La Perrouque

The machine and their Western business practices (WBP) model share much in common with the orbit of a carousel; they continually move according to their own spastic algorithmic rhythm. Their entrance and exit points, like a circle’s circumference—lines carefully balanced, are visibly indistinguishable. La Perruque, Michel de Certeau’s modern-day proletariat, is entrenched in the same chicanery. Tasked with defusing or “making do,” the mapless minefield of his place of employment, la perruque, without promise of a transparent user manual, camouflages his vexation by encoding his ways of operating in order to remain complicit and compliant. To the extent that I wish to retain employment and any remaining sanity, I choose to write with an anonymous pen. If there is an argument or telos to be found on or between the lines, it follows the passion of Nietzsche’s mad man or Camus’s revolt. Intended for la perruque,  this is a user’s manual that critically examines the intricacies of the academic employment process, from the interview to the chicaneries that one endures during his at-will tenure. And so, this manifesto is not only a creative, autobiographical account of how I have so far tactically revolted or “made do” and am surviving the prodding and churning of the machine, it also is one of many portraits that collectively paint an encouraging picture of human resistance. It all begins with the job announcement.

Job Announcement

The department of philosophy at The Adventist University (TAU) invites applicants for a department chair position. This is a full-time teaching position, which begins August 2012, that requires a teaching load of five courses each semester. The primary teaching responsibilities include: Introduction to Philosophy and the Printing Press, Critical Analysis (utilizing cultural, feminist, Marxist, postmodern, psychoanalytic, and semiotic approaches), and Winning Souls according to Ellen G. White.¹

The Interview

Scene 1: Mounted on the wall was an eerie silhouette of the great prophet. 147.05 sq. ft. by 13.66 sq. ft. measures the dimension of the short-circuit, dimly lit Ellen Conversion Room. BzZz..BzZz…BzZz. With each palpitation of light, the demonic, possessed image of the great prophet disembalms, keloiding and receding into the walls. Professor Andrew, nervously waiting, brushes his neck with his left pointer finger only to find a smither of blood. Enter the six devoted faculty members—followers of Ellen (meat free, caffeine free, and sexed free), cloaked in cultish, black Faustian garb, with an upside-down crucifix made from acacia wood around their necks—who share the good news of The General Conference (TGC) to hire/convert Dr. Andrew for the position of department chair of philosophy. Unbeknownst to Prof. Andrew, the TGC has taken a blood sample and filtered it into the proverbial “birth pen.” His signature is an unbreachable contract. The game begins.

Dr. Bates [chair of the Conversion Committee]: Prof. Andrew, the department of philosophy endorses your application and has recommended that TGC support our decision to hire you as chair of the philosophy department. After a few perfunctory signatures and samples, the conversion will be complete. [Dr. Bates orgasmically exhales, lips quivering “Ellen’s will, Ellen’s will.”]

Prof. Andrew: [Needling, gyrating, and cavity-checking his person for a pen, each pocket seemingly a complex maze of dead ends] Without fail, yes, here it is, my lu…ck…y [between the short /u/ and the digraph ck, his tongue goes mute.] pen! I mean…mon stylo sentiment. Pardon mon, français.

Dr. Bates: Bien. Sure, Prof. Andrew. In keeping with tradition, all new converts sign with a birth pen. Pardon le expression si tu plais. We are a small university, so we want all of our new converts to feel appreciated. It’s a personal touch—your personal touch—and our way of saying welcome to the family!

Prof. Andrew: Dr. Bates, I am a recreational connoisseur of fine writing utensils and ink, but I have not seen any fountain ink quite like this. Luxury Red, Quink? Please do share.

Dr. Bates: Hmmm, indeed. This is a DNA-pigmented sanguineous ink that operates on the principle of capillary, carbon movement. The ink is about, say, 38 years of age—exactly your age—and is a fine example of permanence. Both the pen and the ink have a unique feel…but this conversation is for another day. Let’s not keep the faculty waiting.

The Adventist University:  [Collectively, the six interviewees and Dr. Bates patiently await Prof. Andrew’s signature.]

