Education and the democracy of the flesh
This presentation is concerned with the public character of education and
more precisely with the question whether one could rethink this public dimension of
education starting from an analysis of human corporeality. The background of this
question has to do with the uneasiness I have regarding the way in which the theme
of human embodiment is being discussed within philosophy of education, whenever
this topic is object of discussion – and one should consider that this thematic is
really a marginal topic within our field of research. Now, as far as corporeality is
even mentioned in this branch of philosophy, it is seldom linked to the problem of
the public and critical dimensions of education. Nevertheless I think that authors
such as Judith Butler, Alphonso Lingis, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Helmut Plessner and
others might grant a new perspective on the relationship between corporeality and
the public. But, let me first start with a brief sketch of what might be understood by
“the public”.
Traditional definitions of the public
When one considers the way in which traditionally “the public” has been
conceived, one can distinguish the following positions:
1.a. The public might be grasped in terms of visibility. E.g., in her famous
commentaries on Aristotle, Hannah Arendt describes the agora, the public place
where all free men were expected to gather and to discuss about the good life of the
city, as a space where every citizen, irrespective of his economical position or
physical weakness or strength, might participate in the debate. The agora is then
considered to be a structural framework which allows that every man might appear
as equal. The existence of the agora grants the possibility that every participant of
the discussion is willing to consider the point of view of another fellow citizen. So
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the public refers here to the structural possibility to be seen and to be heard as
someone whose standpoint really matters. This is especially important for those
who belong to a minority: the public space allows them a voice and motivates the
majority at least to listen to their opinions, insights and desires. The majority, that
has a factual predominance, is willing to forsake their own interest: so they leave
their strength behind in the private sphere. In the public realm we have to behave as
if we are all the same, even if, privately spoken, we are all unequal. The public
immunizes, so to speak, our private vulnerabilities.
1.b. Of course, the public might also be interpreted in terms of invisibility, as
is the case in the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman. He is concerned with the
life in the modern metropolis. In the big cities, which are a typical phenomenon of
the 2Oth Century, people are constantly exposed to one another. We continually
bump into each other, so in a metropolitan context we unremittingly live in a state
of potential violence and war. In order to overcome this, we have all tacitly
consented with a social contract not to interfere with one another. Social life is made
possible by “civil inattention”: when we wait at the buss stop we do not look into
each other’s eyes, we behave as if our fellow travellers do not exist. We all know it
feels most uncomfortable to be addressed by a complete stranger who starts to talk
about even trivial things as the weather or the running late of the buss. So, in
contrast to the analysis of Arendt, the public could also be negatively interpreted in
terms of invisibility and anonymity.
Nevertheless, in both cases – Goffman and Arendt - the public protects us
from some private harm or vulnerability. Anyway I think anyone who has some
experience in teaching in secondary schools knows that the safeguarding of those
two principles, visibility and invisibility, are sometimes of the utmost importance.
Sometimes you feel in a classroom it’s necessary not to address a shy pupil during a
discussion on grief and mourning, or that it’s unwise to involve someone belonging
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to a poor income class, e.g. when the topic is discussed in what exotic countries
pupils spend their holidays. So the possibility to retreat in anonymity can be very
beneficial. On the other hand, when some important decisions have to be made and
when you discuss this in class, e.g. regarding the decision whether to plan a written
or an oral examination, the formal context of the classroom might facilitate that
everyone has a saying (and not only those pupils who are verbally more talented,
and who will of course plea fervently in favour of an oral examination).
2. A different way to elucidate the concept of “the public” has to do with the
traditional conception of res publica, a common interest we share. This might be
either seen in a minimalist view, viz. the classic liberal conception of the public as
that which we can all find important, despite of our individual interest which we
leave behind in the private domain. One might think here of the constitutional state
which safeguards a maximum of basic human rights to each and all of its
inhabitants. So, the community we share does not demand that we all think and act
the same, but merely that we bother about the possibility for every man and women
to act and think as he or she pleases, as long as the freedom of others is not
interfered with. This view is of course a nightmare to the defenders of a maximalist
definition of the public: here “the public” refers to the common values we share. A
genuine community is only possible if and only if each participant is willing to
identify his- or herself with a set of values, a language, a tradition, etc. which is
commonly shared. In spite of the major differences between this maximalist and
minimalist view, they both consider the public as a kind of product to achieve, and
mostly education plays an important role in the constitution of this community-tobe-produced: it is as if we are born as private beings who, thanks to initiation and
socialisation, come to belong to a particular community. I only refer here to some
rather bloody incidents we had in Belgium, e.g. when a youngster in Ostend was
stabbed to death with a knife by a peer, because the victim wouldn’t lend hem a
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cigarette. The following day the opinion pages of newspapers were full of analyses
stating that our schooling system was to blame and that it was high time that we
should take serious again value-education and so on. So it seems that the public
vocation of education resides in the overcoming of our private nature, in order to
become willing to be concerned about human rights, or to bother about the
continuity of a language, a tradition or a set of values.
