Paulo Freire's Last Laugh: Rethinking critical pedagogy's funny bone through Jacques Rancière

Paulo Freire’s Last Laugh: Rethinkingcritical pedagogy’s funny bone throughJacques Rancière_690 635..648

Tyson Edward LewisMontclair State University, New Jersey, USA

Abstract

In several enigmatic passages,Paulo Freire describes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a ‘pedagogyof laughter’.The inclusion of laughter alongside problem-posing dialogue might strike some asambiguous, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is no laughing matter. And yet,laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy of the oppressed. In this paper, Iexamine the role of laughter in Freire’s critical pedagogy through a series of questions: Are allforms of laughter equally emancipatory? Certainly a revolutionary pedagogue can laugh, butshould he or she, and what are the political (if not revolutionary) implications of this laughter?In order to shed new light on Freire’s fleeting yet provocative comments, I turn to JacquesRancière for his emphasis on the aesthetics of politics, and PauloVirno who connects joke tellingwith critical theory. Overall, I argue that we need to take Freire’s gesture toward a pedagogy oflaughter seriously in order to understand the aesthetics of critical pedagogy and the fundamentalneed for a redistribution of the sensible that underlies educational relations between masters andpupils.

Keywords: laughter, pedagogy of the oppressed, Paulo Freire, Jacques Ran-cière, Paulo Virno, democracy

There is no better starting point for thought than laughter. (Walter Benjamin,Understanding Brecht)

Paulo Freire once described his pedagogy as a ‘bohemian pedagogy of happi-ness ... . This will be a pedagogy of laughter, of questioning, of curiosity ...’ (in Gadotti,1994, p. 160).The inclusion of laughter along side problem-posing dialogue might strikesome as an ambiguous gesture, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is nolaughing matter. And yet, laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy ofthe oppressed. For instance, in his dialogue with Myles Horton, Freire makes the strongclaim, ‘It’s necessary to laugh with the people because if we don’t do that we cannot learnfrom the people, and in not learning from the people we cannot teach them’ (Horton &Freire, 1990, p. 247). In this quote Freire emphatically emphasizes that laughter is anecessary action within the pedagogy of the oppressed. Laughter is not sufficient for a

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critical comprehension of the world, yet it does form an affective rupture of dichotomousstudent-teacher relations. Finally, it is also important to note that those close to Freire—students and friends—repeatedly mention Freire’s laugh as a constituent aspect of notonly his personality but also of his methods. In her poem dedicated to the memory ofFreire, it is ‘the childlike laughter’ of Freire’s eyes that Antonia Darder (2002, p. xiii)chooses to emphasize.

Given these comments, Freire offers us an invitation to reconceptualize the role oflaughter in the critical pedagogy tradition. Recently, scholars such as Chris Mayo (2008)have argued that the transgressive politics of certain black humor traditions are integralto a critical pedagogy project, offering a critique of white dominance through a nonre-ciprocal actor-audience relationship. Also Joris Vlieghe, Maarten Simons, and Jan Mass-chelein (2009) have argued that the topic of humor and of laughter should be moved intothe center of discussions concerning democracy and community in critical pedagogyclassrooms. And yet, if Freire is to further our understanding of laughter and education,we have to ask what exactly Freire means by laughter. In particular, we have to ask aseries of key questions that Freire’s work poses. Are all forms of laughter equallyemancipatory? Certainly a revolutionary pedagogue can laugh, but should he or she, andwhat are the political (if not revolutionary) implications of this laughter?

In order to shed new light on Freire’s enigmatic reflections on the necessary role oflaughing in the pedagogy of the oppressed I will turn to contemporary theories of humorand jokes. From a phenomenological analysis of laughter, this essay will then turn to anexamination of the structural relationship between jokes and critical thinking. Alongthe way, my argument will build a network of connections between Freire and a variety ofphilosophers who are, in some way shape or form, interested in democracy, education, andsocial activism. In particular, I turn to Jacques Rancière for his emphasis on the aestheticsof democracy and Paulo Virno who connects joke telling with critical theory. Overall, Iargue that Freire was correct but that his comments need to be unpacked and rigorouslytheorized before we can begin to see the exact nature of the internal relationship betweenjokes, laughter, and critical pedagogy. Through this analysis, joke telling and laughingemerge as integral parts of the aesthetics of critical pedagogy, redistributing the sensiblethat underlies educational relations between ‘masters’ and ‘pupils’ in the classroom.

Make’em Laugh, Make’em Laugh, Make’em Laugh!