Prof. Andrew: [Prof. Andrew’s pen and the contract disagree like opposite poles of a magnet. The professor reluctantly signs—the best non-option, the only option—and the grinding cycle begins again.] That about does it.

The Adventist University: [a large roar culminates] Welcome, and God Bless Ellen! To our new convert!

Le Jeux and Règles and the Not-So-Beautiful Game

Admittedly, The Interview is my nerdy, literary attempt to stone my contemporaries with Adventist bibles without facing Ellen’s eternal wrath. Beneath the satirical veneer commences a subversive game of power, its ideological composition, what it reveals/conceals, and how it disindividualizes, which is the tacit logic of les jeuxs. Disindividualization is the process in which the individual is magically raptured from ordinary life and thrown into a collective phantasia, what anthropologists call phratria, in which solidarity, openness, and benevolence are disguised as other means. Our concern is therefore one that investigates other means, ideological inscriptions “so obvious that one does not see them.”² Decoding or re-encoding this Wittgenstein-like riddle, there is hidden publicly some-else-where a limited edition user’s manual that is from the Bronze Age and is readily available. Whether you’re playing Lick the Dean’s Ass, Chase the Superior, The Non-Participatory Faculty Game, Provost Says, or some other humiliating gray-collar working game, systemic règles (rules), both visible and invisible, are governing codes that render possible or impossible operational movements (enunciative practices) on the given field. Game theorist Jesper Juul, in his text Half-Real, ascribes some of the following qualities to gaming:

(1) Games are rule based; that is, the activity has structure, which makes it possible to repeat it.

(2) Games are variable and have a quantifiable outcome: The various outcomes can be precisely enumerated and each of the outcomes is assigned a value.

(3) Players are attached and have a vested interest in the outcome.

(4) Games have negotiable consequences (fictive or real-life) to an outcome.³

We therefore may conclude that games are an interplay of systemic activities played out in espace  in which participants make decisions and exercise power to achieve a unilateral outcome. Significant here are the terms espace and unilateral. Espace signifies le domaine, or the iterating venues of play in which everyday practices are exercised. This is critical, and I will return to the topic.

To be clear, règles  are never altogether defined. Depending upon the situation, they are both determinate and indeterminate. Règles  are determinate in the sense that invisible hands write with invisible ink on invisible paper, so a piece is still a work in progress. The players, then, must possess a type of savoir faire that sheds light on such double-dealing. Navigating such institutional contradictions and immaterialities is similar to dodging projectiles from a barrage of Mayan atlatls—you’re on borrowed time! Operating in bad faith becomes the only modus operandi for most. Strategies include (1) teaching 15–18 credits a semester without additional pay, (2) volunteering to take on additional administrative duties, (3) assisting with facilities management, (4) visiting neighboring high schools to recruit, and (5) without promise of remuneration, paying out of pocket for pizza for the department—part of the indenture contract you sign to keep your job and stay in good favor. In return, the occasional limp, clammy, shifty-eye uncertain handshake from a superior prevents one from seeing how close the projectile really is.

What follows are inventoried and dated thoughts, diagrams, and analyses of the most salient games played at TAU. Ranging from beginner to advanced, all games carry weighted consequences. It always begins with the job announcement!

Jeux 1: Job Announcement, aka Solicitation for a Prosti-letariat

Level: Beginner

TAU: The Game Encoded

Lecturer, Assistant, Associate, Full Professor, depending upon qualifications, tenure-track

Beginning fall 2013. 5 courses/year (3–2/semester), undergraduate and graduate. Dissertation and thesis supervision. Usual committee work. Ph.D. in area of specialization prior to appointment. Competence in appropriate ancient and modern languages.

TAU was founded in the name of The Adventist Church as a national university and center of research and scholarship; its School of Philosophy, which is canonically established as an Ellen White Faculty, seeks candidates who understand and will make a significant contribution to the university’s distinctive mission and goals.

La Perruque: The Game Decoded

Purpose: To fish for Call Girls for High-End Escorts, those willing to prostitute themselves into serfdom without promise of emancipation.

Research agenda: Publish or perish, team player/martyrdom, community or university service/free labor. Salary.

