artigo revista critical literacy

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Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 3:1 2009

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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-taintedneedles strategically planted as a means of revenge or out of sheer cruelty. Clubscene habitués are getting doped at parties and waking up the next morningimmersed in a bathtub surrounded by ice just to find that their kidneys have beensnatched by the international traffic of body parts. Innocent fast food diners are beingexposed to the risk of contamination from all sorts of unthinkable ingredientsdeliberately added to their happy meals. Schoolgirls (and boys) are terrified of goingto the school bathroom alone in case they bump into the ghost of the bloodybathroom blonde (in Brazil, the lira do banheiro): an ex-student whose unrequitedlove 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 therisk of long-term damage, or even cancer. Are any of these stories commonly passedon 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 morepopularly named, ‘urban legends’1: these unverified reports of unknown origin, told inmultiple versions as having actually occurred in a social context whose fears andaspirations they express symbolically (Renard, 2006). That’s all this is about. A (notso) modern form of mythology which does little but recycle, in narrative, the same oldfears and apprehensions involving contamination, violence, death… But is that allthere 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 intothe language class as other “semi-fictional”, “semi-factual” narratives that havebecome staple didactic genres. My experience as a Brazilian teacher of English as aforeign language to Brazilian students – particularly those with a greater familiaritywith Internet pop culture – shows that these narratives elicit a great deal ofcontroversy and debate. However, these tend to take place in a rather uncriticalmanner, 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, disregardingthem as manipulative lies with nothing about them “worth learning”, at bestsomething to be entertained by.

It is my belief that a Critical Literacy perspective has a lot to contribute to thesediscussions in the sense that it provides both teachers and students with a practicethrough which they are able to question their own naturalized conceptions of cultureand truth. It would help readers to think through the power relations, discourses, andidentities being constructed and reinforced through these texts (Shor, 1999). And itwould eventually lead to reading those texts as embedded in broader meaning-making practices in which the fear of Others in our social relations can take on manyforms, of which contemporary legends could be one, whereby receivedinterpretations and stereotypes of alterity are enacted. We might then be able torecognize 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 moreconsistent 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 underliethe commonplace discussions on contemporary legends such as I have been able toobserve in my own teaching practice in Brazil, I draw here upon some philosophicaland critical theory focusing on the problem of truth that should allow us to understandwhy such a debate is so pervasive. It is my hypothesis that by critically looking intothis “moving force” of the debate we may be able to better understand how and whysuch stories in contemporary culture keep being reinvented, then spread and re-transmitted, over and over, whether or not they are perceived as having actuallytaken place somewhere specific, at some point in time. My focus will be, then, on thispowerful – if elusive – thing called truth.

When one looks at contemporary legends, one cannot actually avoid the issue oftruth that surrounds them. It may appear explicitly in the very proposition of thenarrative, 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 mayalso be read into the reactions of listeners or readers of such narratives in the form ofincredulity, 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 howplausible these might seem.

I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1976/1999) in the claim that every discursivepractice has the capacity to generate effects of truth which are more or less potentand enduring. Such a possibility of the creation of truth effects in and throughdiscourse occurs due to an inescapable element that affects the subjects ofdiscourse: the will to truth. It would seem that the question of whether contemporarylegends are true or false cannot be answered adequately – or at least not beyond amere factual investigation in terms of “this one actually took place” versus “this oneactually did not” – unless we consider the fact that legends are transmitted within

socially and historically situated discourse practices in which certain programs oftruth are at stake.

Speaking of programs of truth implies letting go of a traditional conception of truthaccording to which a conscious, knowing subject, free from power relations, canaccede to a truth that is rational and universally validated. In the history ofphilosophy, one can trace that belief in its most rationalized form back toEnlightenment – with Descartes at the forefront. It is only in the late 18 th century thatthis view began to be seriously questioned; and later with Nietzsche, and throughoutthe 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. Forthat purpose, and to back my claim on the relevance of reading contemporary

legends, I turn now to two major currents of critical thinking – themselvesdiscontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth – which share the aim ofdeconstructing the belief that truth is one, unique and transparent. Firstly, I examineNietzsche’s and Foucault’s 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 byRorty. Secondly, I relate these three currents to the concept of programs of truthemployed by Veyne in connection to his analysis of the different approaches towardsmyth.




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Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as Will

One of the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea that there is no truth astransparent knowledge of the world ‘as it is’. He was opposed to the idea of apossible apprehension of reality by means of language, since there is no single pre-existing (i.e. before language) universe of “things to know”. In fact, the Germanphilosopher proposed that we abandon once and for all any attempt of “knowing thetruth”. For him, we should give up on the idea that language is capable of coveringand “representing the whole of reality” – a reality that is supposedly determinable anddeterminate and whose truth we could “unveil” or “reveal”.