In a brilliant ethnography of a Catholic junior high school in Toronto, Canada, PeterMcLaren argued that laughter in the classroom is a particular form of student resistance.‘Laughter of resistance is unlike any other. It occurs when the entire class—or a signifi-cant number of students within the class—spontaneously turn against the teacher’(McLaren, 1999, p. 164).This laugh is unlike the laughter directed at the class clown orthe laughter of merriment or the laughter of the saint. Rather, ‘the laughter of resistanceserves to mock and denounce. It is a hostile act, an insurgent symbol, one which inscribesthe via culpa’ (ibid., p. 165). Such laughter ‘neutralizes’ (ibid.) the power of the teacher.The sacred authority of the teacher is shattered by the roar of resistance laughter whichenables students to ‘reclaim their sense of collective identity’ (ibid.) over and against theritual performances of schooling. Such acts form the internally excluded, or liminal

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‘antistructures’ of the classroom—holes in the ritual authority of the school wherestudents open up terrains of contestation. In the coda to this text, McLaren returns to thetheme of laughter, this time imbuing it with a postmodern, ludic aura. Drawing onDerrida, Cixous, and others, McLaren argues that laughter ‘helps to counter totalizingdiscourses by writing through the body as a transgressive and recusant material act; itcelebrates the multiplicity of narrative practices of the self and struggles against thegivenness of the social world’ (ibid., pp. 288–89). Laughter is a type of embodieddeconstruction where normalized discourses and power hierarchies demonstrate theirartificial and thus fugitive natures. In many ways McLaren agrees with Vlieghe, Simons,and Masschelein in that laughter is an experiential democracy of the flesh that offers aradical restructuring of power relations in the classroom.

McLaren seems to give added ethnographic and philosophical weight to Freire’soriginal contentions. Laughter emerges as a transgressive act against the ritual of school-ing. Yet in the introduction to the third edition of Schooling as a Ritual Performance,McLaren (1999) retracts or at least heavily tempers his previous reflections on laughter.Here laughter becomes nothing more than a symptom of postmodernism’s ‘giddyfree-fall of infinite semiosis’ (ibid., p. xxxviii). The rupture of laughter in the classroomis not a real rupture after all but rather a soft, ineffectual substitute for direct socialaction. Dismissingly, McLaren argues that ‘such resistance does not aspire to the realmof critical practice and is not sufficient to free that aspect of agency subsumed to thelarger determinations that position individuals in the world. Students are unable toinvent the multiple strategies needed to overturn fixed ideological positions and revealtheir anchorage in practice. Capitalism and its laws of motion quickly and effortlesslyoverwhelm this type of student (and sometimes teacher) resistance’ (ibid., pp. li-lii).Thusin the end, McLaren’s introduction overwrites his previous, much more affirmativeanalysis of the laugh and of the critical capacity of classroom humor.

Cultural critics such as Slavoj Žižek would agree with this more or less pessimisticreading of laughter. In his critique of Umberto Eco’s popular novel Name of the Rose,Žižek argues that Eco’s thesis is upside down. If Eco argues that the greatest threat tosociety is the totalitarian and dogmatic rejection of laughter, the truth is actually theopposite: the greatest form of totalitarianism today is not the lack of laughter but ratherthe persistence of laughter. Žižek argues ‘What is really disturbing about The Name of theRose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarian force of laughter,of ironic distance’ (2001, p. 28). In this reading, laughter is internal to the cultural logicof late capitalism. If there is any transgression through laughter, it is a transgression thatadheres to the structure of capitalism itself.The perfect examples seem to be ‘fake-news’anchors John Stewart and Steven Colbert—both incite laughter that is critical of con-temporary politics yet without ‘anchorage in practice’ (McLaren, 1999, p lii). In otherwords, if laughter was at one point resistant to being co-opted by capitalism and theculture industry, it is now fully integrated and anticipated ahead of time into an economyof affect. Laughing transgressions are always already part of the internal power relationsthat constitute our postmodern condition. In this example, Žižek’s critique of laughter iseven more vehement than McLaren’s, for if McLaren does not want to completelyabandon laughter (just to demote it), then Žižek wants to link laughter with totalitari-anism directly.

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At this point, it would seem that McLaren has abandoned Freire’s clarion call to laughwith the people. If he once championed laughter as resistive, now it would seem thatlaughter is at best a displacement of certain radical potentials into a gentrified culturalform and at worst a symptom of the very thing which laughter was supposed to resist:totalitarian excess. It is in other words part of the ritual performance of schooling as it isalso part of the ritual of capitalism on a larger economic scale. In what follows, I want toargue against this claim and return to Freire’s original thesis. But there is some truthto McLaren’s and Žižek’s warnings. In the next section of this essay, I will outline atopography of laughter that will enable us to maintain both the critique of laughter aswell as Freire’s insistence on its necessary role in critical pedagogy. In other words,through this topography we will be able to qualify these critiques as regional critiquescorresponding to specific modalities of laughter.

