The Body Made Flesh - Embodied Learning and The Corporeal Device

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The body made flesh: embodied

learning and the corporeal device
a b a
John Evans , Brian Davies & Emma Rich
a
School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University,
Loughborough, UK
b
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Published online: 16 Jun 2009.
To cite this article: John Evans , Brian Davies & Emma Rich (2009) The body made flesh: embodied
learning and the corporeal device, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30:4, 391-406
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British Journal of Sociology of Education
Vol. 30, No. 4, July 2009, 391–406
The body made flesh: embodied learning and the corporeal device
John Evansa*, Brian Daviesb* and Emma Richa
a
School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK;
b
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Downloaded by [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] at 04:02 23 August 2013
(Received 2 September 2008; final version received 8 January 2009)

Taylor and Francis
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10.1080/01425690902954588
0142-5692
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402009
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John.evans@lboro.ac.uk
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Francis
JohnEvans
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of Sociology of(online)
Education
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
Why bodies matter when reading and researching education and health
What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and
operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never
give it a thought. (Sacks 2007, 47)
How a society classifies, defines and allocates value to the physical dispositions,
characteristics and demeanours of individuals and populations inside and outside
schools will depend on the distribution of power/authority in society and the nature of
the principles of social control. For this reason, ‘the body’ as a corporeal reality/entity
has always been of interest to the practices of schooling that variously endeavour to
shape and regulate its characteristics, usually according to dominant class interests
and prevailing social norms. Over recent decades, however, for a variety of reasons
(see Featherstone 1982; Evans and Davies 2005; Shilling 2008), not least of which is
the current near-‘global’ preoccupation with ‘risk factors’ affecting the body’s
*Corresponding author. Email: John.evans@lboro.ac.uk
ISSN 0142-5692 print/ISSN 1465-3346 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01425690902954588
http://www.informaworld.com
392 J. Evans et al.
durability and capacity for ‘health’ (e.g. rising obesity levels), there has been growing
appreciation of the need to study the body as a corporeal presence in school settings
so that we may better understand how, why and what young people learn. A good deal
of the work of reinstating the body’s importance in social theory (for example, Butler
1993; Grosz 1994, 1995; Shilling 2000, 2005, 2008) has been productively refracted
in research in education, especially on curriculum areas explicitly associated with how
the body is schooled (e.g. sport, health and physical education). Much of it has alluded
to ways in which subjectivity and identity are embodied and inscribed with particular
meanings, for example, around social class, race, gender and ‘ability’ and how ‘the
body’ is monitored and controlled to serve social control functions inside and outside
schools. In particular, work by researchers (for example, Gard and Wright 2005;
Larkin and Rice 2005; Rice 2007; Wright and Harwood 2009) critical of much main-
stream and official literature on obesity has valuably illustrated how contemporary
health discourse around weight, shape and size presages unprecedented levels of
surveillance and regulation of individual corporeality through formal school practices,
such as their health education curricula.
Notwithstanding such attention, we are going to suggest that – with notable excep-
tions (for example, Prout 2000; James 2000; Zembylas 2007; Lynch 2008; Halse,
Honey, and Boughtwood 2008; Sparkes 2009; Walkerdine 2009) – the body’s pres-
ence as a flesh and blood, thinking, feeling, sentient, species being, a ‘body with
organs’1 whose very presence – moving, growing, changing over time – is generative
of a meaning potential to which both the self and others must respond, has remained
rather a shadowy presence. Ironically, in the sociology of education, just as in much
of the sociology of policy, teacher education, illness, health and medicine, the body is
still no more than an organic entity (especially its ‘biogenetic foundation’; Vygotsky
1978; Hasan 2004) everywhere but nowhere to be seen (Williams 2006, 3). Why is
this so? At risk of grossly oversimplifying what is a vibrant and fast developing field
of sociological research on the body in education, we characterise the sociological
perspectives now dominating this field as ‘the body without flesh’; ‘the body with
fleshy feelings’ and ‘the ‘body made flesh’, elaborating on the merits of each below.
We do not provide a detailed overview of the wide range of perspectives brought to
bear on ‘the body’ through social theory but seek to explore and exemplify their
differing capacities to deal with specific features of the body-culture nexus, without
dissolving either or both to mere ‘discourse’. As much of the empirical material from
our research has been reported in detail elsewhere, our intention here is not to again
present our ‘findings’ or provide empirical verification of our developing conceptual
scheme but rather to offer up for discussion a conceptual apparatus that has ‘emerged’
from our work and proved useful for making sense of data dealing with body/culture
issues.
Our initial interest in the nature of relationships between body/mind and biology/
culture arises from work that we have been doing over recent years exploring
connections between formal education and health discourse around obesity and eating
disorders (Evans et al. 2008). At one level, that work has been an exercise in the
sociology of knowledge. Reflecting commitments to social constructionist principles,
it has demonstrated how health knowledge/s produced in the primary field of
knowledge production – for example, in science communities – come to be considered
‘the thinkable’ and ‘sacred’; that is to say, official truth as to what populations ought
to believe about their bodies and their capacity for health, fit to be purveyed in
schools. We have described how ‘the body’ is constructed through particular health
British Journal of Sociology of Education 393
knowledge/s, typically with reference to weight and shape and how, in the process,
certain populations are defined either as ‘healthy’ and ‘good’ or deviant, lacking and
irresponsibly ‘bad’, and the purposes this serves. We have articulated health discourse
as an instance of ‘bio power’ (Bunton and Petersen 1997; Howson 2004), functioning
to normalise and control certain reproductive behaviours around food, diet and exer-
cise and family life. At the same time, our work has explored embodied subjectivity,
for example, as we trace how health knowledge/s recontextualised within popular
culture through television, web sites and other media imagery translate into education/
health polices directed at the pedagogies of schools. These, we suggest, are ultimately
mediated by the class and cultures (through the ‘knower structures’; see Maton 2006)
of parents, teachers and pupils, via their lived experience and what we refer to as the
workings of the ‘corporeal device’ (see below). And it is this latter element of our
work, involving the interrogation of the lived experience of young people and how
they actively interpret and react ‘agentically’ to the transmission of health knowledge/
s in school, that has brought to the fore the significance of ‘the body’ not just as a
discursive construction, a conduit for the relay of messages outside itself, but as a
biological body, a material relay of and for itself in processes of reproduction.
Concomitantly, it has also highlighted the limitations of our own and others’ thinking
on the relationships between mind/body and biology and culture, and the inadequacies
of the languages of description available to deal with them in a way that neither
essentialises, privileges, nor dislocates the ‘agency’ (and restraints) of mind or body,
biology or culture. The concept of the corporeal device, we suggest, provides but a
starting point for addressing these concerns and registering what Sacks (2007, 155)
might term the personal or Proustian ‘physiology of the self’.
The corporeal device