Anyhow, in all these traditional definitions, in terms of visibility, invisibility or
commonality, “the public” is never appreciated in a fully positive way. By this I mean
that we only consider the public in relation to a private sphere that must be
protected or that must be overcome in some way (via education). The public is the
non-private. Now, in this text I would like to offer another perspective on the public,
especially I relation to education, which does not start from this framework.
The public dimension of the body
In an earlier stage of my research I have been analysing the more recent
writings of Judith Butler, who time and again, refers to “the public dimension of the
body”: “As material embodied creatures we are exposed to the touching the gaze
and the violence of others” (Butler 2004a, p. 26)”. This experience of expropriation
of the self “establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others and a sense of
disorientation of the first person” (Butler 2004b,p.25). Therefore the experience of
belonging to a community refers to the condition of corporeal frailty and
vulnerability. “To be a body is to be given over to others” (Ibidem p.20). “Non of us
is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in
each’s other’s hands, at each others mercy” (Butler 2001, p. 205). So, when she
analyses the example of what it means to belong to a politically marginalized group,
she shows that the feeling of indignation one might have, is not to be explained in
terms of the longing for a more equal society which respects all individuals in their
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claims of identity and/or recognition. No, the experiencing of indignation refers to
“a disposition of ourselves outside ourselves [which] seems to follow from bodily
life, from its vulnerability and its exposure”. Therefore critical agency is only granted
within an
experience of
dispossession-of-the-self
which results from the
vulnerability of our flesh. And that’s why we might say, according to Butler, that the
body has its invariably public dimension.
An interesting point here is that this kind of corporeal experience refers not
so much to an individualised body – in the sense that I can say that it is about
something I, my own private body, experience(s). In this moment of selfdispossession I experience a kind of anonymity. One could say, referring to
Merleau-Ponty, that we feel to be entangled in “the flesh of the world”, which he
also labels as intercorporéité. So there exists an experience of corporeality which
doesn’t allow me any longer to say that my body is my own possession. So the
public dimension of the body seems to be residing in the experience of anonymity.
In this experience of anonymity we share perhaps, as Alphonso Lingis would
call it, “a community of those who have nothing in common”. He distinguishes this
type of community from “the community of reasons”, which is considered to be a
project, a “work” of people who have good reasons to form a bond. This type of
community is founded by a justified insight: anyone who shares this insight
comprehends the necessity to engage in a larger association. Entering in this
community, we don’t loose anything, but instead strengthen our position, in the
sense that the hard core of our identity, viz. our rational powers, gets confirmed.
But, there’s another community, which is formed “when one exposes oneself to the
naked one, the destitute one, the outcast, the dying one. One enters into community
not by affirming oneself and one’s forces, but by exposing oneself to expenditure at
a loss, to sacrifice” (12). It is “[…] the brotherhood of individuals who possess or
produce nothing in common, individuals destitute in their mortality.” (157) What we
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share is a void. Therefore, there is a sort of communication even without the
necessity that there is something that we should understand. Mutual comprehension
is not a necessary condition for this “other community”.
So, in contrast to the second definition in terms of commonality, the public,
according to Butler and Lingis, is not about something we share. The only thing we
seem to have in common is our mortality, our belonging to an anonymous flesh-ofthe-world. Furthermore, in contradistinction to the first definition of the public,
which had to do with visibility, this corporeal condition of not being fully oneself,
refrains from seeing the public as something that we might enter or even employ as
an instrument to defend or protect our individualities. So when we follow the line of
thought of Butler and Lingis, we should not think of the public in relation to the
private, but rather come to consider the public dimension of the body as a condition
which is there and “with which we cannot argue”, to use one of Butler’s phrases.
