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well-educated upper income earners), many individuals pay them no heed.
Equally, many people actively use their detailed knowledge of certain gen-
res and modes as markers of distinction from others in society. In still other
cases, even very visible modes and genres that we know to be socially impor-
tant do not always sway us - at least knowingly. For instance, having a basic
and broadly positive sense of what 'science' is doesn't necessarily mean that
one pays much or especially close attention to what any given scientist says
or recommends. It's highly context-dependent at the level of the individual
person.
Subjects and self-hood
These caveats notwithstanding, I'd suggest (and am hardly the first to do so)
that our familiarity with different genres and modes of representation tells
us something important about their hold over us. I say 'hold over us' in
a general sense and for good reason. Most people would acknowledge that
their school experience, along with their family and friends, has had a major
influence on their identity, outlook, values and aspirations. This is because,
in our early lives, so much time is spent being taught by various teachers,
being at home, and socialising with siblings or neighbours. But what of all
the other things we learn from, say, novels, trips to the library, magazines,
television dramas, web surfing, a family atlas, adverts or a visit to a gallery?
Are these experiences somehow secondary in conditioning the kind of peo-
ple we become? Regardless, when we eventually leave school and home,
aren't we sufficiently independent and self-sufficient, both intellectually and
emotionally, that we're less readily (or, we might say, less 'unreflexively')
influenced by the claims or actions of other people, even ones who appear
to be experts? At this point, aren't we, in short, 'mature' and able to 'think
These questions, if read non-rhetorically, are predicated on the idea that
we can, at some point and at some level,
separate ourselves
as thinking, feel-
ing subjects from the wider social environments in which we live. So far in
this topic I've occasionally implied that this idea is credible by using the
term 'consumer' to describe people's engagement with these environments.
In modern parlance, consumers are said to have 'freedom' and to exercise
'choice' among a range of options. But what if those environments, in sig-
nificant measure, constitute and reproduce our characters, preferences and
practices? What if they shape not merely what we 'know', 'feel' or 'do', but
who we are
? What if the panoply of epistemic communities we're familiar
with - with their various subject matters, genres and modes of address -
together provide the complex, changing and pockmarked 'grid of intelligi-
bility' through which we come to define both ourselves and the world at
large?
These questions oblige us to consider the deep connections between
our individual selves and what sometimes appears to be (but is surely