Our data demonstrate that discourses are always inevitably mediated for individuals
through their material (flesh and blood, sentient, thinking and feeling) bodies, their
actions and those of their peers, parents/guardians and other adults. And as a way of
articulating the materiality of the lived experiences typically associated with acquiring
the attributes required by obesity discourse and ‘the actual embodied changes result-
ing form this process’ (Shilling 2005, 13), we have been inclined, pace Bernstein, to
talk of the ‘corporeal device’ – to focus on the body as not just a discursive
representation and relay of messages and power relations external ‘to itself’ but as a
voice ‘of itself’. As a material/physical conduit it has an internal grammar and syntax
given by the intersection of biology, culture and the predilections of class, which regu-
late (facilitate and constrain) embodied action and consciousness, including the ways
in which discursive messages (and all other social relations) are read and received.
This concept, we suggest, privileges neither biology nor culture, and endorses Frank’s
(2006, 433) view that neither ‘the experience of embodied health nor the observation
of signs of health circulating outside bodies has to trump the other as being the real
point of origin. Instead each is understood as “making the other possible”‘. Our
research barely begins to touch the complexity of such relationships (see Grosz 1994;
and discussion with Ausch, Randal, and Perez 2008), although it illuminates how the
corporeal device finds expression as conscious and subconscious embodied action and
is subjectified (given shape, form and definition as ‘personality’) in schools.
As a model of embodied action/communication the corporeal device not only
facilitates exploration of the relationships between mind/body and body/ culture, but
394 J. Evans et al.
also the features of each of these elements (see Figure 1). Bernstein (1996, 40) derives
his understanding of the pedagogic device from Noam Chomsky’s view of language.
In a Chomskian view, says Bernstein, the language device is ‘a system of formal rules
which govern various combinations that we make when we speak or write’; it operates
at a number of levels and has two facilities, a (biological) ‘built in sensitivity to
acquisition of the rules of the device and an interactional [social] facility. Without
the latter, acquisition is not possible’ (Bernstein 1996, 40; parentheses added). The
rules and acquisition of this device and its creative possibilities are independent of
culture:
From an evolutionary point of view why this is the case is because we could not leave a
device as critical as this to the vagueness and vicissitudes of culture. We can say from
this viewpoint that the acquisition of this device, which is fundamental, is ideologically
free, but not its rules […] there is a meaning potential outside the language device, and
this meaning potential activates the device, and the result is communication. Addition-
ally the communication has a feedback on the meaning potential, either in a restricted or
in an enhancing fashion. (Bernstein 1996, 40)
The language device, then, simply put, ‘is that which mediates between the mean-
FigureLD,
Note: 1. language
Meaningdevice;
potential,
CD, communication
corporeal device.
and the corporeal device.
ing potential of a discursive order and the actual meanings realized’ (see Davis 2004,
44). Although there are differences, the corporeal device (CD) resembles both the
quintessentially kinetic language and the pedagogical devices in a number of ways. Its
formal structure is represented in Figure 1. Its inherently ‘bio-social’, internal rules are
the product of evolution and development that regulate the body’s cognitive, social,
affective and kinetic resources (Figure 1, A). There is a meaning potential (somatic
and semiotic) (Figure 1, B) generated by the presence of the body’s geography in
space, time and location, which lies outside of and activates the CD and the resultant
embodied communication. Socially, affectively and cognitively encoded, somatically
mediated communication feeds back on meaning potential, ‘either in a restricted or in
an enhancing fashion’ and ‘regulates fundamentally the communication which it [the
device] makes possible’ (Bernstein 1996, 41). The rules of the corporeal device, like
those governing the language and pedagogic devices, are not, however, ideologically
free but ‘reflect emphases on the meaning potential created by dominant groups’
(Bernstein 1996, 41) and are activated, for example, through various regimes of
authority and bio power reflecting interests and hierarchies of social class and culture.
As Bernstein pointed out, at ‘the most mundane level […] the [language] device has
built into its systems some very fundamental classifications, in particular gender clas-
sifications’ (1996, 41). The CD, like the language and pedagogic devices, makes
possible the potential range of communicative outcomes. The forms of its realisation
are subject to rules that vary with context (Figure 1, C) – for example, whether we
were having a drink or talking to a teacher – constrained not only by the somatic but
by distinctive semiotic rules for communication.
A, B and C in Figure 1 highlight different aspects of embodied communication,
each having distinctive features/qualities and a degree of relative autonomy, no one
alone accounting for either the generative (productive) or constraining (reproductive)
elements of embodied action and social reproduction. A draws attention to the biolog-
ical (or rather, the bio/socio/genetic) aspects of corporeality, B the meaning potential
of ‘the body’ brought into play in social context and C the contextual rules and power
relations that determine them. Teachers and students as embodied individuals, like all
others, are, then, always ‘partly fated, partly free’ (Baker 2008). Elsewhere, we have
Language Device
Stable Rules? Contextual Rules
Meaning
Potential
(symbolic/
LD Communication
semiotic) (Language)
.. .
Corporeal Device
Stable Rules? Contextual Rules
Meaning
Potential
(somatic/ CD Communication
kinetic) (Embodied Action)
.. .
B A C
Figure 1. Meaning potential, communication and the corporeal device.