Corporeality and education
In this text I would like to propose a view of human embodiment which might
elucidate this public character of the flesh. I also think that this approach might
grant another line of approach to talk about the public character of education and
the role of corporeality within education, than the one that is usually found in
literature on this topic.
To give a brief indication on how the body, in relation to the public and
critical dimension of education, is usually seen, I can refer to the thinking of Käte
Meyer-Drawe. In her influential book (within the german context, of course)
“Leiblichkeit und Sozialität” she makes use of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “fleshof-the-world”, which I mentioned earlier. This, in her view, is a metaphysical
dimension which is evidently experienced by little children, but which becomes
suppressed as we grow up and become adults. So where we as adults find it normal
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to see intersubjectivity as a problem, for children in the first stages of their lives,
when they couldn’t speak and judge, there was no strong difference between
themselves and others, for them this conceptual opposition I/other didn’t make
sense. We might think here of the phenomenon of transitivism: one child hurts
itself, and the others begins to weep. As primarily embodied creatures, entangled in
the
flesh-of-the-world,
as
young
children
we
experienced
a
pre-rational
“intercorporéité”. It’s only because we become rational and judgemental creatures
that we loose contact with this metaphysical Urgrund. So we know what we have to
do. Given the multicultural societies we live in, we should regain contact with this
suppressed dimension of being, we should acknowledge that what seems the most
alien to me is in fact mine, and vice versa. And this acknowledgement makes a true
intercultural education possible. Intercorporeality here functions as a firm ground
which legitimizes good educational practices and which offers justified and solid
solutions for actual educational and societal problems.
Now, as I mentioned before, I have no problem with Meyer-Drawe’s recourse
to the oeuvre of Merleau-Ponty. Nevertheless I think she gives a very partial
interpretation in which the strength of his thought becomes neutralised. I will only
give one example here. When we are confronted with ambiguous figures, such as
the famous duck-rabbit, you might read this experience in two distinct ways.
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(1) Meyer-Drawe sees in it a proof that the rational and conceptual thought of
adults is not capable of grasping something that is quite natural for young children,
given their pre-rational involvement in the world. Conceptual thought can see in this
figure either a duck or a rabbit, but never the two at the same time. That’s why this
ambiguous figure disturbes us. Nevertheless these figures are also fascinating,
because we are confronted with a possibility of seeing which is older than our
rational grasping of the world. Figures like these might, according to Meyer-Drawe,
help us to come in contact with the pre-rational and might help us see the
arbitrariness of our adult style of thinking. Consequentially it’s no coincidence that
children’s drawings from across the world all look the same. They lack perspective
e.g. So in relation to our pre-rational capacities we share a common humanity which
precedes all cultural and historical determined differences. The next pictures are
children’s drawings from Iraq which are used in a campaign to foster money for
young war victims – “Sponsor an Iraq Child”. The moving effect has perhaps to do
with the recognizability of these drawings. In any case it could underline the point
Meyer-Drawe wants to prove.
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(2) In my view, the fascination for the duck-rabbit lies elsewhere. MerleauPonty also comments on these figures and states that they confront us with a feeling
of desubjectivisation. That is because we cannot choose any longer what we see.
The abrupt transition in what we see – we see a duck and suddenly we are
confronted with a picture of a rabbit – surprises us and is in no way object of
intentional control. It is a question of “voire selon”, seeing in accordance with. I am
forced to see what I see. Using Blanchot here, one could say that we are confronted
with an anonymous seeing. It’s no longer about something that “I” see, something
that I make appear to my intentional consciousness, I am confronted with a pure
seeing, which is due to being an embodied being, which is totally of the world. I
experience myself as “a subjectivity without a subject, an already dead subject of
which I can never say, I, my body”.
The point in question is that you could call this experience pre-rational. But
when you do this, then you still suggest that this modality of perception is another
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kind of rationality, a more fundamental rationality, so to speak. It is not in a sense
something else which is given in an experience we cannot master. So what I suggest
is that we take the insights of Merleau-Ponty really serious, in the sense that we can
experience something which in a radical way exposes us to the anonymity of
belonging to the flesh-of-the-world. This furthermore might have serious
implications for education and for intercultural education in particular. What is
suggested in this kind of experience is that we are in fact equal. I will call this later
on the undeniable democracy of the flesh.
