ABSTRACT
We take as our starting point Basil Bernstein’s two ‘interrelated levels of mediation’ which Gabrielle Ivinson and Gerard Duveen (2006: 111) referred to as, first, ‘the imaginary subjects that teachers construct and which regulate modalities; and second, the constructive activities of children’. They emphasise that ‘(C)hildren do not simply internalise the recognition and realisation rules available in classrooms; rather they reconstruct knowledge according to developing socio-cognitive resources’, analyses of which take us beyond the ‘two kinds of practice projected by two opposing models which represent recontextualised knowledge’ (ibid.) defined by Bernstein (1996: 58) as ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ models. These, we suggest, are not exhaustive of the codes dominating formal education at the present time. Unlike Durkheim, Bernstein was not particularly concerned to interrogate how social relations are ‘embodied’ and, in our view, his characterisation of two contrasting modes as models for heuristic purposes, if adapted insensitively, could obfuscate both the presence and significance of other codes and their modalities that have their social and intellectual origins outside the social, psychological and behavioural sciences. Some have their social bases in the economic interests of business, industry and the media and the medical and health fields, centring, unlike performance and competency codes and their modalities, on the dynamic between body and nature, and biology and culture. We refer to the latter as ‘relations of ’ the body rather than ‘relations to’ (competency modes) or ‘differences from’ (performance modes) individuals and agencies outwith ‘the self ’. If we were using a more Foucauldian language we would, no doubt, here refer to ‘relations to one’s embodied self ’ best characterised within contemporary society, we suggest, as body-centred perfection codes (Evans and Davies, 2005). These codes regulate the grammar and syntax of the pedagogic device, shape the voice of
education and, when embedded in contemporary education/health policy, frame the actions and thinking of teachers and ‘the imaginary subjects’ that they then construct through the body pedagogies of classrooms. Our previous work on education, disordered eating and obesity discourse documented the class and cultural origins of this ‘projected subject’, showing that social value and moral virtue are ascribed to ‘its’ corporeality. It also demonstrated that some young people are badly damaged by the interplay of perfection and performance codes in contemporary education (Evans et al., 2008). Concentration on the second ‘act of mediation’ referred to by Ivinson and Duveen suggests that here, too, current educational theory rather underplays the way in which the interpretive activity of children is subject not only to developing socio-cognitive resources but also corporeal resources (not least of which are levels of physical maturation) over which they have little control. This raises fundamental questions concerning relationships between biology and culture and their refraction, for example, in the embodied actions and meaning systems expressed in the policies and pedagogies of teachers in schools. In the discussion which follows we suggest that Basil Bernstein’s (1996) notion of the ‘pedagogic device’, when reworked around the concept of a ‘corporeal device’ (CD), may provide one way of conceptualising such relationships so as to avoid some of the fault lines and dualistic thinking inherent in other perspectives. Reflecting the ‘corporeal realism’ which Chris Shilling (2005: 12) has outlined, the CD neither separates nor essentialises biology and culture, yet retains the principle that ‘the body and society exist as real things, that cannot be dissolved into discourse, possessed of causally generative properties’ (ibid.; Grosz, 1994). If sociologists of education and educational practitioners are to address the agency of ‘the body’ in cultural reproduction and the corporeal realities of children in classrooms, they must deal with the ‘somatic mediations’ of lived experience (Evans et al., 2009). This will mean giving as much attention to the biological dimensions of embodiment as its discursive representation receives (Cromby, 2004; Williams, 2006).