Note: LD, language device; CD, corporeal device.
reported how the young women in our study repeatedly illumined the significance of
‘the body’ as a biological presence (given by maturation levels, size, shape, physical
demeanour) in social interaction, a presence over which they had only limited control.
Theirs were bodies both issuing and being attributed meanings specific to time, place
and social context, but were irreducible to prevailing social rules. Amanda, for exam-
ple, stated:
Amanda: When I first started secondary school I’d like … I’d started sort of … puberty
quite early I’d say cus emmmmm … I started getting like acne and stuff
RA:2 Yeah
396 J. Evans et al.
Amanda: When I was just about ten.

RA: Really
Amanda: Nobody had really mentioned anything about it before at primary school but
when I went to secondary school … a couple of the lads started picking on
me about it.
RA: Ahh
Amanda: Like I’d get pizza face and horrible stuff.
RA: Ahh
Amanda: Nothing really to do with weight or anything though … it was all just like …
the way I looked.
RA: Really … it’s really horrible that people picked on you about it then … it’s
hard enough to cope with as it is! (See Evans et al. 2008, 89)
Our development of ‘the corporeal device’ enables us to both register and articu-
late such a dialectic of biology and culture, resembling Zembylas’ (2007, 2008) and
Ekman and Davidson’s (1994) attempts to conceptualise the body as a ‘multi compo-
nential phenomena’. However, in our model, individuals are perceived as physical
bodies resourced not just with ‘emotions’ (Zembylas 2008), ‘desires’ (Sykes 2007) or
‘jouissance’ (Pronger 2002; Davis 2004) but with a range and variety of cognitive,
affective, social and kinetic ‘capabilities’ or resources that are always encoded by the
device (Evans et al. 2008). This echoes Zembylas’ (2008, 4) notion that ‘human
beings have universal corporeal potential’ (A), enacted in particular socio-cultural
and political arrangements that provide them somatic and semiotic meaning (B) and
that they are always ‘socially and culturally specific persons engaged in complex
webs of power relations’ (C). It also announces the body as always both ‘being’ and
‘becoming’, capable of action and performance (see Grosz in Ausch, Randal, and
Perez 2008).3 Biology and culture, ontology and epistemology, are inextricably
entangled via the interminable dialectics of the corporeal device. The CD thus clearly
denotes a ‘structural orientation’ (a ‘physical’ universe of discourse; Sacks 2007,
135) but without neglecting the phenomenological/lived body (a ‘phenomenal’
universe of discourse; Sacks 2007, 135). It signals a regulative but not a determina-
tive power over the characteristic experiences and bodily orientation outcomes of
those subject to it. The realist impact of the CD is that it both captures a relation
between past means/experience/outcomes that are not guaranteed in the future, and
specifies the parameters of a potential relation between the three (Shilling 2008).4
We seek to look afresh at how various sociological perspectives on the body may
help further illuminate or diminish our understandings of its constitutive elements
and relationships.
The body without flesh: social constructionism and the discursive body
Writing of the body/culture problematic from within medical sociology, Simon
Williams (2006, 7) has argued that the ‘Foucauldian legacy’ and the ‘medicalisation
critique’ has presaged something of a retreat from acknowledgement of an ‘underlying
‘natural’ or ‘biophysical’ reality’. As a consequence, ‘associated notions such as tradi-
tional disease–illness distinction have been cast in doubt if not abandoned altogether’.
The body and disease, he says, have become mere discursive matters, the product, that
is to say, ‘of strategic, shifting, historically contingent configurations of power/knowl-
edge’ (Williams 2006, 7). The idea that our bodies are but discursive productions, the
fabrications of particular educational ideologies, good or bad science and political
expediency is, indeed, equally evident in the sociology of education, sport and health,
as well as in much feminist writing on identity and learning in schools and its role in
the social construction of gender. This perspective has undoubtedly generated impor-
tant insights, particularly around the ‘the production, regulation and representation of
bodies within the context of disciplinary surveillance and the medical regime (Turner,
1997: xv)’ (Williams 2006, 8) and how the body is constituted in and through
language. It is manifest in the work that we and others (for example, Campos 2004;
Gard and Wright 2005; Monaghan 2006) have carried out on obesity, education and
eating disorders in recent years, which has endeavoured to ‘open up the discourses
which fabricate our bodies and territorialises us, through various forms of disciplinary
expertise, in the name of health and illness’ (Williams 2006, 8) by exploring: how
certain health discourses flow across local, national and trans-national boundaries, for
example, via the pronouncements of the World Health Organisation; how they
objectify certain populations (more often than not, the poor working class); and how
bio-medicine’s production of obesity ‘facts’ and discourse, when usurped by central
governments and health agencies and recycled in popular culture and the education
policies, fabricate certain identities and damage people’s lives. Such studies highlight
the not always subtle, often invidious, means of sustaining social hierarchies, of
disciplining populations through ‘body work’ and securing social control. They
acknowledge the biological body but centre attention on how it is defined through
particular discursive regimes and cultural inflection.
There are, however, a number of shortcomings to this perspective in which the
body is seen essentially as ‘a carrier, a relay for ideological messages and for external
power relations, or in contrast, as an apparently neutral carrier or relay of skills of vari-
ous kinds’ (Bernstein 1996, 39). The focus is on what is being carried or relayed rather
than study the constitution of the relay itself, failing to explore the sociological nature
either of ‘body knowledge’ or ‘knowledge of the body’. In treating the body largely
as a discursive formation (a focus on C in Figure 1), a source of inscription, a relay of
social relations external to itself, it fails to interrogate the nature of the relay
adequately, including the materiality of the body itself and its productive capacities (A
