Comic absurdity and profane acts in education

ABSTRACT

In this theoretical and provocative paper our aim is to problematize universal ideals, and the closely related belief in educationalization, that frame education today. Inspired by the ethico-political work of Agamben ([2007]. Profanations. New York: Zone Books), and his focus on profane acts of play, and Zupančič's ([2008]. The odd one in: One comedy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) psychoanalytical adaptation of Hegel's ‘concrete universal', we illustrate how universal ideals and beliefs often ‘fail' in comic absurd ways when they are performed in concrete practices. By analyzing different examples, which stem from the research literature, we describe how such ‘failure' looks. We argue that it is important to engage with the comic absurd as doing so can reveal how educators, politicians, and policymakers contribute to the (re)production of failures within the socio-symbolic (educational) order. However, such an engagement may enable us to ‘fail better’ in education if we also allow ourselves to question, challenge, and perhaps change this order by means of profane acts.

KEYWORDS:

• Failure
• educationalization
• concrete universality
• identity
• liberalism
• illiberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Lynda Stone (2005) likens her experience of an NCATE review of teacher education to Alice’s ‘nonsense adventures’ in Wonderland wherein ‘yes, it was like falling down a dark hole’. The author’s playful critique of the NCATE review, as at once ‘banal and bizarre’, points to the absurdity of the organization’s claim of ‘democratic engagement’ while being both autocratic and dictatorial. No faculty of education would ‘dare not comply’ (p. 15)! Moreover, to meet NCATE requirements Stone and colleagues found themselves trying to fabricate (literally making them up!) links between their richly conceived teacher education program and a set of reductionistic NCATE learning and assessment standards. ‘Assignments’, Stone writes, ‘were retrospectively made to fit’ (p. 16). The end result not unlike Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderful: pure fiction.

2 In the 1970s, Duracell used the drumming Duracell Bunny to promote long-lasting copper-top batteries. In the 1980s, Energizer created the Energizer Bunny as a parody of the famous Duracell Bunny. In the parody, the Energizer Bunny enters the Duracell ad midway, banging a huge drum, wearing sunglasses and swinging a mallet over his head. The message was that the Energizer bunny could outlast its counterpart.