The Palgrave Handbook of

Embodiment and Learning

Edited by
Anja Kraus · Christoph Wulf
 The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment
and Learning

“In the Anthropocene, a time when the fate of the planet is determined largely by
humans, it has become difficult to differentiate between nature and culture. There is
hardly any nature remaining that has not been impacted by humans. In view of this,
the body - the place where nature and culture meet - is becoming increasingly impor-
tant for human identity, our understanding of humanity and the processes by which
we live and learn. In our bodies, nature and culture are inextricably interwoven. The
body is a clear manifestation of what all human beings have in common, what is dif-
ferent because of culture and what is individual and unique. This is why processes of
embodiment and learning are so important both for society and the individual. In the
cultural and social sciences, and also in the natural, technological and life sciences,
this insight is now widely accepted. This handbook contains contributions by schol-
ars from a variety of academic backgrounds who use different scientific paradigms to
examine diverse processes of embodiment and learning. Main references are theoreti-
cal and empirical approaches of philosophy, historical anthropology and cultural or
social anthropology. In the processes of embodiment and learning, the senses, the
emotions and practical knowledge come into their own. Education is seen as the
development of the whole person. The handbook makes an important contribution
especially to the advancement of educational practice.”
 Anja Kraus • Christoph Wulf
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of
Embodiment and
Learning
Editors
Anja Kraus Christoph Wulf
Department of Teaching and Learning Anthropology and Education
(Ämnesdidaktik) Freie Universität Berlin
Stockholms universitet Berlin, Germany
Stockholm, Sweden

ISBN 978-3-030-93000-4 ISBN 978-3-030-93001-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1

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 Contents

Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and

Education 1
Anja Kraus and Christoph Wulf

Part I Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings 19

Promoting Embodiment Through Education in the Anthropocene 23

Renaud Hétier and Nathanaël Wallenhorst

Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 39

Christoph Wulf

Awareness as a Challenge: Learning Through Our Bodies on a

Planet in Crisis 61
Mariagrazia Portera

Building Blocks of a Historical Overview of ‘Tacit Knowledge’ 75

Kristina Brümmer, Thomas Alkemeyer, and Robert Mitchell

The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment: A

Historical and Phenomenological Investigation 91
Norm Friesen

v
vi Contents

Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical

Interpretation 107
Christian Rittelmeyer

Part II The Pedagogical Relationship and Professionalism 129

Knowledge of Pathos 133

Shoko Suzuki

Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment of the

Pedagogical Relationship 145
Anja Kraus and Thomas Senkbeil

Gestures in the Classroom 163

Regula Fankhauser and Angela Kaspar

Vulnerability: A Basic Concept of Pedagogical Anthropology 179

Daniel Burghardt and Jörg Zirfas

Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships of Power 193

Kathrin Audehm

Part III Body, Sociality and Learning 209

The Performativity of Learning 213

Birgit Althans

The Embodied Other: Mimetic-Empathic Encorporations 229

Léonard Loew

The Embodiment of Gender in Childhood 245

Anja Tervooren

The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 259

Tatiana Shchyttsova
 Contents vii

Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous Learning Conditions and

Embodiment 277
Anja Kraus

Part IV Body, Space and Learning 291

Movement and Touch: Why Bodies Matter 295

Gabriele Klein

Like Water Between One’s Hands: Embodiment of Time and the

Ephemeral of Dance 311
Gabriele Brandstetter

Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 325

Arnd-Michael Nohl and Morvarid Götz-Dehnavi

Body-Related Learning Processes in Museums 341

Bernd Wagner

Part V Body, Virtual Reality and Mindfulness 355

Technical Mediation of Children’s Onlife Worlds 357

Michalis Kontopodis and Kristiina Kumpulainen

Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture:

Results of a Qualitative Study on Transformations of Aesthetic
Practices 367
Benjamin Jörissen, Martha Karoline Schröder, and Anna Carnap

Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice

Between Neuroscience, Therapy and Self-awareness 383
Andreas Nehring

Part VI Classroom Practices 403

The Role of Bodily Experience for Learning Designs 407

Staffan Selander
viii Contents

Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 419

Nathalie Sinclair and Eva Jablonka

Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 437

Cornelie Dietrich and Valerie Riepe

On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation: Educational

Videography Research in Glocalised Classrooms 457
Juliane Engel and Cristina Diz Muñoz

Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 479

Tiago de Oliveira Pinto

Part VII Bodies in Times of Glocalizations 501

Embodiment of the Values System in Indigenous African Society 505

Michael Omolewa and Adetola Adejo

Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 519

Reza Arjmand

The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil

and Latin America 541
Karina Limonta Vieira

Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese Perspective 561

Hongyan Chen

The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of

Education: A Perspective from South Asia 577
Srajana Kaikini
 Notes on Contributors

Adetola Adejo is an assistant lecturer and a PhD student in the Department

of History and International Studies at Babcock University, Nigeria. Her
research interests focus on food politics, food security and climate change
with reference to their impact on states’ relations.
Thomas Alkemeyer is Professor of Sociology and Sociology of Sport at the
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. His main research
interests are sociological theories of practice, sociology of the body and of
sport, subjectivation research and cultural analysis of the present.
Birgit Althans received her doctorate in 1998 with “Der Klatsch, die Frauen
und das Sprechen bei der Arbeit” (Campus 2000). From 2000 to 2008 she
was a research assistant to Prof. Christoph Wulf at the Free University of
Berlin in the Department of Anthropology and Education/General Pedagogy
and in the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) “Cultures of the Performative”. In
2005 she received Habilitation with “Masked Desire. Female Social Reformers
between Social Work and Management” (Campus 2007) from the Freie
Universität (FU) Berlin. Since 2018 she is Professor of Pedagogy at the
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her research interests include pedagogical and
historical anthropology, gender and cultural studies, early management his-
tory and organisational theory and qualitative methods.
Reza Arjmand is Associate Professor of Education at Linnæus University,
Sweden. He has written extensively on Islamic education and everyday life of
Muslims. His recent publications include “Sexuality and Concealment among
Iranian Young Women” (Sexualities, 2019); “Ephemeral Space Sanctification
and Trespassing Gender Boundaries in a Muslim City” (Storia Urbana, 2019);

ix
x Notes on Contributors

Handbook of Islamic Education (2018) and Public Urban Space, Gender and
Segregation: Women-Only Urban Parks in Iran (2017).
Kathrin Audehm is Professor of Pedagogy with a focus on education and
heterogeneity at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her main areas of work
are ethnographical and theoretical research on performative practices, on
authority and power relations in the field of education, the interferences
between socialization and habitualization and gender constructions in popu-
lar culture.
Gabriele Brandstetter is Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at Freie
Universität Berlin, Germany, Director of the Center of Movement Studies
(ZfB) and Co-director of the International Research Center “Interweaving
Performance Cultures”. Her research focus is on history and aesthetics of
dance from the eighteenth century until today; theatre and dance of the
avant-garde; contemporary theatre and dance, performance, theatricality and
gender differences; and concepts of body, movement and image.
Kristina Brümmer is a research assistant in the working group “Sociology
and the Sociology of Sports” of the Institute of Sport Science at the Carl von
Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. Her research focuses on pro-
cesses of subjectivation, coordination and learning in high-performance team
sport. She works with sociological theories of practice, knowledge, technology
and the body as well as methods from qualitative social research (especially
ethnography, videography and interviews).
Daniel Burghardt is a Professor of Educational Science with a focus on
inequality and social education at the University Innsbruck, Austria. His main
areas of work are pedagogical anthropology, pedagogical theory of space and
critical pedagogy.
Anna Carnap is an education researcher and a lecturer at the Friedrich-
Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Humboldt University
of Berlin, Germany. Her research interest is dedicated to the intertwining
relation of situated practice, the visible and the sayable, society and its change.
Her researches had yet taken place in the fields of school, social media
and gender.
Hongyan Chen is an associate professor at the Institute of International and
Comparative Education, East China Normal University, China, and Director
of the Intercultural Education and Communication Research Center. She
obtained her PhD from the Free University of Berlin, Germany. She is the
principal investigator of the National Project “Educational Ritual and the
 Notes on Contributors xi

Urbanization of China”. She has written papers in international conferences

(USA, Germany, Korea, New Zealand and China) and journals including
books and chapters. Her research fields include ritual and mimetic learning in
education, intercultural education, urbanisation and school reforms in mod-
ern China and picture-interpretation as qualitative method.
Morvarid Götz-Dehnavi is working as the Chair for Education Science at
the Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany, since 2006, with her
main focus on history of education, political socialisation, child and youth
research and qualitative methodology.
Tiago de Oliveira Pinto is UNESCO Chair Holder on Transcultural Music
Studies and Head of the Department of Musicology at the University of
Music Franz Liszt, Weimar, and Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany.
De Oliveira Pinto is Former Professor of Social Anthropology at the University
of São Paulo, Brazil, and Director of the Brazilian Cultural Institute in
Germany. He was a visiting scholar at universities in the US, South Africa and
several other European and Brazilian universities. He is the author of books
and numerous chapters and papers on music in Latin America and in Africa,
on music as living cultural heritage, international cultural policy and method-
ological issues in musicology and anthropology.
Cornelie Dietrich is Professor of Educational Sciences at the Humboldt
University of Berlin, Germany, with a focus on primary school education and
co-director of the Interdisciplinary Center of Research in Education (IZBF).
Her main research interests are cultural anthropology in school and child-
hood studies, theory of arts education and language education and theory
of care.
Juliane Engel holds a professorship at the Institute for Pedagogy, Goethe
University Frankfurt, Germany. Her work focuses on theories and empirical
studies of relational subjectivation and videography research in cultural stud-
ies. In her most recent research project on “Glocalized Lifeworlds”, she inves-
tigated ethical judgements of students in the context of heterogeneous
interpretations and (post)digital learning cultures. She has developed respon-
sive methodologies in the context of qualitative educational and social research
in schools and other fields of socio-cultural education.
Regula Fankhauser studied philosophy and German literature in Berne,
Berlin and Zurich, where she received her doctorate in 1998. She actually
holds a position as a senior researcher at the Berne University of Teacher
Education, Switzerland. Her research focuses on teacher educational training,
xii Notes on Contributors

classroom teaching and aesthetic literacy. She currently leads a project on per-
sonalised learning.
Norm Friesen is a professor in the Department of Educational Technology
at the College of Education, Boise State University, USA. He has recently
translated and edited Klaus Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture
and Upbringing (2014) as well as a book on Existentialism and Education in the
Thought of Otto Friedrich Bollnow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He is also the
author of The Textbook and the Lecture: Education in the Age of New
Media (2017).
Renaud Hétier is Professor of Pedagogy at the Catholic University of the
West (UCO), France. Some of his books include Cultivate Attention and Care
in Education. At the Source of Wonderful Tales (Rennes, PURH, 2020),
Humanity Against the Anthropocene (Paris, PUF, 2021) and Presence and
Digital in Education (ed. Bord de l’eau, 2021, in French).
Eva Jablonka is Professor of Mathematics Education at Freie Universität
Berlin, Germany; she has held positions at King’s College, London, Great
Britain, and Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Her main research
interests include mathematics classrooms in different cultures, effects of cur-
ricula and transitions between sectors of education on access to different
forms of mathematical practice and mathematization as a social process.
Benjamin Jörissen is Full Professor of Education with a focus on Culture
and Aesthetics and Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in Arts and Culture
in Education at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
(Germany). The Chair’s research aims to contribute to an understanding of
the role of aesthetic, arts, and cultural education in a transforming and diverse
world, including digitization, postdigital culture, as well as UNESCO-related
and postcolonial perspectives. Jörissen is a member of the European Academy
of Sciences and Arts, member of the UNESCO UNITWIN Network Arts
Education Research for Cultural Diversity and Sustainable Development, as
well as a member of the German Council for Arts and Cultural Education
(Rat für Kulturelle Bildung).
Srajana Kaikini is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Division of
Humanities and Social Sciences and Division of Literature at the School of
Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University, India. Her works span across
philosophy, writing, teaching and curatorial/artistic practice, reflected in her
formal education in architecture, aesthetics, curation and philosophy, along-
side a continuing engagement with music, dance and design.
 Notes on Contributors xiii

Angela Kaspar has a teacher’s degree and studied applied ethics and social
theory in Berne and Zurich, Switzerland, and Jena, Germany. Since 2015 she
has been working as a research assistant at Berne University of Teacher
Education and as a lecturer at Lucerne University of Teacher Education. Her
main research focus is intersectional research and career choice in the context
of personalised learning.
Gabriele Klein is Professor of Sociology with focus on human movement
science, dance and performance studies at University of Hamburg, Germany.
Her English publications include books like Dance (and) Theory (2013, with
G. Brandstetter), Emerging Bodies (2011, with S. Noeth) and issues like On
Labour and Performance (Performance Research 2012, with B. Kunst) as well
as numerous articles like “Urban Choreographies in: The Oxford Handbook
of Dance and Politics” (2017). Her last monograph is entitled Pina Bausch’s
Dance Theater: Company, Artistic Practices and Reception (2020).
Michalis Kontopodis is a professor and Chair of Global Childhood and
Youth Studies at the School of Education, University of Leeds, Great Britain.
In collaboration with a wide network of academics, practitioners, NGOs,
community organizations and policy makers, Kontopodis conducts research
on inclusive and equitable quality education and children’s well-being in a
global perspective. His books, edited volumes and journal articles have been
published in six languages.
Anja Kraus is Professor of Arts and Culture Education at the Stockholm
University, Sweden. Her research interests are corporeality in educational
contexts; phenomenological, ethnographical and theoretical research on prac-
tices; transcultural learning; teacher education; and different questions within
arts education and pedagogical anthropology.
Kristiina Kumpulainen is Professor of Education at the University of
Helsinki, Finland, and an associate professor at Simon Fraser University,
Canada. She has written widely on communication, learning and education
in the digital age including publications on multiliteracies, children’s agency
as well as visual and participatory research methodologies. She serves as the
co-editor of Elsevier’s journal Learning, Culture and Social Interaction.
Léonard Loew is a lecturer in the Social Sciences Department at the
Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken,
Germany. He has studied history, philosophy and educational sciences, and
made his PhD with a thesis on the history of the empathy-idea. His main
focuses in research are the history of ideas in pedagogy, historical semantics
and social theory of the psyche, ethics and epistemology of the educational
relationship.
xiv Notes on Contributors

Robert Mitchell is a research assistant at the Institute of Sociology, Johannes

Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany; scientific coordinator of the
research center ‘Human Differentiation’ at the JGU Mainz. Capitalizing on
his experience as a professional ballet dancer, his autoethnographic research
focuses on movement systems, his most recent work comparing ballet and
taijiquan. His research interests are sociological theory, sociology of the body,
practice theories and (auto-)ethnography.
Cristina Diz Muñoz is a research assistant at the Institute of Secondary
School Pedagogy, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her work focuses
on notions of difference and knowledge as well as on representation practices
within the school context—especially from a postcolonial perspective. Her
PhD project analyses digital-aesthetic forms of reflection as paradigms of
inquiry on the emergence of subject positionings in the classroom.
Andreas Nehring is Professor of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology
at the University of Erlangen, Germany. His main areas of work are theories
in religious and cultural studies, postcolonial theologies, transcultural pro-
cesses of exchange and communication between Europe and India, Buddhist
modernism and its western expressions.
Arnd-Michael Nohl studied educational science, psychology and Islamic
studies in Heidelberg, Germany; Ankara, Turkey; and at the Freie Universität
(FU) Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 2001. After positions as
research assistant (1997–2001 FU Berlin, 2001–2004 University of
Magdeburg), he was Assistant Professor of Intercultural Education at the FU
Berlin from 2004 to 2006 and since then he has been Full Professor of the
Foundations of Education at the University of the Federal Armed Forces/
Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg.
Michael Omolewa, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of the History of Education
at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, member of the Council of the
International African Institute in the UK and of the Centre for Black Culture
and International Understanding. He served as the president of the 32nd ses-
sion of the General Conference of UNESCO and on editorial boards of many
learned journals including the Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of
the History of Education, Journal of African American History and the
International Review of Education.
Mariagrazia Portera is Junior Research Fellow in Aesthetics at University of
Florence, Italy, after being a post-doctoral fellow at the Universities of Rijeka,
Berlin, Zagreb and Edinburgh. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the
 Notes on Contributors xv