in Figure 1). The more we read about the body, the less we see of it as a material/
biological presence and, even when it goes badly wrong, we get barely a glimpse of
its flesh and blood corporeality. Indeed, in our own work, we talk very little of the
(bio-genetic) kinesiology or materiality of anorexia itself as a form of ‘body knowl-
edge’, not least because of the difficulties of researching, recording and naming ‘lived
body experience’ (see Davies 2000, 43).5 This knowledge may be derived as much
from changes occurring within the body’s biology, chemistry and physics (or those
induced by extreme lack of eating and excessive exercise regimes) as from its discur-
sive constructions via the (psycho-therapeutic) health knowledge/s brought to bear on
its performances; and which together, in the dialectic of ‘body knowledge’ and
‘knowledge of the body’, define the individual’s sense of embodiment. Similarly,
others dealing with the sociology of pain and injury in sport have tended, when work-
ing from a social constructionist perspective, to focus more on how individuals are
variously configured through medical discourses than deal with the corporeality of
pain and corporeal change itself. Commenting on these tendencies Williams (2006,
11) reminds us of Frank’s (1996, 58) injunction of ‘how odd’ the idea of body as
‘surface’ or ‘text’ is for someone who suffers from cancer: illness means living with
the body, experiencing it through a ‘shifting synthesis of this perpetually spiralling
dialectic of flesh, inscription and intention’. The problem here is that, as Williams
(2006, 9) pointed out, in social constructionist approaches to health: ‘the world, and
398 J. Evans et al.
the body and disease within it, become equated or conflated with our discursive
constructions’, with ‘discovery’ traded for ‘fabrication’: a ‘writing out’ in effect,
through the very process of ‘writing in’. These and related issues are also well
rehearsed within feminist (for example, see Birke 1999; Somerville 2004; Davies
2000; Weiss 1999; Canning 1999; Grosz 1987) and post-humanism (see Hayles 1999)
theories (see Kirby 1991).
It may be the case, then, that social constructionist projects around education, the
body and health unhelpfully dissolve boundaries between epistemology and ontology,
failing, for example, to distinguish between forms of health knowledge that are tempo-
rary, socially constructed and ideologically loaded and those that reflect the albeit
always socially produced and located sum total of scientific wisdom at given points in
time (see Young 2008). If this is so, then they take us dangerously close to claiming
that as there can be no such thing as knowledge outside the social relations that
produce it, there can be no valid knowledge at all. Without an adequate theory of ‘body
knowledge’, social constructionist perspectives may be resigned to position taking and
polemic, claim and counter-claim around who has the better version of truth (see Gard
2009). In research such as ours regarding obesity and health it leaves the body reduced
to mere knowledge politics, with no life of its own, rendering us unable to determine
what health knowledge/s, albeit inevitably transitory ‘truths’, can be taken, trusted and
accepted as ‘medically viable or valuable’ and should be taken seriously and reflected
in schools. The strength of social constructionist perspectives, however, is in high-
lighting the social meanings and contextual rules (B and C in Figure 1) that frame and
help generate embodied communication, even though unable to explain either the
latter’s aetiology or form and content. Indeed, we are unlikely to achieve an adequate
understanding even of ‘contextual rules’ and ‘meaning systems’ of the corporeal
device and how these bear on individuals’ senses of embodied selves unless we more
adequately register distinctions between ‘knowledge/s of the body’ (including facts as
best we know them, fabrications and ideologies) and different forms of ‘body knowl-
edge’, then document the relationships between them through the workings of the
pedagogic device. Only then might we begin to better understand the body’s
generative qualities and its ontological capacity for critical engagement with the very
discursive forces by and through which it is inescapably ‘shaped’. We are also unlikely
to understand why health knowledge/s considered sacred (official or expert) have such
variable impact on and behaviours of pupils and parents and the ‘profane’ health
knowledge/s that help shape their lives (Somerville 2004; Evans et al. 2008)
The body with fleshy feelings: post-structuralism and the affective body
The second representation of the body in the sociology of education, physical
education, health and sport offers an extension of, although not a radical break from,
the above in our understanding of embodied communication. It recognises: ‘the role
of the body as agent within a world of bodies which are above all producing bodies’
(O’Loughlin 1998, 295, cited in Zembylas 2007, 341) and is well represented in
educational research in the work of Davis (2004), McWilliam (1999) and Zembylas
(2007), centring attention on certain generative capacities of the body. The latter, for
example, draws on ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to offer what he describes as a
‘post Lacanian theory of the body and desire’ (1983, 335) to explore how certain
inherent qualities of the body may be better used in pedagogy as a source of progres-
sive change. In this perspective, ‘desire’ is activated as a seminal explanatory
construct and conceptualised as ‘both autonomous and productive in its own right’,
[an] ‘affirmative force that not only defies any social determination but also shapes
the social in many ways (since desire is a material thing) […] It runs in a flow and is
always becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 335–336). It ‘is not just a feeling or
emotion but a force influencing the subject’s modes of existence’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983, 337). As Zembylas points out, this perspective not only invites us to
centre on the body as a ‘force’ of change but also consider how ‘desire’ is regulated
within context. In this perspective, then, desire is not simply ‘a longing for pleasure
or fantasy, but ‘a relational encounter that seeks immersion into learning and teaching
environments’ (Zembylas 2007, 334). However, in reducing ‘corporeality’ to a
discursive encounter between politics and an unexplicated ‘existential force’, once

