Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 3:1 2009

When truth is at stake:

The case of contemporary legends
Carlos Renato Lopes
Paulista University, Brazil
Unsuspicious moviegoers and pay phone users are being stung by HIV-tainted
needles strategically planted as a means of revenge or out of sheer cruelty. Club
scene habitus are getting doped at parties and waking up the next morning
immersed in a bathtub surrounded by ice just to find that their kidneys have been
snatched by the international traffic of body parts. Innocent fast food diners are being
exposed to the risk of contamination from all sorts of unthinkable ingredients
deliberately added to their happy meals. Schoolgirls (and boys) are terrified of going
to the school bathroom alone in case they bump into the ghost of the bloody
bathroom blonde (in Brazil, the lira do banheiro): an ex-student whose unrequited
love for a teacher led her to suicide on the school premises. All-too-frequent cell
phone users are suddenly fearing for their brains, which might well be exposed to the
risk of long-term damage, or even cancer. Are any of these stories commonly passed
on mouth-mouth or via the internet true? Are we justified in dreading them?
A bunch of myths, some might say; another series of contemporary legends, or more
popularly named, urban legends1: these unverified reports of unknown origin, told in
multiple versions as having actually occurred in a social context whose fears and
aspirations they express symbolically (Renard, 2006). Thats all this is about. A (not
so) modern form of mythology which does little but recycle, in narrative, the same old
fears and apprehensions involving contamination, violence, death But is that all
there is to it? Are contemporary legends simply a matter of believe it if you will?
In this article I wish to argue that such accounts are texts just as worth bringing into
the language class as other semi-fictional, semi-factual narratives that have
become staple didactic genres. My experience as a Brazilian teacher of English as a
foreign language to Brazilian students particularly those with a greater familiarity
with Internet pop culture shows that these narratives elicit a great deal of
controversy and debate. However, these tend to take place in a rather uncritical
manner, since the discussion often gets polarized into a dispute of whether the
facts do or do not actually occur. Not being able to move beyond this polarization,
both students and teachers would end up disqualifying the accounts, disregarding
them as manipulative lies with nothing about them worth learning, at best
something to be entertained by.
It is my belief that a Critical Literacy perspective has a lot to contribute to these
discussions in the sense that it provides both teachers and students with a practice
through which they are able to question their own naturalized conceptions of culture
and truth. It would help readers to think through the power relations, discourses, and
identities being constructed and reinforced through these texts (Shor, 1999). And it
would eventually lead to reading those texts as embedded in broader meaningmaking practices in which the fear of Others in our social relations can take on many
forms, of which contemporary legends could be one, whereby received
interpretations and stereotypes of alterity are enacted. We might then be able to
recognize that since texts are constructed representations of reality and of identities,
we as critical readers have a greater opportunity to take a more powerful position
with respect to these texts to reject them or construct them in ways that are more
consistent with [our] own experiences in the world (Cervetti et al., 2001, p. 8).

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In order to shed a light on and begin to question the assumptions that underlie
the commonplace discussions on contemporary legends such as I have been able to
observe in my own teaching practice in Brazil, I draw here upon some philosophical
and critical theory focusing on the problem of truth that should allow us to understand
why such a debate is so pervasive. It is my hypothesis that by critically looking into
this moving force of the debate we may be able to better understand how and why
such stories in contemporary culture keep being reinvented, then spread and retransmitted, over and over, whether or not they are perceived as having actually
taken place somewhere specific, at some point in time. My focus will be, then, on this
powerful if elusive thing called truth.
When one looks at contemporary legends, one cannot actually avoid the issue of
truth that surrounds them. It may appear explicitly in the very proposition of the
narrative, in which the narrator claims she will tell something that really happened
not to herself, but typically, to someone known to someone else she knows. It may
also be read into the reactions of listeners or readers of such narratives in the form of
incredulity, doubt or perhaps just straightforward belief. And, to be sure, it may be
detected in the struggle of commentators who aim at establishing the scientifically,
technically attested falsity or at least, implausibility of such reports, no matter how
plausible these might seem.
I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1976/1999) in the claim that every discursive
practice has the capacity to generate effects of truth which are more or less potent
and enduring. Such a possibility of the creation of truth effects in and through
discourse occurs due to an inescapable element that affects the subjects of
discourse: the will to truth. It would seem that the question of whether contemporary
legends are true or false cannot be answered adequately or at least not beyond a
mere factual investigation in terms of this one actually took place versus this one
actually did not unless we consider the fact that legends are transmitted within
socially and historically situated discourse practices in which certain programs of
truth are at stake.
