From an international as well as a European point of view, “intelligence” is a widely used concept with special bearing on education. It is linked to different scientific discourses, which inform tools for measuring and comparing people and predicting their future careers. However, the discourses of intelligence are not only matters of different conceptualizations within scientific networks and/or disciplines, but also matters of everyday practices in education. Differentiation between people in terms of smart, high and low achieving, fast, slow, et cetera, are ongoing processes of social selection and reproduction as well as self-identification. The present paper is a part of a project that seeks to explore naive theories about intelligence among students and teachers in Swedish upper secondary schools, and among teacher-students. The larger project involves quantitative as well as ethnographical approaches. The paper is based specifically on ethnographic data produced in two Swedish upper secondary schools: Rockmeadows High, which provides vocational training aimed at work in the transportation sector and Cromwell High, which is a highly prestigious, school with a academic curriculum aimed at preparing students for the university. We elaborated on how students in the two settings used cultural resources, e.g. particular linguistic styles and ways of joking, in constructing their identities at school, and particularly how they used references to discourses that involve intellectual traits in communication and (self) identification. We find this to be an interesting enterprise, because in spite of a long standing political ambition in Sweden toward equalizing educational opportunity, and an upper secondary school system that is constructed to break up class and gender boundaries, educational endeavors are still following the same sociological patterns as before. As a theoretical framework we rely on Bernstein, Bourdieu and Foucault. Of special importance for the analysis in this study is what could be labeled the post-Foucault governmentality-turn in educational theory, initiated by for instance Peters and Olson. These post-Foucault perspectives have two major consequences of significance for us. (i) They re-formulate the object submitted to power in relation to Foucault’s early texts, and conceive of this object not as body targeted by disciplining-technologies, but as a citizen-consumer that is “shoved” in certain directions by processes of choice and self-identification in relation to these choice processes. (ii) They draw attention to the historical-materialist dimension of Foucault’s writing and therefore open up possibilities to bridge between Foucault’s (self-)subjectification-theories and analytical tools offered by Bourdieu and Bernstein.

The paper is based on data from two ethnographical studies that were conducted in different sites and used different strategies for data production: In Rockmeadows High, the researcher followed two groups of students in their first and second year of study during one semester. The fieldwork involved observations of traditional classroom lessons and driving lessons, and of a workshop-based mechanics course in which the researcher participated together with the students. A selection of students and teachers were also interviewed. In Cromwell High observations where also supported by video-recordings.

Our analytical entrance is constructed around the communicative strategies applied within school practices when in comes to handling intellectual traits in terms of what counts as being intelligent, in terms of how this is actually communicated and used as means for self-identification. We draw attention to this double folded marginalization strategy and discuss it in terms of irony and humor in the paper. We argue that these strategies could be conceived both as a consequence of a special form of governmentally that seeks to construct citizen-consumers, but also as resources for individual students in order to structure a meaningful life. However, we also argue that these two different perspectives on strategies in handling intellectual traits are not contradictive. On the contrary, we argue that the ambivalence in these strategies is what makes them work.