University of Florence. She has worked on themes concerning the history of

aesthetics between the eighteenth century and nineteenth century in Germany;
her current areas of interest are contemporary aesthetics, the role of habits in
philosophy and in aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics, biology
and neurosciences.
Valerie Riepe is a scientific associate in the Art and Design Department at
the University of Europe for Applied Sciences, Campus Hamburg, Germany.
Her main research interests are the theorisation of (in)equality, cultural and
social theory of body and embodiment as well as ethnographic methods and
methodology.
Christian Rittelmeyer was Professor of Pedagogy at the University of
Göttingen, Germany. His main areas of work are theory and history of educa-
tion, pedagogical anthropology, psychology of child development, empirical
and phenomenological research methods and aesthetic education.
Martha Karoline Schröder is a consultant for media education and e-learn-
ing at the Saxony-Anhalt State Institute for School Quality and Teacher
Education, Leipzig, Germany. Her research focuses on transformation pro-
cesses of cultural practices in the post-digital age.
Staffan Selander is Professor Emeritus of Education in the Department of
Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, Sweden. He is the
founder of the e-journal Designs for Learning (and the bi-annual conferences)
and has during the last ten years focused on designs for learning, multimodal
knowledge representations and cultures of recognition.
Thomas Senkbeil PhD, is associate in profession and professionalization
research at the University of Education FHNW. His main areas of work are
pedagogical anthropology, social pedagogy, educational philosophy and criti-
cal culture sciences.
Tatiana Shchyttsova is a professor in Philosophy at the Department of
Social Sciences and Director of the Center for Research of Intersubjectivity
and Interpersonal Relations at the European Humanities University, Vilnius,
Lithuania. Her main areas of work are philosophical anthropology, phenom-
enology of intersubjectivity, social philosophy and theories of emotions.
Nathalie Sinclair is a professor at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada,
and Canada Research Chair in Tangible Mathematics Learning. Her main
research interests are in the use of technology in mathematics thinking and
learning, in the aesthetics of mathematical activity and in posthuman theories
xvi Notes on Contributors

that seek to understand the co-construction of material and cultural processes

as they pertain to mathematics knowing.
Shoko Suzuki is Professor of Educational Philosophy at the Kyoto University,
Japan; principal investigator of the Center for Advanced Integrated
Intelligence, National Research Institute Riken, Japan; and a visiting researcher
at Research Institute for Information and Communications Policy, Ministry
of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan. In 2009–2010 he was a visit-
ing professor at Free University of Berlin. Her recent publication is “Redefining
Humanity in the Era of AI—Technical Civilization” (“Paragrana—Zeitschrift
für Historische Anthropologie”, 2020).
Anja Tervooren is Professor of Education and Childhood Studies at the
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research is situated in the fields
of ethnography and inclusion, and doing difference in childhood and youth.
She completed her PhD from the Free University of Berlin, worked at Goethe
University Frankfurt and held a professorship at the University of Hamburg
prior to joining her current institution.
Karina Limonta Vieira holds a Doctorate Degree in Education from
Universidade Estadual Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil, with doctoral internship at
Interdisciplinary Center for Historical Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin.
She is member of Gesellschaft für Historische Anthropologie and International
Network of Historical-cultural Anthropology. Her research interests include
foundations of education, anthropology of education, mimesis, cultural learn-
ing and body.
Bernd Wagner is Professor of Social Science Education at the University of
Leipzig, Germany. His main areas of work are intercultural and political edu-
cation in primary school lessons of social science, primary school children in
museums, early education and objects of museum collections, anthropologi-
cal research in childhood education and education for sustainability.
Nathanaël Wallenhorst is an associate professor at the Catholic University
of the West (UCO), France. Some of his books are The Anthropocene Decoded
for Humans (Le Pommier, 2019, in French), Educate in Anthropocene (ed. with
Pierron, Le Bord de l’eau 2019, in French) and Resistance, Resonance: Learn to
Change the World with Hartmut Rosa (ed. Le Pommier, 2020, in French).
 Notes on Contributors xvii

Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education and a founding

member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology at Freie
Universität Berlin, Germany. He has been a visiting professor or been involved
in research projects at many universities across the world. Major research areas
include historical and cultural anthropology, educational anthropology, ritu-
als, gestures, emotions, imagination, intercultural communication, mimesis,
aesthetics, epistemology and Anthropocene. His books have been translated
into 20 languages. He is the vice-president of the German Commission
for UNESCO.
Jörg Zirfas is Professor of Pedagogy with a focus on pedagogical anthro-
pology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His main areas of work are
pedagogical and historical anthropology, philosophy of education, peda-
gogical ethnography and psychoanalysis, cultural education and aesthetic
education.
 List of Figures

The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment: A Historical

and Phenomenological Investigation
Fig. 1 One, two, … three, four, five, six 100
Fig. 2 Let’s try Alizé or Marie, then. What was the new number we
just learned? 101
Fig. 3 Wake up, will you? Seven! 101
Fig. 4 Lopez briefly looks away and sighs 103

Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning

Fig. 1 Photogram at 00:01 (copyright: the authors) 336

Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture: Results

of a Qualitative Study on Transformations of Aesthetic Practices
Fig. 1 Hybrid creative practices using the example of the case vignette
‘Lara and Lara’ 377

Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With

Fig. 1 Exhibits in the Friedrich-Froebel-Museum in the Thuringian town
Bad Blankenburg, in the house that the practitioner and theorist of
early pedagogy used for his first kindergarten. The images refer to the
Spiel und Beschäftigungskasten No. 3 (play and activity box No 3). (a)
Some of the forms of knowledge and gestures used to interact with
the cubes; (b) some of the forms of beauty. (Source: the author’s own
photos) 421
Fig. 2 Picture of a master and disciples using counting rods from the
Seijutsu Sangaku Zue 1795; according to Volkov (2018, p. 152) a

xix
xx List of Figures

collection of pictures related to computation methods by Miyake

Katataka (1663–1746). (Source: Public domain, Wikimedia
Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/
Counting_board.jpg)) 423
Fig. 3 (a) A 2-regular orientations of C26 in their stylised form; (b) the
drawing on the backboard. (Source: diagram by graduate student
Finn, Menz (2015), Figs. 6–18 (left) p. 199; Fred’s diagram, Menz
(2015), Figs. 6–16 (right), p. 196) 430
Fig. 4 A permutation of four letters achieved by swapping the last two.
(Source: the author’s own diagram) 430
Fig. 5 A diagram showing all six permutations of the letters a, e and r in a
transposition graph. (Source: the author’s own diagram) 431

Social Choreographies in Primary School Education

Fig. 1 Source: Authors’ own picture 442
Fig. 2 Source: Authors’ own picture 444
Fig. 3 Source: Authors’ own picture 447
Fig. 4 Source: Authors’ own picture 450
Fig. 5 Source: Authors’ own picture 450
Fig. 6 Source: Authors’ own picture 451
Fig. 7 Source: Authors’ own diagram 452

On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation: Educational

Videography Research in Glocalised Classrooms
Fig. 1 Physical learning and education processes in the classroom’s world
trade game are here portrayed from a high-angle camera shot: wide
shot of the classroom from above. (Source: Authors’ own picture) 463
Fig. 2 Touch: A student is holding her breath while trying to stop a hand
reaching for a piece of paper. (Source: Authors’ own picture) 464
Fig. 3 Body and technology: An isolated, lonely student interacts with
the audio recorder and then addresses the camera directly. (Source:
Authors’ own picture) 464
Fig. 4 Wanting to participate in class activities, a student reaches for a pair
of scissors. Another student wants to push the first one out of her
territory; her hand gestures express distancing attempts. (Source:
Authors’ own picture) 465
Fig. 5 A student holds another in a headlock while looking at a girl. Neither
of the girls at the table looks at what the other students are doing;
they smile and keep on working. (Source: Authors’ own picture) 465
 List of Figures xxi

Music as an Embodied Learning Experience

Fig. 1 Short extract of a transcription of a drumming piece sequence
from a silent film, based on a ‘frame-to-frame’ analysis
(Kubik, 1984, p. 216) 484
Fig. 2 Photo: Rubab master Ustad Ghulam Hussein with pupil, from
Kabul: the master and his student on stage in Weimar (University
of Music Franz Liszt, 2015) 493
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge
for Learning and Education
Anja Kraus and Christoph Wulf

The aim of this handbook is to show that embodiment is far more important
in learning and education than is often assumed. Modern cognitive science
has also reached this conclusion, having recognized that consciousness and
cognitive processes need a physical body with which to interact, without
which they would not exist. This has long been known in the fields of
Anthropology, Cultural Studies and the Humanities. In recent decades, how-
ever, it has become considerably more important. In many societies and in
many sciences, there is an increased interest in the body and the concept of
embodiment. Today, there is hardly any scientific discipline which is not
expressly interested in processes of embodiment. The chapters in this hand-
book, therefore, bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarly
research on embodiment from different countries in many areas of society,
focusing especially on children and young adults. In situating the body at the
centre of educational practices and research, the authors follow historical,
conceptual, empirical and practical educational approaches and traditions.
The core argument is as follows: on a superficial level, education appears to
be designed by normative requirements and largely without regard to bodily

A. Kraus (*)
Department of Teaching and Learning (Ämnesdidaktik), Stockholms universitet,
Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: anja.kraus@su.se
C. Wulf
Anthropology and Education, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: christoph.wulf@fu-berlin.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1

A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_1
2 A. Kraus and C. Wulf

needs and corporeal interactions. However, thorough analysis reveals that

education is composed of a broad spectrum of bodily expressions, forms of
‘corporeal regulation’, personal abilities, motivations, subjective perceptions,
individual peculiarities and the like. These aspects play a major role in learn-
ers’ success. Here, we can see a historical development in terms of focusing
on bodies as vehicles of learning. In former times young adults’ bodies were
viewed either as obstacles to learning due to factors such as weakness and
deviance, or as objects, as in the context of physical education or training
lessons.
The handbook forms part of a development in the Humanities in which
there has been a re-evaluation of the body. The book provides an overview of
corporeality and embodiment from both theoretical and empirical perspec-
tives. It focuses on seven areas in which the processes of embodiment and
learning in the field of education are particularly important. Before turning
to these, however, it is important to define the frame of reference of our
research.
There was an explicit interest in the body in the progressive education of
Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the
twentieth centuries, and this interest was then developed further in
Educational Anthropology over the last 50 years under the influence of
Anthropology and General Pedagogics when it became an important area of
education and Educational Science research (Wulf, 2013, 2022b). This
development was supported by a number of research projects in the
Humanities and Social Sciences which highlighted the important social role
of the body. There were important insights into the role played by the ‘per-
formative’ and the ‘material turn’ in our understanding of the body—this
will be explored further below (Wulf and Zirfas, 2007; Nohl, 2011). It
became clear that incorporating the world is dependent on our imagination
and that this generates emotions of many kinds. Studies show that many
embodiment processes generate practical knowledge (Kraus, 2008–2012).
A considerable part of this knowledge is implicit or tacit. This is where we
see the limits of theoretical language-based research. Tacit or wordless
knowledge is practical knowledge that is important for social and pedagogi-
cal action (Kraus et al., 2021). This knowledge is indispensable for the social
changes that must be made as a consequence of the many negative effects of
the Anthropocene (Wallenhorst and Wulf, 2023).
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and Education 3

1 Historical Perspectives
The body has become an increasingly important subject in the Humanities,
Social Sciences and Cultural Studies for almost 50 years now. In the early
1980s there was a growth in studies on the body (Feher et al., 1983). It is
therefore completely acceptable to speak of a “return of the body” (Kamper
and Wulf, 1982). From the very beginning of this early research it was clear
that there is no single scientific discipline that can claim the body as its own
topic, and also that new fields of knowledge were emerging with different
thematic approaches and research methods. New forms of knowledge were
appearing (that were sometimes contradictory), not only because of their
interdisciplinary nature but also because they were intercultural (Wulf and
Kamper, 2002).
From a historical point of view there were several reasons for the body
becoming a central subject of research in the Humanities, with new concep-
tions of the world and humanity. One reason lies in the fact that the tradi-
tional ‘western’ division between body and spirit was unsatisfactory. It had led
to an increase in processes of abstraction, which has distanced, disciplined and
instrumentalized the body. With the increase in digitalization there has been
a further intensification of these processes of rationalizing the body, seeing it
in terms of economic factors, taking away its materiality, all of which can be
seen as a result of this division (Kontopodis et al., 2017). We have become
increasingly aware of the appropriation of the body for purposes that have
nothing to do with human bodiliness (that has been suffered in silence) and
also of the destructive effects of this development on many societies and the
life on our planet. Human bodies with their diverse senses, passions and
desires have become forced into a control mechanism of prohibitions and
rules and subjected to many forms of repression. Critical Theory, for example,
has seen this as a consequence of the increasing abstraction, the media trans-
formation of our world and the transformation into images, in many instances,
there has been an increase in psychogenic and sociogenic illnesses. Many of
these are related to the undesirable side-effects of a social dynamic that is ori-
ented towards growth and progress, with side-effects which have expedited
climate change, the depletion of non-renewable resources and fast-growing
rubbish mountains. In leisure, art and culture we see a marked increase in the
desire for bodily experiences to compensate for this abstraction. This can be
interpreted as a desire to find new ways to live and new meanings in our lives
and a less destructive relationship with nature and our own bodies.
4 A. Kraus and C. Wulf

2 Continental Educational Science

and Educational Anthropology
In the Humanities and Social Sciences, the reception and development of the
paradigm of the body has been different across the countries of Europe, and
this is still the case. The same is also true of the field of education where there
have always been different assumptions in different countries on what peda-
gogy is about. In this book you will find a collection of chapters that picks up
on a variety of traditions and premises that have coloured the way the body
and embodiment have become an important subject in society and education.
In Germany, for example, there were two important developments which we
will briefly mention.
One development relates to the concept of ‘Bildung’ which has become a
central concept in education since the early nineteenth century. Johann
H. Pestalozzi prepared the ground for this in some ways but the concept was
influenced and made popular by Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Friedrich Schleiermacher and many others (Wulf, 2022b). In the 20th cen-
tury, it came to our attention through Progressive Education, and it was then
picked up by the Frankfurt School that emphasized the political dimension
that had received too little attention until then. In the present day there are
controversial discussions about using the concept to characterize quantitative
metric empirical studies as well. The concept of ‘Bildung’ differs from the
English tradition of ‘education’ which is understood predominantly as a task
performed in the context of school. ‘Bildung’ goes further, and the emphasis
is placed on the activity and the responsibility of subjects for their own
‘Bildung’. ‘Bildung’ is not limited to teaching and learning in school and to
an education that is going to be useful or vocational. The goal is a fully
rounded person, morally, politically and aesthetically, who has the capability
of judging and forming critical opinions.
The second development that led to seeing the body and embodiment as
issues in the field of education was based on discussions in Anthropology and
Educational Anthropology which played an increasingly important role in
German Educational Science from the 1960s onwards. The understanding of
Anthropology and Educational Anthropology that formed the basis of this
again differed from the customary understanding of the concepts in the
English-speaking world. Anthropology was understood first and foremost as
four paradigms. Two of these were based on what is common to all humanity
(Wulf, 2013). They were hominization (Roberts, 2011) and Philosophical
Anthropology that had its inception in Germany in the first half of the
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and Education 5

twentieth century (Scheler, 2009; Plessner, 1981; Gehlen, 1988). The other
two paradigms were Historical Anthropology that grew up at the same time
in France around the Ecole des Annales (Burke, 1991; Bloch, 1964) and
Cultural or Social Anthropology or Ethnology that became popular in several
European countries (Kuper, 1973). Subsequently, views which were based
rather more on general characteristics of the human body and on incorpora-
tion were combined with views which emphasized that what was special about
the body and what was imprinted differently depending on cultural and his-
torical factors. Educational Anthropology was also swayed by this, changing
its focus from being predominantly philosophical, developing instead into a
historical, cultural, educational anthropology. Educational anthropology
today considers theoretical philosophical, historical and ethnographic research
important (Wulf and Zirfas, 2014). The anthropological approach has helped
with the understanding and research of embodiment and learning as being on
the one hand something common to us all and on the other as a process that
is culturally and historically different. In the globalized world of the
Anthropocene in which human beings largely determine the fate of the planet
and where it is essential to put right what has gone badly wrong in a com-
pletely different way, an anthropological view of things together with the edu-
cational practices based on this are of key importance. Perhaps this will also
mean that the sustainability goals will be achieved (UN, 2015). If education
approaches the human body, embodiment and learning in a conscious and
respectful way, then educational anthropology and education will be able to
play an important part in fulfilling this task (Wallenhorst and Wulf, 2023).

3 Learners as Human Beings

A further reason for ‘rediscovering the body’ in education is because corpore-
ality plays an especially important role for children and young people. Our
relationship to our body changes depending on our age and what we experi-
ence as pleasurable or repulsive, what draws our attention or what doesn’t
interest us at all, and also depending on how we evaluate something (Kraus,
2000). This plays a particularly important role in school and classroom educa-
tion (Kraus, 2008–2012).
Seen in a more general way, as young people’s personalities develop it
becomes clear that listening, being spoken to by another person and perceiv-
ing the world through hearing are of central importance for the incorporation
of the world into their imaginary. The fact that we hear ourselves when we
speak plays a key role in the forming of the subject and intersubjectivity. The
6 A. Kraus and C. Wulf

senses are also extremely important in the way we experience the world. It is
through smell, taste and touch that we perceive and (more or less implic-
itly) understand the world, its objects, other people and also ourselves. It is
through the senses that we experience the alterity of the world and are able to
become individuals and subjects (Michaels and Wulf, 2014; Wulf, 2016).
Physical movements are also important. They lead to incorporations which
transform the outside world into the world inside us and transform the inner
world of our imaginary into the outside world. Lakoff and Johnson (1999)
have detected several directions of perception: source–path–goal; up–down;
into–out of; towards–away from; straight–curves, which are bound to the
positions and movements of the body and which are essential for our balance
and physical orientation in space.

4 Corporeality and Senses

“ʻCorporealityʼ is a term that can be used to signify the body as social actant”
(Gilleard and Higgs, 2013, p. 17). Our corporeality conveys and performs
individuality, such as specific dispositions, age, gender, a certain social upbring-
ing and cultural imprint. Corporeality is the conditio sine qua non for all indi-
vidual life. As one cannot position oneself outside of one’s perceptions,
corporeality largely evades transparency and reflection. It can neither be fully
grasped nor expressed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty expressed this from a phenom-
enological point of view: “In so far as it sees or touches the world, my body can
therefore be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its ever being an object,
ever being completely constituted [M.-P’s emphasis] is that it is the instance by
which there are objects” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 92). According to phenom-
enology, all reality appears in the first hand as sensual impressions, non-articu-
lable perceptions, subliminal thoughts and as the origin of speaking in silence.
As our body is our ‘natural I and as such the subject of perception’, we are our
body, without any distance. Thus, we cannot have a complete consciousness
about our living body. The bodily orientation in an individual or situational
field of seeing, acting or speaking is a ‘point zero’. At the point zero—where we
always already are—we become (tacitly) aware of how one deals with some-
thing and how practices relate to their contexts. This is where Meyer-Drawe
(2008) locates the experience of learning. Learning, thus, lacks evidence regard-
ing its starting point and process—it is an occurrence. In learning, former
knowledge is rejected and new features enter familiar contexts: an inner
estrangement enables us to respond to things we do not yet know. Thus, we do
not gain knowledge, insight and understanding only in an active way. Rather
we experience and learn by dealing with multiple disruptions, chiasms and
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and Education 7

fissures. After we have learnt something, then all of a sudden things make sense
in a kind of archaic and persistent way, as if this sense had been there forever.
It is our senses that primarily enable us to connect with others and the
world outside our own body and also to perceive ourselves (Michaels and
Wulf, 2014). There are three aspects that clarify the process of embodiment
and perceptions. The first is based on the physical attributes of homo sapiens
and, as the prerequisite for our sensory experiences, is the same for all humans.
The second aspect denotes the historical and cultural differences in human
perception. There are differences depending on whether people live in the
Middle Ages or in the present day, in Europe or in China. The third aspect is
determined by the uniqueness of each individual person which distinguishes
them and their lifeworlds from all other people. All our sensory perceptions
are constituted through the working together of these three aspects, which are
merged into an inextricable nexus in which the individual aspects can no lon-
ger be differentiated from each other. The senses cannot be seen in isolation.
The way we understand the senses determines how we understand our bodies
and vice versa. Michael Polanyi described this situation thus: “Our body is the
only assembly of things known as most exclusively by relying on our aware-
ness of them for attending to something else… we make sense of the world,
we rely on our tacit knowledge of impact made by the world on our body and
the complex of our body these impacts” (Polanyi, 1974, pp. 147, 148).
Bourdieu drew our attention to the fact that our social habitus is the conse-
quence of a multidimensional embodiment (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990) in the
course of which embodied identities and embodied practices are formed,
through which we are socially engaged and historically situated within social
and personal time: Embodiment encompasses all those actions performed by
the body or on the body which are inextricably oriented towards the social. As
living beings and living bodies we react to our social environment: we learn
and act.