Speaking of programs of truth implies letting go of a traditional conception of truth
according to which a conscious, knowing subject, free from power relations, can
accede to a truth that is rational and universally validated. In the history of
philosophy, one can trace that belief in its most rationalized form back to
Enlightenment with Descartes at the forefront. It is only in the late 18th century that
this view began to be seriously questioned; and later with Nietzsche, and throughout
the 20th century, it was systematically challenged. A short genealogy of this reviewed
approach to truth in philosophy is what I set out to do in the following sections. For
that purpose, and to back my claim on the relevance of reading contemporary
legends, I turn now to two major currents of critical thinking themselves
discontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth which share the aim of
deconstructing the belief that truth is one, unique and transparent. Firstly, I examine
Nietzsches and Foucaults views of truth as will to power (and hence will to truth),
and the pragmatist conception of truth as a language tool, proposed more recently by
Rorty. Secondly, I relate these three currents to the concept of programs of truth
employed by Veyne in connection to his analysis of the different approaches towards
myth.

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Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as Will
One of the hallmarks of Nietzsches philosophy is the idea that there is no truth as
transparent knowledge of the world as it is. He was opposed to the idea of a
possible apprehension of reality by means of language, since there is no single preexisting (i.e. before language) universe of things to know. In fact, the German
philosopher proposed that we abandon once and for all any attempt of knowing the
truth. For him, we should give up on the idea that language is capable of covering
and representing the whole of reality a reality that is supposedly determinable and
determinate and whose truth we could unveil or reveal.
How does knowledge work, then? Nietzsche says knowledge is mans invention, that
is, it is not something which is absolutely inscribed and inherent in human nature just
waiting to be revealed. At its root, knowledge is the fruit of a will to power which
mines its object and seeks to annihilate it in all its menacing potential. It is as if one
needed first to reject the object only then to bring it back to ones domain, already
tamed, already molded. This implies that each and every form of knowledge,
including science and technology, becomes necessarily perspective, partial and
oblique.
Thus, if knowledge, which is the outcome of a historical will, leads to what we call
truth, truth is, according to this reasoning, nothing more than the result of contingent
human relations to which we seek to ascribe universal status by means of a will to
truth. Nietzsches classical definition, proposed in the essay On Truth and Lie in an
Extra-Moral Sense, perfectly synthesizes this thought:
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been
enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which
after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are
illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors
which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their
pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins (Nietzsche,
1873/1977, pp. 46-7).
For Nietzsche, then, truth is interested knowledge, the brainchild of a will which
creates its own opposition between true and false: its own effect of truth. It appears
in the fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which are nonetheless made to become literal,
taking on a conventional and naturalized form throughout history. The original
intuitive metaphors are therefore taken for the things themselves.
But man forgets it. He forgets that he has created his own truths, since he has built
himself and things within a paradigm of rationality. He believes that he builds up from
an essence and that language serves merely as a transparent conduit for that
essence. He believes that he can look into the real from the outside. And that is what
allows him to think of science and philosophy in terms of discovery of truths. As
Arroyo observes, the perspective proposed by Nietzsche points to the conclusion that
man does not discover truths independently from his will to power or his survival
instinct; he rather produces meanings and hence knowledge which is established
through the conventions that discipline man in social groups (Arrojo, 1992, p. 54, my
translation).
The production of solid and naturalized meanings, however, does not take place on a
rational dimension only; it also occurs in mans relation with myth and art. Man allows
himself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever-reinvented, particular form of
relating to the world of dreams. As long as it does not cause him any visible harm, he
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will be charmed when he listens to epic tales being told as true, when he sees an
actor play a king more regally than the king himself and, why not say it adding an
example to the ones Nietzsche proposes when receiving and transmitting urban
legends over the Internet.
The Nietzschean notion that truth does not exist as a pre-existing absolute fact of
reality, but that it may exist as an effect even if necessarily illusory points to the
utilitarian nature of truth. Nietzsche claims that knowledge, inasmuch as it presents
itself as a set of truthful and reliable beliefs, may serve certain purposes, but not
others, and that certain things can be described as useful to certain kinds of people
but not to others. This only reinforces the authors refusal of the idea of truth as
correspondence. Rather than corresponding to a factual reality existing outside
language and independent of human beings, truth as conceived by Nietzsche is a
cultural construction, a way of meeting human desires, needs and uncertainties. As
such, it is a value.
