Once, I told H., I was relatively content in my warehouse. I was neither alpha male or omega male, but somewhere in between. Days passed contentedly; each weekday I would arrive early, resting my heading on a desk and napping for an hour. Each Saturday, I would come in for training, learning to navigate fork-lift trucks and order pickers through the racks of boxed products. I was one among others, I told H., and could use the word ‘we’.
How wonderful that was, I told H., the word ‘we’. It belongs to another age, I told him. The warehouses are disappearing from Winnersh Triangle, I told him. No doubt they are being reborn on the other side of the world, and a new group of workers are using the word ‘we’. But it is likely they labour in much more unpleasant circumstances that our own, I said to H., and would have only rare occasion to look up from their labours and say the word ‘we’.
But there was definitely a sense of solidarity, I told H. There we were, men and women together in the warehouse, men and women of the warehouse and therefore infinitely different from the men and women of the offices, I said. They would hardly dare to visit us in the warehouse, I said. They would search for us by telephone I said, but we were always hard to find. We’d hide behind the boxes, I said, and in the racks. No one could find us, I said. Of course we were not busy at all, I said. We larked about. We climbed up the racks like monkeys.
My job was to find UTLs, I told H. – unable-to-locates. But it was less bother, I said, to destroy what I found rather than filling in the paperwork. I never found a thing, I said, and no one minded. I worked with a small team – Cowboy Pete, in cowboy boots and a cowboy shirt who would always tell me about his debts, and a scrawny guy who was always pulling sickies. Our little team never found a thing, I told H.
Once a month, there would be a motivational meeting. We were encouraged to look ever more carefully for UTLs. We were told to hunt high and low. But in reality, the insurance would take care of missing products; our boss knew as we knew that we were there only for show. When my boss could report we couldn’t find a UTL, it was written off. When we did find one, it bothered everyone, so we were encouraged to hide what we found or to destroy it, I said. Later, our team was abandoned and I became the standards man, in charge of regulating the flow of goods through the warehouse to conform to British Standards. I oversaw the processes of the warehouse, from goods in to goods out. I was to make sure that everything passed through the warehouse with speed and efficiency.
No one bothered me, I said, and I bothered no one. I found a staircase that was supposed to lead to another story of offices but that led only to the roof. I would take The Mammoth Book of Fantasy to those stairs to read. All day I would read in that quiet space, leaving only to visit coffee machines.
I bring the same rigour and hard work to my academic work, I tell H. I am just as thorough and diligent. Yes, I work with the same focused concentration as I did in the warehouse, lightly skimming this or that book and then going for tea. And don’t we all? We’ve read everything, I tell H., but we’ve read nothing. We leave that to others. In truth, we prefer introductions, I said. We like our thought predigested. We like it prechewed and uniform. We want to read books in a standard format, we told H., all exactly the same.
We want them to conform to British Standards, I said – to appear in a series from Routledge or Continuum with uniform covers and uniform contents. We want the prose on the page to be broken up by useful summarising boxes, I said, and conclusions to follow at the end of each chapter, setting out the main points. On no account, I told H., do we want to encounter thinkers in the raw. We would withdraw like a vampire from daylight from the real pages of a real book. What is more horrifying than catching sight of a page of real philosophy?
British Standards, I said, require that all continental thought be reduced to certain standard measurements. You know the attitude, I said: If they cannot write clearly themselves, we must write clearly for them. That’s the attitude, I said. The French think and the British paraphrase, I said. It is a marvellous industry, I said, like a great sausage factory. In one end come books of all shapes and sizes, books of ideas. Out of the other end comes a standard product, I said, books of exactly the same size and with the same cover. Publishers won’t touch anything resembling real thought, I said.
We British are underlabourers, I said, and we are happy being so. The Germans used to think, the French think and the British translate and comment. Of course we have no choice, I said. How else can you have a career?, I said. At least it’s meritocratic. Research is measured by volume, not by quality. We can all agree: it is the weight of the research that matters, its bulk. You have to produce as much as you can, I told H. and all this because real thought is hated.
This is what Britain has become, I said. The annihilator of thought and ideas, I said. It appears we are most hospitable of all, that thought pours into Britain from all directions, I said. But in truth we are reducers of thought. We reduce it to nothing. I am worst of all, I said to H., I’ve always maintained that. I am still the man of British Standards, I said. I’m happy to contribute to the great stupidity, I said.
It’s not that I can go back to Winnersh Triangle now, I said. The warehouses have all gone and solidarity has disappeared. It was disappearing then, I said, but it was boom time, and if you were sacked by one temping agency you could find employment by another. But those times have passed, I said. Companies have contracts with only a single agency nowadays, I said, and the contracts are longer and more exacting. The worker is expected to manage herself, I said. She is expected to develop her skills, I said. And the same is happening in academia, I said. Now you will have to cover your salary three times over. You’ll have to bring in money to the university, I said. It’s not enough to teach – teaching is already nothing – nor even to write. No, money is the measure of all things, I said.
