Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999), James C. Scott details the ways the modern state has run roughshod over local, customary, and undisciplined forms of knowledge in order to rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and political practices that have profit as their primary motivation. In

nebbish,

dastardly

alterity,

teacher who realized that people must be led to learn rather than taught to follow. Ranciére comments ironically, “Like all conscientious professors,

ignominious

hegemonic

of course the very idea of the exotic, as we know from all kinds of postcolonial theories of tourism and orientalism, depends upon an increasingly outdated notion of the domestic, the familiar, and the known, all of which come into being by positing a relation to the foreign, the alien, and the indecipherable.

unregulated territories of failure, loss, and unbecoming, must make a long detour around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. Let me explain how universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than promote quirky and original thought. Disciplinarity, as defined by Foucault (1995), is a technique of modern power: it depends upon a