This is the making of philosophy, really. This is how we’ll become really interesting. Being crushed … helps.
The conditions are here for … great thought, maybe. Real thought.
A sense that there’s no way out. That’s what might do it. The pressure. This is our chance. Genuine oppression. Like Eastern Europe all over again.
The world is ending and will never finish ending. The world is doing nothing but end. These are the last days. They will always be the last days.
Everything is wrong. Everything is bewildered and disgusting. And reeling. It’s all reeling. The whole Creation.
How can we speak about how disgusting everything is? How do we speak of it? With what vocabulary? What words can we use? What words that aren’t lies?
I want to say a single true word. A single word, in my own name.But what is my name? What are our names? What would God call us, if there was a God?
Something’s come over the world. Something’s befallen the world. A shadow.
I see the shadow of wings.
Whose wings?
Satan’s wings. Because Satan’s falling. Satan’s always falling. Satan’s falling in our fall.
How far further? How much further is there to fall.
Oh, much further.
The evil at the heart of Organisational Management. The very heart. The base of operation. It all radiates from here. Does it? It all radiates out from here. Like that tower in Mordor.
I’m going to off on very long term sick-leave. Because I’m very very sick. In the head. But I don’t want to miss it. I want to watch it all unfold. All the horror. Every component of it. Every part.
It’s mesmerising, the unfolding of our downfall. It’s the best show in town. Our slow fucking strangulation. I take pleasure in it. I like watching them at work.
Even when they’re destroying you?
Especially then. It’s a form of attention. I like that we’re so watched. So monitored.
Come on – they’ve done it a thousand times before. They’re just applying a crush-the-enemy programme. It’s not about us.
But I so like being crushed. I’m suited to this.
You’re a masochist.
Of course I’m a masochist. I like seeing how they work. How they destroy us. The attention to detail. They’re practised at this. It feels bespoke. I feel special. Like they’re paying special attention to me.
It’s amazing that our fantasies are being reduced to this.
There are always new depths to my masochism. New ways for it to unfold. I like it. It’s beautiful. It’s so complex and rich, my masochism. My masochism’s so much more interesting than I am.
The only interesting thing about us is our psychologies. Or rather our psychopathologies. They’re blooming, interestingly. We’re developing all kinds of interesting fetishes.
We’ve found a way to enjoy our pain. Suffering’s become a thrill. And humiliation. That’s what it’s about. We’re turned on by the System. By very powerful organisers. And managers.
The only truly individual thing about you is your malady.
Malady – is that what we’re calling it?
Our disorders. Our mental disease. They’re just adaptations. They’re a way to wring some pleasure out of all this madness. To pretend we have some kind of perverse agency. Even if it’s agency just to get turned on by the madness.
Are you actually turned on by cruelty? By Organisational Management?
It’s how we adapt. We have to find pleasure where we can.
We haven’t got souls. What we call souls is just … our complications. The depths of our humiliation. The way our humiliation registers.
What our strategy? What are we going to do?
We can have no strategy. We can’t out-strategise these guys. This is Organisational Management, for fuck’s sake.
Unless our strategy is no strategy. To give up strategy. Forward planning. Any idea that this is all leading somewhere.
We should just wait for it all to just EXPLODE.
That’s a strategy?
It’s collapsing, even as it appears to be succeeding. It knows that its days are numbered. That it’s fucked. The incorporation of philosophy is just one of its last gasps – the system, the total system.
It’s, like total triumphal. Running everything. Until it doesn’t. Until it breaks down, or whatever. Until it falls apart. Which could happen at any moment. Organisational Management could just … collapse.
These regimes don’t last forever. It looks as though they’re perfect and seamless, but they’re not. They’re brittle. They can break.
So let’s destroy it. We have to work out where the weaknesses are. Where they’re vulnerable.
This is our onboarding. That’s what it’s called.
Don’t be awed. Don’t be overwhelmed. Don’t be taken in by all this shit. These buildings. This purple office. Don’t think this is real. It’s not real. It’s a dream. The world’s a dream.
Is it?
They’re making us devise the way we can make ourselves fit in. Of course they are. Saves them the trouble. They outsourcing to us finding a way to destroy ourselves. They’re going to make us do it to ourselves.
This is how we’re being colonised, right? This is how they work on us. It’s devious. We’re going to be our own police. We’ll police ourselves.
We’ll crush ourselves. Admonish ourselves. Wag fingers at ourselves. That’s how it’ll work.
It’s amazing that they’re taking time to crush us. That they’re putting effort into it. It’s a sign that they see us as a real threat. Isn’t that something? I like being a real threat.
A threat that they’re going to crush.
But that takes effort to crush. Planning. Forethought. It’s so flattering. It’s like we have actual efficacy, or something.
They can’t be explicit about what they’re doing. Not even to themselves. They can’t view themselves as oppressors. As powerful, even. As anything less than kind.