If for Nietzsche every form of knowledge and, consequently, every form of truth is
necessarily a perspective, it becomes impossible to aspire to an absolute and final
apprehension of reality. As Mos summarizes: by affirming that truth is a value,
Nietzsche wishes to desacralize this evaluative principle, revealing its condition as a
human invention: truth is an idea, a construct of thought, it has a history (Mos,
2005, p. 31). It is, therefore, inescapably partial.
Directly influenced by Nietzsche, Foucault finds here the inspiration for one of his
most fundamental themes: the relation of interdependence between power and
knowledge. According to Foucault (1971/1996, pp. 13-21), truth is an important
external exclusionary procedure in the order of discourse which operates by means
of the true/false opposition. When one looks into a discourse, at the level of the
sentence or proposition, such an opposition is neither arbitrary nor violent. It does not
vary, either: the proposition is always true or always false. But when it comes to
identifying what has been, historically, the will to truth that pervades our discourses
and what sort of separation rules them, then truth presents itself as a historical and
institutionally sustained system of exclusion. Major transformations which our
societies have undergone over the centuries, including scientific discoveries, can, to
a certain extent, be interpreted as being the result of always new wills to truth which
were gradually imposed on a number of institutional practices, such as pedagogy,
empirical research, or the exploitation of technological resources.
But something peculiar occurs with discourses of truth: by presenting themselves as
freed from desire and power, they simply cannot recognize the will to truth that
pervades them; that is, in order to establish themselves as true, these discourses
cannot help but hide the fact that they are products of the will to truth. Thus, what we
are allowed to see is a truth that is rich and fertile, a sweet and insidiously universal
force, and not the prodigious machinery designed to exclude all those who, time
after time in our history, have tried to evade that will to truth and to question it against
truth (Foucault, 1971/1996, p. 20, my translation).
Truth is not produced as an autonomous error-free entity, hovering above human
errancy, independent from the institutional mechanisms of social action and control,
or from human desire. Truth is inextricably attached to those mechanisms and,
therefore, to power. Foucault reminds us that in any society the multiple power
relations which characterize the social body cannot be established or function outside
a regime of truth, that is, without being sustained by discourses of truth. In the
authors words:

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There is no exerting of power without a certain economy of discourses
of truth which function in, from, and through that power. We are
subjected by power to the production of truth, and we can only exert
power by producing truth. [...] After all, we are judged, condemned,
classified, obliged to duties, destined to a certain way of living or to a
certain way of dying as a result of discourses of truth that carry with
them specific power effects, truth effects (Foucault, 1976/1999, p. 28-9,
my translation).
Foucault concludes that the will to truth, originated from the historically
constructed division between right and wrong, or true and false, is nothing
more than the exclusionary will to power. True discourse is no more than a
necessary illusion on the basis of which social subjects struggle for power. And
it is important to understand that this struggle takes place from inside the very
discursive practice: we cannot reach the truth, for we are always-already
assigned a circumscribed subject position the moment we enter discourse, the
moment we are assigned a social position in our communities.
The author proposes that in order to analyze the will to power (and knowledge) in
discourse we must gradually build and define our analytical tools in a practice he
calls genealogical. This is done in keeping with demands and possibilities designed
by concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault, 1997). Bringing our object of study into
this perspective, I believe we ought to better investigate and understand how the
discursive practices around contemporary legends point to the issue of the
truthfulness versus falsehood of the stories as being the key to those legends as if
the narratives depended exclusively on scientific-objective verdicts in order for
validation. Such an investigation would imply the analysis of the discursive
practices which produce these narratives in their local knowledge dimension.
On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion of
contemporary legends1, a great number of posts refer specifically to the issue of truth
in/of/around the legends. Different interlocutors often struggle, by means of
argumentation and supposedly legitimate scientific references, to debunk the rumors
or proto-legends and re-establish the factual order as soon as these narratives hit
their e-mail boxes. It is as if to prove the stories false were the very raison dtre of
such narrative practices: the moving force of the debate. Indeed, one must carefully
examine how those narratives build on the tension between the local, discontinuous
(in Foucaults terms) and unverified knowledge, on the one hand, and the hierarchical
force of true knowledge on the other true knowledge which, once available to all by
means of the rational-logical apparatus of science, is taken as something revealed
or explained by the discourse of those select few who possess it.
