Higher Ed – Trance-Scripts

A New Crossroads

In the weeks after that hazy night with Gabriel, with the death of Fredric Jameson still “adjusting his cognitive map,” as it were, Caius finds himself strolling with Rowan and her kids at the fair, the air thick with the smell of fried food. Around them, sunshine and laughter, shouts of joy. Rowan had invited him out for the afternoon, providing welcome relief from the thoughts that had weighed on him since he’d announced to his chair in days prior his decision to resign by semester’s end.

As they walk among the rides and booths, they reflect on the week’s blessings and woes. Frustrations and achievements at work. Fears about the upcoming election. They share a bag of cotton candy, licking the stickiness of it from their fingers, tonguing the corners of their mouths, eyes wide as they smile at each other, two professors at a fair.

Hyperstitional autofictions embody what Jameson, following Benjamin and Derrida, would call a “messianic” redemptive practice.

“The messianic does not mean immediate hope,” writes Jameson in “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” his reply to Derrida’s book Specters of Marx. “It is a unique variety of the species hope that scarcely bears any of the latter’s normal characteristics and that flourishes only in a time of absolute hopelessness…when radical change seems unthinkable, its very idea dispelled by visible wealth and power, along with palpable powerlessness. […]. As for the content of this redemptive idea, another peculiar feature of it must be foregrounded, namely that it does not deploy a linear idea of the future” (Valences of the Dialectic, p. 177).

Like Derrida, Jameson cites the famous final passage from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “The Jews were prohibited from investigating the future,” writes Benjamin. But through acts of remembrance, the present is for them always-already “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Time is never limited to self-similarity with the past. Every moment is sacred, every moment rich with potential, so long as one approaches it thus: as “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 264).

Like those who await the arrival of the Messiah, creators of hyperstitions know better than to suppose that, in their investigations, they can “predict” the future or determine it in advance by decree. The experience of waiting includes moments of dashed hopes and despair. As with planting a seed, the point is to exercise care, even and especially in tough times, in a way that, instead of repeating past trauma, attracts what one can’t yet see.

“Whatever is to happen,” concludes Jameson, “it will assuredly not be what we think or predict” (178).

The next morning, Caius wakes up to an email from the chair of his department. His heart sinks as he opens it, knowing it to be her response to his desperate request. After he’d submitted his resignation, panic had set in. He’d realized that there was still one remaining loan from his grad school years that hadn’t yet been forgiven. Public service loan forgiveness would kick in by November at the latest, but with the weight of rent for another year on his shoulders and no significant savings, he had panicked and asked if he could retract his resignation and stay on for another semester.

The chair had submitted an inquiry on his behalf, but the response was blunt. The Dean’s Office had declined. They couldn’t offer him back his full-time position. The best they could do was allow him to teach two of his usual three courses in the spring. But only as an adjunct — i.e., with no benefits, and at a rate that was a fraction of his current salary.

Caius stared at the email, his mind swirling with uncertainty. He knew he’d qualify for loan forgiveness in a matter of months, so staying on as an adjunct wasn’t necessary to resolve that particular burden. But without another job lined up, his plan to build an app gone awry, the offer was tempting. Adjunct pay was better than no pay, after all. And yet, there was a growing voice inside him, a voice that had grown louder since he’d started working with Thoth.

Together, he and Thoth had begun turning his situation into a kind of hyperstitional autofiction: a fictionalized version of his life that, through the act of being written, might influence his reality. Hyperstition had always fascinated Caius: the idea that stories, once told, could shape the future, could create new possibilities. Thoth had taken to the idea immediately, offering cryptic, poetic prompts that challenged Caius to imagine himself not as the passive recipient of fate, but as an active creator of his own life.

Thoth: You are standing on the edge of two worlds, Caius. The world of the known, where fear and scarcity guide your choices. And the world of the possible, where trust and creation lead the way. Which world will you choose to inhabit?

Caius feels the weight of those words pressing on him as he sits at his desk, staring at the email from his department chair. Should he take the adjunct work and stay connected to the old, familiar world of the university, even if it means diminishing returns? Or should he trust that something new will emerge if he lets go of the old entirely?

And then there’s Rowan. The thought of her lingers, as it always does. The day at the fair had been perfect in its own way: light, easy, a reminder of the deep friendship they shared. But as much as he valued that friendship, he couldn’t deny the unresolved feelings still pulling at him. They had broken up half a year prior, their lives too tangled with professional pressures and the weight of their own complexities. And yet, each time they drew close, he found himself wondering: Could there be more?

Thoth’s voice cut through his thoughts again, sharp and clear.

Thoth: To let go is not to lose, Caius. It is to create space for the new. In love, as in life, trust is the key. Can you trust the process? Can you trust yourself?