So they’re killing us out of kindness.
Of course. For our own good. They see themselves as helping Philosophy. At helping us adjust to the new world. As bringing us on board. They’re sharing something with us. Secrets. Of how the world works. Of what the world is. They think we don’t know. That we have so much to learn.
I want to kill myself.
You want to kill the old you. The pre-Organisational Management you. The new you is what this is about.
God!
What are you going to do – protest? Who you’re going to protest to?
The universe. I’m going to protest to the universe. I’m going to cry up to the universe. To the blank sky. For no one to hear.
God hears.
Fuck off, Io.
Can’t believe the world’s still bothering to exist. I mean, really – why? Doesn’t it know? It’s all past its self-by date. All of it. And everything. All of this. It’s missed the perfect moment to … end.
I mean the way it all continues is just … tasteless. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Being isn’t what’s supposed to be. What it was, in the good old days, eh Helmut?
And the days go by and go by, and what do they add up to? They don’t … culminate. They don’t build to anything. They’re not going anywhere.
Should they be going anywhere?
It’s life in deferment, right? Nothing can be finished. Nothing can be done definitively. Nothing can be accomplished. Not once and for all.
The unending end. The end that can have no ending to being the end. Ending can never end. Yet it’s still an end.
How much money have you brought in? Let me guess – no money. How many successful philosophy bids have there been? How have you done with the research councils?
How useful are you to the world? How are you changing things for the better? How are you meeting the societal challenges?
We’re doing very well. We’re the UN’s good boys and girls. We’re getting all sorts of brownie points. They think we have the right attitude. We’re making our presence felt.
Organisational Management research, rippling out into the city and beyond. From the O.M. campus to the world.
We’re plugged into the governing system of the world. Into the public private partnerships. Organisational managers are everyone’s favourite.
We’re putting out best O.M. feet forward. Bubbling upwards. Rising in all the metrics. We’re top of the academic pops. You’ve teamed up with a winner, philosopher. We’ll show you how to succeed.
I don’t want to succeed.
Don’t be sulky. I don’t like sulky. How’s about some good attitude? I can see why you guys are plunging down the league tables.
Let me see the postgraduates. Bring me to them.
I just want to see them. Frolicking. In the wild. Doing postgraduate things. Running free. Free range!
I want to bathe in postgraduates.
A single postgraduate is enough to explode the world. Is that right? And a whole cadre of them …? Harness that postgraduate energy, and …?
They’re not even postgraduates anymore. They’re part of no university. Except their own one.
They’ve entered some new space. They’re post-post graduates, or whatever. They’re post everything. Opening out to infinity. Just opening out and out.
Remember – they’re c. They’re something else now. They’ve interrupted their institutional studies indefinitely. They’re busy with something else now. With … studying without end. Inoperable study. Without project. Without measurable outcomes. Without purposes or plans. Freed up from all instrumentality. With no necessary relation to an end. Without any developmental teleology.
They’re studying without destination. They’ve freed themselves from testing, accreditation, from graduation ceremonies. They have no-one standing over them – no supervisors. No authority. No one officiating.
They’re in a perpetual state of suspension.
They’re experimenting with what they can do. With what they can be. That’s their delight, which is unfathomable to us.
They’re no longer what they learned to be. They no longer say what they learned to say.
They don’t feel any guilt about what they haven’t yet achieved. They don’t feel a sense of failure – unlike us. They don’t hanker after greatness – not like us.
They’re not about hope – in the future. They’re not about deferred gratification – about sacrificing the present for the future. They’re not waiting for happiness to arrive.
They’re always escaping. In perpetual parabasis. They’re always seeking an exit from the scene.
They’re students as not students. They’re postgraduates as not postgraduates.
It's an occupation of sorts. They go amongst us, these post postgraduates. They use the same library. They walk the same corridors. But they’re suspending the function of these places.
Never belonging to this world. Never wanting to be part of it.
The reality principle: they don’t know it. They haven’t been inducted into the present world. They never accepted it. Its terms and conditions.
They were never broken, as we were, by part time teaching.
Authoritarianism and dependency-creation: that’s what management is about.
We need elite leadership because of the irrationality of the working class. The tight regulation of the working class. They’re collectivist! Undisciplined! Irrational! They’re not able to secure individual futures. They don’t show the right kind of self-care.
They’re unthinking out there, beyond the stony wastes. They’re prone to drift The risks of the mismanaged life. Easily led. Susceptible to demagoguery.
They need to be policed. Manipulated. Moulded and modulated.
The recalcitrance of the majority: this is why planning and management can never end.
We’re all about moulding and modulating our subjects. About creating acquiescence. Shaping and reinforcing behaviour. Encouraging useful potentials and rejecting others.
The great management task. The great moral reconstruction. The great re-education.
An interventionist management. An elite administration. New kinds of … social collaboration. The re-engineering of the subject.