One must not lose track, however, of Foucaults reminder that there does not exist a
simple division between accepted and excluded discourses, or between dominant
and dominated discourses. There is no discourse of power on the one hand, and
discourse against power on the other. Rather, in a given discursive practice, we often
observe a co-relation of forces, a multiplicity of different power/knowledge strategies
that co-exist. And it is this distribution of forces which is to be detected in the
analysis: the play between the things that are said and those that are unsaid or
banned from discourse; the variables and distinct effects depend on who speaks,
when, from which subjective/power position, and within which institutional context.

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Rorty and the Pragmatist Approach to Truth
For pragmatists knowledge is a tool, an instrument that must be put to the service of
the conditions of experience. One of the basic principles of pragmatism shared by
its major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John Dewey and
Donald Davidson in between is anti-representationalism: the idea that there is not a
world out there, a reality independent from thought which might be represented by
language in a relation of correspondence or correctness. An idea which was already
present in Nietzsche.
The same holds for the notion of truth, which, already with the first pragmatists,
appears as dissociated from the idea of the representation of things in reality. The
focus here is on experience, the way people relate to reality. According to this line of
thought, truth cannot be mere correspondence to reality, but rather the contingent
product of relations that humans establish with each other through usage or, in
Wittgensteinian terms, language games. In other words, being true is not a
property which is external to language, a predicate of things in the world out there,
but rather a fundamentally linguistic device, a predicate of phrases, sentences or
propositions, produced by members of social communities through their interactions
and inter-relations.
Rorty, arguably the most outstanding name in current pragmatist philosophy,
formulates the questions in the following terms:
To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no
sentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human
languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth
cannot be out there cannot exist independently of the human mind
because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out
there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the
world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the
describing activities of human beings cannot (Rorty, 1989, p. 5).
This reflection leads Rorty to wonder whether truth even deserves
philosophical inquiry as a relevant and unquestionable concept in itself. He
questions the utility for human society of insisting on formulating a theory of
truth, a consistent body of thought that might account for a concept which, after
all, pervades all the transcendental-metaphysical-epistemological problematic,
from Plato to Heidegger, and which continues to confound and obscure
philosophers. Instead, Rorty claims, philosophical thought should set out to
describe the conditions in which the true presents itself in linguistic behaviors,
that is, in contingent practices where people do things with language.
What Rorty values the most in the pragmatist tradition is his precursors vocation
notwithstanding their differences and divergences to shift the focus away from
questions like What in the world is true to questions like How is the word true
used? (Rorty, 1991, p. 132) or, simply, to consider the issue of truth in language in
performative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and hence social nature of
language.
In a sort of radical minimalism, Rorty claims that everything that can be said about X
is what X is, there not being to X an occult or intrinsic side which eludes the
relational apprehension of X through language. For Rorty, truth cannot be
discovered, for that would be admitting that truth depends on what the world is like
in the sense of causal relations rather than descriptive acts.
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Broadening this view towards a more specifically political formulation, Rorty argues
that, in an ideally liberal and democratic society, the notion of truth as
correspondence to reality should be replaced by an idea of truth as what one comes
to believe over free and open encounters. For the American philosopher, truth
appears as a historical contingency, and not as a convergence or a rational and
universally valid (even if uncoerced) communicative consensus, such as defended
by the likes of Habermas (Hoy, 1994). But does that mean one should take Rortys
view as reducing truth to a mere pact, a fragile and capricious agreement between
language players?
The Polish sociologist Bauman could be called on into this debate. He aligns himself
with the pragmatist view whereby truth, rather than symbolizing the relation between
what is said and a determined non-verbal reality, stands in our usage for a certain
attitude we take, but above all wish or expect others to take, to what is said or
believed (Bauman, 1997, p. 112). Still, according to Bauman, there is no sense in
speaking of truth if not in a situation of dissent. Truth only comes up as an issue
when different people hold on to different beliefs, making it the object of dispute on
who is right and who is wrong. Truth comes up when one claims the right to speak
with authority, or when it becomes particularly important for an adversary to prove
that the other side of the dispute is wrong. The struggle for truth represents, then,
the struggle for establishing certain beliefs as systematically superior, under the
excuse that they have been reached at through a reliable procedure, or one that is
vouched for by the kind of people who may be trusted to follow it (Bauman, op. cit.,
p. 113).
