Halberstam describes (on p.9) how the university's standard disciplinary way of knowing resembles the mode in which (according to James Scott's Seeing like a State (1999) the State attempts to make its citizens (or groups of citizens) legible through 'the imposition of methods of standardization and uniformity."
Scott's work, Halberstam holds, implicitly offers an argument for antidisciplinarity, "knowledge practices that refuse both the form and the content of traditional canons.... [and that] ... may lead to unbounded forms of speculation, modes of thinking that ally not with rigor and order but with inspiration and unpredictability." (10)
A few lines later: "Disciplines qualify and disqualify, legitimate and delegitimate, reward and punish; most important, they statically reproduce themselves and inhibit dissent." (10, emphasis mine)
Instead she finds inspirations in the various forms of oppositional pedagogies as described by Sedgwick, Ranciere - or before them, Paolo Freire. Pedagogies in which children are not 'disciplined' or trained to be rigorous, but which aim to liberate the creative potentialities of those it teaches.
Models for those modes of thinking are found in the fringes of culture, in the domain of the non-serious, the infantile, the childish, the stupid.
Or, as Halberstam puts it, we have to mine the Silly Archives.
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