There was a War in Peace Studies.

At the corner of his vision he saw the regional official, waiting outside HR.

Lend me your ears. Who among you remembers which member of staff cut up the HR cushions and sent the bits of fabric to colleagues like little ransom notes. Who?

Do not censure me. The little cushions that lay on the sofa outside HR. Two cushions there were. One with ‘H’ and one with ‘R’ on them. They looked like guilty alibis for the whole dirty university in physical form.

And then they were replaced with identical items, as though the transgression had never occurred.

When the poor have cried, I hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. It should not be tied to this place at all. Judgment has fled to brutish beasts. Men have lost their reason.

Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin.

September. He was back. He was only glad to get to the building because of the weather. Hot and cold at the same time. All weather was now this. Bruised weather. Impossible weather, or it used to be impossible. Now very little seemed impossible.

Into the equilibrium of air con. On screen, by reception, someone doing Parkour in new clothes to advertise a gadget with five lenses. It dripped with infantile Pantone goop. It switched to the news. Endless horizontal scrolling. The infowar has replaced the phony war. Or, if western intelligence is to be believed, to get past the inconvenient phony war you stage a war that is phony. And this was now the logic of everything, including the university. The aesthetic of this new logic-of-everything was the same infantile Pantone goop. The art shows, the exhibitions, all in playroom colours, explained with ga-da-ma, the language of the cot.

He stopped by the pigeonholes next to the lift. He was closer to the regional official now. The regional official had been eating what looked like an egg mayonnaise sandwich and some of it was on his chin. A spider appeared to hang from his nose, from a single thread. The regional official swished at his own face, irritated. It disappeared.

He was here because there was a War in Peace Studies. It wasn’t a joke. Even though it stretched the couldn’t-make-it-up clichés until they wrapped around his head like ten foot elastic bands, it wasn’t a joke. He tried to fight his way out of the tangled facts of it. To live at the side of it. But he couldn’t. Because this logic was also the logic of everything else.

The union branch rep had told him that when he last visited the regional office, he had noticed a banner with MANCHESTER AND DISTRICT hung over the official ‘Northwest Headquarters’ sign, partly obscuring it. This was because regional officials were now in Manchester all the time. Almost all of their allotted funds were being spent on barristers, for Manchester tribunals.

Because there was a War in Peace Studies. They hoped Preston didn’t have a major incident. And one appeared to be brewing. If it went off bang in Preston there was no money to deal with it. Because of the War in Peace Studies.

The union rep had told him about the meetings at Manchester and District. How the old-school regional official described one of the main staff bullies—a bully in Peace Studies—as ‘that black African’. Apparently, nobody had challenged his choice of language. The old-school regional official had left IS, International Socialism, before it became SWP, because it was ‘too conciliatory.’

He remembered how the union branch rep had explained it. Apparently the Reader in Conflict Resolution and the Senior Leader of Peacebuilding had been going at it verbally for about a month before it blew up online. Then the trade union was involved. By the time they opened a file on it nine other members of staff had been dragged in. Two members of staff were suspended due to aggressive and threatening Tweets. But not the Reader in Conflict Resolution, or the Senior Leader of Peacebuilding.

The origin of the war was already partially obscured by the spiralling escalation. Claim and counter-claim had to be filed on top of the original grievance by the trade union clerk. As far as he could see—as far as anyone could see—the origin of the spat was the tone of an email sent on the first official day back after the summer break, August the 28th. A tone. A slight, but detectable insouciance at the surface of a text about timetabling. But after that, piles of A4 printouts of emails with declarations that stopped short only at promises of deep, sincere murder.

The union rep appeared to be telling him about it to try to confirm that it was actually happening. The union rep seemed to think that he needed to break all of his usual confidentiality protocols to just tell someone else, just to know that he still existed, that he hadn’t been sucked into an evil hallucination. After over two thousand years of philosophy and science still nobody knew for certain if reality was or was not an evil hallucination. In this, they were no further on than the caves.

In Peace Studies, they were sliding back to the caves. Peace Studies had been relocated to a former wing of Engineering that was far too small for its staff. People who had never shared offices before were now forced to. These people were trained in negotiation and some had worked at the UN. Most had legal training and the experience to weaponise that training. It took a single summer term in the new space for the War in Peace Studies to begin.

Staff delivered the Bono version of their practice to students in lectures, before returning to the office PC, to engage in Peace Studies Cyberwar. Students occasionally put their heads around the door to ask questions. They were completely oblivious to the atmosphere among the staff. Data and Marketing had noted a higher than usual number of students in Peace Studies from Quaker families. They asked naive questions about the international relations essay they were working on. They were given smiling, facile answers. He had taught a couple of philosophy sessions for that department. Spiritually speaking, it was like walking into an office where all of the staff had been freshly knifed. Their bleeding bodies obstructed the corridor floors, you had to step over them, and the pools of black, coagulated blood, to find your room booking.

It was all part of the new fractal reality. This reality in micro was identical to all the other parts, at all other scales. This was the new logic of everything. He looked over again. The regional official had nodded off.

Concentrate. Pigeonholes. He had post. The new edition of Ananke was out. It was much more lavish than previous editions. He had a review in this one. He flicked through the pages with some satisfaction. He was now in print alongside Benjamin Noys, Michael Taussig, Bernard Stiegler and Luciana Parisi, which was a hike up the arty folk he is in print with ladder, at exactly the same moment as he dropped down the ‘ability to buy shoes’ ranking. This was not a new paradox in his life. The review in Ananke provided an augur for his current full-scale midlife crisis. In fact it was a manifestation. He went into the office: the infestation.

