ABSTRACT
The body/subject in the modernist rationalist discourse has suffered the effects of alienation in its abstraction of sensual existence and concrete social experience. Rational thinking has left its mark as it has hidden the knowledge of human experience in the separation of objective and subjective worlds. Peter Solterdijk (1987) asserts that “Enlightenment, which strives for the reification and objectification of knowledge, reduces the world of the physiognomic to silence” (p. 140). Postmodernism, in its criticism of these aspects of modernist or enlightenment thinking, has insisted on the particular over the grand scale, the embodied over the abstract, and the sensual/aesthetic over the distantly rational. As a “step-child” of modernist thinking, and despite its emancipatory intent, critical pedagogy has continued to emphasize a notion of intellectual enlightenment that occurs through a process of critical-contextual reflection upon “everyday” existence. From this essentially rationally-based theory of human liberation there has developed a number of criticisms broadly categorized as postmodern. Among the most important of these is the assertion that it represents part of a patriarchal discourse. Feminist theorists such as Elizabeth Ellsworth, Frances Maher, Rhonda Hammer, Michelle Fine, Kathleen Weiler, and Patti Lather indicate the effects such a discourse have on the development of critical pedagogy. One example is given in Frances Maher's article (1987), that critiques the liberatory model of pedagogy in its disengagement from the particular, a model that remains disconnected from experiential knowing, and therefore the body/subject. “Liberation models of teaching, and Marxist feminism as well,” writes Maher, “often fail to attend to the 53role of intimacy, of feelings for particular people in particular situations” (p. 97). Phillip Corrigan (1988) in a distinctly postmodern narrative reflects upon the institution of schooling in its relationship to the body. He insists on the need for educational theory to address the “forgotten body.”
All I am trying to say is that bodies matter in schooling. They/we are the subjects who are taught, disciplined, measured, evaluated, examined, passed (or not), assessed, graded, hurt, harmed, twisted, reworked, applauded, praised, encouraged, enforced, coerced, consensed…. To have around volumes of educational theory (however radical) that never mention bodies, and their differentiation, seems to me now, slightly stupid. In a more extended emphasis, bodies may be what (who) is being schooled because by now—I hope—we cannot so easily separate minds, psyches, emotions from bodies. (p. 153)