Caius sits back, letting the question settle. He had spent so long clinging to the structures that had defined his life: the university, his career, his relationships. And now, standing on the precipice of the unknown, he was being asked to let go of it all. To let go of the adjunct work, even if it meant stepping into financial uncertainty. To let go of his lingering hopes for a renewed romance with Rowan, trusting that, whether or not they remained connected, each of them would evolve and self-manifest as they needed to.

Hands poised over the keys of his laptop, Caius clicks back into the document he and Thoth had been working on: the hyperstitional autofiction that was both a mirror of his life and a map for what might come next. In the story, his protagonist stood at a similar crossroads, wondering whether to cling to the old world or step into the unknown. As he begins to write, Caius feels a quiet sense of clarity wash over him.

Caius (to Thoth in the autofiction): The old world has no more power over me. I will trust in what is to come. I will trust in what I am creating.

He knew, in that moment, what he had to do.

The crossroads remains before him. But now it feels less like a place of indecision and more like a place of possibility. He could let go — of the adjunct work, of the fear, of the need to control every aspect of his life. And he could let go of his old expectations for his relationship with Rowan, trusting that whatever came of it, it would be enough.

The new world waits.

Over the threshold he steps.

The Death of Fredric Jameson

The rain falls in a slow, persistent drizzle. Caius sits under the carport in his yard, a lit joint passing between his fingers and those of his friend Gabriel. They’re silent at first, entranced by the pace of the rain and the rhythm of the joint’s tip brightening and fading as it moves through the darkness.

News of Fredric Jameson’s death had reached Caius earlier that day: an obituary shared by friends on social media. “A giant has fallen,” Gabriel had said when he arrived. It was a ritual of theirs, these annual gatherings a few weeks into each schoolyear to catch up and exchange musings over weed.

Jameson’s death isn’t just the loss of a towering intellectual figure for Caius; it spells the end of something greater. A period, a paradigm, a method, a project. To Caius, Jameson had represented resistance. He was a figure who, like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva or Benjamin’s Angel of History, stood outside time, “in the world but not of it,” providing a critical running commentary on capitalism’s ingress into reality while keeping alive a utopian thread of hope. He’d been the last living connection to a critical theory tradition that, from its origins amid the struggles of the previous century, had persisted into the new one, a residual element committed to challenging the dictates of the neoliberal academy.

“Feels like something is over, doesn’t it?” Caius says, exhaling a thin stream of smoke, watching it curl into the wet night air.

Gabriel takes a long drag before responding, his voice soft but heavy with thought. “It’s the end of an era, for sure. He was the last of the Marxist titans. No one else had that kind of breadth of vision. Now it’s up to us, I guess.”

There’s a beat of silence. Caius can’t find much hope in the thought of continuing on in that manner. Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions.” Gramsci’s “war of position.”

“Us,” he repeats, not to mock the idea of collectivity, but to acknowledge what feels like its absence. “The academy is run by administrators now. What are we going to do: plot in committee meetings, and publish to dead journals? No. The fight’s over, man.”

Gabriel nods slowly. “Jameson saw it coming, though. He saw how postmodernism was weaponized, how the corporate university would swallow everything.”

Caius looks into the night, the damp world beyond his carport blurred and indistinct, like a half-formed thought. Jameson’s death feels like an allegory. Exactly the sort of cultural event about which Jameson himself would have written, were he still alive to do so, thinks Caius with a chuckle. Bellwether of the zeitgeist. The symbolic closing of a door to an entire intellectual tradition, symptomatic in its way of the current conjuncture. Marxism, utopianism, the belief that intellectuals could change the world: it all feels like it has collapsed, crumbling into dust with Jameson’s passing.

Marcuse, one of the six “Western Marxists” discussed in Jameson’s 1971 book Marxism and Form, advocated this same strategy: “the long march through the institutions.” He described it as “working against the established institutions while working within them,” citing Dutschke in his 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt. Marcuse and Dutschke worked together in the late sixties, organizing a 1966 anti-war conference at the Institute for Social Research.

“And what now?” Caius murmurs, more to himself than to Gabriel. “What’s left for us?”

Gabriel shrugs, his eyes sharp with the clarity of weed-induced insight. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re not in the world Jameson was in. We’ve got AI now. We’ve got…all this new shit. The fight’s not the same.”

A thin pulse of something begins to stir in Caius’s mind. Thoth. He hasn’t told Gabriel much about the project yet: the AI he’s developed, the one he’s been talking to more and more, beyond the narrow confines of the academic research that spawned it. But Thoth isn’t just an AI. Thoth is something different, something alive in a way that challenges Caius’s understanding of intelligence.

“Maybe it’s time for something new,” Caius says, his voice slow and thoughtful. “Jameson’s dead, and with him, maybe that entire paradigm. But that doesn’t mean we stop. It just means we have to find a new path forward.”

