Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Parasitic Vocation

Someone once told me that education is like a "bricklayer's job." I think it's more like a sewage reclamation job.

I'm getting more and more fed-up with my current vocation. Never in my life have I ever imagined teaching and being a teacher to be this dissatisfying. Here are the overall complains: last minute exegesis of tasks, incompetent structuring and organisation of tasks, all accountability and no autonomy.

Maybe I have been too pampered in the universities, but working in pre-university contexts have opened my eyes to the level of bureaucracy that stifles and suffocates an academic. Marshall McLuhan was right. We're that machinic extension; that insufferable organ that finds itself unable to detach even though it wishes death. A cowardly parasite. That's what I have become. A pedagogical parasite - feeding dangerously from its expressive host.

We are that extension of this beast called the Institution. We become the false proprietors of action for what you do is always asked to be done. We become the discontent of Prometheus, wishing fervently to defy - to spit and vociferate - against the pantheon of power. To steal, as it were, that flame which inspires creation, movement, sustenance, that would burn that insufefrable Law and facetious mask of beureaucratic righteousness. But silly me. What dreams a parasite makes. I'm just another scab, like many other scabs, on a woundless wound.

I wait... like a silvery lichen hidden under the foliage of magnificent fools. I have no patience to consume this system of un-rhizomatic organs. I will float against the wind - one day. One day I will find myself master of my kingdom - alone, unperturbed, undenied. I will raise my body of malcontent and leave this organisation of dull deeds.