Work in Progress

We’re idea-stealers, that’s all! Panners for philosophical gold in European waters. Gathers of European pollen from the finest European flowers. Fishers of ideas in the European pond.

Ideas we barely understand! That we barely even grasp! Ideas that we have to dumb down. Simplify. Rip out of their context. Reframe. Make stupid …

Ideas that we have to domesticate – to transplant to Anglophone soil. That we have to make grow here. Simplified! Contextualised! Reframed! Remade! To be presented in our journal articles and conference presentations.

Explainers: that’s what we are. Makers-clear. Renderers-up of difficult things. Cutters-and-dryers. Servers-up of difficult things!

We know the division of labour: the Europeans think, and we introduce their ideas. Europe is the element of ideas, and the Anglophone world the element of introductions to ideas. Europe is where ideas swim in the wild, and the Anglosphere is the place where ideas are caught – snared. Domesticated.

We’re supposed to be idea-seizers. Idea opportunists. Dutiful worker ants. Drones. Making ideas usable in the Anglophone humanities. Ready to be put to work, by other humanities disciplines. Read for the discerning educationalist or art historian or music theorist …

We’re supposed to be in the deciphering department. In the explanations game. Rendering explicit: that’s supposed to be our job. Translating obscure European ideas into clear English prose. Transforming the fire from heaven into packageable ideas – into gaudy paperbacks in collect-‘em-all series.

Whole careers can be made from a few crumbs from the European table –but  not our careers. Great books to be written – for prestigious presses; where you can make your name as an [insert European name here]-ian; as a specialist in the thought of [insert up coming name here] – but not our books.

Plan well, and you could be ahead of the curve – but we’re behind it, and behind every curve. You could be the go-to person about this thinker-on-the-rise or that – but no one would ever come to us. Think strategically, and you could be ready with a raft of articles on this up-and-coming thinker or that one – but we’re hopeless at tactics. We can’t do strategy.

You could be hunters-down of other crumbs from the French philosophical table. Stuff that’s been missed from the ‘50s or ‘60s. Thinkers Deleuze mentioned in passed. Ready to be translated! Introduced! But we were incapable of that.

We were never epigone of this thinker or that. Never ready to the Deleuzian thing or the Badiouan thing. And doing something else when that gets tiresome.

We had no hotline to the Parisian experimentium. To the Parisian ideas incubator. Paris: we’ve never even been there. We can’t even conceive of Paris. We don’t speak French, let alone Parisian. We can read a but of French, sure. A bit of German. We know the letters of ancient Greece. But Paris would be quite impossible for us. We’d explode if we ever went near Paris – My God!

Could we say that we resisted it all – that we wanted to be more than covers bands, doing our own crap version of European ideas? That we aspired to more than being the backers of the right European horses? Could we say we had too much integrity to play pass the European philosophy parcel?

 

It was as though we were not yet philosophers – that’s what Cicero said. As though we were not even philosophers. Philosophy, in us, was the ache, the desire for philosophy. Philosophy, in our cases, was the full knowledge that philosophy of any kind was impossible.

Philosophy, for us, was the perpetual as-not … You never philosophise as a philosopher: that’s what we knew …

 

Our idiocy. Our experience of idiocy. As it belonged to philosophy. As it was the most intimate part of philosophy. As the core of philosophy. Wasn’t that what was most important?

Knowing ourselves as having no ideas of our own, of having nothing to say, and no means by which to say anything. As being never able to philosophise. We could never pass ourselves off as philosophers. Let alone as philosophier-introducers to European ideas. We could never play the part of philosophical master – as in command of the oeuvres of others. As explainers. As contextualisers.

The completeness of our stupidity: that’s what we expressed in our best moments. In our drunken laments. In our ceaseless complaints about our inability. Stupidity without apology: that’s what we became. The happiness of idiocy: even though we were also as miserable as sin.

Perfect idiots. Beautiful idiots. Beautiful in our idiocy and because of it. Dwelling in idiocy. In a whole ethos of idiocy – a way of perceiving and engaging with the world, with ourselves, with others …

Perhaps it takes a non-idiot to understand it, Cicero said. A non idiot standing outside it. Who’s not part of it. Who doesn’t dwell within it. The point is to affirm idiocy. Not to see it as a deficiency. Not to see ourselves as lacking anything. But we were incapable of that.

You have to know how to read idiocy, Cicero said. There’s a whole idiocy’s hermeneutics. And that was her role: to show the meaning of our idiocy.

Which is why she’d given us jobs. Why she’d raised us to these heights …

Cicero knew we’d disappoint ourselves – of course. She knew we’d come to realise that we couldn’t change who we were. That there was no way out of our condition. No escape. From what we were and continued to be.

Despite our summer nights! Despite our music friends! Despite their joyful example!

Our summer friends. Our summer reliables, who’d meet us at the back of our building on their bikes. With whom we’d cycle off, for summer sun-downers. For the Free Trade in the evening, the summer still bright above us.