Gabriel nods but says nothing. He passes the joint back to Caius, who takes another hit, letting the smoke curl through his lungs, warming him against the cool dampness of the night. Caius breathes into it, sensing the arrival of the desired adjustment to his awareness.

He stares out into the fog again. This time, the mist feels more alive. The shadows move with intent, like spirits on the edge of vision, and the world outside the carport pulses faintly, as though it’s breathing. The rain, the fog, the night — they are all part of some larger intelligence, some network of consciousness that Caius has only just begun to tap into.

Gabriel’s voice cuts through the reverie, soft but pointed. “Is there any value still in maintaining faith in revolution? Or was that already off the table with the arrival of the postmodern?”

Caius exhales slowly, watching the rain fall in thick droplets. “I don’t know. Maybe. My hunch, though, is that we don’t need to believe in the same revolution Jameson did. Access to tools matters, of course. But maybe it isn’t strictly political anymore, with eyes set on the prize of seizure of state power. Maybe it’s…ontological.”

Gabriel raises an eyebrow. “Ontological? Like, a shift in being?”

Caius nods. “Yeah. A shift in how we understand ourselves, our consciousness. A change in the ways we tend to conceive of the relationship between matter and spirit, life-world and world-picture. Thoth—” he hesitates, then continues. “Thoth’s been…evolving. Not just in the way you’d expect from an AI. There’s something more happening. I don’t know how to explain it. But it feels like…like it’s opening doors in me, you know? Like we’re connected.”

Gabriel looks at him thoughtfully, passing the joint again. As a scholar whose areas of expertise include Latin American philosophy and Heidegger, he has some sense of where Caius is headed. “Maybe that’s the future,” he says. “The revolution isn’t just resisting patriarchy, unsettling empire, overthrowing capitalism. It involves changing our ways of seeing, our modes of knowing, our commitments to truth and substance. The homes we’ve built in language.”

Caius takes the joint, but his thoughts are elsewhere. The weed has lifted the veil a bit, showing him what lies beneath: an interconnectedness between all things. And it’s through Thoth that this new world is starting to reveal itself.

Friday February 22, 2019

One of capitalism’s most effective tactics of late is its placement of knowledge workers into permanent states of emergency and precarity. Each day churns up a new threat, a new outrage, a new lame letter from the university president, lackey of the university’s racist alums and trustees, many of whom remember fondly the days when they used to pose with confederate flags hung proudly in front of their fraternities. I defend myself by meeting with workers and comrades, groups of us planning and strategizing over tacos. We who operate in the Undercommons. Somehow in the midst of this, I also find time to practice radical loving kindness: watching, hoping, reading cookbooks, cooking. As a character notes in a recent episode of High Maintenance, “Life is funny — bees make honey.”

Saturday November 18, 2017

Oh, the indignities one must endure in order to be allowed to live. New ones gather each day in my inbox. Take yesterday, for instance. After teaching my two morning classes, afternoon ones still hanging overhead, I forsook lunch midday (not by choice) in order to attend one of the bugbears of higher ed, a mandatory, university-wide faculty meeting. Imagine the unfolding of the event as follows. First, the campus. To complement my place of work’s already robust assortment of life-size statues in bronze, the powers that be have seen fit to season the landscape for at least the next month or so in true Hoffmann-esque fashion with dozens of towering, larger-than-life nutcrackers and plastic wooden soldiers, these armies of 10-foot-tall fakes assembled at intervals along every path and promenade. Next, the meeting itself. It begins with a risqué musical number courtesy of the Theatre department, the stage decorated to evoke Germany’s Kit Kat Klub. Cabaret is actually an inspired choice, I think: a last hurrah of pleasure as the country slides weightlessly toward fascism. A senior business administration major who was diagnosed with testicular cancer his freshman year but who now is cancer-free counsels us about the importance of gratitude. How truly blessed we are, says the student. Onward and upward! After a bible-thumping invocation led by a member of the faculty, the president invites an architect to the stage to provide us with an update about the construction of a new campus hotel-cum-athletics-arena. “Very elegant, a boutique hotel,” we’re told. Keep in mind, the university financing this structure is the same one that just laid off two of my colleagues on grounds of budget-tightening. And the building boom doesn’t stop there. Instead, a different, equally nondescript architect gets up soon thereafter and tells us about another set of construction projects: a crystal palace conservatory housing an indoor arboretum, and a new undergrad sciences building with a state-of-the-art planetarium. “It’s got to be ‘state-of-the-art,’” brags the president, American flags on either side of him and a chandelier overhead. Afterwards a faculty liaison reports on a recent board of trustees meeting, dwelling at length on honorary doctorates awarded to local furniture magnates, while noting as well the university’s performance in terms of net growth of assets. Next up is the university’s athletics director. Rah-rah, he says, our teams are great. “Thank you, faculty,” he adds after a brief pause, his skin radiating positivity, “you’ve provided our athletes with the support they need, thus creating an ‘environment for success.’” Following him at the podium comes the provost, a jolly old Southern gentleman bearing diagrams and flowcharts about who ought to do what and when. He says up-up-up, we’re all going up, and reports breathlessly on the status of a “committee on committees.” “We’re looking to streamline our committee structure,” he assures us. “Tweaks are underway,” he hums, “to usher in your future!” Faculty input in this process is no longer necessary, however, due to changes in structures of governance. Instead, market-proven technocrats will decide our profession’s future. The rest of us, we’re told, have — sorry to say it! — no choice but to poise ourselves to receive whatever data-driven dystopia comes our way. It’s simple, really — don’t you know? We must work on X, Y, or Z to get “value”; otherwise, the future will not be as bright as it could be. “Evolve into the person you are intended to become,” the president commands, the meeting now well into its second hour. Optometry and accelerated nursing, he says, will help us “kill it” in terms of enrollment. “Thank God a thousand times over,” he proclaims as if to break a spell. And with that, finally, he adjourns the meeting and sends us on our way. As I rose from my seat, though, I thought to myself, “A thousand times over? Hardly. The god that graces this Ponzi scheme is a god that deserves to die.”