The Laughing Consciousness

Freire’s ‘archeology of consciousness’ (see Freire, 1972; 1998; 2001a) offers an inter-pretive lens for thinking through various forms of laughter. Rather than see Freire’s threemodalities of consciousness (naïve, magical, and critical) as hierarchically ordered stages,I agree with Peter Roberts’ dialectical model. For Roberts (2000), Freire’s theory ofconsciousness does not denigrate those at ‘lower’ stages of development. Rather, eachindividual is a complex, de-centered subject with multiple modalities of consciousnessoperating at different times, in different places, and in different capacities. In otherwords, the manifestation of certain cognitive qualities is not a permanent or predictiveindicator of one’s intellectual capacities, of who can and cannot speak or think. QuotingRoberts, ‘Conceivably, a person might be classed as magical, naïve, and critical, depend-ing on the sphere of that person’s life under examination. People might display thequalities associated with critical consciousness within one discursive setting, while actingin typically magical or naïve ways in other situations’ (Roberts, 2000, p. 153). Thuscritical consciousness can erupt and disrupt the status quo even within the most ‘naïve’or ‘magical’ of thinking. In what follows, I appropriate Freire’s dynamic model in orderto understand modalities of laughter in a postmodern, postindustrial world.The goal ofthis analysis is to demonstrate the complexity of laughters that exist and in turn howlaughter is not a priori a democratic rupture or a simple totalitarian excess.

1. Naïve Consciousness

In Freire’s analysis, naïve thought is an unreflecting acceptance of the inevitability of theworld. Freire (1998, p. 18) writes that the naïve consciousness ‘is characterized by anover-simplification of problems; by a nostalgia for the past; by underestimation of thecommon man [sic]; by a strong tendency to gregariousness; by a lack of interest ininvestigation, accompanied by an accentuated taste for fanciful explanations; by fragilityof argument; by a strongly emotional style; by the practice of polemics rather thandialogue; by magical explanations ... it may be deflected by sectarian irrationality intofanaticism’. Instead of a critical analysis of the world, there is an overall acceptance of thegiven as absolute and unchanging.Writing in a different context yet theorizing a similar



condition, Herbert Marcuse once called this condition the ‘happy consciousness’. Thehappy consciousness is a consciousness without a critical capacity to question/negate thepresent reality. In other words, ‘It reflects the belief that the real is rational, and thatthe established system, in spite of everything, delivers the goods’ (Marcuse, 1964, p. 79).Naïve consciousness is naïve because it takes reality at face value without problematizingclaims of equality, freedom, and liberty despite the ongoing existence of inequality,exploitation, and subjugation. For the naïve consciousness, laughter becomes a purepositivity without any critical capacity. It is yet another way of affirming the irrationalityof the system and as such is part of what Freire would describe as the ‘magical’ qualitiesof a mystified reality. Like magic, the naïve laugh conjures away the pain of exploitation,and helps us ‘laugh it off’ or ‘just relax’ in the face of the growing human and environ-mental catastrophes that mark the present historical moment of late capitalism. Withinthis context Žižek’s warning against the totalitarian nature of laughter rings true, for thenaïve laugh is the abandonment of reason to the irrationality of massification, which asMax Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002),characterizes both American commercialism and Nazification. Seeming to agree withŽižek, Freire also points out that the naïve consciousness can all too easily transform into‘fanaticism’. The political ramifications of naïve laughter become a form of symbolicviolence as the happy consciousness becomes a totalitarian consciousness unable tounderstand its own role in the reproduction of systemic crisis which its form masks.

2. Superstitious Consciousness

Subjects with superstitious consciousness might well recognize the contingency of socialrelations but at the same time they feel helpless to transform their living conditions.There is a vague sense that ‘they’ or ‘the man’ might control the system, yet there is nosense of agency that emerges from this insight. Because explanations remain rathermagical, no solutions to systemic problems can emerge, and the oppressed become‘resigned’ to the world (Freire, 2001b, p. 47). Perhaps the perfect example of this type ofsuperstitious consciousness today is the prevalence of conspiracy theory in both mediaculture and in radical political/new age subcultures (Lewis & Kahn, 2005; Knight, 2002).Conspiracy theories illustrate an underlying paranoid sense that ‘the world is out ofjoint’.They contain intricately detailed attempts to map the global relations that consti-tute world systems and the centers of power against which struggles are waged.Yet whiledemonstrating an unmistakable critical capacity as well as ingenious imaginative powersof invention, these theories ultimately deflect attention away from root causes of exploi-tation and as such offer mere caricatures of political action as ‘solutions’.

