What Is It That I Have Become? Some Fragments [Acquired Wisdom Essay]

Abstract

There are many ways to write oneself. Most popular is the story—a life lived, experiences accumulated, lessons learned, wisdom acquired, triumph or tragedy—a coherent and linear self. I do not want to do that. That is a fiction. Rather, I offer some fragments, some discontinuities, and some tensions and paradoxes that make up what might be called my biography. I want to think about “what it is I have become.” And I will do that against the backdrop of the epistemic shift that has framed and forged my intellectual career—the shift from a welfare state to a neoliberal state, from one form of domination to another, an intensification. I will try to make sense of myself as a social subject, as produced contingently and historically across that shift, and allude to some struggles and resistance to not being governed thus—another kind of fiction perhaps. This will encompass both my experience of education, very briefly at school and at university and the evolution and reorientations of my intellectual preoccupations as a researcher and “scholar.” There is a class, social class, sub-text to some of this; but I will not dwell on that. I have written about it before.

Let us try this. As I say, I want to write myself as a social subject, or rather two contrasting and incoherent subjects, two historically contingent, unstable subjects, and the foreshadow of a third. One was an Enlightenment subject, produced in a world defined epistemologically by rationality and progress; the other is a Neoliberal subject produced by self-interest, competition, and profit as individual dispositions and as the solution to social problems of any kind. The latter did not erase the former but overlaid, colonised, and distorted. The third is ill-defined, a struggle in process and it will continue so.

So, this is an account of discomforts, misalignments, and a long circular journey from school and back again; from loving and then hating school; from wanting to “save” it, to wanting to erase it. It is also an account in which my singularity is exaggerated far too much. The opportunities I have had, the things I have thought and written, and the wisdom I have acquired, such as it is, have been a collective effort. I have been supported, encouraged, facilitated, stimulated, criticised, informed by, and learned from a long list of teachers, colleagues, and collaborators, and my life-partner, Trinidad.

I would have been able to think much less well without them. It is difficult to find the right words to express how grateful I am.