Our summer peloton, along the Quayside. Along the Tyne. Until we carried our bikes up the steps to the Free Trade. To drink with our music friends around a table. To bring out beers on a tray for our friends.

And repairing to a music friend’s house for dinner after a few golden beers. For bottles of white wine with crème de cassis. For cured meats. For stews. And tequila – sipping tequila. Bottles of Jose Cuervo Reposado, for sipping.

And back to our offices, every morning. Working in our offices, every morning. And Cicero, observing it all. Cicero, admiring our summer tans. Smiling at our summer tales. Knowing that all that sun and drink had done nothing to lift our work.

How long would our summer optimism last? For the whole of summer? The first summer, yes. And for our second summer, too. But by our third summer? When we reread our work in our third summer?

 

Cicero knew our tragic hearts. She looked at us, smiling, indulgent. Even as she knew our summer optimism could not last.

Did we ever read our writing back? Did we ever reread what we’d written in our summer trances? Did we really think that summer had saved us, lifted us? Did we really think a summer spell had been cast? That would make us not as we were? That would transform our creaturely condition? Our prose styles? The content of our prose?

Remembering how it used to be. Remember our part-timers’ summers.

The summer signing on. The summer humiliation. The summer dole office queue. The summer farce of pretending to apply for jobs. Of proving that you were job-seeking.

Wasn’t summer when our humiliation was at its deepest. Our suffering? Because it was summer, and we couldn’t partake of the summer. Because summer blazed all around us, and we couldn’t let it touch us. Couldn’t let it lift our spirits.

Because we were abandoned in the  summer. That’s when we were abandoned most deeply.

Left to fend for ourselves. Left behind. Left over. Cast aside. Not needed.

And having to force ourselves to work. Making ourselves work on those long summer days. Writing our papers. Rewriting our papers. Studying the day long. And trying to write! Trying to publish!

And never understood in the dole office. What were we doing with our lives? Where were we going?

And skint – so skint. A tenner a day – was that all we had to live on?

Writing with the summer. Writing under summer. Under summer’s influence.

Summer, idling in our work. Letting itself be pressed like flowers into our summer work. Summer, lying down on summer in our philosophical work.

 

And planning great works – long works. Several summers long works. Across the summer. Across this summer, and the next. Opening ourselves not just to this summer, but the next one. To all summers.

 

And, in the evening, drinking summer cider and honey beers with our music friends.

 

And for the first time actually sitting around a table with our music friends in a beer garden.

After a day of righteous work. After a day of writing.

 

And drunk with summer. Summer-drunk. Summer-staggering.

In a summer trance, up above the Ouseburn Valley. Looking into the trees.

 

And our work was of the summer just as cider is of the summer.

 

And evenings drunk. Evenings – nights – knowing the happiness of drinking. Through to the early hours.

 

And cycling home. Cycling across town. From the Ouseburn Valley, and down the Tyne.

 

We were substantial people, after all. Flesh and blood, after all. Ghosts no longer. We were anchored on the earth, after all.

Friends – did we have friends? Were we friends with each other? Our music friends: were they real?

Didn’t the music department initiate us into the arts of life? Didn’t we learn the culinary arts from them, the music department? Of the meal, lovingly prepared. Of the ceremonies of communal eating.

The good things to life. Traditions of hospitality. Of which we knew barely anything! Which we’d forgotten since our distant childhoods.

 

The musicians always cheerful. With their jam sessions. With their folk nights. With their internationalism. With their mandolins. With their ouds.

 

We needed help, that’s what our musical friends knew. We needed to be shown the light.

We needed not to die for a while. We needed non-destruction. Non-suffocation. Non-death. Non-murder.

We needed a musical breather. Needed a musical timeout. A musical holiday.

 

But didn’t we sometimes scare them, our music friends? Couldn’t we be too dark for them, our music friends? Couldn’t we say things that frightened them, our music friends? Didn’t we have to make a positive effort to be chipper, with our music friends?

We didn’t want to scare our music friends. Didn’t want to perturb them, our music friends. Couldn’t we threaten to lose them in some doom philosophy spiral? In some deadly philosophical vortex?

We had to unlearn what we’d learnt in those part time years. Had to normalise. Be brought back into the human fold. Relearn our human skills.

It was like we were wild children, who could only communicate in hoots. Like we were Kasper Hausers – only semi-civilised. Still out beyond the human pale.

 

We’d been all but down and out. All but dossers. Technically homeless, for all those years. Subsisting on less than the dole would pay. Cashless. Prospectless. Each mad, in their own way. Each contorted. Each crabbed.

 

But we were inside now. The fight of our lives was over. We had to relearn the human arts. The arts of living. We had to be brought back into human civilisation.

We weren’t outcasts anymore. Not staggerers and stumblers anymore. Not obscure – not lost. We’d been Found.