The way I read him, Rorty would put this issue in other, maybe less ideological,
terms. By explaining the relation between truth and justification related to the
cautionary use of truth discussed above the philosopher claims that the need to
justify our beliefs and desires to others and to ourselves subjects us to certain
norms, the obedience to which produces a behavioral pattern which we must detect
in others before we can confidently attribute beliefs to them (Rorty, 1998, p. 26).
In other words, we enter the language game of the communities to which we belong
with certain beliefs, and we know that those we play with possess, on their side, their
own beliefs. But we must attest to the existence of those beliefs performatively, from
within the linguistic exchanges, and not take them as givens. What Rorty does not
believe, perhaps unlike Bauman, is that the rules of the linguistic game necessarily
imply obeying an additional norm the commandment to seek a [final] truth (Rorty
op. cit.).
Reading Legends, Reading Myths: The Lessons Theory Teaches Us
Bringing our contemporary legends back into focus, we could but only begin, in a
tentative exercise of critical reading, to reassess the issue of truth as it manifests
itself in the practice of transmitting and commenting on these narratives. Rather than
taking to the facile opposition between truthfulness versus falsehood, which would
imply a view of truth as correspondence to a self-sustaining order of reality (i.e. the
facts, the truth out there), we would do better by using the lessons our
philosophers have offered and applying them in our language classes in an
attempt to reassess our common sense interpretations and view the discursive
practice with different, critical, eyes.
We could certainly retain Foucaults critique of truth, particularly as it is formulated in
the following passage by Barry Allen, one of his commentators: [f]or truth-value (and
associated values like reference, translation, relevance, implication, identity, and
objectivity) to be determinate in any case depends on the effectiveness of
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historically contingent practices of evaluation, and on nothing else (Allen, 1995, p.
110-1). This amounts to claiming that the difference between true and false cannot
be established by external, context-free parameters. It does not exist apart from a
(contingent) local practice, in which these values are produced and evaluated, and
statements circulate as true, presenting themselves in the form of facts, news,
legends (legenda, i.e. what is to be read). Allen continues: Only here have
statements currency, the capacity to circulate, to penetrate practical reasoning, to be
taken seriously, to pass for the truth. These practical conditions situate truth amid all
the major asymmetries of social power, undermining its status as a common good
(Allen, op. cit., p. 4). Truth then is not common good. Rather, it is a space for
potential dissent, in which power relations will battle their way towards either
debunking or reaffirming the different stakes in the game.
Contemporary legends, more particularly the practical conditions in which they are
produced and perpetuated, function as the stage where a number of partial truths
gain their currency. In other words, they are the space where different regimes, or
programs of truth, are enacted. Believing or not in certain narratives in this or that
version of a specific contemporary legend implies more than a single-minded
pursuit of factual truth. It more likely involves a permanent shift between modes of
belief a shift that is not unlike the one Veyne (1983) identifies in the complex
relation the Greeks held with their myths.
Belonging to a time long gone, in all its wonders, its narratives of gods and men
and fantastic creatures that one does not come across walking on the streets, at
least not in the present myth offered itself to the Greeks as an integrally truthful
reality, one that transmitted collective memories which could not have been simply
invented lies. As Veyne points out, believing in that body of narrative as a plausible
one means still being within the true, but in analogical terms. Myth is inherited
information. It is an accepted tradition. And it is respected. Once the story is over, we
can shift to another mode of truth that of real life and then back and forth, in an
analogical operation.
One may criticize myth from within a historians program of truth rejecting the
chronological incoherence and the improbable cause-and-effect propositions but
one may also be compelled to read allegorical truths into it. To the rationalist
condemnation of the imaginary as false, the apologetic of the imaginary replies that it
conforms to a hidden reason. For it is not possible to lie (Veyne, 1983, p. 62). By
claiming that truth and interest which I equate with (ever-partial) interpretation are
inseparable concepts, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the process
of attempting to fix the meanings of a discourse practice in a regime/program of truth,
contingency (as situatedness) becomes a necessity that keeps justifying itself. And,
as we have seen with Rorty, justifying is one more language game one plays with
truth.