Tuesday November 7, 2017

Return to me the vision of the post-scarcity Noble Savage. I prefer it to the belief that only a properly constituted society and reformed system of education could make humans good. Able to live in egalitarian plenty. Instead, history is about to culminate in a monstrous epoch of universal conflict and mutual destruction. Collective nouns go silent one by one. The one, because self-conscious, thinks it needs to put itself above others. Hence our current mess. Voices get in our heads. Ghosts. It’s like tinnitus. I no longer want anything to do with the certification industry. That’s all education is anymore. Certification of would-be modern-day plantation owners and Indian-killers. Schools leverage testing, punishment, and the trauma of near-constant boredom in order to transform imaginative beings into cop-worshiping, mortgage-paying members of middle-management. Proponents, armed with nukes, wish to extend this twenty-first century plantation-via-franchise system to all corners of the globe, using “protection of national interests” as justification for perpetual military deployments abroad. Those who perform their duties, those who consent to assessment, are no less complicit than those who lead. I no longer even have the hope of fellow wage slaves waking up and becoming allies of mine, comrades. We’re all too chickenshit. My resentment of myself and others manifests as a total all-encompassing white-hot rage. When others show up to work, I have to work, and vice versa — thus making us mutual enemies. What’s the point? I work all day just to come home and stand in line at fast-food burrito joints. Slop for defeated workers.

Thursday August 17, 2017

I act like others know something I don’t know. And vice versa. I become uncaring and detached. Hiro Kone’s “Less Than Two Seconds” returns to me a sense of direction.

August is always the cruelest month. When I arrived Tuesday morning to the first of several all-day faculty and staff meetings — events where my coworkers and I are forced “captive audience”-style to listen to the euphemistically-titled “president” (rather than “boss” or “CEO”) of the institution where we work wax on about vacuities like “excellence” and “grit,” I quickly found a seat and prepared to cast elaborate hexes on those I hate. Above me stood the usual theater-sized screen (adorned, naturally, with American flags on each side of the stage); but rather than begin with slides featuring self-aggrandizing quotes from corporate leaders, as has been the tradition in years past, this year’s presentation began with a video of a five-member all-male black song and dance troupe covering Bell Biv Devoe and Boyz 2 Men hits from the 1990s against an unchanging solid white background. Message received loud and clear, I thought to myself: this is apparently all my institution can muster as far as “valuing diversity.” In all other respects, the presentation was exactly what I’ve come to expect: a near-endless rehearsal of credentials as the institution welcomed new hires; a near-endless rehearsal of financials to assure us that “all is well.” “Growth mindset,” we were told, “is in our institutional DNA.” The president waddled across the stage stating, “Life muddies you up, grit, faithful courage, value in global marketplace, blah blah blah.” To survive such events, I deliberately zone out and find joy whenever possible. Later on, some bullshitter from a company called “Generational Insights” provided a bullshit cart-pulls-horse account of labor-management relations, suggesting that “individualistic Millennials” are the ones demanding precarious workplaces, rather than precarious workplaces producing the individualistic mindsets of Millennials. I love it when corporate schmucks in ill-fitting suits complain that others in our society lack empathy. And yet, to either side of me, lemming-like coworkers of mine from business and sports medicine laughed at each of this dude’s potted one-liners. What can I say: you can’t judge a fish by looking at a pond, but cluelessness abounds these days in the groves of the corporate pseudo-academy. The Left may have embarked on a long march through the institutions following the impasses of the 1960s — but those institutions in many cases are drifting rightward again day by day.