Within the superstitious consciousness, laughter is cynical. This is the laughter of‘those in the know’ who understand the web of conspiracies that we are caught within yetincapable of escaping from. In the end, this critical distance from the pure positivity ofhappy consciousness does not result in collective action. Rather it results in moreisolation, or perhaps the illusion of individual liberation through new age spirituality,virtual reality gaming, or the occasional work-place transgression. The cynical and orironic postmodern laugh becomes a poor substitute for political action, a catharticmoment of release that simultaneously ‘affirms’ one’s superiority over the system while



also indexing one’s complacency with this modicum of reassurance. Stated differently,the cynic or postmodern conspiracy buff receives too much dirty pleasure from his/herprivileged insider knowledge, and as such this pleasure sustains political inaction. Inother words, if there is a critical dimension to this laugh, it has always already beenco-opted by a cynical cultural logic that anticipates and feeds off of the very tendenciestoward superstition that constitute the cognitive backdrop of the laugh.

3. Critical Consciousness

The final form of critical consciousness which Freire describes is in many ways theintensification of trends found within naïve and superstitious consciousness (and thusnot external to these other models). Rather than simple negations, Freire’s criticalconsciousness takes the ‘gregariousness’ of naïve consciousness as well as the criticalcapacities of superstitious consciousness and intensifies them toward collective dialogueand critical consciousness-raising. Basically, critical consciousness is not so much an endstate as it is an internal tendency marked by ‘depth in the interpretation of problems; bythe substitution of causal principles for magical explanations; by the testing of one’s“findings” and by openness to revision; by the attempt to avoid distortion when perceiv-ing problems and to avoid preconceived notions when analyzing them; by refusing totransfer responsibility; by rejecting passive positions; by soundness of argumentation;by the practice of dialogue rather than polemics ...’ (Freire, 1998, p. 18). Fatalism andcynicism are replaced by a new hope in the possibilities for collective action and socialtransformation. In other words, a critical consciousness understands the function ofoppression and collectively seeks to overcome limit situations through action.

In this model, critical laughter is transformative and revolutionary. It is on the side ofa rupture with society’s norms, principles, and ways of life by opening up a new logic ofaction for which we do not yet have words.To laugh with the people (rather than at them)is to engage in a transformation of the relationship between self and other. Rather thancynical (with its hierarchies) or naïve (with its emphasis on individual pursuits ofhappiness), the critical laugh is collectively curious about the world and the divisions thatseparate the oppressed from the oppressors.Yet we still need to explore the ramificationsof Freire’s peculiar insistence that it is necessary to laugh with the people.To answer thisquestion completely, we have to understand the aesthetic dimension of democracy.

Laughing: No Laughing Matter

Through the work of Jacques Rancière we can begin to understand the aesthetic ruptureof laughter as integral to democratic education. The order of things, for Rancière, iscomposed of conventions that privilege certain contingencies over and against others.Consensus within this order demands the exclusion of the non-identical as ‘disruptive’ or‘threatening’. The boundaries between the proper and improper, the organization ofpower relations, and the knowledge systems utilized to legitimate these divisions are allmanifestations of ‘policing’ the commons in the name of consensus. According toRancière, ‘The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of waysof doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by



name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that seesthat a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood asdiscourse and another as noise’ (1999, p. 29). In other words, the police identifiessubjects within a given distribution of the sensible, determining the audible and theinaudible, the intelligible and the unintelligible, the included and the excluded. Thepolice is a commonsense understanding of the world that partitions the sensible accord-ing to what counts and what does not count.

