 

Organisational Management is very ecological. Very renewable. We’re very green, philosopher.

I didn’t ask to be born: isn’t that all philosophy says? Like some petulant adolescent? What’s the point of making your students question, like, the terms and conditions of existence? Why are you teaching them how to be miserable? About all the things that are fucked up about the world?

 

A philosophy degree is just license for unemployment.

Ice wine – is that an actual thing?

It is in Austria.

What about snow wine? What about wine popsicles?

 

Ah, that’s the wine song.

The wine song?

All great wines sing, that’s what Cicero said.

She meant that figuratively.

 

Why is it humming Ode to Joy? Why can’t it be humming Shostakovich?

I forget about your spurious connection with Shostakovich.

What’s the music that plays over the closing credits of a civilization? That’s what the wine should be humming.

 

Can you just apply it, like a wine run? Drink it through your skin? It’ll have the same effect, won’t it?

 

If only it was mulled. Use your psychic powers to mull it, Fiver.

Cicero wanted some Hindu lunacy. Hindu ardour. She wanted to bring in some maniac of sacrifice. Relight the Hindu fires. To sound the great Hindu howl.

 

Cicero always liked your Hinduism. She’d always quiz you about it. She took it quite seriously, your Hinduism. Unless that seriousness was part of the joke.

We didn’t expect much from life, did we? We never thought it would turn out well. That we’d actually be functioning citizens. That we’d ever actually have some kinda job, let alone an academic one. That we’d even be alive. That we’d actually reach our thirties. Fuck. I’m shocked just to be alive.

I can hear a groaning. I can hear a moaning

It’s the weight of Organisational Management towers upon the earth. A terrible weight. The foundations, just above our heads, and pressing down.

And the earth is protesting. And the earth is crying out. There’s the song of the crushed earth. That wants to throw the weight off it shoulders. That wants to rise up, as it did when the glaciers melted, after the last Ice Age.

 

The underearth, moving, always.

There are torsions. There’s tearing.

The earth falls in the earth. The earth shifts in earth.

There are rivers of earth within the earth. Dark currents.

The urgrund. The abgrund. The groundless ground. The earth abyss.

 

The roots of their world. The foundations of those buildings come down so deep. The pylons they stuff into the earth. That they cram down. That they press down. That they drill all the way down. Almost as far as where we are.

It all rests on this. This unmoving earth. But what if the earth moved? It could happen, couldn’t it?

Are there earthquakes here? In the northeast?

Every day is the day of wrath. Every day is the last day. The world is burning – why can’t they see that?

Amazing we’re still alive. You don’t have to do much to be still alive, do you?

We were part of Cicero’s department soup. We were her philosophy dept ingredients.

 

Anyway, it was Cicero who put all this in motion. Who pressed go. She brought us together to see what would happen. We were Cicero’s experiment.

Cicero’s plan, more like. Cicero was always ahead of us.

Cicero just found a way to use us. To deploy us. We’re her soldiers.

 

And she decided we needed to be slammed into the Organisational Management oven. That it would wring even more pathos from us. That it would increase our existential charge of our lectures. Make us even more intense.

Sure, Cicero wouldn’t be there to savour it. But she could imagine it.

European wine to British lips. We can’t take it, undiluted. It’s too much for us. Too heady.

We have to water it down with secondary commentary.

 

Drunk with it, European philosophy. Thinking we can do it: European philosophy. But we can only ever do drunken impressions of European philosophers.

 

Philosophy’s only about the absence of philosophy now. About the impossibility of philosophy – of the conditions of philosophy. It’s about why you can’t do philosophy. Because its conditions have disappeared.

 

Philosophy belongs to our kind now. It’s been turned over to us.

 

Pathos is our business in European philosophy.

Pathos is what we do.

 

Repackagers of European ideas. That’s what we are.