5 Performativity
The growing interest in the body and embodiment is also connected to the
discovery of the cultural importance of performativity, performance arts and
the performativity of theatrical staging and productions. Performativity high-
lights a central aspect of social action and behaviour. Here the meanings of
actions are not predominantly interpreted in words. What is central are the
staging and performance and the skills that a situation demands. It is the
8 A. Kraus and C. Wulf

social staging and performance of actions and ways of behaving that are
important. The quality of people’s social relations depends very much on
‘how’ people use their bodies, that is, the physical distance they keep, their
stance and posture and gestures. All of these convey to other people more than
the conscious intentions of their actions. The bodily qualities of actions also
suggest intersubjective and social relations, interpretations and meaning,
views of the future and so on. In order to give a full picture of processes of
embodiment in education we investigate here how social and educational
action comes about and the extent to which it is intermeshed with language,
deeds and imagination (see also Kress et al., 2021), how its uniqueness is a
result of social and cultural frameworks (Resina and Wulf, 2019).
Based on the premise that pedagogy is a science of actions, that is, a practi-
cal science to be practised (Wulf, 2003), performativity in the act of education
acquires a special importance in the processes of embodiment and learning.
Since performative practices place an emphasis on valid norms, rules and cer-
tainties, they can have a conserving and stabilizing effect as well as one that
transforms or subverts a situation at hand. The execution of performative acts
contains the possibility of disempowering and changing the norms and rules
in their very execution, treating them in an ironical way and questioning their
unquestionability.
Performative acts also have a dimension that refers back to itself, identifies
and exemplifies itself. They do not definitively refer to something outside of
themselves but to something within themselves; they do what they mean;
their meaning is to be found in their execution. By being executed they por-
tray a reality; they create ‘their’ reality as ‘the’ reality in question (Wulf and
Zirfas, 2007, 2014).
Social knowledge can be grasped as performative knowledge that has been
acquired through the execution of social practices (Wulf et al., 2010). Here we
see that the corporeality of the people performing the actions, from the per-
formativity perspective, seen as elements of staging and performance, is of
central importance. Social actions are symbolic arrangements of the human
body. When we consider performativity, it is a question of how the links
between language, power and action that make up social action determine our
world and thus also education (Wulf et al., 2001; Wulf and Zirfas, 2007).
From the performativity point of view, we realize that not only norms but
also objects, spaces theories about, bodies and artefacts play a part in every-
thing we do, and this means that what happens in an educational context
need to be rethought. The performativity concept locates the body as the site
and medium of all that we do. In empirical research, the performative turn
involves a micro-analytic examination of various practices. The performative
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and Education 9

turn entails a revision of the existing theoretical approaches to educational

practices and learning by drawing our attention to tacit, that is, unwritten,
unofficial and unintended but effective features and practices and, in this con-
text, to corporeality (Kraus et al., 2021). From a methodological point of
view, a social setting is then not seen as merely ‘given’, but as ‘constituted’ by
historical and cultural conventions, conceptual approaches, methodological
and methodical presuppositions and the like.

6 Mimetic Processes
In recent years there have been three approaches to researching and demon-
strating the important role of mimetic processes in the incorporation of
knowledge. The first of these shows how mimetic processes were conceptual-
ized historically in European philosophy from Plato to Derrida. It also shows
how these processes were developed as important ways of handing down cul-
ture from one generation to the next. According to the mimesis approach,
embodiment takes place by means of copying, ‘wanting to become like’,
‘becoming similar to’ or assimilation. Acting mimetically also means express-
ing, ‘bringing something into being’ or even anticipating something that does
not yet exist (Gebauer and Wulf, 1995, 1998).
A second approach that has demonstrated the importance of mimetic pro-
cesses for the incorporation of social relations was developed as part of
Evolutionary Anthropology. Here investigations have shown that although
elementary forms of mimetic learning do take place also in non-human pri-
mates, human beings (and small children in particular) have the special capac-
ity to learn mimetically (Tomasello, 1999). In young children’s striving to
become similar to adults or older siblings we find the motivation to under-
stand causal connections between the objects of the world and the communi-
cative intentions of other people in gestures, symbols and constructions.
Accordingly, event schemas and object categories are formed through depen-
dence on others (Tomasello, 2008).
Thirdly, research on mirror neurons has shown that we reproduce what we
have perceived in our brains in the very process of perceiving it. For example,
an act of violence elicits similar processes in the person perceiving it to those
in the person committing it. This incorporation happens because of the mir-
ror neuron system (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2008; Jacoboni, 2008).
Mimetic abilities are interwoven with such bodily processes and often
counteract social abstraction processes. They form a bridge to what is outside
of us, to the world and to other people. Thus, the focus on mimetic learning
10 A. Kraus and C. Wulf

softens the strict split between subject and object and the sharp difference
between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. What we have instead is an understanding of some-
thing ‘in between’, which is experienced in a person’s assimilation of an out-
side world or another person. Mimetic processes contain rational elements;
however, they go beyond this. As mimetic processes allow us to get really close
to objects, they are indispensable for our understanding. Whereas modern
rational thinking relates to the isolated subject of cognition, the mimetic pro-
cesses take place in a network of relationships between subjects. The mimetic
creation of a symbolic world makes reference to other world views and draws
other people into our own world. It recognizes the exchange between world
and subject and the aspect of power that this contains.
The history of mimetic processes in education and human development is
also the history of the struggle for the power to create symbolic worlds, for the
power to portray oneself and others and the power to interpret the world in
one’s own way or else to fit in or perhaps be forced into doing so. In this way,
especially in the field of education and socialization, mimesis is also part of
the history of power structures.

7 Imagination
Imagination plays an essential role in the embodiment that takes place through
mimetic processes. Imagination helps to transform the outside world into the
inner world and the inner world into the outside world (Wulf, 2022a).
Imagination is the force that creates images, that expresses itself in images and
that can be understood in images. In a general sense, inner and outer ‘images’
include feelings, atmospheres and other ‘imaginations’, that is sounds, traces
of touch, smell and taste. In the imagination on the one hand what is absent
is present; but on the other, the imagination is also materially absent. The
representative character of the imagination lies in this paradoxical structure.
The representative power of imagination makes it possible to transform and
incorporate the outside world into the inside world and the inside world into
the outside world. The spectrum of possible changes in this process ranges
from minimal deviations to major innovations and inventions. While a psy-
choanalytic perspective, for example, tends to point to the limited possibilities
of emotions changing (Kraus, 2000), an aesthetic perspective emphasizes the
creative possibilities of the individual. Perceptions of both the external world
and internal images can generate emotions. An example of this are percep-
tions of erotic situations in the outside world or the perception of erotic
images in the imagination. The erotic images of the imagination can precede
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and Education 11

and evoke emotions; they can become their medium and accompany them; as
well as they can be a consequence of emotions.
Arnold Gehlen (1988) sees imagination as rooted in the life of the human
body and its origin in the vegetative system and understands it in connection
with the excess drive of humans. For André Leroi-Gourhan, the development
of the imagination has its starting point in the muscular activities in connec-
tion with movement, food and sex (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993). Marcel Jousse
(1974) sees the emergence of the imagination in the mimetic actions of peo-
ple directed towards the processes of nature. Despite their different points of
view, these authors agree that imagination is closely related to people’s physi-
cal activities, emotions and actions and is therefore essential for embodiment:
the imagination creates representations of emotions in the world of ideas and
is, thereby, an important prerequisite for the ability to communicate emo-
tions. Imagination also brings emotions to light in dreams, visions and hal-
lucinations and enables them to be created in works of culture, in art and
literature, theatre, music and architecture, as well as in politics, business and
technology (Wulf, 2022b). While imagination and emotion are universal
human life conditions, historically and culturally they manifest themselves
differently (Huppauf and Wulf, 2009). They unfold differently under differ-
ent historical and cultural conditions.

8 Emotions
Processes of embodiment produce feelings. This is true both of perceptions of
the world that are based on the senses and also of processes of the imagination
which bring to our consciousness imaginary worlds that are not really present,
such as those created in literary texts for example. In teaching and learning
feelings and the formation of feelings are of central importance. They are
important in how people lead their lives. There are no embodiment processes
that do not affect the emotions which are important in the constitution of the
person and of individuality (Michaels and Wulf, 2012).
The truth of this was seen in Johann Gottfried Herder’s response to Descartes’
cogito ergo sum: “I feel! I am” (Herder, 1960, p. 282). Feeling is understood here
as a guarantee of being, of human existence. For Herder, people experience
themselves in their feelings, in the immediate presence of feeling, of touching.
The feeling derived from the sense of touch is the sense that determines the
emotions. On the one hand, emotions are similar, while, on the other hand,
they are different from person to person. Emotions are socially and culturally
shaped, that is, they are incorporated and communicated linguistically, medially
12 A. Kraus and C. Wulf

and normatively. Many emotions are generated and conveyed in interactions;

they are the result of relationships with other people and with the world.
Emotions are understood neither as essence nor as-mere social and cultural con-
structions. Emotions have a bio-social character. From such an understanding
of emotion a number of challenges arise that require further exploration. These
include the relationship between emotion and body, in particular between emo-
tion and movement, emotion and action, emotion and ritual, emotion and
memory, emotion and language, emotion and imagination.
In contrast to the extensive experimental research into emotions, which
often tends to regard emotions as being independent of their historical and
cultural contexts and draws universal conclusions in a way that is not always
acceptable, the focus of anthropological and historical research as well as
historical-anthropological research is on the particularity resulting from a sit-
uation and a context. There seems to be a limited number of basic emotions,
but there are numerous shades, blends and overlays between these so that
many emotions are ambiguous (Kraus et al., 2021). Every time emotions are
new, but also known at the same time; we know them, but not well enough;
much has been said about them, but no language can capture them fully; they
surprise, cannot be tied down, they change and evade control. Even in mem-
ory they appear differently. Emotions are fluid; that makes it difficult to make
them objects of cognition; there is a difference that is hard to resolve between
their dynamic movement and the claim to distanced objective knowledge.
The commercialization of emotions permeates all areas of human relation-
ships in capitalist societies (Martin et al., 2003; Gobé, 2001). Not only com-
mercialization, but also the politicization of emotions plays an important role
in all societies and cultures. In particular where politics becomes populist,
emotions are used, or rather misused, for example, by playing with people’s
fears and hopes in order to achieve political goals (Furedi, 2005).

9 Tacit Knowledge
As we have seen, in research on embodiment and learning we keep coming
up against the limitations of a knowledge that can be expressed in language.
We experience the difference between what can be put into words and the
perception and learning processes of the senses and the body. The research
on iconic and performative knowledge has shown that the insights gained
here are quite different from those that can be expressed and portrayed in
language. Much of the learning that is done by the body takes place on an
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and Education 13

unconscious level or via the senses and movements of the body (Kraus
et al., 2021).
With his distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, Gilbert
Ryle had already in the 1940s drawn attention to the fact that there are differ-
ent forms of knowledge, the practical implementations of which, described as
‘knowing how’, are difficult to research (Ryle, 1990; Collins, 2010). With
these methods, the focus is not on the acquisition of factual knowledge that
can be expressed linguistically. On the contrary, ‘knowing how’ describes a
skill that enables the person to act. ‘Knowing how’ is learned in mimetic pro-
cesses by relating to the practices of other people. An example of this is rituals.
Rituals are not statements, reasons or explanations themselves, but they trans-
port such. They must be staged and performed in order to come into force.
The knowledge required for rituals is a performative, practical knowledge,
which differs from the knowledge needed for the description, interpretation
and analysis of rituals. One can see here that ‘knowing how’ is practical knowl-
edge—an embodied skill that is visible in a person’s performance (Wulf, 2006).
A practice such as driving a car is only learned if the explanation of how to
learn was understood. But constantly remembering the explanation is not
necessary to execute the action. An action cannot be ‘skilfully’ performed as
long as this remembering is necessary. Learning happens through embodi-
ment, through which the person gets the skill to do something, that is, to
drive a car. Practical skill is thus a form of knowledge that requires attention
and social recognition; in the words of Gilbert Ryle (1990, p. 33): “Successful
practice precedes its actual theory”. Types of practical knowledge are constitu-
tive for many sciences such as Medicine, Law and Education. In this regard,
embodiment and learning are decisive for all everyday and professional
knowledge.

10 The Structure of the Handbook

This handbook develops the awareness that, as the agent, medium and
addressee of education and socialization, the body plays a central role in learn-
ing and education in several specific ways. In line with its goals the handbook
is divided into seven parts, each one of which has its own short introduction.

1. Part I consists of various “Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings”

which help to put the subject into context. It includes chapters on how the
subject can be anthropologically and socially classified as part of the
Anthropocene, on the embodiment of cognition, on attentiveness, on tacit
14 A. Kraus and C. Wulf

knowledge and on the importance of mindfulness and the intergenera-

tional and antinomic foundations of pedagogy.
2. Part II moves on to examine “The Pedagogical Relationship and
Professionalism”. In view of the vulnerability of the body, here the focus is
on the significance of power, how power is expressed in educational ges-
tures, and on the need for a tactful approach in enculturation and
socialization.
3. Part III, “Body, Sociality and Learning”, continues to develop and analyse
questions around enculturation and socialisation. Mimetic and performa-
tive processes underpinning education and the embodiment of learning
are examined. These chapters show that learning based on embodiment is
focused on other people and that experiences of alterity and gender play a
key role in the engendering of emotions.
4. Part IV, “Body, Space and Learning”, examines the importance of move-
ment and touch, of temporality, space and materiality in processes of
embodiment. Embodiment is to be seen as a multisensory, multimodal
process. This is illustrated with examples from the worlds of dance, muse-
ums and school.
5. In Part V, “Body, Virtual Reality and Mindfulness”, our attention turns to
the forms of embodiment that result from the processes of digital transfor-
mation and also the role of mindfulness in the development of individual-
ity and subjectivity.
6. In Part VI, “Classroom Practices”, the focus turns to school learning pro-
cesses, how they are designed and choreographed and the ‘structured ways
of acting together with others’, with an example from a mathematics les-
son. A conscious approach to embodiment can play a role in postcolonial
subjectivation. Through the sharing of music a conscious approach to
embodiment can help lead to important aesthetic experiences.
7. Part VII and final section, “Body in Times of Glocalization”, considers the
importance of research into the processes of embodiment for the reciprocal
interchange between global and local, general and particular points of
view. Studies relating to China, India, Nigeria, Brazil and the Islamic world
show that in the world of the Anthropocene what is needed is for local,
regional and global perspectives to be interconnected if we are to meet the
challenges that lie before us on various levels. And here it is corporeality,
embodiment and learning that create an awareness of difference just as
they also promote mutual understanding.