But I will illustrate this first with the example of how we relate to human
nakedness. In 1866 the famous French realist painter Gustave Courbet made a
shocking picture entitled “The origin of the world”. This theme is a very much
respected subject of traditional painting – we only have to think here of the ceiling
painting of the Sixtine Chapell in the Vatican by Michelangelo in which the creation
is symbolized by God touching the hand of Adam.
The nakedness of the first creature doesn’t really pose a problem as it is a
highly appreciated motive within history painting, which in a sense glorifies the
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creation, as through human beauty the perfection of God’s work is glorified. We
might illustrate this further by Titian’s well known Venus of Urbino and the less well
known birth of Venus by Cabanel, a secondary 19th Century painter. I show this last
illustration because it was produced the same year as Courbet’s masterpiece and
because it won he first prize at the salon, so it indicates the taste of the public of
those days.
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So you can understand why Courbet’s painting was so shocking. We get a
close up of a women spreading her legs and showing her genitals. The rather odd
framing, which prevents us from seeing he head of the woman, accentuates the
anonymity of the body in question. We see public genitals and are reminded of the
fact that this really was the origin of our live, of everyone’s life. Whereas the public
was expected to see a variation on the theme by Michelangelo, they get
unambiguously exposed to the ultimate truth about humankind. We are ultimately
made of the same flesh.
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What happens here, to the viewers, is of course a once-only effect.
Nevertheless I find it an interesting example because in viewing it there is
constituted another public than the public going to the salon, watching the nudes
painted in the tradition of the old masters. This public is not the community of
those who share the good taste and the art historical interest, prescribed by
tradition. Nevertheless a community of viewers is formed, viz. in the reaction
towards the truth which is revealed in this painting. What we share is that we cannot
deny being made of the same vulnerable flesh.
Furthermore the example of what this painting does to us, presents an
occasion to ask why we find nakedness so disturbing. Perhaps this is because, in
spite of all social and cultural distinctions we make, ultimately we are all the same,
because we are bodies. There exists, in my view, an indisputable democracy of the
flesh – and here resides the public dimension of the body. In the end we all produce
sweat when doing hard physical efforts, we all have to burp and to fart and are
handed over to uncontrollable sexual impulses, no matter what our gender, income
class, position in society, cultural background is and so on. And at the end we all
have to die. In this sense corporeality constitutes a time bomb which constantly
threatens every societal ordering. Eventually our bodies function autonomously and
are indifferent to the social structures man invents.
This could well explain why there is a clear-cut relation between the level of
the social class one belongs to and the fear for all phenomena that might reveal this
autonomous functioning of the body: people from the highest social classes are
much more abhorrent of and adverse to farting, picking one’s nose, eating with
one’s bare hands, etc. in relation to members of the lower classes. For them it’s
much more easy to speak about one’s period, sexuality and masturbation then in
bourgeois and aristocratic milieus, where these things are tabooed and sometimes
harshly punished within education. An interesting study that points in the same
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direction is Lieven Vandekerkhove’s research on tattooing and piercing. Until
recently, tattoos were an ineradicable transformation of our body and therefore they
revealed the uncontrollability and autonomous functioning of this body. So it
doesn’t come as a surprise that this sociologist found a conclusive relation between
the depreciation for these cosmetical practices and the level of the social class one
belongs to.
Aesthetical
appreciation of
tattooing
Social class (according to income level)
Because nowadays laser technology allows to erase tattoos and therefore they
no longer are a sign of the uncontrollability of our corporeal existence,
Vandekerckhove diagnosed that recently there is a significant higher appreciation
for tattooing and piercing, also within higher social categories. Now, to conclude
this reflections, one could say that there exists an undeniable democracy of the
flesh, a belonging to a corporeality we can never fully control and which defies every
societal ordering. There is something we share and this is older than any cultural or
societal ordering and shows that in a very odd sense we are equal. This equality, or
sameness, if you like, is a condition that makes communication possible and in this
sense you could say that we might find here the public dimension of the body,
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Butler referred to. Of course, this sharing of something universal is something that
precedes every cultural or linguistic ordering. It is something we might experience
as an in-between you and me and which can never be articulated in linguistic
categories. As soon as we start to name this in-between, it becomes an object of
control, whereas the democracy of the flesh is something that is revealed in the
ultimate lack of control, that is revealed as vulnerability, so to speak. So, to make
things clear, I am not stating that this public dimension refers to some metaphysical
ground, but nevertheless there is in our experience, in the banality of everyday life,
a kind of equality we cannot deny.
