Disseminar: Education at the Limit of Common Sense

This article introduces the term "disseminar" to name the desire to burst out of the institutional confines of education. This departure interrupts the discursive and institutional regimes that regulate the educational enterprise and allows for the enactment of alternative pedagogies. While disseminar has an inherently emancipatory thrust, its project faces various perils. First, by leaving the institutional apparatus behind, disseminar creates a vacuum of authority which runs the risk of being occupied by coercive elements. Second, as disseminar disconnects itself from given opinion and common sense, the knowledge it creates appears increasingly esoteric. The article assesses these political and idiomatic dangers by discussing examples in Friedrich Nietzsche's work and John Williams's novel Stoner. It suggests that disseminar can avoid its pitfalls by interrupting its own interruption, incessantly bursting into the outside of education's confines.