The door was open. In fact the fire door was propped open with the fire extinguisher. Dan was shouting like he was hard of hearing. He wasn’t. Marco had picked up a theology exam paper and declared it interesting, out loud. Dan started shouting ‘YOU’RE TRYING TO DRAW ATTENTION TO SOMETHING YOU THINK YOU HAVE, NOT SOMETHING IN THAT EXAM PAPER’.

Nobody said anything.

Nobody said anything in a way that said something.

Nobody said anything in a way that said, ‘Dan is batshit crazy.’

‘By saying it’s interesting,’ he continued, in the new, clean silent space in the air, ‘you are really telling people that you know a lot about that subject Marco, you want them to ask you about it so you can show off by doing some more talking.’

Silence.

But everybody understood the hard reality in Dan’s observation. They got the truth of it. As usual, they just couldn’t handle the way it slammed into the courtly social dance, like a coach driver having a stroke at the wheel and driving, already dead, straight onto the pavement of a busy shopping street, on Saturday afternoon. The dead person, who made others dead.

In the far corner of the office the man who claimed to be an anarchist was talking about Levinas with an unbearable smugness. He had an even sillier pair of glasses on than usual. Massive, square and black. They looked as though they had been bought at a joke shop. Watching someone who imagines themself to be virtuous, thinly performing that virtue, had its own particular horror. Someone who has been observed being hypocritically self-serving, and sometimes evil, in the past—which is to say, just human, nothing more—but still the horror was there. The horror was firmly rooted in watching an animal trying not to be an animal. And it was rooted in knowing that you were exactly the same. It would have been more comforting to watch people screech like seagulls and fight over scraps of food, than to watch them talk about philosophy in a university.

If this moment were just a single freak anomaly, it might be alright. But he had been here many times before. Too many. In a very real way, Dan was more with it than any of them. Because he was honestly mad. His symptoms hung out all over the place. They didn’t hide, plotting together, underneath the thin surface of civilisation. They strode right out and declared themselves, stark naked. It might be contradictory to call his madness sanity, but it was an objectively more appropriate response to the environment he was in.

He had seen others just get angry in these horrible environments. The anger usually began with a single unfairness, upheld by management. Then he had seen that anger being policed further—usually by the man who claimed to be an anarchist—until it was a verbal warning, after which the anger got worse. Because the original anger had been over something legitimate, the new and more concentrated anger sped on without barriers, increasing in velocity and weight, until another verbal warning was issued, usually followed by dismissal. How many times had he seen that? How he had avoided it himself seemed miraculous, in this moment.

His hatred of the man who claimed to be an anarchist spread, a liquid lead weight, through his chest. The sick meetings. The unfair workloads. The endless changes to contractual arrangements with no consultation, or with the real details hidden in cowardly other places. His past colleagues, picked on until they left, permanently damaged. He met some of them for coffee. Their auras were bruised. They were lessened.

But Dan sat in the corner merrily burping out non-sequiturs and laughing to himself. In a university art department, nobody seemed to be able to police this. People, including managers—particularly the managers—who were used to lying their way upwards, using some ferally-acquired project management skills and a sketchy understanding of the philosophy of ethics, hadn’t got a single strategy for dealing with Dan. Not one. The status of the middle classes relies to a great, underacknowledged extent, on their ability to police the ‘tone’ of the supposedly rogue, usually working class subject. What they really want to police is that subject’s ability to become disinhibited and to then question privilege, to question the invented hierarchy the others merely climbed.

But in a postmodern age the ability to call a mad person mad had been completely dismantled by the default relativism. With Dan they were at sea. The fact that Dan had been a celebrated performance artist who had once crawled from Manchester to Stockport on his belly and called it art sank them. This also meant that the one person who needed the most help got none at all. Now he just sat there, repeating the phrase ‘smell basket’ over and over and over again and laughing while a sociopathic bully blathered some half-understood rhetoric about ‘faces’ and ‘recognition of the other’ in the opposite corner of the same room. Yet somehow Dan managed to teach without complaint. Nobody could quite square this with his condition outside of the lecture theatre.

When he thought about this, he was as helpless as everyone else to process the situation. Sometimes he thought Dan was taking the piss as well. Dan’s madness meant he clung on, but why had he survived? He knew that his intellect had helped him. He knew that the management understood that he was smart because he could see like this. It meant they were a little wary of going for him. With some new members of staff, they smelled the fear and lack of confidence immediately and went straight to destroying them, with no preludes, no fancy music.

Man-who-called-himself-a-communist had now put a request in to HR asking for staff retention figures. He had been told he might need to complete a freedom of information request for this. Man-who-called-himself-a-communist felt helpless and was fuming. And so it began again. Invisible psychological demolition strategies completely dissembled humans who knew exactly what was happening to them but couldn’t even speak about it or tell anyone. Despite PhDs and publications, despite worthy papers talking about western capitalism’s instrumental destruction of human culture, they suddenly had no language to describe or oppose the total destruction of their own self.   

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Steve Hanson has a PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths, but has vanished into experimental writing. He apologises to his supervisor, there isn’t anything he can do about it. 

Erratum Press publishes works of experimental fiction and theory-fiction that take the form of the book, and the manner of its appreciation, as a critical problem space. https://www.erratumpress.com