ABSTRACT

Chapter 4 What we talk about when we talk about community is an academic essay framed by the “antiscience” science of ’pataphysics. In this chapter, Schutzman interrogates notions of identity, understanding, and community. Drawing from cultural anthropology and performance studies, the author explores how and where paradox, digression, and discord – even deception and (pataphysical) absurdity – inform radical community building and social healing. Schutzman posits the Joker System as a viable modern-day ritual that locates liminality (or “antistructure”) in active dialog with form (social structure) and, in so doing, exemplifies this radical agenda of community revisioning. The Joker System is also likened to mechanisms at work in invisible theatre, play frames, shamanic healing, trickster logic, and jokes, all of which host a somewhat prescient exchange between unlikely parties. Schutzman asks, What if these “humorous temporalities” could be expanded and sustained into experiential events? This chapter explores how the Joker System just might be a means of doing so.