If the police order operates to patrol the symbolic limits of community and thusmaintain consensus, then a political act calls into question precisely the distribution ofthe sensible that maintains these divisions. In the moment of questioning the divisionsthat define the social, Rancière observes that ‘politics is aesthetic in principle’ (2006b, p.58). Aesthetics and politics are intimately linked because both function by ‘first freeingup the norms of representation, and second, constituting a kind of community of senseexperience that works on the world of assumptions, of the as if that includes those whoare not included by revealing a mode of existence of sense experience that has eluded theallocation of parties and lots’ (ibid.).The aesthetic dimension of politics blurs boundariesbetween what can and cannot be said, can and cannot be seen, thus expanding, recon-figuring, hybridizing/mixing notions of what is common to a community (see alsoFriedrich et al., Ruitenberg, and Bingham in this Issue). A sensorial disruption/disarticulation allows for a new political subjectivization against a police order that fixesand reifies the configuration of the sensible according certain institutionalized compe-tencies and qualifications. For Rancière, all aesthetic mixing introduces a ‘democraticexcess’ into the order of things—an excess that reveals ‘governors are like the governed,the young like the old, slaves like their masters, pupils like teachers, animals like theirmasters’ (2006a, p. 38). In other words, democracy turns everything ‘upside down’(ibid.) by verifying an underlying equality that questions all claims of authority. Thisanalysis does not simply collapse politics into aesthetics or aesthetics into politics.Rather, Rancière enables us to realize how aesthetics play a constitutive role in democ-racy, pinpointing the reliance of political thinking on the interruption of sensation intoand against consensus.

Returning to the critically transformative laugh, I would like to argue that it is anaesthetic rupture that redistributes the sensible of the classroom, fracturing the powerrelations between the teacher as master and the student as passive pupil as well as thedulling rituals of standardization. Any survey of policy trends in contemporary educationreveals the deadening nature of national standardization movements such as No ChildLeft Behind [NCLB]. Testing anxiety, fatigue, passivity, and cynicism toward educationall define the conventional affective and sensual experiences of these classrooms(Sadovnik et al., 2007; Meier & Wood, 2005). New divisions between teacher as admin-istrator (a bureaucratized master) and student as statistic create a ‘loveless’ relationship(Cho, 2005) that views all personal relations between teachers and students as distrac-tions from the efficiency of NCLB. Even worse, we could argue that the overwhelmingreduction of educational outcomes to aggregated test scores indicates the statisticalabstraction of the student body into a mere ensemble of parts to be counted. As Rancière(1999, p. 68) would argue, this trend is part of a larger hatred of democracy wherehomogeneity of numbers (everyone can be counted in order to be corrected) replaces the



heterogeneity of politics in schools. As in Plato’s republic, contemporary, standardizededucation is a policing function of ‘archipolitics’ which attempts to harmonize thepopulation through scientific management of all the allotted parts, erasing messy remain-ders. NCLB in other words transforms a political wrong (the structural limits of nationaltesting to account for systematic educational inequalities) into an administrative problemremedied through more scientific pedagogies and increasingly more rigorous account-ability measures. This affectless circulation of numbers and statistic where there oncewere embodied students and teachers also challenges traditional interpretations of edu-cation as a form of interpellation. As Rancière describes (2001), the function of thepolice is no longer to hail a subject (‘Hey, you there!’) but is rather to organize theefficient circulation of objects, ideas, and people within a system in order to account forall movements and to calculate strategies of control. Applying this distinction to educa-tion, we can see that the classroom is no longer interested in the individual investmentnecessary to interpellate students but rather in the proper flow of grades through thepolicing mechanism of accelerated testing.

Laughing draws new lines of alliance that cut across the police order of standardiza-tion, introducing a surplus collectivity not necessarily reducible to predefined social roleswithin the structures that dominate standards of classroom behavior, etiquette, andnotions of ‘appropriateness’. Laughter as a political operator reconnects the discon-nected (the teacher and the student) and recomposes the perceptual organization ofspaces marked for study versus play and private versus public, creating a paradoxicalzone of indistinction or indetermination. Laughing is a return of the body into education,of the excess of voice, and of the immediacy of affect that are drained off by theimmunizing power of standardization. By undoing the fundamental sensual and aestheticdivisions of the standardized classroom, the contagion and contamination of laughterdemonstrates the contingency of that order. While some classrooms might be full oflaughter (the ludic postmodern classroom for instance), this cynical or naïve laughteris—as described above—already co-opted by the status quo as an internally acceptabledirty pleasure. Such a laugh exists within and thrives off of the logic, norms, and valuesof the pre-established police order and is thus already a consensus of opinions. HereMcLaren might very well be right: such laughter is a distraction against confrontinginequality and is thus a corporeal expression of yet another manifestation of the hatredof democracy. In such situations, the critical laugh is a laugh against laughing, aninterruption of laughter within laughter, a joyful hope set against joyless cynicism andcontempt.

