The Politics of Incompetence: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance

“Incompetence” is not an objective state lacking competence nor a kind of deficiency that needs to be filled. Rather, it is a constructed state that is productive, working in tandem with its opposite, “competence.” Perception of incompetence/competence is what Michel Foucault (1977) calls a technology of “normalization” that pushes individuals to aspire to follow a shared norm, while hierarchically differentiating individuals according to their proximity to the aspired norm. The notion of incompetence is thus “productive” in that it turns individuals into specific kinds of “subjects” (Foucault 1977). The Politics of Incompetence: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance further investigates other productive processes around the perception of “incompetence” specifically through its intersections with various ideologies—“academic achievement,” teacher-student hierarchy, “native speaker” ideology, normative unit thinking, and privilege of vulnerability—as such intersections generate new knowledge, new reflection on one’s assumptions and privilege, new space for marginalized language, and more. This volume opens up a new area of study—productive cultural politics of “incompetence”—by focusing on language learning in diverse contexts: Japanese-as-a-Second-Language classrooms in US colleges, Italian language tourism in Italy, and indigenous Maori language revitalization at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school.