again we face the possibility of perceiving interaction as purely affective or semiotic
encounters in which the body’s corporeal presence (the personal, physiological self)
is but a shadowy presence (albeit a force to be reckoned with) in social relationships.
If we do so, the way in which social meanings are mediated somatically barely gets
mention at all.
A similar perspective has been applied innovatively to the study of physical
activity and sport by Pronger (2002) and Sykes (2007). Sykes, for example, draws on
a variety of post-structuralist feminist theory (especially Leder’s 1990 critique of the
‘the absent body’) to advocate re-discovery of ‘the body’ through psychoanalysis. It
is claimed that psychoanalysis ‘explains the mechanisms by which cultural
representation, unconscious fantasy and corporeal sensation coalesce to form the body
image, or more broadly, a person’s sense of embodiment’, providing ‘a theory of the
particular intersections between the organism and language’ (Shepherdson 2000, 5)
that reveals ‘how the natural substratum of the body falls prey to the work of
representations’ (Sykes 2007, 128). In this view, ‘Identification is the pivotal mecha-
nism that links fantasy and representations with the somatic’ (Sykes 2007, 130). In
exemplification, Sykes recounts Butler’s somewhat problematic injunction that
‘Heterosexuality is cultivated through prohibitions, and these prohibitions take as one
of their objects homosexual attachments, thereby forcing the loss of there attachments
(136–137)’ (cited in Sykes 2007, 133). Our empirical study could be seen to provide
ample evidence of how such affective processes work in the lives of young women.
Within the interactions of formal and informal education they learn, time after time,
to define themselves with reference both to the evaluations they make of their own
bodies and those made of them by others who ‘share’ their ‘lived experience’ in
context. Such interactions are affectively loaded (which multiplies their damaging and
enhancing affects) and, for this reason, reach the deep recesses of the individual
psyche often in very damaging ways. In certain respects then, our data resonate funda-
mentally with this perspective, illustrating how identities are formed through
processes of ‘identification’, assimilation and/or rejection/prohibition of one’s own
and other’s bodies in context. From this view, anorexia could indeed be seen, at least
in part, as something ‘cultivated through prohibitions’ that take as one of their objects
the overweight or fat body, as with heterosexuality, ‘thereby forcing the loss of these
attachments’ at some considerable cost to the individual’s health.
However, once again, while highlighting how ‘the other’ is implicated in the
constitution of affectively loaded classifications of one’s own and the ‘others’ embod-
ied selves – that is to say, the role of B and C in shaping the corporeal device – no
sooner is the body brought to the fore in talk of ‘corporeal sensations’, than it quickly
disappears; there is barely a body to talk of at all beyond its discursive formation and
400 J. Evans et al.
reproduction through ‘identification’ and the interplay of symbolic/discursive power.