Intellectual value cannot and should not be quantified. Consider yourself part of an emerging elite, gray-collar, working-poor class. Minorities, including women, are welcome to apply as the university benefits from tax credits. All applicants must provide certification of their New Religious/Academic Movement Vaccinations (NR/AMV), 3 letters of conversion, transcript(s) of perpetual training and brainwashing, M.A./Ph.D. (preferred), and oaths of poverty, silence, and obedience.

Equipment: Cover letter, extreme debt, rose-tinted glasses, bipolar disorder

Interlude

Solicitation for a Prosti-letariat: Showing My Ass(ets)

You know those seedy gringo games played in South America where a beautiful woman at a discotheque pretends that she’s interested in you, kisses you on the neck or gently brushes her lips against your ear, then walks away? Unwittingly, you are a marked man. You’re a target. My cover letter was the seedy adulterous kiss. For about a year, I’ve moled around the church, taught workshops, helped out with extra-curriculars. I even castrated myself by publicly repenting. Hell, the university even included me in their Bible retreats. While there, I gained intimate knowledge of disciplinary environments of enclosure and control existing between the church and university. And if I was to save myself from the drudges of unemployment, my cover letter had to reveal that I was a convert, not a dissonant—a missionary, not an intellectual. I had to show that I wanted to win souls for Ellen. My cover letter was the perfect rouge, a linguistic portrait of who they were, and by extension who I pretended to be. Cover letters and other documents of verification essentially express the same thing—I need a job, no two ways about it! Much like Internet porn, it’s a game of aesthetics and speculation. You gaze, intellectually masturbate, and cum to a decision. Pygmalion’s virtue of adoration and Narcissus’s vice of self-indulgence served me quite well and are the reasons that I achieved competency in this game and am currently employed.

Game Played

Cover letter: Solicitation for a Prosti-letariat

“Three, oh, it’s a magic number. Yeah, it is—the magic number.” Lithium’s atomic number, the holy trinity, and the anecdotal “third time is a charm,” etc.., all signify the importance of the three, so my cover letter was divided into three parts: castration, ideological brainwashing, and submission.

The opening paragraph demonstrated humiliation. I once more castrated myself, if that’s even possible, by talking about my religious conversion, likening it to Paul’s journey to Damascus. I also talked about how my life is now dedicated to “winning souls for Ellen.” Admittedly, this is not a phrase the institution uses, but it’s catchy and cultish, and Adventism has that feel. Moreover, Ellen White’s text on education was particularly helpful in defining my role as a vessel used by God to nurture and spread His word. It really drove home the true purpose of Adventist education, the assumed sincerity of my conversion, and that I understood the purpose of the church and the university as one in the same—as Jesus (God, the son) is one and the same in the trinity. Ergo, if I were hired, my whole being, no matter how free spirited, had to possess the gravity and singularity of an Adventist black hole.

The second paragraph addressed the nexus between the church (habitus) and the university (field). To be quite honest, I just paraphrased a bullet point from the pastor’s sermon: Mental, physical, social, and spiritual health, intellectual growth, and service to humanity form a core of values that are essential aspects of the Adventist education philosophy. Spiritual metaphors, scientific metaphors, and alchemic metaphors are often used when talking about religious and intellectual transformation, so I had to tightrope over the 666 bridge of intellectual freedom and religious enlightenment. The distinction between the church and the university is not altogether clear—even Adventists find it challenging. From what I have observed, this is intentional and allows for puppeteering bureaucrats  to pass the buck whilst finding protection behind the invisible hand.

My final paragraph emphasized the purity of my bodily habitus as a hollow, completely cleansed vessel, ready to be whored and soiled by the best taker. Low self-esteem, submissiveness, and docility—all priority qualities of prostitutes. Remember, we are all prostitutes, or in this case prosti-letariats. Be it the call girl for the jet-setting escort, we all have a price. The cover letter communicates your price and what favors you are willing to do. Religious institutions are nothing but whorehouses with crosses on them; they charge by the hour, so I knew what I was getting into!