How does knowledge work, then? Nietzsche says knowledge is man’s invention, thatis, it is not something which is absolutely inscribed and inherent in human nature justwaiting 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 oneneeded first to reject the object only then to bring it back to one’s domain, alreadytamed, already molded. This implies that each and every form of knowledge,

including science and technology, becomes necessarily perspective, partial andoblique.

Thus, if knowledge, which is the outcome of a historical will, leads to what we calltruth, truth is, according to this reasoning, nothing more than the result of contingenthuman relations to which we seek to ascribe universal status by means of a will totruth. Nietzsche’s classical definition, proposed in the essay “On Truth and Lie in anExtra-Moral Sense”, perfectly synthesizes this thought:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, andanthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have beenenhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which

after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths areillusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphorswhich are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost theirpictures 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 whichcreates its own opposition between true and false: its own effect of truth. It appearsin the fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which are nonetheless made to become literal,taking on a conventional and naturalized form throughout history. The originalintuitive metaphors are therefore taken for the things themselves.

But man “forgets” it. He forgets that he has created his own truths, since he has builthimself and things within a paradigm of rationality. He believes that he builds up froman essence and that language serves merely as a transparent conduit for thatessence. He believes that he can look into the real from the outside. And that is whatallows 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 survivalinstinct; he rather produces meanings and hence knowledge which is establishedthrough the conventions that discipline man in social groups” (Arrojo, 1992, p. 54, mytranslation).

The production of solid and naturalized meanings, however, does not take place on arational dimension only; it also occurs in man’s relation with myth and art . Man allowshimself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever-reinvented, particular form ofrelating 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 anactor play a king more regally than the king himself and, why not say it – adding anexample to the ones Nietzsche proposes – when receiving and transmitting urbanlegends over the Internet.

The Nietzschean notion that truth does not exist as a pre-existing absolute fact ofreality, but that it may exist as an effect – even if necessarily illusory – points to theutilitarian nature of truth. Nietzsche claims that knowledge, inasmuch as it presentsitself as a set of truthful and reliable beliefs, may serve certain purposes, but notothers, and that certain things can be described as useful to certain kinds of peoplebut not to others. This only reinforces the author’s refusal of the idea of truth ascorrespondence. Rather than corresponding to a factual reality existing outsidelanguage and independent of human beings, truth as conceived by Nietzsche is acultural construction, a way of meeting human desires, needs and uncertainties. Assuch, 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 finalapprehension of reality. As Mosé summarizes: “by affirming that truth is a value,Nietzsche wishes to desacralize this evaluative principle, revealing its condition as ahuman invention: truth is an idea, a construct of thought, it has a history” (Mosé,2005, p. 31). It is, therefore, inescapably partial .

Directly influenced by Nietzsche, Foucault finds here the inspiration for one of hismost fundamental themes: the relation of interdependence between power andknowledge. According to Foucault (1971/1996, pp. 13-21), truth is an importantexternal exclusionary procedure in the order of discourse which operates by meansof the true/false opposition. When one looks into a discourse, at the level of thesentence 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 toidentifying what has been, historically, the will to truth that pervades our discoursesand what sort of separation rules them, then truth presents itself as a historical andinstitutionally sustained system of exclusion. Major transformations which oursocieties have undergone over the centuries, including scientific discoveries, can, toa certain extent, be interpreted as being the result of always new wills to truth whichwere 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 asfreed from desire and power, they simply cannot recognize the will to truth thatpervades 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 weare allowed to see is “a truth that is rich and fertile, a sweet and insidiously universalforce”, and not the “prodigious machinery designed to exclude all those who, timeafter time in our history, have tried to evade that will to truth and to question it againsttruth” (Foucault, 1971/1996, p. 20, my translation).

Truth is not produced as an autonomous error-free entity, hovering above humanerrancy, 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 powerrelations which characterize the social body cannot be established or function outsidea regime of truth, that is, without being sustained by discourses of truth. In theauthor’s words:




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There is no exerting of power without a certain economy of discoursesof truth which function in, from, and through that power. We aresubjected by power to the production of truth, and we can only exertpower by producing truth. [...] After all, we are judged, condemned,classified, obliged to duties, destined to a certain way of living or to acertain way of dying as a result of discourses of truth that carry withthem specific power effects, truth effects (Foucault, 1976/1999, p. 28-9,my translation).

Foucault concludes that the will to truth, originated from the historicallyconstructed division between right and wrong, or true and false, is nothingmore than the exclusionary will to power. “True” discourse is no more than anecessary illusion on the basis of which social subjects struggle for power. Andit is important to understand that this struggle takes place from inside the verydiscursive practice: we cannot reach “the” truth, for we are always-alreadyassigned a circumscribed subject position the moment we enter discourse, themoment we are assigned a social position in our communities.

