The body made flesh: embodied learning and the corporeal device

Abstract

Over recent years there has been growing appreciation of the body’s corporeal significance in how children learn in educational settings. ‘The body’ has been conceptualised from a variety of perspectives that we characterise as: ’the body without flesh’, ‘the body with fleshy feelings’ and ‘the body made flesh’. We reflect on these perspectives with reference to the model of embodied action used in our ongoing research on relationships between education and disordered bodies, outlining what they might differently offer in terms of understanding body/mind/culture relationships. We suggest that Basil Bernstein’s notion of the ‘pedagogic device’, when reworked around the concept of a ‘corporeal device’, may provide one way of better conceptualising such relationships avoiding some of the fault lines and dualistic thinking inherent in other perspectives. If, as sociologists or school practitioners, we are to address the agency of ‘the body’ in cultural reproduction and better understand how the corporeal realities of children influence their sense of position, value and self, then we will need to deal with both the ‘physical’ and the ‘phenomenal’ universes of discourse, and the ‘somatic mediations’ of lived experience. This will mean giving as much attention to the biological dimensions of embodiment as its discursive representation currently receives.

Keywords:

• ‘the body’
• sociology
• biology
• nature
• culture
• education
• disorder

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to two reviewers who provided valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper and regret not being able to deal in full with all of the issues raised. We are also extremely grateful to the ESRC for supporting the development of our research.

Notes

1. We refer intentionally to the ‘Body with Organs’ because of the centrality of its counter position, the ‘Body without Organs’, in post‐structural theory and the latter’s culpability in the disappearance of the organic body from social investigation.

2. RA indicates the research assistant.

3. We echo Grosz’s view that while ‘identity is performed through action and not simply, as psychoanalysis suggests, through identification’, a distinction must also be made between action and performance. ‘An action doesn’t require an audience in the way that a performance does’. Grosz re‐centres attention to ontology while recognising that ‘we can’t have any access to ontology except through epistemology’ (Aush, Randal, and Perez 2008, 10).

4. We are indebted to Chris Shilling for his observations on this aspect of the CD (personal conversations, 2008).

5. As Davies (2000, 43) has pointed out, ‘We can struggle to retrieve memory that exists before it is called one thing or another and in doing so arrive at something that can be recognised as truthful, though elusively so’.

6. Including investigation of our ‘secret sense, our sixth sense’ […] ‘proprioception’ […] ‘the continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body (muscles, tendons, joints), by which their position and tone and motion is continually monitored and adjusted, but in an way hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious’ (see Sacks 2007, 47).

7. We are grateful to one of the referees for emphasising this point.