Embodiment and Education: Exploring Creatural Existence (Philosophy and Education)

EMBODIMENT AND EDUCATION

Philosophy and Education VOLUME 15 Series Editors: Robert E. Floden, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, U.S.A. Kenneth R. Howe, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, U.S.A. Editorial Board: David Bridges, Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. Jim Garrison, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, U.S.A. Nel Noddings, Stanford University, CA, U.S.A. Shirley A. Pendlebury, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Denis C. Phillips, Stanford University, CA, U.S.A. Kenneth A. Strike, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, U.S.A.

SCOPE OF THE SERIES There are many issues in education that are highly philosophical in character. Among these issues are the nature of human cognition; the types of warrant for human beliefs; the moral and epistemological foundations of educational research; the role of education in developing effective citizens; and the nature of a just society in relation to the educational practices and policies required to foster it. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any issue in education that lacks a philosophical dimension. The sine qua non of the volumes in the series is the identification of the expressly philosophical dimensions of problems in education coupled with an expressly philosophical approach to them. Within this boundary, the topics—as well as the audiences for which they are intended—vary over a broad range, from volumes of primary interest to philosophers to others of interest to a more general audience of scholars and students of education.

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

Embodiment and Education Exploring Creatural Existence

by

, MARJORIE O LOUGHLIN University of Sydney, Australia University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, U.S.A.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13

1-4020-4587-5 (HB) 978-1-4020-4587-5 (HB) 1-4020-4588-3 (e-book) 978-1-4020-4588-2 (e-book)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

The Scopic Regime and the Ordering of the World

21

Chapter 2

Creatural Embodiment

57

Chapter 3

Working Bodies

95

Chapter 4

Emotion, Sociality and Embodiment

125

Chapter 5

Embodied Citizenship

149

Epilogue

169

References

177

Index

185

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several people helped me to complete this book by providing me with critical support. I take this opportunity to thank them: Luciana O’Dwyer who introduced me to Merleau-Ponty’s work many years ago and who despite her allegiances to Husserl, nonetheless encouraged my exploration of the great ‘philosopher of the body’. The late John Murphy whose philosophical conversation and commentary helped clarify my thought at a time when this project was just beginning its long gestation. My colleague Carmel Young for her sharing of insights on our non-human companions. My students in the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney for their often irreverent but always insightful discussions of embodiment. For their outstanding technical support Julie Rosenberg, Ross Blackwood and Cecilia Rigor-Aguilar. For their patience and kindness Tamara Welschot, Astrid Noordermeer and Sandra Oomkes at Springer. Finally I acknowledge the unflagging effort on the part of James Leung to support me in completing the work. His interest in the project and assistance both technically and intellectually is deeply appreciated. His ‘practitioner’ knowledge helped me to understand the relationship of hand and eye. Marjorie O’Loughlin, Sydney, October 2005

INTRODUCTION The body has been a focus of attention for a very long time in Western thought, both religious and secular. But in the last decades of the twentieth century such interest intensified and – at the beginning of the new millennium it has become ubiquitous as a theme for discussion.1 Within academic disciplines, as a topic of absorbing interest in the broader social and cultural sphere, or as the focus of the ever-expanding fields of health and personal development, the body continues to be argued about, scrutinised, redefined, reconstructed and celebrated. Talk of the body crosses diverse theoretical terrain and is the central motif in much of popular culture. Studies of consumption in modern societies have declared the body to be the site of intersecting fields of discourse, hence its frequent characterisation as a surface upon which is written various cultural codes and meanings. It is identified as a symbol of communication and, as such, can assume the status of a market phenomenon to be exploited, for example, in selling all kinds of products, from beauty aids to vacations. Moreover, while the basic events in the life of individuals are still acknowledged somehow to involve the body, increasingly such events are understood to be normalised through the interventions of experts – health professionals, counsellors, fashion gurus, lifestyle experts – who themselves symbolise specific models of bodily consumption. But contemporary views of the body, like most of their predecessors, are haunted by a paradox. In attempting to talk about the body one is immediately faced with the problem of the language used habitually in describing our experience of bodies. The difficulty is revealed when as an individual human being, I simultaneously lay claim to having a body, while also acknowledging that in some fundamental and irrefutable sense I am a body.2 Both descriptions are apt on occasions, expressing usually taken-for-granted attitudes about embodied human existence. At present the idea that I have (am the owner of ) a certain kind of body seems to have assumed a peculiar prominence in contemporary social life.3 Consumer culture presents the body as object par excellence; if images are now the currency in which our ideas of what is appropriate to think and feel about others and ourselves are constituted, then images of the body saturate everyday awareness. In consumer capitalism bodily ‘performance’ has assumed a central position in the consumption and the selling of products. This performance includes the management of others’ perceptions of our appearance, demeanour and general selfpresentation, our skill in selling ourselves in different ways, in most spheres of social life from the workplace to sexuality. Yet despite the sense of excitement and expectation which can accompany an apparently endless expansion of new meanings assigned to bodies, there remains a sense of the body objectified, as ‘object’ of the gaze and of exchange, having an undeniably public aspect. But now it is also a selfregulated body, no longer just the externally disciplined body of earlier times. This ‘inscriptive’ body – because upon it are inscribed the values, morality and law of the society – has always existed but now its ‘owner’ is more deeply than ever before implicated in the inscriptive process. It is a body which is engaged in ‘doing’ but is simultaneously that to which something is being done.4 It is a view of the body 1

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which emphasises its status as cultural phenomenon: gendered, sexed, ‘racialised, and ‘disabled’ bodies have revealed the operation of unequal and often oppressive power relations in institutional and corporate life. This approach to the study of bodies is characteristic of much recent educational writing aimed at demonstrating the manner in which bodies are imprinted through varieties of discourse with relations of power, often producing differing educational outcomes. Analyses of the ways in which discourses of race, ethnicity, class and gender are constitutive of subjectivities and the part played by schooling in this process have revealed the political nature of the educational enterprise. Critical accounts of the functioning of discourses about learning, knowledge, educational performance and so on have shown how different social positionings may produce unequal results for individuals and groups. Poststructuralist work in education, including analysis of the curriculum, has emphasised the production of particular kinds of subjectivities over time, through the regimes of institutional power, socially originating practices, and other discursive configurations. Common to the work is the understanding of the body as having an indisputably public dimension, its various meanings being contested at different times and in different places with often widely varying social and educational positioning of individuals. The concept of inscriptive or ‘discursive’ draws upon an understanding of the manner in which corporeal inscription takes place through a variety of mnemotechniques (etching or branding processes) formalised as regimes of carving meaning into or out of bodies. As such it foregrounds the microsociological level of everyday life, demonstrating that while the regulation and governance of whole populations had historically occurred through direct coercive means, the notion of discipline as it is now understood involves not only overt consent on the part of the self or subject, but also the harnessing of individuals’ own desires as disciplinary operations – the manipulation of activities of the organism itself. As is clear in the case of young children, much disciplining takes place at this level involving the construction and reconstruction of new gestures, actions, habits and skills in the creation of changing forms of subjectivity. But what distinguishes the present conditions from those of the past is that human subjectivities seem to be products of increasingly intensified self-regulation and self-management, not merely those brought forth by the external power structures of the institutions of states – or indeed by adults (parents and teachers) in their supervisory role of the young. Foucault’s account of epistemic practices has been deployed by theorists of education to show how those transformations which constitute human subjectivity are socially generated and historically specific. Examples are practices such as childrearing or pedagogical techniques – practices which, in the process of inscribing social and political powers across the body, carve such relations into the very configuring of being, and thus constitute its presence. In examining these, what we see is the shift or transformation in the way in which subjectivity is present from one age to the next. The bodies of those being educated are simultaneously shaped and compelled through disciplines: while bodies can be said to discipline themselves in a

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sense, they always do so within institutional frameworks and in discourses which are outside of themselves and whose imprint they will bear. The body is the inscribed surface of events; it is a text to be decoded and read – a locus of production, the site of contested meaning. Such accounts of the body present it as imprinted by history, even though bodies will always have to obey the laws of physiology and are indeed moulded by multiple distinct regimes.5 Bodies perform in culturally visible space – they are therefore ‘read’ by others and themselves in ways that are culturally determined. Such a characterisation of bodies reveals the manner in which they are constructed and inscribed as members of social groups such as ‘indigenous’, ‘black’, ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ and so on, and reveals the working of various kinds of imagery that assign degrees of power and control in social relations. In her complex formulation of bodies Judith Butler demonstrates the two-sided character of human beings in which bodies are simultaneously agent and instrument, that which acts but is equally acted upon by others. Her conclusion that the body is at one and the same time ‘my own’ and yet, in the public sphere, somehow ‘not mine’ raises questions that are of considerable importance to social life generally but in particular to education. In fact it this complex characterisation of the body which both informs and motivates the exploration of human embodiment which I attempt in this work. The tension between the body which is mine (that which I am?) and that which I am for others, presents particular challenges for education. Some of these can be attributed quite directly to dominant cultural imperatives in contemporary consumer societies. It is obvious that there are increasing pressures upon us to regard bodies as ‘terrain’ upon which we work in order to create and maintain forms of subjectivity that are open to the constant scrutiny and judgement of others. As we dress, exercise, shape and continually discipline our bodies through diet, medical regimens and, perhaps most significantly, through professional and personal development and improvement programs, we do so through discursively constructed norms. But over time such activities can and frequently do become projects in their own right. Now, working on the body (making it our project – and incorporating a moral, even religious, dimension) takes on the significance previously accorded other kinds of labour and there is no reason to think the effort it inspires is any less intense. Thus ‘bodywork’ represents a significant shift in focus from earlier conceptions of human labour. The school curriculum incorporates certain conceptions of bodywork; these function in complex but highly ambiguous ways to structure ‘understandings’ and attitudes regarding action and human agency. The idea of bodies as self-conscious projects has currency in contemporary literature in the social sciences as well as in everyday life. In the work of Giddens, for example, bodily passivity is meliorated by its depiction as a means of psychological absorption and satisfaction for the ‘self ’ for whom it is the crucial form of expression. Nonetheless in this depiction of the reflexive subjects of late modernity, the body remains an ‘object’ for a self which employs techniques of mastery in the process of achieving competent agency. This sort of thinking seems to be reflected

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in popular culture in which there is encouragement to produce an acceptable body. In other words the body appears to be the prime object of a monitoring consciousness.6 As such, it seems to me, there is reinforcement of a traditional mind – body dualism in which consciousness or ‘self ’ monitors and directs the body. One outcome of this may be an attitude of disdain towards the body – a deep sense of suspicion about what it might get up to if left to its own devices! Ultimately such a view lends support to the idea that there are no limitations to a rational mind’s power over its body. Much educational practice and the curriculum itself have often been predicated on such a view, with some unfortunate results. There are however, critics who detect a quite profound antipathy to the physical body in theories of discursive bodies. I refer briefly to some of these below. Although there is enormous variety in the themes and problems that such critics address, what they all have in common is not only a determined opposition to varieties of dualistic thinking about human existence, but also a specific interest in what it is to be a body which is engaged in the endless diversity of activities that characterise the human animal living in relation with its world. Philosopher and feminist Elizabeth Grosz refers to a hatred of the body which she believes is characteristic of some contemporary social theory. In a recent work The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, she urges us to go beyond merely examining how culture inscribes bodies, and to address the question of what is actually in the very nature of bodies that makes them amenable to cultural inscription. Terence Turner writes of an aversion to the carnal aspects of human existence and all that these entail for our self-understanding and self-description as embodied beings. And according to phenomenologist Thomas Csordas, it is not only reproduction and the everyday interdependence of bodies which appears to have slipped into the background, but also the body as the expression of its own needs, bodies which are in effect ourselves. In Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues moral philosopher Stuart Macintyre notes a failure to adequately recognise that we do not merely have, but are our bodies. This he relates to the repudiation of human animality, the latter being one of my major preoccupations in this book, and to which I refer as ‘creatural existence’. The issue confronting such critics and myself concerns the manner in which human subjects are situated within networks that cannot be neatly separated into ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’ categories, but must be conceived as ‘subjects’ who are not only marked by discourses but who in turn mark those very laws and codes which effect bodily inscription. Further, their work contributes in major ways to an understanding of how embodied selves, through material relations with embodied ‘others’, enact their lives. Through a variety of approaches, they draw attention to the multi-sensorial nature of the body – its creatural character – including its emotional attachments and motivations and how these function to socially immerse human beings and non-human animals in ways that reinforce neither a mind – body dualism nor the well – entrenched nature – culture dualism. Further, the work of otherwise disparate theorists such as the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and

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sociologist of science Bruno Latour suggests a creative re-thinking of the earlier subject (self ) – object (material world) dualism, by means of an ingenious ontology of the flesh in the case of the former, and an account of the ‘folding’ of humans and non-humans in the latter. Merleau-Ponty’s complex theory of perception and Latour’s explanation of the manner in which the human and non-human spheres meet and are reciprocally transformed in practice, provide valuable conceptual tools in understanding the relational nature of bodies and their worlds. The issue of relationship to world and to others is central to my exploration of embodiment, a key focus being the body’s connection to the forces which shape it. Of particular relevance therefore must be an understanding of the body’s relation to place. Lived bodies are a dynamic connection to place: that is, to the experience of the spaces which they habitually socialise through their activities great and small. Like all creatures, humans create place through expending energy; indeed the body is itself what Lefebvre calls a proto-place in that it constitutes one’s corporeal ‘here’. Place plays an animating decisive role in our individual and collective lives, according to the contemporary philosopher Edward Casey: an account of creatural existence cannot ignore the issue of ‘implacement’. It is essential therefore, in my view, to an understanding of educational practice. Scope of the work Foremost in my awareness when I think about the theme of embodiment in education is the sense-richness of human experience of the world. The senses do not merely ‘make sense’ of life but are our means of furnishing intelligibility and ultimately our capacity to reason, judge and feel as we live out our lives. Since my intention in this book is to explore those conceptions of human embodiment which emphasise creativity, responsiveness, and relationship in a non-dualistic world, the senses occupy a central place in my selection of particular themes dealing with the body. It seems to me that educational theory, policy and practice in Western consumer societies retains an allegiance to an excessively rationalistic view of mind, or forms of cognitivism, which cast it as a kind of ‘pilot’ steering a sometimes unruly or unpredictable body.7 So to better understand consciousness and its development by means of education we need to come to a renewed understanding of how the senses can teach us about the world – human and non-human, animate and inanimate. Because it deals with fundamental questions of being and knowing, my primary sources in this exploration of creatural existence are philosophical. But the work as a whole is interdisciplinary in that it draws upon social and political theory, psychology and especially cultural studies, studies in the visual and performing arts, and architecture. In particular it emphasises the requirement for returning to those discourses of the recently ignored ‘natural sciences’ which place human embodiment in the context of broader ‘natural’ orders and systems.

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My exploration begins with an examination of the functioning of vision in the inherited philosophical tradition and most particularly in contemporary culture. Since my focus is on the senses, I see this as essential because of the association of the eye and sight with major views of knowledge, truth and reality. This is followed by an examination of what I define as the creatural, and how it may be foregrounded in educational thinking and practice. The theme of ‘work and its meaning’ in an age of disembodiment is then undertaken. In examining concepts of work I am not motivated by a wish to reinstate a version of the virtue of hard labour but to show how embodiment is expressed through the productive activities of bodies, whatever these might be. Thereafter I turn to an exploration of emotion and education, a theme I see as crucial to an understanding of how people learn. A brief critique of citizenship and civics education concludes the work. Merleau-Ponty, philosopher of the body par exellence is a key resource throughout the work. I draw also upon John Dewey, particularly in terms of his explanations of the creatural and of practice. But in an enterprise of this kind there is a great variety of rich resources available, that illustrate the complexity and multidimensional nature of embodiment as a theme and as a challenge to present thinking, including in education. Thus I have drawn upon diverse theorists who share a commitment to overcoming dualistic versions of creatural life. Among them are the philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Grosz and Edward Casey. A particular kind of feminist sensibility informs my thinking on the question of human embodiment. It is the sort of feminism that understands the body first and foremost in its basically social aspect as material activity. Such feminist works include those of Irigaray, Valerie Plumwood, Carol Bigwood and in particular the writing of Megan Boler on emotion in education. Explorations of experiencing and experienced bodies of present ways of thinking about the body and a reframing of a vision of human embodiment that does justice to its active, sensuous, productive nature. The issues I examine are: the consequences for the body of the privileging of vision in our relation to the world and the dominant concept of knowledge (the scopic regime); the ‘problem’ of the body’s materiality, its corporeality and its ‘creatural’ status; the absence or disappearance of the ‘productive’ body and how we might develop anew a sense of the body as potential; the importance of recognising emotion in our account of the embodied subject; and the question of how social relations may be understood as embodied. In the following I briefly outline what is entailed in these issues before providing a short account of the significance of the work of philosophers and other theorists of the body for such a project. The scopic regime and its effects Western philosophy has had a longstanding commitment to vision as that superior sense through which a self knows the world. Since Plato, philosophical works have been replete with metaphors associating knowing with seeing and with the eye as the

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investigative tool that simultaneously distances subject from object and allows control. In an ocularcentric culture, as Michel de Certeau tells us, everything is measured by its ability to be ‘shown’, its ability to be seen.8 The historical privileging of sight has intensified with modernity, and technological innovation has resulted in a profusion of images, what Heidegger called ‘the conquest of the world as picture’. Vision is the pre-dominant means by which the world is revealed – and the world, of course, includes bodies. Thus the body is that which shows itself within discourse: it displays for us what is written upon it by discursive formations. I will critically examine the claim that our sense of vision produces hegemony of sight in cultural development and within educational theory and practice, as well as in the curriculum. In light of this I will make a case for greater attention to the multisensory experience of lived bodies which often go unremarked in the accumulation of visual experiences that make up everyday life. The epistemological privileging of vision in Western culture has had very specific effects, including the disengagement of the body from essential social and emotional connectedness. It fuels certain potentially repressive tendencies in postmodern theorising that flatten the world and disengage the subject. The dominance of the ‘scopic regime’ and the epistemological consequences arising out of the ‘snobbery of the eye’, I will argue, has had significant social and educational consequences. The claim that consciousness actually takes the form of sight and that the world we live in is itself structured in relation to an organism (ourselves) for whom sight is an essential bond to matter, is for me a convincing one.9 Nevetheless there are, I believe, significant dangers at the level of culture in vision-centredness. These need to be addressed through changed educational thinking and practice. By way of an examination of aspects of the school curriculum, specifically that of citizenship education, I will identify some ideas and practices which I hope may help us regain a sense of the multisensorial body – subject. In directing attention to the multisensoriality of the lived body, my aim is to place it, at the very least, in a complementary position to systems of representations or texts, because the body is the existential condition of the possibility for self and culture. From another perspective, I am interested to find out how knowledge, specifically educational knowledge, is corporealised. Creatural Existence While not a fixed biological entity resistant to discursive systems, the body is nonetheless anchored in a relational web that is both human and non-human, ‘cultural’ at the same time as it is ‘natural’. If bodies have become for us those objects which ‘sell’ us to others, they are also that specific possession which provides us with the means of self-recognition. They are those living, three-dimensional forms that are not only inscribed but which are also involved in inscription themselves. We are as Nietzsche and more recently Macintyre remind us, one species of animal. Although we may indeed develop from our original animal

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condition into individual, thinking agents, we remain human animals whose bodies feel joy, fear and anger, impelling them to actions that continually constructs a world they share with other species. Corporeality is the very condition for subjectivity and, since education is about the construction of subjectivities, then it is fundamentally about issues affecting incarnate bodies. An account of the nature and ontology of the body relevant to education needs to address the ever-present tendency in education towards the de-corporealisation of knowledge and to return embodied subjects to the centre of all discussions about knowing and the production of knowledge. Understanding what bodies are as well as what they become through education and other processes is essential to this investigation. The gulf that is produced in our being by the repression of the animal and the living body was recognised most dramatically (and controversially) by Nietzsche who valued the body, its explosions of power and its instinctual epistemology. For Nietzsche the repression of the senses and the passionate body are the unfortunate effects of the ascendancy of human consciousness and a conception of reason that effected its separation from vital living nature. The domestication of the material (natural) world for our consumption has been brought about through the privileging of abstraction, which is the distinguishing characteristic of modern consciousness. In Nietzsche’s philosophy the sources of human wisdom were therefore instinctual and experiential and the embodied self at once cultural and creatural, a part of nature by virtue of its animal character. What Macintyre reminds us of is our basic animality that includes, as fundamental conditions, vulnerability and dependence – characteristics having special relevance to education. Producing and re-producing bodies Merleau-Ponty notes that our body is both an object among other objects, and also one that sees and touches those objects. Taking this further, Latour argues that the body is also responsible for the creation of those objects in the world, but not as mere abstractions. The creation or ‘production’ includes the bringing forth of the artificial (material and symbolic objects) and the re-production of the human species itself. Human endeavour and the objects which are its results, the production of new human beings through the female reproductive experience are, I will argue, the key manifestations of a resonant sensuality that is fundamental to embodied existence. References to a ‘producing’ body may appear out of step in a post-industrial age, perhaps suggesting outmoded ideas about human labour. In classic depictions of exploited manual labour of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bodies of workers often revealed the mark of physical toil and the consequent ravages of poverty. The anger of many workers was directed at what was regarded as the appropriation of the bodies of workers by capital. But my account of ‘productive’ bodies aims at directing attention to bodies as potential, not merely as constrained, disciplined and inscribed by alienated labour. ‘Productive’ bodies were distinguished by the experience of doing work of specific kinds; that is, they became

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skilled bodies shaped by the continued practising of the tacit knowledge they had acquired over a long time. Thus skilled workers (including domestic ‘labourers’, male and female) interpenetrated their worlds of work and in fundamental ways were fused with it as they created material objects across the spectrum of the built and manufactured environment, private and public worlds. The bringing into being of previously non-existent objects was, at least in part, an unfolding of material culture and as such emphasised the fulfilment of human potentialities. Moreover, it could be argued that productive bodies have always in some significant sense furnished possibilities for the construction and fulfilment of identities. At a time of proliferating discourses about bodies, the labouring body finds itself to be decidedly unfashionable. This should not really surprise us; the urban based proletariat of earlier times has now declined and there have been profound alterations in the definition and configuration of work in post-industrial societies. Just as it is now often said that mass consumption rather than mass production is the distinguishing feature of late modernity, now too we may come to regard the body itself as that most desirable object of consumption. The bodies of the collectivity (workers), at least in the ‘developed’ world, have been replaced by the consuming body of the postmodern era. Nevertheless while it is true that the earlier ‘working’ body was in the main depicted as a machine, an object for external manipulation by employers, it nonetheless could also be seen as subject – that is as, active, in some cases as inventive, skilled and practised. If producing bodies are less visible in discussions, then the reproducing body is also discursively submerged. In any case the ‘mothering body’ has always been difficult to accommodate in most theorising. It was mainly of concern to feminists, some of whom, in an understandable desire to purge it of its unfortunate historical associations with brute matter and passive nature (for Merleau-Ponty its ‘incarnate situation’) have overemphasised its discursive status as representative of various groups of women. Hence it has become almost commonplace to insist upon the primacy of a discursive understanding of reproduction. But as the sociologist Arthur Frank insists, bodies do not emerge out of discourses and institutions: they emerge out of other bodies, specifically those of women. The experience of the pregnant and reproducing body somehow tend to be submerged or excessively ‘culturalised’ so that the certain living pulsation which it is, remains repressed. The approach that I take in this work is that the corporeality of the body, its materiality and its obviously ‘natural’ character, continues to challenge present thinking about inscriptive female bodies. Emotional and communicative bodies Since the body is both communicative and active, it must be regarded as a body in process of creating itself and therefore, subject. Body-subjects are not simply subject to external agency, but are simultaneously agents in their own socialconstruction of the world, unpopular as this view may now be. Gesture, body

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orientation and proximity are vehicles through which the body-subjects’ meanings are actually expressed, and expression presupposes an intersubjective encounter. If the communicative body is about the sharing of others’ embodied experience in their pleasure and happiness as well as their unease or suffering, emotion is absolutely fundamental to its functioning as embodied subject. So we need to find a way of better understanding emotion in human embodiment, and most particularly of attending to the social dimension of emotion. This suggests that a certain kind of education needs to be undergone and that all aspects of educational theory, practice and policy would need to be reassessed. That emotion has been until recently a somewhat marginalised concern in the Western philosophical tradition is now quite widely acknowledged, but its absence from versions of the inscriptive or discursive body must also be recognised. Because bodies enter specific discussions for the most part only as discursive constructions, ‘real’ bodies only construct themselves in the image of those of the dominant discourses. It is not in the nature of discourses to register the detail of our everyday relationships with our bodies, so the emotional lives of embodied subjects are usually absent. But if emotion is the wellspring of human action, it is surely nothing less than the generative point for all individual bodily dispositions, orientations and attitudes. Therefore active, producing bodies are also always emotional bodies. The thing is that most thoughtful, intelligent and caring classroom teachers are well aware of this. It seems, however, that educational theorists and policy-makers may not be quite so conscious of it. An understanding of embodied praxis requires that we address the issue of emotion, for if the body is to be understood as more than that which constitutes individual subjectivity, then it must be conceptualised in its essentially relational and interactive dimensions, not simply in its socialised form. This is precisely what feminist theorist Megan Boler has provided in her major work Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. Theorising the body as more than simply that bounded by the skin requires distancing from the notion of the passively inscribed body to that of the emotionally charged agent of embodied praxis. Such a move then emphasises its status as social phenomenon. This is the focus of Boler’s analysis. There is, I believe, a need to shift attention from the inscribed socialised (passive) body to that of the communicative, relational and interactive aspects of embodiment – that is, to the body embedded always within intersubjective relations, including those of other species and ‘the outside world’. We need therefore to think of emotion as always implicated in those activities which entail collective embodied action and the pursuit of common goals – an adequate understanding of social agency demands a concept of embodied agency. Embodied selves, expressing feelings and dispositions communicatively – that is, intersubjectively – inhabit their places in the world. So, properly understood, emotion functions as a guide to, and a preparation of, the individual’s action, itself the source of generations of social relations. The sociality of emotion is crucial to thinking about education because at present, conceptions of learners and of learning as well as dominant curriculum

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discourses all tend to confine emotion to specific areas of the curriculum and to severely limit its application in theories of learning. In terms of the latter, there is an assumption that the familiar independent reasoning or cognition are the crucial ingredients in the acquisition of knowledge. As educators we know, of course, that student learning does not occur for individuals without emotional involvement – the emotional depth that is necessary for an accurate assessment of one’s own situatedness as a learner in a social context, only occurs when there is a developing awareness in each of us of our involvement with others – and that involvement is always emotional at some level. In exploring this theme I draw not only on Boler’s work but also, on the sociological literature notably on the works of Lyon and Barbalet as well as Maffesoli. Corporeality and the world In the works of Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Dewey, as in that of MacIntyre and others, we encounter the body as the centre of the experiential world. Because our bodies are constantly in interaction with our environment, world and self continually inform and reshape each other. These philosophers of the body provide an immensely rich source of ideas for thinking about revitalisation of embodied subjectivity in social life and in education. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche showed that the body and its various parts are acculturated through a great variety of practices, including those that libidinalise the body. It is Nietzsche as champion of the passionate and sensuous ‘natural’ body, critic of Cartesian rationalism, interpreter of Darwin, existentialist and philosopher of process, whom I want to draw upon in the rehabilitation of the experiencing and experienced body. In his advice to ‘start from the body’ and ‘employ it as a guide’, he acknowledges this body’s naturalism, its (organic) materialism and most importantly its potential. For Nietzsche it is the body that is the sole source of any truth that could be achieved. The peculiar structure of our senses – evolved over a very long time – renders the world the way it is for us, and so we think in the ways we do because of the kinds of bodies we have. A different kind of biology would yield a different universe. As Lakoff and Johnson acknowledge in their comprehensive and critical work Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, it is the body rather than the mind which interprets the world. I would add that what ‘knows’ are our multiple sensory powers which are the very ground of those imaginary constructs by which we live and flourish. In his day Dewey insisted that we acknowledge the body’s primacy, but it would not have been a body comprising only an inscribed surface upon which are written the discourses of the culture but rather a feeling, thinking, desiring, willing, vital, material agent. In order to understand human being and becoming, that despised object – the body – must be reinvested with all its interests and passions. Nietzsche’s materialism, like Deweyan naturalism, invites us to rediscover the body as locus of all human action. Both reject the aristocratic status given to reason and spirit in the

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Western philosophical tradition and emphasise that it is the characteristic mode of human beings to affectively think about their experience and thereby to create significance for themselves. The creation of meaning must surely be the paramount aim of education. For me thinking, reasoning and cognition are in fact simply specialised functions of our basic bodily ‘drives’ distilled and refined over time. Consciousness is not to be thought of in absolute terms but rather is present only to the extent that it is useful. It is philosophers who have placed their trust in ‘concepts’ at the expense of the senses, thereby elevating consciousness as an ideal and final attainment. Such philosophical idealism was, for Nietzsche, insupportable. Consciousness and ideas, he believed, are only generated out of the will to truth and power. Concepts are true only to the extent that they are the very conditions of life for us. We cannot do without them precisely because they are the means by which we chart our perilous path in a chaotic world. Embodied subjects produce ideas, beliefs, values unavoidably as they battle to maintain their ongoing existence. As Nietzsche reminded us our ‘lust’ for knowledge of nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself. Philosophising, as with all ‘intellectual’ activity, is at base a part of our attempt at survival. Both Dewey and Nietzsche acknowledged the working of the body of emotion and desire in ‘knowing’ the world, Dewey noting that preference and temperament played the key role in deciding what to believe, Nietzsche identifying ‘the will to power’ as the wellspring of human action. For each, ideas have their root in desire and the interests of the body. Ideas arise out of the desire to know; those which survive are those which are most vigorously pursued and forcefully insisted on as ‘truth’. For Dewey the ideas that survive are the ones that work. Thus mind/body, mental/manual dualisms are basically pseudo-problems. The issue was not about how the material and non-material could ever interact, but rather why it is that experience in all its variety and complexity ever comes to be distinguished at all. The answer to this key question had of course already been provided by Nietzsche, who showed that in order for us to control our physical environment (matter, the organic realm) in any way at all we had essentially to ‘mentalise’ it to distinguish it from the material realm. So reasoned reflection and so-called primary (bodily) experience are not descriptions of two separate realms which human beings straddle, but rather they exist on a continuum upon which, for Nietzsche, consciousness is merely ‘the latest and last development’ of the bodily organs. The idea therefore that experience can only be meaningfully talked about when emptied of its physicality and materiality so that only then can it be seen as an essentially knowledge issue, is one of the major mistakes of the philosophical tradition. The privileging of cognition at the expense of the totality of complex processes constituting the ‘intercourse of the living being with its environment’ reinforces a view of ourselves that is not only impoverished but also dangerous. When incorporated uncritically into the educational curriculum it may have disastrous consequences.

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Overcoming dualisms: Merleau-Ponty and body-subjects Merleau-Ponty’s work and that of others I have mentioned are in my view, central to any genuine attempt at furnishing a compelling account of lived embodiment. The extraordinary richness of Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment as simultaneously subjective and objective, ‘mental’ and material, personal and interpersonal, natural and social, provides a remarkable resource for the project of recovering the experiencing and the experienced body for education. Merleau-Ponty assigned a central role to the body as the subjective matrix of experience. His conception of the body-subject as effective agent emphasised its intersubjectivity, which is to be understood as an historically situated and institutionally configured social order. It is the concept of perception which renders his account of embodiment significant. Perception is not about objects in the world affecting subjects. Rather the perceptual field itself is constituted through the articulation of body and world. It is an entirely in-the-world affair in which there is quite simply something which is seen. Perceivers become decentred in relation to the visible world. The perceptual field which ‘constitutes’ the perceiving subject, surrounds that subject as far as the eye can see so that perceiver and perceived are relational beings. This suggestion of a common visibility, a presence of each to the other in a mode of equality of status allows not just the animate seer (persons or other species) to grasp others, but also places the non-animate in a position of viewer. As I will show later in this work, this original way of thinking has important ramifications for our understanding of materiality. It also provides an effective antidote to that ocularcentrism which characterises much of contemporary culture and as such, I maintain, provides us with a splendid opportunity to redefine what might be envisaged by the term ‘multisensorial education’. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is always a multisensorial embodied experience. It consists in meaning-generation: the actual seeing, hearing, tactile encountering on the part of embodied sentient beings. Mind cannot be a separate entity from the body since it is the body that furnishes the meaningful configuration of senses which is the process of perception. The body’s ‘visible-tangible presence’ is crucial to perception in Merleau-Ponty’s account; as percipient, one is always positioned – one always perceives from somewhere, and it is one’s visible, tangible presence which furnishes this ‘somewhere’. Merleau-Ponty’s argument is that we cannot even begin to talk about perception without a theory of embodiment as the perspective from which each and every observation must occur. So a fuller understanding of daily living actually depends upon our both having (a body) and being embodied. The account of enfleshment which Merleau-Ponty’s last work The Visible and the Invisible contains is one of the most illuminating insights we have into the problem of understanding lived bodies as systems of possible actions through the meshing of these bodies with the perceptible world. He revolutionises the customary idea of the ‘thing’ and the ‘world’ by moving the usual boundary between subject and object to situate it anew within the body. Flesh thus comes to incorporate bodily

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being but, crucially, is not confined to it. As embodied perceivers we always already belong to, or are ‘of’, a surface from which we can never be regarded as completely separated. Embodiment therefore is not a matter of humans being mere objects in space. It always involves a form of perception based in behaviour: in looking, listening and touching, all of which are acquired as cultural, habit-based forms of conduct. For Merleau-Ponty the experience of embodiment is like nothing else we have throughout our lives – it is in fact the very basis for our having all experience. Our bodies are nothing less than our characteristic way of being in the world. Unpacking what exactly is entailed in this ‘characteristic way’ is, I think, a major task for education. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of carnality allows us to make sense of the social dimension of embodiment. He presents the practice of communication as always being generated from within social contexts and therefore it always pertains to the specificities of individual body-subjects’ situatedness. We speak from our ‘place’ to others also ‘placed’ that is, to say, positioned in space, or as Cataldi describes it ‘ecologically niched’. Bodies speak and are spoken to in this communicative configuration. The double process of speaking and being spoken to underscores an important point: embodied agency can be seen as reflexive agency, and because this agency arises out of the reality of language exchange as well as other intersubjective activities (bodily actions and positionings), then particular attention should be paid to regimes of embodied action or body repertoires which constitute the intersubjective world. These are realms of shared meanings participated in by bodysubjects in the mutually cooperative transformation of their world. Body subjects, by virtue of their involvement with the social world, develop culturally typical ways of being and doing. These need to be recognised and understood, particularly as they play out for differently embodied subjects in educational and broader social contexts. Merleau-Ponty’s work is critical for the discussions about embodiment and education in its own right as a major contribution in phenomenology, but also because of its important interconnections with other thinkers. For example, his work on the body, like that of Dewey’s on the complexity of embodied experience, drew upon the psychology and neuroscience of the period in which he lived. His contributions can be configured as carnal sociology because of its insistence that forms of embodiment are always routinised and habituated within a culturally configured world. Last but not least, Merleau-Ponty’s work provides a particularly useful way of conveying a sense of the material dimension to connectedness and fundamental sociality that avoids the restriction to surface notions of the inscribed body. Dewey’s unity of the embodied human being In his articulation of the nature of human practice, Dewey insisted that consciousness is a constructive function of action but that emotion is the engine of all

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activities. He concentrates attention on the body with all of its interests and passions as the locus of all human activity. In Experience and Education Dewey wrote of the continued growth of flesh and blood human beings in their social relations noting that life itself is this very growth and development and nothing more. Education therefore has as its end the ongoing interaction of embodied individuals in their social context. Thus Dewey’s naturalism reveals its social character; his focus on the social is the correlative of his naturalism. Meaning which is unavoidably social, emerges from embodied cooperative human activity. By ongoing participation in the activities of a group, individuals learn to respond with habitual orientations to the ‘charged stimuli’ of their environments. Embodied communication is the way in which, over time, people grasp things in common and come to partake of communication in a communal understanding. This, in my view, is the very foundation for effective citizenship. Dewey’s understanding of human embodiment is clearly outlined in his account of the ‘unity’ of the human being. In this he provides a critique of the Cartesian subject, noting that the boundaries by which we have been accustomed to mark off the human being are very different from the energies and organisation of energies which make her a unified human being. Whereas we can grasp the boundaries – the skin – at a single moment, on the other hand we can grasp the unity only as something occurring in a stretch of time. Despite this complex reality, the view of the person as being that which is encapsulated within the skin remains firmly fixed within the dominant culture. Yet we cannot grasp what is entailed in being an embodied subjectivity unless we understand the interaction that internal bodily processes have with the environment outside of the skin. As Dewey reminds us, entire philosophical systems have been built up by treating thinking about the self as if it had no connection with the activities the body executes in the environment, including, notably, those bringing satisfaction and enjoyment. Through language and gesture, which go beyond the individual body’s neural structures and processes, the human collectivity participates. So it is that by means of this process, things beyond the body (‘other’ bodies) are engaged with in a neverending communication with the environment and with them. There is always an active, operative presence of environing conditions in the activities of a human being. Dewey points out that when a human being loses integration with the medium in which it lives it then loses integrity ‘within itself’, thereby developing pathologies and other psychic disturbances. The environment about which Dewey writes so compellingly is always social – it is the world of interpersonal relations. For him there simply is no single human activity or experience that is not socially originating.

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Bodies in education The body is both a problem and a challenge for educational thinking and practice at the present time. Education, I will argue, remains embedded in a culture which, though in many respects still adhering to a basic Cartesian dualism, nevertheless has undergone a peculiar transformation or taming at the hands of discourse. Thus earlier formulations such as the mental/manual distinction in knowledge, the theory/ practice, consciousness/world dichotomies, the reduction of experience to mere knowledge experience, continue to influence educational thinking. But in many places these older conceptions now sit uneasily beside a (partially) textualised curriculum and discursively constructed accounts of learners, teaching and knowledge. At the formal and institutional levels the curriculum is still to a large extent evaluated in terms of whether or not it conforms to standards of rationality and abstraction. In this traditional approach the body had long been denigrated and despised. But now as the sole object of social and political discourses in education (as the inscriptive body) it may be lapsing into silence, a mere surface upon which history and culture write themselves. The task therefore is to bring to light the body as multidimensional, as agent and as locus of all possible action. As a teacher and philosopher of education, and drawing upon the work of the philosophers of the body and other writers on corporeality, I want students to come to a critical understanding that the act of knowing is always replete with the relations and connections that accompany experience. In other words I hope to help them to understand that arriving at knowledge is not a mere end-product, a set of abstractions stripped bare of all that is experiential and sensuous. So I have posed such questions as the following: If the maintenance and enhancement of the body is the mainspring of the desire to know (as Nietzsche tells us) then how, for example, does the highest-status knowledge in the present curriculum reflect this, and how closely is that knowledge linked to everyday human experience? To even begin to address such questions requires that all of us, students and teachers, reflect upon what has been our own experience of embodiment. Educational theorists have often appeared to be rather uncomfortable with the brute fact of corporeality. Their discussions of cognition, social phenomena, and the development of intellectual skills or moral reasoning have been frequently carried out as if bodies were something of an embarrassment. Moreover, the body has been largely absent from work on academic performance and achievement (except of course in the areas of physical education and sport and some more peripheral areas in the curriculum). Motility and gesture – the somatic – have been relegated to the margins of educational research into the process of knowledge gaining, of ‘becoming educated’. We have tended to accept that the body will be absent in our accounts of the construction of human knowledge and this absence is echoed in our research on how and what our students know. Therefore to understand what is really involved in the making of different kinds of epistemic subjects I think we must now

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focus with determination on the corporeality, emotionality and sociality of human beings and their material processes. The relationship of the body to place and space may seem to be dealt with in a variety of ways in the present educational curriculum. Yet it is arguable that students really have opportunities for exploring the multiplicity of experiences and behaviours associated with often contested and potentially conflictual places, spaces and environments within which as differently embodied, socially constructed subjects they live. For example, is an examination of issues of spatial meanings and spatial behaviour, awareness of boundaries and territoriality, its history in human affairs and significance today, available to them in a way that is not purely theoretical and abstract? How are the place preferences and collective attitudes towards ‘environment’ of significantly different social groups (and I have in mind here a global, not just a local comparison) conceived as natural and social? What are the experiences of embodied sociality that could be encapsulated in the curriculum, such that students may come to be aware of the deepest meanings generated in their common corporeal experience? As I have noted, there has been a movement within the social sciences away from the notion of human productivity through embodied interaction and a turn towards the discursively constructed body as an object of scrutiny. In its current educational forms the latter emphasises the health of the individual body, the cultivation of healthy lifestyle habits, advice on individual sexual behaviour, establishing patterns of regular exercise, much advice on diet and so on. Most of this material is incorporated into learning or curriculum areas which could be said to have an underlying social theme, but which remain conceptually and theoretically underdeveloped. What is missing here is the recognition of the role of the body as an agent within a world of bodies – producing bodies – that is, bodies which are not only dieted, clothed, shaped and groomed but crucially bodies which work (in all sorts of ways) and in so doing transform themselves and their world. In consumerist societies there are, as Lyons and Barbarlet point out, no competing images with the ‘consuming’ body. Such a body is increasingly passive – it is the body we ‘have’ and the body we do things to.12 It is, in other words, the body which is disciplined by regulatory discourses and which we own, but which, strangely, we are not.13 A central concern of this work therefore is to attempt to answer the following question: How can education be specifically concerned with those ‘lost’ dimensions of ourselves that had resisted instrumental rationality in past generations, but that have now become the object of violence inflicted by others, or, increasingly, by ourselves? Civic life and the embodied citizen Nowhere are the questions and issues raised above of greater importance than in the area of citizenship education. I think this area of the curriculum shows most starkly the contemporary crisis of the body. In an age in which individuals are being

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educated to see themselves primarily (and in many places, only) as consumers, and private consumers at that, the lived body and the body as natural, social and cultural force has become submerged. Educating the body is not an idea encountered in most programs of citizenship education today. Ideas about democracy and the development of democratic dispositions as a way of being do not at present include the body. The development of democratic dispositions is for the most part seen to be a strictly cognitive affair and there is a profound conviction on the part of some that emotion and affect have nothing to do with the process of educating young people for participation in civic life. One of the major problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century concerns the basic process of social reproduction – the means by which society maintains itself, how it reproduces effectively socialised people who have the capacity for meaning-creation and the will to engage in a wide variety of socially useful and individually satisfying projects. The decline of sociality, a shrinking of preparedness to participate in activities in groups and in the community, is accompanied by an increase in the consumption of cultural products (television programs, videos, computer games) as a largely individual and often isolated activity. Enormous changes in employment opportunities, workplace practices and an increasing lack of security about economic survival in a globalising world, contribute to a fragile social fabric, one in which ‘social capital’ is fast evaporating. Citizenship education meantime remains anchored in a view of both self, society and nation that has contributed to a diminished sense of agency while at the same time presiding over the dismantling of meaning for individuals and nations. Developing a sense of citizenship that is an embodied one, that takes account of emotional community and collective sensibility, is in my view essential for a form of citizenship education that is relevant to the future. The key question for me is: How can the body be enabled to create the forms of civic life? In the final chapter of this work I will suggest what is necessary for citizenship education to bring this about. Directions of Discussion In Chapter 1, I address the theme of the scopic regime and its various cultural influences upon understandings of the body. The aim of this chapter is to provide an insight into the ways in which vision has been privileged in Western thought at the expense of the other senses. The ramifications of this for educational thinking and practice, past and present, will be explored, and implications for what I call multisensorial education will be outlined. In Chapter 2, I explore in some depth the idea of the lived body, contrasting it with that of the discursive body. The theme here is that of the implaced creatural body. I will discuss how this might be renaturalised without a diminution in human agency. In this connection, I will argue for a particular conception of ‘education in the flesh’. Chapter 3 focuses attention on the decline of the ‘producing’ and ‘re-producing’ bodies and the problem of how to recover a sense of vital, potent embodiment that

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gives full rein to human creativity. I will mount a case here for emphases on certain sorts of subject matter in the curriculum, and specific practices to be undertaken in the service of providing what I will call ‘education for meaningful existence’. In Chapter 4, I undertake a study of the role of emotion, particularly with regard to an understanding of the notion of human sociality. I will attempt to sketch-in the significance of these for educational theorising and practice. Finally, in Chapter 5 I conclude the work by addressing the theme of citizenship and education, arguing that effective education in this crucial area of the curriculum demands a strong sense of the lived body if it is to be meaningful. NOTES 1. There is an enormous contemporary literature on the body, approaching the theme from a variety of perspectives. The Continental European tradition in philosophy has yielded Merleau-Ponty’s ‘bodysubject’ and later the ‘disciplined’ body of the work of Foucault. Deleuze and Guattari have contributed the idea of the body without organs. Social theorists such as Turner, Hepworth, Featherstone, Csordas, Frank, Barbalet, Lyon, Elias and Falk have commented extensively on the difficulties that arise in current theorising on the body. Feminists on the body include Irigaray, Bordo, Grosz, Gatens and Butler – and there are many more. Important collections such as Donn Welton’s Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile’s (editors) Places Through the Body, and the monumental three-part Fragments for a History of the Human Body edited by Michael Feher, present immensely rich and varied accounts of human embodiment. The journal Body and Society is admirable for the breadth and depth of its multidisciplinary discussions of issues of the body and embodiment. 2. Among contemporary philosophers, Alasdair Macintyre makes the point strongly when in Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999), he reminds us that we do not merely, have, but are, our bodies. The inadequacy of language to describe the reality of human embodiment is noted with characteristic lucidity and wit by Terry Eagleton in his critique The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996). A particular complexity however needs to be borne in mind regarding the problem of language and the body. The issue of ‘having’ or ‘being’ a body is obviously one that arises in Anglophone discussions. The German language has two different terms to refer to the body, ‘Korper’ and ‘Leib’, the former referring both to bodies other than my own and to a corpse, the latter to the living body with its sensations, feelings and perceptions. The histories of the terms Leib, Korper, life and the English ‘body’ are intertwined in interesting ways, as are those terms used to refer to self, body, person etc in many other cultures including those of China and Africa. 3. I am aware of the fact that the term ‘contemporary’ society is highly problematic. What I have in mind are what are variously referred to as ‘Western’, ‘late capitalist’ or more commonly, postmodern or consumer capitalist societies. Having lived and worked in places that do not fit any of these descriptions, but whose peoples and cultures have insights about embodiment of great depth and sophistication, I acknowledge the rather narrow scope of reference of this work. 4. This crucial notion of the body as ‘doing’ and ‘being done to’ is to be found in Judith Butler’s work. Elizabeth Grosz has described bodies at the present time as ‘more amenable, malleable and more subordinate to mind or will than ever before’.

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5. Amongst post-structuralists Judith Butler’s work is notable for its treatment of the question of the ‘material’ body. Butler refers to the processes of materialisation – for example, sex is an ideal construct which is ‘forcibly materialised through time, it is not a “fact” or static condition of the body’. She is, however, clear on her insistence that bodies are public sites as well as being ‘one’s own’. 6. I agree with several critics of Giddens’ conception of consciousness that it is an essentially strategiccognitive ego, one that keeps the body under regulation (see for example Lash & Urry’s Economies of Signs & Space and Anthony Elliot’s Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction). One is also reminded of what Bruno Latour refers to as the earlier ‘mind-in-the-vat’ version of Kantian constructivism in which the transcendental Ego dictated most of the world’s laws, laws it has extracted from itself without help from anyone else’ (Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, p. 6). 7. I refer here to much ‘developmental’ theory that has been influential in education (especially in teacher education), that has emphasised ‘mental’ or cognitive development largely without reference to the body; but also to more recent analyses of race and gender which emphasise discursive construction, while ignoring lived embodiment. 8. The critique of ocularcentrism by French thinkers in the twentieht century include works of Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Derrida and Irigaray. Martin Jay, in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century Thought, provides a comprehensive treatment of this critique. Michel de Certeau’s discussion of vision is to be found in his The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1984. 9. In his thought-provoking book Thinking Matter, Joseph Catalano makes the point that the only consciousness we can know about is that which takes the form of sight. 10. The habit is to be found not only within the curriculum itself but also in theories of knowledge, learning theory and pedagogy, much of which ignores or at least minimises the role of emotion. 11. The centrality of love and empathy to solidarity was an idea that, before Marx, had attracted Feuerbach. 12. Lyon and Barbalet believe that the prominence of the consumerist ‘body’ is a function of the fact that the mental has achieved complete domination over the manual. It is an issue I take up later in this work. 13. In one of the strongest of the inscriptive accounts, for example, that of Gayatri Spivak, the body’s materiality is inaccessible to us and knowledge of the body is achieved only through mediation (it is therefore in a sense the body which we are not). Spivak’s claim supports the view that there are merely ‘thinkings’ of the systematicity of the body, there are only ‘value codings of the body’, culminating in the view that ‘the body as such cannot be thought’. If we still want to retain the language of materialism all we can say is that ‘materialisation’ is effected through discourse as language and by means of (discursive) practice: bodies are materialised through discourse as both word and deed. The notion of materiality in play here directs attention to the idea of a discursive construction by means of the process of material constitution itself. As with Foucault, emphasis lies in the manner in which subjects are gradually, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, and so on.

CHAPTER 1

THE SCOPIC REGIME AND THE ORDERING OF THE WORLD The new fascination with modes of seeing and the enigmas of visual experience evident in a wide variety of fields may well be token of a paradigm shift in the cultural imagery of our age.1

The ramifications for human embodiment of a continually globalising culture cannot be underestimated. There are many possible paths that could be taken in attempting to gain some understanding of these. One way is to explore the power and influence exercised upon individuals by globalising forces through an exploration of the peculiar role, status and functioning of vision as an immensely powerful cultural trope in consumer societies.2 I have selected this theme because the visual model of mind has played a central role in the Western intellectual tradition, and seeing and knowing have had the longest association in that tradition, making vision enormously epistemologically significant. It seems to me that the paradigm of seeing, of vision, is without doubt central to any discussion of present social conditions and therefore relevant to education. As I have outlined in the Introduction the focus of my exploration is the multisensorial experiences of lived bodies. This requires an engagement on my part with those forms of analysis which have taken as their central theme vision and its function, not merely as one of the senses, but also as the most powerful symbol of how, as humans, we understand and relate to the world. A key element in such an undertaking is to address the variety of concerns raised by critics about the power of images, and what theorists of visual culture such as Nicholas Mirzoeff call ‘the postmodern globalisation of the visual as everyday life’.3 The image now sits at the centre of global culture; there is a seemingly inexhaustible process of production and circulation of images that distinguishes contemporary life. Individuals are exposed to a succession of images flowing across every realm of culture including the workplace and the home. Such a veritable avalanche of images could not have been predicted even fifty years ago. As cultural analyst Mieke Bal comments: …period of scarcity when images were relatively rare is currently yielding to an economy of plenty or of excess in which television, cinema, newspapers, magazines, books, advertising, design and the internet all participate in making the social fabric scintillate with the profusion of images.4

In the past decade the volume of images circulating globally has increased massively both in terms of distribution and consumption. The process of distribution of images has been accelerated by advances in electronic technology. This frequently has the effect of detaching them from their origin, simultaneously 21

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rendering them ephemeral, ahistorical and decontextualised. Cultural boundaries, previously serving to frame and preserve specific imagistic traditions, now dissolve, allowing the merging and reshaping of images in ways that could not previously have been foreseen. But however ubiquitous images may be, claims concerning their psychological effects on individuals need to be carefully assessed. The belief that we are somehow overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of visual representations in ways that are quite different from that of earlier times remains open to question. While we may from time to time appear to suffer from a kind of ‘vision-fatigue’ (bombarded by the succession of images conveyed on television screens, at the cinema or on the Internet), there will nevertheless be significant difference in the responses of the individual to this. So perhaps quantity is not really the issue. As Camiel Van Winkel argues, it may be not that there is an actual overabundance of visual representations but, on the contrary, a perennial sense of insufficiency with regard to them. As recent events such as the terrorist bombings in London and the war in Iraq illustrate, the imperative to visualise is the driving force of contemporary culture – a drive in which there is relentless pressure to see what has happened. The demand is for the constant provision of new and enhanced sites for the production of images. Van Winkel writes of a ‘regime of visibility’ that permeates all levels of culture and society ‘from centre to margin, from high to low’.5 The quantity of images is therefore less powerful than the imperative to visualise. If the world is now presented to us most convincingly through the lens of the camera, by means of television footage, or via images on the Internet, what then might the ramifications be for creatural embodiment? Is the body in its multiple sensory dimensions somehow diminished by this excessive attention to sight, to vision, to the eye? We might ask therefore what ‘pleasures’ are afforded through vision and, indeed, what ‘pains’ do they bring? And not least, what are the ramifications for education of a vision-dominant culture? These broad and complex questions raise some of the most significant issues for a re-examination of the situated, fleshy, creative self. In this chapter, I will address them by focusing on three of the most important themes arising out of critical work on ‘the hegemony of the eye’, best known in the relevant literature as the problem of ‘ocularcentrism’. Beginning with critics of ocularcentrism in the philosophical tradition, and drawing strongly upon a wide range of other resources, I explore the issue of ‘visuality’ and its cultural implications for a corporeal subjectivity that is not only project, but practice, and thus the very source of its experiential world. This discussion of the dominance of the eye is intended as both a ground-clearing exercise and an introduction to themes outlined in the Introduction, which will be revisited in subsequent chapters dealing with creatural existence. I begin with the theme of the eye and vision because it foregrounds the notion of multisensorial education.

