It must have happened to you. As many do today, you have gone to school and found yourself in a situation in which you had a test and your good friend did better. You might have wondered what is wrong with you (Am I a loser? You might have asked yourself), you might have even been envious of your friend (the winner at this point) and might even wished to be him. He is more āintelligentā, faster in grasping stuff and able to understand things you do not, you must have said to yourself. When thinking all these things, you might have been only rehearsing things you have heard from others . Teachers and parentsāadults in generalānarrate similar events in the world in this way. You could easily attend a parent-teacher meeting in which a teacher shares with a parent the fact that she finds her daughter ānot very intelligentā, not able to grasp with ease very difficult tasks. These words sound ānaturalā to us; we do not think of them as ideological rhetoric , a way of speaking, but we believe them to be ātrueā descriptions of a studentās abilities.
At another point in life, you might have been in a more fortunate situation, one in which you get the better grade and become the object of envy. Things stay much the same, but now it is you who is more āintelligentā, faster in grasping and able to better understand complex things . It is those others now who are not. Little has changed; however, now it is you and not your friend who feels better.
This book is about these words, what they do to us and what we do with them. It is about what happens when we take these words as proper understandings of the world and those involved in it and about these words as properly explaining what goes on in the world and with us, while inhabiting it.
Feeling to be a loser or a winner in the events just described debilitates or strengthens your sense of who you are. āDebilitateā or āstrengthenā, pay attention, are very similar words; they just work in different directions. They need each other in their absence and both are assumed to work on something inside you, something that is not totally clear what it is. As if who you are is other than what you do, a duality, which though difficult to sustain, seems very real to all of us today, at least in the Western world. The āwho we really areā comes in different labels: self , identity, individual, personality , you name it. We even add to them adjectives, the self/identity/individual/personality can be āauthenticā or not, āstableā or not, āperniciousā or not, āintelligentā or not, but for whatever they are, we seem not to doubt they are real.
We also have theories as to how this āwho we really areā becomes. Depending on our philosophical and psychological inclinations or understandings, we might assume that the āwho we really areā was there before we came into being or is the result of our development after becoming. Again, here the only difference is one of genesis; the āwho we really areā may have been there from our inception or it is a becoming after birth. At times , not really knowing the product of which exactly is the āwho we really areā, we settle for an integrative approach and we agree that it is dependent on bothānature and nurture. People around us use these words (e.g., self /identity/individual/personality ); although these words, in their present meaning , are relatively recent in human history , they are used as if they express a truth that should not be doubted.
This book is about these words too, about what we do with them and what they do to us. It is about what happens when we take these words as proper understandings of the world and those involved in it and about these words as properly explaining what goes on in the world and with us while inhabiting it.
We are still in the same class, but this time you and your friend are not taking a test but rather reading a text. The teacher asks you to explain what you have āunderstoodā from the text and, hesitantly, you offer an answer to which the teacher reacts kindly, while hinting that you might not have properly understood the text. Your friend offers a different answer to which the teacher reacts by pointing at the clarity and exactness of the answer. Nevertheless, you still think that your answer, though not the only possible answer, is a correct one (at least for you and that you can explain why it is correct consistently), you choose to keep quiet and register in your notes the answer offered by your friend. The teacher seems to know better and you believe she must be right; like it or not, teachers are higher in the school hierarchy and what they believe to be ātrueā might have consequences for your standing in school. Again, you feel somewhat miserable hoping some day you will be as āintelligentā and āknowledgeableā as your friend. Again, you have a sense of your āselfā or āidentityā being weakened. Being told you do not āunderstandā , that you do not āknowā, that you do not ālearnā well enough is not helpful in strengthening your sense of āselfā. It could have been the other way around and then it would have been your friend the one struggling with a sense of insecurity, with a weakened identity or a debilitated self . If you come to think about it, āknowingā and āunderstandingā are not clear concepts, though they are brought up in multiple contexts by many (teachers , parents, and adults in general)ācontexts that many times correspond with situations where blame or hierarchies are being produced, while never being exposed as part of the scene.
This book is about these words too, about what they do to us and what we do with them. It is about what happens when we take these words as proper descriptions of what is happening in the world and with those involved in it and about these words as properly explaining what goes on in the world and with us while inhabiting it.
These words make assumptions about individual students and what there is allegedly inside of themāidentities, selves, emotions , minds and even understandings (at least when dealing with literary texts)ānone of which have yet been empirically shown to exist as such. Has anyone āseenā or ātouchedā an identity? How does it look? Has anyone ever āseenā or ātouchedā an āunderstandingā of something? Yet, we speak as if they exist. We are even told they have been measured. However, the most we have on these concepts are reports by self or others . Reports can indeed be measured, but these measures should not be taken as anything other than the measure of these same reports and not the things reported about (be these āintelligenceā or āidentityā, and so on.) People do indeed talk about their identities and understandings. Reports are empirical indeed but do not make these concepts any more real. Yet, these concepts ceaselessly se...
