Help

"Help me get my feet back on the ground."

Listening to a Beatles tune beside the water.

Dressed in 3 layers.
The air is cold at first.
But the sun soon burns.
Just me and Neruda. In the sand.
Fog on the water and gulls. Looking lakeward.
Until a tall man approaches, following the shore.
He stops.
Facing me with feet firmly planted in his blatant stare.
Head down, my silver pencil flashing light.
I write,

"Are you God?"
"Because if so, stop and say hello."

Eventually he moves past my sideways glance.
His body shrinking on the shore,
but turning back four times. Four.
Each time, his stance still stuck in my direction.

Finally, he disappears into an unfinished paragraph.
And I remember this:
thesaurization writes the scribe.
The commodified trade
of one word for another
is thinking me.
Its cultural capital.
Our knowledge strictures.
O great wall of Western episteme.

To question the traditional limits of knowledge,
its disciplinarity,
is a political act.

To challenge the modern university's authority.
To quest for something more than 'knowledge',
to step beyond the limits of traditional subjects,
to examine how disciplinary governance restricts research.
Still stuck in that grove
of wanting to undo disciplinary restrictions.
Inter-disciplinarity.
Not in the sedate sense of subject experts engaged in
academic conversations across subject parameters.
But inter-disciplinary thought
freed from fixed bodies of knowledge.

A Deleuzoguattarian notion of self
(or analogously, a university subject)
not bound by any physical body
(or disciplinary parameters).
Body (of knowledge) dis-embodied.
But instead, understood through the concept of multiplicity.
The continuous flow of everything.
Like a body without organs.
Without organ-ization.

The words I read,
the music I hear,
the man on the beach,
the layers worn
and waves that tug the sky,
all combine into one nebulous cloud of perception.

In the gap between subjects,
if there is no single horizon of ideas in place,
academics are free to rethink (their) identity
as something more than mere commodity brokers.
To see beyond the safe enclosures of subjects.
Even if still bound by language.

"...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).

The view is always clearer at the border line between disciplines.
If there is a frontier, there is also politics.
While Derrida's deconstruction presents academics
with a way to resist theory
through the limitless translatability of dissemination,
its practice also threatens pedagogical control
and the transport of meaning
within the institution of the modern university.
Deconstruction teaches university academics
that the possibility of something novel always emerges
from an intolerable stasis, from within the impossibility
of institutionalized freedom of expression.

But do I want to wage this war today?


And o,

my dear dead night

of tidy-tendered verse

and other sonic-soldiered things,

all trapped within their phonic flap of falling into standard form,

amidst a rose by any other name and yonder light.

What perch upon these walls will push me off,

to let me leap beyond these stony limits

to another fate?



But for the want of particular walls
and sun-soft sand to land upon.