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Ocularcentrism and its critics: The hegemony of the eye There have been many critics of ‘ocularcentrism’, and their work is diverse in orientation.6 By no means is all of the work philosophical in character, but undeniably philosophers have provided the sharpest critiques. Some refer to a preoccupation with the world as picture, that is a predominantly visually represented world. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger located the origins of the problem of ocularcentrism in classical Greek philosophy, and associate it with Hellenic thought’s privileging of sight over the other senses, as well as with the special status in classical times accorded light in enabling human beings to know the world.7 Although the critiques of ocularcentrism in Nietzsche and Heidegger take different paths with differing emphases, they have in common the view that the worst tendencies of an earlier age of vision dominance have been intensified in modernity. For Nietzsche the privileging of vision was part of the general denigration of the body and its displacement from its rightful place as the source of all (multisensorial) experience, while for Heidegger vision’s hegemony was further entrenched by technological invention permitting the eye to strengthen its grasp on the world. Both saw ocularcentrism as reducing and restricting the individual’s experience of the world, thereby impoverishing human existence. Beyond attributing the origin of a vision-centred world view to classical Greek thinking, many critics disagree to a greater or lesser extent over subsequent manifestations of ocularcentrism in Western culture: for example, on the extent to which the Middle Ages in Europe could also be said to have privileged vision above other senses. However there is more general agreement on the sources of modern ocularcentrism, which is traced back to Descartes’ philosophy and to Cartesian perspectivalism.8 What Martin Jay calls ‘the vigorous privileging of vision’ accompanied the technical advances, marking the dawning of the modern era. At the present time ocularcentrism, according to its many critics, is the foundation of the scopic regimes that are said to ‘order’ the world. This ordering has many aspects, and a variety of effects – one of which is particularly relevant to the project of recovering the body for education. I refer to the manner in which major aspects of technology and culture have appeared simultaneously to order the world by firstly separating and then downgrading the other senses. However, this effacement of the other senses is not simply a characteristic of postmodernity; on the contrary, it has roots in much earlier times. The contemporary phenomenologist Drew Leder is among the many who discern a ‘certain telos’ toward disembodiment in Western intellectual history.9 Central to this, he argues, is the privileging of the eye and vision. David Michael Levin, in one of his major works The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation, deploys phenomenological psychology and critical hermeneutics to link human suffering and injustice to certain predatory modes of vision. Others have argued that sight is accorded pre-eminence among the senses, and thinking itself has been

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thought of in terms of ‘seeing’. Sloterdijk regards the eyes as having been the organic prototype of philosophy per se, his most radical claim being that a large part of philosophical thinking is itself merely ‘eye reflex’, ‘eye dialectic’ and ‘seeing oneself see’.10 In classical Greek thought certainty was grounded in the visual, a theme which is later given fresh force in Descartes’ account of seeing and knowing; it is, in effect, a valorisation of a disembodied eye. Plato held sight to be humanity’s greatest gift; his notion of the ‘mind’s eye’ has been a significant one in Western thought, not least for much later theories of mind and cognition, but also because of its assertion that ethical universals are available to the mind’s eye. Plato’s emphasis on the purified soul, the centrality of the cogito and Cartesianism all tend towards an account of the human being as characterised pre-eminently by an immaterial rationality. Classical Greek philosophy abounds with metaphors of knowing as seeing. Inseparable from this is the depiction of light as the invisible medium giving access to a knowable world.11 In Greek thought visibility represents the ultimate certainty of a reality that must be confirmed visually. The immateriality of sight made it for Aristotle the most important and most noble of all the senses: sight for him approximated the intellect more nearly in that it is relatively ‘immaterial’ in its knowing, the other senses assuming an inferior position. However, as I noted earlier, the claim that the ocular bias of classical times regarding knowledge and the senses has persisted in an unbroken line to the present is problematic. There is considerable disagreement among scholars across disciplines about the extent to which pre-modern European society could be described as ocularcentric in orientation.12 Certainly the high status accorded vision is to be found in pre-modernity, but so too is the acknowledgement of the functioning of the other senses. In the Renaissance the five senses were configured as a natural hierarchy from vision as the highest down to touch as the lowliest, each being related to the image of the cosmic body: thus, vision was equated with fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth.13 But the increase in importance of vision culturally is directly an outcome of the invention of perspectival representation in art, which is thought to have rendered the eye the focal point of the perceptual world as well as placing it at the very heart of the notion of the self.14 Perspectival representation itself is transmuted into a symbolic form, one which not only describes but also conditions perception. However, there were other factors, and these had to do with the developing of quantification techniques in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a brief discussion of which I undertake further on. While a detailed account of the status of the various senses in relation to knowledge in the early centuries of the Christian Church, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and so on into modernity, is beyond the scope of this book, nevertheless it is worth noting that by the time of the infusion of a Platonic element into Christianity in the twelfth century, the already existing separations of human beings from ‘nature’, incorporeal mind, and spirit from body, were well established, as too was the latter’s association with (inferior) matter. Such beliefs had deep roots, at

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least in the ‘high’ culture of the time. These separations fitted well with the Christian repudiation of the body, nature and the feminine, remaining to later underpin the innovations of Cartesianism on the nature of mind, thinking and the human being. Despite vigorous contestation of these ideas both in Descartes’ time and at the present time, they continue to influence our understanding of ourselves and of the world.15 The idea, for example, that we ‘see’ with ‘our minds’ continues to have currency both in the wider culture but also within educational thinking. Nevertheless, while the arguments of anti-ocularcentrists are compelling in many respects, they also need to be approached with caution. This applies as much to claims regarding the founding Platonic myth about vision and knowledge as to later intellectual trends and material change that underlay them. Plato’s account of knowledge and human grasping of it actually reveals a more complex attitude to vision. His position was one of scepticism about the reliability of all of the senses (not only sight, but certainly including it) in regard to knowing the world, rather than an uncritical acceptance of the superiority of vision in gaining knowledge. We can look for example at his repudiation of the arts, specifically at his distrust of painting which he forbade any place in the ideal state as described in The Republic, and his dislike of theatre because of its illusory nature. Interestingly music, because it shares with mathematics an imitative relationship to the loftier realm of the forms, was acceptable. Nevertheless, as the architect Juhani Palasmaa has pointed out knowledge has become analogous with clear vision, and light the metaphor for truth. Indeed the notion of sight has not only been made analogous to cognition but also to other sensory dimensions as well. Since the Greeks the philosophical writings of the West have been characterised by ocular metaphors regarding knowledge and perception. In my view the story of visual pre-eminence cannot be told purely by reference to philosophical and cultural – historical studies, no matter how critical in tenor. Ongoing work in the natural sciences has crucial insights to contribute to debates concerning the dominance of the eye. Broadening the disciplinary purview allows one to assess afresh the complexity of arguments mounted by critics of ocularcentrism. An important outcome of this expanded investigation is the emergence of a particular distinction – that between vision’s functioning in perceptual experience of individuals on the one hand, and what Jay identifies as vision as cultural trope, on the other. The latter has been the focus of philosophical and social critiques of cultural discourse, and these continue to provide important understandings of ocularcentrism. But I think they now need to be supplemented by a wider set of intellectual resources. Therefore, while I have neither the expertise nor the space to address in any detail those contributions from the natural sciences here, nonetheless I accept that they are essential to a full consideration of the significance of vision in creatural life. The processes involved in visual perception, research into optics, the working of the eye in creatures of all species, are legitimate objects of investigation. Research and debate occurs within and across a range of fields from the neuro-sciences and

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psychology to zoology and marine biology. Sight is undeniably a function of physiology and thus evolution, a genetically determined capacity arising in the socalled natural realm. The work of Andrew Parker, for example, on the ‘Cambrian explosion’ from which the eye emerged and the number of phyla or animal classifications multiplied rapidly, dramatically emphasises the point that sight matters.16 We cannot simply do away with it, even if we are repelled by the cultural hegemony of the eye. Therefore if we want to understand why vision seems to have monopolised the other senses and why it exerts cultural dominance, then there are some basic biological and evolutionary realities to be acknowledged. These include the fact that most of the body’s receptors are located in the eye, that light enters only through the eye and that the behavioural system of human beings has already been shaped by vision throughout its evolutionary history. It is on this basis that the contemporary philosopher Joseph Catalano takes a definitive position with respect to vision and consciousness, his argument being that our bond to the world can only be by means of our organs of which sight is primary.17 For Catalano, human consciousness has emerged in such a way that vision is essential; the only consciousness that we know about is one in which sight is the dominant aspect. Regardless of illusions or errors in perception, regardless of issues of interpretation, regardless of how the great weight of culture and tradition presses down upon our sense impressions of the world, Catalano argues that with its basic differentiation, the world is the way it is because our body is the way it is, with the eye as the initial means of contact we have with it. This is a strong statement from biology about of the pre-eminence of the eye and the dominance of vision in embodied individuals’ relations with the world. Put this way it does seem to present an unequivocal claim for the superiority of vision amomg the senses. Attractive as I find Catalano’s argument, I am concerned that it could be used to support a kind of visual determinism relying not only on a significant downgrading of the other senses but also ultimately on a narrow identification of the concept of mind with the brain, an idea successfully contested by philosophers of embodied mind such as Daniel Dennett and Mark Johnson, and the linguist George Lakoff.18 For these, as for Merleau-Ponty, vision is ‘crossed’ with the other senses in a complex collaboration to reveal the world to an embodied consciousness. So, for example, although our eyes can take us across a landscape, around buildings, up and over hills and into the distance, projecting us across time and locality into far-off places, such viewing implies an unconscious touching, a bodily mimesis which draws upon haptic memory. It is this – the haptic – which really gives us the sense of distance and the three-dimensional nature of all objects. But our assumption about the primacy of vision in knowing the world is also subject to critical scrutiny from other quarters. Re-examinations of the precise functioning of vision in perceptual experience undertaken by Dennett and colleagues in perceptual psychology, have significantly challenged established views, problematising the relationship between perception and the world, and questioning the accepted view of vision as revealing to us by means of images, exactly what is

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present in the world and where precisely it is located.19 Such empirical work reminds us powerfully of the corporeality of seeing, and that we still do not know with certainty what we perhaps thought we knew about the immensely complex act that is visual perception. The analysis of visuality and ocularcentrism requires this input as much as it requires the sort of analysis encountered in fields of cultural studies, art history, aesthetics and media studies, all of which in different ways help to explain the nature and varieties of socially constructed visual practice. All contribute various forms of critique which ultimately illuminate the manner in which the visual functions as a ‘scopic regime’ ordering the world. A world ordered through a scopic regime The claim of visual culture to be new rests on the assumption of a pictorial or imagistic world, one that claims to have supplanted recent structural and linguistic versions of social construction. The centrality of the image dominates such views, which at one extreme propounds the notion that contemporary life itself takes place on screen.20 Everyday life, it seems, is lived increasingly under the ruthless eye of video surveillance cameras which are to be found everywhere in workplaces, government buildings, shopping malls, highways and within automatic teller machines. Moreover in the workplace as well as in their leisure activities, increasing numbers of people engage with the visual through the use of computers. On the face of it, human experience now seems more obviously visual and visualised than it has ever been. For critics the visual is associated with the spread of technological culture. Television, and perhaps to a lesser extent movies, mediate the lives of millions of people. Interactive visual media such as the Internet and virtual reality applications intensify and shape life for increasing numbers throughout the world. Thus for analysts such as Nicholas Mirzoeff, seeing is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life.21 Most anti-ocularcentric writing reveals an awareness of the crucial place of vision in knowing the world, but also a concern with the capacity of images to overwhelm us and to render us passive spectators. It seems that there is anxiety regarding our sense of identity which now appears to assigned to us mostly through the eye, and through what is seen of us by others, the idea being that we are most fully grasped in that moment of instantaneous perception of the eyes of others. This was a view that had earlier been most fully explored by Sartre in his highly influential account of the gaze.22 More recently, though on the one hand we seem through technological means to have transcended what we were once the limits imposed by our bodily anchoring in a particular time and place, on the other, we find ourselves strangely ‘flattened’ by the ‘pruriently interested’ gaze of others. This is a cause for concern in some critics, but by no means all. Such anxieties seem to W.J.T. Mitchell, one of the strongest critics of the anti-ocularcentrists, to reveal a deep suspicion about vision and a fear of the image that is quite unwarranted.23 But

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to be fair, most critics of ocularcentrism base their objections on more than just a simple fear of the image. In its philosophical exploration of the functioning of vision, Levin’s Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision attempts to reveal how the drive for autonomy is tied up with the aggressiveness of vision haunting contemporary ocularcentric culture. It has, he believes, a peculiarly intimate connection with the will to power. Hence he writes The will to power is very strong in vision. There is a very strong tendency in vision to grasp and fixate, to reify and totalise: a tendency to dominate, secure and control, which eventually because it is so extensively promoted, assumed a certain uncontested hegemony over our culture and its philosophical discourse, establishing in keeping with the instrumental rationality of our culture and the technological character of our society an ocularcentric metaphysics of presence.24

Levin refers to ‘the psychosocial pathology of everyday seeing’ which according to Juhani Palasmaa amounts to an ‘imbalance’ in our sensory system. Levin’s linking of the dominance of the eye with patriarchy reminds us that, historically, while the senses per se were regarded as feminine (in contrast to the masculine character of rationality), nonetheless within the realm of the senses there were other divisions. In the pre-modern West, while it was acknowledged that both males and females were equipped with the full range of senses, it was considered that they used them for different purposes – men were associated with the ‘distance’ senses (sight and hearing) which were necessary for travelling and governing, while the ‘female’ senses (smell, taste and touch) were the ‘proximity’ senses associated with home and intimacy. As Constance Classen has demonstrated, the association of men with sight was embedded in the cosmology, medicine and popular culture of pre-modern Europe.25 While sight was linked to the male sun in cosmology there was also thought to be a direct relationship between sight and the male organs of generation. The notion of the seminal eye had appeared in the work of Aristotle as well as in the Platonic notion of perception. In contrast there were many cultural practices that supported the association of women with sightlessness but also most particularly with taste and the olfactory. Male visuality was regarded as being symbolically and even physiologically opposed to female sensuality, epitomised as touch. Thus were sensory and gender hierarchies reinforced and the ground laid for later formulations not only of the primacy of vision, but of a re-emergence of a sensory order that privileges the retinal image over multisensorial experience. Therefore, rather than simply denying the functioning of vision in human knowing, we need to better understand ourselves, says Levin, as ‘visionary beings’. In order to do this, however, we need first to grasp the depth to which our world view, our characteristic way of thinking, is imbued with a sense of the superiority of vision, especially in relation to questions of knowledge, truth and reality. An ocularcentric paradigm, in the view of its critics, is about a vision-generated, visioncentred interpretation of knowledge and the means by which we attain it. According to anti-ocularcentrists, there have been historical connections between vision and

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knowledge and it is these that have had such disastrous effects for the development of the dominant culture. In their view, both the connections and the effects need to be re-examined and their negative cultural outcome recognised. The privileging of sight over the other senses in generating knowledge was neatly encapsulated in a work published in 1938, titled On the Rationalisation of Sight by William N. Irvins, who declared that : Science and technology have advanced in more than direct ratio to the ability of men to contrive methods by which phenomena which otherwise could only be known through the senses of touch, hearing, taste and smell have been brought within the range of visual recognition and measurement and thus become subjects to the logical symbolization without which rational thought and analysis are impossible.26

This association of vision with a view of knowledge that was ‘quantificatory’ signalled a sea change in the general mentality in European culture beginning in the fifteenth and advancing most rapidly in the sixteenth century, a growing fascination with measurement. The eye was portrayed by Leonardo Da Vinci as the ‘master’ of astronomy and cosmography. It also advised and corrected all of the human arts, conveyed men to faraway parts of the world, in addition to creating architecture, perspective, painting and navigation. Contemporaneous with this was a gradual alteration in culture towards a quantitative outlook concerned with calculation and manipulation of materials, but also, at least among the upper classes, with external appearance and style in individual dress and deportment. In his classic work The Waning of the Middle Ages, the historian Huizinga comments on the increasing obsession with the minutiae of superficial appearance in dress in European courts, which occurs at a time in the fifteenth century when literary preference turns away from poetry to prose, this move being seen to match the growing cultural preference for more precise means of exact physical description. Huizinga believed that thought itself during this period began to take the form of visual images.27 That sight had become the predominant sense was to him, as to subsequent theorists, irrefutable. Of singular importance were the philosophical critiques mounted against ocularcentrism, amongst which Nietzsche’s is significant because of its place within his larger critique of modernity and its neglect of the body. Nietzsche’s critique of ocularcentrism is inextricable from his defence of embodiment and criticisms of that cornerstone of the Western philosophical tradition – rationality. It is the body with all of its sensory powers which knows. He argues against the association of vision with truth and knowledge, reminding us that the concepts of ‘pure reason’, absolute knowledge and absolute intelligence all presuppose a kind of ‘overseeing’ eye, an eye that cannot be imagined, one required to have no direction and to abrogate its active and interpretative powers. Assertions about pure reason and absolute knowledge were for Nietzsche based on the transcendental assumption of this all-seeing eye. But there were even more basic aspects of the privileging of vision in the Western tradition which he found disturbing, especially the spectatorial distancing of subject and object, and the process of abstraction said to characterise reflection at its ‘highest’ level. These are

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all negative features of rationality, having all but obliterated the role of the senses (touch and hearing in particular, as means of access to reality), and most important, the functioning of emotion in human perception and in all of our knowing. Rather than the highest human achievement being that of pure rationality (in the Classical Greek sense) it is the passions and interests of the body at work in the world as power and desire that properly occupy such a position. We can only know about the world that which our limited senses will allow us to: we grasp our world with our bodies. In Nietzsche’s account of human being and knowing, knowledge is both shaped and circumscribed by our bodily capacities.28 So while he accepts that a crucial capacity is that of vision, he nonetheless mounts his critique of the ‘domination of the dispassionate gaze’ in terms that suggest a deep understanding of the effects of a vision-centred culture. The hierarchisation of the senses and the resulting ‘long ascendancy of seeing’ could only be overcome by acknowledging all the senses. For Nietzsche the submersion of the senses is a key element in the triumph of an arid Apollonian tendency in modernity which, in chaining the body, had the effect of making us ‘unlearn’ how to behave as an animal. His critique of Cartesianism includes admonitions against relying on visual experience as a sole source of knowledge. Nietzsche’s criticisms of Apollonian art are interwoven with his critique of the reigning paradigm of knowledge. The complex and creative intertwining of the Apollonian, individuated pure form with the unseeing forces of self-dissolving Dionysian energy in the realm of art had its counterpart in the cognitive domain, in the disruption of both the speculative (rationalist) and observational (empiricist) ideals of neutrality by the ever-present demands of the life-affirming instincts, the senses, or that which the historian Rolls calls the individual’s ‘total capacity’.29 Twentieth century critics of ocularcentrism – philosophers, cultural and social analysts and others – owe a debt to Nietzsche’s vigorous denunciations of ‘the eye outside of time and history’. Faith in the neutrality of the knower and hence the objectivity of knowledge, is disrupted by Nietzsche’s reaffirmation of the materiality of the body against the disembodied mind. In this Nietzsche was in tune with Bergson who, prefiguring Merleau-Ponty, insisted that the body was the centre and ground of all perceptions.30 Interestingly, the hegemony of vision comes to be challenged in the name of the body. Along with Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ was the eventual challenge to the ‘God’s-eye view’ of knowledge, and ultimately the demise of the dualism consisting of a subjective consciousness and the mimetically reproduced ‘object’, and hence the decline of belief in the old Platonic dualism that was so intimately connected with sight. Among the critics of the hegemony of the eye and the dominance of vision culturally, Heidegger stands out because of his insistence that a world picture does not necessarily mean a picture of the world, but refers to the world both conceived and grasped as a picture.31 This is a complex notion which suggests that visual culture does not in fact depend on the multiplicity of pictures or images in themselves, but rather on the tendency of increasing millions of people to visualise

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existence. Indeed it is this visualising tendency which according to Heidegger radically distinguishes the present period from that of both the ancient and medieval worlds. Hence, while visualising and the visual have always been present, nonetheless it is only in recent times that they have become absolutely inevitable and unavoidable. This is the principle of visualising in general and recalls Van Winkel’s notion of the imperative to visualise. With the growth of modernism sight had become intensified, especially through technological means, and has gathered pace in recent times. Heidegger, like Nietzsche, deplored the subject/object dualism which is further entrenched in thinking and culture generally by according vision pre-eminence. The notion of a ‘looking-at’ that fixes and, in so doing, sunders and compartmentalises is deeply entrenched in Western thinking and in the tradition of knowledge, according to critics of ocularcentrism. But it is not the only way of characterising vision. Even Heidegger, like Merleau-Ponty and later Levin, allowed for the possibility of a much less negative version of vision. What they suggest is a non-oppressive kind of seeing involving a primordial opening of the senses which is prior to the differentiation of each into its own characteristic mode. After differentiation, this more benign sense of vision remains as Umsicht – that which is a non-invasive, pre-reflective and altogether more ‘care-full’ sense of vision. It is, I think, a view found at its most comprehensive and persuasive in Merleau-Ponty’s work, where the seer is positioned within a visual field, not anterior to it, and thus not aggressively towards the object of her gaze. She is therefore limited by what she can see around her, the main point being that something is allowed to be encountered; this is not the invasive staring, nor an aggressive interrogation of the scopic kind. Nevertheless, because of the prevalence of the latter kind of vision in modern life, the world becomes a ‘standing reserve’ to be dominated by human beings. So although Heidegger agrees with most of the critics of ocularcentrism who decry the predatory and intrusive nature of the dominant vision, he offers hope for a less damaging visual engagement with the world. Levin’s view of the possibilities of ways of looking that are exploratory and multiple, inclusionary and context-sensitive is compatible with Heidegger’s but he explores more fully the possibilities of nonaggressive ways of seeing. In this he provides an antidote to Sartre’s bleak account of le regard and its devastating effects on its victims. Technology was a problematic issue for Heidegger because he saw it as the end product of the ‘distancing’ impulse in which the already existing gulf between subject and object became intensified. For him, technology quickens the pace of ‘the conquest of the world as picture’, becoming a means of more sharply delineating the subject of modernity, standing separate from his world, surveying and manipulating it. A distinguishing feature of the Modern age was that it had entrenched the notion of a correspondence between object and mental image. Heidegger was of course familiar with the technology of photography and film which existed in his day, but it is interesting to speculate as to his reaction were he to become familiar with the technological extensions of the eye manifested in more recent technologies, which

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for example take us into the realm of virtuality. I do not agree with Heidegger’s general position on the evils of technology, and will, for example by reference to the work of Bruno Latour in subsequent chapters, show how certain technologies can be seen as an extension of the senses rather than as instruments of de-humanisation. Nevertheless I see Heidegger’s critique as providing a warning about the dangers of undiscriminating, uninformed and passive acceptance of technologies. It is important to grasp that the critique of ocularcentrism mounted by Nietzsche and Heidegger encompassed crucial insights regarding the ‘ordering of the senses’, that is the hierarchical organisation of them and the status each carries. I refer to the attention paid by both philosophers to hearing, listening and sound. In Nietzsche’s work there was an insistence on the centrality of the aesthetic, especially music, in the life of the individual. For him music had pride of place among the arts; it so intensified our sense of vigorous participation in life effecting meaning in unique fashion. He recognised that music was both physically and emotionally based, arising within the body, and therefore must always be a product of embodied functioning. Heidegger’s critique of the ocularcentrism of Western culture involved paying special attention to language. He argued for a revival of a sense of authentic listening in face-to-face encounters which he felt had become submerged in favour of a ‘reduced-by-half’ conception of communication and knowledge – reduced because of its failure to adequately account for complexities of genuinely attentive listening.32 The visual, which for both Nietzsche and Heidegger emphasised the spectatorial, implying distance and exteriority, contrasts with the oral and aural (the auditory system in the psychologist J.J. Gibson’s terms) which is embedded, incorporating and centring in its effects on humans.33 The claim here is that there exists an intimacy achieved through the auditory by the individual with things in the world; it is regarded as having none of the remoteness of a visual relationship. Feminist critiques of ocularcentrism, emphasising the negative effects of ‘the look’ and focusing upon the manner in which women have been the object of a patriarchal and predatory vision, have been important in providing an understanding of the ways in which both selves and knowledge are gendered. Irigaray’s exploration of the theme of ocularcentrism is important for a number of reasons, but particularly in my view, because of its unapologetic assertion that women should secure their identification with all that opposes itself to the specular and phallogocentric culture. In Marine Lover Irigaray engaged with Nietzsche’s account of women’s supposed lack of essence and that enigmatic aspect which prevented their full incorporation into an economy based on the spacialisation of the eye.34 Her work is in part a sustained critique of the pre-eminence of the image in contemporary culture, identifying processes and effects of the symbolic marginalisation of women. This project is carried out, in my view, without losing sight of the fact that, as Grosz affirms, female bodies remain in their materiality, firmly located within larger biological systems. Understanding the potency of the gaze (not only the male gaze) is important, I think, in assessing the effects of a dominant visuality on various social groups and

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individuals, because it raises the problem of the way in which people – groups and individuals – can be objectified by judgements that are made on the basis of physical appearance. Though race and gender have been the focus for analysis of the negative effects of stigmatisation, there are people in other social categories who can suffer severe forms of social sanction: those who are unusually short or large for example, and those not fitting the cultural norms for bodily attractiveness. While this account of the gaze might appear relatively harmless in the larger scheme of things, there is much evidence to suggest that, reinforced through inscription within specific discourses of abnormality, desirability, beauty and even health, such assessments can have a negative effect on, for example, individuals’ prospects for employment. They may limit participation in education and social life generally, and can elicit in others various kinds of character disparagement and perhaps, ultimately, a denial of human rights. There is much historical evidence to support the view that the visual has been deeply implicated in the denigration of various groups, leading eventually to persecution and even annihilation. The hegemony of the eye has always been profoundly involved in racial vilification, sexism and homophobia. In present cultural conditions it is very easy to mobilise vision’s fascination with surface appearances to dehumanise others. These are surely matters with which educators must engage, especially those who claim to have students’ health, both physical and emotional, as their particular responsibility. Pathologies of ocularcentric culture: Identifying some problems Though the special status of sight as the pre-eminent sense is a fact supported by physiological, psychological and perceptual evidence, nevertheless critics of the dominant visuality see its operation and its effects as pathological in that they produce dysfunction in human relations, in some instances reducing the individual’s capacity for agency and limiting their opportunities for a full sensuous existence. Underlying much of the distrust of vision in contemporary culture are three concerns which it seems to me can be drawn from the anti-ocularcentric and related literature. These I believe have considerable significance for explorations of embodiment and education and relevance for the larger project of reviving our awareness of the corporeal dimension of human subjectivity. The first of these is the role of the visual in consumption and the question of how visuality is implicated in the everyday lives of consuming selves under present social arrangements. In reflecting upon how identities are now constructed through a variety of media, a clear ocular bias can be discerned. A somewhat hazardous undertaking at the best of times, identity construction for the individual under present social conditions is complicated by what Melucci calls ‘an excess of symbolic possibilities’, conveyed powerfully by images. This can affect the young most deeply in adolescence, a time of greatest vulnerability. The power of the brand name in advertising in particular, but also in other areas, to cast individuals as mere extensions of the products they consume, is probably underestimated. The

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circulation of images, whether on television, at the cinema, through the Internet, on billboards, on public transport vehicles or by a host of other means, continually fuels consumption – and not only among the young. The important point about all of this is that the surfeit of images conveyed through various forms of advertising can make the world appear much more readily available to us than it actually is, or indeed, ever can be. Yet paradoxically while we are, as it were, bathed in images, we can also find ourselves curiously distanced from the world. ‘Distancing’, then, is the second of the issues arising from various critiques of ocularcentrism. Having both psychological and social dimensions distancing has been dealt with in great depth and in a variety of ways by critics, so here I have simply distilled what I take to be the essential elements of an argument about what it is and how it functions. As a feature of a visually-dominated culture, ocularcentrism casts individuals as passive spectators whose characteristic mode becomes a sense of detachment from an objectified world, including other people. While the sheer quantity of images may play a role in distancing, it is the functioning of images in satisfying voyeuristic impulses in the viewer that some critics find disturbing. For example, because of the saturation of images of violence and cruelty conveyed on television, one may almost casually observe the suffering of others (victims of war, refugees, non-human animals) yet remain largely impervious to the carnality of such horrors. Palasmaa refers to this as a kind of ‘chilling de-sensualisation and deeroticisation of the human relation to reality’.35 For critics such as Levin and Frederic Jameson, depersonalisation can occur through exposure to an endless stream of images; for Jameson, there is a pornographic quality to many of our transactions with others.36 At a deeper level, distancing can, over time, preclude the development of a sense of embodied ‘implacement’, of that ‘being-in-place’, which Edward Casey regards as essential to human flourishing and the better understanding of which, I maintain, should be recognised as a prime educational aim.37 The third issue arising from the critique of ocularcentrism is the problem of the downgrading of the role of the other senses under the hegemony of the eye. For me this is the most compelling of the issues because it draws attention to the ways in which the ‘mesmerising flow’ of imagery may serve to nourish only the eye and so deny these other senses their respective roles. Further, the issues of consumption and of distancing are directly related to the suppression of the other senses; our eyes may embark on a quest for gratification that our sense of touch, smell, taste frequently modify or even limit. While much of the time our relations with others are genuinely ‘intercorporeal’ and therefore multisensory, we can still maintain the fiction of sensory and mental detachment from them through the visual distancing process. But if, as Eric Rolls claims, our senses constitute our assessment of life, then any assessment which does not encompass the working of ears, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and musculature in interaction and collaboration with the eye is not only deficient but probably, if made habitual, then also profoundly disabling.38 The fact is that in our everyday experiences, including those that appear perhaps to be the least multisensorial (such as sitting at the computer, writing a book, or ‘casting an eye’

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over items on a restaurant menu) the collaboration of the senses is at work. That educational practice and the curriculum may still not adequately reflect this reality is a major theme to be addressed further on in this work. So I want now to look at each of the three themes – consumption, distancing and the neglect of multisensoriality, in greater detail in order to demonstrate their significance for a better understanding of how vision-centredness may impede but also enhance an awareness of the corporeality of human creatural existence. Consuming images The consumer is the primary kind of agent in contemporary societies and is rapidly becoming so in those societies which are ‘transforming’ through embracing market economies. The term ‘individual’ may still refer to the citizen but these days it is far more likely to mean ‘the consumer’, or the ‘customer’. We speak of consumers of healthcare and education in the same way that we talk about consumers of electricity, CD players or red meat. Capital, as Mirzoeff points out, has commodified all aspects of everyday life including, crucially, the actual process of looking. Debord’s well-known depiction of the ‘society of the spectacle’ in which everything is held in thrall to an essentially spectator culture, presents the consumer as passive in the face of his culture, with desires revolving around the ever-increasing demand for more and more products. Debord’s explanation is that the image-dominated culture is the result of the spectacle becoming capital to the extent that transforms it into image. Hence brand logos such as Rolex, Jaguar or Nike are recognised in whatever context they are encountered. As Mirzoeff argues, the link between capital and labour disappears completely in the mesmeric power of the spectacle.39 In the image society we are sold ‘the sizzle rather than the steak’, the image instead of the object. It was Baudrillard who took this to its logical extreme when he wrote of reaching that stage in which the object disappeared entirely and only the simulacrum remains. For him images have a ‘murderous’ capacity – they are murderers of the ‘real’.40 The continuing globalising of culture, new forms of modernity and movements of population on a scale hitherto unforeseen, make for an unsettling situation in which the pressure to generate more images becomes relentless. Exhilarating as this may appear at times – encouraging us to employ our imaginations in the practice of our everyday lives – it can also represent for many an aspect of those changing realities that engender a profound sense of crisis. It is in respect of this that another aspect of visuality seems to have a pivotal function – this is virtuality, which is now to be encountered everywhere: in cyberspace and the Internet, television and the telephone. The term ‘virtual reality’ is commonplace, not least because of the facility with which electronic impulses transport money around the globe. The important point here is that the distinction made between the virtual and the real (a feature of earlier discourses) is no longer prominent. Rather, the complex arena of the interaction of what is simultaneously local and global (most importantly, the

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incorporation at the level of the individual’s own ‘self’ project of the global into the local), means that present day cultural practice in all of its extraordinary diversity, is at one and the same time both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’. Television is thought by some critics to have provided the convention of viewing par excellence, that of passive spectatorship. Mirzoeff notes that cable television has now moved away from reliance on texts and narrative and has emphasised imagebased material which is dominated by graphics, stylisation and special effects.41 In fact the artificiality of the medium is accentuated through the extensive use of computer graphics and hand-held camera techniques. Extraordinary numbers of people own at least one television set which is turned on for up to eight hours in a single day. Certainly, while television is viewed at the same time that other domestic activities are carried out (notably, eating), it is probably fair to say that the type and range of activities that could be carried out simultaneously with viewing are strictly limited (you probably can’t play the piano, develop photographs, paint the room, or practise your golf stroke – at least not if you want to do these things well!). So the point about the essential passivity of much television viewing is well made. The impact of television on children has been a topic for considerable research and debate over the past few decades but until fairly recently it has been program content that has usually occupied educators. The impact on whole populations and cultures is still being assessed. It is the spectatorship aspect that is significant in the present discussion, that is, the manner in which passivity (not just physical, but social and even moral) may become ingrained. While television viewing is more obviously a passive visual activity, it is in the creation of virtual computer environments, allowing viewers to actually ‘enter’ contexts, that questions about the effects of visuality become complicated. In virtual reality facilities the viewer can manipulate images, find her way around a site (whether it be the inside of the human body or the galaxy), thus undergoing an experience that is not available in any other form. It is frequently presented as a new form of reality which is the result of extreme specialisation of computer technology. Digital biology is one of the most advanced fields in which, for example, participants can watch the flow of cells from within the veins of a particular life form, can move about inside a creature variously shrinking and expanding in size, speeding up or slowing down the passage of time the better to see this or that organ or process at work. Participants in virtual reality environments have an interface with the computer that furnishes them with a visualised world that is completely of an interior kind because it cannot be experienced in the flesh-and-blood world of everyday life, but is nevertheless undeniably ‘real’. The difference between this kind of experience and that of being a viewer of film or television, is that in the former users have the freedom to manipulate their own point of viewing whereas in the latter they are fixed as recipients of the material that is being presented. But exhilarating as certain kinds of virtual reality experience undoubtedly are, the question still needs to be asked: what impact does computer virtuality have on everyday life? Among culture critics there are widely differing views on this. While

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some see the situation as offering remarkable possibilities for future virtual experience and the increasing ‘virtualisation’ of much of social life, others see it as reifying a mind/body split that is undeniably patriarchal as well as reinstating an ideal of viewing that is phallic, colonising and panoptic. Yet the virtual environments do offer some genuinely new experiences, notably the opportunity for an individual to go beyond the given and to alter the conditions in which they will experience the ‘space’ within a specific environment. The potential for change and growth in one’s opinions and viewpoint through the interactive function seems at first glance to be considerable and obviously no final verdict on its possibilities can be made at present. Yet so much of it still appears to be structured by the traditional hierarchies that have shaped and determined everyday reality throughout the period of modernity, though perhaps in a slightly altered configuration. Despite claims to the contrary, the Internet is a space that is as historically and culturally determined as any other. It is for example configured according to gender, class and race. First, while it is true in theory that anyone may access the Internet, in practice it is still only available to a minority of the global population. These are usually people of middle-class with a relatively high level of education, more male than female. Second, users can, by the activities they engage in, communicate with a relatively narrow section of the society. If they choose, for example, to shop or socialise via the Internet, they may be able to avoid contact with the larger population, that is with those of certain racial, ethnic or social class backgrounds. This may seem a trivial point but when it becomes habit it may have an impact upon the individual’s sense of social diversity and appreciation of difference. Third, despite the fact that at the time of their inception, the Internet and other virtual environments appeared to offer alternative forms of sexual and gender identity, and that bulletin boards and multi-User Domains, for example, allow online persona to be created out of any gender or sexual identity one wishes, nevertheless a rather traditional, and indeed stereotypical, set of imaginings around gender still seems to underpin much content.42 But perhaps the most significant issue is the extent to which much text-based material is now being replaced by images, in other words by the directly visual. Real-time video contact is now not only possible but increasingly widespread. An interesting point not often acknowledged, and certainly not by educators, is that the move towards the increasing use of virtual visual technology received its original impetus from purveyors of pornography. At the beginning of his book Digital Biology: How Nature is Transforming Our Technology, Peter Bentley invites readers to accompany him on a journey to a place filled with beautiful and exotic plants which are made from the flow of electrons within the digital universe of the computer.43 But he warns that in order to enter this digital universe we must first abandon our physical form, and don our ‘digital’ bodies. Virtual contexts such as this are often portrayed as a form of liberation for those with various kinds of disability, notably those with motor impairment. For the hearing-impaired, cyberspace is a realm in which their particular disability becomes irrelevant. Technology grounded in the visual has allowed hearing-impaired to have

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much greater communication with the hearing world than previously. The representational medium of the Internet, email, etc, appears to have been particularly attractive to those suffering autism, seeming to allow communication in situations in which the face-to-face encounter would overwhelm the attempt to communicate. It is churlish and wrong-headed to deny the value of such media in these instances. But it would be a mistake to think that bodies are of no significance in such activities simply because they are temporarily eclipsed. On the contrary the bodily disappearance of the self while in cyberspace, its apparent immateriality whilst in that space, merely serves to remind us that it is, nevertheless, always there, even if temporarily, only as tacit background. The issues raised by anti-ocularcentrists about a culture that is significantly visualised are important especially in relation to the theme of the creation of self under conditions of consumer capitalism. Awash in images representing every conceivable kinds of goods and services, consumers may be unaware that they not only ‘consume’ the physical properties of objects but also the image which identifies their ‘style’, aspiration and attitudes. Because we may experience powerful, even overwhelming exposure to symbolic stimuli, it can seem that we have access to an unlimited range of ‘symbolic possibilities’ (information, products, unprecedented varieties of relationship, new identities, new opportunities for self-exploration). The opportunities for participation in new kinds of visual practices via new technology seem to be endless. But the simple fact is that they are not for the vast majority of people, for whom the realities of class, gender, race, age and other kinds of (embodied) positioning means that expectations and imagining will more often than not fall way below the likelihood of fulfilment. Perhaps if we are members of professional, intellectual, social or political elites we will not think this matters very much; it may be that sufficient numbers of us are persuaded that because visuality contains within it the potential for a greater degree of freedom in identity creation and in other areas, that we will not care that the broader population lacks such opportunities. If so we may find that social alienation is deepened in ways not yet fully recognised. Vision and distancing What is it, then, about the nature of vision that leads us to believe it furnishes a relationship to the world which it actually does not? The question is central to our consideration of ocularcentrism and underlies the critique of the dominance of the eye and vision-centred culture. It is a question about knowledge but also, crucially, about intersubjective relations. It invites us to reflect upon how it is that the manner in which our actual belonging in the world (being a part of its materiality) is manifested as our (visual) separation from it, and how it is that we have it as object within a horizon from which we are significantly but not completely distant. Through vision our continuity with the world actually conceals itself, the very place where we mistake our actual contact for distance, imagining

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that seeing is actually a substitute for, rather than merely a mode of touching. Thus are our transactions with the visual rendered unrecognisable. The problem with distancing, then, is not only cultural, with ethical implications, but fundamentally epistemological. The starting point for a critique of ocularcentrism which can overcome the problem of distancing is one which is resistant to a unified, selfreflexive or panoptic viewpoint regarding vision. The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty provides just such a critique. In Merleau-Ponty’s work vision is a very different matter from its portrayal in the classical Greek and later Cartesian philosophies: it is markedly anti-Platonic precisely because it embraces the notion of the collaboration of vision with the other senses, especially that of touch. Starting from the position that vision is simply something that occurs in the world, Merleau-Ponty described how it is that we do not merely see the world but that in a real sense the world also sees us. We are in effect that spot of locus through which the world achieves visibility. So it is misleading, though commonplace, to say that each of us sees the world as quite privately our own. The views of others, together with my own, are inserted into an entire system of necessarily partial perspectives which refer each of us to the same world in which we coexist, and within which our views intersect. For Merleau-Ponty this intersection demonstrates that we are two entities whose views enter into the same being. Because we think of vision as providing us with the most comprehensive ‘view’ of the world we tend to associate it with definition and permanent location. Yet in reality vision is a chiasm in the world – a site of its interlacing in and through itself, but a chiasm however which cannot be articulated in strictly visual terms.44 We are the place the world ‘sees’ or shows itself because we are of the world and thus continuous with it. Such an account of situated seeing emphasises the innate plasticity of perception and does not reduce vision to mere ocular activity. On the contrary, it decentres the viewer, in the process arresting the process of distancing which is the hallmark of the disinterested gaze. So for Merleau-Ponty vision encompasses tactility – it merely reveals what touch already knows. In his commitment to making a radical break with the privilege accorded objective thought as the basis of all genuine knowledge, he does not subordinate the other senses to vision, nor vision to them. Rather he encompasses vision within a comprehensive account of perception, the structuration of which avoids reduction to the well-established disembodied and objectivist accounts of consciousness. His work is, among other things, a powerful critique of the Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime. The idea of an all-seeing eye which gazes objectively upon objects in the world accompanied a view of consciousness which was at once disinterested, ahistorical and disembodied. The account of vision supplied by Merleau-Ponty is carnal. Perception itself being always an embodied experience and therefore fundamentally a matter of the senses in which events, things, encounters are seen or heard or felt in some way. His entire works are focused on perception and upon vision in particular, and his understanding of sight is that it is an incarnate component of the ‘flesh’ of the world. As he tells us our body is both ‘an object

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among objects’ and that which sees and touches them. World and self are mutually interpenetrative, they emphasise the simultaneity and interaction of all of the senses, not merely sight. Central to Merleau-Ponty’s theorisation of vision is the concept of depth, without which, he reminds us, there would not be a world. It is only because of depth that visible things – all the objects in the world including ourselves and others – are. Depth for Merleau-Ponty is the means things have to remain things, while not being what one is looking at a particular moment. Depth is above all the dimension of the simultaneous. It is because of depth that ‘things have a flesh’. Vision, no matter how direct, does not overcome depth, rather it goes around it. Further, there is also always that depth which I am not looking at this moment – the surrounding depth of the ubiquitous visual field that always abides for the duration of my looking at a chosen object. So my look in no way overcomes depth but on the contrary renegotiates it.45 For me, bodies (human and non-human) are at the very centre of the experiential world. We choose our world through our bodies, not our disembodied minds, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, as ‘living centres of intentionality’: and that is how the world chooses us. Further, it is the body in its totality which integrates all sensory experience. So that in our interactions with our environment, including others, we are engaged in whole-body interaction. Moreover our bodies and movement are in ceaseless interaction with the environment; we are not distanced from that world in any meaningful sense. Rather, world and ‘subject’ infuse, inform, shape and reshape each other constantly. The percept of the body and the image of the world are in reality a single continuing existential experience – there is no body distinct from its implacement (in space) but equally there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving subject. Each of us ‘receives’ the world around us through eyes, ears, nose, hands and the skin which covers all of our body, yet it is the eyes that have been regarded as the not significant means by which we engage with the world. Unfortunately the restriction of such engagement to the operation of the eye only, both reduces and restricts that experience, detaching and distancing, making that which is near appear far. Distancing in social relations, and the problems of intersubjective encounter are themes well explored by critics of ocularcentrism. The fundamental act of the visual is the intersubjective encounter, an encounter of eye and gaze involving not only humans, but all other species in the phenomenon of imprinting. But in addition to this it also encompasses the encounter with the non-animate, situations in which bodies are immersed and in which they engage or collaborate in myriad projects with systems that can be both organic and non-organic. The latter renders critiques of ocularcentrism problematic because it involves, particularly in relation to complex technology, a rethinking of the traditional distinctions between humans and the non-animate material of the world; this is an issue I address in the next chapter on the nature of creatural embodiment.

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The distancing process in the social relations is also raised by psychoanalytic theory. The conception of fetishism and that of ‘the gaze’ are based on the idea that there is a profound misrecognition of what the viewer sees. This has often been associated with the objectifications of the female by the male gaze. However Irigaray, as feminist and psychoanalyst, does not limit her critique to the connection of vision with male sexuality. Although she holds that the look is not as privileged in women as in men, nonetheless she takes an anti-ocularcentric stance in her claim that more than any other sense, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets ‘at a distance’ and maintains that distance. In our culture, the dominance of the look over smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations.46 So Irigaray’s analysis goes well beyond the critique of the gaze within a phallocentric economy, providing a compelling critique of the functioning of a metaphysics of presence. One of the most important points that she makes, however, is that fetishistic viewing is not limited to the neurotic but rather is now a critical aspect of everyday viewing. It is a feature of a culture that now ensures that individual subjects invest heavily in visual forms. Also writing from within a psychoanalytic framework, Teresa Brennan argues that there has been a foundational fantasy of mastery over the world which is integral with the rise of the ego in modernity.47 The distancing aspects of vision occur because of the ego’s drive to establish itself precisely by means of detaching itself ever more firmly from its originating environment. In modernity not only is the subject progressively cut off from the movement of life, but a mindset arises that is preoccupied with what the ego has created – its ‘product’ (no matter that such products are themselves fantasmatic) – rather than with recollecting what has created it and what it has previously been a part of. Elaborating on this theme, Brennan refers to the various senses which connect the subject to the world as ‘standing back’ in favour of the visual. The view that gradual hegemony of the eye is an accompaniment of development of Western ego-consciousness in modernity is seen by others as clear indication of the increasing separation of self from world. It is obviously a major obstacle to the establishment of genuine intersubjective relations. The difficulty, however, is that the healthy consciousness cannot develop without the distancing that vision procures, while simultaneously generating those fictions of indivisibility and boundedness that are deeply implicated in the sense of detachment that continues to afflict the subject in late modernity. Whether altered social arrangements encouraging different kinds of practices (including significant educational ones) can alter this, is an issue which I will explore in later chapters. The integration of the senses – multisensorial embodiment Psychoanalytic theory has furnished a key insight regarding body-image or bodyschema as the centre of the integration of experience by means of the action of the whole body. This reminds us that such body-image or schema is informed at a most basic level through haptic and orientating experiences which occur very early in the

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life of an individual. Our visual images are developed later and depend for their meaning on these primal experiences. The significance of this insight should not be underestimated: it states that we cannot really see our world unless we have first learned to move within it and to touch it. Our first experiences of our built and ‘natural’ environments involve a polyphony of the senses. Despite the fact that our experiences are multidimensional and now often involve the occupying of symbolic rather than physical space, and that both time and space have become multiple and discontinuous, we nonetheless still encounter a world which requires the interaction and fusing of the senses in order to be experienced. We still rely on the haptic in fundamental ways to provide that basis upon which all later experience, no matter how apparently visually grounded, owes its existence. From a phenomenological point of view one of the difficulties we encounter when trying to assess the role of vision and the denigration of the other senses is that, as Leder points out, when we do succeed in recalling the importance of our fleshy bodies in their multisensorial diversity, we nonetheless tend to forget them again precisely because when they function well, we simply pass through them in using them, whereas in seeing, we seem not to have eyes but rather to be ‘in contact’ with the world.48 But the world we are in contact with through vision is one that can become fixed and static if we ignore the rest of the fleshy surface of the body. The collaboration of the eye with the other senses occurs in complex ways to provide the varieties of encounter we have in everyday life: with our whole bodies, not just our eyes, we inhabit our places of work, community, leisure and our homes and in so doing make our world open up to us. More profoundly, I think, it recalls for us our basic animality, our connection with other species, and our embeddeness within systems both animate and non-animate. We cannot ‘see’ the world unless we have learned to move in it and to touch it. Nor do we somehow leave behind the other senses while we engage with it visually. But our culture, like all cultures, has as one of its specific tasks that of teaching us to see things in specific ways – there are ‘ways of seeing’ that are peculiar to certain ways of life, that is, to particular social and historical discourses that both constitute and thereafter identify the culture. A major aspect of contemporary global culture is precisely the pre-eminence accorded the visual. Unfortunately this can have the effect for many of limiting their experience to that which can be looked at, watched, observed and scrutinised, forgetting or denying those memories of the body itself which are the legacy of earlier experience, in which all of the senses have been involved, and in which as embodied beings we had formed passionate liaisons with things in the world. As I try to show throughout this work it is the forming of such passionate liaisons that must also be a major aim of education. Understanding how the eye collaborates with all of the other senses is therefore a task that educators need to address.

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Visual culture and embodiment The notion of a dematerialised image as the centrepiece of a disembodied visual culture which shapes the way the world is viewed, is contested by cultural analysts. In response to critics of contemporary visual culture, the influential art historian and literary theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, whose work was mentioned earlier, claims that in fact there are no purely visual media, that all media are mixed, and the idea that there exists a medium which utilises only a single sensory organ is mistaken.49 His arguments are detailed and complex but together add up to a substantial critique of the view that visual images are powerful tools for manipulation and control through the imposition of scopic regimes upon unsuspecting populations. There is no uniquely visual quality about the present era, he maintains, and media, specifically photography or film, do not exert a hegemony of the visible. Mitchell denies that the age of literacy and ‘the linguistic turn’ has now been overtaken by a ‘pictorial turn’ which confuses the image in the domain of art with that of the wider culture, and, as some critics of ocularcentrism seem to suggest, heralds in a new form of consciousness. While I think his comments are useful in many respects in that they encourage a more considered approach to the study of individual forms of visual culture, nevertheless I do regard the hegemony of the eye as exerting influence on contemporary social relations and ways of thinking. Jay and the other critics remind us that although the ‘visual turn’ may not be legitimately depicted as wholly negative or oppressive in its effects, there are nonetheless many disturbing aspects which require critical consideration. The following example will illustrate what I mean. In 1997 Susan Sonntag published On Photography, a book about the power of the photographic image. Later she returned to her theme in a work titled Regarding the Pain of Others, in which once again she emphasises the paradoxical nature of the photograph, especially when it captures moments of terror, agony and the often violent death of individuals and groups. The book is a meditation on the acts of looking but is also an exploration of the implications of that looking. Specifically it throws into question the claims of the camera to provide an unmediated witness to the real, to truth. Her analysis includes incidents captured on film from the American Civil War, the Indian Mutiny, the Spanish Civil War, the Balkans and Vietnam. At the heart of Sonntag’s deliberations is the question of the power of images. We are presented with the problem of the photographic image’s capacity to inspire in us powerful feelings of empathy and compassion on the one hand but on the other to engender a prurient curiosity that approaches the pornographic. What underlies Sonntag’s examination is, I think, a deep fear of the manner in which a strictly visual medium (and a fixed one at that) fails to convey the flesh-and-blood nature of the suffering individual, the fullness of embodied existence under dire threat.