Note to Reader

Reflections: Solicitation for a Prosti-letariat

Reconnaissance at various levels is strongly recommended. Depending on the size of the institution and the department, you can penetrate only so far. TAU is an anomaly because the church is both a material and immaterial extension of the university. By forfeiting many Saturday nights, I learned a great deal about its organizational structure and took note of (1) its governing behavioral practices, i.e., interior/exterior dispositions, (2) the ideological nexus between the university and the church, and (3) bodily habitus, i.e., the body as a vessel consubstantiated and/or, in some cases, transubstantiated with an unknown quality ‘X.’ Intel served as a cheat sheet to get my foot in the door. I got the interview.

Jeux 2: Jeux bac à sable

Level: Beginner to advanced

TAU: The Game Encoded

The general purposes of the interview for the interviewer is to gather pertinent information about the candidate(s) in question, to fact-check one’s qualifications and job-related skill sets: communication, organizational, leadership, motivation, work ethic, competency, and emotional and behavioral intelligence.

La Perruque: The Game Decoded

You apply for a position because you have no sandbox in which to play, are about to be kicked out of the sandbox, or you need more sand. Everyone knows this. Every interview is an evolving manifestation of strategies and tactics learned in the nursery school sandbox: deception, negotiation, and mechanics of power.  Metaphorically, the sandbox represents the habitus—the building blocks of one’s culture—a deep cognitive template that allows for members of the community to function systematically; therefore, success in the sandbox depends on one’s savoir faire—habitus  in relation to the field(s). Fields are micro-habiti  that have their own procedural codes but are not altogether autonomous from their habitus, thus concealing and protecting their true operational logic; moreover, unlike habitus, fields are liquid-like, possessing all the transformative qualities of matter, which makes them very difficult to detect. Thus, the game is played on two levels: beginner and intermediate. The interview is an empirical test of whether you can follow rules and how likely you are to go AWOL. Behavioral and emotional intelligence are assessed in relation to rational practices within the habitus at the beginner level. At the intermediate to advanced level, the habitus is no longer static. Its violent energy is released, setting off high-velocity chain reactions. Fields are birthed; they collide, cancel each other out, and bleed into one another. Likewise, the game Sandbox is not static. It is an incessant eruption of signifying homonyms (i.e., sandbox = potlucks = departmentals = faculty retreats = faculty evaluations = spirit day). For all intent and purpose, the game, no matter the level, boils down to how much sh*t you are willing to shovel, if you’ll sh*t on others, and how likely you are to cry Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) once the sh*t hits the fan. That’s a lot of sh*t.

Equipment: Shovel, smile implants, black suit, linguistic roulette, knowledge of la perruque, shifting fields

Interlude

Jeux Bac à Sable

From the moment the phone hits the receiver until the doorbell rings, you get the chills. Is she a non-smoker, is “she” a “he,” bait and switch, D&D free, or worse—law enforcement. You just don’t know! Interviews, like soliciting for prostitution, are a game of roulette—black, you’re lucky; red, you get burned. The outcome is fatally certain, but you don’t care. I got red; after being escorted to the back room, I got a bad feeling that I was gonna get f*cked. One by one, the virgin bible bangers entered the room and formed a circle around the table. I was at the head. Even after going to Jesus Camp and participating in a whole bunch of extra-curriculars, when Dr. Bates asked me to commence the interview with prayer, for 30 seconds or so I was a fish out of water. Irregular heart palpitations, arrhythmic breathing—the last time I prayed was for the winning pick-6 lotto. Like all sinners, I defaulted to “Our Father, who art in Heaven….” No sooner had the “n” in Heaven left my mouth, Dr. Bates interrupted me with dagger eyes, ready to chase me, like Jesus chased the money changers out of the temple. Avoiding eye contact was a way for me to not acknowledge his and possibly others’ contempt for my sacrilegious prayer. Instead, I murmured through until the last word, “Amen.”

Other than inviting them to happy hour at a Brazilian steak house, there was no greater offense. However, not everyone was ready to publicly flog me; they were too busy getting off at my expense. Others had a sense of humor or at least could mask their disapproval. Maybe they were mollified by my limited edition, vintage, lambskin Bible with Ellen’s signature engraved; the lingering aroma of my spiced ginger tea; or my acacia wood crucifix. Unbeknownst to them, each artifact selected was a calculated tactic on my end that constructed a terministic screen (a selective network comprising cultural terms, practices, and symbols) used to persuade them and bolster my ethos. Who knows. They got off. I got the job. Happy ending!

