Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

evaluating the Catholic Church by the hypocrisy of one of its representatives. Whatever
my age, to my feeling the priest did not have an answer to this question and could
not admit his lack of knowledge. Disassociating proved not to be a hard problem
because my parents were rather easy on religious matters.
I call my teenage years my Romantic period, Romantic in the philosophical meaning of
the word. I saw a world in which the macro and the micro level are connected and I
supposed that an individual was part of something bigger. This perspective still contributes
to my orientation on the world as an interdependent and socio-evolutionary
phenomenon, although nowadays not in a spiritualistic sense. It also contributes to my
some sort of optimistic stoicism towards what is happening. Somehow I was caught
by a fundamental belief that things are interdependent and will be balanced.
My teenage years were also decisive for my political and pedagogical orientations. ‘No
church’, ‘no boss’, ‘no omnipotent parents’, ‘no capitalism’ and ‘no government’ were
inspiring themes in the 1970s. I experienced them as years of liberation of mind-controlling
and compartmentalized ways of thinking about religion, politics, social relations
and education. I was infected with an allergy for authorities. An example of this
allergy is when I got fired in 1973. I refused to negotiate directly about overtime with
the highest chief of the store I worked for. The day before he had refused to talk with
me and had directed me to my supervisor. So, I also directed him to my supervisor. At
that age – and still nowadays – I somehow had no respect for authority based on
position instead of quality of arguments.
Student & marriage
From 1975 till 1981 I attended the university, studying social pedagogy and philosophy.
In 1981 I got my master‘s degree in social pedagogy. From a neo-Marxist and emancipatory
perspective I wrote a thesis on a model of ecologically situated interventions.
The premise of this perspective was that behaviour could not be interpreted as an
individual decision, but was related to its context. For the same reason individuals
could not be held fully responsible for their misfortune and should be supported. I
learned to interpret behaviour as context related.
Paramount for my epistemology was becoming acquainted with the concept of the
paradigm developed by Thomas Kuhn (1922 – 1996). Because of the logical restrictions
it placed on science and reasoning it politicizes knowledge and therefore even the
truth of science becomes negotiable. Emancipation, context and paradigm became
part of my defaults.
In 1977 I got married. Being married is also living close on one spot and learning to deal
with mutually different expectations. I remember that the first year of our living
together we had a lot of intensive discussions making clear that anticipating the
supposed expectations of your partner, leads to a lot of misunderstandings. We coped
by sorting out our personal habits and expectations, and to negotiate about shared standards.
3. My taken for granted assumptions as a researcher | 69