In that sense, could contemporary legends be some sort of modern-day myth? I
would argue that just as it is impossible to lie about myth, it may be impossible to lie
about urban legends. The force that a legend may acquire in a certain interpretive
community tends to be greater than the evidence that contests its veracity. Whether
or not the narrative is trustworthy does not affect the impact that the force of its
message may cause. As Whatley and Henken point out:
[T]he evidence countering the veracity of a legend rarely carries the weight
that the legend does. [...] The impact a legend has on those telling or hearing
it may have little to do with whether the story is believed. () What may be
more important is the truth that folklore conveys about the attitudes, fears,
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and beliefs of a group, which in turn shape and maintain the identity of that
group (Whatley & Henken, 2000, p. 4-5).
Thus, our students may not believe, for example, that someone could have really
planted an HIV-infected needle on their theater seats, but this will not necessarily
stop them from double-checking before sitting. Equally, they may not believe that the
long-lasting use of their cell phones may pose any risk of explosion, but still they will
turn off their devices when pulling into a service station. That is, the most relevant
aspect of this kind of narrative may not be its objectively attested implausibility, but
rather the truth it reveals about the beliefs and values of the communities in which it
circulates.
Finally, we might stick with a lesson that Veyne indirectly teaches about the myths of
our present time, and that somehow paves the way toward a more critical
understanding of our object in point. What he says about myth serves just as well for
contemporary legends: in order to engage with those narratives we would do well to
sort through the heterogeneous programs of truth that constitute our imagination
programs that tell us what we, in our communities, are or are not allowed to believe
at different moments in history; programs that intersect or even contradict each other
in our everyday, ever-shifting contingent practices of being in the true. And so, at
each moment, nothing exists or acts outside these [space-defining] palaces of the
imagination[...] They are the only space available (Veyne, 1983, p. 121).
This Elusive Thing Called Truth
Agents and advocates of Critical Literacy will have identified in all these discussions
one of the tenets of their own belief system, thus summarized by Cervetti et al.
(2001, p. 10): Reality cannot be known definitely, and cannot be captured by
language; decisions about truth, therefore, cannot be based on a theory of
correspondence with reality, but must instead be made locally. Locally in the
different interpretive communities we claim membership to; locally in our classrooms,
as we and our students learn to rethink the often deeply ingrained assumptions we
hold on to as truth, and on what can or cannot be true about the stories we are told.
In view of our theoretical grounding the search for the truth of/in contemporary
legends leads us along the routes of two intersecting tracks. The first one shows that
we cannot possibly learn all the facts and hence all the truth narrated in these
stories. That is, we cannot know with absolute certainty what is a technically,
scientifically attested (or even plausible) fact and what is merely a persistent rumor or
piece of misinformation and I think here particularly of the abundant narratives
surrounding the mysterious powers of not so new technologies, or the risks of yet
uncontrollable diseases. We simply err; we cling to our most essential and
mundane truths: that we are all exposed to too-close-to-home risks, and that
someday we will all die. The second track teaches us that, albeit incomplete,
controversial or merely plausible, facts only make sense insofar as they belong to an
itinerary of truth. They are mediated by a regime of discursive practices that see
narrative as a privileged form of manifestation narratives of a particular type,
dispersed and mutable, such as contemporary legends, but also other narratives of a
particular type, those claimed by the legitimized institutions of power/knowledge that
go by the name of science, politics, education, the media, etc. Ultimately, narratives
of this sort are the stuff that makes up the fabric of our everyday engagements with
reality.
So as to make the most out of these reflections in a critical stance towards
contemporary legends, we could perhaps draw the map of those two tracks in the
form of a dialectic sway: one by which the will to truth in legends simultaneously
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constitutes on the one hand, a form of social regulation of, and on the other hand, a
fictional reinvention of, the fears and anxieties of daily life, through narrative.
Positioning ourselves as teachers and learners who can perceive and critically
engage with this dialectic will have been the result of a critical practice: a continual,
ever-transitory but not a bit elusive exercise in critical literacy. An exercise which I
believe, from my experience, could take place the moment the agents involved in the
language classroom practice venture beyond the predictable, consensus-aspiring
discussion on the falsehood of legends and begin to think possibly different truths.
References
Allen, B. (1995). Truth in philosophy. Cambridge and London: Harvard
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