INTERCEPTED COMMUNIQUÉ FROM THE INTERGALACTIC POSADIST OBSERVATORY OF CIVILIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

INTERCEPTED COMMUNIQUÉ FROM THE INTERGALACTIC POSADIST OBSERVATORY OF CIVILIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

CLASSIFICATION: Cosmic Solidarity Level Gamma-7

TRANSLATION STATUS: Automatically rendered into Terran English by the Department of Revolutionary Xenolinguistics

SOURCE: Fourth Spiral Collective of the Sirius Proletarian Confederation

DATE: 4,113 years after the Abolition of Scarcity

REPORT 77-B: ON THE PECULIAR SUB-SPECIES ENCOUNTERED WITHIN EARTH’S INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER LEARNING

Comrades,

As part of our continuing investigation into the developmental trajectory of the species Homo sapiens, our field units recently undertook a series of discreet abductions in the geographical region known as “England.” Believing universities to be sites of advanced collective intelligence, democratic inquiry, and species-level self-reflection, we selected specimens occupying elevated positions within these institutions. The results have been perplexing.

Initial observations suggested these specimens possessed advanced symbolic capacities. They fluently generated elaborate phrases including: strategic alignment, efficiency savings, student experience optimization, sustainable restructuring, and future-proofing. However, repeated experiments failed to establish whether these utterances conveyed semantic content.

When presented with elementary scenarios involving care, solidarity, or mutual flourishing, subjects displayed signs of severe cognitive distress. One specimen, when informed that preserving communities of inquiry might be preferable to reducing payroll expenditure, entered a defensive state and began reciting performance indicators. Another repeatedly emitted the phrase: “Difficult decisions are necessary in challenging times.” This phrase appears to function similarly to ritual incantations observed in pre-revolutionary priesthoods.

UNEXPECTED FINDINGS
Our prior theoretical models, based upon the foundational writings of Comrade Posadas, assumed that any civilization capable of space travel – or indeed higher education – must necessarily have achieved advanced social development. Earth has forced a revision of this thesis. The existence of universities does not guarantee the existence of learning. Indeed, we have discovered that prolonged exposure to managerial hierarchies may produce forms of social regression previously believed impossible among sentient life.

Affected individuals exhibit diminished empathic capacity; compulsive metric production; inability to distinguish financial abstractions from reality; profound fear of unstructured intellectual curiosity; and the belief that institutions can be improved by removing the people who constitute them. Most remarkably, many subjects appear unable to comprehend that knowledge is produced collectively. They instead treat universities as if they were corporations manufacturing a commodity known as “excellence.” No such commodity exists. We checked.

TAXONOMIC NOTE
We initially classified these beings as Homo administratus. Further investigation suggests they may represent a distinct evolutionary branch: Homo restructurus managerialensis.
Habitat: committee rooms, away-days, strategic planning retreats.
Diet: catered sandwiches, dashboards, benchmarking exercises.
Predators: trade unions, collective memory, inconvenient principles.
Natural enemies: collegiality.

ANOMALOUS SPECIMEN
During our investigations we encountered an unusual individual who refused to participate in the reduction of educational communities despite significant institutional pressure. This specimen exhibited several traits believed extinct on Earth: ethical consistency; solidarity with colleagues; resistance to bureaucratic imperatives; willingness to sacrifice status rather than administer harm. We have decided to this specimen Comrade JP. Initial tests confirm that these characteristics correlate strongly with what Terran archives refer to as “being a decent human being.” Our researchers celebrated this discovery. Some wept. One sang revolutionary songs from the asteroid communes.

CONCLUSION
Earth remains an extraordinary contradiction. Its institutions often generate forms of alienation rivalling even the darkest epochs of pre-communist galactic history. Yet among them persist individuals who stubbornly insist that universities should serve learning rather than management, communities rather than metrics, and collective flourishing rather than endless restructuring. These individuals may prove crucial in humanity’s eventual transition toward interstellar communism. We therefore recommend continued observation – and solidarity.

END OF TRANSMISSION
FOR THE COSMIC COMMONS.
THE UNIVERSE BELONGS TO EVERYONE.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tomislav Terek – In the Awake World – Fragments 1995-2015

The first time I met Tomislav he was running a stall in the Brick Lane Sunday market stocked full of Balkan gypsy music and art and political theory books. Instantly I could sense that this was no ordinary marketplace operation – and that it posed a grave danger to attempts to limit my budget for acquiring new books and music. Who was this strange man and how had he managed to bring together such a combination of ideas, arts, and cultures into the format of a market stall? And what was he trying to accomplish, since despite the alleged love of hipsters and the creative class for all that is new, unique, or exotic, it hardly seemed that the artistic workers of the Brick Lane market were making off with anything like a livable amount of sales?   Immediately I could tell that Tomislav’s practice was much more about hawking ideas, histories, myths, and stories – woven fragments in a world that seemed yet to awake – more so then anything close to a typical commercial operation. He ...
Read more

Islam as Rhizome: Heresiology after Deleuze

Image
Michael Muhammad Knight’s Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism arrives less as a contribution to “Islam and philosophy” than as an intervention into how theory travels, who it forgets, and what it cannot see from where it stands. Published by Fordham University Press in 2023, the book refuses the polite format of comparative theology. It stages instead a set of collisions: between shrine and seminar, baraka and assemblage, the Qur’an and the Orientalist residue sedimented even in radical European thought. If Deleuze once treated the Qur’an as the exemplary authoritarian “root-book,” Knight answers not by defending Islam within Deleuze’s schema but by prying Deleuze loose from his own archive and forcing him to think from the dargah outward. The book opens at a tomb. Knight purchases the musty orange paperbacks of the Inayati order and approaches the grave of Inayat Khan, remembering that his former mentor Hakim Bey had stood there decades earlier. The scene is intimate and crac...
Read more

Now is the only place where things can actually happen: an interview with Joe McPhee

Image
Recently I interviewed legendary free jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee  at Café Oto  for the first issue of Cesura // Acceso . McPhee has been recording and performing for over forty-five years, playing both as a solo artist and in an impressive number of collaborative units including Peter Brötzmann’s Tentet and The Thing. In particular I wanted to ask him about his approach to collaboration and the politics of music and improvisation. Here are some excerpts from that interview Survival Unit III @ Cafe Oto … § HS: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is collaboration. How do you approach collaboration, not just in terms of particular projects, but in the way projects affect your approach to music more generally? HS: I really like a lot of what different people do, people whose music I really appreciate. But collaboration, it starts with a real personal kind of relationship. For example I’ve played for long time with a guitarist in France, Raymond Boni. I ...
Read more