I

Temporarily pulling up the blinds. Using "I".
Sigh of relief at the consequential flood of light
pressing past the present. Its shifting shadows.
Perhaps it is time.

Part of a day spent wandering from shop to shop
in an antique district. Casual conversations with
merchants who chat like neighbours with their open ear
for historical tangents. Layering my (re)search for
something else within the guise of an elusive object.
Mantle clock with Westminster chimes. Art deco face.
Curves, not corners. Just to hear again the
tick tick tick of Sunday afternoons spent after
dinnerattwo when I was small. Sunsplit patterns streaming
across the persian rug of a waiting silence remaindered
by the night before. Books on the livingroom floor, dog
asleep on the carpet and the curious wor(l)ds that danced
along a page of thoughts penned ages hence.
Those comforting rhythms.

R's store is in a reconverted house. A year ago, he occupied
the space across the street which was infinitely larger.
Windows that compress the afternoon light. But he left.
Declaring the antique market to be much better, "...in the
States where people know the value of things. Whereas here,
they just don't get it." That's what he said. And yet, he's
back. If you ask him why, he just sighs and keeps on polishing
his silver. Long grey hair obscuring his face. When I ask if he
has any clocks, he mumbles, "ya, upstairs." without looking up.
His space is so tightly packed. Manoevering through requires
a complicated stepping-sideways. But before leaving, I ask
about the runner rolled up beside the door. It looks persian
and he tells me that its part of a set. Previously owned by a
doctor and barely used. I nod. He insists on opening them up.
Outside. On the street. In the light. To see the design. Soft
colours. I hesitate, remembering Sunday afternoons spent
with the dog, knowing those patterns and not willing to barter
for memories. "They are worth a thousand but for you, seven fifty."
I hesitate, also knowing their worth. Afterall. I came for a clock.
And what I am really thinking is how much better this moment would
be if not spent floating alone inside of it. If only to look over
at someone else, just to punctuate it. "You've purchased from me
before. So just for you, just for today, five hundred". I tell
him I don't need both rugs, just the runner. For a hallway. But
he doesn't want to split them up, also noting how I admire their
design. Admiring the memory of a design. A few people have
gathered beside us on the sidewalk. He seems to know who they
are but ignores them, only making eye contact with me: I value
t/his gesture. "I wouldn't normally do this, but since I may not
be here much longer, for you, two fifty....if you buy them today."
As he speaks, I am drawn to a look in his eyes. One that he tries
to hide by looking past me. By kicking the gravel, by staring down
at the persian patterns stretched across cement. As if he really
doesn't care to make the sale but wants something else. l sense
that he could use the money. He tells me that I had better decide
by 4 pm since he will have to leave. Adding rather casually,
"For chemo".

Objects crammed so tightly into his house. Years collected
into rooms. All stacked up and none of it matters (to him).
Life distilled into that singular moment of surrender that
I spy trapped in his eyes. The look he lets me witness.
Much as I want to give him the money, I concede that I
don't need a rug and saying so, outloud, makes me sad.
To watch his eyes turn flat again. But in speaking those
words, I realize something. That it's not so much the clock
that I want. Not the thing of it, anyway. Notion of buying
time. What I am really looking for is a way to layer the past
onto the present in one cohesive whole. As if trying to
congeal disparate moments into a continuous exhalation. One
unending fluid line. Synchronous with each subsequent step.
The continuous comprehension of moments stacked up like slides
atop a light table. Dissolving frames and borders past
individual events. Understood in a single glance expressed
through the eyes. Heard in the steadfast tick tick tick of a
sunlit Sunday afternoon.

Re search. Re view.

To come to terms with the institution of ideas that support
the traditions of Western epistemology. It first becomes
necessary to understand what drives the educational practices
of modern universities. To question the relevance of
Western philosophical tradition. Its totalizing claims. So as
to understand its relevance to formalized learning. Notion of
a post modern age stretched across this specific confluence.
To interrogate the modern university as its instituting
structure. This becomes the overriding task of re-search.
Daunting task. As if any university is comprised of more
than its physical structure. As if it also includes the
structure of interpretation within a research community.

