Something strange happened online this year. A forgotten joke from Zoolander seemed to borrow its way up from the substrata of theorygram mutating into a riot of informational play online.
We experienced the phenomenology of the frenetic, as we pushed the concept to exhaustion. The admins non-chalance towards dwindling numbers driven to annoyance only did more to fuel the madness, as the concept drifted far from the any original connotations to the discourse of architecture or the 1999 Ben Stiller classic. The value of not giving a fuck about the numerical or monetary consequences of this “loss” did as to much to consolidated the socialist impulses of the account and its followers, as it did to ground its production in humour and experimental play. Followers became like ants ourselves, working collectively on the project. ( you lose the game if you even mention hivemind ). This information event I have come to realise was exactly what Deleuze imagined when he spoke of fabulating and deterrorialising discourses and texts, creating new ways to play.(Pagowsky, 2015)
the deconstruction of discourse into a shared joke that became a Delezian rhizome itself, growing and mutating as a text and a lived collective information event in which “emerging theorists” played with each other, having fun “misbehaving” and acting with childish abandon, eager to join in on the fun. (Chapman, Routledge, 2009).
The point here is not that this fun was created organically through a naturalism within the discourse, but precisely that it was inorganic. As contrived and contorted as Derek Zoolander’s blue steel but questionably as much as Hansel’s Le Tigre (he’s so hot right now) we took the time pull faces in the mirror of social media, entertaining each other with the moves we postured.
The transitory spaces in which we gather, share and experience the joy of information we once felt, destigmatised when we bashfully expose our derpy sides outside of class. Think of us as the class clowns who still got an A. The ones who made class fun. But remember to give us a break too, if we are inappropriate or take it too far sometimes, we are still learning.
This ecstatic and energetic pulsion is what I believe TLs will need to connect to in the future if we are to reanimate the lifeless spaces of neoliberal education.
Chapman, Siobhan, and Christopher Routledge, eds. Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Pagowsky, N. (2015). A Pedagogy of Inquiry. Communications in Information Literacy, 9 (2), 136-144