Crash Knowledge: Pretending to be a professor who fails

Abstract

“Crash Knowledge: Pretending to be a professor who fails” attempts to diagram the performative matrix of teaching a university level large lecture and practice class on performance art history-as-performance art. The essay approaches the task by locating the core impulse of the gesture as foregrounding the “professor” as the Lacanian Master ‘who knows’ layered with a pop-culture re-performance of ‘Charles Kingsfield,’the cruel contract law professor from the film/TV show The Paper Chase from the early 1970's. The class and the essay are both reflective this recombinant theater of  “crash knowledge” where the question of knowledge transference not only “fails” to occur, but also becomes the site for the critique of the post-contemporary triangulation of education as the “failure” of the Master ‘who knows’, the ‘discourse of the university’, and ‘discourse of the capitalist’. It is at this nexus of our current systemic “failure” that the tactic of pretence reaches a fever pitch of how and what “crash knowledge” is gained within the condition of having “failed” via the liminal condition of the hysteric formation of knowledge. By foregrounding and connecting Luce Irigaray's reading revolutionary potential of hysteria's performance art like trajectories of unknowing-knowing as the class's pedagogical potential. So buckle your sit belts it's going to be a bumpy ride!