Disidentification as Joke and Political Strategy

• In Event: Opening the Session: An Audience Rebellion

Abstract

1. Purposes:
This paper explores knowledge dissemination within academic conferences such as AERA as a police order that delimits what is considered common sense—what is sayable, doable, thinkable, heard, and seen by whom and where. The joke as political strategy can open a gap in the sensible towards the nonsensible that temporarily de-stabilizes the order of educational research dissemination so that political potential might be explored. In particular, we undermine the role of author/expert while pushing the function of audience to its nonsensible limits through acts of disidentification.
2. Perspective(s):
Post-political perspectives including Rancière’s (1995/1999) notions of democratic politics and Mouffe’s (2013) artivism are intersected with a purposeful misuse of Virno’s conception of the joke. We focus on Rancière’s (2008/2009) disidentification through joke that might incite us to infuse our practices, roles, and places with democratic potentiality, political passion, and greater equality. Specifically, we pursue alternative distributions of the sensible from within and in relation to AERA as police order that typically delimits the processes and products of educational research and its dissemination through our adherence to norms/rules.
3. Modes:
The stultified modes of AERA research dissemination are also, as Virno (2008) proposes, the tools that we can use to rupture any fixed order toward reshaping it radically. Virno embraces the creative innovation of jokes that apply rules in an unexpected way so as to open any given norm to multiple and absurd meanings. This throws the rules and their application into doubt and possible alternative futures to what, for example, education, research, and its dissemination, along with research conventions as police have become.
4. Data:
Within this very session, TBD participants will be invited to complete parts of the paper presentation/performance through collaborative tasks that reconfigure the typical roles of research spectator/consumer and expert/author. Alternative modes of participation will be considered in light of humor, nonsense, and political passion brought about through our embodiment of the disidentification of roles.
5. Results:
The joke as disidentification intervenes in the current distribution of the sensible, but here we don’t offer another version of the police with which to replace it—ways to interpret our performance correctly will not be offered. This change of register instead, and most importantly, poses a gap for participants to consider for themselves how the existent police order might be reconfigured in relation to current conceptions of the consumer and creator of research/knowledge.
6. Significance:
As experts engage with publics so as to foster democratic solutions and passions towards educational issues, we have opportunities to reconsider our acts of knowledge and research dissemination away from stultification towards enhanced equality through the disruption of our current orders and logics. We maintain that public intellectuals of educational research might inspire publics to act as participants in the practice of democracy. Democracy can’t trickle down, it has to be practiced. Democratic action can also be provoked by the slightest intervention—even the nonsensible can have political potential.

Authors

• Nadine M. Kalin, University of North Texas

• Daniel T. Barney, Brigham Young University

• TBD Participants