Knowledge, Power & Other Bullshit

Walking quickly, one’s stare observes the pavement, as its immobility is turning into a stream, simultaneous with one’s steps conquering the spaces of the company  estate populated by neatly cut grass, water fountain,  and the impressive headquarter architectural colossus. Around  the central building are the smaller ones, nothing short of the mastery of urban planning. Only, more modest in expressiveness, so idea of power can be sustained. As if the very fact that the person who is observing the surrounding were not enough to prove that ridiculous insistence on superficial orderliness. One’s hand awkwardly forming a shield around the electric cigarette, head slightly bowed, between a harmless transgression and  an imposed sense of guilt, mouth hidden behind the scarf, exhaling whatever it is one inhales smoking aids and supplements. As if an ordinary person approaching the workplace weren’t enough to bear witness to the exhausting  senselessness of formalities for formalities sake.

As one is walking through that empire whose irrational rationality one is trying to seize day in, day out, one recalls college years when campuses were crowded with numberless student population, offices of admission congested with a ceaseless influx of applications from knowledge-starved youth. They say knowledge is power. Only, they don’t say whose definitions of power and/or knowledge are being referenced. Neither do they elucidate the notion of hunger. Anyways, back then, in cafeterias, over a light meal and coffee between classes, students would reminisce stories they inherited from the time bygone, when their parents’ conduct  was exemplary recalcitrance given their persistent smoking in the lavatories on the premises of the institutions of higher education, boasting of a successful implementation of the law that prohibs smoking in public spaces. Poor grandmas & grandpas were not offered such a luxury of transgression to start with.

Instead, they were looking forward to see their youngsters quenching epistemic thirst. Little did they know that along with fine-tuning of the definition of thirst, refined will also be understanding of education. Learned faculty were welcoming ever growing generations of students. Corporate world, ever so sternly enhancing the rigor of employment policies, defining skyrocketing dimensions of competition, strangely reflected the guiding principle in all segments of culture: expertise matters. So, countless professionals safely guarded the fortresses of their respective disciplinary kingdoms. Well-trained, disciplined, widely-read, in possession of all communication skills, unreservedly obeying business dress code and other aspects of the etiquette, those magnates of cognizance, sadly, radiated no inspiration for anything other than a successful journey through the labyrinth of curiously conspiring power relation narratives between culturally constructed idea of omnipotence and carnally conditioned hierarchies. Not that they were expected to emanate anything beyond such a magnificent goal to begin with.

*To fuck with nostalgia!

*To fuck with the fortresses of dim-lit definitions!

*Stop dehumanizing threats of somnambulist thinking!

*Stop the torture of the ill-defined authority!

*We are not fucking robozombies!

*We are not fucking robozombies!