Learning and Unlearning Being Guilty: On the Contingent Ascription of a Deficit Category

Abstract

Scientists of natural as well as social science have studied individual deficits in three ways: positivist scholars in psychology, neuroscience or genetics identified factors that correlate with the probability of actually being deviant (e.g. antisocial behaviour, mental disorder); critical scholars in criminology and sociology identified deficit categories as culturally or socially biased and prejudiced (such as low intelligence); and, thirdly, constructivists study the actual discourse of deficit ascription in particular cases and in certain institutional contexts (such as the judiciary or schools). All these approaches presume the outcome of the deficit discourse, which resembles a structural pattern rather than the contingent result of struggles. Scholars underrate contingency because they start with the category already attached to an individual. I claim that we learn a lot about a deficit category and its powers when visiting the places and moments when it is not fixed yet, when parties fight it, when it is still contested.