Power (potential as opposed to kinetic)

POWER

Dear Graham,

I address and re-address these missives
impossible to you as my new boss, or meta-
boss really—Professor Mycoff, my immediate
superior.

And in the hierarchy of logical and organizational
levels, there’s also Dr. Howard (meta-meta boss)
and Dean Garrett (meta-meta-meta boss) and
finally, at least in this circum-scribed system,
BOSS of Boss of bosses of boss: President Pfeiffer.

Political Ex-officio authority:
chain of command and responsibility.

In the middle ages these levels had their
counter-part or were inspired, say, by
spiritual organization (Psyche) and the
natural need by naming to limit infinite
regress: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones
of the first realm, Dominions, Virtues, and
Powers, of the second, and then Principalities,
Archangels, and Angels in the third: A TRIAD
of triads of angelic (messenger: news bearing)
responsibility.

Has to be a name, tag, designation for
these essential psychic and political
differentiations other wise all we
have is a flat-line flatlander sense
of organization and people saying
“IT’s all RELATIVE, SAM” meaning
quit being so picky ( rather than it’s all
related. )

Nothings change but titles and
connotations & IT’s still necessarily
hierarchical. I have women’s studies
students in class who object to the
word HIERARCHY (and hegemony)
—but they’re just being political and
not academic.

Without Levels is No Organization:
psychological or political—and the
collapse, conflation, and confusion
of organizational levels (psychological
or political) is a form of heat-death,
& entropy: an equilibrium no body loves..

So I find it appropriate to address you
with my sub-ordinate issues, with apologies
to Dr. Mycoff whose level of authority I confess
I am violating—but now, as no time in the passed:
a hierarchical conversation is no longer
necessarily privy but available to the
WHOLE institution.




And this is a difference that makes a difference.
Courses without Borders; Frontiers Yet Unknown.
Hierarchical & Horizontal incommensurate values
and can they Just Get Along? The medium is the
message.

Power

Thanks to the enabling power of David Harper,
J.T. Wagner and the student Computer Crew—the
proper dialectical antithesis and counter to hierarchical
authority is simultaneously present and accessible for
the first time in our evolution-of-the mass of men
leading lives of quiet desperation..

VOICE. We live in a community of the whole, a
collaborative genius more and less explicit, articulate
and manifest than at any earlier point in time —eternal,
really: one can access any one else 24/7/365 regardless
of when & where some mindful part has leaned in to let
fingers meet the keyboard and tappety tap tap-out mind
onto screen & page: clickety click—I can hear it in the
computer lab surrounded by MFA students: the sound
of constellational all-at-once-ness reduced to the digital
logical linear, sequential and thesis driven, intentionality
of time/space use & abuse & particulate purpose.

Parts to WHOLE relationship: a sacramentality.

I’m talking here! Space and time, where & when
don’t make no never mind & momma don’t like no
banjo picking going on round here but we can play
our banjos any old time plink and plunk etc.& it’s
OUT THERE, you got a problem with that? Deal
with it. The media is the Message—not the
message.
.
Power: a “posse” - possibility.
Potential. Potency. Every one:
a Potentate: constellations of
spiral nebulae & solar system
permeate one’s noggin and we
got to be reducing it to a line
of discourse: a kinetic impotence:
just pit it out in poppa’s hand
as Twain told Henry James.

It’s a rip-off, of course, and a violation of the whole and so
no wonder the anxiety that surrounds our transactions.
Never doing social justice & it helps to admit it: no
in denial cover up illusion and pandering necessary
these days.

Ah, humanities. Fine Artists do it so much better.

xxxooo, Sam