Critically transformative laughing is a violently non-violent weapon of democracy thatopens a new space of disidentification and dissensus with the given social allotment ofroles and identities typified by educational standardization through a semiotic excess.The laugh is a threshold between sound and signification, between animal phone andhuman logos. Within the moment of hysterical upheaval that destabilizes classroometiquette (what kinds of interactions are legitimate) and power (who is qualified tospeak) there exists an aesthetic kernel that creates, as Rancière puts it, ‘uncertaincommunities that contribute to the formation of enunciative collectives that call intoquestion the distribution of roles, territories, and languages’ (2006b, p. 40). Becausethe uncertain community is composed of subjects who do not coincide with the social



division of parties (teacher as administrator of tests and students as abstracted/disembodied statistics), it cannot be measured by the preexisting police order. Inanother context, Rancière (2003, pp. 121–122) refers to these uncertain communitiesas existing in ‘atopia’ or a zone of displacement where ‘we no longer know who we are’and that is ‘foreign to the system of places’ that constitute a police order. Atopia is nota utopia (a no-place that exists outside and over there) but is rather the democraticexcess—an untamed and unnamed space that cannot be quantified by statisticalmeasure—that always already exists here and now just waiting for a laugh to verify itsexistence. Critical laughter marks the contours of atopia within the classroom, creatingan uncertain community which lasts for only a fleeting second before it dissipates. Inthis model, the laugh is critical not because it raises consciousness and thus reveals adarker reality hidden behind the veil of appearances—as is suggested by Freire’s origi-nal model of critical consciousness—but rather because it introduces a new mixture orarrangement of parts.

Rancière argues that a democratic dissensus names a wrong and thus inaugurates adisagreement between the count and the no-count. According to Rancière, politics is thestaging of a dispute whereby the uncounted proclaim a wrong that divides the socialagainst itself, breaking consensus. I would argue that critical laughter is transformativebecause it embodies the r(u/a)pture of joy accompanying any verification of equality.Thejoy of the transformative laugh is the experience of an egalitarian community whose fleshhas not yet been made into words.The laugh is therefore not so much the proclamationof a wrong (spoken through argumentative reason which gives the noise of pain a logos)but rather the affective verification of a surplus equality—it is the sensual pleasure ofdemocracy. And this is why the transformative laugh is necessary for Freire (it verifies thehappiness of critical pedagogy) as well as for Ranciere (it highlights the affective dimen-sion of dissensus). Here I would like to highlight Rancière’s (2009b) brief discussion ofpassion as the redistribution of pleasure and pain in disagreements in relation to laughteras a particular form of such passion.

Combining Freire and Rancière, I would suggest that more than a distraction, thecritically transformative laugh is a burst of joy—a spontaneously sensual affirmation of ademocratic excess. Yet here we must pause to return to a possible criticism of thisposition. Echoing my description presented above, Mladen Dolar (2006, p. 29) arguesthe laugh is a ‘postlinguistic’ eruption of the material voice beyond mere signification. Inthe moment of the laugh, the voice emerges as a surplus of language, and excess ofmeaning. Turning to political theory, Dolar suggests that this precarious position of thelaugh as surplus is structurally identical to the ‘state of exception’ which also exists bothinside yet outside the social order.The state of exception is a zone of radical indistinctionbetween law and fact, public and private, nature and culture. The sovereign decides thestate of exception by suspending the law (thus the law remains constitutive through itsdeactivation), yet ironically enough, it is precisely this suspension of the law that in thelast instance founds the law (Agamben, 2005). Just as the state of exception finds withinthe heart of the polis the radical exteriority of the lawless state of nature, so too the voicelies between nature and culture, constitutive of yet disavowed by the symbolic order.Because of this correspondence, Dolar is leery of the voice, linking it directly with thesovereign decision—an observation also made by Agamben who links laughter with the



enjoyment of the master (1991, p. 50). Dolar argues, ‘the voice is structurally in the sameposition as sovereignty, which means that it can suspend the validity of the law andinaugurate the state of emergency’ (2006, p. 120). For instance, in Fascism, the irratio-nal, violent, and vengeful voice of the leader corresponds with the letter of the law (i.e.nature and state coincide). Perhaps this coincidence of laughter and sovereign voiceexplains the importance of the maniacal laugh of the arch villain in Hollywood films—who, although outside the law, is more often than not on the radical interiority of the law(politicians, business elites, etc.). As such, Dolar would seem to agree with Žižek’sprevious warning against the totalitarian nature of the laugh.

Yet we cannot foreclose on laughter just yet. If the laugh exists as a surplus of languagethen it is not only an instantiation of the state of emergency declared by the sovereign butalso of the state of emergency of the authentic revolution inaugurated by the people fromthe ground up (see Agamben, 2005). If the state of exception is decided upon by thesovereign, then the authentic state of emergency is a separation from this decision—aninterruption of the interruption of the decision. Thus the naïve laugh, the superstitiouslaugh, and the critical laugh all hold the same structural location as exceptions. It is thesmallest of differences that shift us from the register of dystopia to atopia, from Žižek’stotalitarianism to Rancière’s uncertain community.