Drinking isn’t drinking yet, in some way. We haven’t attained drinking – haven’t reached it. There is a drinking beneath drinking. A depth. That we have to find. Let ourselves sink to.

 

So long as it’s vigilant. So long as it’s an intensifier of world disgust. So long as it makes it cry out against this world – this fallen world.

 

Be not conformed in this world. Be not sober, in this world. Accept nothing!

 

Let us never rest in drunkenness. We slur – yes. But it doesn’t mean that we should think any less forcefully.

 

It’s Dutch courage. Philosophical courage. It’s resistance-courage. We’re drinking against.

Some Eastern European doom wine. From the black terroir of Mitteleuropa. From some old-growth European forest somewhere.

 

A terroir that keeps memory of fatality. Deep doom. Darkness falling on darkness.

 

Pure pathos. A fundamental mood in a glass. European doom, right? In liquid form. As the blackest of black wines.

 

This is radioactive wine – cancer in a glass.

(Toasting) To cancer.

Maybe this will make us immune from cancer.

Maybe it’ll give us cancer.

Is there anything good about cancer?

 

Black wine from former communist soil. From what lay behind the former iron curtain. The wine of tyrants and apparatchicks and concrete high rises and shortages and queues. The old communism, quite different from the coming communism …

 

Drink to hate. Drink to feed the hate. Drink to let the hate leap up. Black flames, from the black soil.

 

All the world’s poison has seeped into this terroir.

You’ve heard of the water table? This is wine from the poison table. There are whole rivers of poison down there, flowing through the darkness.

 

The terror of dark suffering. Where so much blood has been split. Communism and fascism and despotism. Globalism now.

 

It smells like sulphur.

 

Corpse wine – that’s what it tastes like: corpses.

 

Gnostic soil. Buried-alive soil.

A draught of the oldest Europe. Some curse from the earth.

 

The horror in the ground. Not Lazarus resurrected, but Lazarus rotting, and deep underground.

 

Why did Cicero want to make us drink these things? Why did she leave these bottles to us?

To remind us not to trust the world. Not to trust the earth, and any terroir of the earth. You do not belong here: that’s what Cicero wanted to tell us.

 

Nothing lives in the soil of this terroir. No earthworms. No slugs. No burrowing moles. No millipedes. No bacteria, even. Algae, or whatever. Nothing grows in the cursed earth.

 

Nothing ever hibernated in the soil of this terroir. Any animal that built its burrow down there would be screaming with horror. Any plant would wither immediately. There’s just poison, incubating in the darkness.

 

The earth of this terroir has a fever. The earth is sick. The earth’s chest is rising and falling. The earth’s febrile. Sweating.

 

The terroirs of Alexy German and Bela Tarr. The thick deep darkness.

 

This wine’s turned. It’s zombie wine.  It’s undead. Like a zombie turns.

 

Libate the camps with black wine, then see what happens.

What’s supposed to happen?

Organisational Management isn’t what you think it is. It’s not all mechanistic anymore. It’s not all about managerial omnipotence. It’s not all economico-technological determinism. We’re not all about reductionist models.

It’s not about hierarchies of power. We’re against the organizational monoculture. We’re for pluralism! The small! The local! It’s about policy and ecosystem changes that might allow alternative businesses to grow.

The margins, not the centre: that’s where we should look for future modes of organising. No more giganticism. We need to explore an organizational variety. We need to open up diverse potentialities. We have to counter the thinning out of the social imagination.

It’s about solidarity, stewardship, dignity, compassion and care. You know – sowing seeds of hope.

 

It’s not about exclusion or privatisation. This campus is a context for sociality. Space for human coexistence in relationships and interactions. We want to open the future, rather than closing it down. We want to challenge the managerialist imaginarium …

Forget the Organisational Management textbooks. Tear them up! Forget the O.M. pundits. Participative management – that’s what we’re looking at. Organisation as artistry: that’s what we want to explore. Management as an artform.

And that’s part of the reason we’ve brought you guys on board. It’s about transboundary knowledge exchange, production and transfer.

Philosophy’s fallen into the pit. Our pit. We’ve dragged Heidegger into our pit. And everyone else!

We play with these ideas, like children. We don’t know what they’re about. We don’t understand their stakes.

That’s our charm.

It’s like all we do is try on costumes. Drive about in clown cars. Stamping about in shoes that are too big for us.

And? So?

We’re not worthy of philosophy. We’re not serious.

That’s what Cicero loved about us.

European philosophy without the continental stuffiness: that’s what she said. And without the UK reverence for stuffiness.

European philosophy without the philosophy. Or the Europeanness.

 

We can’t take it seriously.

We can’t take seriously our taking things seriously. We can’t let us ourselves get pompous … pretentious.

Always joking. Always taking the piss.

That’s what saves us.

Saves us! We destroy everything we touch. Even philosophy! Even Heidegger! Nothing survives – not even Heidegger.

He was a Nazi.

Why do we have to be like this? Why are we so unashamed? Is this all we can be? Is this all I can be?