We would like to express our gratitude to Elizabeth Hamilton for reviewing

the language in many sections of the handbook and to Silas de Saram and
Zinnia Lautner for their help in preparing the manuscript for printing.
 Introduction: Embodiment—A Challenge for Learning and Education 15

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 Part I
Philosophical and Historical
Underpinnings

In the light of the fact that we are now living in the globalised world of the
Anthropocene, that is in a situation in which human beings have become a
power that determines the fate of the planet, there is an urgent need to rethink
the relationship between nature and culture. Nature hardly exists today in a
form that is unaffected, unmoulded even, by humans and their cultures. There
is a close interconnection between nature and culture and it is no longer easy
to tell them apart. The reciprocal interaction between nature and culture
affects the way we understand the human body. We come to realise the degree
to which this understanding is culturally determined. If we want to under-
stand humans today we have to take into account the effect we have on nature
and the effect nature has on us, which gives us an understanding of how
nature and culture are closely interwoven in our cultural and social activities.
In view of these insights it is clear that in the context of embodiment and
learning we have to consider the entanglements and interdependence of
nature and culture.
In their introductory chapter (Chap. 2), Renaud Hétier and Nathanaël
Wallenhorst focus on the challenges for education, development and socializa-
tion of the younger generation in the Anthropocene. They use the example of
COVID-19, showing how this pandemic not only endangers many people’s
lives but also leads to a crisis in the economic and political as well as the cul-
tural and social structures of societies. In time of crisis transformations take
place in all areas of human life. Bodily experiences that were previously quite
natural are no longer a matter of course. We are becoming more and more
disembodied, with images and abstractions attaining ever more importance.
At the same time, we can realise how valuable living bodily experiences are.
20 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

In the field of education, the detriment to the body and corporeality shows
the great importance of embodiment in learning as well as in social and cul-
tural life.
In mimetic processes, a creative re-creation takes place in which learners
learn and incorporate new knowledge, through using their senses, body move-
ments and imagination (Christoph Wulf [Chap. 3]). Mimetic processes are a
fundamental part of education and human development. For a long time, it
was even thought that education takes place entirely through mimetic pro-
cesses, so that no distinction was made between mimesis and education.
Mimetic processes make clear the extent to which humans are social beings
who need other humans as role models for their own development.—Children
try to become like adults. They need their attention, appreciation and care.
Mimetic processes are not only related to other people and their cultural and
social actions but also important in the incorporation of social and cultural
spaces and situations. They are essential if we are to understand the world
around us, and develop practical knowledge. The central significance of
mimetic processes for the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of
humanity has been the subject of research not only in historical anthropology
but also in evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience.
Chapter 4 by Mariagrazia Portera ties in with this. She shows that the
changes that the Anthropocene demands of us should not be purely theoreti-
cal but must lead to changes in the way we act and behave. Such transforma-
tions are only possible if our insights become part of our bodily
experience and lead to practical knowledge. For this to happen new attitudes
and habits must be developed. In the face of the many negative developments
in the Anthropocene, comprehensive changes to correct people’s behaviour
are needed. In the field of education there is a need for body-based strategies
and practices that target sustainability. At present, however, we are still unsure
of the extent to which habits that have developed over long periods of time
can change as a result of insight and knowledge and can be replaced by
new habits.
Chapter 5 by Kristina Brümmer, Thomas Alkemeyer and Robert Mitchell
illustrates the fact that numerous processes are necessary for social changes to
take place, processes that cannot be rationally planned, structured and brought
to fruition. Also forms of knowledge are required that cannot be put into
words. The distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ and
research studies on the importance of implicit, tacit and silent knowledge
have highlighted how important certain forms of non-scientific knowledge
are if social change is to take place. This is particularly true of important areas
 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings 21

of practice such as Medicine, Law and Education in which the performativity

of what is practised dominates over academic knowledge. Up until now in the
Anthropocene hardly any research has been done on connections between the
negative effects of human actions and behaviour, the recognition or the grow-
ing uncertainty and complexity of human knowledge and the new under-
standings of the human body.
Norm Friesen’s chapter (Chap. 6) about antinomies of pedagogy serves as an
example of the search for such a new understanding, which he traces back to
Socrates’ exposition of ignorance as fundamental to insight and knowledge,
then explaining heteronomy as being constitutive for freedom in education.
Pedagogical antinomies are seen as a ‘fluctuating between different percep-
tions and value judgements’ in an ‘also … but’. From a phenomenological
perspective, the body is the central factor in ‘integrating and manifesting
opposed phenomena simultaneously’. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh
describes awareness and expression as emerging in the simultaneity of mind
and body, sensed and sensing, subject and object. Friesen’s analysis of a film
sequence of a teacher and pupil shows that semantic and material effects and
communicational shifts are brought about when the teacher touches the child.
In this way, it highlights and explores the striking isomorphism of the embod-
ied and the pedagogical—both as fields and as processes.
Learning processes have a distinct corporeal aspect without which it would
not be possible to fully understand them. This is clear in Christian Rittelmeyer’s
chapter (Chap. 7) which examines embodied cognition. The premise here is
that the entire body shapes the features of cognition. Accordingly, mental
constructs and the performance of various cognitive tasks are dependent on
the motoric and perceptual system and on bodily interactions with the envi-
ronment, such as physiognomic imitation and corporeal habituation of cul-
tural patterns. Rittelmeyer replaces the concept according to which
assumptions about the world are built into the structure of the organism
through information-processing by the brain like a computer by a ‘biological-
organic epistemology without a neurocentric narrowing of perspective’. In the
scientific field, he describes the use of visualising or imaging techniques in
order to render visible body processes that are normally invisible, thus proving
philosophical theories. Rittelmeyer describes so-called mindreading that is the
reading of facial expressions by neural mirroring, as an example of basing
scientific results on corporeal processes and the conditions under which they
take place. He sees the consequences of the embodiment approach for peda-
gogy in the recognition of the importance of the sensomotoric system of the
body for cognitive activity. The aim of this research lies in ‘anthropologically
substantiating more comprehensive and corporeal didactics’.
 Promoting Embodiment Through
Education in the Anthropocene
Renaud Hétier and Nathanaël Wallenhorst

1 Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic is partly linked to the Anthropocene; unquestion-
ably, it is a characteristic marker thereof. The concept of the Anthropocene
originated in geology in the early 2000s; it refers to the new geological period
which Earth’s system has entered due to the impact of human activities. The
advent of the Anthropocene means we have had a permanent impact on
Earth’s habitability, both for humans and for all living things. This scientific
concept, which is increasingly heavily imbued with militant and political
meanings, marks the point at which human survival is under threat.
We can even go so far as to say that COVID-19 is an Anthropocene dis-
ease—a tangible manifestation of the ecological and political threats that
come with the dawn of the Anthropocene. This poses a particular problem in
view of what we have experienced in recent times. The pandemic is (or has
been) a crisis. However, it is something that can be overcome, and consigned
to a particular slice of time, with a clearly demarcated beginning and end. The
Anthropocene Epoch, on the other hand, has no foreseeable end. There is no
way in which we can get through the Anthropocene, and then return to an
earlier way of life—it marks a point of no return. We now have no choice but
to try and organize human society against a geological backdrop that has been

R. Hétier (*) • N. Wallenhorst

Catholic University of the West, Angers, France
e-mail: Renaud.hetier@uco.fr; nwallenh@uco.fr

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 23

A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_2
24 R. Hétier and N. Wallenhorst

irreversibly changed. The Anthropocene is characterized by countless crises

(COVID-19 being just one example). One of the characteristics of this pan-
demic is that it has altered and reshaped our relationship with bodies: the
human body in relation to the animal body and with the body politic, and the
way in which we experience the living world.
During the pandemic, we in our physical bodies have been kept apart—
imprisoned, even—as the result of political decisions. This is a clear indicator
that the Anthropocene has begun. Now, in the field of education, we need to
reflect on new ways of thinking. How can we plant the seeds of a relationship
with the body which is characterized, firstly, by its inclusion in the creative
and resilient living world? That world itself will, undoubtedly, be able to
weather the coming storm, though humanity’s endurance is less certain. Is it
possible to fully grasp the concept of embodiment, in the Anthropocene
Epoch, against the backdrop of Enlivenment?1

2 When Politics Separates

and Confines Bodies
In France, during the lockdowns in the years 2020 and 2021, public spaces were
off limits until further notice. Everyone had to stay home, so as not to overload
hospital resuscitation departments, which simply were not set up to cope with
so widespread health crisis. The aim was to prevent people dying at home or on
the streets for lack of treatment—though COVID-19 patients often died in
spite of the professional care they received. The slogans exhorted everyone to
stay home ‘to save lives’—starting with their own. Suddenly, everyone was
acutely aware of the timeframe over which the crisis was unfolding. Nothing,
apparently, is more effective than an emergency in shutting down our ability to
think clearly. During the first few weeks of lockdown, powerful emotions (espe-
cially distress and anguish) came flooding to the fore, with rationality fading
into the background. It can be said that our ability to think and to deliberate
were simultaneously affected. That is, a state of emergency makes people think
in terms of immediacy (their actions are guided by instinct and emotion rather
than rationality)—a knee-jerk reaction, where actions take the path of least
resistance. Politics, however, requires us to think in the long term and to
deliberate rationally. We found ourselves faced with a formidable problem:
1
This chapter was written by two Frenchmen, in the wake of months of lockdown to combat the
COVID-19 pandemic. The perspective expressed in this chapter—particularly in the first part—is that
of a Frenchman, and relates specifically to the political context in France. [Nevertheless, the general points
about the human experience apply quite readily in other sociocultural contexts].
 Promoting Embodiment Through Education in the Anthropocene 25

political and intellectual function in an emergency represent a veritable contra-

diction in terms. The healthcare measures, including but not limited to the
lockdown, meant the populace was restricted in unprecedented ways. The strat-
egy may have effectively suppressed the spread of the virus, but only because
sufficient information was promulgated to enable everyone to fully grasp the
reality of the danger, and appreciate that the measures were genuinely necessary.
Hence, the general point must be conceded: we ceased to use public spaces in
full knowledge and with our full consent.2 As individuals, though, each person
attached different levels of priority to (a) their physical safety and (b) their free-
dom (freedom of body, movement and contact).
This crisis is symptomatic of globalization and of the Anthropocene. Many
factors have contributed to the dawn of the Anthropocene, but prominent
among these are the unlimited exploitation and global exchange of resources.
Such unrestricted exchanges bring organisms into contact which have, hith-
erto, been independent of one another, and allow them to circulate far and
fast. In that respect, COVID-19 is a disease of global capitalism, which also is
related, in part, to the Anthropocene. Today, it is clear that unlimited human
exploitation of ecosystems disrupts the balance between animals, plants and
pathogens. The pandemic must be understood in the context of the
Anthropocene (and papers and newspaper articles show that epidemics are
breaking out ever more rapidly—Grandcola and Valo 2020; Mouterde 2020;
Thiaw 2020). In addition, COVID-19 first appeared in China—the ‘reactor
core’ of modern economic globalization—and, in the space of only a few
weeks, spread all over the world. As far as the Anthropocene is linked with
global capitalism (this new geological period could even be said to be
‘Capitalocene’ and ‘Globalocene’), the pandemic is, at its very origin,
‘anthropocenic’.
The COVID-19 crisis saw a certain type of authoritarianism, which we
believe is symptomatic of political desolation.3 This remark needs to be put
into context. Today, the world over, there is an extremely pervasive, and sub-
jective, sense of insecurity. Though the world is safer today than it has ever
been, everyone appears to be afraid of everything. For example, parents seem

2
Note that in the digital age in which we live, there is less and less need to actually move in order to con-
nect with others, or to engage in some form of struggle.
3
Since the 1980s, with the disastrous policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and later, François
Mitterrand, neoliberalism has become the policy of those in power. We have witnessed the scuttling of
the political system: as the State has been reduced in importance, politics has taken a back seat. However,
this has meant that politicians have to actively support the economic sector (it cannot survive without
this support): with the high-risk game of finance, with all the losses and crashes that come with it, costs
are incurred that businesses cannot cover (damage to the environment, pollution cleanup, dismantling of
factories etc.).
26 R. Hétier and N. Wallenhorst

to be constantly worried about the safety of their children, who spend far less
time outside than did previous generations—today’s children are much too
busy with digital technologies. In the face of COVID-19, most governments
implemented restrictive health measures, because of some kind of emotional
communion or contagion (which can surely be analyzed from the perspective
of mimicry). This suggests politics is no longer playing the role it should—to
convert emotions (tragedy, in the words of the Ancient Greeks) into logos,
elaboration and debate (the agora, the City). In addition, given the astonish-
ing progress in science, each human being is increasingly in a position to
control events (thus, we are no longer powerless, as we were in the Middle
Ages, when we did not know how to protect ourselves from the Black Death).
The approach adopted stems from the principle of precaution, with anxiety
being exploited to achieve safety. Finally, as a result, we have also entered a
period of extreme litigiousness. For this reason, all authority figures have
become extremely defensive (think of the nightmare faced by mayors who had
been ordered to reopen schools, while trying to ensure the safety of the chil-
dren in those classrooms). Above all else (be it political or health-related), they
rush to protect themselves from potential complaints (in fact, formal com-
plaints were lodged against government ministers themselves).
The management of the COVID-19 pandemic is indicative not of the
return, so sorely needed, to normality in politics, but rather of a political void.
In France, the government has been given unlimited power in dealing with
the crisis; the National Assembly has been bypassed entirely, with its debates
becoming irrelevant—in the name of ‘managing the crisis effectively’. This
means, however, that many authoritarian decisions have been made that are
no longer ‘political’, if that term is understood as what emerges from regu-
lated debate in our institutions. A campaign was launched, calling on people
to ‘stay home to save lives’, and the message was relayed by vast numbers of
YouTubers, influencers, private citizens, associations or other professional
organizations without critical distance. What does ‘saving lives’ really mean?
What is a ‘life’ when stripped of all social, cultural and political roots? What
are these ‘lives’ that need protecting? Do we as citizens really want to be ‘pro-
tected’ by the State? By ‘protecting’ us, the State strips us of our duty to par-
ticipate in world affairs. But should the State not, instead, be facilitating our
involvement and democratic exposure?
Since the days of ancient Athens, politics has offered the opportunity for
public presence and ‘corps-à-corps’4 (in-person) discussion. Today, though, we

4
‘Corps-à-corps’ refers to a relationship of proximity between at least two bodies, which may be erotic,
tender or agonistic.
 Promoting Embodiment Through Education in the Anthropocene 27

are caught in a paradox, between a political vacuum (the State has stepped
back, allowing commercial interests to become prevalent; and people’s physi-
cal bodies have been confined) and an excessive focus on authoritarianism,
security and health (saturating the public consciousness with anguish and
blame). Indeed, while it is the right response from a health perspective, the
solution deployed is profoundly unsatisfactory from a political standpoint: in
the long term, it is dangerous—all the more so if it lasts for a long time or is
repeated. The limitation of physical liberties has accelerated in recent times.
The rise of virtual technologies has already limited physical motion in our
daily lives. This foreshadows the human condition in the Anthropocene, with
the combination of two components. Firstly, there is growing inhospitality
that will lead to defensive behavior, with people shutting themselves off.
Secondly, there is an increasing sense of insecurity (resulting from increasing
demographic shifts, and burgeoning inequality). As a result, people take ref-
uge in safe havens (the richest among us are currently investing in New
Zealand, among other places) and barricade themselves in ‘strongholds’.5
Thus, the Anthropocene could be marked by the overflow of humanity across
the planet, causing the human body to ‘retreat’ into enclosed, private spaces.
That is to say, it is not only the COVID-19 pandemic that has weakened
political action, but rather the Anthropocene, which is sure to last a few thou-
sand years, at least. Anthropogenic effects, which cause irreversible harm to
our planet, seem to be due to a form of unrestrained pleasure-seeking (espe-
cially consumption). This is physical enjoyment, and as such, fits in perfectly
with a material approach (consumption of the world). An ‘effective’ political
decision would be to try to constrain physical bodies and limit such enjoy-
ment—by force if necessary, if individuals refuse to comply—in the context
of an authoritarian State. Such an approach would limit access to resources
(energy, food, items, travel etc.) and also sanction any excesses (obesity, unnec-
essary travel, consumption of toxic products, excessive reproduction etc.) in a
fashion reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. Ultimately, we must ask, beyond
a trend toward authoritarianism or totalitarianism, what becomes of demo-
cratic public function without physical presence—without ‘corps-à-corps’
debate. This is a problem in itself, in our hyperspecialized and hyper-technical
societies: today, it is no longer enough—as it was in Socrates’ time—to know
oneself and examine one’s thoughts in order to be a true citizen. Decisions
often need to be based on knowledge that is not necessarily widely accessible

5
Such is the case, for example, in Brazil—see https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/1999/10/07/
quand-les-riches-bresiliens-vivent-en-etat-de-siege
28 R. Hétier and N. Wallenhorst

(‘expert knowledge’). There is always the risk that technology will dilute the
essence of democracy.
The Anthropocene will undoubtedly have an increasing impact on our
bodies, both physically and politically. COVID-19 affords us the opportunity
to prepare for that impact by forging bonds (as some have done with gestures
of solidarity: taking care of caregivers, singing on balconies, screening movies
on the sides of buildings, manufacturing facemasks instead of lingerie etc.).
We can also forge similar connections with the living world as a whole, by
taking back possession of arenas for expression, exchange and conviviality that
are too often neglected, in order to cultivate our sense of belonging to a ‘com-
mon people’.

3 A Regression of the Experience

of Bodily Interaction
COVID-19 is not the first disease to tear us apart from one another. Even
when the Black Death was ravishing Europe, our ancestors learned social dis-
tancing. Advances in hygiene and medicine have meant we have been able to
drop our guard. However, in the 1980s, the HIV epidemic made contact with
others dangerous once more. Admittedly, HIV affected only intimate rela-
tions, and solutions could be found; but something changed: the bodies of
others became potential sources of danger, and we had to learn to protect
ourselves. Even by putting on a condom, we are putting a certain distance
between ourselves and others, introducing a foreign body object into the
naked ‘corps-à-corps’ experience. With COVID-19, which is far less deadly
than was HIV before triple therapy was developed, the harsh measures taken
may mean greater social distancing for a long time to come. The experience of
lockdown is one of complete removal—or imprisonment—of the body. Yet
even after lockdown ends, some of its effects remain. To be unable to touch
with our hands, and to see the other person’s face, detracts directly from the
very thing that makes us human. Remember that the homo genus came about
by straightening the body and gait, thus freeing the hands to manipulate
objects, and allowing the face, open to the horizon, to finally communicate.
It is likely that our haptic habits will soon resume in our private relationships,
but professional or public relations will remain marked by physical distance,
which will mark a cultural transition. France—a Latin country with a rather
tactile culture—will likely come into line with the more reserved, aloof cul-
tures of the English-speaking world and Scandinavia.
 Promoting Embodiment Through Education in the Anthropocene 29

Epidemics could be interpreted as time-localized ‘accidents’, whose impact

continues to be felt over time to varying degrees. In the Western world, we
have all but forgotten the Plague. However, there is a gradual cultural evolu-
tion toward greater bodily distancing. There are several contributing factors.
The first is urbanization: concentrating a large population in a limited space,
inevitably leads to a certain degree of anonymity. While we still greet each
other on a path (whether we are running or walking), we typically do not
exchange greetings on a city sidewalk. The next factor is the capitalist system,
in which humans are viewed as exploitable resources. Capitalism has no hesi-
tation in displacing people (human commodities: the best example is to be
found in the centuries of slavery), or bringing them together en masse (e.g., in
factories and workshops in the industrial era). This system uproots individu-
als, and causes them to experience a certain degree of isolation, even amid a
crowd of others. As Tocqueville noted, the establishment of democracy marks
another turning point. Prefiguring H. Rosa’s treatise on social acceleration
(2010), Tocqueville stated:

[D]emocratic peoples are grave, because their social and political condition con-
stantly leads them to engage in serious occupations; and they act inconsider-
ately, because they give but little time and attention to each of these occupations
[…]. (1990, p. 188)