That’s what British Standards mean, I said. There are no warehouses and no UTLs. There are no objects anymore, I said. Nothing manufactured, not in the UK. There is a pure flow of services, I said, which is really the pure flow of capital. That’s all anyone deals with now, I said. Goods come in from overseas and we provide services. And what are services? I said. Money chases money. Money creates more money. We are a trading floor, nothing more than that, I said. When I close my eyes and think about Britain all I see is a great streaming. And the same for academia, I said. The age of monographs and scholarship has passed, I said, and the age of the introduction and the commentary is passing. Soon we will be dealing only in money.
Only the income generators will be left, I said to H. Interactive software from Microsoft will teach for us. Lectures will disappear even as seminars as disappearing. Assessment will be by means of online multiple choice. Learning will be self-directed, I said, which means directed by Microsoft. Men and women of British Standards will oversee the process. It be a benign takeover, a kind of liberation. Now learning meets the individual midway, they will say. There’s no need for lecture rooms and staff offices. What matters is the virtual learning environment. What matters are electronic resources. The real business of a university is the flow of information, they will say. Now everything can flow more smoothly, they’ll say, now you’ll have time to make out our funding applications. What matters are capital and information, one and the same.
I went to a meeting of Nobel Prize winners for science lately, I said, and I’ve met several fellows of the Royal Academy. The uploading of consciousness, I said, that’s what they talk about. Consciousness will become pure information, I said. Our physical bodies can be liquidated and there will only be consciousness swarming around. It’s like Buddhism, I said, it’s exactly the same thing. The environmental disaster is upon us, I said, and all the scientists talk about is uploading consciousness. They’ve given up, I said, it’s like Bush and the belief in the Rapture.
What will become of the world?, I asked H. It hardly matters, I said. You’ll find everything you want to learn in the virtual learning environment. Never mind the real enviroment, I said. Never mind the desecration of the planet, I said. Never mind real suffering and real poverty, I said. In the future there will be no pain, that’s what the Nobel Winner told me. In the future, we will live forever, he said. We’ll be barely individuated, said a Fellow of the Royal Academy. We won’t love or fear or hate any longer. We won’t need to work, he said. We’ll just enter the great flow of capital and information. We’ll be at one with the cosmos, I said, which is to say with capital.
No one cares about Joyce and Tarkovsky and Mann, I said to H. And no one cares about the more difficult equations in maths or counterpoint in music. It’s information that counts, I said. Information into which everything can be translated. It begins with the Routledge Critical thinkers I said, but then it spreads everywhere. Can you feel it passing through you? I asked H. Can you hear it whispering? What’s frightening, I said, is that it’s unintelligible. It does not speak words, but babbles. It is not rhythmical. It has no shape. The Greeks called it the aperion, I said. It has no limits and no contours, I said. And we will not be able to draw aesthetic satisfaction from it in the manner of the sublime, I said, no more than those killed by the whirlwind admire the beauty of the whirlwind. We’re caught up in it, I said, and it is indifferent to us.
Can you hear it traversing you?, I said. It is not glorious as Van Gogh’s starry night is glorious. It does not appear for itself but nor does it hide. It is indifferent to us, I said, and it streams indifferently. The Nobel Winners know it, I said, and that’s why they want to upload our consciousness to other media. Eventually, I said, they would like to do away with media altogther and just disperse the human race, I said. They want to dissolve us into the flow of information, they say, which is to say, pure capital.
In the end, there is no human history, I said. There can be no memory and no biography. It’s all a thin film covering the movement of capital, I said. Our dreams are dreams of capital, our philosophies are philosophies of capital. It’s closer to us than we are, I said. It’s no good becoming Buddhist, I said. There’s no need to meditate to experience the Nothing. It’s here, I said, and its everywhere.
Can you see it in the eyes of the Vice Chancellor, I said, or in the career academic? Can you see it the eyes of Deans recruited from industry and the marketers and advertisers brought in to rebrand the university? They are reptilian, I said. Or they are insects. I am frightened by what I see in them, I said. It is a new kind of nihilism and one which will do away with everything, I said. They hardly know it, I said, they don’t know what they embody. The Vice Chancellor goes home to play with her grandchildren, the Dean does charity work for Guide Dogs for the Blind. But they are filled with reptiles and insects, I said, just as we are all filled with reptiles and insects, and not even them, I said, but just an insect buzzing and a reptile hissing.
The apocalypse is upon us, I said, and what we will see will be nothing because we’ll have no eyes with which to see and no bodies. Our descendants will upload themselves directly into capital. We will give birth to capital, to the streaming of capital. It’s no good talking about the new earth, I said, or dreaming of wild new territorialisations. There need be no places, no terrains, no topoi except the utopia of capital. The darkness of space will be filled with capital, I said. And capital will draw all light and energy into itself, I said. That’s how the universe will end, I said.
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