The Smallest Authority: poder, olhar e registro na primeira infância (C2)
Nothing in the house has authority except the smallest thing in it. It cannot walk, or bargain, or name what it wants, and by these deficits it governs absolutely: a sound is emitted, and adults who negotiate contracts by day abandon their sentences mid-clause and go. There is no appeal, because there is no argument; the creature has not yet entered the country of reasons where the rest of us are obliged to live. Watch the household at three in the morning and the hierarchy is unmistakable — the powerful are the ones apologising. What unnerves me is less the demand than the gaze. It rests on a face without recognition and without indifference either, the way weather rests on a field, and one understands that one is being registered rather than known. Later this will be called attention and will be praised in schools. For now it is something older and less flattering: the survey a stranger makes of a landscape it has not chosen and cannot leave. We say the infant is learning us. It would be truer, and less comfortable, to say the infant is auditing us, taking down the world's first impression of itself in a script none of us can read, and which it will spend a lifetime failing to recall.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A substituição do verbo "learning" por "auditing", no período final, serve para
- A) reforçar o elogio à capacidade cognitiva precoce do bebê, antecipando o desempenho que mais tarde será reconhecido e premiado pela escola.
- B) atenuar a imagem de tirania construída na primeira parte do texto, devolvendo ao adulto a posição de sujeito ativo da relação.
- C) converter o cuidado numa relação de exame e registro, em que os adultos são inspecionados sem ter acesso ao arquivo produzido a seu respeito.
- D) sugerir que a linguagem técnica é a única capaz de descrever com precisão os vínculos afetivos que se formam no ambiente doméstico.
- E) indicar que a criança avalia moralmente os adultos e que dessa avaliação dependerá o caráter que ela virá a desenvolver.