Derrida implores that scholars acknowledge this
institutional concept at play in every act performed.
Whether it be in

"...a reading, an interpretation, the construction of
a theoretical model, a rhetoric of an argumentation, the
treatment of historical material and even of mathematical
formalization...[we take] a position, in work itself,
toward the politico-institutional structures that constitute
and regulate our practice, our competances and our
performances...[it] requires a new questioning about
responsibility, an inquiry that should no longer necessarily
rely on codes inherited from politics or ethics."
(Derrida, 1992)

The modern university.

The power of an institution to systematically perpetuate
logocentric learning in the tradition of Western episteme.
Its mandate to train academics to produce 'knowledge' as
cultural capital without questioning its process. I want
to believe that a responsible academic is (presumedly)
one who must learn to produce 'knowledge' from within the
simultaneous awareness of its institutionalization. With
a self-scrutiny that always questions the university
tradition of disciplinary boundaries. Afterall.
Questioning the traditional limits of knowledge, the
institutionalized disciplinarity of it, is a political
act. One that challenges authority. One that quests
after something beyond mere 'knowledge'. The desire
to step beyond the limits of traditional subjects.
To examine exactly how disciplinary governance restricts
research. To add something new.

Undoing disciplinary restrictions.

Inter-disciplinarity. But not in the sedate sense of subject
experts engaging in academic conversations across subject
parameters. Instead, to liberate any one fixed body of
knowledge from itself. To think what has not yet been
thought. To unfold Derrida's deconstruction. As if to
think the undecidable so as to create the impossibility of
an aporia. Or the possibility of an event which leaves
behind a trace of something (as yet) unthought. Like
those curious wor(l)ds once read with Sundayed rhythms.
Deleuzian notion of the self (or university subject)
as not being bound by the physical body (or any
disciplinary parameters as the definitive body of
knowledge). But instead, seen through the concept
of multiplicity. Continuous flow of everything. Body
without organs (D&G, ATP) found in the gap between
subjects. Where no single horizon of ideas lies in wait.
Where academics are free to rethink their identity as
something more than knowledge brokers. As Bennington states,
inter-disciplinarity profits from a vista. To see beyond the
safe enclosures of subjects. To grasp

"...what it means to 'profess' in an era which increasingly
attempts to condemn thinking to mere scholarship,
disciplines to mere disciplinarity, professing to a mere
professionalism and the University to a mere
bureaucracy or management of established learning."
(Bennington, 2000).

Persian patterns interlock.

Perhaps my desire to dissolve the boundaries between
then/and/now is nothing but a need to blur the borders
between my own dichotomiesofself. To obtain a view that
is infinitley cleaner when seen from any newly-dissolved
border. From the in-between of things. Although. wherever
there is a frontier, there is also something in the order
of a politic to get past. Politics of self. While
deconstruction presents academics with a way to resist
theory through the limitless translatability of
dissemination, its practice also threatens the pedagogical
control and transport of meaning (within the institution
of a modern university). So many words piling up.
Deconstruction teaches (university academics) that the
possibility of something novel always emerges from an
intolerable stasis. From within the impossibility of
institutionalized freedomofexpression. Although not
without its consequences, stasis is what one needs to stir.

For the sake of elegant ideas,
compressed light.

Of the instituting politics caught within the modern
university (and its market-driven economy), there is a
growing trend to fund vocational degrees. Often at the
expense of unprofitable subject disciplines like
philosophy and art. The timeismoney metaphor. This trend
indicates the connection between culture and university
education is dissappearing. The desire to invest in
human capital through courses that over-emphasize
quantifiable (and even qualifiable) research methods
intended for direct application in the corporate sector.
While also chosing not to teach how to develop the critical
thinking skills necessary to critique the capitalistic
framework of academic bureaucracy, nor to discern its
influences on post modern culture. Not to question its
ethics, nor how to develop the academic writing skills
necessary to engage in a discourse that transcends the
notion of disciplines. Not to think about developing new
ways of thinking. But instead, to indoctrinate scholars
with a research agenda that claims 'only that which is
measurable is meaningful'.