Hand in hand with democracy comes individualism (which is linked to

equality), and a sense of self-importance, self-recognition and confidence in
one’s own activity. Individuals, who are increasingly overwhelmed, are paying
less and less attention to others, which widens the chiasm between them. This
trend is constantly being amplified by the phenomenon of social acceleration,
which Rosa highlights.
In the West, at least, we see another anthropological viewpoint emerge in
the eighteenth century, both in culture and in education. Norbert Elias notes
that vision—the sense which requires least closeness—is given certain priority
in our society. Claudine Haroche (2008, p. 170) points out:

Since vision is less threatening to the social order than touching, it becomes
necessary to avoid physical contact, and make eye contact only. Establishing
contact—letting glimpses of kindness, or especially warmth, show through;
being touched or moved by another, a peer, by his condition—will tend, for a
variety of reasons, to decline. They will be supplanted by distance, coldness,
hardness, insensitivity; an attitude of observation, evaluation, calculation,
resulting in interchangeability and indifference to one’s peers.
30 R. Hétier and N. Wallenhorst

This emotional distancing from one another is linked to bodily distancing,

and a retreat from the phenomena resulting from physical presence: the sense
of closeness but also movement. Elias notes that

the pleasures of the eyes and ears become ever more intense, richer, more subtle
and more widespread, while the pleasures of the flesh are increasingly limited by
commandments and prohibitions. (Elias, 1991, p. 163)

These remarks are of value for our analysis: we see how a certain inhibition
of the body, and particularly of ‘corps-à-corps’ interaction, with the attending
physical contact, is partly linked with lending too much importance to ‘what
is left’—that is, remote perception. We shall examine this point in depth in
the next paragraph.
Postman (1996) noted in 1983 that modern media (television, especially)
tend to expose children to what he called ‘adult secrets’, including violence
and sexuality, from which they had been sheltered since the late Middle Ages,
by the division of adults and children imposed by the schooling system. Of
course, this trend has practically skyrocketed with the advent of the internet
and free access to pornography. The aim here is to analyze this evolution from
the perspective of the role the body now has. Plainly, today’s children are not
in the same situation as those in the Middle Ages, who were frequently
exploited and often abused. Through their screens, though, children are
indeed exposed to a great deal of violent imagery. This violence of images
(Houssier, 2008) creates fascination, and the experience is all-consuming.
This phenomenon can be analyzed in the context of excitation of the scopic
drive. For children and adolescents, screens are so pervasive that, without a
doubt, we can point to ‘overstimulation’. Screens represent a pleasure which is
difficult to get away from (so they create a certain dependency). This addic-
tion also inhibits the potential of other senses and impulses, and reduces over-
all mobility. When we speak of a ‘fixed gaze’, we are referring to the immobility
of that gaze. We can also say, though, that such a gaze hypnotizes and immo-
bilizes the viewer themselves. It seems that digital technology, and the digital
industry, has found a way to literally alienate digital ‘consumers’ by seizing
their attention in an unrelenting grip (Stiegler, 2008). The immobilizing
effect on their bodies is even more powerful. This explains how children—
who, it must be recognized, have a pressing need to move around—find them-
selves immobilized: screens—especially video game screens—provide them
with constant movement, stimulating the scopic drive. This stimulation is
redoubled, since users can make the images move by interacting with the game.
 Promoting Embodiment Through Education in the Anthropocene 31

Such immobilization also helps keep people apart from one another, lead-
ing to a sort of voluntary confinement. In addition, we can wonder about the
more general process of virtualization (Lévy, 1995). Here, the term refers to a
general process by which humans mediate their interactions with others. This
began, at the dawn of humanity, with the use of primitive tools and the devel-
opment of language, and it continues today through the burgeoning presence
of technology. Not only does technological development mean ever-more
‘machines’ are being interposed between humans, and between people and the
outside world; the world itself has become one of hyper-communication. In
other words, we increasingly connect with others and with the world through
languages, objects and images. The crisis of resonance which Rosa describes
(2018, 2020) can also be interpreted as over-mediation. Texts and images
have become more striking than real-world events; virtual universes mean that
the living of real life is now only optional; and the world has been reduced to
what our devices can comprehend. When, today, do we present ourselves to
the world, to nature, to life around us, without some form of mediation?
Only in the context of a sexual experience can we have an ‘unarmored’ and
‘naked’ relationship with someone else, without the intercession of any exter-
nal objects—just with our bodies (provided the experience is not tainted by
the compulsion to conform to pornographic ideals). The advance of virtual-
ization and digital technology ultimately marginalizes the agōn and eros of the
‘corps-à-corps’ experience (Hétier, 2014). This trend culminates with the cre-
ation of avatars (Tisseron, 2012). The body itself becomes virtualized. Our
sense of our own bodies practically evaporates, being traded for constant vir-
tual movement (in a form of ‘transcendental life’), and we develop a false sense
of immortality (given that, in the digital world, one can always simply
respawn).

4 Restoring a Bodily Experience of the Living

World: Promoting Embodiment Through
Education in the Anthropocene, Against
the Backdrop of Enlivenment
What can be done, in education, to lay the foundations to enable people to
have a different type of relationship with their own bodies? How can we, as
educators, encourage a relationship with the body that interacts with the liv-
ing world, through the flesh? How do we approach active participation in the
living world? The contemporary German biologist and philosopher Andreas
32 R. Hétier and N. Wallenhorst

Weber, whose work follows on from Critical Theory, developed by the

Frankfurt School (closely connected to Rosa’s research), proposes a particu-
larly interesting shift of thought in order to comprehend embodiment in the
Anthropocene. We should think of our awareness of the world, not only from
the standpoint of Enlightenment similar to that which gave rise to the
Industrial Revolution, but also from the standpoint of a form of Enlivenment
for the Anthropocene. This concept is particularly present in two of Weber’s
works: the first, co-written with his fellow philosopher Hildegard Kurt,
Lebendigkeit sei! Für eine Politik des Lebens. Ein Manifest für das Anthropozän
(2015) (Towards Cultures of Aliveness: Politics and Poetics in a Postdualistic
Age—an Anthropocene Manifesto) and the second, Enlivenment. Eine Kultur
des Lebens. Versuch einer Poetik für das Anthropozän (2016) (no official English
translation found).
What we need to do, in Weber’s view, is supplement Enlightenment by
steering contemporary societies toward reintegration with the living world.
What Weber proposes is that intellectuals shift focus away from Enlightenment
and onto vitalization. In each of Weber’s works written in German, he uses
the term ‘Enlivenment’, a word he invented, undoubtedly to highlight the
parallel with the term Enlightenment, and emphasize the importance of adopt-
ing this paradigm in the way in which we think, and in the way in which
human society is organized. The word refers to a form of dynamics intrinsic
to living creatures, which must be allowed to be expressed and to spread,
bringing the human experience along with it.
Enlivenment is based on what we have in common—what we share with
other creatures: living and feeling. This concept discards the idea of separation
between humans and the natural world. The premise is that humans’ notion
of total dominion over the living matter that constitutes us is nothing more
than an illusion. In our modern way of living, everything has been seized
upon as ‘culture’, and we have developed the belief that we are superior to
nature. Weber decries an approach to the world based on mechanisms
designed with efficiency in mind. Rather, his approach to the world, which
Kurt echoes in their coauthored manifesto, is ‘A process of creative relations
and interpenetration allowing us to experience and express’ (Weber, & Kurt,
2015, p. 11). This view is rooted in the current revolution of biological think-
ing, ‘similar to the revolutions in physics […] through relativity theory and
quantum physics’ (p. 11). In fact, ‘[h]umans and nature are one, because
creative imagination and feeling expression are natural forces’ (Weber & Kurt,
2015, p. 11).
Above all, Enlivenment celebrates vitality. Life holds irrepressible and sub-
versive power and creativity, which simply cannot be contained or influenced.
 Promoting Embodiment Through Education in the Anthropocene 33

Furthermore, it is the vitality of others (both human and non-human) and of

our environment that makes our own existence possible. The crux of this
notion is that, far from being exceptional in comparison to other lifeforms, we
humans are an integral part of a vast web of life. Fundamentally, life is beyond
our control, as it should be, according to Weber’s idea of Enlivenment. It is
precisely by recognizing and embracing our place in this infinitely intercon-
nected fabric of life that we will be able to survive the Anthropocene. The
power of vitality and solidarity between all living things can offer hope, so it
is crucial we do not view ourselves as being, in any way, removed from the rest
of that web. Enlivenment refers to the conception of life as a creative practice,
as opposed to a technical exercise. The idea of Enlivenment, upon which the
manifesto places particular emphasis, hinges on the need to fundamentally
alter the way in which we think about human beings: we must think about
the ways in which we are connected to the rest of the living world—in terms
of the biological fundaments of life.
Weber cites the American poet and eco-philosopher Gary Snyder, and his
view of the wild as a process beyond human control. It is not by controlling
the Earth that life will be made better; it is by participating in the natural
intercourse of existence. That represents a major shift from our current prac-
tices. The ‘human adventure’ (understood as this inclusion of humanity
within the living world, characterized by the uncertainty and malleability of
its anthropological fate) has a role to play. We have the possibility to partici-
pate more fully in this web of solidarity between all living beings. Such par-
ticipation is possible, but it is poetic, and is diametrically opposite to human
control of our environment.
Enlivenment can be viewed as a form of second Enlightenment (‘Aufklärung
2.0’) (Weber, 2016, p. 25). Andreas Weber criticizes Enlightenment and its
ideology of death, where everything around us is viewed as inert matter. (It
should, however, be remembered that Enlightenment was a highly multi-
faceted concept—a fact which Weber seems to overlook somewhat when con-
structing his argument). Weber’s work follows on from Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno’s critique in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972).
Horkheimer and Adorno highlight how the ideology of Enlightenment did
not only bring freedom, but also contributed to catastrophic totalitarianism.
However, it should be recognized that in this criticism of Enlightenment,
Horkheimer and Adorno did not put forward any alternative approach. This
is what Weber set out to do by proposing the concept of Enlivenment. Thus,
Weber’s work is directly connected to Hartmut Rosa’s approach, which also
follows on from the Frankfurt school’s Critical Theory. In addition, alongside
the concept of resonance, Rosa develops an alternative concept: a kind of
34 R. Hétier and N. Wallenhorst

political proposition. Enlivenment is a ‘corrective’ type of concept. The con-

cepts of Enlivenment and resonance are closely intertwined. For instance,
Weber frequently uses the term Verbindung, which can be translated as a rela-
tionship, link or connection. The concept of Enlivenment lends an additional
biological foundation to the concept of resonance (in addition, e.g., to the
mirror neurons which Rosa describes).
The poetics of Enlivenment criticize, firstly, neo-Darwinism, with the idea
of biological optimization, and secondly, neo-liberalism, with its quest for
economic efficiency (Weber, 2016, p. 45). These two paradigms may, at times,
seem sufficient to encapsulate our current knowledge of how the world works.
However, they fail to recognize any commonality among humans, and
between humanity and the rest of the living world. (Both theories also ignore
cooperative dynamics). In Enlivenment, Andreas Weber shows that the
anthropological concepts based on individual competition, at the heart of our
biological (Darwinism) and economic (liberalism) function, are linked to the
way in which we have historically viewed reality. Weber suggests shifting our
perspective. The world is not a never-ending war of every person for him or
herself. We need to supplant the bio-liberal principles that guide our scien-
tific, political and educational decisions with the dynamics and principles of
Enlivenment. Being aware of one’s own vitality is the foundation upon which
to build a connection with nature and other living organisms. While educa-
tion in the Anthropocene entails education in resonance, it also involves edu-
cating in favor of Enlivenment (both experiential, allowing us to feel our
immersion in the living world, and cognitive, learning to overcome the domi-
nant Cartesian rationale). The term Enlivenment is deliberately chosen so as
to closely relate to and link in with the ideas of Enlightenment. It is not a
question of replacing rational thought and empirical observation with poet-
ics, but of being able to interlink different rationalities. It is a question of
allowing science, politics and society to regain interest in sensitivity to the
lives both of human beings and of other creatures.
Enlivenment is the cornerstone of a policy of civilization that can come
about through establishing a culture of vitality, whose purpose is to allow us
to survive the Anthropocene Epoch. Thus, Enlivenment counters the ideas
about nature which tend to shape political positions. Firstly, nature is not
efficient. Quite the contrary—it is continually wasteful: fish, amphibians and
insects have to lay millions of eggs in order for just a few to reach maturity.
Another example of this inefficiency is the fact that warm-blooded animals
use 90% of their energy simply to keep their metabolism running. Secondly,
the biosphere is not growing. The biomass of the biosphere is in balance (with
only very slight variations). Thus, nature is characterized by a steady state.
 Promoting Embodiment Through Education in the Anthropocene 35

Thirdly, no new species has ever appeared as a result of competition for

resources. Rather, it is new cooperation and symbioses (or simply chance) that
allow new forms of life to emerge. Fourthly, nature affords resources enough
for everyone; the prime example of this is solar energy, which is abundant
enough for all living things. Thus, we can conclude that, with symbioses and
cooperation, all species should be able to coexist. Fifthly, the concept of own-
ership has no place in the biosphere. The body itself is not the property of the
creature which inhabits it, given that it must interact with its environment
and is characterized by exchanges of matter (Weber, 2016, pp. 55–57). In
view of the above observations, Andreas Weber developed biopoetics as a
model of living relationships.
What is particularly interesting in Weber’s philosophical and political
thinking is that the dawn of the Anthropocene should not crush all hope.
On the contrary, the vitality of life means we can embrace revitalization
and renewed solidarity in our lives, with our existences becoming political
capital. The Earth, and the living macro-ecosystem upon it, shows us what
we must do if we are to survive the Anthropocene. We are not masters of
the Earth; rather, the Earth—and the web of life which inhabits it—is
master of us. From this perspective, Enlivenment breaks with all forms of
anthropocentrism.

5 Conclusion
The global crisis that is COVID-19 reveals uncomfortable truths about
human society today. It has forced us to face up to accelerated, intensified
manifestations of trends that are already at work in our societies: notably,
political weakness, and heavy investment in security to compensate, some-
times with the unmistakable tang of authoritarianism. This has a major impact
on our freedoms and, in particular, the ability to actually be with one another
physically, be it for social interaction or for debate. This is part of a long-
standing historical tendency to create distance between us. The role of digital
devices in this trend cannot be underestimated, as they facilitate communica-
tion, but bypass the need for physical presence and ‘corps-à-corps’ interaction.
Andreas Weber reminds us how nature possesses vital power, and how the
living world is inextricably linked to a complex environment. Humankind’s
Promethean error is, without a doubt, losing sight of our corporeal nature, by
which we are firmly grounded in the natural world and on our planet. From
an educational perspective, we need to completely re-examine individuation,
and with it, the idea of autonomy. Even before we begin to look at the
36 R. Hétier and N. Wallenhorst

catastrophic consequences of individualism, the shaping of an individual

identity must go hand in hand with an awareness of, and regular reflection on,
interdependence (Second Convivialist Manifesto): interdependence which is
experienced through daily life in the flesh—interdependence with others,
with the living world and with the world itself. It is a concrete, dynamic and
collaborative task, whose aim must be to ‘give life’ (Hétier, 2019, 2021) to all
that we can.

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 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning
Christoph Wulf

In many mimetic processes the body plays a central role which is often not
obvious. This is true especially for mimetic processes in which body-based
learning takes place. In mimetic processes a creative re-creation takes place in
which learners learn and incorporate new knowledge, through using their
senses, body movements and imagination (Brandstetter & Wulf, 2007). In
these processes learning and education take place. They make clear the extent
to which humans are social beings who need other humans and their approach
to culture and society as role models for their own development. People
behaving in a mimetic way are both active and passive at the same time.
Mimetic processes are directed toward other people and the way they behave
and are driven by an active urge to become like them. Since people acting
mimetically use other people as role models, they have a receptive attitude
toward them and absorb or incorporate them into themselves. Mimetic
behavior is an interweaving of active and receptive elements. The result is not
a simple copying of other people and the way they act. What happens is far
more that the people acting mimetically become similar to their role models
in a way that is specific to them. The result is a new way of behaving which is
both similar and different at the same time.

For Josephine and Karlotta.

C. Wulf (*)
Anthropology and Education, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: christoph.wulf@fu-berlin.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 39

A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_3
40 C. Wulf

Infants and small children relate to the people with whom they live: par-
ents, elder siblings, other relatives and acquaintances. They try to be like
them, by, for example, answering a smile with a smile. However, they also
initiate responses in adults by using skills they have already acquired (Dornes,
1993; Stern, 2003). These early exchanges also enable small children to learn
new forms of behavior, language and feelings. They learn to evoke their own
feelings toward other people and to elicit them in others. Initially, the mimetic
actions of infants and children do not allow for a separation of subject and
object; this occurs only at a later stage of development. At first, the world is
perceived as magical, that is, not only humans but also objects are experienced
as being alive. As rationality becomes more developed the capacity to experi-
ence the world in this way gradually becomes less central. However, it is this
capacity upon which children draw to transform the external world into
images in mimetic processes and to incorporate them into their internal image
worlds (Gebauer & Wulf, 1995).
In his autobiography, Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin
(2006) illustrated how children incorporate their cultural environments in
processes of assimilation. During these processes, children assimilate aspects
of the parental home, such as the rooms, particular corners, objects and atmo-
spheres. They are incorporated as ‘imprints’ of the images and stored in the
child’s imaginary world, where they are subsequently transformed into new
images and memories that help the child gain access to other cultural worlds.
Culture is handed on by means of these processes of incorporating and mak-
ing sense of cultural products. The mimetic ability to transform the external
material world into images, transferring them into our internal worlds of
images and making them accessible to others enables individuals to actively
shape cultural realities (Wulf, 2022a; Gebauer & Wulf, 1998, 2003).
These processes encompass not only our modes of dealing with the material
products of culture, but also social relationships and forms of activity and the
way social life is staged and performed. This involves forms of practical knowl-
edge that are learned mimetically in body-oriented, sensory processes and
enable people to act competently in institutions and organizations (Wulf,
2006b). This knowledge is learnt in rituals and gestures (Wulf, 2005); and this
is how institutions become rooted in the human body. Images, schemas and
movements are learnt in mimetic processes, and these render the individual
capable of action. Since mimetic processes involve products of history and
culture, scenes, arrangements and performances, these processes are among
the most important ways of handing down culture from one generation to the
next. Without our mimetic abilities, cultural learning and ‘double inheri-
tance’, that is, the handing down of cultural products along with biological
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 41

inheritance, which enables culture to change and develop, would not be pos-
sible (Wulf, 2022a, b).
Cultural learning is mimetic learning, which is at the center of many pro-
cesses of education and self-education. It is directed toward other people,
social communities and cultural heritages and ensures that they are kept alive.
Mimetic learning is a sensory, body-based form of learning in which images,
schemas and movements needed to perform actions are learnt. This occurs
largely unconsciously, and it is this that is responsible for the lasting effects
that play an important role in all areas of cultural development (Kraus et al.,
2021). ‘Becoming similar’ to the world in mimetic actions becomes an oppor-
tunity to leave egocentrism, logocentrism and ethnocentrism behind and to
open oneself to experiences of otherness (Wulf, 2006a, 2016). However,
mimetic processes are also linked to aspirations to forms and experiences of
higher levels of life, in which vital experiences can be sought and found. As
the experience of love, mimetic movements invoke “the power to see similar-
ity in the dissimilar” (Adorno, 1978, p. 191). No knowledge is possible with-
out the production of similarities, without mimesis. It is certainly taken as
true for scientific knowledge that mimesis is indispensable in the process of
knowing.