Game Played

Jeux Bac à Sable

At 8:00 a.m. in the morning, on 42nd Street in New York, you can find Les Trois Perdants or a three-card monte game. From left to right, right to left, the field (card) floats. Don’t lose sight! For la perruque, winning is an interminable process that begins with a few precarious victories followed by a dammit, shrug, hands in the pocket, and walk of shame to elsewhere. Losing is inevitable, but the manner of losing isn’t. The challenge is semantically decoding the language game played, for it is a matter of ideological homonyms, the difference between the image and the shadow or the habitus and field. They are the same, yet different; thus, la perruque has to keep his eye on the dealer’s use of strategic space (anticipating probable and certain movements) and trapdoors, while calculating his next movements. La perruque is the worker’s work disguised as work for his employer. De Certeau explained: “[I]t may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room”⁴

The syndicated comic strip Dilbert is an anecdotal narrative of the modern-day perruque—an undervalued, overworked, under-payed non-smoker who smokes because it ensures a 10–12 minute work break. This worker is occasionally AWOL and takes nooner masturbation breaks, extended lunch breaks, and the more-than-occasional promenade to the printer. Depending on where this person parks, the I-left-something-in-my-car excuse can shave between 60–90 minutes off their work day.⁵

La perruque is the tactical response to the ongoing gray-collar chicanery present in everyday places of business. It’s a way of “dicking around” without dicking anyone over. Already built into the perimeter of the sandbox, or taken into account by the architectonic structure, is dicking around, so any tactical maneuver or psychological victory by la perruque is really faux and just a feel-good moment. In Solicitation for a Prosti-leteriat: Showing My Ass(ets), I have gone to considerable detail recounting how the game of negotiating in the sandbox is played, the importance of tactics (artifacts) as a means to manipulate and persuade. What follows are tactics that I’ve charted over the course of a year at TAU whose sole strategic purpose was to manufacture a climate of fear and anxiety by means of surveillance or the representation of surveillance that eliminates idleness and encourages motionless movements in which institutional surveillance ceases altogether and individuals monitor and regulate their own behavior.

Definition of Terms

Logics of Enclosure: Seamless environments that one ceaselessly passes through that are under heavy surveillance. A mechanism of control is felt but unverifiable.

Maps: Strategic organizations of shifting space and representations of reality, maps are diagrams of power in which the cartographer exercises ideological tactics of confinement.

Emploi du temps: Ensuring symbolic complicity, artificial rhythms allow for accurate and predictable tracking of objects along coordinated planes on a map.

Mutawa: Ad hoc religious committee tasked with the duty of ensuring strict adherence to established codes of conduct in which agents are subjugated, whereby losing their agency, and forced to comply or face disciplinary action.

Strategic objective: A process of interpolation whereby the individual is fully dismembered and ideologically reconstructed, made adaptable, and synchronized with the regime.

Logics of Enclosure

Motionless Movements

In grammar school, after lunch, I remember being dismissed for recess at 1:30 p.m. We all hurried down to the courtyard, formed a large circle, and anticipated who we were going to throw the red rubber ball at. Looking back at the game, unbeknownst to the catapulters and the dodgers, the circle became smaller with each dodger being hit; it was only a matter of time before every dodger was eliminated.

Encroaching boundaries not only restrict movement but also create new movements, predictable movements, motionless movements. Motionless movements are non-movements determined by encroaching logics of enclosure in which autonomous spatial movements are already calculated and accounted for by the dominant logic; thus, any movement exercised in free agency is a movement in bad faith. Each tactic, logic of enclosure, map, emploi du temps, etc.., is a synchronic analogical tracking point for which the subject is reduced from an object to a nodal regression tracking point on a linear curve (represented or measured against a Faculty Performance Appraisal [FPA]). Operationally, each tactic is synchronized with the strategic objective. Take, for example, the jeux bac à sable ‘Y’ axis. Each logic, stretched along this axis, forms an encroaching, indomitable barrier that repetitively squeezes the individual from one motionless movement to the next. Surveillance is no longer needed as new synapse connections begin to create new neural pathways that re-engineer behavior and attitude. The power of ideology and behavioral engineering compresses the individual. Not only is he motionless in the sense of kinetic movement (I often envision individuals dripping with fresh plaster; each moment the plaster dries, movement is restricted until the subject is motionless), but he transforms into the straw man with nothing between the ears and the lion without courage, roaming from one enclosure to the next. He neither thinks nor acts; he just is. Quite naturally, these tactics hinge on the cultural manufacturing of alienation in which the individual is neutered from his identity and his work community and is made to feel powerless. TAU, if not efficient at anything, is quite effective at executing this tactic. Consider the following points:

• To my knowledge, the institution has never had a faculty senate and refuses to acknowledge the importance of one.
• The institution has never guaranteed any contract, short-term or long-term.
• Best practices include church members and their families employed by the university as faculty and high-functioning administrators to control and mute dissent.
• Any decision begins and ends with prayer to absolve one’s self from accepting responsibility.
• Allies and enemies are often one and the same as self-preservation trumps.

My Fall 2013 schedule illustrates tactical qualities (Jeux bac à sable) executed by TAU that not only restrict movement but insidiously suffocate any possible escape or temporary reprieve. Work and leisure are indivisible as every moment has to be accounted for! Every sphere of my life is plastered by alienation, weighing on my being like water-logged clothes, making it impossible to stay afloat. Moments when I’d find ways to steal time, I’d asked myself, why am I the only person actively seeking to leave the compound? It occurred to me that I was not fully denatured, never losing memory of my original free nature, never embracing my oppressor—or his discourse of freedom was never an option, although the desire to be appreciated and serve one’s oppressor is quite natural. Pierre Clastres’s ethnography confirms the “Other’s” hypnotic love for his oppressor’s savagery, his willingness to indulge his master and sacrifice himself for his master’s approval⁶. On the contrary, the “Other” has no such memory; his mind is unhackable, digital  tabula rasas, with spyware that ensures quality and obedience to the ideological code. Each software update is a stronger ideological code, a reproduction, a self-generating system of representation, positioning, and repositioning of ideology that is vacuous but generates a metaphysics of purpose.

Map

Ligne de foi et Emploi du Temps

Including myself, there is only one full-time faculty member; my chair is also my warden, but he was ad-hoced into the position, so he doesn’t count. Lecture rooms 060 and 090 are within 10 steps in any direction of my office, which is 5 steps away from the warden’s office, a paper toss away from the warden’s daughter’s office—the secretary. Everyone has eyes, even the newly installed surveillance software on our desktop that monitors and maps kinetic movements and voice levels. And if you need your one unsupervised bathroom (code masturbation) break, the super-warden, like a highly calibrated Swiss chronometer, without fail is strolling the corridor on the hour, half hour, and quarter hour; is keeping record; and knows the time differentials. Daily, we are permitted our 1-hour promenade in Adventist Park. Office raids and cavity searches ensure that no floating copies of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ  or Darwin’s The Origin of the Species are circulating. And so, my entire being was mapped. Freedom was an elaborate smörgåsbord of exotic-looking and rare cuisine, tantalizing to the eyes and mouth, countless choices and options that ultimately taste like tofu. (Restricting one’s diet is another mode of fine-tuning chemical levels for behavioral and perfect ideological alignment.)

***

9-22-13

To: Regular full-time employees

Re: Mapping Best Pedagogical Practices

Dear TAU Faculty:

Early academic alerts can play an invaluable role in student success and retention. The Ellen Center for Student Success has designed an Early Alert program that encourages faculty and staff involvement. As soon as a student begins to struggle, communicate your concerns to the student and offer your assistance. This should be an ongoing process.

Please use the link provided to alert the Ellen Center for Student Success of your efforts and to share your recommendations for additional assistance. Commencing the Spring 2014 semester, all regular, full-time, and part-time faculty are required to be present 15 minutes before the start of their class, take attendance, and turn in their attendance sheets to the center every 2 weeks. Faculty accountability and intervention are key to growing a healthy, Christian community. [God Bless, Ellen!]