This perspective, then, like the social constructivist, privileges and essentialises
discourse; yet simultaneously, diminishes the complexity (and materiality) of the CD
and with it the range of ‘biological’ resource, including ‘desires’, that drive people to
action and through which embodied subjectivities are formed. Importantly, Sykes
presses beyond such reductionism, attesting that queer and postmodern theories of the
body have been exploring the question of ‘touch’ ‘to rethink the visual economy of
images in the formation of our subjectivity’. Drawing on Turps’ (2000) work, she
highlights that tactile and kinaesthetic perceptions ‘mingle with visual representations
to produce fantasy representations that coalesce to form the body image and sense of
embodied subjectivity’ (Sykes 2000, 135). In this view, embodied subjectivities are
‘filtered through our identifications’ while ‘the psychic histories and fantasies derived
from tactile and kinetic sensations further complicate the taken for granted meanings
culture typically attributes to the skilled movements of sport’ (Sykes 2007, 135) (and,
we add, myriad other social practices). Identifications ‘devour bodily otherness’
(Silverman 1996, 24) ‘by assimilating or incorporating similar elements of the other
into its own body ego […] Feeling rather than vision become vital to embodiment’
(Sykes 2007, 136). Lynch’s (2008) recent reworking of ‘desire’ using Spinoza and
Hume offers further advance on how this concept could be used productively in the
sociology of education to bring ‘the bodies’ of students and teachers back into the
view.
In many respects, such perspectives bring us much closer to realising that some-
body is actually present in the social relations of schooling. Certainly, they provide for
a far more ‘embodied perspective’ on matters of education, health and illness than
those of social constructionism. They emphasise ‘the body as a moving, thinking, feel-
ing, pulsing, body; the lived body as a mindful, intentional site of ongoing experience,
a spontaneous synthesis of powers, and the very basis of our understanding of the
world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, cited in Williams 2006, 10) (see also Sparkes 2009;
Walkerdine 2009). Attention to the ‘emotionally expressive body’ does at least
presage consideration of how ‘bodies’ are generative of social structures and how
meaning systems and contextual rules, when mediated somatically, affect learning and
health, reach into the deep recesses of the human mind and become embodied. They
bring us closer to our third perspective in which the body’s materiality in interaction
and culture becomes a fundamental concern. Yet, by reducing the body’s corporeal
presence essentially to the play of emotions, enjoyments, fantasies, identifications and
desires (however broadly defined), this perspective (despite Deleuze/Guattarian
elaborations voiced by Zembylas 2007, as above) not only risks reducing human
agency (including its expression as pedagogy) to a composite product of individual,
pleasure-seeking self-gratifications and fulfilments, but also obfuscates the range and
complexity of the socio-biological ‘forces’ that define human action, many of which
reach beyond the quest for utilitarian pleasures, ‘illicit enjoyments’, self-gratification
and avoidance of pain. Ultimately, while enhancing our understandings of human
agency and embodied action, it simultaneously obfuscates the range and complexity
of somatic mediation6 and the influences of the corporeal device.
The body made flesh: corporealism and the material body