The Joke of Critical Theory

It is my contention that this difference lies in a particular fidelity to the structure of the joke.As Freire argues, to laugh with the people it is necessary to engage with a variety of popularacts of ‘subterfuge’ including ‘parties, dances, jokes, legends ...’ (cited in Roberts, 2000, p.129). But what is it about jokes as such that make them spontaneously transgressive andthus can lead to critical laughter? For Italian political theorist PauloVirno, the joke ‘residesin a no-man’s land that separates a norm from its realization in a particular case.The pointof honor of the witty remark lies in its ability to show how many different ways one canapply the same rule’ (2008, p. 119). Jokes exist in a state of exception which alwaysquestions the rule of law. Because there is a disconnection between every rule and itsparticular application, there is need for linguistic ingenuity on the part of humans. Notonly are jokes part of this creativity, but they are also, forVirno, ‘the diagram of innovativeaction’ (ibid., p. 73). As model or diagram for virtuosic performance, jokes are a form ofpraxis that ‘open up an oblique path that links together heterogeneous semantic contentspreviously unrelated’ (ibid., p. 97).Wit is the faculty of creative exploration through whichthe joke explores the openness/inherent difference that exists between rules and particu-lars calling into question the order of things. The emphasis on difference experiencedthrough the joke exposes the contingencies of judgments, and reveals that there is a residueof the state of exception (the state of indistinction) within every application that cannot beerased. As Rancière (1999, p. 88) argues, democracy is a ‘theatre’ which ‘connects theunconnected’ through the performance of actors that resist inscription into prefabricatedidentities.The joke’s ability to set into relation ‘heterogeneous semantic contents’ is onesuch reorganization of what can and cannot be said or heard or thought.The joke is in otherwords a democratic theatre that opens up the state of exception through which thecritically transformative laugh can emerge.



In order to safeguard his analysis against criticism,Virno is quick to point out that thejoke as a model of innovative action does not mean that political praxis rests on illogicalif not ridiculous premises.The absurdity of the joke only appears as an absurdity withinthe framework of the existing rules of application, which attempt to deny the underlyingstate of exception which all applications of rules harbor.Viewed from a slightly differentperspective, the erroneous appearance of the joke becomes the ‘main ingredient ofcounterfactual reasoning’ where jokes ‘contribute to elaborating a hypothesis about hatwould happen if conditions other than those at hand were to prevail, if certain empiricaldata were to vary, if other endoxa [opinions and beliefs of a community] or other ruleswere in place’ (Virno, 2008, p. 140, emphasis in original). In fact,Virno finds surprisingsimilarities between the methodology of mathematicians formulating new theorems andthe ‘fallacies’ of jokes. In both, the ‘logic of discovery’ emerges as totally distinct from ‘thelogic of justification’ because both jokes and abstract mathematics must rely on ‘irre-sponsible tools’ such as analogy to explore the openness between rule and application.Thus the shockingly ‘absurd’ claims of string theory in quantum physics appear to besimilar to the witticism of Lewis Carroll who also speculated about alternative dimen-sions where new rules of physics and of logic apply. With jokes ‘we are dealing withproductive fallacies, whose function is to vary a linguistic game or a lifestyle’ (ibid., p.146). Extending Virno’s analysis, I would argue that the joke of critical theory is that itis a joke, that it is a laughing matter, and this is precisely its powerless power to challengethe authority of a police order with the paradoxical ambiguity that lies within its ownrules and procedures of justification.

If this is beginning to sound like the postmodern resistance or transgression whichMcLaren previously warned about, we must keep in mind Virno’s critical distinctionbetween entrepreneurial innovation and exodus. Rather than simply a condition of latecapitalism where the entrepreneurial self is an educational and social norm unique toneoliberalism (Foucault, 2008), forVirno, every linguistic animal is an entrepreneur whomust inevitably play with the open polysemy of the symbolic order. Because of theno-man’s land between rule and application, all linguistic animals must play with acombination of symbolic elements in order to form meaning. While these small innova-tions exist within the strictures of preexisting symbolic frameworks, there is anothermuch more radical example of the joke as political praxis: exodus. Virno’s analysis inmany ways coincides with Ranciere’s own analysis of joke telling. In a recent essay on thefate of aesthetics in contemporary art, Rancière (2009a) makes the provocative claim thatthe critical confrontation of heterogeneous elements found in political art has beenreplaced by the innovative play of the joke.The dialectical clash of two competing politicsof sensoriality once had the ability to shed light on class conflict and political dissensus,yet in the reconstruction of art as a joke, ‘the conjunction of the heterogeneous elementsis still staged as a tension or polarity, pointing to some secret, but there is no more secret’(ibid, p. 46). Art becomes devoid of political power and can no longer organize itselfunder the sign of dispute and disagreement, only playful innovation and ironic com-mentary. While these small innovations exist within the strictures of the police order,there is another much more radical example of the joke which Rancière misses: the jokeas a political praxis of exodus. Rather than remain within the parameters set by a rule andits normative applications, exodus modifies or short-circuits the grammar that predeter-