***

A couple of days ago, I received the aforementioned memo in my inbox and marveled at the complexity of the tactical cocktail of social control employed: a bit of guilt and shame stirred with policy and sanctions that ultimately communicate, “We have discovered other efficient means of mapping and surveillance.” It was not at all a surprise that there was no opposition to the mandate, and for good reason. A sure way to carry out tyrannical policy is to cut the vocal chords of dissent, the non-existent faculty senate. It was demoralizing to know that 18- to 22-year-old students were recording me, on some pre-emptive mandate, just as I was watching them, utterly emasculated. Up until now, I had some autonomy over my time; now space and time were on the verge of elimination.

***

9-24-13

Emploi du Temps

The Invisible Committee is a fictitious committee created by the university to carry out tyrannical operations without accepting responsibility; today, they put together an emploi du temps, an artificial timetable that beats to the drum of the committee. It was a way for them to evaluate flows and rhythms and perform cost-benefit analysis of their dispensible subjects. Emploi du temps are the central nerve in the machine, the rhythm to which all pieces of the machine obey: who is teaching, what is being taught, where it being taught, how long it’s being taught, who is in motion or at rest, roll call, informal and formal beckonings, etc. It’s the Adventist’s version of Hoeryong. Emploi du temps, in their minds, accomplished the following:

1.    Debunked the myth that God rested (because God worked on Sunday), eliminating any idle time for self-reflection and reprieve, ensuring that all prosti-letariats work ceaselessly.

2.    Developed deep Christian moral values about free labor and charity. After all, we are building Ellen’s kingdom.

3.    Ensured that indoctrination is evenly distributed and that any counter-discourse is easily mitigated by a regular pace of labor.

4.    Made certain that everyone is being watched, if not by the administration then by Ellen or your co-worker.

5.    cont’d

9-26-2013

Mutawa

In an address on Saudi state TV, King Abdullah said women will be allowed to “play with themselves and do other unmentionables”⁷ Less King Abdullah’s televised announcement concerning female masturbation, Saudi Arabia is still not on my top-ten places to visit, even for a layover. There is a ban on just about everything: hand-holding, Carley Rae, Dr. Pepper and even Twinkies! Mutawans are always on the prowl for subverters of Sharia Law. As I am typing this, in mid-thought, it really never occurred to me that I am functioning under what appears to be the Adventist version of Sharia law, Ellen’s Law, known as the 28 core fundamental beliefs. In my mind, there are no qualitative differences between the two; they even agree that Twinkies are not only of the devil but stir sexual desires—probably the cream-filled middle—but the similarities don’t stop there. Saudi Arabia and TAU both have an overzealous body of officials tasked with enforcing Sharia Law or Ellen’s Law—flogging included!

Not just the Mutawa, but most Adventists at TAU are complicit and take delight in being a ginger tea-drinking, Hawaiian roll-eating, Bible-thumping honorary mutawa, whose sole purpose is to bring the infidel to justice. For example, last minute, and not by mistake, I was ordered by Thomas to man the writing lab on Thursdays from 3:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m. Proxy to the writing lab are two deans’ offices, the Students’ Spiritual Association, the Ministry of Outreach, and the Welcoming Committee, all of which, if beckoned, will report to Thomas about my goings-on.

9-26-2013

5:35 pm – No sooner had I finished the last sentence that a dean walked by, smiled, and said, “Good evening. I guess he’s punishing you.” “Being the infidel that I am [with a devilish smile, I reply], the lake of fire awaits.” “ ‘For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness’ ” (Romans 1:18). Adventists, like most fundamentalists, believe that they are the chosen ones, and those who aren’t might as well be the seed of Satan. God has always been used by religious crusaders as a weapon to piss on others. Being detained in a writing lab for hours is just another example of this. By mimicking the classroom environment (boring and uninspiring), the writing lab was and is a barometer that gauged my behavior and best practices in the classroom. It was another way for them to indirectly gather information to confirm and build an unflattering case about the infidel. Let the witch-hunt commence.