Our third representation of the body also directly addresses body/mind/biology/
culture relationships while attempting to avoid the limitations of theories that either
exclude or underplay the possibility that ‘social life also has a material as well as a
discursive (or representational) component’ (Prout 2000, 1–2). It moves beyond
biological or cultural reductionism – foundationalist or anti-foundationalist
approaches – and treats ‘the body as a real, material entity, which is connected with
but different from the many different frameworks of meaning in which it is variously
represented in human cultures’ (Prout 2000, 3). From very different standpoints,
Sacks (2007), Grosz’s (1994, 1995) and Shilling’s (2005) writing on ‘the body’
exemplify this endeavour. Shilling’s (2005) attempt to avoid the dualisms of biology
and culture is best expressed in his formulation of corporeal realism. His view of the
human body as socially and biologically unfinished at birth, something that over the
life course changes through processes that are simultaneously biological and social,
is, like Sacks’ and Grosz’s, of seminal importance. It centres the body as ‘an emer-
gent, socially generative phenomenon’; the embodied subject, in keeping with realist
commitments, is possessed not simply of a body geography but ‘feelings, dispositions
and embodied consciousness which emerges through evolution and development as
an organism and which together enable humans to intervene and make a difference to
their environment, to exercise agency’ (Shilling 2005, 13).
Attention to the body’s materiality has subsequently been reflected both in
Shilling’s (2005) empirical work and that of many others (for example, Prout 2000;
Burrows and Wright 2007; Evans et al. 2008; Wright and Harwood 2009). James
(2000), for example, has demonstrated ‘how material differences in size and weight
present young people with a series of problems which must be negotiated by working
representational transformations that can render them nearer to or further from bodily
appearances of their peers’ (Prout 2000, 5). Our research documented similar
processes, clearly demonstrating that children and young people do not simply
passively absorb cultural stereotypes, but ‘actively apprehended and used them in
experiencing not only their own body but also its relationship to other bodies and the
meanings that were forged from these encounters’ (Prout 2000, 8). Shilling, Prout,
James and others provide invaluable insight into the connections between corporeal
bodies as agentic entities, ‘lived experience’ and culture. But theirs (like ours) is an
unfinished project, still stronger on conceptualising and documenting relationships
between biology and culture than analysing particularly the first of these elements. As
Crossley (2007, 1) observed, ‘having announced that the body and society have
analytically distinct properties and that each impinge upon and shape the other, we
still need to consider what those properties are’.
Conclusion: fleshing out the corporeal device

The above analyses offer but allusions to the many sophisticated perspectives brought
to bear on the body and schooling, and are intended only to illumine either their miss-
ing or underdeveloped elements. Such lacuna require attention not least because ‘the
body’ is becoming increasingly important in educational settings, not just as a form of
capital within the social relations and subcultures of schools, but as a credential for
potential future employment and ‘health’. A growing body of research is documenting
how ‘the body’, especially its size, shape and demeanour, is influencing employment
prospects in certain spheres of work (see Brownell et al. 2005). Researchers are now
highlighting how employers in the service sector are increasingly looking to recruit
young people on the basis of their ‘aesthetic labour skills’ (appearance, voice, accent,
body shape, general trendiness). It is argued that these ‘skills’, often linked to ‘middle-
402 J. Evans et al.
classness’, can be taught, making ‘the bodies’ of young people ‘legitimate’ sites for
intervention and control and raising the question of whether schools should have a role
in developing such presentational awareness in them in preparation for the labour
market.7 However, long before the body achieves ‘exchange value’ for particular
forms of paid work, it presents itself in the routines of schooling either as a resource
or restriction in respect of prevailing social rules, and as ‘capacity’ for education,
learning, and health. Its physical presence is both meaning-making and meaning-
taking, generative of opportunities for either recognition and reward, or rejection and
abjection among teachers, peers and friends. However, although interrogation of the
regulative and generative properties of the body, using whatever language we chose
to describe them – ‘jouissance’, ‘force’, ‘desire’, ‘semiotic mediation’ – is immensely