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The endless circulation of the photographic image and that on film (note the repetition of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York) can actually bring about a loss of meaning in viewers, it has been argued by many critics, Sonntag included. In part this arises because of the general passivity on the part of viewers, most often seated around their television sets – the archetypal ‘consumers’ of images. But while in her earlier work Sonntag had expressed some faith in the power of images to enlighten, she now focuses on the capacity to numb sensibilities, indeed to convert images into fetishes. So while she acknowledges the value of photographs to help us remember, she draws a distinction between the remembering of atrocities and of understanding. The latter is a much more subtle and complex matter requiring the techniques of narrative which allow the ‘fleshing out’ of context and details of time, place and specifics of social organisation and issues of power and control. Of course this too may lead to the institutionalisation of such images, the foregrounding of some sets of images (the history of slavery in America), while at the same time the censoring of others (American military activity in Vietnam). The point here is that images are open to manipulation, to censoring for both commercial (television stations censoring the news) and political reasons, for example the control of images by military authorities. Nowadays, of course, computer imaging means that it is not only possible to alter photographs but to create pictures that are entirely fake without the viewer being any the wiser. Sonntag’s insights are important not least because they explore the issue of how a mentality of the visual can lead us to regard the whole world as a potential set of photographs, such that reality can seem more and more to be that which we can be shown by the camera. What we do and how we think about ourselves and others can be influenced by those omnipresent photographic or filmic images. Sonntag is concerned that by filling an already crowded world with an endless stream of images we are leading people to think that the world is more available to each and every person than it actually is.50 Little wonder, then, that many individuals come to believe that indeed they can have everything they wish and that they may make themselves with relative ease into a copy of the image they see in advertising, in television dramas and the like. What can become submerged, of course, are real embodied selves with all of their imperfections, and their placement in the multiplicity of contexts in which they live their lives. What also may be hidden is the understanding of the interplay of the senses within the individual and in the interactions between and among groups of people as they engage in social practice. The fact of individual embodiment can be problematic, not only in a visually dominated culture, but for an age in which the notion of having a body overshadows that of being one in the sense of being a productive creature engaged in transforming the material bodies around it. Although the body is that where each of us lives and will eventually die, it is very easy to think of it as merely the terrain for selftransformation under conditions of postmodernity. Attempts to align external appearance with interior perception take many forms, and not surprisingly are shaped by the demands of fashion and social class, and also by the dominant ideals

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of youthfulness and sexual attractiveness. The body which alters through ageing or illness is not to be pitied – it has betrayed its ‘owner’ and is deserving of censure. If it cannot be renovated, then it should be seen in public as little as possible! It is not surprising that people will wish to escape the body either through diet, surgery, or various forms of addiction. The preoccupation with how one’s body ‘looks’ is widespread, particularly among the young. The following brief examples illustrate the point: A sixteen-year-old female respondent in a research project on the theme of identity and self remarks during an interview, ‘I’m happy with myself ‘cos I know I have a good body’. An adolescent boy commits suicide after receiving repeated text messages from classmates about his facial features.51 ‘I hate wearing these (gym shorts). I look awful and I know they’re laughing at me’ says a girl in junior high school. The tyranny of the beautiful body myth can weigh heavily on vulnerable youth. Multisensorial experience and embodied knowing Human beings are embodied centres through which space and time is known. This can be demonstrated through my short fictional description of an embodied encounter with a familiar space: At the beginning of the new school term the child encounters the school building. Stepping through the entrance she turns into a hallway. Her legs mark out the length of the passageway leading into the classroom, while one hand traces out the familiar friezes that decorate the walls. Her gaze projects her body to the lockers and to the far end of the passage. As she arrives at the classroom door her body encounters the solid, fleshy mass that is her best friend. For a moment their arms intertwine in a greeting and together they enter to sit at adjacent desks. Each experiences herself in the school building and then within the classroom and the classroom exists only through their embodied experience. The classroom and the bodies define each other: the world that is the classroom is reflected in the bodies and the bodies are projected on the world.

What this description illustrates is that in living our lives we establish places around which we orientate our world and our spatial activities. Such centres confer what the phenomenologist Edward Casey calls a ‘placial identity’.52 In the example, they show how the child is ‘implaced’ within the specific environment of the school at a particular moment. She is at present in the school but later she will be at home or in the park on the sporting field and so on. In each case she is not merely present in terms of simply ‘seeing’ what is around her, but belongs to and is, in a sense, inside the place (Casey’s ‘implacement’). But it is her own embodiment that creates the place where she is at any given time. The significant point is that genuine implacement is always a multisensorial experience, that polyphonic interplay of the senses which attends each and every encounter with the world. Both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger had in mind this collaborative character of sense interactions in their respective descriptions of the individual’s encounter with the world-at-hand. All sense modalities are engaged but they may remain unacknowledged because of the demands of sight.

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According to Merleau-Ponty our bodies are wherever there is something to be done.53 Since sensory experience is always unstable it is through the body in its totality and all at once, that the world is made accessible to us. But it is always the body itself that furnishes those sensations which constitute our experience of the world. In traditional cognitivist theories of perception (which in the recent past have had a major influence on theories of learning) it is viewed as a mode of knowing, hence the intense focus on how perception opens the gateway to knowledge. As I have tried to show throughout this chapter, culturally there has been a strong bias in favour of vision as the primary source of knowledge. But in Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception there is the sense of a process both pre-conscious and therefore pre-objective which, unfolding automatically in dialectical fashion, is a flowing between body-subjects and their world. This contact is foundational to all other modes of encounter. The major point for the present discussion is that it is only by means of the body that the different sensory experiences (touch, taste, smell) are integrated. In other words it takes a body to effect such integration; the body itself is only constituted through such sensory integration. Merleau-Ponty’s remarkable account of intertwining of touch and vision presented most strikingly in The Visible and the Invisible effectively demolishes the notion that perception involves mere sight. Merleau-Ponty’s relating of vision to touch was not the first but it is perhaps the most extensive and I believe the most enlightening because it shows in effect how it is that the eye ‘collaborates’ with the other senses. It is in fact this interaction of all the senses that is central to his account of embodied existence. Using his concept of reversibility as ‘translation’ in The Visible and the Invisible he is able to demonstrate how it is that reversibility applies to the overlapping and intertwining of touch and sight. My sight can tell me that a surface will be smooth or grooved to my touch and I am able to determine texture with my sight. Likewise I know that the glare of the sun through the windscreen of my car is the source of discomfort to my eyes. So the visual and the tactile intertwine. For Merleau-Ponty it is a matter of our habituating ourselves to thinking of the two as always overlapping, not merely between touched and touching, but also between the tangible and the visible ‘which is encrusted in it’, just as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a ‘nothingness’ of visibility; that is, it is not without its own visual existence. He presents a collaboration of the two senses rather than an identification of the two, for however close the intertwining, they are not the same – they do not coincide. Indeed in our embodied encounters with the world, we can often be intensely aware of the collaboration of our various senses, such that our sense of encountering the real and indeed of being alive is enhanced and strengthened. As Palasmaa reminds us ‘the senses are specialisations of the skin’: all of the senses, including vision, can be regarded as extensions of the sense of touch. The eye itself ‘touches’ through the gaze and the glance: all the critics of ocularcentrism implicitly acknowledge this in their respective critiques of the aggression of the eye. But some place the sense of touch prior to that of sight on the grounds that it is

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the only sense which can provide a sense of spatial depth. James Gibson replaces the conventional view of the senses as distinctive and separate with the notion of five sensory systems, but insists on the priority of the haptic in human knowing. In so doing he accords hands and fingers particular pride of place. Vision can only know what touch has already discovered, yet touch can so easily be forgotten in a culture of the visual. Palasmaa suggests that in fact touch might be regarded as the unconscious of vision.54 Yet it is in the greatest of visual art that tactility receives its fullest recognition: for Merleau-Ponty the genius of a painter such as Cézanne lay precisely in his ability to portray depth, the smoothness or hardness of objects – in other words, things in their wholeness, their unsurpassable plenitude. The account of vision which critics of ocularcentrism find repellent is a monocular kind, delivering a flattened vision of a (disembodied) transcendental subject, and a distanced and distancing autonomous ego. But the kind of carnal vision that Merleau-Ponty had in mind arises out of the very nature of the body subject itself, and is essentially stereoscopic vision, in effect vision requiring the assistance of touch for the apprehension of materiality. Touch already knows what vision thereafter reveals; it simultaneously clarifies and supplements that which is revealed through sight. Ours is a three-dimensional world and it is the vision – touch connection that most forcefully reminds us of this. While the eye distances us from the world, touch connects us – providing both intimacy and emotion, however much we may choose to ignore this. While the eye fixes and investigates, touch advances and embraces. The intertwining of sight and touch which Merleau-Ponty describes so compellingly is to be seen in the non-human world in the way, for example, that primates locate objects in space by deploying eyesight and touch. In the above description of the child entering the school building, the experience is as much about touch as it is vision – it is about a set of bodily behaviours and movements that, as memory and habit, can no longer be said to rely on firstly seeing and then moving, but rather in which vision – touch and the other sense systems are brought into complex interplay. As Martin Jay demonstrates, there is quite a remarkable number of terms and expressions that describe our relationship with the world by means of sight.55 But there are also a great many which draw attention to the centrality of touch in human experience. There are extremely powerful metaphors of the tactile: we speak of individuals who are ‘prickly’, colleagues who are ‘thin-skinned’, ‘ticklish situations’ which require ‘delicate handling’, ‘abrasive’ personalities, acquaintances who are ‘smooth’ or ‘slick’ operators. Lawyers refers to ‘tangible’ evidence in a criminal case, we speak of being ‘in touch’ with family, ‘losing touch’ with childhood friends, of being ‘out of touch’ with fashion or the real world, of ‘being touched’ by the kind gesture of a neighbour and of ‘touching upon’ a ‘sensitive’ issue. We talk of ‘smoothing over’ the cracks, ‘soothing’ jangled nerves and ‘massaging’ egos. It seems that despite its submersion within the more prominent vision-centred discourses, our everyday awareness of the tactile is maintained at some level.

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Sight and sound, vision and the aural are interwoven in everyday experience but the acoustic generally remains as a background accompaniment to the visual and tactile. Yet the power of sound to move us can be enormous. The first raindrops on leaves after days of heatwave, the rushing of wind through open windows before a storm hits, the contractions of a metal roof as the temperature rapidly decreases, and the frantic twittering of birds as they brace for the coming tempest all remind us of the importance of hearing in placial experience. They are a basic feature of being ‘in place’ as embodied beings. But whereas sight isolates and distances, sound incorporates. While vision takes us in a specific direction reaching towards an object, sound envelopes, receives. Heidegger’s critique of ocularcentrism included centrally a strong defence of voice and of hearing. The issue of the ear rather than the eye as the surest route to knowledge had been explored in the nineteenth century when Helmholtz and others had not only raised it to prominence among the senses, but had also attempted to find an equivalence between the visible and the auditory. Sound waves and light waves, it was thought, suggested a possible intertwining of vision and sound. In the literary realm both George Eliot and Thomas Hardy imagined eternity in terms of sound, the former referring to the ‘choir invisible’ in what Beer refers to as a harmonious acoustic eternity.56 Palasmaa’s notion of the ‘acoustic intimacy’ is furnished by the best kind of architecture, that is buildings which are ‘good listeners’.57 In terms of individual human development, the auditory is the first sense available: infants in utero react to both sound and touch and it is likely that auditory perception leads to a baby’s initial realisation that there is something beyond itself to which it is nevertheless related in a fundamental way. Mother and child are united by an ‘umbilical chord’ of sound. After birth vocal interchange between mother and infant persists, strengthening mutual attachment. Kristeva writes of the chora which underlies the logos of speech and language harking back to this understanding of the auditory, the aural as foundational to human experience.58 The chora concerns the rhythm, pitch and timbre of human voices and is best identified by Kristeva as a kind of basic musicality. Such an element remains in certain kinds of poetry and in the prose of such writers as James Joyce. But this basic musicality can so easily be absorbed by the demands of the eye and the hegemony exercise by the visual. Sound is ‘framed’ in many cultures as music, and as such has its own disciplinary positioning and status. For Nietzsche, music was not just a pastime, a mere transient pleasure, but rather one of the elements that made living possible. The significance he attributed to music makes him closer to the Greeks, to Plato, than to many modern thinkers. In his depiction of the Apollonian and the Dionysian he placed music with the latter, believing that music somehow reconciles us with the horror of existence. If, as he believed, the philosophical tradition itself was actually a misunderstanding of the body, then the arts – and music particularly – could begin the process of recovery. In The Gay Science he wrote: And so I ask myself: What is it my body expects of music? I believe, its own ease: as if all animal functions should be quickened by bold, exuberant, self-assured rhythms; as if

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iron, leaden life should be guided by good golden and tender harmonies. My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection; that is why I need music.59

He might also have added that music’s basic processes are located in the constitution of the body as well as in the patterns of interaction of bodies ‘implaced’ in their societies. The olfactory is the most underrated sense and probably the most difficult to appreciate, according to Lyall Watson who refers to it as the Cinderella of the senses.60 It is also the one which in a visual culture, cannot be represented other than in visual means. On screen a character in a drama grimaces, covers his nose with his fingers and turns away to indicate an unpleasant or disturbing odour. A powerful message is conveyed about the extent to which we are affected by particular odours. Yet as Diane Ackerman points out in her remarkable history of the senses, smell is ‘the mute sense – the one without words’.61 We lack a vocabulary for talking about our olfactory experience, which is no doubt one of the reasons why smell figures so rarely in education. In many of our sanitised and deodorised homes and workplaces, to raise olfactory matters risks disapproval if not downright censure (of course there are places in which we are permitted to indulge our noses as when buying flowers or in restaurants). But smell is there for us with every breath – we cannot block out that particular kind of sensory input as we can for example, stop seeing by closing our eyes, or cease hearing by inserting earplugs. We can probably, however, minimise our experience of smell by our uses of visual technologies. A renewed recognition of the intertwining of the senses reminds us that in making a life we never cease to draw upon the wisdom that is stored in the body. Remembered by the body are certain corporeal practices, tasks carried out engaging all of the senses, things done to form bodily habits that are nevertheless much more than mere bodily habits. These remain, despite our frequent disavowals, residing in the postmodern bodies of the present, ‘passionate liaisons’ as Bachelard described them, linking individuals with the primordial experiences of previous generations.62 Such experiences have to do with a sense of attachment, of belonging, of various kinds of achievement, and they will always involve the senses and their intertwining in complex ways. So we touch, smell, listen to and look at the world, using our whole bodies not merely in a sensually compartmentalised mode. To say that fundamentally we are our senses will no doubt deeply offend many who believe that the mind only develops when one has overcome the demands of the senses. And it will possibly trouble those who wish to deny that what we have in common with other species are our senses in all of their complex interactions. But we can think of what we have called human intelligence as a distillation of our senses, and all the knowledge we have amassed and indeed the new knowledge we are in the process of generating must also have roots in the senses. Even the most apparently abstract and representational must have this grounding, I believe. To remind ourselves of this rescues us from descent into a ‘narcissism of the eye’.

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Multisensorial education The resource par excellence in many societies now is information, and information has a central place in education. It is conveyed through technologies that did not exist even a few years ago. The main currency of many of these is the image and it is that which, as I have tried to show in my previous discussions, alters our perception of distance, of relative size and proximity. Students seated in front of computers in a classroom can now engage in forms of symbolic communication which are at the same time forms of perceptual contraction. Such contraction necessarily involves the disappearance of an earlier sense of the physical dimension of objects large and small in space, and a sense of the distance to be covered in moving them around as well as the time involved. In other words, the ‘space’ of the Internet (which is now no less real than that of physical space) can now only be dealt with adequately by one of the senses. It is only the eye and vision which can keep pace with the speed that now characterises the symbolic. But the resulting ‘flattened’ world of the present does not seem like that to those who participate in it. On the contrary, it seems to provide remarkable opportunities for multidimensional experiences involving great flexibility of movement, the making and remaking of identities and the assimilation of methods not so much concerned with learning this or that body of knowledge or curriculum material but with learning how to learn. This, according to Alberto Melucci, cultural sociologist and psychologist, consists of learning how to control our cognitive processes and motivations and to apply them to new problems.63 The exercise of technological skill has led to an explosion of ‘symbolic possibilities’ which, whatever else they may involve (and I’m not sure that at this time we know what the limits will be), entail the construction of a world of self-created images which we then inhabit so that, in Melucci’s words, in reality or in the imagination ‘we participate in an infinity of worlds’. Part of this very process of world-making involves ordering and separating the senses. Today young people undergoing education at various life-stages are part of a visualised culture in which the disembodied image and the embodied human being are permanent elements in a dialectical relation. Very young children are less firmly anchored in this visual culture and have yet to enter the universe of image construction. But even that is changing as technology reaches more surely into schooling, and homes (at least of middle-class children) keep pace with the cultural imperative to plug-in to a visualising world. In the secondary and higher education sectors it is a different matter; there, embodied students may have experience of a wide variety of visual technologies, of visual events in which information is sought but where also meaning and pleasure are pursued and ‘consumed’. Technology transmits and receives quantities of information that individuals must now devote unprecedented amounts of time to receiving, analysing, storing appropriately and responding to. In the process individuals develop the capacity to both produce and define the meaning of what they do. Situated at a point at which circuits of information intersect, it is likely that at least some individuals are at risk of being

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overwhelmed by the images, of becoming detached from multisensorial engagement and, ultimately, from emotional, involvement with others. If as I suggested earlier in this chapter, visuality has been associated with truth, certain knowledge and the privileging of a specific account of the mind, then it has also been caught up with another imbalance in the Western intellectual tradition: the privileging of ideas (theories) over practice. The visually oriented concept of theoria that accompanies the so-called Apollonian impulse in Greek philosophy has been the object of critique by such as Nietzsche and Heidegger but also notably by John Dewey, especially in relation to education. His critique of abstract theoretical knowledge, especially in schooling, focused as Nietzsche’s and Merleau-Ponty’s and others’ had done on the theory/practice dichotomy. There remain subject areas of the curriculum in schools which are highly problematic in terms of their degree of abstraction. As such they reinforce not just the distancing from the world, but also further a sense that knowledge itself is a ‘package’ for the consumption of educational clients. Unfortunately, despite innovations in pedagogy and new approaches in curriculum, there remains a strong tendency to impose upon students sedimented and disembodied curricula. While the early school years may avoid this, the later years too often must yield to the demands for uniformity of content and the so-called rigour demanded by syllabus designers. What is often neglected in this view of education is an understanding of the function of language. Philosophies, social, political and educational theories and analysis, and the curriculum in schools and institutions of higher education do not exist merely in institutions, libraries, in commercial or political applications. Like the languages in which they are written (both ancient and modern) and spoken, they live to greater or lesser degrees through embodied individuals – in speakers’ and writers’ embodied practice and discourse. It is this understanding of the embodied character of thinking and language which has become submerged in recent times, contributing among other things to the continuing theory/practice dichotomy that bedevils education, the workplace and social life generally. What we say and do find their origin and continued existence in the bodies that go to make up our communities and the wider culture. Unfortunately, because of the dominant ways of thinking about the curriculum and educational practice we continue to place ideas, concepts, theories in a category separate from our actual daily practices. Hence we may come to think that our theories (be they philosophical, scientific, literary or anything else) have a life of their own, which in many ways we see as more important than the bodies upon which such theories have been inscribed. Such a way of thinking about our inherited understandings of the world is often underlain (albeit perhaps quite unconsciously) by the view that language is somehow external to thought. For Merleau-Ponty, it is bodies that have inherited the language, and therefore the concepts, metaphors, claims which we identify as constituting particular theories and propositions that these bodies continually shape and modify in the endless process of sharing with others. And while individuals may believe that the theories and the language in which they are expressed have the status of time-

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honored truth irrespective of who takes them up and when, the reality is that the theories and the language only have their life in those embodied speakers and writers; and their circumstance are always culturally specific and anchored in a particular time and place. To assist in overcoming the still influential view of knowledge as disembodied, an embodied and multisensorial approach needs to be taken to the curriculum and to pedagogy. Opportunities for the active exploration of the tactile within the school curriculum can take many forms, and these do not have to be merely confined to specific subject areas such as the arts. For example, in two Sydney suburban schools ‘rhythm’ has become ‘the fourth R’ when, in an experimental arts-based program, mathematics, specifically geometric concepts, are taught in a very different way. By ‘dancing through angles’ and using music to work with fractions, children can address what are basically musical problems of a mathematical kind. Important sections of the science curriculum lend themselves to the use of body movement; and forms of environmental education allow the interaction of all sense modalities, not just the processing and memorisation of information presented in books or even through the use of interactive computing programs. The time – space dynamic must be experienced in a fully embodied fashion, not merely simulated. Education about the built environment has, I think, a most specific and often quite underrated part to play in assisting students to develop sensory intimacy with their world, counteracting the tendency to de-sensualise and commodify human relationships with the environment, natural and cultural. Opportunities for the exploration of architecture, both public and private, are of importance in education, offering, if handled well, a heightened sense of awareness of the body, its skin and muscularity, a sense of the continuity of time and an appreciation of the realities and possibilities of matter and craft. Such explorations serve not only as a reminder of the embodied life but may also act as an antidote to the sanitisation of the world which can occur through scopic regimes. In a culture which is dominated on the one hand by the abstractions of theory and on the other by the reifications of the image, there is, it seems to me, a deep need to recover the situational bodily encounter with nature and with built environments. Experiencing and reflecting critically upon varieties of architectural construction involves whole body responses and exemplifies the incorporation of both physical and ‘mental’ structures and processes. Increasingly, curricula in the secondary and post-secondary arenas are predicated on the notions of looking and seeing. There is a continuously shifting clustering of contemporary visual media utilised in classrooms. These include film, television, photography, art, video, and perhaps most significant, computer-generated media. They have infused the curriculum with visual events (an interaction involving the visual sign, and the technology that enables and sustains that sign, and the viewer) which are currently regarded as indispensable to some subject areas in the secondary curriculum. The interpretation of visual images has come to be an important part of specific curricula, including the older areas of history and social sciences. Visual literacy is a major focus. Implicit in this is the transcendence of actual physical

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space and the specificities of environment and, not surprisingly, a shift to ways of knowing what can be delivered by means of the technology. While there are obvious benefits in the use of the Internet and in online exchanges as a part of education, there remain more profound considerations about the role played by visual images and visual culture as a kind of ‘go-between’ in social transactions, as repertoires of ‘templates’ that can structure our encounters with other human beings and as a means of confining and shaping corporeal subjectivity to a life lived onscreen. What a life lived predominantly in a visualised world means for embodiment has yet to be determined, but it is a matter that I think invites our attention as educators and as educational analysts. NOTES 1. For a comprehensive overview of the key issues regarding visual culture, the rise of the pictorial and its relation to the linguistic or discursive see ‘Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions’, Introduction by Martin Jay to the collection Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, edited Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. New York: Routledge 1996. 2. The crucial distinction between vision as perceptual experience that each of us has by virtue of our physiology and that of vision as cultural trope is made by Martin Jay in his influential work Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. See Introduction, Chapter 1 and Conclusion. 3. See Mirzoeff’s An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge 1999, Introduction ‘What is Visual Culture’, p. 1. 4. Bal, Mieke, ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 2(1), pp 5-32. 5. Van Winkel, quoted in Bal, op.cit., pp 5-32. 6. Anti-ocularcentrist philosophers include Sartre, Bataille, Bergson, Althusser, Debord, Derrida, Levinas, Certeau and Irigaray. There are also critics of various aspects of ocularcentrism among theorists and critics of visual culture such as Bal and Mirzoeff. 7. Nietzsche’s critique is located in a number of his works including The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science. Heidegger deals with the ocularcentric and its philosophical origins in The Origin of the Work of Art, in the essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 1938, p. 134. 8. There are many works dealing with the implications of Cartesian philosophy and in particular with perspectivalism. Sources on Descartes’ own work, which I have drawn upon, include the following: Descartes, René, Philosophical Letters, translated and edited by Anthony Kenny Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cotteringham, Robert Stoothof and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 9. See Chapter I, ‘The Ecstatic Body’ in Leder, Drew, The Absent Body. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp 18-20. 10. See Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, translated by Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 145.

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11. For an incisive analysis of the role and functioning of light in relation to knowledge see Cathryn Vasseleu’s Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge, 1998. 12. Differing views are to be found on this. For example Walter Ong claimed in his work Orality & Literacy that historically the move from oral to written cultures was basically a shift from ‘sound to visual space’, the notion of space that has become dominant in Western culture and ‘print replaced the lingering hearing’-dominance in the world of thought and expression which had its beginnings in writing. Hearing – dominance has yielded to sight-dominance, bringing about a fundamental change in perception and understanding of the world. But in at least one analyst’s opinion the hegemony of the eye may actually be much more closely connected with the rise of science and the increasing emphasis on organising, classification and ordering which constitutes its methods. The hierarchy of the senses in sixteenth century European culture indicates that hearing and touch outranked sight in importance, according to others. 13. For a useful overview see Palasmaa, Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. London: Academy Editions, 1996, pp 14-16. 14. The ‘discovery’ of Renaissance perspective is attributed to the painter Leon Battista Alberti. For a succinct account of his innovation and its significance see Crosby, Albert W, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society 1250 – 1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, Chapter 9 ‘Painting’, pp 165-196. 15. One of the most thoroughgoing, yet relatively brief accounts of Descartes’ ‘error’ is to be found in Leder, op. cit., pp 128-148. 16. See Parker, Andrew, In the blink of an eye: the cause of the most dramatic event in the history of life. London: The Free Press, 2003. 17. See Catalano, Joseph F., Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam & Sartre. New York & London: Routledge, 2000. 19. In a very important work Daniel Dennett and colleagues challenge the established view that there exists a rich phenomenal world for individuals and consciousness occurs as a ‘stream’, that is, as continuous. Although vision is a rich experience, its richness does not necessarily arise in the way we tend to take for granted. The arguments that we see the world as it is, are contested in light of evidence from empirical work in perceptual psychology. See Noe, Alva, Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? Thorverton UK: Imprint Academic, 2002. 20. See Mirzoeff, op. cit., p. 1. 21. Ibid. p. 1. 22. Sartre’s account of the mortifying gaze and his general hostility to vision is unremitting. 23. Mitchell’s position is fully elaborated in Mitchell, W.J.T. (2003) ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’. Journal of Visual Culture, 1(3) August, pp 165-183. 24. Levin’s position is most comprehensively put in Levin, David Michael, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1993; and in his earlier work The Opening of Vision – Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. 25. See Classen, Constance, ‘Engendering Perception: Gender Ideologies and Sensory Hierarchies in Western History’, in Body and Society, 3(2), June 1997, pp 1-18. 26. Irvins, William N. Jr, On the Rationalisation of Sight (1938) quoted in Crosby op. cit., p. 127. 27. See Huizinga, Johan, The Waning of the Middle Ages. New York: Doubleday, 1954, p. 284. 28. Nietzsche opposed the idea that we are somehow ‘more than nature’ and that our knowing is therefore something beyond the capacities of our embodied being.

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29. For Rolls the ‘total capacity’ refers to the operation of the senses, which are the expression of our lifeaffirming instincts. See Rolls, Eric, Celebration of the Senses. St.Lucia Queensland: The University of Queensland Press, 4th edition, 1998. 30. I have not explored Bergson’s views on embodiment here but recognise the importance of his work with respect to the body and to sociality in particular. As Elizabeth Grosz makes clear in her most recent work, Merleau-Ponty’s acknowledged the profound influence of Bergson in grasping the manner in which bodies are positioned in the world. Grosz sees both as sharing an ontology of becoming. See Grosz, Elizabeth, In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004, Notes p. 280. 31. See Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Questions Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 32. See Corradi Fiumara, Gemma, The Other Side of Language. Philosophy of Listening. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 33. The psychologist J.J. Gibson, whose work is discussed in later chapters, encapsulated the five senses as ‘system’. These are visual, auditory, taste-smell, the basic orienting system and the haptic system. 34. See Irigaray’s Amante Marine (Marine Lover) 1981, quoted in Jay op. cit., p. 527 n. See also Whitford, Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge, 1991, p. 55. 35. Palasmaa, op. cit., pp 6-25. 36. Jameson holds that in an ocularcentric culture we cannot but look at the world as if it were a naked body. See his Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992. 37 Edward Casey’s account of place and human implacement are presented in his monumental works Getting Back into Place. Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993; and, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 38. See Rolls, op. cit., p. 251. 39. For a discussion of this more fully, see Mirzoeff, op. cit., Introduction, pp 1-33. 40. See Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The Procession of Simulacra’ in Wallis, Brian (ed), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art 1984. Also Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 41. See Mirzoeff, op. cit., Chapter 3, ‘From Virtual Antiquity to the Pixel Zone’, pp 96-99. 42. Ibid. p. 108. Mirzoeff notes that the Playboy site remains extraordinarily popular while ‘sex’ is the most sought-after term on the Yahoo search engine. 43. Bentley, Peter J., Digital Biology: How Nature Is Transforming our Technology. London: Headline Book Publishing, 2001, Introduction, p. 2. 44. For an excellent summary of what lies at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s account of vision, see Stephen Melville’s ‘Division of the Gaze, or Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary Theory’, in Brennan and Jay, op. cit., pp 108-109. 45. In Merleau-Ponty’s flesh ontology as (incompletely) described in The Visible and the Invisible, depth is the hidden ‘dimension of dimensions’. It is ‘behind’ everything, even the flesh. Depth is the means things have to remain things while not being what I am looking at, at the moment. The theme of the flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s work is taken up in subsequent chapters. 46. See Cathryn Vasseleu’s brief discussion of Irigaray’s claim regarding the downgrading of the other senses in ‘Illuminating Passion: Irigaray’s Transfiguration of Night’ in Brennan and Jay, op. cit., pp 129-130.

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47. The account of the formation of the Western ego in modernity is a central theme in Brennan, Teresa, History After Lacan. London: Routledge, 1993. 48. Leder, op. cit., Chapters 3-5. 49. This is one of the key points made by Mitchell in his refutation of many of the claims of ocularcentrists. See Mitchell W.J.T ‘Seeing Showing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1(3) August, pp 65-183. 50. Similar points are made about the ‘rain fall of images’ by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millenium. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Sonntag’s criticism also resonate with those of Levin. 51. The case of a boy who had been harassed by other adolescents because of particular facial condition from which he suffered was reported in the New Zealand press in November 2003. His peers had used ‘texting’ to convey derisory and abusive messages. 52. I explore Casey’s notion of placial identity in Chapters 3 and 4 and specifically in relation to citizenship in Chapter 5. 53. See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 203. 54. Palasmaa, op. cit., p. 29. 55. Jay, op. cit., Introduction, p. 1. 56. See Gillian Beer’s ‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century’ in Brennan and Jay, op. cit., pp 84-98. 57. Palasmaa, op. cit., p. 34. 58. See Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 59. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, p. 23. 60. See Watson, Lyall, Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell. London: Allen Lane-The Penguin Press, 1998. 61. See Ackerman, Diane, A Natural History of the Senses. London: Phoenix, 1996. 62. The notion of ‘passionate attachment’ is integral to Bachelard’s notion of phenomenological place, which has, in my view, strong links to Casey’s account of ‘place’ and the idea that humans are implaced wherever they are engaged with the world. See Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space. translated by Maria Jolas. With a new Foreword by John R. Stilgoe Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. 63. See Melucci, Alberto, The Playing Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, Epilogue, pp 144-154.

CHAPTER 2

CREATURAL EMBODIMENT In the ongoing search for bodily perfection, it seems there are ever-increasing expectations of bodies, their presentation and performance being constantly appraised in the public sphere by others, but also by ourselves. Determining how one measures up corporeally is a major preoccupation of significant sections of the population. The quest for the perfect body continues apace, at least among many of the inhabitants of rich countries whose decisions about whether or not to engage in various forms of bodily enhancement is in stark contrast to the images of people almost literally dying on camera in other places. Constant evaluation of one’s body’s performance is a major preoccupation in the quest for new identities. Such scrutiny clearly involves a kind of body-objectification, which is perhaps rather odd since in everyday life people do not normally experience their bodies as objects. The intensity of present expectations points to a widespread view that bodies have a duty to serve their owners and, indeed, to serve them very well. Awareness of this aspect of embodiment may take the form of annoyance or disappointment when they apparently fail to live up to an owner’s expectations. Owners of course are also expected to show embarrassment, even deep shame, over their socially unacceptable bodies – examples being ageing, fat or misshapen bodies. In fact such an attitude towards our bodies is not entirely new, though in earlier times the notion of the failure of the body was most often associated with loss of strength and flexibility, and the decline of skills that accompanied ageing; or it was seen in terms of those forms of bodily impairment arising from illness or injury. There were also strong religious associations and the body carried a rich set of symbols reflecting notions of the weakness of the flesh and the body’s subordination to the soul. In the major monotheistic religions women’s bodies in particular carried meanings associated not only with lesser strength but also with deficiencies in rationality, and with corruption and sin. In contemporary forms of religious fundamentalism many of these associations have received renewed attention. Meanwhile in the wider society, notions of performance have accompanied our understanding of fluctuations and decrease in sexual potency. At the present time expectations of sexual performance are mediated by influential gendered discourses whose function in large part is to normalise ideas about desire and the sexual body and to uphold certain social arrangements, but also to assure the individual that his or her body can perform to present expectations. We expect, for example, that bodies will perform adequately in terms of providing means of economic sustenance – earning us a living – but will also fulfil the function of effecting social acceptance in various contexts. While attracting potential sexual partners or future spouses, bodies must also present in appropriate ways for family members, employers, colleagues, peers and an ever-increasing circle 57

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of others who will confer status upon them. Surprisingly then, in an age in which mind – body dualisms have been discredited, there remains a sense of a body charged with carrying out its assigned performance at the direction of a mind which, though obviously connected corporeally to it, nevertheless in some sense transcends it. So it appears that a rather rationalistic notion of mind is retained despite the fact that some contemporary accounts of ‘lived bodies’ (as distinct from those externally inscribed by social norms) emphasise the mind’s intentional attachment to its body. Such views seem to me to sit comfortably with earlier religious notions of the inherent weakness and inferiority of the body, except that now the body presents itself mutely for inscription by discourses which simultaneously deepen selfsurveillance while rendering it ever more passive. In the first section of this chapter, I explore those elements of a kind of quasirationalist conception of mind that in my view continues to underpin much educational thinking and practice. Their significance for my discussion of embodiment is that they reinforce in varying degrees the older dualisms of mind – body, nature – culture and subject (humans) / object (the world) as well as variants of the theory/practice dichotomy. As I have indicated in the Introduction, there are important philosophical resources available for understanding the notion of ‘creatural existence’. These resources are both historical and contemporary and range from the phenomenological through varieties of pragmatism and feminist critique. But philosophical work, even the most recent, can only go so far; there are other enterprises beyond the philosophical, notably in the biological sciences, neuroscience and other fields, which I consider crucial to the task. While I can claim no expertise in the latter, it appears to me that the philosophers upon whom I draw in this work, in particular those writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a keen appreciation of the ‘natural’ sciences of their day, especially those which acknowledged the basic corporeality of human existence. The energy, force or activity of embodied creatures – spatial and temporal beings – is understood in the work of each of those philosophers I draw upon, yet in none of them is there an attempt to reinstate ancient dualisms of nature/culture. Nor is the world of the non-living, or technology, neglected, though their status and functioning in the lives of embodied individuals undergo different treatment at the hands of particular thinkers in ways that are by no means unproblematic. Before addressing the contributions of such work I want to briefly outline what I take to be the crucial features of the ‘creatural’. 1. At its most basic the creatural body is my term for animality, human and nonhuman. We are animals – capable certainly of what we have called rationality – yet animals nonetheless. As with all animals, a human being is its senses. This is the source of our multisensoriality, each embodied individual being a set of sensory powers, knowing a world of which it is indisputably a part and yet which, through its collective practices, it continually creates. However I want to make clear that in thus describing the embodied human, I am in no sense subscribing to simplistic

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notions of bodily determinism. On the contrary: the conception of the creatural that I offer does not deny the specific functioning of what we have called intelligence, which is essential to the notion of agency. My version of the creatural has as its central feature the capacity for independent practical reasoning of the kind that Alasdair Macintyre regards as essential for human flourishing including, crucially, moral decision-making. It does, however, insist that such characteristics have their roots in that sensuous existence which is the distinguishing characteristic of all sentient beings. Moreover, as I will argue further on, it takes into account those aspects of embodied beings which traditionally were not regarded as actual part of an individuated creature (human or other animal), but which are nonetheless integral to its implacement. 2. The second major characteristic of the creatural arises from the first, and has to do with articulating the manner in which as human subjects we are located within our environment of the human (within the intersubjective relation) but also in our various implacements, furnished as they are with non-human and inanimate objects that are integral to the idea of environment. The latter is crucial to my account of embodiment because I want to emphasise not just the relation between and among human individuals, their connection to other species, but also their relations with all parts of their world. In other words ‘bodies’ may be living and non-living as, for example, in its most radical formulation, Actor-Network theory propounds. What I want to suggest here is a kind of ‘ecological’ model of subjectivity which relies particularly on the phenomenological sense of place, the notion of bodily intentionality and the relationships between and among all kinds of bodies which constitute specific sites for action. Life is depicted as consisting in varieties of location in which embodied individuals dwell, and as the experiential foundation of community. Recovering the spatial dimension of embodied existence involves a rethinking of the notion of space as phenomenological ‘place’, an idea most comprehensively explored in recent times by Edward Casey, but which also owes much to the earlier work of those philosophers of place, Bachelard and Lefebvre, as well as to the work of Mugerauer and the architect David Seamon. The notion of an ecological embodied self is for me most clearly derived from Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception and his notion of ‘the flesh of the world’, and it has an affinity with the work of environmental philosophers. But because it emphasises what human beings do and where their practice is carried out, then it will involve an understanding of the functioning of emotion in embodied existence. While I will make some reference to this in the present chapter a fuller exploration is undertaken in Chapter 4. As critics of the mind/body dualism and the aforementioned oppositions, these writers direct our attention to the body as the single unified thing with which each person most intimately identifies. Yet it seems to me to have been readily forgotten in education despite its apparent prominence in particular curriculum areas. The downplaying of the body in education is therefore my starting point. By ‘downplaying’ I do not mean merely that momentary forgetting of the bodies which

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occurs when, as individuals, we are not consciously attending to them, but rather something more pervasive and problematic because it involves the disembodying of school knowledge as curriculum, as well as the privileging of the abstract in human affairs. In articulating my position, I argue therefore for a renewed attention to the creatural in educational thinking and practice. Let me begin, then, with a brief account of the body’s ‘absence’ in education. Submersion of the body in educational thinking and practice Educational thinking in Western societies has always been centrally about questions of the mind, even though in classical Greek thought much attention was paid to the cultivation of bodily strength, agility and beauty in the young (male). The old adage about a sound mind in a healthy body, and a notion such as ‘the educated mind’ give some sense of what was thought to be the objective of educational thought and practice over many centuries. Education as the cultivation of reason or, in more contemporary terms, of cognitive rationality within the individual, has been portrayed by the Western philosophical tradition as providing the definitive account of education.1 From its origins in classical Greek philosophy, down to its reformulation as Enlightenment rationality, reason has included not only our capacity for logical inference but also our ability to carry out inquiry, to investigate, to find solutions to problems, to exercise critical and evaluative faculties, to reason about what is moral, as well as to understand ourselves and other people and our environment. Not surprisingly current curricula in schools (especially in the secondary school) reflect the widespread belief that the education of minds is still the central task of education. Technical or vocational education has usually been the exception to this, where the aims have been to fit students more directly for the world of work. This usually entails the acquisition of more obviously corporeal kinds of skills, though these of course have now been transformed by the use of technologies. Although curriculum areas such as health, personal development and the longer established areas of physical education and sport have avowedly had the body as their main focus, nevertheless it is fair to say that in a long educational tradition in the West, the development and enhancement of rational capacities or faculties has been regarded as the major task. The fundamental association of mind with reason and its influence upon educational thought goes very deep, providing a foundation for accounts of how individuals learn as well as informing the ways in which the curriculum has been shaped over many years. It is undeniable that certain forms of developmental theory and the uses to which they were put encouraged a view of reason and the exercise of rationality in the individual as somehow separate from bodies.2 Specifically, reason seems to have been seen as independent of bodily motility as well as perception, thereby reinforcing the sense of ‘mental’ activity removed from the corporeal. The capacity for exercising autonomous reason has been regarded as the hallmark of the human being, that is, the key characteristic which distinguishes humans from other

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animals. Insistence on the autonomy of reason therefore effectively entrenches the divisions between rationality (the mind) and perception, movement and emotion, but also between the human and non-human worlds. Despite those studies of inscribed bodies which have illuminated the processes of discursive construction (individuals as gendered, disabled or racially inscribed) there remains a strong allegiance to an Enlightenment or modernist view of subjectivity as essentially mental in much educational thinking. Further, human action seems to be the expression of a specific self-conception and world view which, having been internalised by the individual, forms the basis for patterns of behaviour. In terms of the discourses of development and learning, this is a ‘cognitivist’ position in which the structures that human beings put in place, and their ongoing practice, are imagined as arising from internalised discursive rules and the distinctions underlying them. Note here the emphasis is on the internalisation of rules. Although the direct external interventions upon bodies may be acknowledged, they are not the real or even the most important aspect of knowledge construction. Several decades ago discussion of the ‘hidden’ curriculum revealed that schools conveyed not just the ‘official’ knowledge of the explicit curriculum, but also attitudes and values, and most particularly ways of thinking about the world that were in some way a reflection of particular ideological positions.3 More recent sociological and cultural analyses, enlisting Foucauldian insights and poststructuralist work on discursivity, have focused upon the construction of subjectivities and the operation of varieties of disciplinary power upon them by means of the institutional curriculum.4 Such work has highlighted the manner in which, for example, race, gender or ethnicity can position groups of students as deficient in educational attainment or disadvantaged as certain kinds of learners. Perhaps it is a function of a rapidly changing social and political climate worldwide, or a sense that innovation has gone too far, or even the various effects of technology on knowledge but, whatever the reasons, there have been renewed emphasise on the intellectual or mental aspects of what students acquire from their schooling, at the expense of acknowledging embodied curriculum learning.5 This, in spite of the fact that much of the older curriculum has been continuously reformed over recent decades to encompass content that is ‘practical’ or ‘applied’. The emphasis on the mental or cognitive in developmental theory and curriculum underscores the fact that much of what goes on in classrooms operates at the level of what Iris Marion Young, Giddens and others describe as discursive consciousness – that is, a consciousness of action or situation which is either verbalised (or at least capable of being so), or founded on explicit verbal formula.6 As such it downplays those aspects of situations and events which have to do directly with bodies, with what happens, so to speak, at the margins of consciousness, at the level of practical consciousness. For the philosophers and other thinkers I have focused on in this book, human beings are embodied minds, not bodies controlled and directed by minds. Students undergoing primary, secondary and further education experience that education as embodied beings with

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an anchoring in materiality. Further, schools and colleges themselves are material structures as well as social institutions. The sheer physicality of school and other institutions of learning, the intercorporeal relations of students, teachers and others is demonstrably concrete, material and carnal. Although discursive analyses of large-scale social and institutional power upon developing individuals have added an important dimension to our understanding of the functioning of disciplinary techniques on school populations, nonetheless such discussions fail to do justice to the subtlety and complexity of the embodied activity that constitutes learning episodes which we all undergo on a daily basis. A quick examination of some of ways in which corporeal education can occur illustrates the point regarding the need to attend to bodies in the classroom. The education of bodies takes in a vast array of practices which in crucial ways contribute to the individual’s becoming a person with particular orientations, tendencies, predilections and behavioural dispositions. Because of the length of time schooling takes in many parts of the world, it plays a key role in this process. In the early years individuals learn some very important lessons about the structuring of time and space – lessons which over the total period of their schooling have the crucial effect of shaping bodies and the movement of bodies within and around particular spaces. With regard to the spatial aspect it is obvious that the action inherent in any building – that is, the promise of certain kinds of action that waits to be concretised by human habitation – takes particular forms in school buildings, just as it does in the home and in other places that students habitually occupy. Given the number of hours children, adolescents and older students spend in educational settings, it is not surprising that their routine experiences of school buildings will have an impact, though they may not be explicitly aware of it. Thus the built world has the power to affirm or suppress creatural existence every bit as much as the socalled natural. As Palasmaa recalls: We are in constant dialogue and interaction with the environment to the degree that it is impossible to detach the image of the self from its spatial and situational existence.7

A bias of the ‘mental’ in theorisations of learning and curriculum can easily foster an attitude in which encounters with environment (the buildings, grounds and so on) so often fail to be seen as a relevant part of the school experience. Direct ‘training’ of the body is very much in evidence in the infant and primary years of schooling, with children learning to line up, to stay within a defined space in the classroom, to sit and stand when it is deemed appropriate – for the most part in response to an invitation or command by a teacher. The protocols of positioning oneself to be noticed, gaining attention, waiting for the chance to speak, all involve issues of placement within the confines of a given area. Generally speaking, in secondary schools the movement of the bodies within school precincts are determined by the layout of buildings, most often in the form of grids with classrooms on either side of a general passageway from which exits lead outside the building. When experienced, the particular structural formations of these schools

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means that the students unconsciously mimic that structure with their bones and muscles. The architecture of schools, especially secondary schools, allows students a relatively narrow range of bodily movements (as of course do commercial, government and administrative edifices, and even many apartment buildings) but this is also the case for teachers upon whom there are similar bodily constraints: for both, the architecture and the interior organisation regulate the space in which they move on a daily basis even though this relation between bodies and buildings may remain largely unnoticed. But all such deep embeddedness in one’s habitual places is nonetheless a major characteristic of human creatures, just as it is for non-human creatures. It is in my view a profound expression of creatural life, not least because of its fundamental sociality. Undeniably there are differences in the way the space is experienced by individuals. Later in this chapter and again in Chapter 3, I will draw more fully upon the notion of phenomenological space as ‘place’ and Casey’s account of ‘implacement’. Here I simply note that in the context of schooling, each child or adolescent makes a ‘place’ for themselves within the larger environs by virtue of their personal, bodily identifications with the building and the particular manner in which their bodies listen, touch and measure the space they move in throughout the day. In the taken-for-grantedness of busy lives, and increasingly in the lives of students of all ages in their schools, there is not, surprisingly, a preoccupation with purposes, goals and strategies, involving various abstracting processes that draw attention away from the ways the world presents itself to us. The latter encompasses specifically our embodied manner of encountering the textures, weight and density of the objects among which we move habitually. They include movement, being ‘fixed’ or stationary, and the phenomenological notion of encounter: our continually fluctuating awareness of our immediate environment. Such awareness continually advances and retreats as we experience our environment. Each moment of encounter is like no other in terms of intensity and the degree and quality of contact which embodied subjects have each and every day of their lives. But all conscious awareness of an environment is underlain by a more basic sort: a sort of preconscious attention which, as in the case of movement, arises only from bodies themselves. It is this kind of fundamental, perceptual ‘implacement’ which is the ground for all of the individual body’s access to the world. Yet it is precisely this which can often be overlooked. With regard to time, schedules and timetables organise the term or semester, and each day. The day itself is divided into prespecified periods, the beginning and conclusion of each being marked by the operation of a buzzer or some other acoustic means acknowledging the change from one period to the next. There is a specific amount of time allowed for moving from one class to another. Eating, going to the toilet and attending to other needs must occur at designated times as does social intercourse including, notably, conversation. The school day is punctuated by a series of beginnings and endings, fitting with a wider world, especially that of work which is likewise temporally divided. So the measurement of time is an

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indispensable aspect of schooling. An individual (student or teacher) can usually be located in a particular place at a particular time in the school day. Temporal routines of this kind maintain a continuity in the life of the student, managing the habitual, repetitive aspects of school life. Supposedly such routines assist in freeing our conscious attention for the more important tasks of the ‘mind’. Moreover the activities occurring within the various time frames (single lesson usually, or perhaps a double) are often isolated units, especially in secondary education. The temporal routines of schooling rarely fuse to enhance potential interpersonal dynamism. This is because the school day is about what Ricoeur calls objectively measured ‘cosmic time’, in contrast to subjectively lived existential time. It is precisely the kind of time to which children and adolescents must become accustomed, for it is the kind of time which will govern their lives as adults, especially as employees or employers but also as consumers, taxpayers and even as citizens. Existential time on the other hand, like phenomenological space, has tended to become discursively submerged. As Grosz has argued, time is an irreducible term in all of knowledge discourse and social practice, yet is rarely examined, functioning rather as a kind of ‘silent companion’ to each of these.8 But time is at the very centre of embodiment: living beings essentially have duration precisely because they are continually elaborating that which is new. It necessarily involves searching, creation – time is creation or it is nothing at all – and a groping towards.9 The conception of time which underlies education, however, is that of ‘clock time’ which is ‘objective’ and measurable, the kind of time that homogenises all other modes of passing. Moreover it does this insensitively. A certain wholeness or unity is imposed, but only through homogenisation and reduction of the duration of specific events and processes. This is particularly noticeable in the secondary school where both teachers and students are aware of the way in which the demands of time passing can impose a considerable sense of urgency. Teachers speak of ‘getting through’ as much syllabus material as possible in a given forty-or fifty-minute period. Students at all levels in education are conscious of ‘how much’ can be fitted into fifty minute period, how much they can ‘cover’ in a two-hour laboratory session or a practical demonstration. The view of knowledge which fits most comfortably with this sense of time is quantitative, factual, providing amounts of material that can be slotted into the bounded time frame. In the school setting, students, their teachers and others learn how to modulate bodily behaviours in particular ways: walking, being seated, moving around and lingering in certain spots before taking up another cycle of activity. Although we may pay little conscious attention to this, the perceptual tools of the individual are thereby shaped, creating patterns that will be repeated as certain kinds of relations and as layers of identity throughout life.10 Individuals learn to deal with other kinds of object – desks, doors, hallways – but also crucially with their peers and teachers in specific ways, observing unspoken understandings about proximity, discriminations and preferences just as all animals do. Bodies of students and staff alike are incarnate ‘learned’ patterns of action and attitude that have arisen out of previous

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experience. What occurs here, then, is the direct somatic transmission of the culture to those being educated. The ‘shaping’ of bodies, however, continues apace without being evidenced at the level of consciousness, or in more familiar philosophical language, of the ‘mind’. This corporeal shaping involves basically the acquisition of certain kinds of perceptual and behavioural skills and dispositions which, unless subjected to definite kinds of bodily intervention, remain throughout the individual’s life. The process also encompasses the production of specific kinds of strengths and limitations, laying down fluidities which become as much a part of the ‘self ’ as the language spoken. These processes pertain directly to the creatural dimension of our lives, the quintessentially private organic life that is the body, what Nietzsche acknowledged as ‘our most certain being’, and what according to Merleau-Ponty we most profoundly and immediately are. For me creatural existence is affirmed through the direct impact upon bodies of material forces and not just the hidden symbolic meanings individuals may have developed – meanings which traditional discourse of mind tell us have been in some sense internalised by those individuals. The focus required is that which examines the nature of these impacts and their precise working upon bodies in specific spatiotemporal situations. In other words we need to determine how bodies have been shaped through direct behavioural influence and the physical (human and nonhuman) environment in which they abide as embodied human beings. Schooling is rich in resources for the somatic moulding of bodies; such shaping is an essential aspect of identity formation. Through education and other experiences we come to have a repertoire of bodily dispositions and attitudes. We are, in a fundamental sense, a cluster of coordinations of arms, legs, spinal cord and most especially hands. In Merleau-Ponty’s parlance our bodies are in the world. But they are there in a particular manner, though the particularity has the character of being both cultural and individual. So while it is true that to become a member of a specific kind of culture is to have a certain kind of body, it is also true that there is an irreducibly individual aspect to each one’s bodily being. It follows then that an indispensable part of people’s identity is manifested in their bodily dispositions, habits, and abilities or skills. These form a central part of the motor skills, perceptual discriminations and behavioural responses which make a person what she or he is. Together these are the ‘identity’ she or he has which others presumably recognise. This is not a particularly startling insight when we recall that direct somatic training of a new human being starts immediately after birth and will involve a huge range of practices including, centrally, the use of language, the aim being the production of a member of the society. Such practices cover holding and touching, dress, the control of physical space, the eliciting of behaviours through certain sorts of address, the use of voice and gesture to modulate behaviours and so on. As a child develops, learning becomes indirect, encompassing the conceptual, developing understanding of relationships and status as well as the essential growth of the notion of social acceptability, emotional responses and moral judgements. But

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these aspects, while they appear to operate in the realm of the mental – as aspects of the ‘mind’ – are never removed from the physical. Bodily dispositions are inextricably implicated in what we do. Even the learning of the ‘native’ language gives the bodies of children a quite specific configuration, one which is by no means confined to facial muscles, mouth and neck, but in which the whole body is involved in acquiring a characteristic vocal/gestural vocabulary with its identifying posture and movements. One of the greatest benefits in learning another or even several other languages is that it provides a window onto what it is to have different ways of seeing and knowing the world in a manner that is not only intellectual but also robustly corporeal. But knowing is not merely a matter of what goes on ‘inside’ individual bodies. It involves in very complex ways the manner in which humans (and other animals) make the world into things and objects through their activities, and the processes by which things, technologies and organisations also shape and modify people. Therefore an account of creatural existence must, in my view, take into account the functioning of technologies in human practice. The joining of human beings with the inanimate in creation is a particularly complex and controversial issue. There have been attempts at the theorisation of the processes involved and their significance for an understanding of practice and responsibility, with Actor Network Theory being perhaps the most radical in terms of its characterisation of humans and technology. In the work of Bruno Latour in particular, embodied human actors seem to relinquish a position of ontological privilege, to take their place beside varieties of non-living objects or technologies relevant to a particular project, no participant in a given project apparently having greater importance than any other. Alarming as this may at first appear, it is neither an attempt to treat humans like objects nor to accept machines as social actors, but rather in Latour’s determined non-dualism, a potent way of describing the ‘folding’ of the animate and non-animate within practice. Keeping in mind that Latour’s focus is on the practice of science, nonetheless his formulation regarding the folding of the human and non-human in action has I think wider significance in that it suggests if the non-human ceases to be regarded as mere ‘object’, then their entanglement with humans in all arenas of practice requires rethinking. So too does the conception of what is emcompasssed by the term ‘social’. In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies and Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, Latour describes a situation of ‘hybridity’ in which humans and other animals, deities, planets, markets, atoms and untold numbers of other entities animate and inanimate, enact forms of agency as ‘actants’ which constitute ‘collectivities’ of practice.11 So far from inhabiting a society that looks outward upon a natural world, or a natural world that encompasses the human social world as merely one of its components, we live in an environment (my term) in which human and non-human comingle through activity, practice, that is – by means of what is done in a specific place and time for specific purposes. Purposes, however, are not attributed to machines no matter how complex, but remain the province of animate beings.

