Work in Progress

The postwar humanities horn of plenty.

Before mass higher education had flooded the academy with midwits. Before those midwits became midwit lecturers in turn. The dreadful cycle of diminution. The academic descent …

God made the word so that we could hate it.

And love God?

Love God as the opposite of the Creation.


God has nothing to do with the Creation. God despises the Creation.

You’re a lunatic.


The Creation is God’s going away. Is God’s disappearance. Is God fleeing from everything. From us.

We were encouraged to make great gestures in thought. To issue forth great claims. Without moderation. Without restraint.

Livia wanted to hear categorical statements. Grandiosity. Delusional ravings. General philosophical hyperbole. Absolutism. Fanaticism, even!

We were to range forth across the philosophical landscape. To stomp! To smash! To make our stupid mark, like philosophical King Kings.

We were to see what we could do! Or what we couldn’t do! Mistakes – that’s what she wanted to see. Erring. Great stupidities – not merely minor ones. Nothing finickity, she said. Nothing delicate. What we got wrong we’d have to get Wrong, capital W. We’d have to go entirely off the rails.

Philosophy needed its outsider artists. Its idiot-antinomians. Philosophy needed our crudities and grandiosity. Our distortions and gaucherie.


Where would we lead our students? To make more like us? But they’d never be like us.

They weren’t mongrels, as we were. They weren’t brought up in intellectual crevasses and cracks. They weren’t scrappers. They’d never have to fend for themselves. They weren’t of the proletariat. Or the lumpenproletariat!

They weren’t underlings. They weren’t low caste. Low born. They weren’t impostors in the university. They weren’t vandals. They weren’t running amuck.

They actually deserved to be here. They actually felt confident that they belonged here. or, indeed, somewhere better. They’d only missed getting into Durham by a whisker. Hadn’t the applied for Cambridge! For Oxford! They’d so nearly got into Doxbridge. But not quite!


The university didn’t mind what we taught, not really. The content of modules didn’t matter, so long as there we identifiable aims and objectives. And outcomes! And assessments!

So long as the students graded us well. Gave us good marks on the student surveys. So long as we kept the customers happy. And kept our admin up to date. Filled in the right forms. They’d leave us alone.

And weren’t we entertaining enough to get away with it? Didn’t the students enjoy our working class flights of fancy? Our peasant’s waywardness. Our underdogs’ eccentricities? Didn’t they find their underclass teachers entertaining, in their own way?


We were performing monkeys, essentially. We were the monkeys, and Livia the organ grinder.


It’s not as if anyone cared, not really. It’s not as if anyone expected anything of the humanities. Rich kids’ playground, that’s all. Something for them to busy themselves with in their undergraduate years. Something to keep them amused. Something with which their parents were happy enough. And happy to fund!

With a bit of vestigial prestige. That could maintain the university’s alibi. That would allow the university go on pretending that it was a university, for a while at least.

Livia’s plans. Livia’s calculations. The contradiction she sought. Her Gnosticism, which was never merely a theoretical affair. Her faith – her anti-faith – in the Void. Her desire for the lightning to strike. For some shift to be made.

Her Gnostic Judaism, or whatever. Her desire to force a new kind of messiah. Redemption through stupidity: wasn’t that it? By admitting the stupid into the university. By giving stupidity a position on faculty.

Livia loved the poshness of Mercia students. And she loved putting us before them, the post southern students who came to study with us.

Mercia humanities is virtually a finishing school, Livia noted. There were veritable aristocrats amongst them. To the manor born types, and all that. Old money and very old money! With Kensington Park addresses!

Didn’t she enjoy it, hobnobbing with the youth of the aristocracy? At Open Days. At visit Days? And at graduation, too?

Livia and the upper class parents. Livia, and the posh parents. Giving her speech at our graduation celebration. How she escaped from the days of communism. How she fell out of favour with the apparatchiks back home. How she escaped with a Chopin record, a book of Nietzsche and not much else. Addressing them all! Winning their sympathy!


She knew what we felt about the posh. She knew how we loved and hated them the posh. She knew what a posh southern accent did to us. To the lower class English in general!

The whole thing amused her. The class thing. The peasant thing.

Our natural deference struggling with our natural defiance. Our automatic reverence at odds with our spontaneous revulsion.


The peasants’ revolt of our lecturing. The revenge of the colonised.

Our lecturers’ revolution. Giving those poshoes what for. Hitting them with Marx! With Lenin! With Trotsky, for good measure! Teaching only communist philosophers. Our communist romance.


We wanted our revenge on the order of things – the order of the world. We wanted revenge on ourselves. We were outraged that we’d succeeded. And glad that we’d succeeded. And appalled that we succeeded. And relieved that we’d succeeded. That we’d waltzed our way into jobs.


Our issues! Our conflicts! Our ferment! Our sizzling!

Always vexed. Always conflicted. Always reeling. Always troubled.

There was an energy to our working classness. There was a drive to our mixture of class hatred and impostor’s syndrome.


Our rogues’ and rascals’ revolt. The revenge of the miserable provincials!

We should have gone down with the ship. Thrown ourselves on Livia’s funeral pyre.

Livia didn’t actually die.

No one ever accepts that they’re an idiot, Shiva, Livia said. No one ever 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. As though they might master it, by calling it idiocy; and by that they are thereby most assuredly not idiots. And that’s what my literaro-philosophy was for me, she said: my method of mastery. Which was a method of denial!

But in the end, I could only fail. And fail failure! Fail my failure as a literary writer and as a philosophical one.

Did I really think I could outwit stupidity itself? That I’d made a move that changed the game? My role was only to deepen it, my idiocy. To fulfil it. To set the seal upon my idiocy. By writing the book that could only be the book of my idiocy. And idiocy in general. The book of the Mercia Philosophy Department. And even Livia’s idiocy. The idiocy of it all – all of the humanities. All of the university. And the universe too – why not?

My book of idiocy – Livia’s book of idiocy: the same. My iteraro-philosophical project – Livia’s idiotenprojekt: you couldn’t tell them apart. I was the official writer-up of the idiotenprojekt. Its anamnuesis. Its scribe. I was to write Livia’s magnum opus.

Livia gave us new names – but these were the names we wanted, in our deepest selves. Our names were the names of our desires, as she saw them. Our deepest yearning. Which she knew! To which she was responding!

She was giving us our real names, our true names, just as Adam named the world in the Garden.

The Organisational Management move is just intensifying things. Pushing us into extremity. Everything’s becoming even more disgusting. Who’s going to kill themselves first?

Is it a competition?


Organisational Management is the way the world is going, not just the university. We were going to be organised and managed sooner or later. Livia saw what was coming. She just made it happen a little earlier, that’s all.


She wanted it for us, that’s all. She thought it stop us sinking complacency and becoming career academics, or whatever.

How dare the sun shine, when we’re feeling so gloomy!? How dare there be a day at all!? How dare the sun even rise! How dare there be a sky! How dare there be a sea! How dare there be … these dreadful blocks of flats.

How dare North Shields exist, let alone South Shields! We’ve had enough of existing things. And existence in general.

How dare anything be! Continue to be! Continue to exist! How dare that we ourselves continue to exist!

The calamity that we are! Which is at one with the general calamity. The bad taste of it all! The bad taste that anything continue to exist! The bad taste of a sunny day, in the midst of horror!

Ah, why does it only register in us, this hatred of all things for themselves? The way the world is appalled by itself? The temerity! The outrage! Why are we the only ones who know it?


Auto-horror. Auto-hatred. Auto-disgust. At ourselves! Ourselves first of all!