public displays of fluidity

since the beginning of the year i’ve been keeping a running list at the back of my diary, A READING LIST, where i keep track of my own little personal theory curriculum (because i feel like i am At A Stage In My Life where i need more words/concepts to think about the world with, more words/concepts than i am personally capable of producing, so now i must outsource that to theory). The first thing i wrote down was Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. in this text (that i’ve not actually read yet, despite all my best intentions), Bakhtin talks about the Carnivalesque and the Grotesque. The Carnival is a kind of social institution, a folk festivity, it happens because people want it to happen (not just because it has been officially sanctioned). it has a symbollic function, a sensuous function, there is also something about the role of laughter and like – on a sociopolitical scale, what is comedy??? you know what i mean? but from my initial googling (again, have not read the…