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The transformations wrought in embodied actors through their taking up available technology (always specific to a particular time, place and task) shape significantly the character of particular practices. So it might be said not that we are what we do, but rather that the doing itself is governed by what we have, so to speak, in our hands at the moment of action. Technologies therefore cannot be characterised either as mere tools for human use on the one hand or as uncontrollable forces which ultimately take control over all aspects of human life, removing from it any real sense of agency. Rather, to the extent that actors are altered by what they use (what they do with what they have at hand, so to speak), they extend the boundaries of their individual bodies beyond the skin. In education the playing of the musical instrument, the manipulation of laboratory equipment in science classes, the making and wearing of masks and costumes in drama or history lesson, the tending to animals or planting of gardens in agricultural education not only awaken awareness of one’s own embodiment but allow us to expand our sense of agency. Thus is a sense of embodiment is returned to human actors, in particular the manner in which the hands and eyes work together to extend subjectivity by means of an extension of these senses. A good description of what is happening here is the animation of the non-animate. Unfortunately the more abstract education becomes the less it allows this recollecting of the complexity of embodiment and its fundamentally relational character. The relational nature of embodied human being is revealed in what is usually referred to in philosophy as the intersubjective relation between people, their fundamentally communicative connection to each other. But in the examples I have given above, the ‘connection’ concerns not only an embodied human or species of animal, but also those things which traditionally have been referred to as tools, equipment or more broadly now as technology. Latour’s work is significant to the present discussion because it focuses on practice in a radical way, his particular form of anti-dualism emphasising the insistent reality of material things in their interactions with the human. For me, one of the most interesting innovations emerging from his sociology of scientific practice concerns the nature of agency which, rather than being tightly bounded within the skin of the individual, is spread across various kinds of ‘participants’, animate and non-animate, emphasising relations among the participants rather than the actions of separate (human) entities. Lest this be interpreted as a form of technological determinism, Latour reminds us that he is not attempting to extend ‘subjectivity’ to things, that is to treat humans like objects or to take machines for social actors, instead to bypass altogether talk of ‘subject – object’. Thus, it seems to me that he expands the notion of sociality to more accurately reflect the nature of the relations between and among all kinds of bodies, animate and non-animate. The significance of this in terms of my own exploration of the creatural is that it demonstrates quite dramatically the extension of the embodied individual’s senses through technologies into that which is beyond the skin of the individual. In other words new senses beyond the confines of the skin are constantly being created by

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means of such technological ‘extensions’. Far from diminishing our humanity and agency, what they support is my claim that not only do we need our senses – but it seems we need more and more of them. Certain technologies are precisely the extension of these senses, examples being radio telescopes, devices for carrying out microsurgery or probes of various types used to photograph internal organs of the body. But technologies are not merely a means for humans to somehow reach directly into what had previously been labelled inert matter; on the contrary, they are actually mediations between the senses of the human body which bring about a continuance of creation through action. They are perhaps most obvious in relation to the endless varieties of work we carry out, a theme I will return to in the next chapter. In other words we operationalise the things we have in order to further our doing. In our continuous practice we enlist ‘others’, human and non-human, and in the process make and remake relations. This does not suggest that there are no distinctions to be made between animate and non-animate. As I have noted above, animals and humans in particular have purposes, machines do not. But perhaps more importantly is the reality that only animals – humans and others species – suffer, and that, in the final analysis, is what really matters to social, political and above all to ethical life. Engagement in embodied action is not merely a matter for the individual’s embodiment (though it is of course that) but rather in developing a manner of being characteristic of her or his culture; it highlights the ways in which emotion is experienced and expressed, the ways in which the demands of status and authority are recognised and responded to in that milieu, the signature ways of being ‘athome’ in various places within the environment, and in general the habits appropriate to the culture. There are basic ways of being that over time are etched into the young individual’s muscles and skeleton, the responses these then demand becoming embedded as neural pathways in the brain. Memory itself is sedimented in the body such that specific clusters of values and categories that are core to particular cultures are entrusted to the body. These can be observed when groups of people from differing cultures come into contact, displaying marked or more subtle differences in such behaviours as attitudes towards touching, managing eye-contact, directing attention from another individual or refusing it, and to patterns of listening and speaking. These values and categories also encompass activities undertaken to form corporeal habits but end up being much more than mere corporeal habits. Since their entry into the individual is not by means of the presentation of ideas and concepts, but instead by means of direct bodily intervention, they in fact bypass consciousness, becoming ingrained as basic orientations towards the world. A cognitive paradigm unfortunately denies the body’s active intentional capacities. It has been customary to distinguish the more ‘physical’ curriculum areas from the academic curriculum. The former has historically included those areas variously labelled technical or vocational and is often characterised as essentially distinct from the latter. But the mental - physical separation can be seen also in terms of the way in which, as students reach the end of their secondary education, the separation

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becomes more noticeable. Physical education, the area dealing explicitly with the body, while being somewhat overtly connected to other areas in the junior years, becomes the furthest removed conceptually and in terms of practice from the academic curriculum subject areas in the senior years; though this is changing as the field has expanded to encompass Health, Sex Education, Personal Development, and a variety of ‘lifestyle’ education areas. Physical Education or Sport occupies a peculiar position in that it reflects the traditional dichotomous thinking of the separation of mind and body: it is the obverse of the cognitivist position and as such has enormous demands placed upon it to fulfil its role as the only fully ‘somatic’ subject area in the curriculum. Educational drama, contemporary dance and creative movement, on the other hand, also offer rich possibilities for having students use the body as an instrument of expression (and not only those who are highly skilled at it, as is often the case in sport), at the same time helping them grasp such activities as important ways of knowing in their own right. At their best, these curriculum areas can make accessible to students the processes involved in creatural meaningmaking, generating significations that are not merely of the mind, but rather are fully embodied. However, as I indicated in the previous chapter, there are opportunities in all curriculum areas for giving greater weight to the body’s capacity for creating its world. Cognitivist accounts of mind and the developing individual fail to give full recognition to direct somatic learning in education because they tend to associate the acquisition of cultural characteristics with the learning of ideas, the acquiring of concepts. This way of looking at learning is a continuation of the traditional rationalist view of the mind and the mind – body split. The remedy however cannot be a simple inversion of the mind – body dichotomy, that is to say a repudiation of the ‘mental’, but a much more corporeally aware examination of what actually happens when embodied students learn. It involves a thoroughgoing assessment of the role of the senses and emotions in the individual’s knowledge-creation and a better understanding that, as we acquire ideas, we also acquire certain bodily dispositions, attitudes and habits. While cognitivist views remain deeply influential in education, both explicitly and implicitly, they sustain a sometimes dangerous fiction that learners only develop as such when they overcome the body, subduing the senses and relegating passion to the dimension of animal existence. In this way creatural existence, (in Nietzsche’s terms, that which is ‘our most certain being’), with its immediate bodily feeling, remains in the shadows. There is no doubt, as I argued in the previous chapter, that the modern individual dwells in a world which through a multiplicity of media is deconstructed and reconstructed at extraordinary speed.12 Yet we can recognise ‘reality’ as an interpretative construction with the body as fundamental constructor. In constructing their world embodied subjects bring to bear many elements and life processes in a unity that produces meaningful interaction with the world. For Nietzsche the human being is a creature that needs meaning, demanding not only the achievement but also awareness of power, not as domination but as agency. Creatural existence for human

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beings is about maximising meaning, but through the operation of sensuous embodiment including, these days, through the technological extension of the senses as I have outlined above. This therefore would seem to be an obvious aim for education – to assist students in the task of making embodied meaning. Theories which privilege cognition and practices based on them do not assist students in the task of self-understanding and may actually undermine attitudes of respect for the body which is, after all, the source of life-enhancing pleasures.13 Human practices – what individuals do – are not simply the result of mental representations that can be made explicit and therefore dealt with at this level. Rather, they are largely unconscious: they are not just the product of processes of symbolic activities in the mind which can be accessed through further discursive processing. They are in fact tied inextricably to a vast repertoire of bodily dispositions, which also bear the imprint or shape of the resident technologies inhabiting various sites which are the particular ‘places’ in which those bodies are niched. This is to say that individuals act as they do because they have the bodies they do and have habitually ‘in their hands’, or at hand, various objects, technologies and so on. Neither cognitivist theories of individual behaviour and ‘mind’ nor discursivist theories of social inscription provide an understanding of this. So we need to understand not merely those imbalances and inequalities which are discursively constructed, but those which are somatically effected – in other words, those which directly involve the bodily discriminations and dispositions imprinted on individual bodies, and the manner in which these are experienced, responded to and how they ultimately become part of embodied selves. We need to follow this through, therefore, in education by trying to understand how individuals make themselves corporeally, how they build up in tandem a repertoire that is expressive of who they are and that affords them a wealth of opportunity for creative endeavours. Some accounts of social inscription of bodies suggest that individual identities can be altered through the body, that is, through bodily transformation. Undoubtedly there is some justification for this claim. But it seems to me also to run the risk of depicting bodies as shaped as it were from above, and often with the purpose of expounding various abstractions about kinds of bodies (gendered, disabled, anorexic etc). On the other hand a psychologisation of the body is evident in rationalist or cognitivist views, especially within education, where the insistence on a kind of transcendental consciousness accords it oversight of the activities of the body which it directs. What both views seem to me to overemphasise is the notion that identities are constructed out of symbols, concepts and theorisation. Whether inscribed from the outside or from the inside, as world view or cultural outlook developing within the individual, who one is can turn out to be a simply a function of the ideational and symbolic. But as I have argued, the realities of embodiment encourage us to contest this one-sided equation of ideas, beliefs with identity. It is my contention in this book that certain aspects of who we are, our ‘selves’, our identity, are not merely the

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product of what we think about or the concepts we have learned, but are, on the contrary, independent of what we know. Some of the most fundamental dispositions and capacities we have – notably the sense of what the sociologist Michel Maffesoli has called fellow-feeling, or empathy – are not learned merely through grasping concepts or having ideas. But in those instances where this does occur, the concepts have been acquired in ways that have a corporeal as well as a cognitive reality. For MacIntyre they are a function of the dependence and vulnerability of all human animals, especially in their early years, and the unavoidable connection with others which arises from these conditions. Our bodies, as philosopher and feminist Hèlène Cixous reminds us, are the place for manifestation of the passionate, the multiplicity of fine and subtle affects that are available to human beings precisely because of their embodied humanity.14 The body is the starting point because it not only furnishes the individual’s basic spatio – temporal stance towards the world but also the fundamental drives towards pleasure, power and the enhancement of life, all of which underlie the subsequent striving for knowledge. As an organising centre in which things are gathered and organically conserved, the body is that abiding presence which is rendered so as much through the muscle-memory of bodily habit as it is through ideas held in consciousness or by means of the inscription of cultural tropes. Thus education cannot simply be a matter of what we put into students’ minds, nor of what can be read off their inscribed bodies. Because certain behaviours and dispositions are the apparent outcome of students acquiring sets of concept or theoretical understandings, it does not necessarily follow that such learning will be sufficient to bring about a desired change in basic embodied dispositions. This is particularly relevant in the teaching of values and the inculcation of attitudes and orientations such as curiosity, perseverance or tolerance of ambiguity. In such instances the specific dispositions may appear to have been acquired mentally, that is at the level of thought. But this downplays the reality that such conceptual schema, beliefs, attitudes are not merely ‘held in the mind’ but are imprinted into the musculature, bones, organs and nerves of the individual, the dispositions or capacities eventually becoming a function not only of the consciousness which has the specific ideas, but of the embodied individual whose corporeal ‘identity’ now incorporates those dispositions and capacities. What this illustrates effectively is that building up the stock of ideas an individual has (a cognitive repertoire?) does not really tell us what she knows unless it taps into the manner in which that individual has learned to perceive, feel and behave in specific ways corporeally. It is the corporeality of dispositions-formation that is essential, and it is precisely this understanding which is often ignored, but which must be activated. Thus education is not simply concerned with the ‘cultivation of mind’. But nor does it consist chiefly in having individuals understand their discursive positioning as member of a social group. Rather it is about how embodied existence in all of its fullness and complexity can be understood, and how individuals can and do, when required, engage productively in embodied action, that is, creatural activity. Such

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creatural activity will involve direct engagement with, and interventions in, the complex processes by which corporeal states and dispositions are shaped and moulded on the one hand by a basic physical environment, and on the other by its cultural forms. As educators we surely should attempt to understand both aspects. For example, we may in genuinely interdisciplinary fashion (across the curriculum) pay critical attention to features of built and non-built environment, not just as a kind of academic study, but as a matter of unavoidable, active encounter in which human beings are involved. We can draw explicit attention to the fact that all buildings, including those of the school or college, interact with the bodies of inhabitants, their body schemes being projected into the spaces inside the building. When we experience a structure we unconsciously mimic it with our muscles and bones: our skeletal system both comprehends and mimics the building itself as a whole and in its parts. Therefore, architecture when sensuously attended to, can provide us with an understanding of depth and connection to the earth itself or, conversely, as in the case of some buildings, it may erode existential meaning, showing us, if we are fortunate, what needs to be contested and refused in the future. Education continues to be presented as a process undergone to provide knowledge and skills, but there remains a strong cognitive emphasis in this. Educational experiences are construed as contributing to the development of mind. What is often forgotten is that people are bodies and all human experience is incarnated: much of what we take in enters directly through our bodies and even when it is more indirect it still has powerful corporeal ramifications. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we take in the world by means of our senses and the particular structure of our perceptual organs – eyes, ears, nose, hands – shape and mould the objects of that world which we apprehend. The significance of this cannot be underestimated, I think. It is the ground of our creatural existence, one we share with other species, though we often do not think much about this and when we do may be unnerved, even affronted by it. It has ramifications across the curriculum and is, I think, especially relevant to issues of social, environmental and citizenship education. But above all, it is central to an account of what education for personhood might entail. Our responses to the world are always embodied as we inhabit places in which we enact our lives, motivated by feelings, desires and needs arising directly out of our corporeality. The intersubjective realm, too, is corporeal – it is always an exchange of visual and tactile activity, of speech, emotion and ways of seeing and understanding. As I argued in my introduction and again in Chapter 1, discursivist perpectives generally emphasise the inscriptions of varieties of social discourse, and of course the power effects upon the bodies subject to them. However, Butler, as I have noted, avoids the trap of seeing the body as either natural or cultural, or portraying the body as a kind of natural surface or purely passive medium for social inscription, whereby culture imposes meaning upon nature. Drawing upon Foucault’s analysis of the body, she maintains that the natural body of traditional mind – body – meaning one which stands over and against either a rational disembodied mind or a dumb

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material/natural entity available for passive inscription – is illusory. For Butler, the body is not an abiding ‘natural ground’ in a traditional sense but rather is always already a cultural sign.15 She shows how it is that bodies are both regulated and inscribed by societies. But inscription upon actual bodies is a complex affair and, as Butler is all too aware, discursive accounts can fail to do justice to the diversity of practices and outcomes which are involved and the effects on particular bodies in their spatial and temporal contexts. As the following brief discussion will show, there are differences in the significations which varieties of inscriptive practices will have in different times and places. The body itself, and the skin specifically as its surface, can be covered in varieties of markings. Social marking of the body has a very long history and has been practised widely in diverse cultures. Stigmatisation as in branding of slaves, the mutilation of criminals, of women and certain groups of men were negative forms of compulsion visited upon particular kinds of bodies by social authority. But there are many forms of marking which were of a different kind – various forms of tattooing, body painting and external forms of decoration such as the wearing of medals or other paraphernalia. Such decoration serves a more positive social ceremonial function while still impressing upon the body certain power relations in terms of status and social position. An example is the highly decorative body painting practices of Aboriginal women, or those of men whose elaborate facial decoration is aimed at attracting females. All of these practices of the body are distinguished by the fact that they involve the larger social entity working upon individuals’ bodies, albeit with differing effects and outcomes for those individuals. This aspect is very much what discursive theorists have in mind when they refer to bodily inscription. But as Foucault demonstrated, the body has now become the locus of intervention in its function as the producer of disciplined bodies. And this involves a move away from the direct marking of bodies by social instrumentalities to varieties of elaboration of one’s own body. It also encompasses a new awareness of the plasticity of the body: the previous permanent alteration of the body through punitive branding and scarring is replaced by the ‘moveable signs’ which have multiplied in recent decades in the West. But the inscription of the body with social signs and cultural categories as described by many cultural theorists, extends far beyond the techniques of actual body decoration such as tattooing, piercing, cosmetic surgical changes and the like. As Mauss points out, the techniques of the body begin to operate upon the new corporeal being very quickly after birth.16 In other words the corporeal aspects of socialisation begin immediately. Every human culture has specific techniques of bringing the new-born up in accordance with the particular codes for the body’s appearance both in its static and its more dynamic representations, that is, as the ‘outlook’ of the body in its various modes – moving, standing, gesturing, approaching and responding to others, managing one’s relationship to the non-animate environment, and so on. The applied techniques of body socialisation mark us out in terms of gender, age, social status and relative authority. But not only

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do they mark us out according to the requirement for socially recognisable representations or symbolic identifications: they become practices of the body, and are those processes lived continuously by individuals. Thus we learn habits as particular kinds of socially designated bodies, particularly those relating to gender and age, and these codes then come to determine what is to be the ‘natural’ mode of the body for a specific culture. The account of creatural existence I have suggested thus far in this chapter insists that we have connection to the sensuous world through our own sensuousness, becoming conscious that our own bodies are, in a significant sense, socially constructed, but at the same time acknowledging that we have a much more complex relation to them, as indeed we have to what we presently call technologies. It is also essential to the second sense of creatural – that of the relationship between the embodied self and its environment, that ‘ecological subjectivity’ as I have called it elsewhere, and of being ‘in place’ and thus in tune with our world.17 These dimensions of embodied experience go to the heart of creatural existence and are essential to the process that philosophers and social theorists alike see as the primary activity of human embodiment – that of meaning-making. Creatural existence and meaning If we return to the older dualisms for just a moment it seems that the discursive world with its constitution through language appears to remove us from what used to be called ‘nature’, yet the body returns us to the natural by means of our own embodiment. What makes the matter complex is precisely the fact of the body – that I am my body – and the reality that although bodies are subjects of cultural and historical discourses, they are at the same time the very centre of our embodied givenness and therefore in fact immersed in the forward movement of time. So there remains a fundamental aspect of bodily experience that can never be translated into linguistic or discursive constructs. This will include most importantly the fact that although emotion occurs in culturally specified ways, nonetheless sensations and emotions are never entirely communicable to others as they concern the deepest aspects of an individual’s embodied experience. Moreover, while discourses are clearly involved in enabling individuals to experience their bodies, there remain certain aspects of what is lived by individuals which will always evade discourse. These without doubt will include in certain instances the functioning in the experiencing of the individual of those technological ‘actors’ referred to by ActorNetwork Theorists. We cannot speak meaningfully of pure ‘natural’ body, that is one which has not been enculturated in the manner previously described. But neither, I would argue, is there a static culturalised body, one which in its ‘always already there’ character, is somehow prior to nature. Rather, as feminist Carol Bigwood has argued persuasively – drawing extensively upon Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied subjecttivity – our human being ‘takes place’ within a natural cultural

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relational field.18 Merleau-Ponty provides a specific account of embodiment that takes us beyond the dichotomy of the natural/cultural body. The body as lived is the centrepiece of his work. Because of its phenomenological character this account of embodiment allows us to engage not only with the notion of lived experience of the body, but also with its embeddedness in place, its implacement in its environs, both human and non-human. This is the view of the body that regards it neither as a passive receptor, nor as mere accompaniment to consciousness. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is a sentience that comes into being with a specific kind of existential environment. It is not merely a passive recipient of sensory inputs but has a particular sensitivity to its environs which is unique. Bodies are actively and always in connection with their surroundings; in their never-ending projects, they are directed always beyond their own boundaries to the wider existence of the world, including its myriad technologies and other body-subjects. So the sensitive body, deeply in communion with its environment, is not a body over which mind has control. In other words, it is not that body which educational theorising has assumed – a separate entity in a world of material objects – but rather is of the very same stuff of its environs, living and non-living bodies. As such it is never fixed but rather emerges again and again out of a constantly changing web of relations to an environment of things, people, projects, demands and the earth with its species and features. The dynamic world is not to be thought of as groups of fully present objects or as a material objective reality that stands outside of the body, separated from it. As Merleau-Ponty describes the world – earth – home, it is rather an omnipresent ‘horizon’ that is latent in each and every experience the individual undergoes. This account of embodiment reminds us, then, that a unified contingent field of relations is present to the embodied individual as its most immediate, familiar and intimate situation. Responding to a cognitivist account of his day regarding experience, MerleauPonty reminds us that living bodily sensation is not an experience of consciousness. It is not simply thought about, but occurs within the specificities of quite particular projects and relationships of which the lived body is the ‘locus’. The salient point here is that our sentient relation to our environment is actually a precognitive one. As embodied beings we are attuned by means of our senses to our environment; we are ‘harmonised’ with it and have an incipient knowledge of it prior to ‘cognising’ it. Intellectuation does not first secure the possibility of sentience; on the contrary, it is this sentience which first secures the intimate bonding with environment – thus, as Dewey recalls, enabling cognition. As corporeal beings we do not grasp determinate objects in the world cognitively. Rather, sensed objects are immersed in the flux of the indeterminacy of relational contexts. What we encounter as sentient embodied creatures is a field whose constituent aspects are touch, sounds, smells, colours, and emotions, out of which emerge meanings, the crucial point here being that the sensory communications with the environment precede thinking. What Merleau-Ponty meant, I think, is that the unity of objects in the world is not achieved by a cognitive operation of association or judgement, but rather by a

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non-cognitive apprehension of immanent meanings in the sensible field. Sentient bodies (and these are not only human) are attuned to life which in effect makes its way across the visual field, binding its elements together – it gathers up in a constitutive stroke the meanings that unite clusters of relations; it simultaneously uncovers the meaning such objects have and ensures that in fact they have meaning. Thus it is that perception actively apprehends meanings, but they are meanings which are also inherent in sensible signs of the visual field and therefore cannot be attributed to the operation of ‘mind’. As Bigwood argues, the sentient body does not cognitively constitute meanings but takes already existing perceptual meanings, hovering, so to speak, in the background.19 This is achieved only by means of a silent communication and a unique bodily questioning that can only find its echo in the perceptual horizon. So the sentient, perceptual body which each of us is, comes to be guided in its syntheses by ‘motives’ in the environment, not by causes or concepts. Such motives cannot be understood as objective causes of perception because motives are themselves essentially inarticulate and indeterminate, therefore allowing endless variation in the manner in which bodies will take them up, clustering and combining them. Motives for Merleau-Ponty mean simply a practical significance demanding corporeal recognition; they are aspects of an ‘open situation’ inviting certain kinds of solution. The question of whether or not the phenomenal meanings promised by motives will be released and so find an answering in the body is a recurring one. The phenomenological body is not a fixed biological entity immersed in a physical world which impacts causally upon it. It is, rather, a constant movement towards situations within which the body must seek out its indeterminate supports. As Latour demonstrates, these supports will include the multiplicity of technologies located as a matter of course in any environment or place, or situated as participant within a specific project waiting to be carried out. Implicit sensory meanings are open, indeterminate tensions shaping and directing our perceptions. But for them to finally become phenomenally meaningful they must be gathered up by perception itself and then acted upon. It is clear, then, that meanings are neither merely cognitive nor linguistic. Indeed the term ‘meaning’ as understood in much cognitive theory and in other fields must be discarded in light of this framework. In view of the radical nature of the capacities of a corporeality which in Merleau-Ponty’s terms has already ‘sided’ with its perceptual environs, older rationalist versions of meaning-creation is rendered obsolete. As Bigwood notes, the French term ‘sens’ not only covers ‘sense’ and ‘significance’ but also ‘direction’, indicating therefore that the non-cognitive and the ‘non-linguistic’ are included in meaning creation.20 This is a most important feature of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of meaning. It indicates that sensory meanings are most accurately described as being latent in that they are indeterminate tensions which shape our perception. Nevertheless, as I have noted above, the operation of perception must gather them, for their being rendered meaning-ful.

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But perception does not ‘hold’ determinate objects. Rather it is a logic that is lived through but which cannot account for itself. The synthesis which occurs is always partial, having effects that are limited in duration. For example, when I see a house in a country landscape, my eyes fix upon the former and the fields fade into the background. In this way my eyes actually come to ‘inhabit’ the house, gathering it up as a unified object. But the house does not become a finished object, one that is translucent to consciousness. It remains as a perceived thing, indeterminate and in a condition of incompleteness for living experience. Thus significances of this kind will always be open to change. Something can appear, that is, show itself, only because of other aspects of itself which are hidden. For Merleau-Ponty then, corporeal subjects always encounter a horizon of other things and sides of things which are not sensed, but which nonetheless persist as non-sensory presence. I sense this hidden, spatial side of things despite the fact that the sensing has no physiological basis. Bodily perception is moreover incomplete, not only because it is spatially spread beyond its present focus, but also because it is temporal and must be untiringly reiterated in us. For Merleau-Ponty there will always be more to the things we sense at a particular instant because our corporeal existence occurs within the indeterminate horizons of time and space – that is, we are pulled towards a past that our bodies have already taken up, but are simultaneously propelled towards a future which our bodies project. So it seems that our existence as incarnate beings is always to a certain extent indeterminate because it consists of an endless process of rendering the meaningless meaningful. But it is also ambiguous because the primary sensory meanings which are accessed by means of our coexistence with others and the world will always have varieties of meaning. The idea, then, that bodies are somehow fixed or given, consisting of structures that are determinate, is erroneous. Nevertheless our bodies are ambiguously joined with their world, specifically with those relationships which define and redefine them in a multiplicity of contexts. Discursive accounts of the body, as I have remarked previously, focus on the fluidity of readings of the body and the manner of inscription upon them. In such accounts the body is not some kind of fixed foundation for differently gendered and other kinds of socially inscribed subjectivities. The very same body (though it could be argued that it is not actually the same) is differently inscribed in a variety of discourses.21 Having acknowledged the changeability of the body as it is inscribed in differing discourses, it is important to reinforce the point that our bodies are not merely discursive constructs. This means that we must then accept that they are, in MerleauPonty’s terms, the very medium for our having a cultural world but that they are also the medium by which we have any sort of world at all. So while the body is undeniably impacted upon by the various systems of representation that exist, it is embedded in its world by means of an inextricable intertwining of the human and non-human (including most importantly, other species of animal), the cultural and the natural. There is, underlying individual and cultural living, what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the ‘natural’ body. Flowing through us, yet independent of us, it provides

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the possibility of phenomenal presence. Each perception occurs in this ‘atmosphere of generality’ and comes to us anonymously, so to speak. Just as we are thrown into that mortal situation in which we find ourselves, ‘already born’ and ‘still alive’, so we are thrown into incarnate situations, modalities of existence, already destined for a fleshy world.22 A useful description of our relation to our environment is that of the connatural body, because it avoids the unfortunate connotations of the old nature/culture dualism. The connatural body that ceaselessly finds its way into the very centre of our everyday lives – despite the ‘absences’ of the body which Drew Leder draws attention to – continually enunciates our communications with others and with things.23 However it is neither foundation nor origin in the sense of a fixed metaphysical ground that certifies, but is a ground in the sense of an indeterminate constancy and thus one that can in fact be easily repressed, ignored or forgotten. In sum then, the connatural body is neither logically nor empirically prior to the cultural or discursive body, but is existentially a codeterminant of the body and therefore can be legitimately distinguished in one sense from cultural determinants. As embodied subjects we are in communication with a rich and inexhaustible sensory world that we do not in any sense possess and which takes place anterior to ourselves. Nevertheless our ‘non-personal’ self cannot be separated from its intermingling existence in things and in the personal lives of individuals. Such a model of the embodied subject demonstrates clearly, I believe, that we exist simultaneously in ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ modes that are tangled in complex ways. We are always already situated in an intersubjective (and therefore obviously culturalised) spatio-temporal, fleshy world prior to taking up a personal position in it. Further, nothing determines us from outside or inside, because from the outset we are already outside, thrown open to our surrounding, in a semi-determinate but constant coition with things. There is, in the last analysis, only this incarnate communication, the natural – cultural momentum of existence, the unmotivated upsurge of being, of which the body and its environment are always moments. Therefore as human beings we are never merely ‘factual things’, but neither are we a bare transcendent consciousness. The world ‘at home’ is both already constituted and constantly in the process of becoming so. There are no immediate ‘givens’ in perception, because phenomena can only be phenomenal to the extent that they are internally if mysteriously taken up by us, coalescing with the body, that is as lived. Our human body with its habits, weaves things into a human and inanimate environment (just as the other animals do in theirs) and into an infinite number of possible environments, thereby showing itself as much more than mere physical life. That said, it must also be noted, that there is not one aspect of human cultural configuration or behaviour that does not owe something to ‘natural’ existence, that is not bound up with the rest of the intersensory environs. The ‘natural’ is indeterminate, while at the same time being the most intimate feature of one’s incarnate situation – for example, as a young Asian male, a disabled adolescent girl and so on, as well as commuter, scientist, bricklayer, pianist and the

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rest. While at the level of social discourse it may not be useful to speak of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in terms of the fixed anatomical and biological structures of sexual bodies, nonetheless since the living out of gender is motivated by ambiguous ‘natural – cultural’ structures of the body (that is, ‘motivations’ in Merleau-Ponty’s sense) there is, as Bigwood and Irigaray argue, a certain continuity in the linking of gender to the body. The pathways we carve out in the course of daily living are faithful to a certain ‘enduring bodiliness’ that coheres across cultures without ever being identical, and yet our human existence is not an innate human essence or structure guaranteed at birth, but must be continuously carved out from one historical period to the next. In the face of assertions regarding the plasticity of the body and gendered identity, I think it is important to understand that even though the body’s organisation is not fixed, neither is it completely contingent and arbitrary. It is not the case that the body’s phenomenological structure depends only on that which we take a conscious decision to make significant, or on that which we are in a position to manipulate as we desire. The sexual body for example has a phenomenal organisation which can be regarded as arbitrary only if an abstract biological view of the body is taken in the first place. By this I mean the tendency to consider body parts as isolable pieces of matter and ignoring their actual living functioning as a unity. The parts of the body grasped phenomenologically are constantly, and in patterned form, integrated into functional totalities, into distinctive ways of patterning our surroundings. Human functions are integrated into intersensory and motor syntheses in such a manner that our bodily composition maintains an indeterminate and fluid constancy. Thus everything in the human body is both necessity and contingency, precisely because human existence is the perpetual transformation of contingency into necessity, and the dissolution of the latter into the former. Creatures in their places In the Platonic version of rationality, the realm of the body, of the senses and nature, of flux and becoming, was but a pale shadow of the real. Variations of rationality throughout the Western intellectual tradition have undoubtedly been contextdependent, as Weber noted, and therefore have taken different forms in different historical periods.24 But what all have had in common is a tendency to dispense with feelings and emotions, these being exclusively associated with the body. Thought as decision-making, choice, calculation and above all as deliberation is ranged against corporeally grounded emotion. Culture regarded as the outcome of deliberative rationality and individual purposiveness (and of course not all cultures are regarded as such) thus stands in opposition to irrationality, the body and to nature conceived as the non-human and inanimate. Now it is not only bodies which are the products of science, technological interventions and representations, but the whole of the previously ‘natural’ world. Remaining within a dualistic framework, the sociologist

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Melucci claims, there is no longer either body or nature ‘out there’ since both are defined entirely within culture. He identifies a ‘great paradox’ of the present time in which nature is no longer generally recognised as such; on those occasions when we do deal with it, it is only that nature which through political reasons we have decided to respect and maintain or, more commonly, to change.25 Melucci’s target is the application of a technocultural form of rationality which has penetrated that previously conceived of as nature, what used to be ‘out there’ distinct from the social world of human invention.26 All of nature, including those aspects of human beings previously referred to as natural or biological, including of course bodies, has now been brought within the purview of discursive explanation and thus subjected ever more intensely to forms of discipline and control. Even those parts of the world formerly regarded as wilderness have been subjected to categorisation and control, rendered, that is, into an arena for manipulation. All the more reason then to think of the human subject as mere cultural construct, he worries. This way of thinking about human beings is highly problematic because it seems to relegate the creatural to a ‘shadow’ world. Indeed the world of political jurisdictions and reified economies now appears to constitute all of reality. However, I think that the idea of culture in some way swallowing up nature as is suggested by Melucci is a misconception which tends to re-instate an older nature/culture division. If we want to avoid this particular dualism then we need to understand, as Dewey did, that the two are not different in kind, but rather culture is an expression of those biological processes which occur without goal or intent and is nothing but a continuation of and organisation of such processes. Feminists such as the environmental philosopher Valerie Plumwood are, in my view strengthened in their critique of present environmental attitudes and practices by this manner of conceiving the continuity, not disjunction, between the natural and social. Plumwood’s work is particularly interesting in this exploration of the creatural because she avoids romanticising ‘the natural’ and uses well – known philosophical tools to elaborate a theory of what I think of as ecological subjectivity. Working within a familiar tradition she provides an alternative version of rationality, one which I think is defensible because it holds the promise of helping us live as coherent and minimally conflicted beings, with desires enough in harmony with what can be hoped and wished for, and a life in which action can satisfy enough of those desires in terms of the kind of beings we are – that is, as creatures.27 The ‘creatural’ theme arises in her work as a detailed and comprehensive account of integrity, cohesion and survival of organisms – human and non-human. As Plumwood acknowledges, hers is a quasi-Aristotelian concept which makes rationality a matter of balance, harmony and reconcilability among an organism’s identities, faculties and ends, a harmony that takes into account the kind of being it is. She argues that since we are indeed embodied and ecological beings, our ‘rational’ lives must involve some kind of compatibility with the biological systems which support those lives. I would argue further that there needs also to be a fuller articulation, especially in education, of the intimacy and complexity of the relations

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that have always existed between animals (human and non-human) and the inanimate, our technological ‘companions’ in our various projects, including those aimed at revitalising and rescuing land, water and air. The phenomenological account of bodies provides a persuasive and nuanced account of intelligent embodiment but also furnishes a view of corporeal subjectivities as embedded within their environment, that is as ‘ecological’ subjects intentionally attached to place. All bodies are instances of being as universal dimensionality, in which the postures and initiatives of bodies interact with the environment as those bodies understand it. Bodies therefore have their world without recourse to the symbolic or objectifying function. For me this is an essential insight which educators need to grasp. Whether temporarily forgotten as Leder demonstrates, or ignored (that is, discursively submerged), bodies continue to have that world. It is the body (not simply a guiding consciousness) that understands its world, and it is the body which holds within it those intentional threads that run outward to the world: the body’s grasping of the world is like a set of invisible but intelligent threads streaming out between body and the specific world with which each body is familiar. Bodies themselves are lived experience and although these experiences are discursively mediated it remains true that it is each and every body which undergoes experience. Further, each has a grasp of the world which cannot be properly captured in such rationalistic formulations as ‘cognitive maps’. Cognition cannot act as a kind of screen to the world – rather the world is the body’s directly. As we shall see further on, the body is always in its particular ‘place’. So the body’s lived experience is that of location precisely because its language is that of gestures, movement and action. In Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘body-subject’, experience in every instance is constituted, located within and as the subject’s incarnation. Commenting upon Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to our understanding of embodiment, Kathryn Vasseleu depicts his view of the nature of experience as something that is transversal in that it can only be grasped as that which occurs, so to speak, between mind and body, or more accurately across them in their lived conjunction.28 In his last and incomplete work The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty deploys the term ‘flesh’ to describe essentially the phenomena of the subject’s simultaneously perceiving and of being perceived, of reciprocal tactile contact or mutual comingling of all objects in the world, human beings in particular.29 While his earlier work The Phenomenology of Perception had dealt with the intermingling of subject and world (intelligent embodiment), in the final work he examined the interrelationship of the criss-crossing of the touching and the tangible, the seer and what is seen. What Merleau-Ponty demonstrated with remarkable clarity is the indeterminacy of the boundaries of each of the senses, their inherent transposability. This recalls my discussion in the latter part of Chapter 1 in which I identified the problem of the way that the senses were separated in traditional views of human behaviour and the ramifications of this for education. Merleau-Ponty’s account of

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the body-subject demonstrates the openness of subject to world through an engagement with it that is multisensorial. Further his account of subjectivity allows us to glimpse that non-entitative, non-identical materiality which is shared by all subjects and objects of perception. Subjects and objects are inherently open to each other, for they are constituted in the one stroke separating the fabric of the world into its distinctive modalities. A conception of subject as ‘ecological’ needs as its ground the understanding that all individual perspectives intersect in that same world as parts of its fabric. The notion of an ecological subject seems to me to suggest that education might need to reorient itself, to overcome the remnants of a dichotomous view of the world and to introduce the possibility of a non-anthropocentric perspective on being. The latter would certainly provide a challenge, not least because it would demand that the familiar category of ‘other’ be extended to non-human and inanimate environment. Yet the benefits would lie in having people better understand that their actions (as consumers in particular, but also as citizens, workers and community members) bring about reactions that are felt in other places, with serious ramifications. Because, as Merleau-Ponty insists, our landscapes actually intersect we must strive to have a better grasp of our role as co-participants and not only as competitors. Such a task, it seems to me, is a central one for education. Creatural agency As an educator I want to fully acknowledge the human being’s constructive and creative capacities, but not by asserting the dominance of a certain view of ‘mind’ or ‘thought’ over bodily existence. The latter obviously has an essential but limited role. Along with Lakoff and Johnson, I wish to emphasise that both reason and concepts are embodied – that is, they do not in some sense belong to a separate ‘faculty’ but rather develop over time out of the individual’s bodily capacities. ‘Mind’, while directing and constructing both the present and future, is nonetheless dependent upon and limited by the limitations the intelligence of the body-subject, that is, by the limitations inherent in the human organism’s bodily make-up as well as by the specific environment in which he or she dwells, including, I would add, its animate and non-animate furnishings. This perspective recognises the creatural dimension of the human being in the sense I have described it: as a set of multisensorial powers knowing a world which, while it limits and sometimes firmly resists, is nevertheless shaped and altered in the service of human ends. Embodied human experience thus consists of the interaction with its environment. This does not amount to a repudiation of meaningful forms of human agency, but demonstrates, rather, that such agency has its root in intelligised emotion and habit. In this, Deweyan pragmatism, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and the cognitive science of Lakoff and Johnson join to affirm the organic basis of human being and to offer an adequate understanding of agency.33

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For Dewey there were no sharp distinctions or dichotomies between the experience of the individual and that which is not part of the individual bounded by her skin. In his view there was no problem of the relation of physical and ‘psychic’.34 Traditional dualisms of the philosophical tradition of which Dewey was a staunch critic included the notorious but still highly influential ontological and epistemological divisions between mind and body, and between knowledge and the actual process of inquiry. Dewey insisted that the assumed clear distinctions between thought and reality simply did not exist: there are no sharp breaks between entities of various kinds; rather there is continuity with things fading into each other, blending and melding.31 Ideas, theories can only provide a tentative glimpse of reality, the philosophical tradition having greatly exaggerated the role of thought which is in fact quite limited. Further, thought and reflection are not activities preeminently involving copying or reflection (some kind of mental mirroring) of an external fixed reality. They only occur because of behaviour: in order to solve problems and avoid danger, and of course to fulfil human desires. Put simply, our thinking only takes place for the sake of our doing. As both Dewey and Nietzsche emphasised, perception, thinking, reflection are bodily originating forms of activity which assist the organism to respond intelligently to its environments, not some kind of mysterious phenomena which exert a directing influence over material bodies lodged in an entirely different realm. Thought is not only natural to experience but is inherent within it. This I think is a central insight with regard to human embodiment: matter and experience are continuous; there is no bifurcation of the two, only a mutual interpenetration. In Dewey’s formulation expressed in the language of his day, experience penetrates ‘nature’, reaching into its depths, expanding our understanding of it. The well-known dichotomies of the physical and mental, and ‘nature versus culture’, were the result of erroneously regarding primary (sensory) experience as crude or primitive and therefore somehow inferior to the refinement of thinking, and especially, to those abstractions that are regarded as ‘cultural’. The difference between primary experience and reflection is simply one of degree, not kind – the former is the result of a minimum of reflection, while the latter is the outcome of continual reflective inquiry and systematic thinking. Thus nature constantly streams into and out of culture, the continuity being preserved between the world of the natural and the world of culture. It follows from this that new experiences or cognitions can never arise in isolation. Rather they are ‘events’ which take time and which are part of a continual process; there are always myriad thoughts occurring as a sequence or ‘train of thought’. Such ‘trains of thought’ are not simply temporal conjunctions of distinctive separate thoughts passing through the mind. On the contrary, they are relations of states of mind (inferences) constituting the sequence that gives value to the embodied individual’s thoughts. Meaning thus is inextricably bound up with action, and the latter with identity. To encapsulate: who I am is what I do (with what I have) and what I do is what I mean. This presents subjectivity as that which we discover

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over time through experience, through our interactions with the world, and in particular through the interactions we have with other people (and I would add with other species): the intersubjective relation, especially most particularly linguistic communication. This sort of description suggests that agency may best be regarded as always grounded in intersubjectivity and therefore cannot simply be a matter of the individual’s rational judgements about what are the best courses of action or appropriate responses to events. It also suggests that agency only arises when we understand and acknowledge the complex and multifaceted nature of our embeddedness in the sensuous world. Yet the distinction between physical and mental events is one that remains essential to our understanding not only of ourselves as subject, but also to that which we identify as going beyond the boundaries of the skin. Dewey certainly made such a distinction but did so because he understood it to be that which allowed human beings to regulate and control their experiential world. So the issue for Deweyan pragmatism was not about how two completely different realms of existence can be interactive but rather about why they are experienced as so differentiated. The answer was one familiar to Nietzsche, but also to some contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers – in order to have control over the physical it must be distinguished from the mental, the key point being that this is a distinction only, not a division into two separate and quite disparate realms of existence. Further, the traditional distinction between primary experience (sensory or physical experience) and what is characterised as genuine thought (the mental) would in fact be more accurately thought of as a continuum: the distinction is merely relative and is also instrumental. That cognitive activity to which Lakoff and Johnson refer in their Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought demonstrates this point: when we reason, we do not transcend our bodies, but remain grounded within them, our thinking arising from the very peculiarities of our animal embodiment. Any notion of agency which does not take this into account is problematic because it attributes to human beings an omniscient, spectatorial and transcendental character beyond the body. Such a view of human agency posits an essentially private consciousness set outside of the physical world. It ignores animality in favour of a notion of the rational agent who is separated not only from other animals but from its own animal nature. It can lead to what MacIntyre refers to as defective modes of self-understanding and imagination arising directly from the forgetting of the body, and can result in the delusion that ‘our’ thinking, as human animals, is the only form worthy of the name. Such modes cannot accommodate the complexities that attend human choice, the difficulties in decision-making, and issues of context and perspective in relation to the ways in which we actually solve problems. If all knowledge is perspectival, then it seems clear that embodied knowers as agents must acknowledge this perspectivity in relation to all their actions. Dewey insisted that what we now call cognition is only one dimension of experience. The intercourse of a living being with its environment includes

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cognition but is by no means exhausted by it. Indeed Dewey threw into question the way traditional philosophy has misrecognised the phenomenon of experience, mostly often mistaking it for observation, and then as I demonstrated in Chapter 1, allowing one of the senses, notably vision, to culturally dominate the others. In examining the consumption of images I emphasised the way in which in present social conditions we are increasingly caught up in a reality that is constituted by information, much of which is visual – in the form of images. Visual information has therefore become the overriding resource in Western culture; daily life consists of the consumption of varieties of symbols and the imagistic and linguistic configuring of desire by a multiplicity of media. Because of this the perceptual and cognitive and emotional realms of the individual’s experience is configured in ways that are different from earlier periods. This, as I believe Dewey understood, has ramifications for human agency and must be a central educational concern. Putting in place creatural education ‘Space’ and ‘place’ are essential concepts to the understanding of human embodiment and to the notion of creatural existence. They carry meanings that go far beyond notions of boundaries, borders, territory, ownership and the like. The notion of ‘space’ as empty and non-solid, awaiting occupation, of space as relative and of spatial relations as assigning ‘position’, whether architecturally, as a central concept within physics, or in the social domain, and the idea of space as a receptacle, are all familiar to modern thinking. ‘Place’, on the other hand, has had a chequered history and, as Casey notes, a hidden one, despite the fact that more recent theorisations can be traced back as far as to Aristotle. It is for example the Aristotelian conception of place that Irigaray and other feminist philosophers have drawn upon to articulate an ethics of sexual difference.30 A phenomenological understanding of place, then, seems to have particular relevance for a conception of creatural existence. As the practico-sensory totalities that they are, bodies are aptly described as being ‘where there is something to be done’, this ‘something’ being the multitude of diverse activities, both simple and complex, that make up the everyday practices animating, connecting and reconnecting us to the many places in which we are to be found throughout our lives. Such places are not merely those having a public designation (downtown, a suburb or an area of countryside); they may in fact be the most ordinary or even unprepossessing places. They are significant only in that they are inextricably bound up with the practices of individuals and the meaning conferred by those individuals. Lived bodies are themselves the dynamic bond to place. Thus phenomenological place only has significance because it is experienced by bodies. Such places are those in which we reside, work, entertain ourselves, engage with our community and carry out the multiplicity of tasks, engagements and, one hopes, enjoyments that constitute our lives. As Casey argues, our identity is tied directly to our sense of where we are and what we are doing in a given spot.