Cognition itself cannot be conceived without the supplement of mimesis, how-

ever that may be sublimated. Without mimesis the break between subject and
object would be absolute and cognition impossible. (Adorno, 1982, p. 143)

If a mimetic element is indispensable in scientific knowledge, it is at the heart

of cultural experience (Michaels & Wulf, 2020). These processes are of central
importance for our understanding of the human situation in the globalized
world of the Anthropocene (Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2022, 2023).

1 Social Learning and Culture

Recent studies in the field of primate research have shown that although ele-
mentary forms of mimetic learning can be found in other primates as well,
human beings are especially capable of mimetic learning. In the light of the
research into the social behavior of primates and in comparison with them,
studies in the field of developmental psychology and cognitive psychology
over recent years have managed to pin down some characteristics of mimetic
learning in humans at a young age and to ascertain the special nature of
mimetic learning in babies and small children. Michael Tomasello sums up
these abilities of toddlers as follows:
42 C. Wulf

[…] they identify with other persons; perceive other persons as intentional
agents like the self; engage with other persons in joint attentional activities;
understand many of the causal relations that hold among physical objects and
events in the world; understand the communicative intentions that other per-
sons express in gestures, linguistic symbols, and linguistic constructions; learn
through role-reversal imitation to produce for others those same gestures, sym-
bols, and constructions; and construct linguistically based object categories and
event schemas. (Tomasello, 1999, p. 161).

It is through these abilities that young children become able to participate

in cultural processes. They can take part in enactments of the practices and
skills of the social group in which they live and acquire the cultural knowledge
of that group in this way (Wulf & Baitello, 2018). The abilities described are
indicative of the central importance of role models for mimetic learning pro-
cesses in young children. These processes can be understood as mimetic pro-
cesses. The ability to identify with other persons, to see them as individuals
who act intentionally and to direct their attention toward something together
with them is due to the mimetic desire of the child to emulate adults, to
become like them. It is this desire to become similar to older people that moti-
vates children to understand causal relationships between the objects of the
world, to comprehend the intentions of other people as they communicate
them in gestures, symbols and constructions and to develop categories of
objects and event schemata. Infants as young as nine months are already in
possession of these abilities that are inherent in the human mimetic capacities
and not available to other primates at any point in their lives.

2 Mirror Neurons
These insights were confirmed by research in the neurosciences that began to
prove humans differ from other primates by the fact that they are equipped in
a special way to discover the world in mimetic processes (Rizzolatti &
Signigaglia, 2008; Jacoboni, 2008). The reason for this is the mirror neuron
system. The analysis of the way mirror neurons function shows how recogni-
tion of other people, their actions and intentions is dependent on our capacity
for movement. The mirror neuron system appears to enable the human brain
to relate observed movements to our own capacity for movement and to rec-
ognize the importance of this. Without this mechanism we would perceive
the movements and actions of other people but we would not know what
their actions mean and what they are really doing. The mirror neurons are a
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 43

physiological condition for us to be able to act not only as individuals but also
as social beings. They are important in mimetic behavior and learning, ges-
tural and verbal communication and understanding the emotional reactions
of other people. The perception of someone’s pain or disgust activates the
same areas of the brain that would be activated if we were feeling these things
directly ourselves. Although there are also non-human primates that have
mirror neurons, the system is more complex in human beings. Unlike non-
human primates, humans have the capacity to differentiate between transitive
and intransitive movements and to select types of action and the sequence of
actions that constitute these types. They can also become active in actions that
are not carried out in reality but are merely imitated. The mirror neuron sys-
tem enables us to grasp the actions of other people, and not just isolated
actions but also sequences of actions. In addition, numerous experiments
have shown something that primate research also proved to be true for chil-
dren during the first year of life, that is, that the mirror neuron system does
not only process observed actions but also the intentions lying behind these
actions. If we see somebody completing an action then their movements have
a direct meaning for us. The same is true of our actions and the way they are
understood by other people. Moreover, experiments have also shown that the
quality of the movement system and the mirror neuron system represents
necessary, although insufficient, conditions for mimetic behavior. Further
neuronal processes would be needed for processes to arise that are more than
simply repetition, but rather processes in which people become mimetically
similar to the world and other people.
Mimetic processes are initially directed toward other people. It is in mimetic
processes that infants and toddlers refer to the people with whom they live,
that is, their parents, older brothers and sisters and other relatives and acquain-
tances. They try to make themselves similar to these people, for instance by
responding to a smile with a smile. However, they also elicit the correspond-
ing responses from the adults by employing the abilities they have already
learned. In these early interactive processes toddlers also learn about feelings,
for example. They learn to produce them in themselves in relation to other
people and to evoke them in other people. Their brains evolve in interactions
with their environments; this means that certain of their potential capacities
develop, while others decline. The cultural conditions of this early phase of
life are inscribed in the children’s brains and bodies. Anyone who has not
learned to see, hear, feel or speak at an early age cannot learn these abilities
adequately at a later stage. To begin with there is no separation between sub-
ject and object in the mimetic referencing of infants and toddlers. At this
point their perception of the world is magical, that is, not only the people but
44 C. Wulf

also the things are experienced as animate. This ability to experience the world
becomes lost as we develop reason, but it contains important opportunities
for us to change the outside world into images and absorb it into our inner
image world.

3 Anthropological Approaches
We can describe social and cultural actions as mimetic if, firstly, as movements
they refer back to other movements, secondly, they can be understood as
physical performances or stagings and, thirdly, they are stand-alone actions
that can be understood in their own terms and that refer to other actions or
worlds. This means that actions such as mental calculations, decisions, reflex
or routine behavior and also one-off actions and actions that break the rules
are not mimetic (Gebauer & Wulf, 1998). In order to better understand the
cultural significance of mimetic processes there are seven aspects that I would
identify.

1. The linguistic origin of the term ‘mimesis’ and the historical context of the
way it was originally used point to the role that mimetic processes play in
the staging of cultural practices and the culture of performativity (Gebauer
& Wulf, 1995).
2. Mimesis must not be seen as simple copying as in making photocopies.
What it is, is far more a creative human capacity which assists in the cre-
ation of new things (Gebauer & Wulf, 1998; Wulf, 2013a, b, 2022a, b).
3. The performativity of social and cultural actions and behavior is an impor-
tant prerequisite for mimetic learning processes (Wulf et al., 2001; Wulf &
Zirfas, 2007, 2014).
4. In the arts and aesthetics mimetic processes have an important role to play.
However it is important to recognize that mimesis is not restricted to aes-
thetics. It is, in fact, an anthropological concept which has a distinct aes-
thetic element (Wulf, 2022a).
5. It is through mimetic processes that the collective and individual imagi-
nary of a historical time and a culture comes into being. In the imaginary
an interweaving of past, present and future takes place. It is a center upon
which social and cultural actions are based (Hüppauf & Wulf, 2009;
Wulf, 2022a).
6. Through mimetic processes we gain practical knowledge, which is silent,
body-based knowledge and is important for how we live with our fellow
human beings (Wulf, 2006b; Kraus, et al., 2021).
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 45

7. Mimetic processes do not only have positive effects. Through their blur-
ring of boundaries and contagious nature they can also lead to violence.
This happens, for example, when rivalry is whipped up through mimetic
processes, or when scapegoats are created or responsibility is delegated to
groups and crowds (Girard, 1977, 1986).

4 Mimesis as a Concept
of Historical Anthropology
If we look at the history of the concept of mimesis, we see clearly that it is an
anthropological concept. As far as we know today it was in Sicily, the home of
mime artists, that the concept of mimesis first came to the Greek culture. A
linguistic analysis of the history of the term reveals that the word mimesis has
something to do with ‘mimos’, performed by a mime artist. The chief task of
the mimos is not to imitate or to create something similar but to put on a
comic farce, to behave as a mime artist. This activity refers to the everyday
culture of simple folk who would perform vulgar scenes from their way of life
in order to entertain rich people at their celebrations. The stagings and perfor-
mances developed were often ribald and disrespectful. It has been confirmed
by many sources as being the origin of the term mimesis in performative,
cultural practices, and it had a pronounced sensory aspect, relating to move-
ments of the body. In the fifth century B.C.E. the term ‘mimesis’ was widely
used in Ionia and Attica. In the Platonic era the term mimesis was already
commonly used to refer to processes of imitation, emulation and striving to
be like something (Else, 1958).
In Greece, it was considered that poets played an important role in educat-
ing the next generation, and in his third volume of The Republic Plato exam-
ines the way in which literary works unfold their educative effect. He believes
that the characters and actions in works of literature inscribe themselves into
the imaginary of young people through mimetic processes. These images are
so powerful that young people cannot resist their effects. Therefore, it is
important to be very careful in selecting the stories and images that are
intended to take possession of the young people’s image worlds. Other con-
tent, however, should be kept away from the young. Plato therefore sees
mimetic processes as being useful for educating and socializing. This is where
cultural knowledge is created and passed on. Aristotle, like Plato, is also con-
vinced that people have an innate ability to behave mimetically. “The instinct
of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him
46 C. Wulf

and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and
through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the plea-
sure felt in things imitated” (Aristotle, 2013, Part IV).

5 Mimesis as Creative Imitation

Mimesis means making oneself similar to something or a person, emulating
them, but also ‘portraying’, ‘representing’ or ‘expressing’ something. Mimetic
behavior or action means relating to another person or another ‘world’ with
the intention of becoming similar to them. It can refer to the relationship
with a given, represented ‘reality’, in which case it describes a representational
relationship. But mimetic behavior can also refer to the ‘imitation’ of some-
thing that has never even existed, such as the representation of a myth, that
has only ever existed in this representation and which is based on no known
model outside of this representation. Behaving and acting mimetically have a
productive function. Mimetic behavior does not necessarily refer back to a
‘reality’; it can also relate to a sign for a word, image or action (Gebauer &
Wulf, 1995, 2003).
The capacity to identify with other person, to see them as intentional agents
and to focus our attention on something alongside them is linked with the
desire to understand the Other through using our imagination to become like
them. This desire to become like the Other is also the prerequisite for under-
standing the intentions of other people as they communicate them in ges-
tures, symbols and constructions and for developing categories of objects and
event schemata and grasping the causal connections between the objects of
the world.
Unlike processes of mimicry, where the person simply adjusts to the given
conditions, mimetic processes simultaneously produce both similarities to
and differences from other situations or people to which or whom they refer
to (Deleuze, 1994). By “making ourselves similar” to situations we have previ-
ously experienced and to culturally shaped worlds, we acquire the ability to
orient ourselves in a social field. Through participating in the life practices of
other people we expand our own lifeworlds and create new ways of acting and
experiencing for ourselves. In this process, receptivity and activity overlap and
the given world becomes interwoven with our individuality as we relate to it
mimetically. We recreate situations we have experienced previously or the
world outside us and make them our own by duplicating them. Not until we
have confronted the earlier situation or the outside world do we attain our
individuality. Not until this process takes place does the excess drive of which
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 47

we had been unaware become shaped into personal wishes and needs. The
confrontation with the outside world and the development of the self take
place in the same system. The outer and inner worlds gradually become
increasingly similar and can only be experienced in this reciprocal relation-
ship. Thus, similarities develop between inside and outside and they begin to
correspond to each other. We make ourselves similar to the outside world and
change in the process. In this transformation our perceptions of the external
world and of ourselves are altered.

6 Mimesis and Performativity

As performance and action, mimesis denotes, firstly, the human capacity to
stage and perform internal images, imaginings, happenings, stories, series of
actions and so on. It also denotes the ability to make oneself similar to the
performativity of social and aesthetic actions as one observes them, by means
of which one makes them one’s own. The differing requirements of the pro-
cesses of mimetically becoming similar to role models give rise to different
results. It is the differences in these processes of becoming similar and appro-
priation that have resulted in diversity (Wulf, 2022b; Wulf & Zirfas, 2007;
Wulf et al. 2001b).
The capacity for performative social action is acquired in mimetic pro-
cesses. For example, in mimetic processes people develop levels of skill in
games, exchanging gifts or ritual actions that differ from one culture to
another (Bilstein et al., 2005). If one is to be able to learn to act ‘correctly’ in
each situations, then it is necessary to have practical knowledge that is acquired
by means of sensory, body-based learning processes in the corresponding
fields (Benthien & Wulf, 2001). The cultural characteristics of particular
social actions can also only be grasped through mimetic rapprochement.
Practical knowledge and social actions have a historical and cultural basis.

7 Aesthetic Experience in Mimetic Processes

Mimetic processes lead to aesthetic experiences (Adorno, 1984). A piece of
music only has aesthetic value if it is performed, when the notes become
sounds and when these sounds are recreated in a mimetic process and made
to resonate both in the performer of the music and also the listener. This is
also the case when we read a literary work and the language and images have
to be brought to life by means of mimetic processes (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
48 C. Wulf

And finally, this process also takes place when we look at works of art which
are recreated by mimetic seeing, by means of which they become images in a
person’s imaginary (Belting, 2011; Wulf, 2013b; Paragrana, 2014).
When we appropriate an image mimetically it is possible to distinguish two
phases that run into each other. In the first phase the picture is there before
the eyes of the person viewing it, and in the second it has already been absorbed
into the ‘internal’ image world. In the first phase it is a question of overcom-
ing a mechanical way of seeing, which takes in images like any other objects
and deals with them by ‘knowing what they are’. A way of seeing that already
knows the meaning that the image is supposed to have provides protection
against being overwhelmed by images. This way of seeing reduces the possi-
bilities of seeing. In acts of seeing that are consciously mimetic the aim is to
recreate and make the work of art one’s own. This mimetic process requires
spending time in front of the work of art, shedding what is familiar and dis-
covering the unfamiliar. The mimetic appropriation of a work of art requires
stopping a while and being prepared to be gripped by it.
In the second phase, as a consequence of mimetic seeing, the image is
already part of the internal image world, the imaginary. A mimetic ‘becoming
similar’ to the image has now taken place. This process of becoming similar is
always incomplete and can continue to reach new levels of intensity. Holding
an image that has been internalized in this way in one’s imagination is good
practice for one’s concentration and imaginative powers. Since the image is
reproduced by the imagination it constantly has to be recreated and held fast
against the stream of intrusive images that appear inside us. It has to resist the
inherent compulsion to disappear. This activity of the imagination is mimetic
and represents an element of every creative production of an image.
Aesthetic experience is an experience of the Other, captured so beautifully
by Rimbaud in his Je est un autre. René Char’s observation about poems is also
valid for works of art: they know something about us that we don’t know.
They contain an element of surprise that cannot be anticipated and which is
often not quite rational; we feel it before we understand the meaning of the
works. Mimetic processes work toward recreating them through us seeing
them and absorbing them into our ‘internal’ image world with the aid of our
imagination. The re-creation of images is a process of mimetic appropriation
which accepts the images with all their pictorial qualities, into the world of
our imagination and memory. Our mimetic appropriation of the images is
directed toward us absorbing into our bodies their pictorial quality, which is
a given before, during, after and beyond all interpretation.
When images have been absorbed into the ‘internal’ image world then they
form points of reference for interpretations that can also change over the
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 49

course of one’s life. Whatever the interpretations may be, the repeated han-
dling of images is an act of appropriation, of discovery even. It involves con-
centration and devotion to the re-creation of imaginary images and repeatedly
demands that the images be ‘refreshed’ by seeing the real images or their
reproductions. The mimetic encounter with images means that we dispense
with preconceptions. Retracing their shapes and colors with our eyes requires
us to suppress the images and thoughts that rise up ‘inside’ us as we look at
them. It demands that we hold the image fast with our eyes, that we open
ourselves up to its pictorial qualities and surrender ourselves to it. The mimetic
process involves the observer making himself ‘similar’ to the picture as he
recreates it through seeing, incorporates it and through this image expands his
‘internal’ image world.
Mimetic seeing is both active and passive; it is directed toward the world
and at the same time receives the world. In the history of seeing there have
been different interpretations of the extent to which it is active and the extent
to which it is passive. Since Maurice Merleau-Ponty, if not before, we assume
that the world, together with the images created by human beings, is also
looking at us. The look is chiastic (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 2002); world and
human being meet and cross over. Mimetic seeing plays an important role in
the way we deal with images. It is a way of us opening ourselves up to the
world. By becoming similar to the images, we expand our world of experi-
ence. We take an imprint of the world and incorporate it into the image world
of our minds. By retracing the shapes and colors as we look at them, the mate-
rial and its structures, these become transformed into the internal world and
become part of the imaginary. In such a process we incorporate the unique-
ness of the world with all its historical and cultural distinctiveness. Here it is
important to protect the world and image from quick interpretations which
may, for example, grasp and interpret the image linguistically but do not do
full justice to the pictorial character of the ‘image’. Instead, it is a question of
bearing with the uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity of images without
wanting to establish clear-cut answers. By retracing them mimetically we
expose ourselves to the ambivalence of the world and images. In this process
it is a question of learning this section of the world, or the image, ‘by heart’.
In the case of images that means we must close our eyes and by using a mimetic
process create the image we have seen in our ‘mind’s eye’ and focus our atten-
tion on the image, fend off other images that float up from the stream of
images in our mind and ‘hold on to it’ as an image through our concentration
and the power of our thoughts. The re-creation of an image through contem-
plation is the first step; holding on to it, working on it, bringing it to life by
repeatedly referring back in one’s imagination to the original are further steps
50 C. Wulf

in a mimetic confrontation with images. The reproduction of an image

through contemplation and staying with it and paying full attention to it are
no lesser achievements than trying to interpret it. Educational processes
require the interweaving of these two aspects involved in understand-
ing images.