King Abdullah, Saudi’s Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, and the Invisible Committee are quick to beckon the witch-hunt to find the infidel who sodomizes their culture, while engaging in the same forbidden acts themselves. And like all witch-hunts, the witch is never found, only created. It was only a matter of time before I was blindfolded, taken to an undisclosed location, stoned to death, and buried a couple of meters down.⁸

***

TAU’s Eyes Wide Shut: Strategic Objective

What happens when everything is exposed and there is nothing more to see—eyes dry up, hardening to a plastic shell, and fall out? Eyes wide open, unmitigated laser vision in all wavelength spectrums in a telepresence paradigm, user-space is a commodity, so there is always room for more cameras, more tracking, more monitoring, more data, meta-data, and meta-meta- data to be gathered. Every angle of space must be accounted for, no shadows allowed. Full-scale overexposure is just the beginning: analog surveillance, digital surveillance, remote surveillance, external and internal body cameras, space cameras, speed cameras, earth cameras, electronic tagging devices, transponders, etc.. There is always more oppression, perversity, fantasy, speed, angles, pixels, filters, and screens in which to view the temporal compression of the objectified—the more intense the gaze, the faster they fade into the incoherent dots and dashes of Seraut’s Parade de Cirque.

The basic tension is not so much between the objectifier and the objectified but rather the erotic inversion in which the objectifier secretly wants to be dominated, gazed at, and fu*ked by his own tools of oppression, the relooping of the Greek tragedy of Narcissus, so obsessed by his gaze that he followed it to his death. Narcissus and TAU’s strategic objective are reminders of the perverse libidinal religious nexus, the desire to forgive and to be forgiven, cleanse and be cleansed, see and be seen.

Epilogue

Game Over

“If we possess our why of life, we can put up with almost any how.”⁹

10-2-13

Earlier, I advanced the idea that games are rule-based, contain an algorithm that governs the operational logic and the possible outcomes; strategic planning and calculated tactics speak to the cultural logic and the emotive value attached to the outcome. Winners are valorized and enjoy all the privileges of victory whereas losers are ostracized and in some cases demonized. “Play casts a spell over us; it is ‘enchanting,’ captivating. It is invested with the noblest of qualities”¹⁰. Inherent in play is tension, strife, indetermination, and pang. What is true for all players is that each player must tirelessly and painstakingly exert one’s freedom without promise of resolve. As such, games measure one’s fortitude, prowess, and character; thus, endurance becomes the central question as transgression always looms. And if one endures without promise of resolve, it is only because there is some groundless ground, some regenerating project worth committing to. Sartre observed that man spends the better part of his life engaging in interminable projects, “plugging up holes, in filling empty spaces”¹¹. My life is one that is possessed with blind passions and projects that justify my contractual existence.

“If the man of action, in Goethe’s phrase, is without consciousness, he is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him…. So he loves his work infinitely more than it deserves to be loved.”¹²

What a useless passion, the only passion. My life is not a jeux, but the machine has made it so. Balancing self-preservation and -realization, I teach, write, research for whom and why? Because my being is contingent on bad faith. I know the university is hollow and those in it are deaf, but I recklessly follow the footsteps of Nietzsche’s madman and revolt. It is through the practice of bad faith that I recognize my freedom. It is real to me, I smell it, it is formless but it presses against my being and I know I am alive. How I understand and practice freedom is the tactic (shell game) and conflict that is mine and mine alone to deal with; and perhaps my vagabond tendency signifies a search, a revolt for a personal value that has no presence nor value in the board or field of play but should. And it is with this in mind that I trudge without guarantee of continuance. Mine to keep is endurance and nothing but endurance.

3-19-14

Camus laments, “When the meaning of life has been suppressed, there still remains life”¹³. Birthed out of frustration, not resignation is this manifesto. Freefalling into the abyss, reaching breakneck speed, I felt worthless, re-examined the value of my personal ethic and at times contemplated suicide, but I did not resign, I embraced my despair, transforming it into a parachute. My hope then is that this piece is not viewed as a symbol of one person’s despair but of hope and continuance, and that it inspires a similar call to action in all of its readers.

[This article was originally published at http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue3/universities-in-question/powell. A PDF the original version has been archived at https://archive.org/details/Lateral3.]