Business & Thinking

Wooden desk, richly decorated with neatly laid documents, pencils, pens, type-writer, and a couple of reference books, is protectively facing a comfortable chair. Carved oaktree bookcase to the right. A glass coffee table next to it. Chest of drawers further towards the wall. A state-of-the- art water resistant door, ornamented with computer-generated motifs, reveals the secrets of the beauty hidden under the surface of the ages-long accumulation of ideas, thoughts, and skills.

Good afternoon! It is my duty and honor to welcome you and immediately proceed with the realization of the reason why you are here. My uttermost pleasure is to present you with the surrounding that the company is proud to have in its museum collection of antiques and rarities.

Feel free to inspect the pieces of furniture as well as the office equipment if you wish to familiarize yourself with the aesthetic of the eras bygone, only to, by  juxtaposition, contextualize contemporary design, business etiquette, and corporate normativity.

FYI, the interview is going to take place in the room next to this and you are more than welcome to join me once you have observed objects on display.

Good afternoon! Thanks! I know everything about museums, stools, and tables. Let’s just fucking go to the interview room and fucking talk.

It is my honorable duty to present you with an opportunity to satisfy your desire to do so. Please!

Thanks!

The purple glass door opens as the bodies are approaching it. A view of the room, spacious enough to create a sense of security even in the most destabilized of interviewees, opens up its lungs caressing the interlocutors with the vibrancy of cutting edge technology-meets-industrial design that defies its own definition. Namely, the tendency of new aesthetics tends to be out-of-symbolic in character, so that offices would, for example, comprise of the equipment that is not easily recognizable as a corporate aesthetic. That does and does not provoke a desire to relate it to a typical idea of an office. The desk consists of several components—collapsible and unfolding—so the computer in the drawer can be reached if the material sensitive to human presence gets activated.

How old are you?

Three.

What is your main motivation for applying for the position of an intern?

What’s your fucking definition of motivation?

I will have to kindly remind you that you should be familiar with the term?

What term?

The term motivation, especially when used in the context in which I am using it now.

Which is?

What is your main motivation for applying for the position of the intern?

I am interested in the cultural flux.

That’s most astoundingly akin to the ethics of the company.

Dope!

Allow me to proceed with the next question.

Shoot!

Would you consider contemplating upon the problem of why humans still speak when everybody knows that: a) Whatever one says by miles misses the actuality of what is to be expressed; b) Everybody can violate the verbalized contents at his or her leisure and according to the increments on the scale of distastefulness?

Yes. The answer to the questions is: c) Because language is what humans do.

What about the languages of different kinds?

Methinks those who can understand them have the right to talk about them.

Thanks! Could you now refresh our conversation with a thought or two about the very specificities of your interest in the cultural flux.

Like fuck!

Could you be more precise?

No, you can! Whadafuck do you think is on my mind if not to talk about the core issues!

Absolutely. Having said that, can you, please, provide a glimpse of your attitude towards the currents in the corporate world during the last two decades.

Popular psychology/sociology packaged in a daring leftist journalist vocabulary is, in fact, mainstream politics politically correct to the bone. Such journalism presumes that the equation between monogamy and love is an untenable one. Journalists of such persuasion are right to assume that there are many monogamous marriages within which the couple do not love each other. An implication that there is love between and among individuals outside a relationship of a monogamous type is probably also true. What is not plausible is to presume that an alternative to monogamy ensures tenability of the equation. Put differently, debunking monogamy is not a wager of love.

Additionally, advocates of popular sociology/psychology/journalism do allow / acknowledge a possibility that there are couples who live in a monogamous marriage and love each other. The logic of these intellectuals lays further claims about lousiness of the very notion of fidelity. According to them, to have sex outside a relationship is inevitable. Not only is the statement itself highly questionable, given the fluctuating character of the definition, but the tone of such a claim almost suggests that the opposite is a deviation from the norm. To support their argument, they insist on the constructiveness of the model. They, however, never leave room for raising the question about infidelity being culturally conditioned, as well. It, one would assume, is either assumed (that it is a construct), or, is not relevant for the debate (which exceeds logical or any other reasoning). The crux of the conundrum seems to be an extremely narrow-mindedly understood the notion of the yardstick.

Another topic the debaters are keen on is the lives of singles, who, according to a popular doctrine, are liberated to the extent and in the way in which individuals in a relationships are not. True as it may be, the claim does not create an impression that it is aware of its unilaterality. Neither do those who lay it seem to be able to boast of such an insight. In other words, such an idea of singleness does not allow a possibility of freedom within a union of two individuals. Stunning is the overarching understanding of being single as a triumph of individuality. Clearly, such logic does not make a distinction between individualism and individuality. Needless to say, one couldn’t even dream of expecting from it to know the difference between uniformity & union.

Answers can be given in diverse keys. Stories can be told in different languages. There are keys and languages that define the answers in the ways in which others cannot. Only those keys and languages one can understand, albeit sometimes in a highly inexplicable way. Other stories can be beautiful, irrelevant, or, just self-dissolving. Reshifting onto the logic of love requires the language that makes it communicable.