mines set choices and set applications. It is ‘a side road’ (Virno, 2008, p. 148), ‘adisplacement’ (ibid., p. 149), or an ‘abrupt deviation in the axis of discourse’ (ibid.)which exposes the self and the collective to the open possibilities of the state of exception.These are the jokes which Simon Critchley has argued are central to new politicalmovements. Critchley argues, ‘Groups like the Pink Bloc or Billionaires for Bush areperforming their powerlessness in the face of power in a profoundly powerful way’ (2008,p. 124). By focusing on the counter-factual as a political operator (an uncertain utter-ance), jokes challenge predefined definitions of what counts as intelligible versus non-sensical speech. Thus the politics of joke-telling verifies an underlying social equality:those who tell jokes express their deep understanding of the rules of the police byinterrupting these rules. Nonsense is not a lack of sense but rather the examination of thestate of exception between rule and application that the common sense of the policeorder attempts to suture over.

When Freire argues that it is necessary to laugh with the people, he is arguing for afidelity to the counter-factual logic of the oppressed as expressed by telling jokes. Whatdistinguishes the critical laugh from the naïve or the superstitious is that the critical laughembodies the joy of joke telling as a sensual theatre of political exodus challengingall inequalities, all preconceived notions of what counts and what does not count as a‘legitimate’ philosophical, political, or social claim. In this sense, we can now fullyappreciate Freire’s description of his pedagogy as a ‘pedagogy of happiness, laughter, ofquestioning, or curiosity, of seeing the future through the present, a pedagogy thatbelieves in the possibility of the transformation of the world’. Existing in the open of thestate of exception, laughing is a post-linguistic somatic excess for which we do not havea fully formed language, only a joyous voice. As an uncertain community, the laughingclassroom becomes an exploration of the atopic space of the exception which suspendsall claims to authority and interrupts the conventional sensory deprivation that define thestandardized classroom (silence, passivity, anxiety, indifference). The laugh as a sensualdisruption is the experience of an unrepresentable horizon of politics that has yet to finda name within the order of the police. If the joke is an utterance that opens the state ofexception, the critically transformative laugh in the classroom is the aesthetic pleasure ofdemocracy erupting from within this space.

Lights Please!

Given these arguments we should not underestimate laughter in the critical classroom(as McLaren’s analysis suggests), nor can we simply dismiss laughter in total (as withŽižek). Rather we must see within laughter a certain form of potential that is bothaesthetic and political. As critical educators, the laugh is an opportunity for exodus andthus for entering into a zone of heterogeneous mixing and contamination that, asRancière would argue, undermines the distribution of the sensible in order to introducea democratic recount of the miscount that defines the order of things.This entrance intothe state of exception for which there are no rules for the application of rules is a creativeand innovative space. In this sense, it is a space that is no laughing matter whichnevertheless must be laughed at! The space of atopic exodus is central to renewing thecritical pedagogy tradition. As Mayo has recently argued, ‘These interventions [the



laughter from black humor traditions] provides a way out of the stalled space of socialjustice pedagogy, because their humor is intentionally a vehicle for bending angryencounters into puzzlingly pleasurable encounters for speaker and audience as well’(2008, p. 251). In other words, the serious ‘earnestness’ of the critical pedagogue, forMayo, must be replaced by a return to a Freirian emphasis on the politics of laughter andits internal relationship with democratic education.

One final thought. For those whose stoic, revolutionary sensibilities find this essay tooplayful for its own good, we must remind ourselves that Marx once said ‘Hegel remarkssomewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur as itwere twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’ (2001, p. 7).History returns or repeats itself as a humorous play with human subjects involved inincreasingly ridiculous situations without a punchline. Thus if the time of revolution isnow, then so too is the time of laughter.

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Paulo Freire's Last Laugh: Rethinking critical pedagogy's funny bone through Jacques Rancière