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Such a conception of place is strange perhaps because it does not seem to conform to the more familiar notion of place as a certain space with a specific (public) name and boundaries. The understanding of phenomenological place arises directly from the realities of embodiment. Bodies are always proto-places constituting each individual’s corporeal presence ‘here’. This means that we are not simply in a particular place but rather that it is we who constitute our own place through whatever it is that we do. As human beings we cannot help but create ‘place’ in each and every situation. So whether we are seated at a computer in the workplace, exercising in the gym or cooking a meal in the kitchen of our home we are ‘implaced’ – we are so, as embodied individuals irrespective of who is with us, family friends or strangers.31 Even when we are in so-called open spaces or in the midst of a crowd we are ‘in place’. People familiar or unfamiliar are nonetheless a part of an individual’s implacement, for whenever and wherever we are involved in any activity, alone or with others, we are part of an ‘implaced’ group of human beings. Each place and its bodies manifests a particular vitality which that place holds us for the duration of a human project. Although social differentiation in terms of status and authority, as well as categorisations such as social class, race and gender will infuse meanings generated in specific places and events, nonetheless it is clear that it is the intersubjective relation which is central to the creation of a phenomenological sense of place. Other individuals and their practice – the intersubjective encounter – link me to my place, in the same way that my practice links them to theirs. It seems to me that there is an important point here for the curriculum. It is that a sense of place in the manner suggested can be nurtured across the curriculum so to speak, by having groups of students involved in those activities which can engender an awareness of shared implacement: for example, restoring environmentally degraded areas, engaging in gardening programs, the caring for other species, various kinds of community-linked activities. ‘Place’ in this sense is really about where there is something meaningful going on. Its patterns arise not from detailed conscious planning but from the pre-reflective interaction of individuals who usually remain unaware of the totality they have assisted in creating through their embodied actions. The history of place becomes our history by virtue of the activities of our implaced embodied practice, not because it is owned by this or that social group – and not because it is the nation’s or my property, someone’s territory or our land. The phenomenological understanding of place challenges established ideas about place as territory, region or nation which is central to much curriculum dealing with the history of nations, the functioning of cultures and various kinds of social conflict. Multidisciplinary curricula which emphasise the mutual caring for places can help students to see that they share in a larger ‘placed’ whole. Innovations in geographical education in recent years have strongly supported the understanding of how a heightened awareness of embodied existence and of community are grounded in the sense of place. For example extending their earlier interest in movement, as in

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studies of the motion of tides, the advance and retreat of animal species across landscapes and the spread of plants and crops over time, geographers have been especially interested in movement in terms of groups within and beyond their places. Studies in human geography, but also in the field of history and related areas can highlight bodies as the root of habitual movements of groups of people, demonstrating effectively the operation of the intentional body-force (each individual) which sensitively manifests itself in ways that become automatic over long periods of time. The arrival of groups of people at their destinations, the tasks carried out together, can become the means of illustrating how the intelligence of each and every body, through its intentional capacities, contributes to the building and maintenance of communal life. Transformations of space into place (and unfortunately the reduction of place to empty space – as in the destruction wrought by war or natural disaster), the demarcation, exclusions and containments effected by authorities over populations or segments thereof, can show how certain notions of space (as ‘our’ place) can be used to both define, exclude and oppress. Those aspects of contemporary curricula which deal with how power infuses certain notions of place open students to an understanding that place is not just a linguistic description but in fact is itself constituted through all manner of human practices. Place is encultured and enculturation is a communal act, even if on specific occasions, only I am present: since my actions are always already habitual at least to some extent then they are also socially constructed in significant ways. But it is also true that we partake of places in common with others – irrespective of whether or not they are actually co-present. This is how we make and remake community. The culture that shapes and characterises a place is a shared culture – shared by virtue of our shared embodiment, including our technologies. So the view that a culture is some sort of overarching entity, larger and more significant than the individual and superimposed upon a particular defined and bounded ‘territory’, is inaccurate. But a phenomenological view of place is not one that simplistically presents place as merely ‘natural’. If places were nothing more than a particular space within the natural world they would not play such a constitutive and integrating role in our collective lives. In fact a given place is already culturally experienced and as such insinuates itself into the collectivity, shaping, altering, modifying through the practices of the collective embodiment. Places thought of as where we ‘belong’ or as ‘home’ are frequently emotionally contested and the relatively recent understanding of the significance of place to indigenous peoples illustrates the point very well. Amongst Australia’s Indigenous people, for example, there is a powerful emotional attachment to various places which are deeply meaningful. However in the phenomenological sense of place – embodied implacement – every person will have ‘attachments’ to locations, simply by virtue of the fact that as human beings they live their lives in one place or another. Casey draws our attention to those who ‘have no place’, for example those living on the street, the unemployed, who are unable to be ‘at-home’ in any meaningful sense and must move or be shunted from space to space, not ‘inhabiting’

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in the deepest sense and refused the possibility of making places for themselves. When the homes of various populations are deliberately destroyed by those in authority or by an invading force there is a sense of violation that is profound because it can also destroy the individual’s deepest sense of being implaced. Individuals in the course of living their lives are always ‘implaced’, irrespective of whether they dwell for the moment in what has been called the public realm or that of the private. The public places of cities and the places in which we work are experienced not only visually but themselves actually incorporate physical and mental structures. The notion of an ‘ecological’ relation of selves to structures is expressed by recognition that as human beings we measure space with our sounds, caress the boundaries with our ears, conjure up images through smell and taste and through grasping the weight and density of objects with our touching and seeing. The ecological relation is expressed in the idea that while the body is projected upon the world, that world is simultaneously reflected in the body. The real experience of built environments offers a tactile as much as a visual encounter. Thus buildings that have been experienced are no longer merely buildings, but inhabited space transcending geometrical space. In other words, they have become places. Cities must figure prominently in discussions of sense of place today, and because they may contrast markedly with the city, also the suburbs with their hinterland, and further afield the countryside. All around the world cities now represent symbolically everything that is desirable. Attracting many millions, they offer the possibility of steady work if one is fortunate and has the right credentials. They also present enormous opportunities for consumption of all kinds, provided one has the money and access, social and other amenities, and has acquired the markers of cosmopolitan identity. For many more it will merely be the place they commute to and from to earn a living and from which they retreat to the suburbs at the end of the working day. Cities offer bodily identifications with a built environment, and depending on the city, some afford the same for the non-built: parks, gardens, or even in some cases small wilderness areas. But the actual implacement of individuals within these often goes unnoticed, unless it is directly brought to attention. How we sense the breathing of trees in a park or trace the texture of the inside walls of a building; how we inhabit ‘with intensity’ the many places of which we are temporarily a part, requires attending to our perception as we go about our daily activities in various locations. These are matters deserving of attention within the curriculum. One of the most important aims of curricula must surely be to help offset the tendency to alienation from place that weakens a sense of shared activity and destroys concerns for significant places. The past few decades have seen a change in how the affluent world thinks about children’s embodiment. Parents in particular, but also teachers, are positioned by a range of health and educational discourses to closely scrutinise the bodies of children and adolescents. Parents especially are made anxious when confronted with dire predictions of serious illness, even premature death, if they do not intervene to ensure the health and physical well-being of their offspring. Teachers may also be

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drawn increasingly into the cycle of intervention in students’ lives in ways that focus attention on bodies, as in the case of mandatory reporting of suspected sexual assault on individual students.33 The dominance of discourses about what health is within the education sphere can be seen in the attention given to issues such as low physical fitness levels in both children and adolescents, obesity, claims and counter-claims about the increase in the incidence of attention deficit disorder and depression in the young, and of course the causes and treatment of child and adolescent drug addiction. The assumptions regarding normalcy, adequacy and social performance which often underlie these health and health-education discourses frequently remain hidden at the same time as physical aspects are foregrounded. Yet the effect of burying these assumptions can be far-reaching for the young, impacting not just on their relationships with parents and relatives but also with the wider society. Now although much of the surveillance of the bodies of the young in relation to these very real problems is presented as an issue of ‘care’ which a responsible society must exercise over the younger generation, it can also be seen as an anxietyinduced reaction arising from complex social changes, including a shrinkage of the sense of attachment to the wider community, a feeling perhaps that each young person is, in the last analysis, up against a ferociously competitive and hostile world and can only expect loyalty really from family members or perhaps a close friend. Actually the degree of control that parents and others in positions of responsibility exercise over children has markedly increased in recent decades and probably in ways that would surprise many middle-class parents. This despite the fact that many parents express the wish that their children will lead happy and fulfilled lives – that they will ‘have fun’ – as well as learn gradually to be responsible adults. After all, children and adolescents appear to be exercising considerable responsibility in such matters as selecting the schools they will attend, the clothes they will wear and entertainment they will consume and so on. So for parents and teachers they appear to be well on the road towards becoming autonomous persons. Indeed it may seem to many parents and teachers that children have far greater opportunities for developing a sense of independence and making choices than they themselves did when young. Yet this is not necessarily so. In fact the extent to which children are now watched, scrutinised by adults is remarkable. This scrutiny, though fond, can also be anxious and fearful. In Australia especially (though the phenomenon is also very much apparent in many places around the world where there is considerable affluence) children appear to be more closely guarded than at any time in recent history. The reasons for this are complex and should not be oversimplified. Some have to do with the reduction in family size amongst well-established and aspiring middle-class parents: smaller families may mean that greater attention is focused upon one or two children who bear considerable burdens psychologically to succeed in every endeavour, but particularly in terms of academic and sporting performance. The aspirations of middle-class parents to ensure that their children gain a head start

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in a competitive educational and social environment impact upon offspring in a multiplicity of ways of which many are negative. But there are also certain features of contemporary social conditions which doubtless also play a role in the changing level and kind of surveillance. One of the most insidious in some of its effects is the widespread notion that the world beyond the family is dangerous and can easily engulf children with catastrophic results. Often a sense of community, if it exists at all, is limited and fragile, and does not stand up well in the face of imagined threats from outside the home. This can lead to restrictions on the embodiment of the young that may deny them the chance to explore the world for themselves, to explore their own embodiment, to develop curiosity, resilience and a certain robustness in moving about, understanding, engaging with and appreciating their implacement in a wide variety of contexts. Certainly children are being attended to, but perhaps it is not in ways that encourage human flourishing. Confining younger children in particular can rob them of the opportunities for just fooling around or ‘hanging out’. For example, the door-to-door transport provided by middle-class parents for their offspring may actually convey more about the adults’ own sense of isolation from the broader community (the fear of ‘others’, the underclass, undesirables) than about the actual safety of their children. Of course there are genuine dangers to the young, but they need to be thought about in terms of the overall benefits that can be gained by allowing greater access to a wider environment, both human and inanimate. If I have correctly identified some of the key features of their creatural existence, then there is surely a need to have the embodied subject engage with particular environments in a positive and creative way. This not only affirms identity but can also contribute to building what I call a ‘stock of resilience’ which has physical, emotional, social and ethical components. It is relatively easy under present social conditions to induce a certain timidity in offspring; once established it is not easily overcome. Often the resorting to increasing extracurricula activity for children and adolescents reflects the fear that despite all the effort and expense something is missing. Valuable though these activities may be in their own right, they may not fulfil the same function as those freely chosen by the young in very simple, often spontaneous ways with no prior organisation involved and no logistical planning on the part of adults. I have in mind here activities such as exploration of the city with a friend on the public transport system, or visits to ‘wild’ places such as outer suburban bushland areas or parks. Large numbers of children now face tighter and more restrictive boundaries than in previous times. The suburbs were once the special preserve of children and companion animals, constituting places in which (often together) they sniffed, encircled, trespassed upon and revealed, gradually uncovering the whole of a suburb and making it their own. Such experiences, neither regulated nor policed, scarcely register as educational experiences in the larger view, yet they can be of immense importance to the embodied life of the young. As the geographer David Seamon pointed out some years ago, people feel regard for ‘their’ place because it is a part of who they are.34 It is of course difficult to feel

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strong attachment to built environments if they are not amenable to human scaling, that is, cannot really in some way be made part of the individual’s or group’s implacement. Walking instead of being driven allows opportunities for adolescents to explore their environment and their own body’s capacities and limit. Walking to and from school is not simply a matter of going the direct route from home to the school buildings: it is an opportunity to drop off and pick up friends, to play with neighbourhood animals, throw pebbles into puddles, slip and slide on embankments, and even in big cities, to impress footpath or sidewalk with imaginary markings, creating fantasy places along the way. It is also an opportunity for the exploration of human relationships and where possible getting to know those who may appear as ‘other’ to us. When children spend formative years being shepherded by adults, bodily initiative and resourcefulness may well decline or in fact never be developed in the first place. There may be unexpected consequences of a negative kind in adult life. Often accompanying anxieties about the safety and security of offspring is the fear of idleness. Extracurricula activities pack each individual’s available hours: music classes, football practice, tennis lessons and so on. These are undeniably enriching and in many respects useful activities, but the manner in which they are ‘scheduled’ and the tyranny that they may exercise over the individual, the endless demands on the available time of each person, may reveal an anxiety on the part of parents that opportunities are being neglected. This can impact on the possibilities for exploring creatural existence, especially aspects which permit them, in exploring their implacement in the world, to give free reign to their exploratory and creative capacities. Part of creatural existence – that which we share with many other species – is an instinct to roam about, to explore our environment in all its dimensions. One of the potentially important lessons that can be learned from such experiences is to distinguish what we do – actions we initiate – from what merely happens to us: it rains and our new clothes get wet, our favourite ice-cream shop closes down or the movie we wanted to see is not showing at the local cinema. Such a distinction is crucial for the development of a sense of effective agency in adult life. In concluding this brief discussion of creatural existence I note again the importance of information technology in children’s lives. Computer games are an integral part of the understanding now of many young people, and there is great sophistication in the design of games that allow children and adolescents to control a virtual environment. Thus when they engage with computer games (as millions do), individuals can command troops, blow up tanks and submarines, give orders that disable or more likely execute ‘the enemy’ and, much more rarely, direct and carry out the rescue of innocents. In other words such games provide a sense of omnipotence – one can be the master not only of one’s own fate but that of others. Whereas in ordinary life the most power many young people will have is that they can choose to change the brand of their jeans or decide what movie they will see. This virtual experience of control can be a hollow one when in reality many of the young do not even have the opportunity to actively explore their own environment.

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There is not a single theory of rationality that has characterised Western thought in its long history. The term cognitive rationality is associated with theories of mind, that is, with the development of the logical structures of the intellect in the individual. Individuals are deemed rational by dint of their cognitive activity which, characteristically, involves the construction of abstract concepts. This version of rationality has been deeply influential in education, notably in theories of learning. The other forms of rationality are instantiated in society itself as instrumental rationality, and juridical or bureaucratic rationality the latter being most famously outlined by Max Weber. But there are various versions articulated from differing standpoints; for example, the environmental philosopher Valerie Plumwood identifies the following kinds of rationality operating in contemporary societies: bureaucratic, economic, political, scientific and ethical-prudential. Although these forms may have tensions between them, nonetheless they share the following features: a clear subject – object distinction epistemologically, a rejection of all that may appear ‘personal’ in arriving at a position of ‘true’ knowledge, and a strong tendency to quantification methodologically. My reference is not specifically to the work of Piaget here but rather to the uses to which his work was put for many decades: in teacher education, for example, the form presented often constituted a dangerous caricature of his work and implied that what mattered about the growing child was her mental capacities, curiously divorced from her everyday embodied activity. This kind of misrepresentation has now declined, but the tendency to see minds and bodies as separate lingers in some quarters. I refer to the highly influential work of Michael Apple in particular, but also that of Giroux and McLaren and others on the ‘hidden’ curriculum, as well as more broadly the whole ‘sociology of knowledge’ enterprise of the past forty years which had deep impacts not only in the British and North American educational contexts but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other places. Influences of Foucault on educational thinking have been considerable and the broader discursivist framework has been strongly in evidence in analyses of the social construction of subjectivities, knowledge and schooling. This is a very broad claim and I am aware of the differences in the extent of embodied involvement in primary and secondary education, in specific curriculum areas, but also amongst different kinds of school and the range of variations in teachers’ classroom practices. For a succinct account of the distinction between discursive and practical consciousness see Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, Chapter 5 ‘The Scaling of Bodies’, p. 131. Palasmaa, op. cit., p. 45. I do not claim that gaining access to the corporeal basis of dispositions formation is easily achieved. The demands of the curriculum, the priority given to preparation for public examinations and the importance of gaining marks that will eventually lead to the desired goals (university entry, gaining of scholarships etc) mean that there is little time to even thinking about such issues. Nonetheless, whether learning is directly or indirectly somatic, there is the effect of society’s ingraining into bodies patterns of movement, perception and feeling, all of which involve the inscription in flesh, muscles, skeleton and neurons. Teachers need to be encouraged and then helped in their efforts to think deeply and critically about this dimension of the classroom encounter. See Grosz, Elizabeth, ‘Becoming...An Introduction, pp. 1-11 in Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures ed, Elizabeth Grosz, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1999. see also

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9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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her most recent work The Nick of Time. Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Sydney: Allen and Unwin 2004. Bergson quoted in Grosz, op. cit., Ch. 2, pp 15-128. These patterns encompass ‘dispositions’ that grow within individuals and are as much physical and affective as they are ‘mental’. I discussed these more fully in Chapter 5 with relation to citizenship. For an excellent account of direct somatic learning, see Chapter 7 of Brian Fay's Critical Social Science, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. I do not interpret Latour to mean that technology, machines attain ‘subjectivity’ in the manner of humans. There is ample evidence in his work to support my interpretation that he is not denying the purposiveness of all human activity. It is this understanding of Nietzsche that has been taken up and developed by discursivists, most notably by Foucault, and has over the past two decades been utilised very effectively to critically analyse issues of power, knowledge and the curriculum as well as the social inscription of the bodies of students. For an interesting commentary on Nietzsche’s discursivist credentials and his ‘naturalism’ see Richard Shusterman ‘Somaesthetics and the Body/Media Issue’, in Body and Society, 3(3), September 1997, pp 33-49. See Hèlène Cixous, ‘Alterite: Being Human’ in French Women Philosophers: A Contemporary Reader, London: Routledge, 2004, pp 191. Refer to my comments on the importance of Butler’s work on the body in the previous chapter. See also Butler, Judith The Psychic Life of Power Theories in Subjection, Stanford CA: Stanford, University Press, 1997. Marcel Mauss 1973 [1935], ‘Techniques of the Body’, Economy and Society, 2(1), pp 70-88. Edward S. Casey’s account of getting back into place is elaborated in the following works: i. Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993, and ii. The Fate of Place A Philosophical History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. For an excellent discussion of the under-theorised nature of themes of space and place in the human sciences see Chapter 1, ‘The Dialectics of Globalisation’ in John Rennie Short’s Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World, London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Bigwood presents a detailed and illuminating analysis in her paper titled ‘Re-naturalising the Body (with the Help of Merleau-Ponty)’ in Body and Flesh. A Philosophical Reader, edited by Donn Welton, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Bigwood, op. cit., pp 104-105. Bigwood, ibid, p. 107. Discourses such as race, gender, disability can be seen to ‘intersect’ in a particular embodied individual. ‘Fleshy’ meaning a material world. The issue of the absence of the body from awareness during many daily activities is compellingly and comprehensively explored by Drew Leder in his work on the absences of the body in everyday life. However my insistence that the body is absent from so much of educational theory and practice (including from the curriculum) is not based on the kind of everyday forgetting explored so delicately by him, but rather on a forgetting at the level of discursive consciousness and by means of somatic ‘blind spots’ which seem to arise from certain kinds of theorising in education. Nevertheless Leder’s work provides major insights on matters of bodily awareness. He acknowledges that our bodily

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‘presence’ is of an extremely paradoxical kind. See Drew Elder, The Absent Body, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. 24. See in particular Weber’s classic account of rationality in modernity as described in Poole, R., ‘Modernity, Rationality and ‘The Masculine’ in Feminine, Masculine and Representation, eds T. Threadgold & A. Cranny-Francis, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990, pp 48-61. 25. For a distillation of this issue see the Epilogue in Melucci, Alberto, The Playing Self. Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp 144-154. 26. Melucci, op.cit., p. 150. 27. See Plumwood, Valerie, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, London: Routledge, 2002. 28. For a detailed and comprehensive account of Merleau-Ponty’s very specific view of embodied experience in relation to the ‘flesh’ see Vasseleu, Cathryn, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, London & New York: Routledge, 1998, Part II, ‘Carnal Light’, pp 19-72. 29. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968. 30. For an insightful discussion of Irigaray’s position and that of other contemporary thinkers on ‘space’ see Chapter 12, ‘Giving a Face to Place in the Present. Bachelard, Foucault, Eleuze and Guatarri, Derrida, Irigaray’ in Casey, op. cit., pp 285-330. 31. For an interesting and perceptive account of the distinctions Dewey made regarding experience and knowledge see Wheeler, Kathleen M., Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, London: Blackwell, 1993, p. 98. 32. See Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 33. This is a practice that most people would find of considerable value as it may be the only means of bringing to light what has been happening to victims. Nevertheless it does involve certain processes of surveillance of student bodies and does place added responsibilities upon teachers. 34. See David Seaman, A Geography of the Lifeworld London, Croom Helm, 1979.

CHAPTER 3

WORKING BODIES The idea of bodies that ‘labour’ has largely disappeared from the discursive landscape in recent times.1 Grounded solidly in an agricultural and later an industrial age, much of the manual labour of the past is seen as something that at least in the post-industrial world has been superseded by very different kinds of work practices, with ‘mind’ work now occupying significant sections of populations. This does not mean that physical labour as it was previously understood no longer exists, merely that the bodies that sweated and strained to excavate, build, carry, forge and craft are much less in evidence. There is obviously more work being carried out in the world than ever before and also much more preparation for such work. But it is also more difficult to represent that work in ways that will identify it as such. There is an extraordinary variety in the kinds of work for which people are paid, just as there is in unpaid work. The strutting of fashion models on the catwalk, the child-care centre employee settling her charges down for an afternoon nap, the film critic viewing the latest Hollywood movie and the volunteer collecting donations for charity in a mall are remote from the vision of the toiling of field or factory worker of earlier generations. This fading from our awareness of a certain understanding of labouring bodies is accompanied by certain abstractions, descriptions of workers as human resources or assets for employers. Such terms seem in themselves to perpetuate the tendency to forget working bodies. It downplays the fact that no matter what their work, individuals do not somehow divest themselves of their corporeality as, implaced, they labour in an endless variety of ways. In this chapter I will explore that aspect of embodiment, which the human species recognises as work. The complexities of attempting a definition of work are well known and formidable. It is not my intention to mount a detailed historical analysis of what has counted as work in the past but merely to note that various discourses continue to influence contemporary notions of work. Since the most recent wave of feminism, important discussions of work have revolved around the issues of paid and unpaid work, the latter identifying labour involved in child-raising and housework as key issues in debates about equality of opportunity and participation in the paid workforce. At the most general level of definition, work is practice. But it is self-evident that there can be no satisfactory generic concept of work that does not look at the precise social and political arrangements and especially power relations under which particular kinds of human practice have

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taken place and will continue to do so. Human beings have been constantly engaged in work, sometimes against their own wishes, at other times, as poorly paid wagelabourers. The picture is complicated by the fact that what is work in one context may not be regarded as such in another. In a complex world some people will be paid a wage for carrying out specified tasks but others doing the same work may not.2 As well, there is the work of reproducing the next generation, undeniably a kind of labour which confirms our creaturely existence in the most fundamental way. Work has a history in different cultures and different historical periods within those cultures.3 One of the most enduring aspects cross-culturally has been the division of labour based on gender and social status, and the relegation of entire groups of people as the ‘living tools’ of others (who laboured mostly with the intellect), the most extreme example being that of slavery and later in the West, serfdom. For the most part, the arduous and unpleasant work has historically been reserved for those with least power. This is still the case. But individuals have also suffered in performing work which they were not forced by others to do, but rather felt compelled by their own deep desire to create, invent and discover. Some have tried to do as little work as necessary for survival; many more have striven to generate work not only for themselves but large numbers of others. In addition to paid work people have developed hobbies they work at assiduously and which are every bit as demanding as their jobs. There is a vast amount of non-paid work in the community carried out by thousands of voluntary workers. Clearly the work ‘ethic’ is alive and flourishing in many parts of the world. Yet under present conditions of consumer capital and extraordinary technological change, work for increasing numbers of people is so changed as to be almost unrecognisable to previous generations. This is a source of celebration for many, but one of deep anxiety for others. Nevertheless work continues to be regarded not only as a means of earning a living but also as ‘self ’-creating activity, that is, as a primary means of human fulfilment, and by some at least, as an expression of creativity. The preparation of individuals for the world of work figures prominently as an aim of schooling and higher education. Discursively the ‘productive member of society’ is reflexively constructed and enacted through such frameworks as those of politics, psychology, economics, human resources and a great many others. It lies at the heart of contemporary conflicting discourses about employment, the health or otherwise of national economies, participation in voluntary community work, the welfare state, enterprise bargaining in industrial relations, housework and a host of other areas of social life. While there will be differing emphases on the criteria for assessing what is involved in being productive, almost all will assume that work in some form is central to an individual’s social contribution. But if work is a constant in the account of human embodiment, then it is not unproblematically so. For it seems to me that among other problems ‘work’

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encounters in contemporary life is the role it can play in intensifying the ‘flight’ from the creatural body. This may occur partly because the jobs that large numbers of people now carry out are of the ‘service’ kind that do not generate a ‘product’ in the traditional sense, but rather offer less tangible outcomes such as making clients feel comfortable, or providing opportunities for customers to air grievances. Here the work is distinctly creaturely but its creaturely dimension receives little recognition and its embodied character remains discursively submerged. The flight from the body may also have hastened some forms of technological change that have swept through a huge range of industries, and while not rendering the ways of working redundant, has nevertheless completely altered their mode of operation. The issue of work in the lives of individuals and communities is to my thinking a major one for education, complicated by the fact that due to technological change only a minority of people may be in a situation where they can clearly identify, so to speak, the ‘fruits of their labour’. The work many individuals perform is often of the kind that, because of its very nature, does not fulfil the rather lofty ideal of affording opportunities for being creative, and fostering self-expression, no matter how much we try to glamorise it. To address the issue of the productive activities of bodies is to cross discursive fields encompassing often contradictory conceptions of work itself, for example the distinction made between paid and unpaid work, particularly domestic work, but also of differing notions of what is involved in production of material objects and symbolic products of various kinds. The idea of a ‘labour market’ as a fundamental institution of capitalist societies is the major understanding of the manner in which workers in search of a wage are brought together with capitalists in search of employees. But in consumer capitalism, production and consumption are inseparable, generating complexities of purpose in the pursuit of employment and economic advancement on an unprecedented scale. In examining the functioning of work in the life of embodied individuals consumption in all its forms needs to be understood, not least because it is seen increasingly as the primary reason why large numbers of people strive relentlessly to improve their position in the workforce. Historically the notion of production is itself embedded within a variety of discursive frameworks, amongst the most influential being modernist and Marxist notions of the reproduction of the workforce. Drawing upon Dewey’s work, Nell Noddings notes that finding the ‘right occupation’ is one key to human happiness but that there has been in recent times failure to understand that different kinds of work suit different people; and that current educational policy in the United States seems to have forgotten this.4 She suggests that a much broader definition of work is needed. Dewey’s own writing on work began from the broadest possible perspective when he argued that the ultimate problem of production was ‘the production of human beings’: the reproduction of the human species itself.5 The notion of ‘producing bodies’ had two meanings, he wrote: that of the ‘natural’ or physical processes of the reproduction of the human species, and those varieties of productive labour known in his day, human beings

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engaged in to transform the material world and create cultural life. Keeping in mind the economic, social and political circumstances of the times in which he wrote, it is not surprising that Dewey was keenly interested in human labour generally, its purposes and prospects under the conditions of the social and economic conditions of his time. Dewey’s references to production encompass all the different kinds of practice which not only furnished a living for the individual and families but which were in his view a fundamental expression of the creativity of the human being. But he reminded his readers of the need to pay critical attention to the social, political and, above all, economic environment of human production. This is of particular relevance in view of present conditions, notably those of abundance for some under consumer capitalism, relegation to the ranks of the ‘working poor’ for many, and downright impoverishment for others, including those who labour in less-developed countries for low wages to provide goods for consumers for the post-industrialised world in a time of unprecedented economic growth. Of particular interest is the fact that under post-industrial conditions of work, while ‘labouring’ bodies of the older kind are now much rarer than they were in the pre-industrial world, they are nonetheless to be found in large numbers in developing countries. Meanwhile, in those countries of greatest consumption, bodies are now curiously situated with regard to work, being on the one hand unavoidably workers of some kind or other, but not necessarily producing anything except information and the virtual. Then there are those whose chief work consists of producing their own bodies as items of cultural consumption for others. My specific intent in this chapter is to explore functioning of the body in relation to the theme of work. In light of symbolic production I referred to in Chapter 1, I see a need to attend to questions about how embodied individuals stand in relation to production and consumption, and how production and consumption are involved as work, in the lives of populations. Much has been written about education for working life and the challenges to earlier notions of human work of recent times. I do not intend to canvass such views in detail here, but want rather to examine more specifically what happens to bodies under newer work orders and how the multisensoriality of bodies is (or is not) engaged in contemporary work situations. My particular interest lies in how bodies may be ‘forgotten’ or become absent in the kinds of work processes that are increasingly common and in the understandings of varieties of human activity, which in previous times may have been called labour or work. In following the line of exploration that I do, I may appear to be indulging in some form of glorification of vigorous physical labour for its own sake, harking back to a time and situation in which the masses toiled in unrelenting grimness, in the way modernist discourses of one kind or other idealise such labour. So I want to make clear at the very outset that my intention is not to reinstate an outmoded notion of the value of hard labour. But I do want to raise certain issues about the impact of technology on what Dewey called the production of human beings, and the manner in which information technology in particular has

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affected the role and functioning of bodies in work. It is necessary, therefore, that I take a critical stance on questions of the corporeality of work practices. Working bodies in contemporary life For Dewey, the production of free human beings associating with one another on terms of equality was the aim of all social activity. Education and work and the relationship between the two were thus significant themes examined in his work, as were the conditions under which workers could satisfy both the need of industry and their markets, at the same time satisfying their own desire to carry out activity that was both productive and personally fulfilling. Hence his interest in the security of workers, their involvement as ‘constructive interest’ in the work they do. Addressing the educators of his day, he asked what gain had been made in giving the great mass of individuals an opportunity to find themselves, and then to educate themselves for what they can best do in work that is socially useful in order to give free play in their own development. The best educators, he believed, were aware of the need to discover the vocational and occupational abilities of the individuals they taught, as well as the need to read just the school system to build upon what they had discovered. But as Dewey realised, the real problem lay in the attempt to ‘adjust’ individual capacities and their development to the actual occupations existent at the time. He argued that it was a matter of the state of existing occupations, that is, of the set-up of productive work in its entirety and the ‘the structure of the industrial system’ to match talents with available jobs so that whatever the social circumstances and the economic system, there would ultimately be appropriate work for all: if the processes of preparation for work were more comprehensive and searching, there would be an opportunity for all people to use their gifts and the education they had obtained. Despite the enormous social and economic changes that have occurred since the time of Dewey’s writing I think there remain important issues, especially under post-industrial conditions. Dewey made an interesting distinction between the planned society – the obvious examples being the fascist and communist of his day – and what he conceived as the continuously planning society involving the ‘release of intelligence’ through the widest form of co-operative interchange.6 The ‘freest possible play of intelligence’ is required in genuine social organisation and association, an ideal that we might see as having declined in recent years in many parts of the world. For Dewey, if social planning was to have any chance of success, then it had to allow the operation of intelligence in this way. With the benefit of hindsight it must be acknowledged that since Dewey’s time the world has become a very different place. This has meant among other things, that the older version of the embodied worker has declined significantly, indeed is no longer to be encountered in very many workplaces. There exists now a set of vastly changed social and economic conditions that include a complete transformation of the ways in which the products generated in relatively stable circumstances of workplace hierarchies once produced identities that were

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stabilised as class categories, as workers or owners of the means of production. Moreover such identities by virtue of their positioning also furnished a well-defined consumer base. This older capitalism which Dewey recognised, was about the production of commodities sold as standardised products to masses of people who themselves were, in an important sense, standardised as modernist subjectivities including, for the majority, labouring embodied selves. The situation has been radically transformed in recent times. The idea that there are ‘new people’ or new forms of subjectivity generated through the changed organisational systems and work practices of ‘fast capitalism’ has become widespread in the past decade. New work practices place demands upon individuals to live out the various expectations that others around them will have of them as workers. This will include the requirement to take responsibility for their own activities within the workplace (whether or not this is realistic or even possible), to demonstrate (sometimes in quite spectacular fashion) truly valiant efforts in carrying out all tasks irrespective of magnitude and availability of resources, and to exhibit ‘entrepreneurial’ behaviour whatever the task. The ‘entrepreneurising’ of all jobs seems to be aimed at achieving ‘ownership’ of each and every task no matter how large or how inconsequential. The viability of the ‘new’ kind of worker and her survival in the ‘system’ is deeply dependent upon her incorporation of the company’s or institution’s goals, values and vision into her very identity as worker. When a company’s ‘productivity’ relies on the organisation’s ability to adapt to changing market conditions, then workers must similarly be attuned and adaptive. Thus the major discourses about the workplace have deliberately forged strong connections with newer ideas about education and learning. Indeed a good deal of the impetus for the notion of lifelong learning has come from the transformed workplace in which individuals are expected to wholeheartedly embrace change not only in what they do but also in what they take themselves to be. The workplace learning-‘new subjectivities’ nexus has frequently been cast in terms of the generation of empowerment within corporations and recently corporatised institutions. The notion that individuals who are ‘in control’ are owners of themselves and their work and have an eye always to the changing demands of markets, thereby learning throughout their lives, has become a commonplace. It is to be found in universities as well as international corporations. But the actual content of this learning often remains unexplained. Interestingly, although it is an influential aspect of a set of discourses about ‘new times’; fast capitalism in its language appears to owe more to older discourses of emancipation. With its emphasis on the power to be grasped by the worker, it seems to be suggesting a kind of freedom that had actually originated in modernist or enlightenment accounts of self and agency. But it can equally be regarded as part of contemporary discourses about the successful worker’s identification with the ‘vision’ or core values of the organisation. As Gee Hull and Lankshear pointed out several years ago, such discourse may simply function as a means of making individuals alone responsible for themselves

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(and all that might happen to them) in a rapidly altering world.7 In this manner the responsibility for the health and well-being of employees (psychological and emotional as well as physical) can simply be downplayed or in some cases ignored by management. In reality it is the body of the individual worker that bears the brunt of the pressure not only to be productive (whatever that may mean to a specific industry, company or institution) but also to forge an employee identity governed by the imperatives of growth and constant adjustment to change. In this, the fact of workers’ embodiment disappears – especially, I argue, in those enterprises in which there has been a transformation from material processes of production (say bricks and mortar) to that of information and ideas. Actual bodily limitations to the demands placed by employers on workers, which were obvious in the older workplaces (workers could only handle so much before they became ineffective or ill, or they died) are no longer visible and can therefore be easily ignored both by management and by workers themselves. This occurs, it seems to me, precisely because of the discursive nature of the position that holds that there can actually be no substantive constraints on the production of new ideas, ever-expanding desires, new customer populations, products and services, and above all on the everexpanding demands of the markets. Essential to this also is the assumption that technology has rendered what previously seemed to be finite resources ‘infinitely expandable’. Mind workers especially – a rapidly expanding group in the workforce – may be relatively easily persuaded to forget the body as they manufacture identities through their central role in the endless circulation of symbol and image.8 Emotional work of which there can be vast amounts to be carried out, depending on the workplace and the people involved, is notoriously difficult to quantify and so will not be counted in the assessment of workers’ effectiveness and productivity.9 Older conceptions of work characteristic of modernity and the consolidating phase of capitalism, carried notions of job security and tenure. The new discourses reinforce the shift to contract labour and the view of the new kind of worker as an independent entrepreneur who contracts out his or her work but of whom it is demanded that while occupying a particular position within the corporation they also be a ‘team-player’. The new worker is assumed to be not only fully informed but also fully operant within the specific corporate or institutional culture. Diversity and above all ‘freedom’ are said to characterise the contemporary economic order, at least for those in specific highly skilled jobs. The texts which constitute the new workplaces foreground notions of liberation, empowerment, trust, vision, selfdirected learning, collaboration and others that have been torn from their anchoring in previous discursive formations and have now assumed different status and meanings. The workplace is the domain in which freedom is now achieved. Moreover the workplace and its discourses is that arena in which not only products are manufactured, but most importantly attitudes and expectations. What therefore can be said of human embodiment in such altered work environments?

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It would be naïve and wrong to claim that workers as embodied subjects do not experience themselves as such, even within the new kinds of workplace. Nor can it be denied that the experiential field in which the body articulates itself through implacement (in Casey’s sense) is only a material or physical one.10 Nevertheless the power of the new workplace discourses goes beyond the experiential forms, submerging them. Therefore such discursive power must be clearly understood, because what it shows is the rendering of the body of the worker as ‘docile’ in a Foucauldian sense. In other words the body is relevant as an active plasticity available to be disciplined, deciphered, technologised and inscribed as an individual relationship to those specific normative discursive formations that are institutionally or corporately produced and administered. These normative discourses set out the range of capacities of workers and the new expectations: in this way the experiential body is ‘overwritten’ by discourses. But while this power, through discursive means, may function to separate the subject from the realities of embodiment (its very condition of existence), precisely because it attempts to put out of bounds the experiential grounds of knowing, it can never totalise the body or practice within its discursive realm. In other words there is always a materiality made explicit and present that exceeds discursive boundaries during human practice. The body, while being ‘done to’, remains capable at least of ‘doing’ – that is, of agency. The production of different bodily forms has been central to theories of social reproduction, which present them in a context of class relations. Bourdieu in particular was concerned with the symbolic value which specific bodies or kinds of bodies carried.11 The ‘instrumental’ body of the working class (both male and female, though in different ways) does not lack symbolic value and in the case of men it was strength and musculature that was often portrayed. Nevertheless, for Bourdieu, the dominant classes were able to exert hegemony over this process and to produce bodily forms of the highest value. In the context of this exploration of embodiment it is worth noting the particular aspects of the male worker’s body that were valued. Great emphasis was given to muscularity, strength, stamina and endurance, and in some contexts agility. These and newer characteristics such as a certain attention to grooming, are features now more likely to be presented for scrutiny on billboards, men’s magazines or in television advertisements, advertising everything from shaving cream to underwear. The qualities previously regarded as proof of a male worker’s capacities to labour are in a new discursive landscape valued as ideals of attractiveness and virility, irrespective of one’s class positioning. As part of the scopic regime they encapsulate ideals of masculinity. Thus although there remain kinds of work that call for physical strength or skill, the representation of strong or muscular bodies is just as likely to signify health, strength and care of the body for its own sake, as it is to indicate attributes required for a particular kind of job. As I have noted in earlier chapters, concerns about the body are not new. The fear of and contempt for the body that Nietzsche identified as characteristic of the culture of his time, and of the philosophical tradition, remain, but in certain respects

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are heightened and made more complex under contemporary social conditions. For although on the one hand bodies are now readily available for our scrutiny, entertainment and titillation, such bodies are less commonly assessed now for their capacity to demonstrate through strength their capacity for work. In very many areas of work there is no longer any need for this, whereas in others such as the beauty and fashion industries, the kind of body that is demanded is one that conforms fairly strictly to norms. As I remarked in my discussion of the scope regime in Chapter 1, the corporeal disengagement from the world of flesh and blood is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the continuing disinvestment of the work that once belonged to bodies, to muscles, limbs and most especially to hands. Technology has relieved increasing numbers of us of the need to engage with the world in ways that our ancestors did and for many of us that is certainly a cause for heartfelt celebration. Technology, if we accept Latour’s formulation, can even assume the status of ‘actor’ in a given project, in exactly the same way humans engaged in the particular tasks at hand routinely do. But there can also be negative effects, when our direct bodily transactions with the world are continually limited or even obliterated. For example in specific kinds of workplace the generation of ‘products’ may involve recourse to the keyboard, or we press buttons as a routine activity. Such activity can cement an attitude of remoteness from the results of our action, a deepening of the process of disembodiment. Consumer capitalism involves an ever faster circulation of the products many of us now produce, in particular those of a cultural kind. This can have both negative as well as positive outcomes for populations. On the positive side there are possibilities for the formation of new kinds of communities which, transcending national boundaries, are cemented through their consumption in common of certain cultural products. But as objects move around the globe they may become progressively emptied of material content; what is now produced is the sign and not a material object. Signs generally are of two kinds: information, which essentially is cognitive material conveyed back and forth through technology; and those objects which express the ever-increasing aestheticisation of everyday life (forms of popular music, film, video and the like). These now constitute major forms of consumption, which shape, and indeed it is claimed, themselves constitute, identities. As discursive constructs they confer identity in ways that clearly did not exist in the past. The negative aspect of this is that with the increasing turnover-time involved, objects as well as cultural artefacts are disposable and emptied of meaning. Some of these objects such as computers, DVDs and video recorders generate such an excess of cultural artefacts themselves that people are quite unable to engage with them. As Lasch and Urry show, individuals become swamped by signifiers, becoming unable to attach meanings to them.12 Bombarded by the signs of the cosmopolitan, people may be overwhelmed and can retreat into hostility or a kind of weary cynicism. The loss of meaning, homogenisation of various kinds, and tendencies to extreme forms of abstraction characterising consumer capitalism in contemporary times, are major concerns for some and of little interest, I suspect, to many more. The tendency to

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abstraction that is to be found among some ‘mind workers’ may have some quite profound implications for our understanding and acknowledgement of our creatural and cultural lives. Its significance can be seen perhaps most dramatically in relation to the question of knowledge and how, as embodied individuals in our work, we understand and transform our world. Knowledge, work and bodies Issues of knowledge are fundamental to the theme of embodiment. Knowing occurs through the operation of the senses, not in a simplistic way but, as I have noted, through the operation of the senses as our total capacity. The changes that have taken place with regard to work and our understanding of what these might mean for personal and social life inevitably raise questions about the relationship between knowledge and work. In the post-industrial era, since so much work is now becoming virtual and many fields of work are now basically about information, there are major challenges to older ideas about the performance of labouring bodies, but also to our present understanding of how work furnishes particular identities that are in large part a function of knowledge creation and circulation within particular kinds of workplace. The well-known distinction in philosophy of education between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ has been a useful way of thinking about knowledge in relation to education and schooling for several decades. Philosophers of education used the distinction to analyse the varieties of knowledge the curriculum claimed to encapsulate. It was also deployed to distinguish the kinds of processes entailed in the more theoretical or abstract kinds of knowledge from that of skills-or processorientated. Such a way of categorising various kinds of knowledge also perhaps inadvertently drew attention to troubling questions about theory and practice, and in so doing, to considerations more broadly of the nature of that work for which schooling was to be a preparation. Implicit in all of this was the understanding of the body as skilled: that is, a body, not just a mind, whose musculature, skeleton and hands engaged with varieties of work. Now, in an age in which so much of work is about information, the notion of skilled bodies may sound old-fashioned. Nevertheless the concept of skilled bodies is a particularly interesting one at a time when information technology pervades all kinds of work. Although one must be extremely cautious about generalising across different kinds of occupation, I think it can be argued that many of the skills learnt now are of a purely cognitive kind, replacing earlier, more physically demanding kinds which in significant ways made workers more immediately aware of the embodied nature of their labour. There may be a greater emphasis now on ‘knowing that’, rather than ‘knowing how’ because of a greater demand on expertise, a kind of knowledge most closely associated with management and bureaucratic kinds of work activity that consist almost exclusively of the organisation and transfer of information. Although the knowing involved in a particular form of expertise will take time and effort to

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acquire, it is nonetheless quite distinctively different from that related to the specific skills needed to perform such tasks as playing the piano competently, removing a brain tumour or plastering a ceiling. These are skills that can eventually be called expertise but which will involve the body, notably the hands, in ways that mere intellectual knowledge will not. The learning of a skill is hard work involving possibly much disappointment along the way as we realise that although we may know a great deal about the theory of making beautiful and functional pottery (or, as an endodontist, how in theory to negotiate a complex root canal anatomy with ease), we may not be able to actually perform such a task. The point is that knowing how something is to be done (having the general idea and perhaps being able to explain it to others) does not mean one can actually do it, especially in the case where skills are sequentially ordered and the more complex skills cannot be acquired until those at a more basic level are satisfactorily mastered. The issue of time becomes a major one for the acquisition of skills in contemporary workplaces where tight deadlines are set and profits are dependent upon the fastest possible production and distribution. But when we watch someone who has skill in, say making a musical instrument or blowing glass, we feel that the skills displayed are so expertly applied that the whole process appears easy, belying the sorts of routine repetition that has undoubtedly gone into the development of such a high level of proficiency. It may seem that the skill is almost mechanical in its smooth operation. But there is nothing machine-like about the performance at such levels of artistry. On the contrary such performers must call on considerable psychological as well as physical resources in order to actually build up the skills required over a long period. This usually occurs during a lengthy period of training, which may take months or years to complete. We often think that a certain depth of knowing has been achieved when a person has much skill, assuming that the know-how sinks ever deeper into the mind. But this is a mistake – it is not the mind as traditionally conceived, but in fact the body itself in which such accumulated corporeal wisdom resides. That what the body knows is not uppermost to consciousness does not make it any less significant. There is a great reservoir of practical knowledge residing within those individual bodies that have engaged in various kinds of practice over a long time (riding a bike; knitting a sock); and in such instances as the building of a house or the making of a canoe, the activity of the body is immediately visible. One can see what MerleauPonty conceived as the ‘intelligence of the body’ in operation. But education at the level of schooling may fail to draw attention to this kind of complex embodied knowing, except in indirect ways and in the earlier years. Rather, if it privileges mental knowing it may contribute to students’ mistaken view that ‘real’ knowledge is that which is acquired by minds, not bodies. Because in contemporary working life increasing numbers of people lack opportunities for making and doing, that is, using the body to construct, shape and transform parts of their physical environment, their awareness of bodily connection with that environment may shrivel. Therefore when schools downgrade or show

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contempt for those skills which are not depicted by curriculum documents as intellectual ones, they not only do their students a disservice but in the long run the community as well. Moreover many students find themselves forced to endure the kind of academic curriculum which does not suit their talents, leading to frustration and their possible failure as Noddings and other have pointed out.13 While people may be missing out on opportunities to develop the skills of the body, languishing in types of employment that reinforce the divorce from embodiment, they do have, however, ever-increasing opportunities to be consumers. It is obvious that, apart from its more mundane functions, consumerism is a means by which people construct their identities and build and maintain social relations, the latter being now recognised as essential work in itself. The power conferred by wealth, while still unavailable to millions, is nonetheless becoming accessible to larger numbers than ever before; so it is only the extremely poor who are beyond the reach of consumerism. Meanwhile, the well-to-do and the aspiring construct meaning and communicate to one another through a complex hierarchy of products. It has become commonplace to present the contemporary world as one in which we are immersed in various kinds of object whose production is total, as well as selfperpetuating. What emerges, however, is a picture of ‘the consumer’ as an essentially passive recipient of products. He or she is unable to ascertain anything about how designed objects are made and how they actually work. Those who design aided by the computer, computer-aided manufacturers and their everexpanding marketing departments are skilled in generating consumer desire. This desire is among other things predicated upon planned obsolescence, which means constant replacement. There is an interesting connection here to the claims that I have made regarding the dominance of the visual in Chapter 1, in that an ocularcentric culture frequently ensures that once a product is technically outmoded it is thus necessarily visually out of date as well. Thus an aesthetic of the expendable accompanies technical obsolescence to ensure that many objects will have a short life span. Objects which have been crafted, reveal much about what has gone into their making as well as about the technology that has been used. When as consumers we understand and admire how something is made we think more highly of it. In a world where we have mostly lost touch with the business of making things, and in which the work we do may give us no access to this dimension of embodied existence, an object crafted through the skilled used of material and technology by an individual may restore the almost fully obscured awareness of the connection between making and using. Of course schooling has a role to play, for if students never have the experience of appreciating the kinds of skill that have gone into the making of objects they are less likely to develop such appreciation and understanding in later life. Making involves the sensuous, and it is this which needs to be accorded its rightful place in education. Many critics have pointed out that post-industrial production has not been able to recover what had first been lost in terms of the de-skilling of individuals that

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occurred under industrial capitalism. The move away from the earlier situation in which a single worker possessed the skills to produce an entire product was a major feature of mass production, ultimately rendering previously skilled labour redundant. Post-industrial production using technology may better be able to integrate particular skills of ‘making’ but no one person can or would attempt to conceive of or design, make, market and distribute products on any kind of scale. In any case the separation of the mental aspects (design and management) from the physical production of objects is very strong culturally and although Cartesian separations of mind from body, mental from physical or material, are now rejected, nonetheless there seems to have been a legacy bequeathed by modernity’s continuing separation of mind and hand that has continued to the present. Lest it be thought that my comments are little more than a romanticisation of an outmoded conception of ‘craft’ and an expression of hostility to computer technology, let me provide an example of a practical kind which illustrates the problem. In the production of certain brands of car most of the engineering involved in developing new models is carried out by software rather than in the older manner using lathes and drawing instruments. Computer-aided design and engineering have replaced the previous practice. The crucial point here is that engineers can design almost any component entirely on a computer and follow this with simulation tests for reliability. This replaces the previous practice of building an entire prototype vehicle, testing its individual components along the way, until each component is deemed reliable. The key issue for the present discussion is that, now, testing for real-world reliability and durability takes place only at the very end of the total process and on prototypes which themselves are developed wholly from computeraided engineering prototypes. The desire to speed up the project to meet deadlines means that enormous pressure exists to increase output. But one of the difficulties is that computer-assisted engineering cannot always accurately replicate the stresses involved in real-world use of the vehicle. In other words they fail to account for the very reality of forces with which vehicles will have to contend in actual situations. In this example two aspects of embodiment are highlighted: the absence of those skills which previously existed (using lathes and other instruments of manufacture) and the fact that cars have drivers and carry passengers who are embodied beings and whose activities in driving and travelling will alter the performance of the vehicle in a multiplicity of ways. Cultural and literary representations of ‘product’ knowledge being dominant in the present era (as epitomised in design, advertising and marketing) has meant that the practical side of production – the exercise of embodied skills – is frequently downplayed or overlooked entirely. The split between the mental and manual persists in a variety of ways and is to be seen particularly in the bifurcation of the design of material products utilising information technology from the actual making of the objects. That there exist material processes that are and will always be inflexible as discursive media seems to be an awkward reality that is not recognised. Perhaps it is regarded as an embarrassment precisely because it recalls corporeality.

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The results however are to be seen in the de-skilling of bodies that has occurred in a variety of ways and in a wide range or areas. For example, the computer in digital automation sets up a qualitative gulf between the physical process of making, which is reduced to the standard action of touching a key, and the act of representation, a mental act of judging that entails selection from a menu of image possibilities. The latter calls for sophisticated intellectual skills while the former shrinks in importance, however complex it may once have been when carried out by a skilled craftsperson. Technology, embodied making and tacit knowing It is neither right nor prudent to lay the blame for the demise of any meaningful sense of bodies who work on technology. As Latour argues, to regard all technologies as mere tools is to reinstate notions of dualism and mediation that are simply wrong. Technologies of various kinds have always existed, improving human life in ways too numerous to list. Many of our activities at work, in the home, during leisure time and so on, involve technology. And anyway, our bodies have long ago incorporated it in a variety of ways – we may wear contact lenses or dentures, carry around plastic hip joints or pacemakers, or rely on hormonal implants under our skin. But because the rise of certain kinds of technology has impacted directly on the traditional areas of making, that is, the production of certain kinds of objects, then the question that arises is how this kind of production may have been negatively affected by such innovation. So it is, I think, legitimate to ask whether or not the introduction of specific technologies has the effect of removing such objects and processes from the realm of the maker’s sensuous experience. By the latter I mean an embodied worker’s encounter with the size, smoothness or hardness of actual objects, their colour, shape, smell and so on, with their specificity as these sorts of object rather than something else. Such sensuous engagement may seem irrelevant from the point of view of consumers, but for workers it can mean that the integration of machines and information for the purpose of creating processes of manufacture and distribution of objects, may render their embodied intentions, desires and active engagement with the world of materials obsolete. Over time the experiential dimension may be lost to them permanently. No doubt in the eyes of some this will not matter, but others may worry that it will contribute to a general lack of interest in knowing how things are made and where they come from. It may dampen curiosity in ways that encourage a kind of passivity, which over time hardens into indifference towards and ignorance about the physical world. The extent to which information technology now shapes our lives remains a contentious issue, though discussions about this are often clouded by misunderstandings. On the one hand there is a strongly deterministic argument which depicts human beings as now being driven willy-nilly by technologies over which they have little control and in the face of which they must yield. In this the individual and her desires, political stance and moral values seem to be swept aside

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in ways she is helpless to contest. A much more subtle account of technological power however, presents it as having its own impetus and logic which reorganises our workplaces, institutions, social and personal lives in ways that may appear attractive and useful, but which still impose new arrangements in which we have had no choice. This, by the way, is not merely an updated version of the older view of workers, citizens or ordinary people having change imposed upon them from above. In fact the recipients of technological change are themselves the managers, directors and even the owners of the technology. Moreover within science, technology, as Latour demonstrates, cannot be neatly extracted and identified as purely instrumental to human agents’ practice. It is this complexity of the relationship of people to machines which makes any objections we might want to raise about technological change difficult. It is not necessarily bosses or management who are forcing us to embrace the latest innovation – rather it is ourselves, or at least our closest colleagues, and competitors. Nevertheless there remain legitimate concerns about the degree that technology can seem to present as something unalterable, and which human beings must accept on any terms. In principle, of course, human beings can organise themselves to change the course of technology, but obviously it is extremely difficult to do this in practice, especially if the trend in a particular industry or institution is well advanced and there is strong competition to perform at optimum levels among those in that sector. Removing computers from fundamental processes such as running the rail system, coordinating flight takeoff and landings at an airport or enrolling and processing student results in a university would not only cause chaos initially but render connected services inoperative, not to mention placing workers at considerable disadvantage to those in adjacent sectors of the workforce. Once a technology has been entrenched in the society it appears that it cannot be dislodged except by another technology. The problems which may arise have more to do with the fact that we may remain unaware of the changes being wrought – not just changes in our physical working environment but also those which over time can reshape us psychically, including our outlook as workers, our sense of who and what we are, and our attitudes to our own creatural existence, especially our sense of agency as individuals and as citizens. Technology may move forward as a series of interventions, but it can also proceed organically with many small alterations and innovations taken by many people in a variety of locations. This in effect is the persuasiveness of technology – ideas continually flow back and forth producing a kind of organic growth that is not of one time or place but rather goes on simultaneously in many locations, all the time and everywhere that the technology is used. Only the most determined largescale political intervention could halt or even interrupt such development. Likewise the notion that any one person is in a position to determine the direction of technology is far-fetched, given the diffuse nature of its ongoing progression.

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Nevertheless there are those whose attitude towards the impact of technology on certain kinds of knowledge and creativity is decidedly pessimistic. They are faced with situations, for example in educational institutions where courses in industrial and product design now consist mostly of virtual design on computers. The chief difficulty as I have already argued is the absence of a tactile or physical encounter with materials. Restricted scope for kinaesthetic and tactile sensitivity seems to be a feature of much of the technology involved in design at present. Specialist in interaction design, Gillian Crampon Smith, argues that it is impossible on a computer to ‘luxuriate’ in a material as one would in shaping clay, simply because every few seconds one must stop thinking in order to click on icons of text sections which interrupt the creative flow. Such critics seem to be saying that until the computer interface becomes more organic, intuitive and indeed ‘human’, that is less mechanistic, then they will not progress in creative terms until they go beyond point and press functions and begin to incorporate human skills. The key point to be made overall is that computer designing of all kinds is a mental craft, not a handcraft. There exists now a globalising culture that is technological in character. That culture is to be found centrally in the world of work as information technology, and as computerisation of design and manufacture. It is also to be encountered in education at most levels and is a feature of other institutions which are not usually regarded as workplaces in the strictest sense of the word: in non-government, humanitarian and charitable organizations for example. Yet the reach of the computer is by no means all-encompassing. There remains a sensuousness to many activities that simply cannot be captured via the rendering of it as information of various types on the computer. This applies not only to the objects that only the human hand can make but also to many processes in fields such as furniture production, jewellery-making and various kinds of metal work. Computers cannot always replicate handwork but even where they can, there is reason to maintain the work of hands. There is a whole dimension of work that is also sensuous but not in terms of generating a concrete product with use or aesthetic value. This is the area of emotional work, something which is embodied in most fundamental ways, as the writing of Megan Boler on education convincingly demonstrates. Such ‘work’ has until recently been little acknowledged, resisting definition and categorisation for a variety of reasons. Suffice to say that such emotional work resonates at a deep level with those work activities that allow us to experience what Heidegger called the eloquence of objects. These are not merely visually apprehended, but impact upon individuals in ways that cannot be encompassed by electronically generated representations, schema, or models. As Dewey understood, making is a form of intellectual and imaginative owning. Children, and even adolescents who have a particular passion for, say, animals or cars, will draw and model such objects in their early years. Making is therefore a way of embedding one’s particular engagement with the world and its materiality in the embodied imagination. And while making is by no means the only manner

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in which we can understand and indeed ‘own’ the objects we desire, it is nonetheless a most powerful one. Becoming engrossed in the object and desiring profoundly to understand it lies at the heart of young children’s impetus to draw and make. It is also basic to the development of understanding of one’s implacement. Understanding through making and doing is, I maintain, a fundamental need in the child, one which for many children is ignored in their later years of schooling when abstract forms of knowledge come to dominate the curriculum. The passivity of bodies so much in evidence in contemporary life, while no doubt having a number of causes, can also be induced by forms of education which, while they may emphasise the acquiring of abstract forms of knowledge, nonetheless do not provide adequate opportunities for experiencing the pleasures of making and doing. Tangible objects produced out of the stuff the world is made of – stone and metal, wood, resins, shells and ochres, as well as human-made paper, glass and dyes – delight young children and can remain a delight throughout their lives if not diminished by the rush to master the presently available abstract kinds of knowledge. Such contact with materials connects individuals with materiality, the earth and its forms. It conveys understandings not only of materials but also of physics and function, demonstrating in ways that perhaps can only otherwise be described in theoretical and abstract terms, the particular characteristics and behaviour of various kinds of matter. Further, the point of contact between different kinds of matter – say wood with stone – can be the means of providing quite profound understandings of how objects and the forces which act upon them operate. Skill, focus, intuition and corporeal intelligence in Merleau-Ponty’s sense are required to work with metal – there are for example questions of beating, melting, soldering and so on. This kind of experience, which though it may not lead directly to employment, can however spark an interest that may well be renewed later in life as hobby or pastime, even, perhaps, being put to use in the service of the community. There will no doubt be argument about the benefits I appear to be claiming here for ‘hands-on’ experiencing of materials and their potentialities. The developments in technology, especially in the area of design, might suggest that the experience of making as described above is no longer as important as it once was. Designing on the computer can provide the same kind of understanding and appreciation of materials and their particular capacities and functions, such critics might claim. But those whose actual work is about making and doing often have a very different response. As the British potter Mike Casson notes: ‘... it must be something about the use of the senses. The physical sense of throwing, for me a wonderful amalgam of power and delicacy. The sense of touch on a pot, smooth or craggy: the sense of sight-colour and visual texture ... and the sense of sound a pot makes when struck which tells much about form and materials and firing. Last but not least a sense of weight – apparently there is an African word that means ‘good to pick up and feel right in the hand’ – a good pot to lift.14

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The urge to make things – to engage with the materials of the world – is strongest when we are young, though of course it can easily be suppressed by uninspiring external conditions. For some individuals this remains into adulthood, but probably in far fewer instances than in previous generations. Only for a relative few does the exploration of ideas take the form of making. For some it remains to provide them with so much intellectual, imaginative and sensory pleasure and satisfaction that they will do it all their lives. In an epoch of technological objectification, I think we need to be reminded of that in everyday life, including in particular through our work, we engage in a wilful grasping and clinging to the world through the use of our hands. David Michael Levin points out in his powerful articulation of Heidegger’s account of how it is that we ‘handle’ the things of the world. His view that the technological age presents a particular problem because of its tendency to want to always tie down or secure through possession all manner of objects in the world is expressed as follows: The grasping gestures characteristic of our technological world is powerful but they cannot reach into the essential nature of things. In this regard, such gestures are tactless transgressions. The careful touch, which is open to feeling what it touches and uses, gets in touch with a thing’s essential nature more deeply and closely than the hand which wilfully grasps and clings moved by strong desires (that is attractions and aversions), or than the hand which is indifferent to the beauty of the thing in the wholeness of its truth. This is why I have argued that the rooting of gesture in thinking requires attention to the body of felt experience.