Laughing
Now, one could ask which implications this hypothesis has for the problem of
the public dimension of the body within educational contexts. If this hypothesis is
right, it should be possible to see the democracy of the flesh within concrete
educational settings. As I mentioned before, educational research tends to forget
corporeality, but, nevertheless, there is a line of inquiry which deals with
phenomena in education such as death, grievance, physical handicaps, the condition
of vulnerability being black or gay etc. Time and again those studies reveal the
difficulty of bringing these things up in classrooms. Time and again these authors
(e.g. Erica McWilliam) tend towards the position of Meyer-Drawe I criticised earlier:
after showing the degree in which these phenomena are repressed within western
culture in general, and within education specifically, they plea that we should
acknowledge this suppressed dimensions, in order to raise young people to become
fully human beings, in the name of the ideals of tolerance, humanity, openness and
democracy.
Perhaps we should reverse this point-of-view and start from the hypothesis
itself that we are equal and that this is shown anyhow within educational contexts.
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Perhaps we have to abandon the discourse of “we SHOULD recognize …” and start
with a descriptive analysis of concrete (and sometimes banal) things in which the
aforementioned equality (or sameness) is shown. And so we might bring something
about the public dimension of education to the fore.
Instead of demonstrating the repression of death and human decay in
educational settings, we should perhaps start with a very common and again trivial
phenomenon such as laughter. Philosophically speaking one could of course say
that this is a most complex theme in the sense that it is very difficult to grasp why
we laugh, that it’s not at all easy to categorize the different forms of laughter etc.
Furthermore within sociology there exists a discussion whether or not laughing is a
conservative power that only has momentaneous deliberating effects, but at the end
reinforces the existing societal order. And of course we could bring to the fore that
in western culture and within education especially laughing is tabooed – one only
thinks of Umberto Eco’s famous novel which deals with the search for Aristotle’s
book on comedy that cannot bear daylight, as – in the word of the austere librarian
Jorge – laughter means “Deus non est” – God doesn’t exist. Christ of course didn’t
laugh.
I would like to start from another point of departure, viz. what laughing
means in concrete educational contexts. Referring again to Alphonso Lingis we
might say that laughter has a deliberating and public effect, because we are
confronted with a truth which is not the fruit of long and difficult discursive
reasoning, but which is shown as such. We might remember here the painting of
Courbet. Furthermore in laughing we experience a moment of radical loss of
control. We cannot help to laugh. Laughing reveals also a form of transparency:
people who laugh communicate and share something which is not something that
should be made more explicit in words, in a common language: even people who
don’t share the same language or the same social or cultural background might
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experience commonality in shared laughter. Laughter constitutes a “community of
those who have nothing in common”. Finally, in laughter we experience an sense of
ultimate equality. As Helmut Plessner, a German-Dutch-Jewish phenomenologist,
showed, laughing is a corporeal reaction that seizes us when it has become
impossible to claim a clear individual position. Mostly we are and have our bodies at
the same time: the thoughts we stand for are made clear to ourselves and to others
in our bodily gestures. There is a coincidence between what we stand for and the
way we bodily behave: the gesticulations of the teacher point towards the relevance
of what is being said. But sometimes we do not longer possess and control our
body, as is the case in the feeling of shame: the corporeal reactions such as
trembling, the reddening of the cheeks, the faltering of our voice, reveal at this
moment who we are. Similarly in laughter we are totally our body. When we can no
longer find any position, our laughter shows that we are nothing but the shaking
and grunting body we experience. In this sense laughing is an anonymous and at
the same time public happening. In laughter the logic of taking in different
positions, higher and lower positions is shown not to exist any longer. There is no
difference between teacher and pupil. To be able to laugh together, to experience
this mysterious in-between, changes us, in the same way that two people who have
delivered themselves to drunkenness together, can never be the same afterwards.
Something has changed. And perhaps this is a truly public event. So perhaps we
should further explore the drunkenness of laughter and see how this relates to the
public character of education.
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