the emperor's bricks

today is spent reading on the couch. then there's time sending and receiving phone messages from a man i don't know. flirting. building potential futures but with enough cynicism to not expect much. he seems nice enough.

he told me there's a fine line between bossy and assertive, and i fall on the good side of that line. he knows how to say the right things. this raises him above the others who sometimes appear in my phone. of late, all i get are disembodied words. i'm bored of this.

after my mid-afternoon shower (breakfast was not long before) i play some music, including this:



all the kids have always known
that the emperor wears no clothes
but they bow down to him anyway
because it's better than being alone

these lines always resonate, but today it makes me think of my relationship to 'the institution' that is 'the university' that is the edifice of knowledge production. the institution excludes as much as it incites, it punishes as much as it encourages. i'm a product of the institution, although i never entirely see myself in this way. but i am. these words that you read arrive at my tongue (and fingertips) through the education that i have been submerged in for over a decade now. and when i realise this (as i increasingly do) i feel like some philip k dick character who imagines he's outside the machine, fighting against the machine, only to wake up one day and realise he has devoted his whole life to sustaining the machine that destroys him. for such reasons, and in such moments, i come to love such songs.

because the emperor wears no clothes. the institution shields itself with its superior knowledge and its rich insights into all things known. but this is an invisible fabric that only the institution can weave and wear, fooling itself that others cannot comprehend, for they do not see what is here. and what they do not see reveals their inferiority (their need to learn).

obviously i'm spinning a fairytale here. some of my favourite people belong to the institution. most of them resent it as much as i do. and maybe we think we can change it, tear it down, brick by brick.

and sometimes we bow down to it because it gives us what we need. the institution is fueled by an ongoing surplus of insecurities, our needs to belong, to be smart, and to be employed. belonging to an omnipresent yet detached machine is particularly attractive to those of us who long to be exterior to a world we loathe. many of us smart-bots subjectify ourselves as 'alternative'. we study from afar, and we critique those things beyond our selves, but often in doing so we forget to critique that platform from where we project these insecurities.

being smart is as performative as any role we might take on. but this performance boils down to wordplay, the right texts, the right theoretical allegiances, and the right friends. the institution is naked but for a network of invisible strings of sentiments that shield it from crass society. the institution allows me to be smart. it also allows me a level of dissatisfaction through which i can bond with others also wrestling the machine. this machine is probably no different to any machine, like the ones we study and critique.

i don't know what the future holds. maybe in a couple of decades i'll be so far inside the machine that i'll forget what the world looked like before i had letters after my name. maybe i'll be one of those bots whose struggles morph into keeping the machine alive because the machine has pierced my being and i can no longer tell its pulse from my own.

i can only hope that this song, and all the other songs, come back to haunt me.