Its in the Is

Ironically, universities remain ideal places for debate about
the education of cultural practice. The heterogeneous meeting
of minds that profit from the potential for interdisciplinary
research collaborations. That address the issues of cultural
education. The culture of education. Perhaps a collective
strategy is needed, one that refuses the economic
cannibalization of humanities programs into vocational
streams or their inevitable erasure from university curricula.
Such a strategy begins by maintaining the link between culture
and education. Begins by questioning the current institution
of ideas that drive an increasingly corporate university
climate away from pure cultural research.

Rethinking the institution.

Of the modern university in a post modern age, Derrida's essay
still holds up. His "Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties"
claims that deconstruction is

"...the taking of a position, in the work itself, toward the
politico-institutional structures that constitute and
regulate our practice, our competencies, and our
performances. Precisely because deconstruction has
never been concerned with the contents alone of
meaning, it must not be separable from this
politico-institutional problematic, and has to
require a new questioning about responsibility, an
inquiry that should no longer necessarily rely on
codes inherited from politics or ethics...
Deconstruction is limited neither as a methodological
reform that would reassure the given organization,
nor, inversely, to a parade of irresponsible or
irresponsiblizing destruction, whose surest effect
would be to leave everything as is, consolidating the
most immobile forces of the university" (Derrida, 1992).

The ever-impending but.

Deconstruction is more than an interrogation of political
and institutional structures. Reflection on the
politic-beyond-ideology. A rethinking of what it means to
be political. That which is most threatening to the
corporate university infrastructure is not an interference
with its academic content. But rather an innovation in the
traditional form of its language. Stylistic innovation
confounds the logocentric tradition and its corporate
infrastructure infinitely more than merely debating its ideas.
Presents that which is not re-cognizable as that which is
yet-to-be. Derrida's notion of university

"...can bear more readily the most apparently
revolutionary ideological sorts of 'content' if only that
content does not touch on the borders of language."
(Derrida, 1979)

To clarify.

The practice of deconstruction is not limited to content alone.
This becomes most evident in the form of a writing style which
playfully resists a traditionally academic one. Derrida's
extravagant use of puns, neologisms and rhymes. His complex
references and tangential digressions become a self-conscious
'acommunicative strategy' for combating logocentrism. His
overriding humanity trying to spill through its rigid concepts.
His neutralization of communication as one that opens up a new
space of experience. Casts doubt on the entire philosophical
tradition to experiment with new ways of presenting and
publishing research. Ongoing experiment towards heterogeneity.
Inadvertent questioning the politics and theory instituted
by the institution.

Irony. That look in his eyes.

Derrida's philosophical claims to logocentric learning finds
its home most readily within the finite realm of literary
criticism. Subset of North American university English programs.
His ideas (along with other post modern thinkers) seep their
way into the interstices of traditional university programs.
Within the guise of a newly-emergent quasi-discipline called
'cultural studies'. Intervention between traditional subject
disciplines and issues of technoculture. If one questions the
mutation of tradition.

One is reminded of the character in Umberto Eco's novel.
Foucault's Pendulum. Someone founds a School of
Comparative Irrelevance within a university where useless or
impossible courses are taught. The School's aim to fabricate
scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of
unnecessary subjects as a reform strategy for the sake of
perpetuating higher education. Course titles that poke fun
at the modern university's drive to market 'knowledge'.
Inane course titles like 'Crowd Psychology in the Sahara',
'Montessori Grading','Urban Planning for Gypsies', and
'The History of Antarctic Agriculture'.

As Derrida would say, responsibility can be irresponsible
even as its irreverence serves a purpose.

In the end,
there is something undefined
about the light compressed
by a Sunday afternoon
spent without a clock.