He continues: A bodily felt guardian awareness, being the mode of our original tactile understanding, our global pre-comprehension of things in a primordial mode of tactile openness, is our most tactful way into the opening depth of things. Touching with equanimity, handling with tact, we leave things whole and intact. Touching with a restraint that is not deformed by renunciation; we let things yield the richness of their more intangible nature, their deeper and otherwise inaccessible nature. Handling things without greediness, our hands will be filled with a palpable wealth. Maintaining things in accordance with the dictates or our guardian awareness, the objects of technology can perhaps be transmuted into the things they originally were and essentially are. Even when we use things, we can be moved to keep them in a way that also lets them be free of our use. The hammer, the piston, the knot and pulley are certainly useful; but they are also manifestly beautiful – and not only when they are left to stand in their own intactness, but even when they are actually being used, if handled by hands receptive to the moving beauty of their presence.

Levin asks what exactly is the nature of our capacity to be touched and indeed moved by that which we are given for our touching. What is it that touches us and by what are we moved? As Merleau-Ponty tells us, touching assumes a capacity to be correspondingly touched, and this ‘primordial reciprocity’ throws into question our long-standing habit of polarising the tactile field into the configuration of subject which knows its object. Is it possible therefore to touch things, handle and indeed use them with a sensibility which speaks of equanimity, that is having the capacity to let go and to ‘let be’? There is, as Heidegger certainly believed and Merleau-Ponty

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recognised, a properly human gesture, one that is in touch with the intrinsic value of Being and which is not attached to ego. Levin gives as an example the cabinetmaker who touches the wood he uses with fingers ‘sensitive to the precise needs of the wood’. He allows his fingers and the work of his hands to be attuned by the wood itself. The wood ‘speaks’ by means of its grain and the hand moves in response. He takes pride in his instruments and handles them with a timeless care. As he planes the wood, he caresses the grain. In the flow of his movements we will observe poise and grace; and in his gentle touching and holding we may sense a ‘visible tact’. It will be argued the kind of touch he refers to is applicable to a very narrow range of human activity, that of making or crafting objects of a utilitarian nature but especially those having aesthetic qualities. It will be seen to have little applicability to the technologically advanced systems that characterise many workplaces today. The activities of many workplaces with their newer kinds of commercial relations and practices and their largely symbolic products and anchoring in communications that emphasise the virtual, can seem far removed from the kind of tactile experience outlined in the example above. Unfortunately such a work ideal will be relevant only to the few. But this does not mean that the intensification of bodily de-skilling is inevitable. People can and do make choices to engage in activities that will allow them to recover ‘old’ corporeal skills and develop new ones. But perhaps education can play a greater role in ensuring that more than just an enthusiastic few do so. Levin suggests that the best kind of response is one in which a new society, a new community in which conditions favourable to a deeper understanding of technology itself, together with conditions hospitable to the gestures most responsive to a radically different ontology, could be tried, tested, and measured against the ontological difference these could make. One possible conceptualisation of this is by way of an extension of Latour’s notion of the active ‘folding’ of the human and nonhuman within collectivities, having well-defined but limited goals orientated to the completion of a specific project. Levin, using more directly philosophical concepts and language, suggests a reconnection with gestural contact with the world, claiming that gestures of grasping, seizing and clinging, gestures of rage and violence and the gestures of mechanical indifference have established themselves as the dominant ones. This he feels would help combat that reductive nihilism characteristic of the present historical era, one in which our way of relating to the things in the world has become remote and abstract while simultaneously abusive and violent: the reduction renders everything available for immediate control and manipulation. According to Levin, what we have is a technologically conditioned ontology, which above all reflects hands that are motivated by the need to dominate and control. But this state of affairs is not inevitable and uncontestable. One of the ways of combating it is by way of a re-examination of the notion of craft-knowledge. The kinds of connections which the body makes with the world in the examples I have provided earlier on in this chapter raise the question of how knowledge resides within the body when know-how is exercised habitually as forms of craft. The

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answer is by means of tacit knowledge – that which is acquired through sensuous experience and is therefore necessarily embodied. It is that kind of knowledge which allows us to be able to do things – drive a car, build a garden shed, implant a replacement tooth, repair a television set – rather than merely verbally describing the processes involved or writing clear and logically organised instructions about how to carry out these activities. This may seem strange since commonsense might suggest that if we know something well and can describe activities vividly and accurately then we ought to be also able to do it. But clearly this is not always the case: one may well be able to write very persuasively, about teaching a Year 9 class for example, but in fact be quite unable to do so; a science journalist may provide a convincing account of an experiment but in fact have none of the practical experience to carry it out. Tacit knowledge is practical ‘know-how’ and it exists within individual bodies and also among groups of embodied human beings. It is learnt and incorporated by individuals only through practice. Although its theory can be learnt from books, videos, CD-ROMs and other sources, its practice can only be acquired over time and by means of embodied activity. To play a musical instrument, operate a lathe to shape wood or to make a container for fuel rods in a nuclear reactor require a high degree of the relevant corporeal skills. That said, it is obvious that different kinds of tacit knowledge stand in different kinds of relationships to practical know-how: while it is doubtful that an individual learning to blow glass would gain a great deal from watching film about the activity, someone following written instructions about how to construct a compost heap may find a magazine article quite adequate to the task of providing information. In a very real sense, therefore, tacit knowledge is embodied in the people who have it. Complex processes of corporeal learning that involve knowing X in order to perform it before passing on to the next task in sequences, are quite a different matter from the learning process involved in knowing about X in order to be able to speak or write about it. Since much of the work in senior secondary school can consist largely of the latter – writing about processes, reproducing ‘results’ at examinations it leaves out not only the realities of those embodied skills in individuals, but it also leaves out an understanding that tacit knowledge in the workplace usually has an important institutional or communal element to it. Tasks of some complexity such as forming by hand an arch-wire in orthodontics, or constructing accurate architectural models, involve greater content and breadth of practical experience than can be said to reside in the individual, no matter how proficient or creative. Hence the element of practice by the many, in a communal work setting, is more often than not a feature of practice in many fields. In this way new ways of doing things are discovered and wider applications canvassed. What we see in these instances is a kind of ‘inter’-corporeality at work, one in which the relation among bodies is as significant as the fact of the embodied individual. It seems to me that education at all levels must resist the tendency to utilise technology in ways that mean that students will be dealing entirely with the virtual,

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rather than actual, material processes and objects throughout all stages of their learning. Virtual objects can be created on the computer and this fits with the contemporary world of work in which computer-generated mass manufacture is well established. Design using computer CAD systems, for example, allows the user to create, modify and thus finish a virtual product which, in actual time, might take much trial and error and perhaps wastage of materials to reach the same end point. What we discern in this process is a quite new sense in which one’s creation of objects or product keeps pace with one’s ideas, one’s inspiration with one’s use of particular software. We may not see any engagement with materials as such at all. We might well ask, then, is this activity still called ‘making’? Is it what used to be called craft, encompassing both personal know-how and communal practice as described above? These, I think, are important questions not only for educators but also for employers and communities. Bodies producing bodies I want to turn now to a very different conception of work but one which Dewey regarded as the prime issue of work or production for human societies, the reproduction of the human being. Reproduction can be viewed as that process of bearing and rearing offspring in a specific cultural milieu within its characteristic normalising, discursive frameworks governing such notions as childhood, parenting, development and so on. But it may also be seen in its biological reality in which one human body produces another of its kind. As a form of labour the reproduction of the species is unique: there is nothing in the external world of work that is comparable. At its beginning – conception, bearing and birth – though it obviously involves both males and females, it nevertheless has a specific connection to the lives of women. The issues of human reproduction highlight like nothing else can the reality that human beings emerge from the physical, animal existence and only then enter into the social realm in the life of the species and individual. Carol Bigwood, whose work I briefly mentioned in the previous chapter on creatural existence, reminds us of the interconnected web of relations with the human and non-human, the cultural and natural, when she describes the experience of pregnancy in which the body cleaves to others and things: in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, to the general incarnate structures of the world. The connatural body I described in that chapter as neither empirically nor logically prior to the cultural or discursive body, but rather as existentially codeterminant with it, demonstrates dramatically that we exist simultaneously in discursively constructed and ‘natural’ ways that are quite unavoidably intertwined. With Bigwood I hold that the female body has its own indeterminate natural structures that ‘noncausally’ generate women’s particular way of being-in-the-world. Absolutely central to this is the experience of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding. Bigwood’s descriptions of the ways in which a woman responds to the ‘natural’ upsurge that independently of her volition courses through her body ‘with a life of its own’,

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demonstrates that blurring and diffusion which Merleau-Ponty felt gave a truer picture of the incarnate self. It is difficult to think of another experience in which the body is so thoroughly in the grip of what Merleau-Ponty referred to as a certain ‘living pulsation’. Nonetheless it is necessary to remind ourselves that the mother in her ‘labouring’ is not simply allowing nature to take its course but rather all that happens to her – the particular mode of birthing, its time and place, the procedures followed by mother and those who assist, the medical interventions and so on – will all be discursively constructed, and depending on the individual’s prior experience, socially formed attitudes and responses, will interact to make the experience of birthing more or less conform to expectations and outcomes already given within the various frameworks that constitute normal birthing and mothering available in a given culture. But it remains an undeniably physical process in which flesh and blood bodies reproduce their own kind as do all animals. Recognising pregnancy and childbirth as a quite unique form of labour has always been problematic for a patriarchal intellectual tradition with its rationalist foundations. But it has also presented problems for feminists of various kinds, in particular those wanting to avoid the pitfalls of an older ‘biological determinism’ based on the long-established nature/culture divide which had placed women at the mercy of their reproductive function and effectively barred them from public participation. For some analysts of discourse the ‘natural body’ of women presents as especially problematic. Yet even here it has been necessary for such critics to explain what it is that they have been engaging with when, for example, they have disavowed women’s ‘nature’ on the grounds that it is essentialist. In other words, stronger explanations are needed about what was included in the account of nature being rejected. By this I mean that the idea of nature was every bit as much subject to changed interpretation depending on historical circumstance as was the conception of culture. In the mid-twentieth century the calls by various forms of feminism for women to take control of their bodies was predicated on a clear division between the biological (the natural) and the social, with the terms more often than not being opposed, representing radically different realms of human existence. Much of this kind of thinking, leading eventually to social policy recommendations, involved either a conceptual repudiation of nature, and/or a program of action that would limit the workings of the ‘natural’ female body through contraception and other means. The broader issue that underlay the feminist political agenda for women’s control of their bodies, was that of how constraining ‘the natural’, either physically or conceptually, could have an impact upon conceptions of human difference and also upon social equality. In the past sixty years the conceptual dismantling of the idea of female nature has proceeded apace. In the work of Beauvoir, historical materialism and Sartrean existentialism were deployed to show that biology for women was not destiny. Meantime actual interventions in the biological lives of women (control of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, etc) allowed women to emancipate

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themselves from nature as animal procreation. Theorising about the lives of women produced varieties of analysis that emphasised the social construction of women and their lives. At the centre of these was the nature vs. culture division, which is most apparent in the claim that gender and biological sex are two different things and that gender does not necessarily follow the dictates of sex. Over the past four decades the term gender has been understood not only to better demonstrate the socially constructed operation of discursive regimes upon actual bodies, but in addition to rescue the latter from their previous unfortunate anchoring in purely biological accounts of male and female bodies and behaviour. Now as I have remarked in previous chapters, discursive accounts of bodies must not be dismissed: they are evidence that we are meaning-making animals. An understanding of the ways in which women’s embodiment has been shaped and in particular controlled by varieties of discourses of the feminine – those about sexual difference, female sexuality, reproduction and so on – are absolutely central to grasping not only the processes of ‘production’ of women, but also how political feminism’s demands have been framed. Language, images, discursive representations are crucial to movements for women’s equality. Depictions of women and men as differing with respect to the objects of emotional response, for example are significant ‘cultural’ means by which the position of women (and men) are enacted. But in focusing on the discursive we must avoid falling into what seems to me is just another kind of essentialism – one in which culture itself is essentialised. When this occurs the physical world, including the bodies of human beings, become little more than a screen for our culturally encoded and psychosocially determined projections. In contrast, for the philosophers and other theorists of the body whose work I have drawn upon, there are no separate realms of the natural or cultural: rather, everything is simultaneously both manufactured and physical. It is women who labour directly with their bodies (just like the females of other species) to produce another generation. In labouring to effect the production of life women have been historically engaged in nurturing the not yet socialised human infant towards entry as an adult person into the culture. This is what feminist Ynestra King calls ‘the socialisation of the organic’ but it is not, I reiterate, proof that there exist two separate realms that require bridging between nature and culture.19 Women, it has been argued, have traditionally been regarded as the means of mediating nature for men who inhabit the separate realm of culture, which transcends nature, but who continue to deny its dependence on the latter. This sort of thinking reinforces a nature/culture, division. Just as it allows an essentialism of nature to occur it can equally lead to the discursive submersion of a female reproducing body, that is, to a repudiation of the actual materiality of the production of life. Although some have depicted this production of life as a labouring ‘in reciprocity with nature’, the labouring of women’s bodies in the production of children does not fit easily into the available categories about what work is. Such labouring of women in reproduction, involves focusing on the time of the human body. It reminds not just women but men also, of the creaturely dimension of

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existence, a fact that not only religious tradition but also the intellectual tradition as a whole has attempted to suppress or at the very least downplay. As such it contrasts with the kind of time I discussed in the previous chapter, which children encounter early on in schooling and which characterises the workplace and public life generally. The ‘time of the body’ challenges ‘clock’ time and the specular logic of the traditional rationality that underlies the way the culture is organised, particularly with regard to work. It recalls the fact of our embodiment which is grounded in a non-dualistic materialism, reminding us that everything we do and what we are is rooted in the body. Our animality, our creaturely character is therefore not somehow outgrown as we become ‘enculturated’. An overemphasis on representation and discursivity can fall prey to the tendency to deny the world’s independence of us as the human species. What is needed is a realisation that for humanity (as for certain others species) culture itself is natural, that human bodies are of the kind that can survive and flourish only by means of culture, that is through the creation of symbols and meanings. Without culture we would die very quickly. Nietzsche may have been scathing about the culture of his day, but he did not deny the significance of culture per se in human life. But an overinsistence on discursive ‘truths’ can have the effect of obliterating the central truth, which is that human subjectivity is physical at the same time that it is expressive. I agree with Eagleton’s comment there seems to be a fear circulating that unless we continually remind ourselves that we are cultural animals, we will degenerate into the long habit of ‘naturalising’ our existence. Female producing bodies (reproductive female bodies in particular) seem to present an uncomfortable physical and surprising reality which must be subdued by various discourses. These can have the unfortunate effect of controlling but also silencing the pregnant body. Obscuring the fact that child-bearing and birthing are work is not helpful in the long run if we want to gain a comprehensive understanding of what work is and can be. It is a much less complicated matter to examine in educational settings issues of work, careers, employment and the like than it is to include the issue of women’s labouring in reproduction as a theme to be explored. Some of the reasons for this are immediately apparent and have to do with the way issues of reproduction are confined to certain areas of the curriculum. Although themes of population growth, paid and unpaid labour may be raised within the frameworks of economics or history, there is little scope for examining the labour of pregnancy and birth in those parts of the curriculum. Much of the discussion about such themes is relegated to the area of sex education where it is more often than not dealt with in a mechanistic way, which is no doubt related to the one-dimensional view of human sexuality expressed in such curricula. In general, sexuality it not approached from the point of view of a broad exploration of human sensuous existence, but rather as a recitation of ‘facts’ about the biological aspects of sex and reproduction, with ideological overtones that are in some cases an expression of a confused, hypocritical set of attitudes about male and female sexuality.

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The growing influence of conservative political groups, notably those of a puritanical religious kind, on curricula in countries such as the USA and more recently Australia means that a more holistic approach to the teaching of human sexuality – female sexuality and its complexities in particular – is unlikely to gain ground. Further there are problems in my view arising specifically from the conflation of health education with that of sexuality and reproduction. Much health education, for example, is underpinned by narrow and uncritical social theoretical foundations that overemphasise the concept of norms both in respect of biology and behaviour. For example, there are ‘norms’ of health regarding the body that conflict with the physical realities of the pregnant body. After all, as Iris Marion Young has argued, the ideal of the healthy body is one of ‘steady state’ and the pregnant body is hardly that.20 The separation of pregnant body from everything else in the curriculum, especially from female sexuality, serves to obscure issues that are important to a wider understanding of its character as simultaneously creatural and cultural. They certainly do not allow the fullest appreciation of women’s work in pregnancy and birth. The work of women in reproducing the next generation is of course shared with men, in ways that it was not in the past. Child-raising has always been a matter of community in many places and at various times in particular it is now regarded in many quarters, but especially among the middle classes in so-called developed or industrialised countries, as a matter for males and females. Discourses of sexual equality have moved from equality in the paid workforce and focused on notions of shared responsibility for the welfare of the young. Ideally the labour that it entails is to be shared between men and women whether in heterosexual or homosexual relationships. Men are not able to experience pregnancy and childbirth as an integral part of their own embodiment, but there is no doubt that they are fully able to participate sensuously and intimately in the overall processes of reproduction (assisting birthing, infant care). All the more reason then for the reproduction and care of offspring to be seen as that work which Dewey claimed is vital to the survival and flourishing of societies. Education for embodied existence – working in and with the world In concluding this chapter I reiterate Dewey’s point about the centrality of work to embodied human existence. Having said that, I also need to acknowledge that there are major difficulties in defining work today. As John White has argued in his Education and the End of Work: A New Philosophy of Work and Learning it is obvious that we have categories which are too narrow and restricting into which we fit all manner of activities called work and which no doubt are work for at least some members of society, in that it is what they carry out in order to earn a wage. But there are a great many things people do that certainly have all the hallmarks of work but for which they are not financially rewarded. Such activities cover the production of all sorts of objects, the provision of all manner of services generating

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those cultural products that regulate, direct and discipline our lives. Many people seem to work for the love of it, others because they wish to contribute directly to the well-being of society. Others still work because they have exceptional skills that virtually demand to be utilised. Unfortunately, however, there are increasing numbers of people who find that the work that they must do (their job, usually, but not in all cases) leaves them little opportunity to appreciate their own embodied existence. It is to this aspect of the theme of embodiment that I turn in concluding the discussion of working bodies. When Studs Terkel wrote his influential study Working more than thirty years ago the Americans he spoke to regarding their feelings about and attitudes towards work indicated that many felt that there was ‘more to life’ than simply the (then) nine-to-five regimen of paid work.21 Such views seem to indicate that people perhaps made a clear distinction between their job, working for a living, career, etc and something else, which was regarded as their ‘real life’, that which presumably was more meaningful at some deeper level. Three decades and more on, people’s attitudes appear to have changed markedly. There are several aspects to this change in attitudes but what stands out, perhaps, is the manner in which identity is tied up with work, that is the sense of who one is, and is therefore deeply meaningful.22 Now we must be very careful of generalisations here: there are millions of people in the world for whom work is daily grind, often poorly paid and with little or no capacity for being meaningful in the sense mentioned. The majority of the world’s population is in such a situation. That is, they are in no position to be inspired or empowered by their work; there is no profound sense of achievement, only resignation to a life of drudgery. Working longer hours merely to make ends meet is the lot of many who are not in the very privileged situation of being in jobs that interest them. It is within particular social groups that the change has taken place. That change is generational and cultural and redefines work in important ways. In many cases people in jobs which interest and indeed excite them welcome long hours. In an era in which unionism and previous concerns regarding a just wage, equality of pay and so on are receding, the question of the hours of work people will engage in has become very much a matter between individuals and employers. Within societies where the overt value is that of success (and I am aware that there are different ways of defining success), working longer hours is an expression of ambition, which is taken now as an unalloyed ‘good’. Inability to gain satisfaction from one’s work is regarded as a failure or simply one’s just desserts for not being sufficiently well educated or ambitious. Being in control may even be one of the newer defining characteristics of work, which the complex domain of home with its emotional and other demands may not be able to furnish. But again we must remind ourselves that only certain kinds of jobs exhibit this all-absorbing character and only for certain people, specifically those with the kinds of skills the technological workplace now demands. There is no doubt that technology buttresses the new world of work;

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laptop computers, mobile phones, voicemail and email mean that the world of work is often indistinguishable from that of the home. But the outcome of all of this is often that longer hours are worked. Despite the greater freedom of choice within specific workplaces about what tasks may be done by particular personnel and the much greater attention apparently paid to personal preferences, it is now frequently expected that workers will be available for much longer periods, well beyond the previously accepted time set aside for the working week or day. Commentators on work point out that workers may now have a greater say in how their own workplaces are organised and run, and have far greater freedom to carry out ‘work’ in locations of their own choosing. But they may also be expected to be ‘on-call’ for particular projects, which requires them to dedicate more and more hours to the work. Australians, for example, now work more than fifty hours per week – twice as many as they did two decades ago. A work-obsessed culture, its critics claim, means that people now accord the workplace and their functioning in it unprecedented status. This is not to deny in any way the reality that many people enjoy their jobs. The reasons for this changed status of work have to do with the explosion of the kinds of jobs that allow for creativity and flexibility, the increased uses of technology and the expansion of the kind of know-how that is the lifeblood of areas such as sales, marketing and advertising, financial services, media and academic work, and which consists largely of the creation and implementation of ideas and forms of symbolic capital. But a more basic reason is that of the enormous financial pressures demanding that individuals subscribe to the values of the new workplace – one in which success at all costs is to be achieved. The idea of what constitutes a decent life is now consistently being revised with the standard being raised ever higher, thus demanding even greater efforts in work to sustain it. This tends to support the growing belief that not only is the workplace now the centre of existence but that this is as it should be. However this outlook goes hand in hand with the acceptance that earning and spending are the twin activities in life – consumption is the other side of the long-working-hours coin, and requires enormous attention to the demands of the workplace. There is fear among the populace (and not just those in work that is routine, even boring and low-paid, but also those with ‘interesting’ jobs) – fear of retrenchment, replacement by others who will expend even greater effort and work even longer hours. A passionate engagement with one’s work is, for many people, the central reality of their lives. Such passion for one’s work has produced many of the great inventions and discoveries that have led to improvements in the quality of life. They are the outcome of the single-minded devotion of individuals and groups, their skills and dedication. In the past such skills were visibly embodied, something that will not be so immediately apparent today. But in many of the jobs we hold today we are unable to see how skills are embodied. If we are fortunate our work may be of the kind that does not diminish our sense of being embodied. If we are not, we may feel a growing disillusionment with the ever-increasing demands of jobs and the

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encroachments made in our creatural lives. The issue of work however is not simply a matter for individuals and their preferences and choices – it is, basically, a matter for political decision and social policy. That in the post-industrial world we now live in a work-obsessed culture is widely accepted as the reality for increasing numbers of us. Is this a bad thing? The evidence that individuals are suffering ‘burnout’ and work-related stress is increasing, but so also is the evidence that populations of the post-industrial world and sections of some industrialising populations are more and more enslaved to consumption. The questions then for educators, it seems to me, are those which ask quite simply: What is work for? And how does the work we do contribute to a more fully realised creatural and culture existence – our own and others? And finally, if the work we do does not fulfil our needs, what kind of action can we take to remedy such a situation? These are not questions I will attempt to answer here but they are, it seems to me, major issues for education at the present time. NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

The demise of the labouring body is a theme cultural theorist Terry Eagleton has explored in a number of his works. His most recent discussion is to be found in Chapter 6, ‘Morality’ in After Theory, New York: Basic Books, 2003. There are many charitable organisations, which in size and complexity are comparable to large corporations. Within these there will often be both paid and unpaid workers who carry out work that is substantially the same, though there may be, formally at least, some differences in overall responsibility. One of the most informative, accessible and sophisticated accounts of the history of work is Richard Donkin’s Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Evolution of Work, New York & London: Textere, 2001. See also Jamie Peck’s Workplace: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets, New York & London: The Guildford Press, 1996. Nodding’s critique is contained in a recent work Happiness and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dewey’s remarks about production are to be found in Section II, Chapter Six, ‘The Individual In the New Society’ in Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy, edited and with an introduction by Joseph Ratner, New York: The Modern Library, 1939, pp 429-430. With respect to the theme of productive capacities in human beings and society’s duty to utilise them well, see also Dewey’s work in and about China and his concerns about its problems of development, but also the processes by which life could be made satisfying and productive for individuals in that country, as it was in his day. John Dewey: Lectures in China 1919-1920, edited and translated from the Chinese by Robert W. Clopton and Tsun-Chen Ou, An East-West Center Book: The University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1973. Dewey’s suggestion that the state should somehow be involved in seeing that individuals find and take up those occupations most suited to their talents and education sounds strange in vastly changed economic times in which, as Beckett and Hager point out, it is assumed that it will be the responsibility of each individual to identify and cultivate his or her own employment opportunities with vigour. See Beckett, D. and Hager, P., Life Work and Learning Practice in Postmodernity.

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education, London, Routledge, 2002, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. The new work order is concerned with creating new people (employees) for the world of fast capitalism. Gee, James, Hull, Glynda & Lankshear, Colin, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism, 1996. I have borrowed the term ‘mind worker’ from the social analyst Clive Hamilton. They are also referred to as ‘symbolic analysts’. See Growth Fetish, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Emotional work encompasses what is also referred to as communicational work. It is that which deals specifically with the maintenance of relationships and development of a positive psychological and social climate within which other work may be carried out. For an insightful and comprehensive discussion of power and emotion, see Megan Boler’s Feeling Power: Emotion and Education, New York: Routledge, 1999 which I draw upon in Chapter 4 in my exploration of emotion and sociality. For an account of the concept of phenomenological place as elaborated by Edward Casey, see Chapter 2 in the section titled ‘Space, Place and Embodiment’. Bourdieu’s writings on the body are spread across several of his works. They include the following: Bourdieu, P., Distinction, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Bourdieu, P., ‘Le Sens practique’, Paris: Minuit, 1980. Bourdieu, P., ‘Les usages sociaux du corps’ Annales ESC, 26(1), pp 205-233, 1971. Lasch, Scott & Urry, John, Economies of Signs & Space London: Sage, 1994, See Chapter 5 ‘Accumulating Signs: The Culture Industries”, pp 111-144. Noddings, op. cit., p. 122. Crampton-Smith’s observations are noted in Jeremy Myerson’s ‘Tornadoes, T-squares and Technology: Can Computing be a Craft?’, Ch 11 in Peter Dormer (ed.), The Culture of Craft, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, pp 176-185. These comments are part of an interview with Mike Casson conducted by Peter Dormer, influential thinker and writer on contemporary craft issues and problems. They are included in Chapter 8 ‘Craft and the Turing Test for Practical Thinking’, pp 137-157 in Peter Dormer (ed.), The Culture of Craft, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Levin, David Michael, The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, Chapter 1 ‘The Bearing of Thought’, p. 128. Ibid., pp 128-129. Bigwood, op. cit., p. 110. Ynestra King is a social ecologist and feminist writing from the early 1980s onwards. She has published a number of articles including ‘Towards an Ecological Feminism and a Feminist Ecology’ in J. Plant (ed.) Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, Santa Cruz: New Society Publishers, 1989, and ‘Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology and the Nature/Culture’ in I. Diamond and G. F. Orenstein (eds), Reweaving the World, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990. Young’s short paper titled ‘Pregnant Embodiment’ is included in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, Donn Welton (ed.), Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998, pp 274-285. Terkel, Studs, Working, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. The notion of work as a lifelong engagement conferring not just financial benefits but more importantly psychological and even spiritual ones has a history. It has long been understood but the modern notion of the dignity of such work, in other words the pride taken in the making of objects for both use and ornament, did not really gain prominence until the Middle Ages with the rise of the craft guilds and the pride taken in the production of the finest craftsmanship by families in which a

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tradition of craft making was long established. There are, of course, strong religious associations with work in the West, notably that of Puritanism and the Protestant ethic which I believe are highly significant at the present time in certain parts of the world. The ‘proving of one’s worth’ through the performance of work, so powerfully explicated by Weber, highlighted as ‘the work ethic’, a central theme which has been subjected to sustained critique because of its emphasis on the belief that moral worth is only attainable through delay of gratification and devotion to one’s work no matter how humble or apparently inconsequential in the larger social sphere such work may appear to be. It was Marx, however, who provided the definitive account of man as ‘labourer’ albeit as exploited, whose work was alienated from his species being by virtue of the exploitation of such labour by capital. Marx’s work also was the source of the modern understanding of the psychological impact of wage labour on the individual, providing a powerful and ultimately influential account of the manner in which the proletariat became alienated from its true nature.

CHAPTER 4

EMOTION, SOCIALITY AND EMBODIMENT To be embodied is to be in touch with the world. Although in our various labours, that world appears to us as object and therefore separate from our bodies, nevertheless it is precisely by means of our myriad activities that we affirm our connection with it. The reality of this connection may become obscured by a preoccupation with the symbolic and formal aspect of cultural life, leading to a conviction that human creation has transcended the merely physical or material. But the fact that human beings have as their particular project the ceaseless making and remaking of culture, does not render embodied creatural existence either invalid or irrelevant. Human beings as embodied beings share creatural status with other species while simultaneously constructing cultural life.1 Central to such creative activity is the functioning of emotion. As the contemporary philosopher Michael Stocker argues, without emotions it is not possible to live a good human life.2 An endorsement of Stocker’s view should not be taken to mean that I regard emotions as always positive in their content and effects. The physical and psychological damage inflicted by emotions such as hatred, envy and jealousy in personal, social and especially in political life, is obvious. But I would see the root of all emotions as lying in prior events in the lives of individuals and social groups which, over time, build a certain a reservoir of reactions and response, these being played out as specific emotional responses subsequently in the life of the individual or group. Among these will be complex feelings and their manifestations that we variously characterise as negative or positive. The specifics of events and contexts will obviously determine how these are made manifest, and with what effects for those involved. Feminist writing of the past two decades and more, has attempted to redress the traditional philosophical reason/emotion dichotomy, revealing the manner in which cognition and emotion are inextricably intertwined within the individual.3 This has had the effect of bringing emotion to the fore in diverse discourses about subjectivity, emphasising its central role in all aspects of life, including that of corporations and institutional structures.4 In this chapter I explore the ways in which emotion enters into the engagement of embodied subjects in the multiplicity of practices enacting their joint social life. Of particular interest are those events involving encounters with people we see as ‘different’, not only because they do not seem to conform to cultural norms (for example, they don’t seem to appreciate those things ‘mainstream’ society does), but also because their bodies do not seem to ‘belong’ either. Hence my emphasis is on the manner in which sociality is generated and sustained through emotion in the

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intersubjective relation rather than its dynamic within the individual. In other words the focus of attention is what Negri calls ‘the multiplicity of singularities in ever changing relations with one another’.5 The characterisation of emotion as irrational because of its supposedly compulsive and disruptive nature, but also because of its historic association with women and ‘the feminine’, is contested; likewise its depiction as threat to the functioning of cognition and rationality. The philosophers of the body, Nietzsche, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty, placed emotion at the very root of all intersubjective encounters. Feminist philosopher Megan Boler affirms this and anchors her own comprehensive analysis of emotion in education in the experiences of her students, and in responding to her own classroom practice. The work of sociologist J.M. Barbalet re-evaluates social theory in terms of its neglect or distortion of emotion in public and institutional life. For each of these, emotion is the mainspring not just for individual action but also for all social activity. With each of these writers, I hold that emotions are the most significant indication that human beings are uniquely fitted for social life, believing therefore as Boler does that education must concern itself in fundamental ways with the emotional lives of students and the endless variety of outcomes arising from emotional engagement with a complex world. Emotion and the social dimension of embodiment Emotion as the very source of human behaviour was a major conceptual undergirding of Nietzsche’s work as a whole and was inextricable from his insistence on the primacy of the body. Needs, drives and instincts interpret the world, one that is constituted out of intersubjective relations. Indeed for Nietzsche it was the senses that make the assessment of our connection with others of our species, not some abstract rationality or cultural norms shaping and limiting consciousness. Emotion therefore has the status of the generative point for all individual bodily dispositions, orientations and attitudes. The affects, as he called them, were regarded as natural powers: our primordial dispositions, the basic structures of psycho-physiological being and the wellspring of human creativity. All emotions are fundamentally connected with the overarching drive – the ‘will to power’ – but many are generated out of the basic needs of the body, including the desire for food and of course sexual desire. Drives propel the physical body into the world, continuously turning it in this or that direction, revealing the manner in which an embodied self is always in a sense constantly being relocated by the competition between drives within the individual body. In the philosophy of Descartes and later in that of Kant, the thoughts that occur in the minds of individuals are held to be the basis of their reasons for and decisions to act in specific ways. The association of emotion with the body depicted it as inferior to mind but also as problematic in relation to moral judgement. The capacity to

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reason was held to be the identifying characteristic of the individual mind. For some this seems to fit neatly with the idea that when individuals join in a collectivity, their individuality as ‘thinking being’ is somehow impaired. In other words emotion stands accused of not merely encroaching on the rational deliberations of the individual internally, but also more damagingly, when it intrudes into the social realm (especially into those structures that have to do with regulation and control of populations, as well as the market and its operation) it can undermine sound political judgement and even government. The contemporary notion of ‘group-think’ carries the negative connotations of the submersion of the individual’s rationality by the emotions of the ‘mob’. Grounded in a view of the unique individual consciousness as under threat from the collective, it directs its fire against the apparent depredat-ions brought about by what Maffesoli calls ‘the emotional community’.6 Such views, it seems to me, are themselves an expression of deep anxieties and antagonism towards the action of groups in social life. Despite recent analyses of emotion and its functioning both in intimate and public life it continues to be cast as something distinct from the ‘mental’ events that occur for individuals in their daily lives. Emotion is still portrayed as an add-on feature to the defining operation of cognition. But as Barbalet, the champion of the notion of the ‘social body’ argues, rather than being opposed to rationality, it is most accurately portrayed as continuous with it. Properly understood, he argues, emotion functions as a guide to and a preparation for the individual’s social action, which is itself the source of the generation of social relations.7 Human actors are bodies that are ‘emotional’ as well as rational, but without doubt they are the former before they are the latter. Freud’s account of emotions as instinctual energy or biological function in the individual, shares with Nietzsche’s an acknowledgment of its source in our animal nature. MacIntyre too emphasises that adult human behaviour has its sources in early habits developed through emotional embodied engagement with environment in the same way that it does for other species. Since Freud, others have broadened and developed this conception of the origins of emotion, focusing on its contribution to such processes as discernment, attachment, memory and judgement, those features that for Barbalet constitute personality.8 Sociological analyses of the workings of emotion in modern social life under conditions of capitalism have provided major insights into the ways that the social forms peculiar to modernity with their attendant kinds of rationality, have variously dealt with emotion.9 But there is a strong sense in which bodies tend to be merely taken for granted in such work, for although they are obviously present in social life, by and large, they are not really present in their corporeal specificity. This despite the fact that in order to gain an understanding of social agency there must first be a concept of embodied agency. As Lyon and Barbalet argue, the body cannot be seen merely as subject to external forces: the emotions which move the person through bodily processes must be understood as the source of agency.10 Barbalet reminds us that our actual endowments and our purposes are made of the world we inhabit, and are fabricated with the involvement of those with whom we share that world, that is

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with other embodied subjects. From a philosophical viewpoint, Casey, whose work on ‘place’ I have already drawn upon in earlier chapters to give an account of creatural existence, makes a closely related point when he shows how implacement is a deeply social occurrence precisely because it is in concert, that we render our (embodied) places meaningful. This rendering must always be emotional at its core. Bodies inhabit their places in the world communicatively but bodies as action and communication can only be so through the dynamic of emotion. Now while it is true that identity is forged in the interplay of emotion within the individual, that interplay is not merely a solitary affair for that individual, but has an essential intersubjective aspect. People come to matter to each other only through emotional involvements, through experiencing the emotional expressions of others who are implicated in all sorts of ways with their own life projects. That is why I think in this age of the spectacle which brings other people’s suffering right into our living rooms, we need to resist the temptation to indulge in a kind of instant sympathy that may afford us momentary gratification, but can soon dissipate as we pass on to the next opportunity for passive observation of others’ misery. Empathy, as I will try to demonstrate further on, begins in proximity: we learn how to care about others because we have had some genuine experience of caring ‘in our own backyard’ so to speak. That ‘backyard’, by the way, may well include our non-human co-occupants whose multisensoriality can extend into the world much further than our own. As we experience such emotions as empathy we are affirmed in our spatio-temporal existence, that is, within the different kinds of context in which we are implaced. The emotions experienced are in important sense not mere mental events but are located in the depths of our actual embodied engagement with the world in all of its complexity. In terms of the social, therefore, emotions properly understood are never reducible to the individual who experiences them, but neither I believe can it be said that an individual can only experience those emotions his/her culture prescribes. This sort of claim obviously requires an ontological basis and an epistemology that will provide a convincing explanation of the relational. Phenomena will be regarded as intrinsically non-isolated, but functionally related to, and contingent upon external physiological and behavioural processes, as part of those ongoing processes which constitute real dynamic situations. The Deweyan conception of the nature of world and human being shares with Mead’s the conviction that consciousness is the actual process itself of an individual organism’s response to environment. Relations and objects as relation are not established in terms of general principles of mental associations on the basis of atomistic data or objects. Rather they are encountered already intrinsically related within nature in terms of the way in which the individual tends to select, manipulate or reconstruct them. It is the dynamic, active character in the transactions of individuals, that determines the always-related objects of consciousness and those of the world of reality. Meanings or objects arising for individual consciousness are derived from, or presuppose, the common meanings or objects in social situations. This is a very strong statement of the

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relational nature of human individuals, how they are socially constituted and the way they have knowledge of their world. According to this view, different experiences undergone by individuals presuppose a common perspective. This is a view radically opposed to the familiar notion of the isolated individual knower who must make strenuous and ultimately very problematic efforts to effect a connection with others if she is to share what she knows with them and they with her. In contrast, it seems to me entirely plausible to accept that individual selves emerge from the social process of relations as aspects of situations. In my view this is the kind of perspectivity that we find not only in the work of Dewey, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty but also in that of Mead. In Mead’s writing for example, perspective had both an evolutionary and a genetic dimension. Hence the order of ‘emergence’ was not only logical but also historical and biological.11 As he saw it, the task was to emphasise the temporal and logical preexistence of the social process for the self-conscious individual arising with it. He therefore recognised the need to explain the social process of behaviour in terms of fundamental biological and physiological relations and interactions such as reproduction or the cooperation required for mutual protection and sustenance of social relations. So for him, ‘mind’ could not have arisen except out of the (embodied) environment. Patterns of social relations are therefore presupposed in his account of human consciousness. In Dewey’s work everything exists to further conscious life, but not in terms of a subject/object separation or as that ‘otherness’ of materiality which is produced by philosophical idealism with its privileging of transcendent principles. ‘Mind’ and self are derived from the biosocial process, involving above all intercommunication and activity. The implication is that a sensate, complex and dynamic view of the individual/social relationship is necessary if we are to do justice to the complexities of embodied subjectivity. Social systems themselves are built up from the projects, tasks and commitments of bodies. The body must be configured therefore as simultaneously medium and outcome of social body techniques, while society itself is both medium and outcome of the sum of individual corporeal techniques. For Dewey the social body is not something separate from society itself but quite simply encompasses the endless variety of ways in which, by associating together, people share their experiences and develop their common aims and interests. Society is nothing more less than the process of associating in certain ways so that experience, ideas, emotions, values are transmitted and made common. Society consists of individuals in their relationship to each other. Because individuals are always ‘attuned’ to each other, their embodied character constitutes the everyday interaction between body-subjects. It is, however, the interaction that generates all meaning and thus we can say that subjectivities are developed fundamentally through a process of intercorporeality. In Experience and Education, Dewey described the continued growth of fleshand-blood human beings in their social relations, noting that life is this very growth and development and nothing more.12 Education therefore has as its end this ongoing

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interaction of embodied individuals in their social context. In this way Deweyan ‘naturalism’ reveals its social character – meaning, which is undeniably social, emerges from embodied cooperative human activity. By ongoing participation in the activities of a group, body-subjects learn to respond with habitual orientations to the ‘charged stimuli’ of their environments. Embodied communication is quite simply the way in which, over time, people grasp things in common and come to partake of communication in a common understanding. The social dimension to Dewey’s understanding of human embodiment is clearly outlined in his account of the unity of the human being, where he insists that the boundaries by which we ‘mark off’ a human being are very different from the energies and organisation of energies, which make her a unified human being. Whereas we can grasp the boundaries – the skin – at a single moment, on the other hand we can grasp the unity only as something occurring in a stretch of time. This is an indispensable insight, I think, one which allows us to understand human embodiment not only as an organism in itself (it is undeniably that) but also as an open-ended system operating within larger human and non-human systems. Dewey takes up the theme of the emotions as they function to construct and maintain that sociality, which in turn constitutes human subjectivity. In his view it is clear that ongoing interactions with others is the wellspring of emotional (visceral) reactions. That which he calls ‘the emotional life’ hinges on the kinds of responses we constantly give to living situations – situations that are invariably generated out of human embodied interaction and through the complete interpenetration of self and humanly constituted actions and events. Embodied experience is the fulfilment of the organism in its struggles and achievements in a socially constructed world of meanings. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of carnality as the social dimension of embodiment, complements that of Dewey’s in important respects. He presents the practice of communication as always generated from within social contexts and therefore always pertaining to the specificities of individual body-subjects’ situatedness. As I have suggested earlier in this work, we speak from our ‘place’ to others also ‘placed’, that is, positioned in space, or as Cataldi describes it ‘ecologically niched’.13 Bodies speak and are spoken to in this communicative configuration. Such an account of embodiment shows it as elaborating a semiotics and culture across, not just within species in connection with the nonhuman environment. The conclusion to be drawn from my analysis of embodied subjectivity in preceding chapters is that a viable conception of human embodiment must move beyond the simple biologically bounded form to include its social relations with other embodied beings. When we theorise the body as more than the mere individual body we can, without abandoning the usefulness of the notion of the inscribed body, direct our attention to the emotionally charged agent of embodied praxis. It is, as I have argued, the body that is embedded always within material social relations. In the Introduction I identified some of these relations as familial and intimate, sexual and affectionate, as instantiated in child-raising, domestic life and

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friendships. They are to be found in work relationships where material and symbolic processes are collectively carried out, but also in civic activities in which, through their presence and engagement with others, embodied selves live the social order. In all of these situations and events, emotion can be seen in its causes and effects. However, until recently, it has been treated as inappropriate for large-scale organisational arrangements generally, being regarded as alien to the operation of corporate and institutional life. Its long association with the feminine and childhood, and by implication with immaturity or instability, has reinforced this view of human existence as being essentially about the exercise of reason, especially in public environments such as workplaces. While there have been important attempts to remedy this, it is still true that in dominant discourses emotions are at best marginalised while rationality is privileged as a personal and social ideal. Such representations continue to do embodied social actors a disservice when they fail to acknowledge corporeality in its intersubjective, affective dimension. The insights of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty have a significant contribution to make in reminding us that emotion has a fundamental role in the forging of community, and hence in the building of collective morality through the implementation of commitment to social goals. As I have suggested in earlier chapters, since it is through the senses that people feel, then it is through the emotions that an individual’s activity has direction and force. This has important ramifications for a deeper understanding of intersubjective relations, in particular for the attempt we make to understand the position of others, to put ourselves in their place. Contrary to rationalist thinking, the situation of others is best understood not by assuming a position of disinterestedness or dispassion, nor by attempting to abstract a general principle about who is or is not worthy of our attention and sympathy, but rather, by means of various kinds of emotional engagement with their circumstances, including what Irigaray refers to as ‘making one’s way in loving speech’.14 It is the bringing into being of an empathic relationship that enables the emergence of genuine fellow-feeling. The idea of empathy has a long history, beginning with notions of empathetic participation in early philosophical and religious thought to nineteenth-and-twentieth century reformulations and contemporary claims about what is involved in feeling empathy with others. A detailed treatment of this history is well beyond the scope of this book. What is important, however, for the present exploration, is the manner in which materiality (embodiment) is incorporated into ideas about how one may achieve social unity or harmonious sociality through affective bonding of a kind and intensity that may effect genuine compassion for others. The undeniable corporeal dimension of those processes by which we acknowledge our simultaneous sameness and difference is the focus of my brief exploration of what is involved in that fellowfeeling we sometimes experience and the action we take in the interests of the welfare of others. My particular interest lies in the emotional complexity that is involved in feeling compassion for our fellow citizens and especially for those who may not be citizens at all, but who nonetheless have a claim on our sympathy

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because of their social disadvantage or suffering. It is the imaginative use of feeling which constitutes empathy that is I think, central to the enhancement of positive sociality in the world. Bodies in relation – empathy as ‘intercorporeality’ As I noted above, empathy is a theme with a long history, certain aspects of which I will very briefly explore further on. It is also one about which an enormous amount has been written, especially in recent times, not least in relation to the cultivation of civic virtues or democratic dispositions but also in varieties of discussion about how to understand and treat those who are socially inscribed as ‘different’. It has been depicted as a key component of what has been called by Goleman and others ‘emotional intelligence’. Among other claims made for it, Boler points out that it can be conceived as a ‘bridge’ between social groups who are not part of a mainstream culture, and is proffered as the engine which may drive the process of genuine democratic dialogue among dominant and subordinated groups. Relating this to classroom practice, Boler, however, like Nussbaum, worries that it may simply slide into a kind of ‘passive empathy’ in which empathetic readers, wellintentioned nevertheless, must restrict their empathising to a mere passive acknowledgement of wrongs done to powerless others and the expression of words of commiseration. Thus while empathetic readers may gain insights into the disadvantage or suffering of others through their examination of different kinds of text, they may well not go beyond this, stymied by the abstract nature of texts, their own remoteness from the actual sites of suffering and their isolation as individuals in a world which does little to foster genuine corporeal connection. Boler is right, I think, to be wary of this kind of empathising which limits itself to looking from a distance, so to speak, on the sufferings of others. As my analysis of the scopic regime in Chapter 1 suggest, it is relatively easy to be horrified by film, photograph or newspaper reports or books of misfortune, but another matter to engage in embodied action to address such misfortune. Such activity may well numb the viewer/reader, such that the act of viewing or reading is reduced to what Boler sees as a kind of ‘consumption of the other’. This concern of Boler’s must be taken seriously, I believe, especially in the light of what I have said in previous chapters about the consumption of images in contemporary society. However, I agree strongly with her that empathy is something we do not want to lose and that it involves an absolutely crucial process of emotional engagement with socially excluded groups, and indeed with all social interaction. My own classroom experience, especially in teaching Indigenous students, leads me to emphasise once again the embodied nature of human interactions and therefore to call for a renewed attention to the fact of corporeal grounding of all emotion, especially empathy. The roots of the notion of empathy were actually material and ideational or mental, drawing upon the idea of duality becoming one, and of the participation of

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the many in the one: they are aesthetic and biological, the former emphasising the organic assimilation of multiple members in the one body, the latter the genetic process of procreation.15 Within the conceptualisation a further division was established, that of the static against the dynamic, referring to the combination of disparate elements in a whole (as in a work of art or a ‘totality’ of some kind in the natural world). From this commonality the two derived their preoccupation with emotion through which a ‘bonding of the material world and human beings occurs’. The specific aspect of existence foregrounded was the relation between heart and mind, intellect and the passions, cognition and affect. However, in its various subsequent transformations this connection remained underdeveloped.16 Bodies, though obviously involved in empathy or love, somehow have come to play a lesser role than that of the spiritual. More contemporary accounts of what is involved in empathising have foregrounded different aspects. Among these is Heidegger’s on language and dialogue, Gadamer on listening, and Canetti on genuine hearing of ‘others’ voices. In criticising our detached way of knowing and our insistence on mastery through speaking, Heidegger uses the expression ‘to dwell’ in describing genuine attempts to listen to others. Gadamer argues that the claim to understand the other person in advance performs the function of keeping the claim of the other person at a distance. ‘Understanding in advance’ shows that the bearer of rationality mistakenly believes himself capable of speaking (that is, thinking or reasoning) before he listens, whereas in genuinely dialogic moments there is a very demanding interaction of opposites in which genuine listening may unfold. Gadamer reminds us that those who see themselves as the holders of a standardising rationality have most often forced the role of listener upon those who have lesser or no ‘right’ to speak.17 Canetti holds that true empathy involves the capacity to both feel strongly and to think, the capacity to hear others as well as to ‘take them seriously in a never-ending passion’.18 In my understanding of it, empathy creates a milieu within which acceptance and genuine validation of another’s presence in all its difference demands that affects, emotional states and understandings may be explored. The blindness to commonality and the simultaneous fear of difference, that characterise much of social interaction is inimical to empathy. When empathy comes into play, it enables people to discern situations requiring a moral response (as in attempting to see that all are treated equally in a situation of competing benefits). But it seems to me that empathy is also required in the process of actually identifying morally significant considerations, since to act morally one must surely need to be able to identify opportunities to do so. And identifying such opportunities involves attempting to grasp what others are experiencing, hence the need to remind ourselves of the corporeal realities of our existence, and that ultimately it is human bodies which make claims on the compassion of their embodied fellows. It is, after all, bodies that suffer, and it is the individual body which, in the final analysis, will draw the line when that suffering has become too great to bear.