The author proposes that in order to analyze the will to power (and knowledge) indiscourse we must gradually build and define our analytical tools – in a practice hecalls “genealogical”. This is done in keeping with demands and possibilities designedby concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault, 1997). Bringing our object of study intothis perspective, I believe we ought to better investigate and understand how thediscursive practices around contemporary legends point to the issue of thetruthfulness versus falsehood of the stories as being the key to those legends – as ifthe narratives depended exclusively on scientific-objective verdicts in order for“validation”. Such an investigation would imply the analysis of the discursivepractices which produce these narratives in their local knowledge dimension.

On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion ofcontemporary legends1, a great number of posts refer specifically to the issue of truthin/of/around the legends. Different interlocutors often struggle, by means ofargumentation and supposedly legitimate scientific references, to debunk the rumorsor “proto-legends” and re-establish the factual order as soon as these narratives hittheir e-mail boxes. It is as if to prove the stories false were the very raison d’être ofsuch narrative practices: the “moving force of the debate”. Indeed, one must carefullyexamine how those narratives build on the tension between the local , discontinuous(in Foucault’s terms) and unverified knowledge, on the one hand, and the hierarchicalforce of true knowledge on the other – true knowledge which, once available to all bymeans 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 Foucault’s reminder that there does not exist asimple division between accepted and excluded discourses, or between dominantand dominated discourses. There is no discourse of power on the one hand, anddiscourse against power on the other. Rather, in a given discursive practice, we oftenobserve a co-relation of forces, a multiplicity of different power/knowledge strategiesthat co-exist. And it is this distribution of forces which is to be detected in theanalysis: the play between the things that are said and those that are unsaid orbanned 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 ofthe conditions of experience. One of the basic principles of pragmatism – shared byits major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John Dewey andDonald Davidson in between – is anti-representationalism: the idea that there is not aworld “out there”, a reality independent from thought which might be represented bylanguage in a relation of correspondence or correctness. An idea which was alreadypresent 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’. Thefocus here is on experience, the way people relate to reality. According to this line ofthought, truth cannot be mere correspondence to reality, but rather the contingentproduct of relations that humans establish with each other through usage or, inWittgensteinian terms, “language games”. In other words, “being true” is not aproperty 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 orpropositions, produced by members of social communities through their interactionsand 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 nosentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of humanlanguages, and that human languages are human creations. Truthcannot 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 theworld can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by thedescribing activities of human beings – cannot (Rorty, 1989, p. 5).

This reflection leads Rorty to wonder whether truth even deservesphilosophical inquiry as a relevant and unquestionable concept in itself. Hequestions the utility for human society of insisting on formulating a theory oftruth, a consistent body of thought that might account for a concept which, afterall, pervades all the transcendental-metaphysical-epistemological problematic,from Plato to Heidegger, and which continues to confound and obscurephilosophers. Instead, Rorty claims, philosophical thought should set out todescribe 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 fromquestions 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 inperformative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and hence social nature oflanguage.

In a sort of radical minimalism, Rorty claims that “everything that can be said about Xis what X is”, there not being to X an occult or “intrinsic” side which eludes therelational apprehension of X through language. For Rorty, truth cannot bediscovered, 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 arguesthat , in an ideally liberal and democratic society, the notion of truth ascorrespondence to reality should be replaced by an idea of truth as what one comesto believe over free and open encounters. For the American philosopher, truthappears as a historical contingency, and not as a convergence or a rational anduniversally valid (even if uncoerced) communicative consensus, such as defendedby the likes of Habermas (Hoy, 1994). But does that mean one should take Rorty’sview 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 himselfwith the pragmatist view whereby truth, rather than symbolizing the relation betweenwhat is said and a determined non-verbal reality, “stands in our usage for a certainattitude we take, but above all wish or expect others to take, to what is said orbelieved” (Bauman, 1997, p. 112). Still, according to Bauman, there is no sense inspeaking of truth if not in a situation of dissent. Truth only comes up as an issuewhen 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 speakwith authority , or when it becomes particularly important for an adversary to provethat the other side of the dispute is wrong. The struggle for truth represents, then,the struggle for establishing certain beliefs as systematically superior, under theexcuse 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 thecautionary 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 detectin 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 belongwith certain beliefs, and we know that those we play with possess, on their side, theirown beliefs. But we must attest to the existence of those beliefs performatively, fromwithin the linguistic exchanges, and not take them as givens. What Rorty does notbelieve, perhaps unlike Bauman, is that the rules of the linguistic game necessarilyimply obeying “an additional norm – the commandment to seek a [final] truth” (Rortyop. cit.).