8 How Mimetic Processes Create

the Imaginary
Mimetic processes help to create the imaginary of individuals, communities
and cultures. The imaginary can be understood as an ensemble of images,
sounds, touch, smell and taste. The imagination remembers, creates, com-
bines and projects images. It creates reality. At the same time, reality helps the
imagination to create images. The images of the imagination have a dynamic
character, structuring perception, memory and projections of the future. The
images interconnect with each other following the rhythmical movements of
the imagination. Not only everyday life, but also literature, art and the per-
forming arts provide an inexhaustible number of images. Some appear to be
stable and unchanging. In contrast, others are subject to historical and cul-
tural change. The imagination continuously creates new meanings and images.
Interpretations of the world are developed using these images created by the
imagination (Wulf, 2022a; Hüppauf & Wulf, 2009).
The imagination has a strong performative power, by means of which it
produces and performs social and cultural actions. The imagination helps cre-
ate the world of the imaginary, which includes images stored in the memory,
images of the past and the future. As part of our inner world the images that
are incorporated in the imaginary are references to the outer world. There are
many factors that determine which images, structures and models become
part of our imaginary. In these images the fact that the outer world is both
present (in our mind’s eye) and absent at the same time is inextricably inter-
woven. Images emerging from the imaginary are transferred by the imagina-
tion to new contexts. Image networks develop, with which we transform the
world, and which determine our view of the world.
It is the fact that the imagination is essentially performative that results in
the images of the social field constituting a central part of the imaginary (Wulf
& Zirfas, 2007). We find there the power structures of social relationships and
social structures. Many of these processes have their roots in our childhood
and take place to a large extent unconsciously. It is in childhood that we learn
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 51

to perceive social constellations and arrangements. These early visual experi-

ences and the images resulting from them play an important and essential role
in our visual understanding of the world. We understand the social actions
that we see because historical and cultural structures and mental images that
arise as part of our lives play a part in everything we perceive. We see social
actions and relate to them as we perceive them. As a result, these actions
become more important for us. If the actions of other people are directed
toward us, they inspire us to forge a relationship with them; a response on our
part is expected. In each case the images of our imagination are important in
forming the relationship. Embedded in an action, we perceive the actions of
the other and act mimetically.

9 Mimetically Acquired Practical Knowledge

The ability to act socio-culturally is acquired from early childhood on in
mimetic learning processes. People develop the skills of playing, exchanging
gifts and ritual actions in mimetic processes, which vary from culture to cul-
ture. To be able to act, practical knowledge is required, which is acquired
through sensual, body-related mimetic learning processes in the correspond-
ing fields of action. The respective cultural characteristics of social action are
captured in mimetic approaches. Practical knowledge and social actions are
strongly historically and culturally shaped (Wulf, 2006a, 2013a; Wulf et al.,
2001a, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2011). Wherever we act with reference to an
already existing social practice thereby creating a social practice ourselves, a
mimetic relationship between the two arises. This is the case when we perform
a cultural practice, when we act according to a social model, when we physi-
cally express a social idea. In mimetically executed cultural practices there is
always the creation of something particular and new. How this is judged does
not result from the mimetic process itself but is the result of normative
considerations.
In mimetic learning processes, previous cultural actions are repeated (Resina
& Wulf, 2019). They are staged, performed and thus performative (Wulf
et al., 2001b; Wulf & Zirfas, 2007). In this process, the reference is not made
by theoretical thinking, but aisthetically, that is, with the help of the senses;
compared to the first social action, the second action distances itself from it in
that it does not directly deal with it, does not change it, but performs it again;
in this process, the mimetic action both shows and performs something; its
performance in turn generates its own sensuous qualities. Mimetic processes
52 C. Wulf

relate to cultural worlds already made by humans, which can be either real or
imaginary.
The dynamic nature of social acts is related to the fact that the knowledge
required for their staging is practical social knowledge. As such, it is less sub-
ject to rational control than is analytical knowledge. Practical knowledge is
not reflexive, self-aware knowledge. It only becomes so in the context of con-
flicts and crises, where the actions arising from it need justification. If social
practice is not questioned, practical knowledge remains semi-conscious. Like
habitus knowledge, it comprises images, schemata and forms of action that
are used in the scenic performance of social actions without any conscious
thought being required for whether they are appropriate or not. They are
‘simply known’ and used for the staging of social practice (Wulf, 2006b, 2016).
Practical knowledge also includes body movements, which are used to arrange
scenes of social behavior. By means of controlling body movements, a con-
trolled practical knowledge emerges, which—stored in the body memory—
enables the staging of corresponding forms of social behavior. This knowledge is
related to the social forms of behavior and performance developed in a com-
munity and is therefore a particular knowledge, limited in its general value, in
mimetic processes an imitative change and shaping of preceding worlds takes
place. This is what makes mimetic acts innovative. Social practices are mimetic
if they relate to other actions and can themselves be understood as social arrange-
ments that represent independent social practices as well as having a connection
to other actions. Social actions become possible through the emergence of prac-
tical knowledge in the course of mimetic processes. The practical knowledge
relevant to social actions has a physical, playful, historical and cultural side; it is
formed in face-to-face situations and is semantically ambiguous; it has imagi-
nary components, cannot be reduced to intentionality, contains an excess of
meaning and is manifested in the social stagings and performances of religion,
politics and everyday life (Kress et al., 2021; Kraus et al., 2021).

10 How Mimesis Can Lead to Violence

Mimetic processes do not always lead to social or cultural actions or behavior
that we would regard in a positive light. When rituals or prohibitions in social
situations lose their power to set limits, mimetic processes can generate vio-
lence. An example of this is violence that arises in groups or crowds, where
individuals pass the responsibility for their violent actions onto the group or
crowd. This happens to a varying degree in bullying in the media, on the
internet, in the world of work and in school. In one of my research projects
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 53

‘Balance—Rhythm—Resonance’ we examined a social situation which almost

led to the creation of a scapegoat (Paragrana, 2018, pp. 81–136). An interdis-
ciplinary study by psychoanalysts, dance specialists, conversation researchers,
educationalists and ethnologists analyzed a teaching conflict in a primary
school class which could have led to someone becoming a scapegoat. It looked
not only at the way the pupils behaved but also the attempts of the teacher
(which not everyone evaluated in the same way) to prevent this from happen-
ing. There were many surprising insights but one thing that emerged was how
infectious mimetic processes can be and how they have the potential to gener-
ate violence.
Awareness of the ‘infectious nature’ of mimetic processes is the basis of an
influential theory of the origins of social violence (Girard, 1977). The mimetic
acquisition of attitudes and behavioral patterns creates competition and
rivalry between the imitators and those imitated, which can trigger violence.
A contradictory situation arises—the fact that the imitators strive to acquire
characteristics from those they are imitating is in conflict with the fact that
both parties aspire to be different and to assert their uniqueness. This para-
doxical situation leads to an increase in the potential for social violence.
Actions containing great emotional intensity seem to trigger the mimetic
processes to a high degree; the infectious nature of laughter, love and violence
is proverbial. In many early cultures, acts of violence were answered with acts
of violence. This resulted in a vicious circle of violence that increased the
extent and intensity of these acts. Not infrequently, the cohesion of societies
was threatened by this; their response was to use prohibitions and rituals to
attempt to control the mimetically intensified violence (Girard, 1987).
In mimetic crises where violence breaks out and cannot be suppressed by
the use of prohibitions and rituals, a scapegoat might be ritually sacrificed in
order to help to end the crisis. A potential victim would be selected by com-
mon agreement, designated as the scapegoat and sacrificed. The community
was bound together by ‘mimetic antagonism’, that is, by an alliance against
the victim, who had been declared the enemy. A defenseless person was usu-
ally chosen unanimously, whose death would not unleash any further vio-
lence. Although the sacrifice was itself an act of violence, it was expected to
bring an end to the mimetic circle of violent acts. The community came
together in solidarity in the act of violence against the victim. This action gave
them, to all appearances, the opportunity to free themselves from their own
inherent violence (Girard, 1986).
The crisis was ended by the following mechanism of reversal. On the one
hand, the victim was made responsible for the violence inherent in society. This
ascribed to the victim a power that he or she did not have; yet it still enabled the
54 C. Wulf

society to relieve itself of the burden of its own potential for violence. On the
other hand, the victim was given the power of reconciliation, which occurred in
the society after his or her death. Both cases involve processes of attribution and
transference that are intended to ensure that the sacrifice will have the expected
results. The return of peace was interpreted as proof that the victim was respon-
sible for the mimetic crisis. This assumption was, of course, an illusion. It was
not society that was suffering from the aggression of the victim, but the victim
who was suffering from the violence of society. In order for this mechanism of
reversal to function, it was important that people should not be aware of these
two processes of transference onto the victim. If people realized the truth of
what was happening, the victim would lose his or her reconciliatory, liberating
power (Dieckmann et al., 1997; Wimmer et al., 1996).

11 Summary and Outlook

1. The concept of mimesis differs from imitation or simulation in that it
relates to something outside of us that we connect with and make our-
selves similar to. We cannot, however, ‘dissolve’ or lose ourselves in it, and
therefore we will always be different from it. This ‘something outside of
us’, toward which children and young people gravitate, can be another
person, part of the environment or an artificially constructed imaginary
world. Whichever it is, what takes place is a connecting with the world
outside us. As our senses and imagination transform this outside world
into internal images, sounds and the worlds of touch, smell and taste, liv-
ing experiences arise which are inextricably bound to our physical bodies
(Michaels & Wulf, 2014).
2. Mimetic processes are an intrinsic part of our human corporeality and
thus they begin at a very early age. They take place before ‘I and thou’
become split and before the separation of subject and object, and they
have an important role to play in psychological and socio-development
and the development of the persona. They are closely bound up with early
complexes and imaginings and extend into the preconscious. Because
they are cemented into the earliest processes of ‘becoming a body’ through
birth, weaning and desire, their effects are very comprehensive.
3. Even before the development of thought and language, the child experi-
ences the world, the other person and themselves mimetically. Their
mimetic processes are tied to the various senses. As they learn motor skills
the gift for mimesis plays an especially important role. However even the
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 55

acquisition of language is unthinkable without mimetic processes. In

early childhood, mimetic behavior is the way of life.
4. Mimetic processes are also involved in the awakening and evolving of
sexual desire. A gender identity is developed and there is a realization of
gender difference. Desire relates mimetically to other desires; it is conta-
gious—it infects and is infected; it develops a dynamic which often comes
into conflict with the intentions of the subject. Conceptions that have
already evolved are modified and new ones tried out. References to other
drafts and experiments continue to be developed. Many of these pro-
cesses take place unconsciously.
5. Mimetic processes support the polycentricity of the individual. They
extend into layers of corporeality, sensuality and desire which are consti-
tuted by forces other than those of the conscious mind. These include
aggression, violence and destruction, all of which are aroused and devel-
oped in mimetic processes. In group and crowd situations they can be
particularly effective, since in these situations an individual’s personal
control center and sense of responsibility are replaced by the authority of
the masses, which enables destructive actions to take place by means of an
intoxicating infection, actions which the individual would not have been
capable of on their own.
6. In the family, school and workplace the values, attitudes and norms
embodied by these institutions are internalized by children, young people
and adults through mimetic processes. As the discussion of the hidden
curriculum has shown, the values that are really effective in the institution
can go completely against its conscious, intended self-image. Analysis of
the institution, a critique of its ideology, bringing in consultants and
making institutional changes can bring these contradictions to the fore,
thus providing a basis for remedial action.
7. The same is true of the developmental, educative and socializing effects of
individual people. These too take place far more in mimetic processes
than is generally assumed. Here too there is a discrepancy between the
teacher’s or educator’s perception of themselves and the effects of their
actual actions. In many cases the unconscious and unintentional effects of
a teacher’s personality have a long-lasting influence on children and young
people. The way individual teachers feel, think and make judgments is
conveyed largely mimetically. In each particular case assimilation or rejec-
tion play a different role, the effects of which are hard to measure. Another
factor that makes it difficult to evaluate the effect of the way the teacher
behaves is that the same behavior is evaluated differently depending on a
person’s stage of life.
56 C. Wulf

8. It becomes clear in memory images that mimetically making places,

spaces and objects one’s own is of major importance for child develop-
ment. Children relate to their environments through mimesis from early
childhood onward, and they experience them as “peopled with animate
beings”. They expand themselves into this world by making themselves
similar, absorb it into their internal imaginary worlds and broaden their
skills and knowledge in this way. Since these worlds are always historically
and culturally determined and the objects in them have meaning, that is,
they are symbolically encoded, the children and young people become
encultured in these mimetic processes.
9. Objects and institutions, imaginary figures and practical actions are
embedded in societal power relations which are also conveyed, along with
other information, through the processes of becoming similar. They are
learned and experienced in mimetic processes, but they are not usually
grasped to begin with. If mimetic experiences are to be fully fathomed
they need to be analyzed and reflected upon. It is frequently the case that
they can only be appropriately assessed and judged once this work of
analysis and reflection has been done. Mimetic processes are important
prerequisites for the development of lively experiences. Analysis and
reflection are required for these experiences to develop.
10. Mimetic processes are ambivalent. The impulse to become similar is
inherent in them and can be carried through independently of the value
of the world that has gone before. Thus, in mimetic processes people can
make themselves similar to things that are stiff and lifeless which block
their development or lead it in the wrong direction. Mimesis can degen-
erate into simulation and mimicry. However, it can also result in a child
or young person expanding into the world around them; it can bridge the
gap to the outside world. Characteristically making ourselves similar to
the outside world through mimesis is a non-violent process. The aim is
first and foremost not to shape or alter the world, but rather to develop
and grow in our encounter with it.
11. Mimetic processes can teach us to relate to other people in a non-
instrumental way. Mimetic movements leave the other person as they are
and do not attempt to change them. They are open to what is foreign in
that they allow it to remain as it is and approach it, but do not try to dis-
solve the difference. The mimetic impulse to make ourselves similar to
what is other accepts this difference; it forgoes clarity or non-ambiguity
for the sake of the otherness of the other, who could only be rendered
unambiguous by being reduced to the same, to something that is familiar.
 Embodiment Through Mimetic Learning 57

By forgoing clarity, we ensure that our experience will be rich and the
alien different.
12. In mimetic movements we interpret a world that went before that has
already been interpreted from a world that we have created symbolically.
This means that we re-interpret a world that is already interpreted. This is
true even when we repeat or simply reproduce. Thus, a gesture that is
made over and over again creates meaning structures that are different
from those it produced when it was made for the first time. It takes an
object or an event out of its usual context and produces a perspective that
differs from that in which the pre-existing world was perceived. Taking
out of context and the switching of perspectives are characteristics of aes-
thetic processes that are connected with the close affinity between mime-
sis and aesthetics, seen since Plato. Mimetic re-interpretation is a novel
perception, a seeing as (Wittgenstein). In mimetic actions there is an
intention to recreate a symbolically constructed world in such a fashion
that it is seen as a specific one.

