Abstract
In this article, I am concerned with the position and role of the human body in the realm of education—more precisely, in relation to the issues of social emancipation and equality. As a rule, educational research has not paid much attention to the body, typically dealing with corporeality in a merely instrumental way. In recent times, the body has more and more become the focus of educational research. This is because these new approaches claim that the body plays a constitutive role in all educational processes. Nevertheless, I argue that the body is actually not taken seriously and that corporeality is still regarded as a nuisance or merely a tool. In this article, I will therefore try to conceive an alternative approach, which I call biopedagogic. I take some ideas from the biopolitical school of thought and confront these with concrete phenomenological analyses of occurrences and practices that take place in educational contexts and bring into presence the body in a literally physical sense (such as laughter, exhaustion, and repetitive exercises). This allows me to move a step beyond the biopolitical point of view, and to conceive of a perspective that considers the body to have, in and of itself, educational relevance. This is because certain corporeal experiences (as distinct from experiences of the body) might enable a deep transformation of individual and collective existence.
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Notes
We could also mention here the recent development of new forms of materialism—inspired by but also going against constructivist accounts of social identity—that show that matter isn’t a mere passive substratum that only comes to matter when it receives meaning by entering into a symbolic or cultural realm, but that matter is an active force (“mattering”) and that it works together with symbolic representations in shaping subjectivity (e.g. Barad 2003).
Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s (2002, p. 137) claim that the basic modality of consciousness is not I think that, but I can. It is the practical relation between the self and the world, which the self can put to use, that forms the very basis of all intentional behavior. Even mere intellectual activities should be understood in terms of the actualization of concrete and embodied projects that the embodied subject (corps-sujet) undertakes.
Recognition of the implicit bodily dimensions of education has also heightened awareness of the negative role the corporeal might play. For instance, students who are physically attractive and who have an agreeable voice are unconsciously evaluated as more motivated and intelligent (Seligman et al. 1972).
A notable exception to this is Susan Stinson’s 2004 article.
And to a lesser extent by Julia Kristeva (1982). The same view has also been defended by Vandekerkhove (2006), who further argues that the fear and disgust towards the autonomous functioning of our bodies is directly proportional to one’s position in the social hierarchy. Sexual taboos weigh, according to his research, stronger in the white board class. This is, logically, because the higher one finds oneself in this hierarchical order, the more one has to lose when confronted with this display of corporeal equality, and therefore the more one has to protect oneself against it.
It might look a strange move to turn to Agamben’s thoughts at this point. He famously contends that biopolitics is not, as Foucault thought, a typically modern form of government, but that it has formed the core of all power regimes the West has known since Antiquity (Agamben 1998). Furthermore, he claims that they precisely operate by arbitrarily (sovereignly) separating within human existence the truly humane, unique, and meaningful life (or bios, the good life) from life aimed at survival and (re)production (or zoé, the naked life, the ‘purely physical’). One might consider here the classic Aristotelian definition that opposes authentic political existence to the dire economic destiny of slaves, women, and migrants, and that articulates (and justifies) the social structure of the Athenian city state (in which only free male citizens were allowed to partake in the public debate). Here we can perceive the working of a ‘biopolitical machine,’ which forms a paradigmatic case that helps us, so Agamben says, to fathom the working of all (subsequent) forms of social power regimes. Important to note is that both terms presuppose one another: zoé can only be defined by referring to bios, and vice versa. At first glance, it might seem that I am doing exactly this, as I am interested in the sort of experience in which we are nothing but flesh. Nevertheless, I believe that Agamben’s criticism only applies to a perspective concerned with experiences of the body (i.e., states during which we are forced to recognize that we are ‘merely’ flesh). During laughter, exhaustion, and repetitive activity, we go through a fully affirmative and positive corporeal experience (being-‘entirely’-flesh). Moreover, Agamben also claims that the only way to escape the workings of the ‘biopolitical machine’ is to affirm life such as it is (Agamben 2005, p. 85) or even to adopt a philosophy of “pure immanence” (for his discussion of the last published texts of both Foucault and Deleuze, dealing with the idea of “life,” see Agamben 1999, p. 238). This concerns a form of existence that no longer allows us to define ‘bare life’ in negative terms (i.e., as merely bare), as a corporeal experience that is beyond or indifferent to the contradistinction between zoé and bios.
It is extremely difficult to express this thought in the English language, because the phrase “that we can” is grammatically not well formed. However, other languages—like the Italian language Agamben uses—facilitate precisely this expression.
We “cannot,” because any actualization of a concrete possibility is precluded (we can no longer do this or that). This claim could not be further from the Merleau-Pontian view that the basic modality of all consciousness is “I can” (see footnote 2). Agamben’s philosophy stands in opposition to the classic phenomenological project of seeking a ground in the subject to explain why meaning is possible in the first place. To him, the very experience of potentiality frees us from the idea that we should seek a subject behind action (as an explanatory ground).
This kind of equality still presupposes a logic of similarities and differences in identity and position.
Lewis uses this phraseology to conceive an alternative to the biopolitics and even thanatopolitics that currently structure education (Lewis 2009a, b). Using an Agambian framework, Lewis argues that current schooling apparatus (bioschooling) operates precisely according to the logic of disqualifying groups of pupils (the nervous child, the black child, etc.) according to a sovereign ban, and so produces ‘bare life.’ Rather than investing in these pupils (normalizing them, making them productive), Lewis argues, the existing schooling apparatus “abandons” these children by the sovereign decision to make of them “exceptions (‘included exclusions’) who are shunned, told to be quiet, and to behave themselves so that the rest of the class can get onto the business of learning and teaching without unnecessary distractions. In other words, the student is rendered ‘uneducatable’ and thus outside the field of normalization” (Lewis 2009a, p. 181). At this point, biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics, and schooling becomes necroschooling.
Trying to find an antidote, Lewis holds, on the basis of Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, a plea for biopedagogy. Natality refers to a characteristic that defines what is properly human about human life, (viz., the capacity to act, the possibility to begin something utterly new and unforeseen, Arendt 1958). This alternative pedagogy should, according to Lewis, be protecting and facilitating “the potential of life for the unpredictable” (Lewis 2009b, p. 497). Biopedagogy is thus wholly life-affirming and this is because “[Arendt’s philosophy] shifts from defining life against death to defining life in relation to the renewal promised by each new birth. Birth and natality make action possible where action is the ability to initiate the unexpected […]. [E]ducation must foster natality not as a biological stage of human development but as a constitutive power of the human condition” (ibid.) This is to say that life should be valued in itself (rather than understood in relation to death).
Our own point of view differs slightly from Lewis’s. This is because his concern for natality leaves intact the logic of relating to one another on the basis of identity and difference (because what is at stake is assuring the birth of unique and clearly positioned individuals) and seems to move away from the affirmation of a potential inherent to physical life. Nevertheless, in his article on dance education, which also draws insights from Agamben, Lewis argues for the educational significance of potentiality that is linked with immediate, corporeal experience (see Lewis 2007). Even if this should be elaborated in greater detail, to us it seems that ‘affirming life-as-potentiality’ and ‘affirming life-as-natality’ are two different things.
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Vlieghe, J. Beyond Biopolitics. A Biopedagogical Perspective on Corporeal Experience. Interchange 44, 257–273 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-014-9211-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-014-9211-9