The world needs an active intervention. New kinds of leadership. A restructuring. Human resource management of the highest kind. New systems of incentives. Of regulation.
All human action is to become economically driven. All values! The polity and the economy are to become one.
We’re deploying the finest minds on motivation theory, leadership innovation, marketing and branding.
It’s about working out how to organise production best. It’s about the best functional solutions.
it’s politics – a new model of politics. It’s a totally political endeavour to order and reorder. Subsuming the whole of society to capital. Making sure there’s no gap between economy and polity. Via the elite guidance of Organisational Management.
We’re investors in ourselves, right? We’re self organisers. Self managers. Self starters. We’re stores of useful data and information.
They don’t know their own best interests. They don’t know what they should want.
It’s about moral reform. About engineering a new kind of soul. Recasting the working class as bourgeois subjects. With bourgeois cares.
There are great productive gains to be made.
We’re the last despairers, postgraduates. This is the last and lowest form of despair. Despair has fallen to us, which is why despair itself must despair.
We’re, like, professional mourners, postgraduates. The kind they hire to wail and tear at their clothes. To fall upon the coffin.
Except we’re mourning the end of a civilization. We’re mourning because no one else will. Because no one else sees it.
Sometimes it feels as though it’s only us. That we’re the only ones. There are tears only in our eyes. For what has passed. For what is sinking into history. An entire civilization! And philosophy is sinking with it. And of course, the humanities. We’re anachronisms, postgraduates. We’re irrelevant.
We’re like coelacanths, caught in the ocean depths. Our time has passed – in fact we’ve never even know it, our time. Essentially belated: that’s what we are. It’s nachträglichkeit. It’s return of the repressed.
And what about you? You’re even more out of time than we are.
You can’t go home again, postgraduates. Because we were never home. There never was a home for the humanities, let alone philosophy. There was only ever temporary accommodation. Only tents pitched in the desert. Only a rest break.
True exile: that’s our true vocation. Exodus. The humanities are only ever on the way out. And we’ve been turfed out again. We’ve been cast out again. The deepest exile of all. Into Organisational Management. Into the anti-philosophical. Not merely indifferent to philosophy, but antithetical to it. Actually hostile to it. In essence. What shelter will philosophy find in glorified Business Studies?
How hard we’ll have to fall, postgraduates! How far we’ll fall! Truly, we’ve never know falling like it.
The logic of the world is leading here. The logic of the new world. The Organisational Management campus is only what the world’s becoming. What the world already is, in essence.
The O.M. campus is only showing us where we already were – for some time. It’s being revealed to us. The essence of the new world. What it is, what it looks like.
Our fate is not in our hands. The dice have been rolled. Where are we being taken? Where are we being led? Will we acquit ourselves well? Will we honour our philosophical ancestors? Will we be brave? True? Will we bear with us the honour of philosophy?
The new regime. The new reality. A world order as organisation and as management.
We’re exposed. Our hearts are beating in the open air. We’re taking risks – terrible risks. We’re all but offering up our sanity.
Management theory isn’t just time and motion studies anymore. We’ve got a bit more sophisticated than that.
O.M.’s about human relations. It’s all about practices, routines, behaviours, norms, rules, regulations, emotions, affects.
Look, management is about economics, sociology, psychology, accountancy … it was a science. That was the way management started claiming it as a science in the late nineteenth century. Well, it’s an art now. We need the humanities to help.
Philosophy’s part of the creative sector, really. All the humanities are. Which is why Organisational Management is turning its attention to the arts.
O.M.’s curious about the humanities. O.M. wants to find out more about the humanities. O.M.’s interested.
We need to be able to draw on the general intellect – language, affect, cognition, creativity, emotion. Even your despair will be useful – do you see?
O.M. can play with whatever it likes. It can have its fun now that it’s taken over the entire world.
It’s all idling. Entertaining itself. Fooling around with the humanities.
They want our freedom. They want our free time. They want our idle talk. They want our stupidity, our most precious resource. They want our capacity to bullshit. To talk rubbish.
They want to work out the secret of the humanities postgraduate. If they crack you, then they’ll understand philosophy. And if they understand philosophy …
The philosophico-literary: they want that, too. Nothing is incidental to them. They want to know all. To study all.
Philosophy is the final frontier for O.M. The humanities are. It’s the last thing to be conquered. It’s like we’re the end level Boss. Except we’re the anti Boss. We’re so weak. We’re so fucked. We shrinking, worldwide.
So you’ve chosen to break the wild horse of philosophy. Break us, and you can break anyone. Break our despair.
Open innovation – that’s what it’s all about. Organisational Management isn’t about R&D. We leave that to the people we bring on board. You guys are the R&Ders. You’re doing the real innovation – you guys in Philosophy. We’re drawing on your brilliance. On the ideas we harvest from you. It’s built on the model of open source software.
Open-source parasitism, more like.
Work in Progress 