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Acknowledging embodiment is essential to a viable account of empathy because bodies are first and foremost spatially located and it is the relation of place and space that is primordially given in the social relationship between self and other. In psychoanalytic terms, if place is seen as a focus of value of nurture and support then the mother is initially the child’s primary place. This indicates that an individual’s incipient sense of place lies in the to and fro movement of attachment and loss, separation and reunion, distance and nearness. Further, as Merleau-Ponty has shown, the landscape in which we dwell – our world – whether we are conscious of it or not, is also a social map whose legend we learn. Despite the apparent bifurcations of modern life we share with others a common language, which is the language not of ‘minds’ but of embodied subjectivities. Renewed attention to the somatic rescues subjectivity from its exclusive association with a rational consciousness and its confinement as judgement divorced from affect or emotion. It also encompasses a move to a conception of body – subjects as grounded in everyday activities, many of which have profound social relevance but which we frequently tend to overlook. As such it involves recognition of that thinking through our skin, the encountering of the hands, not just eyes, which characterises so much of ordinary social intercourse but which tends to be ignored at the discursive level. But most importantly it forces us to explicitly consider the body as we explore major aspects of intersubjectivity and social practice, in particular the dynamic of empathy. Merleau-Ponty’s work, despite the fact that it lacks an adequate sexualised somatics, nonetheless draws attention to this dynamic thereby, allowing us better to grasp in its fullness and complexity, the idea of body – subjects as relation. But Merleau-Ponty’s is by no means the only work illuminating empathic relations in their radical materiality. For Marx, what distinguished human beings from other animals was not self-consciousness but consciousness of the species.19 For him, social interaction was the natural expression of ‘species being’. This implied a specific ethical stance: the surrender of one’s self-being to that of another, and when required, the sacrifice of one’s own being to that of others. The individual could in effect gain through the awareness of humanity as a species when she or he recognised and embraced the principle of human solidarity. In Marx’s materialism this takes the form of the body’s ceasing to be identical with itself, and opening out onto a shared world within which the needs and desires of the one must always be addressed at the same time as those of others. As such it is an expression of the materiality of being-together – a necessary component of genuine empathy. At the present time the sensuous depletion of our sympathy for others is the major obstacle to the development of a kind of empathy that will lead to action.20 Genuine empathy can only arise through an appreciation of the other’s suffering that is corporeal in character, acknowledging that their deprivation is a bodily matter and that its alleviation must be approached by means of a full understanding of that embodied reality.

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In his major work The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty portrays perception as the creation of meaning through the fact that something is seen or felt by body-subjects. This perspective on subjectivity emphasises the basically relational nature of the subject and the body as the ground of all possibility for communication. In this respect Merleau-Ponty anticipates the work of psychoanalytic feminism with its insistence on relationship as the basis for human development. It is the understanding of the grounding of human interaction in embodiment that is fundamental to all moral deliberation, including specifically those questions about how we should engage with others who appear different from ourselves. Indeed Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied subjectivity suggests that if individuals cannot in a strong sense live ‘other’ lives as well as their own, then they will be unable to fully live their own. Fanciful as it may appear, such a claim with its vivid ‘empathics of the body’ entails an ethics of the body grounded in a fundamental sociality. The relevance of this for intersubjective understanding lies in the fact that perceiving subjects are not confined within their own private worlds but are implaced within a world (made up of a myriad of sites) which is shared by all, no matter what their differences. The significant point is that because each individual’s visual field is not strictly her own, that is it crosses and intertwines with others’ constantly, then there is a very real sense in which we can talk of a shared world. What is suggested here is a primordial carnal bond between human subjects, indicating that embodied subjects are connected in their ‘belonging’ to a common world. This situation is most evocatively captured in the term intercorporeality.21 The conceptual bedrock of the notion of intercorporeality is one that I have repeatedly emphasised throughout earlier chapters, that we are our bodies. This means that all of our thoughts, feelings, emotions and intentions are understood as assuming an embodied and thus visible form through language and other culturally shaped actions. Subjectivity is publicly available and therefore a realm of genuine intersubjectivity is possible. The thoughts, emotions and intentions we have in relation to others are available to all. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, intersubjectivity is always concrete intersubjectivity because, like Dewey and Nietzsche, he admitted of no absolute division between the realm of ideas and the material world. Meanings are always embodied as subjectivities and all of ‘matter’ (including Latour’s conception of the non-human) embodies meaning, assuming its place in the world only through such meaning. Hence culture itself in a profound sense is embodied; bodies act, and by such actions construct worlds of meaning and intersubjective relations, while in the context of these relations, bodies are themselves acted upon. Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of a notion of intercorporeality provides an enlarged view of all human being, including those practices which we label thinking, knowing and judgement. The key role of judgement in the modern Western account of ethics and its insistence on the expression of that judgement by way of language, has over-intellectualised what is involved in the choices people make about how they treat others. It ignores that stage in the process which involves empathic

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engagement with them. Thus moral reasoning in its dominant forms relies on the operation of impartial reason at the expense of empathically obtained insights about others. The idea that living is about empathising through intercorporeality, however, shifts our attention from the notion of living as the exercise of intellectual judgement. Empathic knowing, seen as an exercise of the embodied subject’s sensory practices, unavoidably involves others and draws our attention to the realities of human existence, which consists of acting, living and moving in an intersubjective world. MacIntyre’s dependent rational animal achieves virtue first and foremost through her intersubjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s insights provide a rich source of emancipatory imagery, challenging us to explore and extend his innovative account of the nature of the intersubjective encounter. Empathy emerges from his work as implicit in all intersubjective relations. Such an understanding demonstrates how the senses and intellect, emotion, nature and that which we call culture are reciprocally implicated in all human activity, even that of the ethical domain. The account of creatural existence I have tried to develop in this work has implicit in it a demand for an ethic of everyday social life. Such an ethic would have its starting point in a deep sense of shared world, not one that is separate from us, but one in which we can make visible how the world, human and non-human, ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, touches us. The insight that the ‘seeing’ which occurs in ordinary perception is a kind of a shorthand for touch and basic connection, is for me one of the most significant in MerleauPonty’s work and therefore indispensable to the present discussion of embodied emotion. Embodied emotion and the haptic:Touch and the social We speak commonly of being touched by the plight of a starving child or remaining untouched by an accused’s claim that he was driven to commit a violent attack on a victim because of a disadvantaged childhood. Our hands continue to connect us to others and the non-human world, long after our eyes and ears may have ceased to do so. We lose touch with friends and colleagues and sometimes in old-age are only touched by our companion animals. Our body’s connection is with the worldat-hand. Obviously touch is a sense with unique qualities in that it crosses the other senses, combining with them to furnish, for all animal species including the human, an absolutely essential connection with the other living sytems that constitute environment for all creatures. Merleau-Ponty’s last work The Visible and the Invisible deals precisely with the criss-crossing of touch with the other senses. It is for my purposes therefore particularly significant for the deeper understanding of the relationships between individuals and groups, but also their relation to everything else in the world. Merleau-Ponty’s profoundly insightful account of relatedness among not just humans but other species and the earth depends on a radical interpretation of the relationship between two of the senses – those of the sight and touch.

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Signalling his departure from the philosophical tradition’s version of the distinction between sight and touch, Merleau-Ponty provides a compelling account of the way in which our individual perspectives as embodied subjects intersect in the same world. In the tradition, vision is distinguished from touch by the fact that while the toucher is always touched in the act of making connection with an object (person, cat, tree or house), the one who sees on the other hand merely does so from a distance and is therefore not ‘implicated’ in what is seen. In my discussion of the scopic regime in Chapter 1, I attempted to show what critics of ocularcentrism have objected to in terms of the cultural effects of an over-valuation of vision. Not only is the fullness and complexity of the experiencing body downplayed, but vision is extracted from its relationship to the other senses and its function of ‘standing in’ for touch is overlooked in favour of a predatory and aggressive role in the maintenance of power relations in social life. Merleau-Ponty’s writing on the manner in which those of others intersect the particular view open to each embodied creature in a particular milieu, provides a different way of conceiving of our joint embeddedness in a landscape as coparticipants. This discussion of the tangible underscores a determination to depict both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in a generalisable visibility, which is for each the same visibility; it is the key to his articulation of the ‘flesh’ ontology. The latter is a theory of being, that emphasises the role of perception in demonstrating our fundamental condition of belonging to larger whole (being of the same ‘flesh’), to which however we can only have limited access. From this discussion of flesh comes the insight that everyone who sees is simultaneously in view, as it were, to another. Our landscapes intersect not only with our fellow human beings but also with the non-human and even the so-called inanimate. However, this is not a simplistic indulgence in anthropomorphism on the part of Merleau-Ponty, but rather a major claim about a non-entitative, non-identical materiality shared by both the subjects and the objects of perception. As such it fits with the Deweyan relational ontology referred to above. ‘Flesh’ furnishes the capacity for turning the world back on itself, to bring into play its reflexivity. So subject and object are inherently open to each other for they are ‘constituted’ in the one stroke, separating the flesh of the world into its distinct modalities. The individual herself as body-subject is an experienced structure, the things outside of the body being ‘encrusted’ in its joints. Lived human experience is thus a seamless web, a unified zone of awareness, the integrity of which is altered unavoidably through those processes of abstraction that must accompany all attempts at objectification. Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of the criss-crossing of the senses in acts of perception was described in Chapter 1. That aspect of his work demonstrates the subtle transferences that take place between, say, tactile and taste experiences, as for example the manner in which a finely carved and polished surface of a small sculpture can be subliminally sensed by the tongue, or the way in which certain colours or shapes can evoke particular oral or aural sensation. Then the ‘flesh’ ontology of The Visible and the Invisible allows us to see the criss-crossing of

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subjectivities in perception, including especially the emotional expenditure that occurs with each and every perceptual episode experienced by individuals. As such it reveals not only the working of embodied agency in a common social life, but also serves to connect with the operating of emotion in the articulation of that social agency. Perceptual psychology (which focuses upon what the perceiving organism brings to the process of perception) complements Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodied feeling as the very centre of sociality by means of perception. Moreover, because of the central role of touch, such work reinforces a strong sense of materiality. James Gibson’s account of the haptic system provides a significant understanding of how, as a basic function of our creatural existence, we are ‘able to lay hold of ’ that world, which is adjacent to each body-subject, by means of that body.22 The haptic system is the mode by which we gain information about our own bodies and simultaneously about the environment in which we find ourselves at any given time. But the haptic system encompasses the body in its entirety, that is, most of its parts and its entire surface. As Gibson tells us, the extremities are simultaneously sense organs and performatory motor organs; therefore, the equipment in operation for feeling is anatomically the same as the equipment for doing. Now, while it is true that Gibson’s ‘feeling’ refers to touch in a very literal, almost biological sense, and not specifically to ‘emotion’ as it has been traditionally portrayed, nevertheless as Lyon and Barbalet argue and I agree, the haptic system is best understood as part of a dynamic and social process of social touch, for the simple but compelling reason that only the haptic system with all of its subsystems – that is, all of the senses, intertwining – comes into full perceptual use.23 But all the systems are extensions of the sense of touch and it is a deeper understanding of the concept of touch that will underlie any meaningful account of social embodiment and the generation of that fellow feeling that is the basis for solidarity. In my view, therefore, genuine empathy must begin with this awareness of corporeal connection. While aware that in the dominant cognitive discourse the world is an objective entity for a ‘thinking subject’, Merleau-Ponty focuses upon the moments of daily living in which, as subjects, we interpenetrate the world and are fused with it. Genuine intersubjective engagement, whose wellspring is emotion, lies at the very heart of his account of embodiment. Hence his focus on the manner in which touch occurs and the complex processes of intertwining of world and embodied subjects. In his work there are no ontological ‘cracks’ between persons and ‘nature’, the self and world, between what exists (the issue for traditional philosophy) and what we say about what exists: they are one and the same. Merleau-Ponty’s account of body– subject and ‘flesh’ demand that we attend anew to the connectedness of body– subject to world and of the immersion-in-world that is the reality of human existence. Surprisingly, perhaps, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the flesh of the world – that which connects human and other animals and the non-human has an affinity with Latour’s notion of the ‘folding’ of the human and non-human in the moment of practice. In doing away altogether with ‘objects’ which ‘subjects’ grasp, while

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retaining a dualism between the two, it seems to me that despite their different objectives, both Merleau-Ponty and Latour make radical attempts to overcome that ancient dualism. The definition of things, their discontinuities with all other realities and the habit of referring to borders which demarcate oneself and all possible others (human and non-human) is just one way of talking about experience. It is the one most familiar to us. But ‘realities’ alter dramatically when different aspects of human existence are foregrounded: for example, the aspect of place or locatedness within environment, or a sense of connection with a particular person or place. We can focus on the notion of subject as rationality personified, or the self as an arrangement of bodily parts and thoughts and feelings, or we can focus on ‘subjects’ as inscribed within gendered or racial discourses. Or we can take the perspective with Merleau-Ponty that it is not so much that every ‘reality’ has an inherent structure, but rather that structure can be seen to inhere in a whole range of realities within and across bodies of different kinds, including those of the non-human. What such a view contains within it is a conception of the material as an inherent intertwining of subject and world. It is a conceptualisation of materiality, which does not demand a split between human corporeality and the corporeality of ‘nature’. Ultimately this conception of materiality, which clearly has a cosmological dimension, includes everything in and of the world. As such, it seems to me, it is a cosmology for the difficult times in which we live and one that has much to recommend it to educators and the enterprise of teaching and learning. Masculinity, feminity and emotion – A dualistic legacy Any discussion of emotion, education and embodiment must confront the association of emotion with what has been constructed as the feminine, not least because of its persistence in contemporary educational theory, curriculum, practice and even research. Feminists have contributed a great deal to unravelling the deeply entrenched set of beliefs about the ‘natural’ connection of women to the affective. Whether attributed to Greek philosophy or to later periods in the Western philosophical tradition, the setting of the feminine (emotional) against the masculine (rational) has persisted despite varieties of thoroughgoing critique in so many aspects of social life, including educational policy. Discussions of embodiment and emotion cannot be carried out effectively, I believe, without a full acknowledgement of the very long and deep-seated association of the male – female and reason –emotion dualisms. Boler’s work on emotion and education provides, amongst other things, a most comprehensive account of varieties of analyses, together with reporting from her own experiences as a teacher in university. In her account of both the historical and contemporary debates over emotion, Boler assesses the Western philosophical and psychological tendencies to regard emotion as ‘natural’ or as occurring entirely ‘within’ the individual, but most particularly its long association with women and what had been constructed as the ‘feminine’. A major theme in her work involves a

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critical examination of the contributions that feminist post-structuralist theory, feminist theories of emotion and feminist consciousness-raising can make to analyses of feminist pedagogies, seeing the necessity for ongoing conversations among these in order to better understand and articulate ‘feeling power’ in educational settings. Like Barbalet, Boler sees emotion as reflecting the dynamics of one’s specific lived situation which, by definition, will always include the social. For her, as for Dewey, emotions are inseparable from action and relations, and therefore from issues of power. As her analysis of the history of emotion in education shows, it has always been bound up with issues of social control and management, with notions of non-conformity in the individual and therefore with conceptions of normalcy and social acceptability. Her analysis of social control of emotion, both past and present, addresses those questions of how views of the functioning of emotion change under the influences of distinct social and political agendas. This historical approach is especially useful because it shows how emotions have variously been disciplined, ignored and at times completely suppressed in both educational theory and in classroom practices. In this respect Boler’s work is invaluable in showing how emotion within institutions was articulated in relation to specific social groups such as females, or those of ‘other’ races or cultures. An example from the Australian context is that of the ways in which the emotions of Aboriginal people at various times in Australia’s history were interpreted as evidence of their inability to adjust to mainstream culture. As Boler shows, feminist theorising has provided some of the most insightful analyses of emotion in its basically social character. It has successfully opened up an understanding of the manner in which the old public/private division of life relegated women and their ‘subjective’ emotional tendencies to the domestic sphere while simultaneously ruthlessly disciplining emotion in the public realm, the world of work and of politics. Such feminist anlaysis has also enhanced more recent understandings of the role of emotion in the workforce and in public life generally. Nevertheless it has also served to problematise the manner in which emotions are lived out in the embodied and particularised experience of daily life. What such analyses have also demonstrated are the very real difficulties to be faced when trying to articulate this particularity. Moreover as Boler’s exploration of the dominant discourses of emotion – the man of reason’, the medicalised and scientific and the religious – reveal, displaying ‘inappropriate’ emotion has not only often been regarded as a feminine weakness, but has also served to reinforce the notion of emotion as an expression of the individual’s ‘interior’ feelings. Thus one’s emotions were a function of one’s being an individual but at the same time a member of a social grouping to whom an inferior form of rationality was attributed. The supposed location of emotion in a ‘natural’ (mindless) body coupled with (the old nature/culture dualism) further contributed to their being ignored, or treated with considerable suspicion. The idea that emotions were not learnt but were something that burst forth from our animal bodies at inappropriate moments in human affairs, emphasised their connection with animality, viewed as not amenable to rational

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organisation or control. As I have attempted to argue elsewhere in this book the denigration of the connection with non-human animals and the idea of a legislating, transcendent (disembodied) consciousness, are part of our failure to respect the intelligence of the bodies, which includes its emotions. As I understand her, Boler’s view is that the emotion/reason split is built into many of the attempts feminists have mounted to deal with ‘a feminist politics of emotion’. Moreover it seems deeply ingrained in many areas of social life at present, and education is by no means an exception to this. Boler notes the suspicion with which emotion as a topic is greeted in scholarly circles within higher education: the privileging of reason or intellect over the emotional is encountered at the level of funding of research projects and also in the kind of writing that is afforded highest status. Boler sees us as trapped by the well-worn dualism which continues to associate the feminine with ‘soft’ subjects in the curriculum, those which explicitly or implicitly deal with ‘feelings’. There is widespread misunderstanding that to focus upon the emotions in the classroom or the curriculum will lead to indulgence in uncritical sharing of feelings, to therapeutic activities that encourage touching or feeling but have little to do with real knowing. There is also the deep suspicion of the practice of resorting to the individual’s own life experience – what are your feelings? – and the concern that this can weaken considerably the thrust of much that is politically useful in raising the status and performance of disadvantaged groups. A common criticism is that such suggestions for practice only come from feminists who themselves are accused of insisting upon associating the emotional with the ‘feminine’ in attempting to articulate new pedagogies which respect students’ experiences. Boler’s response is to point to those writers such as Freire who deal with emotion but who have not been negatively labelled. Clearly the gender of the writer continues to have ramifications for how a work is received! The strength of Boler’s work on education and emotion lies in its boldly meeting head-on, so to speak, some of the major areas of confrontation in the teaching of humanities and social sciences curriculum. Her specific theme of sexuality and in particular gay and lesbian sexuality is examined in terms of real and practical classroom issues and problems, based on her own experience. Here she is most mindful of the passions which such issues can evoke in classrooms in which there are deeply felt beliefs and attitudes about what is ‘normal’ in regard to sexual orientations and practice. She is able to help students at least begin to see what has been involved in the construction of their identities, assisting them to better understand the fragility and precariousness of each and, most significantly, how subjectivities maintain themselves in complex and delicate relation to others. Unravelling what lies at the heart of one’s deeply felt beliefs can be a most painful experience for both teachers and students, one that can disrupt the apparently smooth transfer of curriculum knowledge. I find Boler’s notion of a pedagogy of discomfort a useful means of exploring matters of deeply entrenched attitudes about those who do not fit mainstream stereotypes: of what is, for her, a way of problematising issues such as sexuality and

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race so that it will challenge students to ‘risk’ disclosure of often passionately held beliefs about others’ ways of life, and in the process perhaps divulge entrenched forms of prejudice. Quite rightly, Boler acknowledges the difficulties that this can involve for students especially, but often for teachers. Emotion comes to the fore in such encounters. It is simply not the case that classroom discussion will be carried out in abstract theoretical terms. On the contrary it involves taking the measure of ourselves and others in ways that on occasion will inevitably make us uncomfortable, precisely because it reveals to us how we have been ‘shaped’, what that shaping has made us feel and how the latter rises to the surface whenever we look deeply into the sources of our beliefs and attitudes. The pedagogy of discomfort connects usefully to my own account of embodiment. The core of such a pedagogy is the realisation that such beliefs are ‘embodied habits’, that is, in the language of both Merleau-Ponty and Dewey, the dispositions to respond in certain habituated ways when faced with specific circumstances. As such they are an expression of our creatural existence. But this does not mean that they are not amenable to modification and perhaps improvement, simply because they are an integral aspect of our animality. On the contrary, like other species, though our habitual behaviours towards others may be rooted in our animal nature, we are always able to ‘correct’ or reshape them in a directly embodied way through our perception of changes in the world (for example, that our neighbours whom we have been socialised to fear and loathe are very much like ourselves) and new awareness that because of actions we have undertaken we have changed situations in a world made up of infinitely complex relationships of human and non-human animals with the non-animate. Practising a pedagogy of discomfort seems to me a very direct way of reminding teachers and their students alike that their lives have both contour, depth and colour and that without these the true possibilities of relationship will remain unrealised. Emotion and sociality in education As I have suggested, a particular strength of Boler’s work on emotion in education is the close attention she gives to making her analysis refer directly to classrooms, building upon her own experience in higher education to draw out implications for future practice. Her focus is on the emotional climate of classrooms in which socially excluded groups – those whose stories do not form part of the official forms of knowledge that make up the curriculum – experience powerlessness. Identifying an emotional numbness on the part of student populations, she associates this with their lack of power in the pedagogical situation. Often in the more traditional ‘masculine’ classroom it is the emotional needs of the teacher that are being met: the massaging of ego, the ways in which the teacher will have the final word on what is to be known and the sense of being in authority – needs that are much more likely to be attended to than those of the students. Because much of her critique is aimed at the dominance of a masculine paradigm of the teacher as authority figure and the

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curriculum as masculinist, she is keen to show how emotional epistemology or literacy can be part of the educational agenda without sacrificing rigour and, indeed, even enhancing opportunities for the development of critical thinking about social problems. Obviously educators will want to develop an understanding of how desire and the affective domain are grounded in basic corporeality – their own and that of their students. Many teachers already possess such understanding, especially those who work with younger children. Part of renewed attention to emotion may involve a re-evaluation of contextual modes of thought and emotional components of ‘reason’ in the everyday lives of students, in order to better grasp affective initiatives and responses by individuals in the classroom. As I noted in the Introduction, cognitive scientists, philosophers and others traditionally have been uncomfortable with bodiliness, resulting in its being limited to certain disciplinary areas both within teacher education courses and in school curricula. Not surprisingly the body has been largely absent from work on academic performance and achievement, except in those areas claiming to be the body’s special preserve. Somatic experience, motility and gesture do not figure prominently in research into the processes of knowledgegaining and general living. There is a strong tendency to overlook the reality of embodiment in accounts of the construction of human knowledge and this is echoed in much research on how and what students know. In articulating what is entailed in the making of the epistemic subject, corporeality, emotionality and the relational are mere shadows that haunt the margins of the stage upon which ‘pure reason’ (as we still see it) plays out its fictions. As I have argued earlier, practical consciousness is the particular realm of the body and emotion, and because of this it has been confined to particular areas of the curriculum where it can be domesticated and carefully distributed. Therefore it seems to me that education for embodiment must claim for itself a specific role in helping individuals access the realm of practical consciousness. This will surely include processes to assist them in understanding how it is that they react to others and how they will deal with them socially and ethically. For individuals to come to an understanding of this dimension they need to grasp the centrality of emotions to perception, the affects of prior experience on our present conduct and the complexities of the operation of desire in constructing the choices, preferences and judgments we make in interacting with others. The maintenance and enhancement of the body is the mainspring of the desire to know; yet education still privileges knowledge removed from everyday human experience and emotion, the domain of practical consciousness. The kinds of curricula which I think foster the understanding of the distinction between discursive and practical consciousness, as well as allowing individuals to explore the roots of their own emotional responses and the emotionality of knowledge construction, already exist. But they often lack status and esteem among parents, students and even teachers themselves. They may also be seen by conservative forces in communities as undesirable in that their emphasis on feeling,

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sensuousness, imagination and the body will threaten current religious or political dogma. But in fact it is more likely that they are the very sorts of curriculum activities which acknowledge and facilitate the expressive aspects of not only individual bodies but, fundamentally, of bodies in relation. In other words they are those areas which deal directly with the formative life of body-subjects. I have remarked in earlier chapters that, in the field of educational drama, for example, through careful experimentation including body movement as well as various forms of communication and reflection, an individual might not merely absorb the characteristics of a fictional character whom she is to portray, but can, through interaction with others in the telling of a story, generate and expand the intercorporeal. The body is central to such portrayal, for creative emotion must be tapped in order to move that which is initially external into an inner realm. By means of this movement the individual renders the desires and emotions of others as part of her ‘self’. Recent innovation in the teaching of history, geography, forms of civics and social education, are ideally placed to expand understanding of the relational and the role of the emotions in intersubjective encounter and social and political life. But there are possibilities in all subject areas of the curriculum depending upon the methods of teaching employed and the philosophy of teachers and the wider school environment. Earlier in this book, I noted that cooperation in the production of various projects can provide students with the possibility of exploring the distinctions between discursive and practical consciousness: it can, for example, allow for the extended exploration of significant experiences and behaviours associated with places, spaces and environments that have been the source of conflict as well as of a sense of attachment and belonging. Student could trace the patterning of interactions characteristic of human behavioural and experiential relationships, comparing and contrasting these in different parts of the world. In so doing they could examine issues of spatial meanings and spatial behaviour, the insistence on boundaries and the impulse to be territorial, its history in human affairs and the significance of this impulse today. They could study the connection between place preferences and collective identities, or focus on attitudes towards ‘environment’ conceived as natural and social. They could explore the inner social-psychological structures that underlie individual and groups’ cultural identities. As I have argued, the emphasis would need to be placed on the actual process of enquiry itself, highlighting the dynamic involved in discovery and articulation by the group; so the method underlying all of this would be one of collective engagement, discovery and creation, for it is only through the experience of embodied sociality that students will come to be aware of the deepest meanings generated by their common corporeal experience. Since human action always entails socially situated bodies in a dynamic of trust as well as anxiety in relation to its environments, then students need to gain some understanding of this by having their attention drawn to the ways in which bodily movement and expression function in social interaction. Ideally, as I have argued

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in earlier chapters, such work should be an across-the-curriculum initiative. Understanding the complexities of just how bodies signify, seems to me to be one of the most important issues that the curriculum can address. It has wide ramifications for showing how different manifestations of embodiment matter in the larger scheme of things and how they are incorporated into forms of discourse. In this, genuine attempts may be made to understand how, as inheritors of particular cultural norms and values, we have learned to ascribe characterisations to people of ‘different’ race, gender, shape, size, ability and so on. There is already a great deal of useful work done in the realm of media studies which assists students to see what is involved in the textual and discursive construction of the normal and desirable, and this can be enriched and extended. Teachers themselves may be assisted to come to a better understanding of how meaning is created within the classroom. In communication, the results of conjoint experience are taken in and articulated. Meanings created in each and every transaction are transformed into desires and purposes which, in indicating a common or mutually understood meaning, present new ties, converting a conjoint activity into a community of interest or endeavour. What is generated is the desire on the part of individuals to engage in activities that are communicable and shared by all concerned. Embodied individuals act and by such actions construct worlds of meaning and intersubjective relations; the productivity of bodies enmeshed in their cultural milieu is the very embodiment of meaning. What needs to be given greater emphasis is the recognition of the role of the body as agent within a world of bodies which continually transform themselves and their world. As a result of the kind of education some students have received, they may neither understand nor respect the functioning of emotion. They may complete their schooling and perhaps their further education believing that emotions are essentially a private concern, not a legitimate accompaniment to institutional and corporate life. However there is a point of intersection of emotions as embodied experiences, of their social dimension and their attachment to feelings which a self has, and which is expressive of personal identity. And it seems to me that in order to see emotions this way we need to more fully articulate the reflexive, relational nature of embodied emotional experience in all aspects of life, especially that of the social, as well as in all the processes of knowledge construction. If as educators we can assist students to see that the mutual sensuous recognition that can occur in social interaction is something to be prized, not relegated to the margins of our lives, then we will have achieved much that is valuable. Experienced teachers are aware that, especially in younger children, what they are learning elicits a visceral response. Knowledge is not simply that which must be understood; it is always felt and responded to somatically – that is, in its corporeal materiality. Yet in the later years of education this insight tends to be lost despite the fact that for many students the knowledge they are attempting to acquire remains more real for them as ‘felt’ knowledge and as ‘lived engagement’ rather than as codified, abstract, ‘received’ knowledge.

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The notion of sociality as involving shared feelings and passions and ‘keeping warm together’, is a good basis upon which to begin to articulate a more satisfactory account of knowledge and the role of the emotions in social life generally, I think, and especially in education. More broadly, the notion of intercorporeality derived from Merleau-Ponty’s work has potential for helping us better understand human interaction and cooperation. Dewey’s insights into the nature and role of habituated behaviours in cementing social ties and reinforcing a sense of community is most important, as is his profound understanding of the ways in which emotions deepen over time to become dispositions that are expressive of attitudes regarding sociality, solidarity with others and a morality of inclusion.24 The work of both philosophers can encourage us in our attempts at somatising education, at renewing our appreciation of experience in all its dimensions, and of grasping life in all its material sociality. NOTES 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

While I identify culture as a specifically human product I am not at all sure that I want to deny other species the capacity for culture. Having shared my home with animals for several decades and encountered many others in various parts of the world, I am profoundly aware that as human beings we have much to learn about the mode of being of other species. For the present, however, I will stay with the widely accepted view that culture is the preserve of humans. This claim however in no way excuses mistreatment of animals. On the contrary, as Terry Eagleton reminds us, we owe non-human animals that respect which they cannot demand for themselves. Stocker, M. (with Elizabeth Hegeman), Valuing Emotions: Cambridge Studies in Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Introduction, p. 1. I am not suggesting here that feminist theorists are the only source of renewed interest in the role of the emotions in the life of the individual. Nonetheless because of the historical association of women with emotion and presumed deficiency of reason, feminist critiques have been influential in focusing attention on the role of feeling and affect in human life. See for example Fineman’s (ed.), 1993, Emotion in Organizations, London: Sage Publications, and the earlier work of Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1975, including ‘The Sociology of Feelings and Emotion: selected Possibilities’, pp 280-307, in Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives: Social Life and Social Science , Ed. Marcia Millman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books, 1995, has played a defining role reassessing the nature of human rationality and the role of feeling within the individual. Negri, A., Time for Revolution, New York & London: Continuum, 2003, p. 243. The term ‘emotional community’ is borrowed from Weber. Maffesoli focuses on emotion as it is to be found in the ‘being together’ of everyday life. Influenced by Bergson’s vitalism, his writing on the life-affirming character of social groups recalls Nietzsche’s invocation of the Dionysian in social life. See Maffesoli, M., 1996, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, London: Sage Publications, p. 15. This view is outlined in Barbalet, J.M., Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, Chapter 2 ‘Emotion and Rationality’, pp 29-61.

MARJORIE O’LOUGHLIN 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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Barbalet, op. cit., p. 34. See Barbalet, op. cit., for a comprehensive and critical analysis of major sociological work on emotion and the way in which embodiment is downplayed. In contrast Maffesoli as a contemporary social analyst foregrounds embodiment. Lyon, M.L. and Barbalet, J.M., Ch. 2. ‘Society’s Body: Emotion and the Somatisation of Social Theory’, Thomas J. Csordas (ed). Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 48-66. See Mead, G.H., 1934, Mind, Self and Society – From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist, edited and with an introduction by Charles W. Morris, Chicago: Chicago University Press, and Mead, G.H., 1938, The Philosophy of the Act, edited and with an Introduction by C.W. Morris, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dewey, J., 1938, Experience and Education, New York: Macmillan, p. 28. Cataldi, S.L., 1993, Emotion Depth and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space, Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 3. Irigaray, L., The Way of Love, London & New York: Continuum, p. 57. My source for this account of the history of ‘empathy’ is Karl F. Morrison’s The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. Morrison, op. cit., pp 3-32. For the discussion of Heidegger, Gadamer and Canetti see Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, London: Routledge, 1990, Chapter 3, ‘A Philosophy of Listening Within a Tradition of Questioning’, pp 28-51. See also Canetti, E., The Human Province (translated by J.Neugroschel), London: Pan Books, 1986. Ibid, p. 50. Marx’s notion of species being is to be encountered across several works. Here I have used The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York: WW Norton and Co, 1978. Eagleton, T., After Theory, New York: Basic Books, 2003, Chapter 6, ‘Morality’, pp 140 -173. The concept of intercorporeality is explored most illuminatingly by Nick Crossley in ‘MerleauPonty, The Elusive Body and Carnal Sociology in Body and Society’. Volume 1, Number 1, March 1995, pp 43-63. For the most comprehensive and detailed account of the ‘haptic system’ see Gibson, James J., The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1966. Lyon and Barbalet, op. cit., p. 61. For a discussion of Dewey’s view on the deepening of emotion see The Early Works of John Dewey 1882-1898, vol. 2, 1887: Psychology, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967, pp 246-247. The ‘depth’ of an emotion is dependent upon its maturity, that is, upon its growth and enhancement over time. It depends on the balancing of, on the one hand, our distance from others, and on the other our intimacy with them. Dewey has provided a most compelling account of the way in which deepened emotion gradually develops into that which is somehow more than feeling or affect. Just as habit is grounded in the interaction of the body with environment propelled by desire, so also are the emotions anchored in felt conditions of the body. In Dewey’s account increasingly deepened emotion congeals over time into a character formation, which is then expressed corporeally. Emotions deepen to the point where they become characteristic orientations of the embodied self under specific circumstances.

CHAPTER 5

EMBODIED CITIZENSHIP In this chapter I undertake a brief exploration of the theme of citizenship. I do this for several reasons. First, such an undertaking continues the discussion of issues raised in the previous chapter on emotion and sociality – I regard citizenship in an important sense as the culmination of the coming together of affective life and the fellow feeling we have for others in our community. Second, it is through notions of the citizen and participation in civic life that the creatural is to be seen in our assessment of what we owe to others and they to us. Third, citizenship offers a unique opportunity for the expression of human solidarity based on a shared embodiment that is, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, of the intercorporeal. Fourth, citizenship as an issue and the forms of community it encompasses and expresses, is one that is singularly important to education because as Dewey believed, it taps directly into those participative forms of daily life that education is peculiarly suited to rehearsing. Finally, citizenship, which expresses both meaning and value in significant ways, raises the most profound of moral issues. In this I take what is essentially an Aristotelian position, accepting that morality and politics are inseparable. It seems to me that since citizenship properly understood is about the good life in the classic sense, then it can provide a model for living well, but only if it is seen as a project to be undertaken with energy and humility. The following is a necessarily brief exploration of how the creatural is expressed within differing notions of citizenship and its fate in some contemporary discourses about citizenship and democratic participation. The neglect of the body and the failure to locate the wellspring of sociality in feeling are themes re-examined in the light of some contemporary civics discourse. A phenomenological notion of place, already articulated in previous chapters, is suggested as an antidote to the present formalism of much thinking about citizenship. The abstract nature of past and contemporary notions of citizenship is the object of my critique because I believe they fail to deal with the specificities of embodiment, thereby neglecting practice and the realm of the everyday. The bodies and emotions of citizens As I suggested in the previous chapter the issue of emotion is essential not only to the account we give of how human beings as individuals come to know their world, but also in terms of the ways in which emotion is profoundly implicated in the generation and maintenance of sociality. The work of Boler in education and Stocker in philosophy notwithstanding, the philosophical tradition has been wary of

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emotion. However, it seems to have fared better in the sociological literature; civilisation is built on forms of solidarity, whether these are described as ‘elective affinities’ as in Weber, or ‘tribes’ as in the work of Maffesoli. That such forms have an obvious emotional basis is a given. Weber, as the main explicator of modern rationality in the social realm, acknowledges the functioning of emotion in social life, while Simmel demonstrates the affective dimension of social relationships in small groups.1 Both were concerned with the shared emotion and open communal relationship that together form solid social arrangements, characterised at different times by permanence and instability. Weber’s notion of the shared emotional community is central to his account of how societies function, acknowledging as it does that ‘reason’ has only a small part to play in the formation and expression of outlook, orientations and the beliefs of groups. Emotion, rather, is the driving force in the social affairs of human beings. Durkheim’s identification of the group as a source of life with its outpouring of feeling, and the opening up of the hearts of participants to sympathy is especially illuminating, his analysis of the clustering together of people having a common understanding demonstrating vividly the fundamental affective dimension of social life.2 This emotional dimension mirrors the individual body, in that the social body is depicted as a complex organism in which function and dysfunction in a sense manage to ‘rub along’ together. In invoking the notion of organism, Durkheim recognises in the social body the presence of Eros, passion and a spontaneous vitalism. The social domain is structured and experienced through all possible varieties of group encounter and situations across and within the multiplicity of groups to which a person belongs. These groups are expressive of varied ways of life both in harmony with and in conflict with each other. The major characteristic of these groups, however, is the affective one. Affectivity is the key feature of the relationships that make up everyday life in each society, and this is always embodied. As such it is embedded in and intertwined with the customs and mores that go to make up subjectivities. Maffesoli notes that we actually experience affectsoaked features without verbalising them, hence their importance to whatever happens subsequently in the formation of our attitudes and social values. So the notion that social life in the form of groups with shared interests and outlook, is simultaneously underlain and vitalised by emotion is a very important one. Rationalist conceptions of society may find this disturbing, as it suggests that fantasy, desire and passion may overrun rational deliberation and choice or adherence to universal moral rules. A focus on emotions in public life and the expression of emotion of certain social groups can be seen in a rather disturbing light, especially at a time of global unrest and violence. Aside from the muchexplored association of ‘group’ emotion with the ancient Dionysian symbolism, there is also the suspicion that emphasis on emotion constitutes a form of neoromanticism which, by downplaying rationality, diminishes possibilities for establishing an open, deliberative public sphere.3 It is feared that the emotion displayed by protesting groups, for example – resentment, anger, frustration – are

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dangerous manifestations of the irrationality of the ‘mob’ and can only lead to social disintegration. I do not deny that there are deeply troubling and even regressive aspects of some forms of social group and the emotions they express, for example, those associated with certain forms of religious fundamentalism, ethnic nationalism, or those relying on ideas about, blood and belonging, or the idealisation of a common ancestor. But to deny the existence of emotion in social life because of its association with oppressive and murderous political regimes of the past and present because it may lead to future undesirable consequences, is to ignore the functioning of the emotions in the collective creation of imagined communities. Unsettling as they may be for some, group emotions are nonetheless the expression of new forms of social imaginaries. What needs to be grasped is that emotions have ‘objects’; that is, as human beings we develop emotional attachments and it is the processes involved in such attachment that will be crucial in the growth and deepening of particular emotions. So just as there will at times be destructive emotions unleashed in the social group, there are also those involved in what Maffesoli calls ‘keeping warm together’, which involve the generation of certain kinds of fellow feeling leading to the development of solidarity over time. Rash assertions about the irrationality of emotion not only fail to do justice to the affective aspects of living, but in any case can also misrepresent what it is to be ‘rational’. Rationality takes various forms in which it has historically been associated with ‘mind’, and dispassionate and disembodied transcendence in the moral sphere. In the social realm, under conditions of modernity, instrumental rationality characterises economic arrangements under capitalism. These coexist with forms of bureaucratic rationality that govern societal structures and functions. But all forms of rationality have certain basic features in common, notably their distancing from the personal, and in terms of the present discussion, the process of abstracting from relationships of family and kin, emotion, and various forms of affective connection and action. The exercise of reason as an ideal in the enactment of social and political life, following Habermas, has come to be called communicative rationality.4 With regard to citizenship in a democracy, the model of rational deliberation has furnished a means by which citizens may be said to nurture and exercise capacities of reasoning and discussion which otherwise may remain undeveloped. The assumption here is that in the rational community one orients oneself towards the common will, such that the outcome of exhaustive deliberations will eventually generate broad principles applying to all. Rational deliberation of the kind espoused by Gutmann and Thompson, for example, in their influential work Democracy and Disagreement, draws upon a Habermasian ‘ethics of discourse’ that demonstrates persuasively how consensus may be reached in genuinely communicative contexts within the wider democratic framework.5 In the democratised forum that is public discourse, the collectivity supposedly constructs its common meanings and acknowledges its differences, while in a spirit of cooperation it works towards consensus. For Gutmann and

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Thompson this occurs when participants satisfy particular conditions of deliberation, these being reciprocity, publicity and accountability. The latter two refer largely to the performance of one’s duty as a representative of others who are not present. However, it is the notion of reciprocity that is most relevant to the present discussion: it seems to require that the individual bring a very specific kind of attitude to the deliberative forum. Not surprisingly, this attitude turns out to be a certain capacity to pursue fair terms of social cooperation for their own sake. What is required for this is that an individual take up a position of disinterestedness which will allow for the emergence of a set of mutually agreeable moral premises in a given debate. This, coupled with a capacity for and access to relevant resources with which to evaluate evidence, places participants in the best possible position to contribute to rational deliberative debates. As I have argued elsewhere there is much that is compelling about this model of the means by which people may participate in the collective making of their shared social life.6 It is indeed encouraging to feel that there are situations and circumstances in which we can exercise our rational deliberative talents to help shape social institutions and arrangements. But we need to look very carefully at the contexts in which deliberation will occur for us as citizens and to ask quite directly: What is the nature of contemporary social forms within which this status as citizen matters, and in which is citizenship enacted? How do the realities of each citizen’s embodiment play out in the social and political realm at the present time, and how is power articulated within particular kinds of arrangements such that specific kinds of embodiment are variously privileged or not? The major contemporary social form that holds the citizen is the nation-state. Although the idea of a global citizenry is an increasingly popular one among those who enjoy a certain level of income, freedom of movement and access to advanced forms of technology, it is not yet clear what eventually this might entail for the world’s populations. In any case, since at the present time only nations issue passports and people who are ‘stateless’ can face major problems in merely sustaining their existence, the nation remains for the present the focal point for citizens. Therefore within the polity that is the nation and its political realm there arise central issues about how citizens are attached to their particular nation and what are the ties that hold them.7 In a period characterised by ‘identity politics’, various groupings within nations have argued for kinds of differentiated relationships to the state, notably that of the recognition of group rights. Such claims seem to me to express not only dissatisfaction with previous arrangements within their respective societies, but also an awareness, no matter how dim, that the problem has its origin at some deep level in the complexities of embodiment. However, when the issue is seen in this light it is obvious that it is not only groups that can feel unacknowledged in their embodiment but that individuals may well experience the same in the face of a kind of citizenship that is formal, abstract and remote from everyday activity. What this suggests, therefore, is that conceptions of citizenship need to be critically examined in terms of the actual material conditions in which

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they currently operate; we need to critically examine what ideas have been inherited about citizenship in order to see how it is lived at the present time.

Disembodied citizens The distinguishing feature of the most influential account of citizenship available portrays it as an expression of the universality of human life. This view of citizenship regards it as an expression of the general will, arising from that tradition of political thought which pertains to the universal. Thus citizenship itself is in a sense, an expression of the universality of human life, specifically life lived in the social and political realm. In the processes of working out the common life, homogeneity of opinion is not a given at the outset, since each person will bring his or her individual perspective to discussions. But private interests are transcended in the participation and ultimately the individual’s submission to the general will. Selfinterestedness must be put aside in the general interest. This view of civic participation and the role of the citizen originated in classical Greek philosophy, changing significantly as it was redeveloped under different social conditions throughout the history of the West. In the civic republican tradition, freedom is achieved through transcendence of the particular, that is, of the desires and perspective of the individual. In the later liberal individualism of Hobbes and Locke, it appears as a general perspective (again transcending the particular) that allows for the development of various forms of control over the pursuit of unbridled selfinterest.8 But irrespective of whether we have in mind civic republicanism or the model of liberal individualism, embodiment has acted as a barrier to inclusion (no slaves, females or landless men), imposing on societies a set of arrangements that, over time, solidified into formulae for the regulation of all, a triumph not only of the universal over the particular but of abstract formulae over the embodied multitudes. What occurs in both models is a removal of the idealised citizen from connection with actual embodied individuals and the practices of everyday life, from those activities which relate him or her to production or reproduction, from the practices and bodily activity that we can recognise as accustomed action and habit, and therefore from everything that is material. Historically women and slaves were excluded from citizenship precisely because they were bound up with the material, practical aspects of life in ways which purportedly made them naturally dependent, and prey to the non-rational aspects of human existence. Of course their labour was also appropriated into the bargain. Later arguments for the exclusion of women from the public realm of citizenship focused upon their role as caretaker of affectivity, desire and the body. Today, while the exclusion of women has been remedied in most countries claiming to be democratic, the association of embodiment, and emotion in particular, with that deemed ‘irrational’ and therefore either irrelevant or dangerous to the civic domain, continues.

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I have argued throughout this work that in the Western intellectual tradition the transcendence of embodied particularity has had wide ramifications, many of which are negative for living a full human life. With the philosophers of the body and others whose work I have drawn on, I understand the body as the centre of the experiential world. Here I note the effects of the downgrading of the body on social life and by implication how people may enact their citizenship. So in the accounts of citizenship I have just outlined there remains an attraction towards the distant, the abstract, the normative and anything that can be distilled into a general rule. This can be most clearly discerned in the notion of the ‘general will’ and that of ‘the common good’. Moreover there is the inclination to seek the unitary or ideal (as in the idea that there is one version of what it is to be a citizen). The conflation of citizenship with crude versions of patriotism is one of the most disturbing examples at the present time. Finally there is the attachment to a fantasy, which reduces the actually existent – the embodied self – to a notion of citizenship that is purely formal. Such a depiction of citizenship, it seems to me, removes it from what should be its concrete anchoring in material bodies and their lived realities, but also in the process it ignores the issue of how values may be developed that will enable a vital expression of what it is to be a citizen. These remarks suggest that in citizenship education there is an urgent need to better understand what is encompassed through having students develop attitudes, orientations and dispositions that will enhance their lives as citizens, above all encouraging their participation in communal life. The difficulty of course lies in grasping what these might actually be, and then being able to determine how precisely they might mount a critique of present perspectives on citizenship, and through this develop an awareness of what citizenship might mean in the future. I take it as given that knowledge, values and dispositions cannot be separated in the practice of everyday life, and certainly not in education. Real fleshy bodies, overlain with images and cultural representations, are what come to be constituted as a citizenry; for that reason, I think citizenship education must begin with a recognition of the body in the development of a democratic outlook. Virtues, values and democratic dispositions There has been much written about the idea of values in relation to citizenship. The idea of civic virtues has a long history but has been revitalised as a major theme in recent times, notably by MacIntyre.9 His emphasis on our animal nature and consequent dependence and vulnerability provides a needed corrective to those accounts of values which are grounded in an excessively rationalistic account of the human being, those which overemphasise individual autonomy and the capacity for making independent choices about which path of action to follow. MacIntyre’s claim that the processes of determining the common good require not only the virtues of the autonomous practical reasoner but also a fully understood and accepted sense of dependence on others is for me highly significant. Creatural

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existence means that acknowledgement of our fundamentally relational character as human animals is essential in considering how agency is engaged to make decisions not just about the ‘private’ affairs of each of us, but also those affecting the wider community or the state. Leaving aside widespread but often simplistic religious views of virtue, the notion of virtues has always been problematic for education. In recent public discourse the term values has been preferred, even though it is obvious that most popular commentators have little conception of how values arise within the individual, and in particular of the nature and functioning of those values we commonly call collective. Debates about values, however, continue to rage within and well beyond educational circles, and contemporary writing explores the notion of civic values in relation to the conception of democracy. Gutmann and Thompson, for example, suggest that certain attitudes which go under the broad heading of moral accommodation need to be generated within the individual.10 These include, ‘civic integrity’ – being consistent in word and deed – and having ‘civic magnanimity’ – treating opponents as reasonable and morally worthy. Although one might reasonably assume that emotion is integral to the development of such values, emotional aspects and processes do not figure prominently in the articulation of such values. The philosopher Eamonn Callan, however, suggests that ‘emotional generosity’ be regarded as an important civic disposition that might help to overcome the shallowness and instrumentalism that infuses many contemporary social values. Patricia White argues, and I concur, that the engagement of the emotions at some depth is essential in all such formulations about the relationship of values to democratic practice.11 Following Dewey, I take the view that depth of emotion is achieved only through an individual’s growing awareness of her connection to others. People only matter to each other through experiencing the emotional connection of others who are entwined with them in various kinds of project – who are implaced with them as they carry out varieties of practice. From this kind of relation, individuals gain and generate kinds of ‘lived knowledge’ in contrast to that sort of knowledge which is excessively abstract and removed from actual practice. Humans realise their humanity through other humans, that is, through emotionally motivated and infused, embodied engagement.12 In the process of experiencing emotions, as embodied selves we are reaffirmed in our spatio-temporal existence. But as Merleau-Ponty and Dewey have argued convincingly, our emotions are neither in our minds nor merely in our bodies – they are instead always located in the very depths of our actual engagement with the world in all its specificity. The enhancement of emotional depth can only occur if we have sufficient privacy to be ourselves, but at the same time retain an essential connectedness to others, thereby continually engaging in such practice as will carve out our common life. Theories of what is involved in being a citizen have tended to be constructed in such a way as to prevent emotion and affect from being absorbed into what is the citizenship’s most intimate concern: the negotiation of everyday social life and the

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conjoint working-out of social problems of all kinds. The latter will include issues related to work, problems faced by environmental degradation, ethical issues such as the humane treatment of asylum seekers, as well as a host of economic and political issues. Rationalist-inspired theories of citizenship have not emphasised the collective and conjunctive aspects of social life in their embodied forms. Direct democracy in which individuals actively participate in governance has been a popular notion in recent times but is often regarded as entirely impracticable under contemporary political conditions. The election of representatives is as far as participation goes for the majority of citizens, and even this function remains unfulfilled in those situations in which voting is not compulsory. Hence it is no doubt very difficult indeed for many citizens (perhaps a majority?) to see exactly what they can do to activate their citizenship. Often an attitude of resignation, even powerlessness and thence uncertainty, arises in a population. The suspicion can arise that even attempting political engagement is pointless, its formality and abstraction a removal from the realities of people’s embodied everyday lives. Yet I argue, it is precisely this manifest or given embodiment in all of its messiness that is the basis for citizenship. Moreover the kinds of embodied sociality explored in the previous chapter – those actions involved in ‘keeping warm together’ – are actually its foundation, not something merely incidental to it. Social consensus and cooperation are more likely to be the outcomes of emotional adjustment in the face of encounters with others than are abstract definitions imposed from above. In making this claim I am not expounding some notion of tribal romanticism, but rather trying to suggest a better balance of the embodied emotional with the externally imposed generalities of rationalistic accounts of citizenship. It is the potentialities of the embodied human animal in all of its dependence and sociality that must be mobilised in considerations about the common good and in those practices subsequently undertaken to achieve it. This issue of disposition and values in relation to citizenship directs critical attention to existing versions of citizenship in order to see what the possibilities are for genuine participation. It seems to me that throughout its existence, discourse about what citizenship is and how it is to be enacted has battled constantly with the contradiction between economic processes, which ceaselessly generate inequality, and political processes demanding equality among members of a population.13 This was the contradiction in classical civic republicanism and it remains one today when, after a period of emphasis on rights (especially economic rights), has given way to a fraying of civic solidarity in the face of neo-liberal economic and social policies. Contrary to the kind of view one finds espoused in many programs of citizenship education in schools (especially the officially sanctioned ones), I hold that the actual conception of citizenship itself needs to be problematised at the present time. One of the major reasons is that there are significant tensions created by demands that citizens be in principle equal, while the economic realities mean that in practice, there is growing gulf between those who have wealth and cultural capital, and a much larger group which has relatively little or no such resources. The

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positioning of embodied individuals under such conditions of differences in power and influence is complex and can be rendered invisible in current programs of citizenship or civics education. Hence the need to remind ourselves of the embodied nature of individuals and the functioning of emotions in the development of attitudes, values and beliefs about participation. Developing democratic dispositions in the classroom has been an of repeated theme in citizenship education recently, especially in light of the criticism that more traditional forms of civics and citizenship education have overemphasised formal, abstract knowledge and historical studies. Teachers have been urged to become more reflective about what they do in civics classes so that they may enable students to experience what it might be like to engage in participatory democracy. Participation in institutional life (the school) is seen as analogous to public participation in the life of society at large. Practising being democratic in school will have positive outcomes in later life, it is believed. Students are provided with opportunities to observe the manner in which their own school operates in incorporating them as individuals into various aspects of corporate life, and they are encouraged to form and express opinions about the legitimacy and fairness of this process. But the success of such activity depends heavily, in my view, on the specific understandings of citizenship and the civic realm, which while complex and varied, are rarely made explicit in citizenship programs in schools. Moreover there are basic themes concerning the rights and obligations of citizens which need to be addressed. Unfortunately the underlying assumptions of such themes tend not to be brought to light in the classroom. Thus, for example, while civic republicanism of the classical kind focused on the responsibilities of the citizen to the polity, contemporary thinking has been heavily influenced by conceptions of the rights of citizens, often heavily influenced by identity politics. The difference between the two have ramifications for the theorisation of citizenship presented to students, hence for the kind of practical classroom activities in civics and citizenship curricula. An acknowledgement of human embodiment in its complexities seems to me to be a basic requirement for a critical study of these and other basic themes. The focus should therefore be on practical explorations of human ideas, attitudes and actions which constitute the actual practice of citizenship. Embodied citizenship – rights and obligations The notion of citizenship articulated by Marshall in his landmark work Class, Citizenship and Social Development significantly expanded earlier ideas about the rights of the citizen to include ideas about economic rights.14 But because of the realities of globalising capitalism at the present time, and in light of the decline in popularity of notions of state welfare, such economic advantages as unemployment benefits, disability allowances and the like are no longer seen as rights. The concept of economic rights is therefore unlikely to constitute any kind of serious challenge to

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existing social and economic conditions. In terms of the theme of embodiment, this reality is therefore unlikely to have a beneficial impact upon those members of societies who are substantially disadvantaged in terms of economic and social capital. The kinds of rights presently available may not in fact lead to the enhancement of life for large numbers of people precisely because they remain grounded in a view that is largely derived from ideas about moral character and behaviour. Such a view is overwhelmingly concerned with possible threats that may be posed to individuals by their fellow citizens and not with questions of equality among citizens. The dominant notion of rights is an individualistic one inherited from the Enlightenment and therefore reflecting the universalistic thinking of that time. It is couched in the abstract, without acknowledging social difference. More importantly it does not – indeed, by its very nature, cannot – challenge existing social and power relations. In particular the prevailing socioeconomic arrangements set up and supported by institutional arrangements around the market, cannot allow for any alternative version of rights. Yet what is excluded is precisely a recognition of those aspects that have to do with embodied positioning – one’s access to capital, economic and cultural, tied to one’s embodied being in terms of class, gender, race, disability and so on. Because of particular aspects of their embodiment, people have different opportunities and potentialities. Moreover, discursive structures which situate them as differently embodied will normalise and assign status. As a result of this kind of discursive assignment within the social order and their actual physical well-being and so on, people’s cognitive capacities and their very identities will depend in major ways on the particular social contexts in which they exist. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the greatly revered autonomy that sits at the very heart of contemporary rights theory cannot be realised if the context in which individuals grow to adulthood inhibits or destroys the very possibility of that development. In contrast, the notion of citizenship as community is regarded as answering some of the difficulties raised by the extreme form of individualism just described.15 With its primary emphasis on the collective it attends not to individual rights so much as to the ways in which group activities and mutual support can function to the benefit of all members. The version of citizenship that is implicit here might be regarded as ‘organic’, in that a community is grounded in shared values and a common appreciation of what is needed if the community is to survive and to flourish. The parts of the whole are strongly intertwined and roots are deep, so that individuals are embedded within a network of beliefs and practices that has been tested over time. Obligation is the centrepiece, that is, the obligation owed by the individual who enjoys the protection given by membership. Participation and identity derive from group membership and the performance of mutual obligations, but what is of primary value is the human association that is entailed as a group member. It is the contribution to the community, the sense of being ‘held’ by the community, that is its own reward.