important, centring attention on the significance of the body in the creation of educa-
tional, social and vocational hierarchies, it requires more searching questions of the
body’s materiality to be asked. And it is here that reference to the deliberations of
those working in the sociology of medicine (or health and illness) perhaps proves most
helpful, not least because they press us to consider more seriously what ‘corporeality’
is exactly, to focus specifically on the materiality of the corporeal device. This is no
easy matter to address. Williams (2006, 18) emphasised that it is ‘very difficult, for
example, as Newton (2003: 9) has recently commented, to “know” or interrogate the
biological dimensions of the body, at least with the conventional sociological toolkit’.
Sacks’ (1985) seminal, and profoundly humane, case work within neuropsychology,
may provide some clear guidance as to how this might be achieved (see also Sparkes
2009).
If nothing more, the above critique of contemporary social theory offers a salutary
reminder of how far we are removed from being able to articulate the nexus of biology
and culture adequately, despite valiant efforts in bringing elements of the ‘material’
body back in to the sociological gaze. As Williams pointed out, we are not yet able to
account either for the nature of ‘biological enablements and constraints’ or the
‘critical potential of the biological in exposing rather than legitimating oppressive
social practices (helping us, in other words, to say what oppressive social practices are
oppressive of and do damage to [Nussbaum, 1992; Sayer, 2000])’ (Williams 2006,
15). Even in our study, explicitly seeking to trace the visceral effects of meaning
systems and contextual rules (Figure 1, B and C) on the embodied communicative
actions of young women in schools, these processes impinging on their bodies’
biologies, chemistries, physiologies and physics barely get a mention, leaving their
agency and un-explicated core elements of the corporeal device underemphasised and
unexplored.
If we are to approach these issues in sociological and educational research without
either separating or essentialising biology and culture, like Williams (2006, 13–14),
we would suggest that we will need to more explicitly address, debate, incorporate and
theorise the biological, ‘going beyond [it] without leaving it out altogether’. In Bury’s
(1997 , 199–200, cited in Williams 2006, 16) view, if the body is to be invoked in
sociological enquiry and especially if sociology wishes ‘to come to terms with “corpo-
real realities”’, then ‘the place of the biological sciences (as well as the biological
dimensions of experience) has to be more clearly appreciated’. Accept this and we
might begin to register the complexity of the corporeal device and learning as
biosocial processes, how the former’s intrinsic grammar and syntax encodes,
facilitating and constraining, ‘desire’, ‘jouissance’, ‘potentialities’ and ‘capabilities’,
as well as how somatic and semiotic meaning systems and contextual rules regulate
the communication that comes out of the device (A, B and C in Figure 1). We share
Williams’ (2006, 13) view that what is required is a ‘material–corporeal’ project that
attempts to ‘marry’ the biological and the social in a ‘truly’ embodied fashion
(Newton 2003). At one level this will mean further elaborating on the nature of
‘somatic mediation’ and the CD, exploring other innovative theoretical perspectives,
for example, Prout’s (2000, 11) notion of children as ‘hybrids of culture and nature’,
reflecting Latour’s (1993, 6) notion, that, ‘social life can only be properly understood
as inescapably impure, constituted in and through heterogeneous networks that are,
simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse and collectively, like society’.
At another, more embodied/personal level, however, the project becomes not just one
of doing better sociological theory or method but actively pursuing different relation-
ships between the ‘academic’ disciplines in order to throw light on the complexity and
nuances of biology in culture and the workings of the corporeal device. It is certainly
regrettable that, unlike the great sociologists of a previous age who routinely called on
a variety of disciplines in their work, the sociology of the body (education and health)
is notable for its absence of engagement with such variety of subject matter that might
help inform its theories. Even when the natural sciences are invoked, more often than
not, it is either to deride the essentialism of their explanations, denounce their contri-
bution to the control of populations via biopower, or deride their ‘body fascism’, thus
leaving it unable to draw on any of their insights or say anything much about the body,
its corporeal, agentic qualities and their significance for learning, success and failure
in schools. Ultimately, neither the sociology of education, nor policy, teaching and
teacher education, will achieve very much by way of social and educational innova-
tion, unless greater recognition is given to the ‘bodies’ of teachers and students
charged with its delivery.
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
404 J. Evans et al.
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.
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The corporeal device

Stable Rules? Contextual Rules

Stable Rules? Contextual Rules

Figure 1. Meaning potential, communication and the corporeal device.

Amanda: When I was just about ten.

discursive encounter between politics and an unexplicated ‘existential force’, once

reproduction through ‘identification’ and the interplay of symbolic/discursive power.

The body made flesh: corporealism and the material body

Conclusion: fleshing out the corporeal device

to describe them – ‘jouissance’, ‘force’, ‘desire’, ‘semiotic mediation’ – is immensely

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