Reading Legends, Reading Myths: The Lessons Theory Teaches Us

Bringing our contemporary legends back into focus, we could but only begin, in atentative exercise of critical reading, to reassess the issue of truth as it manifestsitself in the practice of transmitting and commenting on these narratives. Rather thantaking to the facile opposition between truthfulness versus falsehood, which wouldimply 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 ourphilosophers have offered – and applying them in our language classes – in anattempt to reassess our common sense interpretations and view the discursivepractice with different, critical, eyes.

We could certainly retain Foucault’s critique of truth, particularly as it is formulated inthe following passage by Barry Allen, one of his commentators: “[f]or truth-value (andassociated values like reference, translation, relevance, implication, identity, andobjectivity) 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 cannotbe established by external, context-free parameters. It does not exist apart from a(contingent) local practice, in which these values are produced and evaluated, andstatements circulate as true, presenting themselves in the form of facts, news,“legends” (legenda, i.e. “what is to be read”). Allen continues: “Only here havestatements currency, the capacity to circulate, to penetrate practical reasoning, to betaken seriously, to pass for the truth. These practical conditions situate truth amid allthe 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 forpotential dissent, in which power relations will battle their way towards eitherdebunking or reaffirming the different stakes in the game.

Contemporary legends, more particularly the “practical conditions” in which they areproduced 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-mindedpursuit of factual truth. It more likely involves a permanent shift between modes ofbelief – a shift that is not unlike the one Veyne (1983) identifies in the complexrelation 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, atleast 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 simplyinvented lies. As Veyne points out, believing in that body of narrative as a plausibleone means “still being within the true”, but in analogical terms. Myth is inheritedinformation. 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 ananalogical operation.

One may criticize myth from within a historian’s program of truth – rejecting thechronological incoherence and the improbable cause-and-effect propositions – butone may also be compelled to read allegorical truths into it. “To the rationalistcondemnation of the imaginary as false, the apologetic of the imaginary replies that itconforms to a hidden reason. For it is not possible to lie” (Veyne, 1983, p. 62). Byclaiming that truth and interest – which I equate with (ever-partial) interpretation – areinseparable concepts, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the processof 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 withtruth.

In that sense, could contemporary legends be some sort of modern-day myth? Iwould argue that just as it is impossible to lie about myth, it may be impossible to lieabout urban legends. The force that a legend may acquire in a certain interpretivecommunity tends to be greater than the evidence that contests its veracity. Whetheror not the narrative is trustworthy does not affect the impact that the force of itsmessage may cause. As Whatley and Henken point out:

[T]he evidence countering the veracity of a legend rarely carries the weightthat the legend does. [...] The impact a legend has on those telling or hearingit may have little to do with whether the story is believed. (…) What may bemore 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 thatgroup (Whatley & Henken, 2000, p. 4-5).

Thus, our students may not believe, for example, that someone could have reallyplanted an HIV-infected needle on their theater seats, but this will not necessarilystop them from double-checking before sitting. Equally, they may not believe that thelong-lasting use of their cell phones may pose any risk of explosion, but still they willturn off their devices when pulling into a service station. That is, the most relevantaspect of this kind of narrative may not be its “objectively attested” implausibility, butrather the “truth” it reveals about the beliefs and values of the communities in which itcirculates.

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 criticalunderstanding of our object in point. What he says about myth serves just as well forcontemporary legends: in order to engage with those narratives we would do well tosort 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 believeat different moments in history; programs that intersect or even contradict each otherin our everyday, ever-shifting contingent practices of being “in the true”. And so, “ateach moment, nothing exists or acts outside these [space-defining] palaces of theimagination[...] 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 discussionsone 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 bylanguage; decisions about truth, therefore, cannot be based on a theory of

correspondence with reality, but must instead be made locally”. Locally in thedifferent interpretive communities we claim membership to; locally in our classrooms,as we and our students learn to rethink the often deeply ingrained assumptions wehold 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 contemporarylegends leads us along the routes of two intersecting tracks. The first one shows thatwe cannot possibly learn all the “facts” – and hence “all the truth” – narrated in thesestories. 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 orpiece of misinformation – and I think here particularly of the abundant narrativessurrounding 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 thatsomeday 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 seenarrative 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 thatgo by the name of science, politics, education, the media, etc. Ultimately, narrativesof this sort are the stuff that makes up the fabric of our everyday engagements withreality.

So as to make the most out of these reflections in a critical stance towardscontemporary legends, we could perhaps draw the map of those two tracks in theform 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, afictional reinvention of, the fears and anxieties of daily life, through narrative.Positioning ourselves as teachers and learners who can perceive and criticallyengage 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 Ibelieve, from my experience, could take place the moment the agents involved in thelanguage classroom practice venture beyond the predictable, consensus-aspiringdiscussion on the falsehood of legends and begin to think possibly different truths.

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