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Individualism and communitarianism are twin poles that suggest ways of being a citizen. The criticism levelled at liberal individualism is that society is nothing more than an aggregation of such individuals. The model of the citizen is therefore an abstraction that ignores the realities of real-life people. Communitarianism on the other hand has a strong view of society as much more than the sum of its individual parts. But the difficulty is that it focuses on the collective in ways that exclude both industrial and economic power. The present connection of the power of industry and economics to the state and the ramifications of this are largely unacknowledged in this model. Hence the operation of advanced economies under late capitalism and the forms of politics that now are prominent mean that their impact cannot be dealt with adequately by communitarians. Further, the notion of community itself needs to be carefully examined so that it becomes clear just what a community is synonymous with – is it the nation, an ethnic majority (or minority), a religious community, various forms of cultural configurations within a given state, and so on? The problems that can arise from the association with ethnicity or religion have been grimly demonstrated in recent times. Appeals to shared ethnicity or literalist forms of religious doctrine as central aspects of a culture can be extremely dangerous, as both history and recent events have demonstrated. The association of ethnic, religious and cultural communities with place (not implacement, in Casey’s sense) can lead to the development of insular outlooks and the reinforcement of deeply conservative values with a rejection of the wider world in its complexity. What appears most striking to me about liberal individualism is its neglect of the specificities of embodiment. Liberalism has always been notoriously abstract in its account of the rights of the individual, passing over the realities of different kinds of bodies and the manner in which they are inscribed differently. It fails to recognise that people are differently placed, especially in relation to the economic order, and it also fails to generalise their experience in ways that properly reflect the realities of privilege and disadvantage. Communitarianism on the other hand has as one of its major goals the preservation of cultural inheritance for future members of the community and therefore, by extension, the environment – often places – in which that culture has previously survived. In the latter sense, then, it has about it an awareness of the materiality both of embodied subjects and their material contexts. But I think we need to view this with caution, for communities may well value their territory for the manner in which it has been used and its cultural significance, while not necessarily being aware of how cultural norms and arrangements and the landscape in general may be part of a larger whole in which all people, as well as non-human creatures, are attached to the Earth. The problems I have just outlined in liberal individualism and communitarianism highlight the present reality, which in my view is that, in the West, the actual concept of citizenship itself faces a crisis. This crisis arises in large part from the fact that civic solidarity is in significant ways in a state of decay – ‘fellow feeling’ is indeed in short supply, under the attacks of market forces on the one hand and the destructive effects of some of the most aggressive forms of identity politics,

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including variants of religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism, on the other. Multiculturalism as a national ideal has been much derided, and a resurgence of a narrow, in some cases xenophobic, nationalism has put paid to the idea of a genuine diversity amongs the citizenry of many countries. Because intellectual resources of the ‘wrong’ political hue can be so easily ignored by governments, and the political will is often lacking, the means required to renew a sense of citizenship that is vital and forward-looking may not be easily marshalled. In Australia, for example, the model of the citizen emphasises procedures and information. But it also conflates citizenship with ideas about national identity, drawing heavily for its content upon ‘warrior’ and sporting myths, a narrow masculinist definition of what it is to be ‘an Australian’, and an amalgam of stories about military exploits. Rather than opening out the possibilities for exploring what citizenship might be at a time of crisis in human affairs, especially those relating to the degradation of environment and the impoverishment of millions in the so-called ‘less developed’ world, the dominant discourses serve only to reinforce its formal and abstract nature on the one hand, and its ‘beginnings’ in sentimental myths of origin, on the other. Meantime, actual embodied citizens in all of their diversity are less and less visible in the arena of civic life. The question I pose therefore is this: are there forms of democratic participation that might acknowledge those aspects of embodiment such as emotion and affective life in positive and productive ways without becoming either abstract and formalistic? Are there forms that give due recognition to the embodied character of human interaction and to the importance of emotional connection within communities? What forms of citizenship might be suggested? It seems to me that associational forms of democratic participation may offer forms of citizenship which attempt to reduce the scale at which social affairs are organised, trying to bring decision-making down to a manageable size. This kind of arrangement has an immediate appeal in that it suggests that individual embodiment and attention to material environments in which people have their implacement have a better chance of being attended to. Hirst claims that individual freedom and the welfare of the larger group are best served when as many of the affairs of the society as a whole are managed by voluntary and democratically self-governing associations.16 What this seems to suggest is that people can be much more fully engaged in those organisations in which they work, or in organisations which are charged with providing the myriad services required under complex social arrangements. A sense of genuine participation can be enhanced and the needs of embodied human beings as well as the non-human and the wider physical environment taken into consideration. An extension of the concept of associational democracy, it seems to me, is the idea of having much greater direct (therefore, embodied) participation by citizens, through the institution of election to a cluster of conventions or assemblies. The relationship of such assemblies to the main elected chambers of government would need to be carefully articulated and the relative powers held by each fully defined.

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The assemblies may be of widely varying kinds, each of which would deal with a major area of state responsibility, such as education or housing or a set of obviously related areas such as welfare policy and health. Their purpose would be to overcome the sense that many citizens of representative democracies have of being unable to participate to the extent that they would wish, and the feeling that they are frustrated by the fact that policies of different kinds are simply ‘packaged’ according to the dictates of political parties, often without logic or a consideration that, indeed, embodied citizens are different from one another and thus will have different interests which need to be represented in the political realm differently. While I think the model of associational democracy allows the citizen much greater opportunities for active participation, it may suffer from some of the same weaknesses as communitarianism, chief among which is the fact that it does not attend to the economic dimension in ways that would enable it to critically engage with policies that may disadvantage the most vulnerable members of a society. In other words it does not adequately acknowledge the links between current institutional arrangements and the dominant economic paradigm and its characteristic practices. There may remain a refusal to admit that there will always be a relationship of struggle with the inequalities brought about by the reigning political orthodoxy and the demands for equality among citizens. The idea of specialist assemblies, for example, may on the other hand allow for increased representation and the canvassing of a wider range of views, the bringing to bear of expertise and the perspective of those who stand to lose most if wrong decisions are taken. It seems to me that associational notions of democracy and especially the idea of specialist assemblies stand a better chance of assisting individuals in social contexts to become aware not only of their own embodied implacement but also (and perhaps more importantly in regard to citizenship) to understand what embodied social participation may be. In other words they will have opportunities for gaining a better understanding of their own creatural embodiment, while also grasping that it involves the making of culture (meaning) in company with others who share their humanity and not only their race or gender. This means they may come to better comprehend their implacement with others in an environment of human energy and achievement. Such a sense cannot be conveyed except in the most distant and vague form when notions of citizenship rely on abstract models of individuality or communitarian notions of allegiance to a group. I think people may gain greater insight into how it is that we develop a sense of fellow feeling that is based on shared knowledge, emotional generosity and genuine empathy. Forms of collective striving to achieve better social conditions rely, I believe, on this sharing. But in an age of more individualised practices and the passivity of much social life it may be difficult to see how collective embodiment can become involved productively in social and political participation. It seems to me that there needs to be a re-imagining of forms of communication, with much less emphasis on mere passive reception of images (being visually sated, entertained or pacified) and

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greater attention to forms of communication that will engage us in embodied interaction with others (playing, discussing, enacting). Communal belonging is constituted by living, thinking and working together for a cause or causes which may be loosely or more tightly defined, or at the outset may not necessarily have a goal or cause at all. Feeling close is the key term, I think, the basis for fellow feeling, which I want to insist is in no way based on family or ethnic or racial connection, but on the emotional linking through respect, curiosity, and later, perhaps, admiration. There may also be a sense of competitive playfulness, with the anticipation of vigorous exchange. Identity of the group emerges over time and cannot be imposed beforehand, because it is the very dynamism of the intercorporeal exchanges that drives the whole thing. What is required is not common origin (birth, upbringing, ethnicity) but commonality of tendencies, orientations and aims. It is here that empathy, which I discussed in the previous chapter, comes into play, for empathy is, I believe, essential for the success of projects of this kind in genuine associational democracy. As I noted in my discussion of Boler’s work on emotion, empathy is not passive sympathy, nor is it allowing oneself to be absorbed into others. In the account of empathy I focused on its dynamic aspect, the fact that in trying to temporarily put oneself in the place of the other one needs to become aware of one’s own implacement and that of others. At a time when older collective forms of political struggle have lost much of their impetus, communal practices need to be conceptulised and tested in an altered political landscape. Forms of communication that will express the requisite empathy for effective action are coming into being, but there is a need for greater attention to the practical means by which fellow feeling in a common cause and the generation of solidarity can be achieved. One of the first steps is to come to a better understanding of the manner in which members of groups, through their practice, turn space into place and, in so doing will, among other outcomes, enact the social order, create meaning, and affirm themselves as citizens of a particular polity. Citizenship as partaking of places in common For the philosophers of place such as Edward Casey, place means humanised space, not a bounded territory.17 By means of implacement – the situation of the mobile and extensive body – space is socialised (but not colonised) because it is the product of ceaseless human energy. Places are always enculturated, regardless of their apparent lack of significant features. This does not mean, however, that we have ownership over them, merely that we have made them meaningful to ourselves by our activity. Acknowledging that they are so enculturated we understand that they are matters of experience, just as are those other ‘objects’ we encounter, and which become for us ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects.18 We constantly try places out in culturally specific ways in the company of those with whom we are engaged in all sorts of projects. These can be as simple as joining fellow retirees on a park bench to admire a water view,

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constructing a garden shed in a backyard with a couple of friends or passing legislation in the Parliament. Thus we partake of places in common with others and remake them communally. The culture that characterises and shapes a specific place is a shared culture, not one that is merely superimposed upon the place but is rather part of its very ‘facticity’. But, as I have noted in a previous chapter, place can never be seen as merely inert matter, precisely because of the animating, definitive role it plays in our collective lives. Place is already cultural-as-experienced, and as such it insinuates itself into a collectivity, altering as well as constituting that collectivity. But places have their meanings first and foremost through the fact that human beings are embodied. Partaking of places in common is central to a view of place that is not merely one of possession and manipulation. The sharing of place in the civic realm manifests itself in a variety of ways. In a setting familiar to millions of us today – that of the city – we live and work, but we may also participate in civic affairs such as membership of a local neighbourhood watch group or a branch of a political party. The latter activities may be carried out, for example, in a building which at other times functions as a primary school but for the purposes of the present activity it is where we are. What occurs in such a situation is a functional overlapping which nonetheless carries complex layers of symbolism. As we conduct our meeting to decide on new measures to protect the local community or vote on decisions to be sent by the branch to Head Office of the party, we are just as much implaced as the fifth grade children who occupy the primary school space at another time of the day. What we are creating and re-creating are reservoirs of significance that are attached to particular places and contribute to the collective imagination of a locale or neighbourhood. Such an ‘imaginary’ is always constituted by the intersection of ordinary situations, moments, spaces and embodied individuals. Ordinary and everyday (but nonetheless genuine) sociality is expressed in the various ‘centres of necessity’: a post office, a bus stop, the central business district and local government offices. Out of these arise the specific aura of a given place, the term ‘aura’ evoking a unique colouring and odour. In that place there occurs the making of culture on an everyday levelling – in other words, as the habitual activity of those individuals who make up the local implaced population. A distinguishing characteristic of a population is its vitality and the sense in which it is possessed at any given moment by its place. Out of its activity (practice) can arise an ongoing collective sensibility, which will have little to do with the directed and abstract rationality of national citizenship as it presently exists but, rather, more to do with locally residing and experienced, implaced existence. Knowledge as embodied and the dimension of feeling will be an indispensible part of this. Moreover I would argue that it is here, amid the everyday, that experiencing the other occurs, since it is here that conflict is generated and community forged, dissolved and re-forged. As each engages in his or her situated practice a kind of mutual attunement occurs. Other people and their practice link me to my place, just as I and mine do for them. The history of a place becomes our history by virtue of

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our implaced, embodied practice. Irrespective of the content of this practice – it can be work, politics, leisure pursuits, celebrations, arts activities, sexual, educational activity or whatever – it is by its nature participative and therefore generative of meaning. When our bodily dispositions are fully operant, a sense of being ‘at-home’ is generated. This does not mean, however, that we must be situated in the space that people, tribe or clan has occupied historically in order to be implaced. On the contrary we create and extend our own implacement through the operation of our bodily endeavours. We attain in that place optimum know-how, where everything is at hand and utilised to the full in a manner specific to that time as well as place. It is, in Latour’s terms, a moving towards the world and making it mobile. Thus it involves a folding of humans and the non-human through practice towards specific goals. In this way we come to know what other people are for in a given situation and how they and we will be ‘used’ in the furtherance of our common aims. Such events always present opportunities for a maximum awareness of where and how everyone and everything pertinent to the event will be placed. In other words, there will be a certain familiarity, yet the sense of openness and challenge which arises precisely out of our understanding that there is something to be done, and that we have the basic know-how and prior experience to carry out the task, whatever it may be. Essential to this is our feeling of being an agent, amongst other agents, with intersubjective relations, but also with a keen awareness of the functioning of the non-human ‘actors’ who also play a crucial role. In relation to this notion of phenomenological space and my claim that place has an absolutely central role in our understanding of how we can ‘rehearse’ being citizens, we can identify some examples of communities created, dissolved and recreated which exemplify implacement. We may think, for example, of an annual tree-planting day in which a population is mobilised in particular ways in specified areas to attempt regeneration of the landscape, or a visit by a school rock band to a hospital cancer ward for children. Such things exemplify implacement of communities which, by their nature, are temporary, but are no less powerful in their intent and outcomes for being that. Here are instant communities, gathered for the duration of the event and then dissolved, allowing participants to take up other practices in other situations. As such, these communities are expressive of the changing needs, desires and associations of the actors and the demands of the social and political realms. They afford opportunities for experiencing self-assertion and the exercise of the will, within limits, as well as affording opportunities for feeling a sense of the familiar and therefore of communality. What they emphasise is the sense of locale, or of being at any given moment, shaped by, and simultaneously shaping, the world through practice. Such an account of implacement should not be mistaken for some kind of claim that all human activity is ‘local’ as opposed to ‘global’. It is nothing of the sort. While citizenship as it is presently defined may appear abstract and remote from the individual, to emphasise the local as a solution to the problem runs other risks. For

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example, the locality may embrace those who are regarded as belonging to it while excluding the outsider, or at best reminding her continually of her lack of connection, her failure to have properly settled into the neighbourhood. However, in the place-specific kind of dwelling I have just outlined – phenomenological implacement – it is within communities, regions, locality, having their specific ways of producing reality through significant variant forms, that each individual irrespective of background and recency of habitation, becomes implaced, thus in the fullest sense concretising place itself. Like all social practice, placial practice is lived. And because place incorporates social actions, the action of subjects both individual and collective are in a fundamental sense always localised. Therefore, there can be no one place that is only ever available to a select few who have appropriated it; rather, all places are available to all people who encounter them as enduring scenes of experience, reflection and memory. The question for citizenship then becomes: how can we transform those things we imagine lie at its heart, into social practices of a positive and innovative kind? Practice is the key to the problems faced by citizenship at the present time, and since practice always involves bodies, then embodied individuals in all of their corporeality must be engaged in enacting their common citizenship. Bodily (implaced) awareness and citizenship education If ‘placial belonging’ underpins any attachment we might have to the nation, what might this mean for citizenship education? If placial practice is central to who we are, then presumably the symbolic construction of a nation should involve a renewed sense of place in the phenomenological sense. Unfortunately it is usually assumed that so-called localised or regional loyalties do not sit comfortably with national interests. Citizenship education in many places has often reflected this misunderstanding. Somehow it is imagined that we can be a citizen at a local or regional level, because it is there that we are implaced – that is where our identities arise, are reinforced and nurtured. But as I have argued throughout this book, the phenomenological notion of implacement is not about this or that space, a city, a region, the countryside and so on, it is about activity and the manner in which this creates places, sometimes permanent, but frequently not: the fact that they are not, does not render them any less meaningful; on the contrary, their intensity can be such that they have enormous impact on social relations and the institutions of public life. It seems to me, then, that a citizenship curriculum needs to be constructed from a rather a different perspective, one that focuses on an understanding of space as social – that is, on the phenomenon of implacement. Attention would need to be paid to developing a kind of ‘sociology of everyday life’ from across the curriculum, including a study of those things which go to make up the ‘emotional bond of sociality’ and the meaning of human beings in relation. (Should citizenship education, draw much more strongly for example, on literature and the visual and performing arts as well as the social sciences?) Efforts would need to be made to

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assist students in understanding the origins of social conformity and the significance of sentiment as manifested in social movements of disparate kinds. Histories as experienced every day by ordinary people and the communities in which they are embedded, and not just the history of the big events (concerning nations and peoples), would need to become a focus of attention. Human beings as the inhabitants of places, dwellers and ‘users’ of every kind, in all their diversity of approach and practice, would become a major resource in such a curriculum. Accompanying this would be a reassessment of the functioning of the non-human in human activity, by which I mean a determined effort to recast scientific activity and its deployment of technologies (not just information technology) so that students can come to some understanding of a relational notion of being and knowing. A pressing aim would be to capture the unity of presently dissociated elements in subject areas and to refashion these in such a way that new critical discourses of a ‘politics of the everyday’ may be generated. The creation of a unified public realm, which at the present time is presented as the centrepiece of much civics education, is a concept that ignores the realities of differences in embodiment. This occurs precisely because citizenship remains largely an abstraction, which denies the specifics of differing forms of embodiment. If, however, we acknowledge bodies, we can see immediately that in the creation of a civic realm, differences cannot ever be eliminated (unless of course we decide to get rid permanently of a particular social group, say, because of their appearance or culture), even if they are suppressed for a time. Doctrines in the recent past which insist that for citizenship to be conferred all individuals must be the same in key respects, must now be carefully subjected to critique and their assumptions laid bare. Education for citizenship must surely, therefore, include the development of a genuine appreciation of the manner in which difference is expressed in all of its concrete materiality, not merely in theory. Presenting ‘difference’ in theory is insufficient: students need to engage with diversity in practice as well as in theory. In societies whose ‘public’ is heterogeneous, those differences which are of consequence are irreducible and must be publicly so acknowledged. Social groups whose ways of seeing the world involve different foregrounding of key elements can only transcend their particularity if, at a more basic level of existence, they are accepted as being fully human. Thus the domain of practical consciousness, which I described in earlier chapters in this book, needs to be the area of intervention. Citizenship as embodied community should now be the goal of citizenship education. NOTES 1.

Of Weber’s work the following dealt specifically with the issue of the emotions in social life: Weber, Max, ‘Knies and the Problem of Irrationality’ in Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, G. Oakes (ed.), New York: Free Press [1905b] 1975, pp 93-207. See also discussions of Weber’s treatment of the emotions in Barbalet, op. cit., pp 29-61. Simmel’s work on

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

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the emotions of members of secret societies dealt with the theme also, in Simmel, G., ‘La Sociètè Secrètè’, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, Paris: Gallimard, No. 14, 1976. For an account of the links between Durkheim’s recognition of the role of affect in social life and more contemporary notions of ‘elective sociality’, see Maffesoli’ op. cit., pp 87-88. As I have noted at several points throughout this book, the Apollonian and Dionysian were the two principles derived from the association with the ancient Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, the former being the principle of order, static beauty and boundaries, while the latter is that of excess, frenzy and connection. The Apollonian has come to represent reason in the Western tradition of thought and to depict the human being as having the capacity to stand outside of the rest of reality (‘nature’) and to interrogate it dispassionately. The Dionysian principle presents reality as flux in which human beings, like all other species, are part of the dynamic of the living whole. The Dionysian experience of connection, which can occur in social life, appears to threaten the rationalistic order. The analysis and usages of Apollonian and Dionysian imagery have undergone change and development and, although Nietzsche’s deployment of the concepts in The Birth Of Tragedy is perhaps the best known in the modern period, nevertheless the analysis of Apollo and Dionysus has influenced work in a great many fields. It is of particular interest to certain strands in sociology. Communicative rationality is brought into being and sustained through the complex processes of discourse as described by Habermas in Habermas, J., The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume I: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, and The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume II, translated by Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. See Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D., Democracy and Disagreement, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996. For a fuller discussion of deliberation as it is found in the work of Habermas and of Gutmann and Thompson, and a critique of this in the light of the realities of embodiment, see O’Loughlin, M., ‘Rational Deliberation, Embodied Communication and the Ideal of Democratic Participation’ Special Issue: Citizenship and Education Change, Transformations in Education. A Journal of Theory Research, Policy and Practice, 3(1), May 2000, The University of Sydney. The uses of object - relations theory and the phenomenological understanding of place as means of emotional attachment to country or locale are explored in O’Loughlin M., Ch 11, ‘Psychoanalytic Theory and Sources of National Attachment: The Significance of Place’, in History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003. In neither its civic republican form, nor later under liberal individualism, was there any genuine universalism because of the major exclusions of women, slaves, workers and others from citizenship. See Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edition, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. See Gutmann, op. cit., pp 52-53. See Callan, E., ‘Beyond Sentimental Civic Education’, American Journal of Education, 102(2), February 1994, pp 190-221, and White, P., ‘Education for Citizenship: Obstacles and Opportunities’, in Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education, Wendy Kohli (ed.), New York: Routledge, 1995. I am reminded here of the African concept of ‘Ubuntu’ which conveys the idea that human beings can only be fully so through their interaction and living with others. The reality about this struggle is rarely acknowledged in citizenship education. This is partly a function of the compartmentalisation of the curriculum but also occurs because major doctrines of

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citizenship do not see the achievement of citizenship as work in progress: something to be progressively realised and never completed. Marshall, T., Class, Citizenship and Social Development, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964. On communitarianism, see for example Walzer, M., ‘Pluralism in Political Perspective’ in The Politics of Ethnicity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Hirst, P., ‘Can Secondary Associations Enhance Good Governance?’ in J. Cohen and J. Rogers, Associations and Democracy, London: Verso, 1994. See Casey, works cited in my Notes to Chapter 3.

EPILOGUE Fleshy organic bodies cannot be interpreted away, unless we are prepared to interpret the entire world out of existence. Each and every body experiences itself and is experienced in an endless variety of ways by others at a given moment in time and in its place. This is the meaning of the claim that my body is simultaneously mine and yet not mine. It is an affirmation of the materiality of bodies as much as it is a statement about how bodies signify for others and for us. It supports the view articulated throughout this work – that biological reality is the very basis of creatural existence. This admission however, is neither a defence of a bald corporeal essentialism nor a repudiation of those achievements known to us as culture. It does not deny the capacities of embodied human potential to solve formidable problems and create a better world. The biological dimension of existence reminds us of animal nature, that which we share with other species and which is our means of creatural existence. Fears of being seen to invoke a kind of bodily essentialism in our accounts of social life may have encouraged an over-emphasis on the figurative at the expense of the biological or anatomical, perhaps doing less than justice to bodies as spatial and temporal beings in their own right. Downplaying or ignoring the sheer physicality of the body, is to forget that within bodies there are internal processes each having its own ‘knowledge’ or ‘intelligence’, enacting its role in a mutually co-operative way. So while it is entirely legitimate to think of bodies as being made up of ideas as well as flesh, the tendency to analyse the body predominantly in terms of ideational content can misrepresent both the varieties of bodily experience and the infinite capacities and talents to be encountered in embodied human beings. Given the myriad kinds of practice of bodies in different places at different times it is obvious that they are never entirely reducible to construction or inscription. While cultures can and will continue to frame bodies they can never completely discursively ‘consume’ them; there will always be crucial aspects of experience that cannot be encompassed by language and systems of representation. Emotion, sensations and movements can never be entirely communicated or replicated. Therefore while the motivations, intent and action of creatural bodies must be attributed to signification or culture it is nevertheless the fleshy biological body, with its complex neuro-physiological functioning which is the very source of such accomplishment. Often the organic body is regarded as being the object of incursion by representations, reminiscences, and memories, concepts that render it incapacitated in a variety of ways. The main problem however is that such depictions resurrect a mind – body dualism dominated either by a narrowly conceived cognitivist versions of reason or by cultural theories which largely ignore experiencing bodies. It has been a major assumption underlying this work that reason, far from being the distinguishing feature of a traditional conception of mind, is shaped in crucial ways by the specificities of our bodies, that is, by the complex and amazing neural structures of our brains and by the particulars of our everyday engagement with the world, that is the peculiarities of our implacement in time and space. Rationality is 169

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precisely that which builds upon and utilises our basic animal natures, not something transcending the body and demanding its relegation as a lowly vehicle or instrument. In asserting this I do not suggest that we should now consign all ‘cultural’, social linguistic or political analyses of human endeavour and the like, to the dustbin; they remain significant in explaining, at least temporarily, the political positionings of various kinds of bodies and the operation of power upon them. The theorisations contained within them have been crucial to social movements, notably that of feminism. But there is a need to attend more closely to the specifics of our everyday bodily functioning in environments in which the muscular capacities of the body, the hands (especially through their proprioceptive function), the workings of the digestive and other systems, respiration, the metabolism and so on, are the corporeal details out of which thinking, reasoning itself arises. This in Merleau-Ponty’s terms is nothing less than the ‘intelligence of the body’ at work. If we are to continue thinking in terms of consciousness and reason, as dependent rational animals, we now need I think, to view it as arising out of the contesting desires within each of us for care, affection, success, autonomy against failure, loneliness and vulnerability. Our animality and that of other species as well as the inanimate as various forms of technology, arises out of this internal contestation within the individual. Consciousness far from being simply located in the head as the brain, journeys ceaselessly through the body on moving streams of hormone and enzyme constantly making sense out of the criss-crossing of sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing. We still refer to the five or six senses, while remaining aware that these are not equally regarded, nor equally utilised. The senses of so-called ‘disabled’ people will often show a high development of one or more to replace that of one sense, which is impaired. We know that our animal companions and other species have even more senses. Large ocean mammals dolphins and whales, for example, find their way about by means of reading the earth’s magnetic fields. Australian Aboriginal trackers, a minuscule but fast-disappearing group have astounding skills of ‘sight-smell’ no longer present in the rest of the population. Water ‘diviners’ may well be responding to an electromagnetic sense, which is shared with other species. Of course different species have evolved different senses and we cannot simply put ourselves into the sensory realm of other species. Nonetheless we can learn more about some of the senses by paying greater attention to their functioning in some non-human species. The vibratory sense, which many non-human animals have in abundance probably, needs to be better studied in humans. Our muscular sense guides our relations with objects and with technology - we know immediately when objects are large or small, solid or malleable. Our sense of gravity is always with us letting us know what is behind, before and at the side of us, and enables us to dispose our bodies in certain ways should we over-balance or fall. Phenomenological space is precisely our postural situating in a specific situation and our orientation. The body as totality ‘feels’ the mood of a particular place, but all places one inhabits no matter how temporarily, are examples of engaged human situation. There is the wonder that

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is proprioception, that sensing which allows connection and exploration of a unique kind. Then there is a kinaesthetic sense making us aware of what position each aspect of our bodies is in at any given time. Those who leave the earth for sojourns in space are aware of how their physiology is altered, even if only temporarily. Obviously we not only can, but also do extend those senses we have evolved by the uses of technology. This is in Latour’s terms, the ‘socialisation’ of the non-human so that they may bear upon human relations. Our understanding of this as something that enhances life immeasurably – indeed in crucial respects, enables it – must also include an awareness of the risks in using technology, which may not only contribute to certain aspects of de-skilling of bodies, but also perhaps even more significantly, to a dulling of our capacity to feel for one another. The issue here is that of how to utilise technologies to foster greater capacity for human achievement and greater flexibility for bodies, but at the same time retaining the fullest capacity for responsiveness to our own and others’ real needs. An excessive ‘mentalisation’ of the human faculties through the use of certain technologies for example, may in fact serve to undermine aspects of existence such as emotion and the experience of various kinds of intimacy arising from the operation of the senses. Nowhere are our senses more profoundly required than in our dealings with others and the manner in which we assess their needs and obligations to them and theirs to us. This is the dimension of morality and is directly concerned with the quality of our behaviour towards each other, to other species, and to the non-animate realm. Because the body I have been referring to throughout this work is one of flesh and blood and can only be abstracted from its implacement at some risk of damage, then the questions of morality arising from such a depiction will highlight the manner in which such bodies in their animal being merge with issues of meaning and value. They will emphasise therefore the recognition or its refusal, which is at the core of the relations between and amongst embodied individuals. We live at a time in which the capacity for the manipulation of bodies increases constantly. The promise of a genetic revolution and the manipulation of DNA, the choices available through technology to choose the sex of the unborn and a range of medical and scientific interventions mean that unprecedented possibilities for body modification now exist. Underlying all of this is an assumption that the achievement of physical perfection is not only coming to be within our grasp, but that such achievement is some sort of ethical imperative. There are of course competing and deeply contrasting responses to this – from those who see it as opening up unprecedented possibilities for solving problems of inherited disease and so on, to those who regard it as an extreme attempt to manipulate ‘nature’ and gain greater mastery than ever before. Clearly there are crucial ethical considerations at the centre of such debates: the body remains therefore the very focus of intense argumentation over matters of huge import to the future of creatural existence. But at the very time at which such issues generate strong arguments and counterarguments, there are other urgent issues of morality demanding attention. These concern most obviously the bodies of those whose lived experience is of violence

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and attack on their corporeal integrity. Sadly such events occur on a daily basis. Because they can have extreme consequences for individuals and social groups they cry out for attention to the moral dimension of creatural life. They remind us forcefully of the fragility of one’s bodily integrity and that of members of all animal species. They recall that bodies do and are done to, that they are public and private, that in contemporary culture in which there is a constant inspection, judging and naming of bodies, actions involving assaults upon bodily integrity are frequent and devastating in their effects. While in the scrutiny and naming comes the recognition of difference. Devaluing follows all too often, and so contempt can grow for those who are for us ‘other’ that is, of lesser significance. Bodies can be made to suffer in different ways, through social rejection as exemplified in the following anecdote by Australian human rights activist and author Rhonda Galbally (who just happens to be ‘disabled’) : One evening I set out for dinner with a friend who… had cerebral palsy, and she dribbled. We entered the restaurant and sat down. A waiter then approached us and asked us to leave. When we refused he moved us to the rear of the restaurant, out of view. Too embarrassed and humiliated to argue we ate quickly and left. And my friend didn’t venture into a restaurant for years afterwards.

While in some respects there is now far greater respect shown for the ‘disabled’ body, in occularcentric culture the bodies of the homeless, those of ‘suspect’ ethnic background ( who are associated with for example terrorist activity) and more recently the ‘obese’ are fair game for the intrusive television camera (with faces disguised) as they go about their daily routines. In particular the bodies of those deemed beyond any humane consideration due to their status as ‘enemy’, have not only been subjected to extreme forms of violence, but have suffered ultimate humiliation of having their degradation made public through photographs and video filming. Negative constructions of the ‘other’ as dark-skinned, having oriental features, fat, misshapen or simply old and poor, are amongst other things, a matter of repudiation of certain kinds of embodiment. Strangely the very means by which we convince ourselves that others are unworthy of our consideration originates in representation, that is, in culture itself and not in the creatural, the realm of animality. Social inscriptions of the unacceptable, bodies imprinted with discourses about evil, undesirability, ugliness, criminality and so on are the product of cultural processes. Relegating certain of our fellow creatures to lesser categories is an achievement of discourse and systems of representation, just as the denigration of others species had been in times past. Ironically it is effected precisely by means of a denial of what our senses tell us, which is that they are fellow creatures and for this reason worthy of our respect, not our hatred. While as creatures we are all vulnerable, and dependent throughout our lives, for far too many this vulnerability can be intensified through relegation to lesser social status based on aspects of embodiment. While the lives of many people seems to pass in a comfortable blur, which does not disturb entrenched prejudices about other sorts of bodies, for others their bodies are subject more often to violence than to

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loving touch. What can be said of bodies (and which can be said of nothing else in the world) is that only bodies suffer; only in suffering are we equal as creatures. The physical body is what we share with all of the members of our species and it is because of this and this alone that we can have any sense of morality as universal. And it is precisely because we have the body in common with others that we are able to feel compassion, at least in principle, for our fellow beings. Of course this does not mean that our behaviour will always express such compassion – on the contrary, it can also express the deepest cruelty. Nonetheless it is precisely because I have a body that I am at all capable of understanding what it is like for another to be embodied and hence I can also understand what it is like to suffer. Human beings have the body in common and though this may seem little enough it is indeed a great deal, for morality has its roots in the body. All moral issues must start from the body, taking the body as the fundamental point of departure and involving empathy in the sense in which I have articulated it in this work. This is because mind, which we usually locate as the source of moral thinking and decision-making is inherently embodied, and that which we have called reason is shaped by the body. The implications to be drawn from this is that our thinking about how to treat others will always involve bodies, for the simple reason that it is bodies which suffer the ill-effects of neglect, mistreatment and violence. That is why a social science or an ethics must focus upon the embodied suffering of human and other animals. Such a project will focus upon what as a species we need in order to live a good enough life. As animals we are potential only and not entitlements in a highly abstract sense. The needs we have are those of dependent and vulnerable beings, as MacIntyre reminds us, in other words, the need for love and care, respect and fellowship. The oft-articulated need of freedom is one which can be problematic for embodiment, not merely because it is an inherently slippery concept and therefore open to misinterpretation and abuse, but also because it may not necessarily fulfil those needs which have been shown to be essential for the survival of species-co-operation and the solidarity or ‘fellow-feeling’ required for successful human practice. The corporeal grounding of human existence in my view is the starting point for any genuine change in entrenched institutionalised or governmental practice. This I believe is why social movements aimed at righting injustices and contesting unfair or violent policies carried out by governments must involve the mobilisation of bodies. The action of numbers of bodies provides opportunities for exploring corporeal practices, which may draw attention to the plight of groups such as refugees, political prisoners and others. Because of the techniques of surveillance and management of populations by means of increasingly sophisticated technology, opportunities can be lost for the exercise of actual embodied collective practice. In individual embodied practice there is the possibility of a construction of new ways of thinking about social and political, and therefore moral issues. Bodies it seems can be quite easily morally anaesthetised today through forms of consumption or subjection to a range of normalising procedures, both of which can render them

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passive. On the other hand they may move towards becoming sites for innovative and meaningful experiences, which will allow the release for previously not thought of potentialities. Hence the importance of embodied practice in contestation of contemporary forms of power. Perhaps one of the difficulties in having people engage more positively in moral contestation is that there is a strong conviction that it is minds, which reason morally, and decisions are made with the head and not the heart. Believing that bodies are ‘intelligent’ and have a pivotal role in our moral decision making may even seem to constitute an affront to our ‘minds’ So we remain equivocal in our attitude to our bodies, suspicious of the tendency to release them from their longheld position of instruments. This despite the fact that how and what we know comes to us through our bodies and indeed our intersubjective relations which we may have believed arose by means of ideas and sentiments, always involve the physical encounter of bodies. Emotions are recognized in all of their earthy consistency nourished by sounds and moods, odours and sights. Since he body’s quest is for survival not for truth in the sense of propositions about the facts of the world, such survival extends to the survival of our fellows when, through imagination and empathy, we put ourselves as far as we possibly can, into their situations. At the present time while the quest for perfect bodies proceeds apace, other bodies lie wounded in front of us in the nightly television news. Others, the emaciated bodies of the aged and children literally waste away before our eyes. These it seems, are the bodies that do not matter, or perhaps they matter a great deal less than our own and those of our kin or fellow citizens. At present there is an inexorable process in train constructing an infinitely extended enemy in the form of bodies, which may be violated at will in the name of ethno-religious conviction, political doctrines or in the cause of what we call national security. Such bodies are no longer deemed to have autonomy and may therefore be subjected to whatever treatment is deemed appropriate by a warring faction or a vengeful state and its apparatus. Meantime other bodies in one way or another continue to attract our attention. The potential for medical science to alter irrevocably what the body might become within a few generations sits alongside the increasing demand for bodily makeovers, with an eager – now global – audience giving witness to each step of reformation along the way. In concluding, I return to the notion of the implaced body, which I have articulated throughout the work. I do so because I think it offers great possibilities for overcoming the animosities that seem to generate so much destruction of creatural existence. To examine place is to seek the roots of our human being. It may also include our non-human companions, many of whom like us, take account of specific features of a given environment, developing complex forms of purposeful behaviour. We can of course obscure or ignore this if, like Gadamer and Heidegger we insist that non-humans so lack anything remotely rational that would enable them to develop a free and distanced attitude towards their environments. But many non-

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human animals dwell in their worlds, which are richly significant to them, which they interpret and classify and in which they err and correct their errors. Non-human animals are different in significant respects from humans, but they are able to form meaningful relationships not only amongst their own species but also with human beings. Intimacy between species can be a reality. Then there is also the connection humans have with the inanimate as in Latour’s sociology of science in which relations between humans and the inanimate are an integral part of the former’s implacement. To put this another way, enfleshed bodies (humans and other species) are engaged by specific environments (their places), but so also can the non-animate and technological, called forth so to speak through practice, to enact their joint existence. Despite the horrendous results of bad choices and heedlessness of self and others, it is the body in the final analysis that does not lie. ‘Place’ while not merely an individual’s body bounded by the skin is nonetheless experienced through our body’s participation in it. Perception takes up the role of conscience and it is through the functioning of senses that this occurs. That is why pernicious social, political and religious doctrines, which hate the body in its multi-sensoriality, can do such damage. When we engage in practice, mobilising posture, orientation, tactility and comprehension we commence the processes of implacement. We also re-skill and empower our bodies and deepen our creatural existence, individually and collectively. Education it seems to me has an absolutely essential role to play in this, but it will need to be a kind of education, which re-evaluates the nature of creatural embodiment. Those areas of the curriculum which positively encourage the exploration of ideas about creatural existence, through imaginative action, thinking through the body, utilising where appropriate a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ and practicing empathy have the best chance of helping each and every individual achieve a balance between awareness of self and others and appreciation of the need for intimacy and care in human relations.

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INDEX

Aboriginal, 73, 140, 170 absence (the body’s), 60 abstraction, 29, 51,103 acoustic intimacy, 48 Actor Network Theory, 59, 66 agency, 3, 9, 100 agent, 164 animal, 59, 67, 169 animality, 8, 58, 170 animate, 5, 66 animation, 67 Apollonian, 30, 48, 51 Aristotle, 24 architecture, 63 authentic listening, 32 aural, 48 Bachelard, G., 49, 59 Bal, M., 21, 53 Barbalet, J., 11, 19, 126, 127, 138, 140 Beer, G., 48 Bentley, P., 37 Bergson, H., 30 Bigwood, C., 6, 74, 76, 79, 115 biological determinism, 116 bodies, 1, 2, 6, 13, 57–67, 75, 83–89, 97, 120, 122, 124, 135, 154–155, 159, 165 bodily behaviours, 47, 64 bodily determinism, 59 body, the, 17, 48, 133, 170 body-subject, 13, 82, 137, 138 Boler, M., 6, 10, 110, 126 Bourdieu, P., 123

Brennan, T., 41 Butler, J., 3, 72–73 CAD, 115 Canetti, E., 133 Cartesian, 11, 15–16, 23 Subject, 15 Dualism, 16 Perspectivalism, 23 rationalism, 11 Casey, E., 5, 6, 34, 45, 59, 63, 85, 87, 128, 162 Casson, M., 111 Catalano, J., 26 Cataldi, L., 14, 130 carnality, 14 cartesianism, 24, 25, 30 Certeau de, M., 7 chiasm, 39 Christianity, 24 chora, 48 citizens, 49, 153 citizenship, 6, 18, 149, 152–153, 156–157 Cixous, H., 71 Classen, C., 28 collaboration of the senses, 35 communitarian, 159, 161 community, communicative (bodies), 9, 149 connatural body, 78, 115 Consciousness, 12, 16 discursive, 61, 143–144 practical, 61, 143–144, 166

185

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consumer, 21, 96 consumer culture, 1 consumer capitalism, 1, 38, 97, 98, 103 consumption, 8, 33, 85, 121 corporeal practices, 49 craft, 52 creatural, 22, 25, 35, 40 creatures, 25 Csordas, T., 4 cultural, 7, 8 culture, 21–22, 25–30, 33, 35, 39, 43, 50, 52 curriculum, 10, 50–52, 59–62, 104, 139–145, 165–166 hidden, 44 cyberspace, 35, 37–38

Eagleton, T., 19, 118 ecological subjectivity, 74, 80 ecologically niched, 14, 130 education, 13, 15–16, 55, 67, 80, 114, 122 embodied agency, 14 embodied citizenship, 149, 150, 152 embodied minds, 61 embodied sociality, 17, 144, 156 embodiment, 5, 6, 33, 53, 64, 81, 83, 117, 126, 143, 149, 161 empathy, 43, 128, 131–134, 136, 138, 161–162, 173–175 enfleshment, 12 enlightenment, 158 experience, 12, 13 experiential, 22 eye, 6

Da Vinci, L., 29 Darwin, C., 11 Debord, G., 35 democracy associational, 160–162 participatory, 157 representative, 161 democratic dispositions, 18, 132, 154, 157 Dennett, D., 26 depth, 35, 40, 47, 142 depth of emotion, 155 Descartes, R., 23–25, 126 desire, 12 developmental theory, 60, 61 Dewey, J., 6, 11, 14, 15, 51, 75, 80, 84–85, 98–100, 110, 115, 119, 126, 129–131, 135, 140, 142, 149, 155 Deweyan pragmatism, 82, 84 digital biology, 36, 37 digital universe, 37 dionysian, 30, 48, 150 disciplined, 1, 8, 17, 73, 102, 140 discourse, 1–2, 7, 64–65, 100, 138 discursive, 18, 95, 115, 117–118 discursive configurations, 2 disembodiment, 6, 23, 103 dispositions, 62, 65–66, 69, 72, 146, 154 Donkin, R., 122 dualism, 16, 139 dualistic legacy, 139 Durkheim, E., 150

fellow-feeling, 131 female, 9 feminine, 25 feminist, feminism, 117 Fiumara, G., 179 flesh, 13, 36, 81 flesh ontology, 137 folding, 5 Foucault, M., 2, 19, 72, 73 Gadamer, H., 133 gaze, the, 1, 27, 30–33, 39–41, 45–46, 54–55 Gee, J., Hull, G., & Lankshear, C., 100, 123 gesture, 15 Gibson, J.J., 55, 147 Giddens, A., 3 globalised, globalising, 21 global citizenry, 152 Goleman, D., 132 Greek philosophy, 23, 51, 139, 153 Gutman, A. and Thompson, D., 151, 155 Hamilton, C., 123 haptic, haptic system, 136, 138, 147 hegemony of the eye, 22, 33 Heidegger, M., 6, 7, 23, 30–32, 45, 48, 110, 112, 133 Hirst, P., 160 historical materialism, 116 human, 58, 127

INDEX identity, 100 image, 21, 22, 26, 34 imaginary, 163 imagination, 110 implaced, implacement, 45, 75, 128, 159–162, 164–165, 171, 174 inanimate, 5 incarnate, 8 indigenous, 3 individualism, 153 inscription, inscriptive, 2, 70–73 intelligence of the body, 82, 105, 170 intercorporeality, 132, 135–136, 146 internet, 37–38 intersubjective, 14, 72, 128, 131 intertwining, of the senses, 49 Irigaray, L., 6, 32, 41, 53–55, 79, 131, 147 Jameson, F., 34 Jay, M., 23, 43, 47, 53 Kant, F., 126 King, Y., 123 kinaesthetic, 171 know-how, 105, 113 knowledge, 104–105, 110, 141 Kristeva, J., 48 Knowing, 104–105 labour, 95–96, 116 labouring bodies, 95, 104 Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M., 11, 26, 82, 84 language, 15 Lasch, S. and Urry, J., 123 Latour, B., 5, 8, 20, 66, 67, 93, 108, 139 le regard, 31 learning, 61, 67 Leder, D., 23, 42, 53, 78, 81, 93 Levin, D.M., 23, 28, 31, 34, 112–113 liberal individualism, 153 Lyon, M., 19, 138, 147 MacIntyre, A., 4, 6, 7, 59, 71, 127, 154, 173 Maffesoli, M., 71, 127, 146, 150 making, 111 Marshall, T., 157 Marx, K., 124, 134 material, materiality, 6, 9, 97, 129, 138

187 materialism, 118 Mauss, M., 73, 93 Masculine and feiminine, 3, 28, 139 Mead, G.H., 128, 147 meaning, 74–77, 83 mental, 12, 83 Merleau-Ponty, M., 4, 6, 11, 13, 14, 26, 30, 39–40, 45–47, 54, 56, 65, 72, 75, 76, 77, 112, 126, 129, 131, 134–135, 155 mind-body, 53, 64 Mitchell, W., 27, 43 Mirzoeff, N., 21, 27, 35 modernism, 31 modernity, 7 morality, 146, 171 Morrison, K., 147 mothering body, 9 Mugerauer, R., 59 multi-sensorial, multisensoriality, 7, 35, 58, 98 multi-sensorial experience, 45 multi-sensorial education, 50 musicality, 48 nation-state, 152 nationalism, 151 natural, 73 naturalism, 11, 15, 93, 130 nature/culture division, 80, 117 Negri, A., 126, 146 Nietzsche, F., 7–8, 11–12, 16, 23, 29–32, 48, 51, 54, 56, 65, 69, 83–84, 93, 102, 118 Noddings, N., 97, 123 non-animate, 40, 67 non-human, 47, 59, 130 Nussbaum, 132 occularcentric, 172 olfactory, 28, 49 O’Loughlin, M., 167 Ong, W., 54 ontology, 5 Palasmaa, J., 25, 34, 46, 62 parents, 88 Parker, A., 26, 54 pathologies, 33 pedagogy, 51 perception, 13, 39, 135, 136

188

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personhood, 72 perspective, 54 perspectival, 84 phenomenology, phenomenological, 81–82, 85, 149, 164, 167 philosophy, 67, 104 philosophers, 6 philosophies, 51 philosophical tradition, 139, 149 physical, 78 Piaget, 92 place, 7, 17, 44, 85, 87, 149, 159 placial, 45, 165 Plato, 24 platonic, 24, 79 Plumwood, V., 80, 92 pornographic, 43 potential, 6 practice, 95 producing, 97 producing bodies, 8, 115, 118 production, 97, 108 proprioception, 171 psycho-analytic, psycho-analysis, 41 psychological, psychologisation, 70 rationalism, rationalistic, 154, 156 rationality, 92, 150 communicative, 151, 167 reason, 169 rights and obligations, 157 relational, 67, 128 Renaissance, 24 reproducing, 9, 96, 114, 117 Ricoeur, P., 64 rights (and obligations), 172 Rolls, E., 34, 55 Sartre, J.P., 27, 53, 54 schools, 60–62 scopic, 22, 31 scopic regime, 22, 102 Seamon, D., 59, 90 senses, 5, 21, 24, 28, 170–171 sensory experiences, 46 sensory integration, 46 sensuous, 106, 108 sensuousness, 110 sentient, 75–76 sentience, 75 sexual, 57

sight, 33, 136 skills, 104, 110 Sloterdijk, P., 53 Smell, 29 sociality, 10, 17, 125, 138, 142 sociological, 11 social inscription, 70 social practice, 64 solidarity, 20 somatic, 134 Sonntag, S., 43–44 sound, 48 space, 17 phenomenological space, 63–64 spatial, 17 Stocker, M., 125, 146, 149 subjectivity, subjectivities, 8, 100 submersion (of the body), 60 symbolism, 150 tacit knowing, 108 tactile, tactility, 46 tangible, 137 taste, 28 technology, technological, 66, 101, 103–104, 120, 166 technologies, 66 television, 35 Terkel, S., 120, 123 theory, theories, 51–52 time, 62–63 touch, 24, 28, 46, 47, 136 training, 62 Turner, T., 4 Ubuntu, 167 Umsicht, 31 values, 150 Van Winkel, C., 22, 53 Vasseleu, C., 81 virtual, virtuality, 35–36 virtues, 154 vision, 6, 7, 23, 29, 35, 38 visual, 31 visuality, 22, 32, 51 visual literacy, 52 visual culture, 43 visual technologies, 49 visualising, 31

INDEX Watson, L, 49 Weber, M., 92, 166 west, 159 western intellectual tradition, 21, 154 western philosophical tradition, 10, 139 White, J., 119 White, P., 167

189 will to power, 12 work, 5, 92, 95–106, 110–124 workers, 95, 96, 121 working bodies, 95, 99 workplace, 1, 99–104, 118 Young, I.M., 61, 89, 119

Philosophy and Education 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

C.J.B. Macmillan and J.W. Garrison: A Logical Theory of Teaching. Erotetics and Intentionality. 1988 ISBN 90-277-2813-5 J. Watt: Individualism and Educational Theory. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0446-2 W. Brezinka: Philosophy of Educational Knowledge. An Introduction to the Foundations of Science of Education, Philosophy of Education and Practical Pedagogics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1522-7 J.H. Chambers: Empiricist Research on Teaching. A Philosophical and Practical Critique of its Scientific Pretensions. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1848-X I. Scheffler: Teachers of My Youth. An American Jewish Experience. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3232-6; (Pb) 0-7923-3236-9 P. Smeyers and J.D. Marshall (eds.): Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein’s Challenge. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3715-8 J.D. Marshall: Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4016-7 W. van Haaften, M. Korthals and T. Wren (eds.): Philosophy of Development. Reconstructing the Foundations of Human Development and Education. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4319-0 N. Aloni: Enhancing Humanity. The Philosophical Foundations of Humanistic Education. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0961-5 D. Bridges: Fiction written under Oath? Essays in Philosophy and Educational Research. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1083-4 K.R. Howe: Closing Methodological Divides. Toward Democratic Educational Research. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1164-4 J.D. Marshall (ed.): Poststructuralism, Philosophy, Pedagogy. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1894-0 I. Scheffler (ed.): Gallery of Scholars. A Philosopher’s Recollections. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-2679-X C.A. Wringe: Moral Education. Beyond the Teaching of Right and Wrong. 2005 ISBN 1-4020-3708-2 M. O’Loughlin: Embodiment and Education. Exploring Creatural Existence. 2006 ISBN 1-4020-4587-5

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