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 Awareness as a Challenge: Learning
Through Our Bodies on a Planet in Crisis
Mariagrazia Portera

As Carlisle (2018) points out, ‘habit’—a word coming etymologically from

the Latin habitus (habeo, to have), which is in turn a calque of the Greek hèxis
(from echein, to have, to hold a form through time)—designates a genuinely
interdisciplinary concept, extensively used in botany, mineralogy, zoology and
of course anthropology and the human and social sciences. As she puts it,
“mineralogists refer to the habits of crystals; botanists to the habits of plants;
of course, animals, including humans, have habits—and in each case, ‘habit’
means a shape or pattern of growth. […] Habits are the ‘way’ in which […]
an all-encompassing unity expresses or manifests itself in diverse forms of life”
(Carlisle, 2018, p. 105). The last few years have witnessed an impressive resur-
gence of interest in the notion of ‘habit’ across a wide range of contemporary
fields of inquiry: philosophers turn to the concept to investigate its signifi-
cance to the historical development of Western thought (Carlisle, 2010, 2018;
Sparrow & Hutchinson, 2013); neuroscientists look into the role that habits
play in the functioning of the human mind and identify the neural and psy-
chological underpinnings of habitual behaviour (Graybiel, 2008); anthropol-
ogists, political scientists and sociologists tap into habits as a key notion to
explain social dynamics and collective behaviour (Latour, 2013; Pedwell,
2017). It is a matter of fact that habits pervade our social and mental life to a
great extent (see Bargh, 1997): “during much of our waking lives, we act

M. Portera (*)
University of Florence, Florence, Italy
e-mail: mariagrazia.portera@unifi.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 61

A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_4
62 M. Portera

according to our habits, from the time we rise and go through our morning
routines until we fall asleep,” writes neuroscientist Ann Graybiel (2008,
p. 360). This centrality of habits to the human individual and social life is
notoriously a key point in William James’ theory of human behaviour: accord-
ing to the father of modern psychology, “when we look at living creatures
from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strikes us is that
they are bundles of habits” (James, 1890, p. 104).
In the wake of this recent rise of the concept, the main aim of this article is
to try to figure out what role habits and habitual behaviour may play in tack-
ling complex and multifaceted issues such as the current environmental crisis,
with particular reference to the challenge posed by the fact that, as has been
argued, the vast majority of our habits seem to unfold beneath the level of
consciousness.
Understanding human behaviour is indeed crucial if we are to effectively
address issues such as the current environmental crisis. As scholars working in
the newly established, multidisciplinary matrix called ‘Environmental
Humanities’ (Neimanis et al., 2015, p. 69) have recently pointed out, “at the
heart of global change in the 21st century” there are

human choices and actions—questions of human behaviour, habits, motivation

that are embedded in individual practices and actions, in institutional and cul-
tural pathways, and in political strategies. (Holm et al., 2015; see also
Wallenhorst, 2019; Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2022)

But in what sense are human habits relevant to the current environmental
crisis? Is it reasonable to expect individuals to change their habits to mitigate
the effects of the environmental crisis? And since habits are usually under-
stood as unfolding beneath the level of consciousness, what strategies can be
appealed to in order to face the new challenges?
The recent resurgence of interest in the notion of habit should not obscure
the fact that the concept has a very long and rich history and it is far from
being a term of recent coinage. Philosophical analysis of habit dates back as
far as the work of Aristotle (particularly his Nicomachean Ethics) and the
notion cuts across all schools and traditions until the present day, from
Descartes and Kant to Felix Ravaisson and the American pragmatists, from
Pierre Bourdieu to today’s cognitive scientists. As Barandiaran and Di Paolo
(2014) have shown, any philosopher over the last 2000 years has commented
on or written at least a couple of lines about the concept of habit, recognized
as a key term in any attempt to make sense of the human mind and behaviour.
 Awareness as a Challenge: Learning Through Our Bodies… 63

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, habits—particularly

in the field of the study of the human mind—gradually lost ground to more
recent (at that time) notions such as ‘representation,’ ‘module,’ ‘information-
processing device.’ The advent of cognitivism, representationalism and com-
putationalism in the 1950s and 1960s brought about a decline in the academic
and scientific interest in habits, which lasted at least until the beginning of the
1990s. Over the last decade, the emergence of the new paradigm of 4E cogni-
tion (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) has led to a re-assessment
of the notion as one of the foundations of a new conception of the human mind.
As Alva Noë points out in his 2009 book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are
Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, “tradi-
tional approaches to the mind in cognitive science,” such as the computation-
alist and (hard-) representationalist ones,

have failed to appreciate the importance of habit, for they start from the assump-
tion that the really interesting thing about us human beings is that we are very
smart. We are deliberators, we are propositional, we use reason. (ibid., p. 98)

The intellectualist, computationalist and representationalist stance, the

roots of which according to Noë date back to Plato, sees human beings at
their best as habit-free. Humans’ distinctive nature, in his view, is supposed to
reveal “itself precisely in the fact that [human beings]” decide, plan and act
relying on pure reason and that they “rise above mere habit and act from prin-
ciples” (ibid.). Is this approach to human nature able to grasp the specificity
of our way of thinking and behaving? According to the proponents of the 4E
cognition paradigm, the reverse is true. As Noë argues, we can make delibera-
tions, act and carry out plans not because we are endowed with pure reason,
but because we have bodies, that is, because our bodies can learn, which
means they can contract habits. In a word, we are Homo sapiens because we
have (and are) habitual bodies. Even skills so sophisticated such as mathemati-
cal expertise and the ability to speak two or more languages would not be
possible if we had no habits:

If I am working on a mathematical problem, I may be pushing my understand-

ing to its limits, but this is only possible because of my confident mastery of the
more basic skills (such as counting) on which I depend. (ibid., p. 99)

In other words, solving a mathematical problem is only possible because

more basic skills such as counting have become a ‘habit,’ on which I can con-
fidently rely without paying too much conscious attention to the mechanisms
64 M. Portera

of its execution. There is a difference, in Noë’s account, between an expert and

a novice: an expert, e.g. a pianist has habits, which enables her to perform her
task in the smoothest and therefore most effective way; a novice—let us think,
for instance, of a boy who has just started to play the piano for the first time—
must pay attention to every single gesture and movement of his actions, which
sound then fairly ‘mechanical.’ It has been demonstrated (ibid., p. 100) that
the level of brain activation decreases in experts (compared to novices) when
they engage in the performance of tasks which they master efficiently; in this
sense, it may be said that “expertise requires precisely the absence of care and
deliberation”—that is, requires habits—“that the intellectualist wrongly takes
to be the hallmark of our mental lives” (ibid., p. 101).
The conclusion to which Noë comes sounds very much like William James
in its spirit: “Human beings are creatures of habit. Habits are central to human
nature […]. Only a being with habits could have a mind like ours” (ibid.,
pp. 97–98). If we want to understand how the human mind works, why we
behave in the way we do and how it is possible to promote more sustainable
and pro-environmental behaviour, we need to turn the spotlight on our
embodied, embedded, partially unconscious (but not utterly impermeable to
cognition) habits. Indeed, our habits have very much to do with our learn-
ing bodies.
Perhaps no one as effectively and clearly as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has
brought to the fore in the twentieth century the relationship between habits
and the human body. In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), he under-
stands ‘habit’ as a ‘rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema,’ an
ability to feel ‘at home’ in the environment by incorporating new motoric
significances, that is, by acquiring bodily familiarity with instruments and
tools (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 164). If I take up the habit of driving my car
or if a blind man takes up the habit of relying on his stick to walk, the car and
the stick cease to be seen as “objects with a size and volume which is estab-
lished by comparison with other objects” (ibid., p. 165) and become an exten-
sion of the living body, the more so the deeper the habit of using them.
Merleau-Ponty chooses the example of a woman who types so regularly (for
work) that she contracts a habit of type-writing: her habit is neither cognitive
knowledge (based on representations) nor a Pavlovian involuntary action;
rather, it is a non-representational, embodied and embedded ‘knowledge in
the hands,’ a feeling of being familiar with the type-writer as if it were a sensi-
tive extension of her own body. As Merleau-Ponty puts it,

it is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters
which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys. To know how to
 Awareness as a Challenge: Learning Through Our Bodies… 65

type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to
have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the
letter as it comes before our eye. (ibid., p. 166)

To know how to type is instead a habit, that is, a rearrangement of my own

body in connection with environmental factors or elements. It is because our
bodies can learn, which means because they can be moulded and shaped by
experience, that we are able to take up habits. This point is very clearly brought
out by William James in the fourth chapter of his Principles of Psychology
(1890), in which he discusses habits and their role and relevance to human
experience. “The phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity
of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed” (James, 1890,
p. 68); plasticity, as a defining feature of organic materials, is understood by
James as “the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence,
but strong enough not to yield all at once” (ibid.).
Now, what have our easily moulded bodies and habits to do with the cur-
rent environmental crisis? A growing body of recent literature has addressed
the question as to how climate change and the current environmental crisis
can be mitigated through personal actions and the acquisition of better envi-
ronmental habits (Howell, 2018; Steg & Vlek, 2009; Farrow, et al., 2017;
Knussen & Yule, 2008); there is today

an urgent need for a robust theory of consumption that addresses how habits
form, how they change and how policy can contribute to the formation of new
habits that are less environmentally intrusive. (Wilhite, 2015, p. 100)

Examples of simple environmental (bad) habits are: leaving the light on

when nobody’s in the room; leaving the tap running while brushing the teeth;
buying more food than needed (thus increasing the amount of waste); regu-
larly leaving household electrical appliances on standby mode instead of
switching them off and other similar patterns of behaviour. Project Drawdown®,
a non-profit organization which has emerged in the last few years as one of the
leading resources in providing climate solutions, offers lists of actions, to be
performed both on the collective-global and on the individual level, that are
useful to tackle effectively the environmental and climate issues (https://draw-
down.org/solutions/table-of-solutions). It is important to notice that each of
these (apparently) minor behavioural patterns (leaving the lights on, leaving
household equipment on standby mode etc.), which we perform in most cases
automatically, without being completely aware of what we are doing while we
are doing it and which are potentially environmentally harmful, reveals a
66 M. Portera

more general propensity (acquired, not innate) to think of natural resources

as if they were infinite and of us, human beings, as if we were the ultimate and
only masters of the planet. Each of them, to put it differently, taps into a more
general, ‘neo-liberal’ habit of thinking that is specific to the Anthropocene
‘milieu.’
Let us dwell for a moment on the fact that human beings are never com-
pletely aware of their habitual actions as they perform them. According to
William James, one of the laws of habit is that it “diminishes the conscious
attention with which our acts are performed” (James, 1890, p. 74). As James
explains,

if an act requires for its execution a chain, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., of successive

nervous events, then in the first performances of the action the conscious will
must choose each of these events from a number of wrong alternatives that tend
to present themselves; but habit soon brings it about that each event calls up its
own appropriate successor without any alternative offering itself, and without
any reference to the conscious will, until at last the whole chain, A, B, C, D, E,
F, G, rattles itself off as soon as A occurs, just as if A and the rest of the chain
were fused into a continuous stream. (James, 1890, pp. 74–75; for an insightful
discussion of the relationship between habit and attention, alternative to the
Jamesian approach, see Magrì, 2019)

This means that, if we start to perform habitually an environmentally

harmful behavioural pattern, with one repetition after another the whole
action will result in becoming easier and easier, the attention with which it is
performed lower and lower, up to the point of it being executed unconsciously.
But then, if the current environmental crisis is worsened by our non-
environmentally friendly habits, how should we grasp and change them since
they unfold beneath the level of consciousness?
On 19 August 2020, The Guardian published an article by Damian
Carrington featuring climate activists Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer,
Anuna de Wever and Adélaïde Charlie:

“Looking back [over two years], a lot has happened. Many millions have taken
to the streets, and on 28 November 2019, the European parliament declared a
climate and environmental emergency,” Thunberg said. “But over these last two
years, the world has also emitted over 80 bn tonnes of CO2. We have seen con-
tinuous natural disasters taking place across the globe. Many lives and liveli-
hoods have been lost, and this is only the very beginning.” The young activists
pointed out that “when it comes to action, we are still in a state of denial. The
gap between what we need to do and what’s actually done is widening by the
 Awareness as a Challenge: Learning Through Our Bodies… 67

minute.” It seems, Thunberg and her fellow activists recognized, that the climate
emergency is a “fact which most people refuse to accept. Just the thought of
being in a crisis that we cannot buy, build or invest our way out of seems to cre-
ate some kind of mental short-circuit. This mix of ignorance, denial and
unawareness is the very heart of the problem.”

These last words by the climate activists are relevant: here we are confronted
again, as it emerged while discussing the notion of habit in general, with
unawareness as being at the very heart of the environmental issue. Why does
it seem that our minds and habitual bodies are, as it were, ‘designed’ to refuse
or at least to struggle to accept the reality of the environmental crisis?
In a book published a few years ago, Reason in a Dark Time. Why the Struggle
Against Climate Change Failed and What it Meant for Our Future (2014), Dale
Jamieson offers a few answers to this question. First, it seems that a sort of
evolutionary bias is at work with the environmental crisis: we, as evolved ani-
mals which have passed through the sieve of natural selection, struggle to
recognize problems like climate change.

We have a strong bias toward dramatic movements of middle-size objects that

can be visually perceived, and climate change does not typically present in this
way. The onset of climate change is gradual and uncertain rather than immedi-
ate and obvious. Increments of climate change are usually barely noticeable, and
even less so because we re-norm our expectations to recent experiences.
(Jamieson, 2014, p. 102)

That is, even less so because we have a strong tendency to habituate our-
selves and to get accustomed even to the most extra-ordinary experiences,
provided that they are repeated often enough. This is all the more evident
today, in a world whose spatial and temporal boundaries have inevitably nar-
rowed and in which, at least in the Western countries, the socio-economic
system forces us to be as flexible and fast as possible. Devising good solutions
to mitigate the environmental crisis, however, implies a number of time-
consuming efforts, the results of which might require many years before
becoming tangible.
As Jamieson (2014) points out, other psychological mechanisms inhibit
action: “The scale of a problem like climate change can be crippling. When we
do not feel efficacious with respect to a problem, we often deny that it exists”
(ibid., p. 103). In his view, the problem with climate change and the environ-
mental issues is that they
68 M. Portera

must be thought rather than sensed […]. Even if we succeed in thinking that
something is a threat, we are less reactive than if we sense that it is a threat.
Consider the difference between touching a hot stove and being told that the
stove is hot. Scientists are telling us that the world is warming, but we do not
sense it and so we do not act. (ibid.)

Here again, the issue at stake is that of ‘bodily’ unawareness: how is it pos-
sible to make our bodies—our habitual bodies—feel and sense the climate
change? Indeed, if we do not feel the environmental crisis, and if we do not
feel and sense (i.e., if we are not aware of ) the harmful impact on the environ-
ment exerted by some of our habits, how might we contribute to the mitiga-
tion of the current environmental crisis?
In this final section of my paper I would like to present two models of
answers to the question with which I concluded the preceding one. On the
one hand, recently there have been proposals aiming at ‘by-passing’ the ques-
tion of the awareness of our (bad) environmental habits, ultimately consider-
ing our lack of awareness not to be crucial or decisive in enabling us to grasp
and eventually change our habits. On the other hand, a line of research has
lately emerged focusing on the development of new, non-intellectualist and
non-cognitivist tools that are useful for making people aware of their environ-
mental habits, under the premise that, without awareness, no modification or
transformation of our habits would ever be possible. Let us start with the first
proposal.
Theories of sustainable environmental habits have been put forward in the
last few years. These approaches revolve around the notions of ‘affordance’
and ‘nudge’ (see, for instance Lehner et al., 2016; Kaaronen, 2017). It is
stressed that in order to steer people towards more sustainable behaviour it is
not necessary to make them aware of their, largely automatic, environmen-
tally unsustainable habits, rather it is enough and indeed much more effective
to implement minor changes (‘affordances,’ ‘nudges’) to the everyday infra-
structures and architectures so that people can be pushed into environmen-
tally friendly behaviour. In other words, independently of us being aware or
not of our habitual behaviour, a suitably equipped and designed environment
will gently ‘force’ us to make the best choices and to act in the most nature-
friendly way. ‘Affordance,’ as is well known, is a concept coined and brought
to the fore by the American psychologist James Gibson in the 1960s and fully
developed in his masterpiece The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
(1979). Gibson defines ‘affordances’ as follows:
 Awareness as a Challenge: Learning Through Our Bodies… 69

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it pro-
vides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dic-
tionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something
that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing
term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.
(Gibson, 1979, p. 127)

Affordances are ‘possibilities for action’: for example, the curved handle of
my breakfast mug invites me to grip it in a certain way; it is, in this sense, an
‘affordance.’ Less well known is perhaps the concept of the ‘nudge,’ put for-
ward by University of Chicago economist Richard H. Thaler and Harvard
Law School Cass R. Sunstein in a book published in 2008 under the title
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. According
to the authors,

A nudge […] is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behav-
iour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly chang-
ing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must
be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye
level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not. (ibid., p. 9)

Nudges are not just affordances: they are affordances designed by someone
specifically with the aim of letting people carry out a certain action or take a
certain decision. The main premise underlying the theory of the nudge is, of
course, that people usually do not make choices and take decisions in their
best interests; pushed by ignorance, emotions, feelings and other non-rational
factors, humans end up in most cases with reasoning very badly. An example
of the application of nudging to promote environmental causes in food con-
sumption (through the modification of the physical environment) are changes
in the positioning, accessibility and visibility of products on the supermarket
shelves, for instance, to reduce meat consumption (and therefore the huge
impact of meat consumption on the environment).
There have been critical voices concerning the idea of applying nudging to
promote behavioural change, both on a theoretical and on an empirical basis.
As Pedwell (2017) has argued, for instance, the nudge theory focuses on per-
nicious habits with the idea of getting rid of them without the ‘active’ and
fully aware cooperation of individuals and without addressing the more com-
plex question of how ‘intelligent,’ malleable and more sustainable habits can
be formed; moreover, it targets isolated individuals alone—seen more as con-
sumers than as citizens—instead of communities, groups and their shared
70 M. Portera

values. In a word, it seems that the ‘libertarian-paternalist’ approach based on

nudging is just another facet of the manipulative, neo-liberal habit of hyper-
and quick-consuming that has dominated so far in the Anthropocene. On an
empirical basis, a recent study by Hagmann et al. (2019)—among other
pieces of research following the same lines—has demonstrated that a nudge-
based approach with the aim of promoting the reduction of carbon emissions
(instead of a carbon tax, which imposes direct costs on consumers) would be
in the long term more detrimental than beneficial to the environmental cause.
As the researchers propose, “nudges aimed at reducing carbon emissions could
have a pernicious indirect effect if they offer the promise of a ‘quick fix’ and
thereby undermine support for policies of greater impact” (ibid., p. 484).
Moreover, nudges risk providing the “false hope that problems can be tackled
without imposing considerable costs” (ibid.). Tiefenbeck et al. (2013) have
shown, in a similar vein, that people who were nudged to reduce their water
consumption ended up with increasing their use of electricity, which is an
example of behavioural spill-over that risks undermining the effectiveness of
the nudge approach as a whole.
Being fully aware of our behavioural patterns, including our environmental
habits and the energy- and time-consuming efforts required to modify them,
seems then to be crucial if we are to promote truly effective pro-environmental
change. This is why in recent years—with the current resurgence of interest in
the concept of habit—a stimulating body of research has emerged addressing
alternative ways to make people aware of their habits. I stress the term ‘alter-
native,’ since a purely cognitive, in a broad sense intellectualist or rational
approach to our embodied habits is assumed not to be enough to grasp them
and eventually change them. As Carlisle (2010, pp. 141–142) has argued,

Awareness of habit has to be cultivated at the level of sensations, feelings, and

involuntary thoughts […]. Developing the faculty of awareness of passive phe-
nomena […] can gradually enable a person to discriminate between habits in
order to choose which to maintain and which to resist.

In this sense, an interesting path that environmental scientists have started

to explore has to do with the possible interconnections between policy-
making, the behavioural sciences and mindfulness, understood as a practice
through which individuals are invited to develop ‘sensitive awareness’—aware-
ness on the level of the body, see Shusterman (2008)—of the present moment
through meditation techniques (see Lilley et al., 2014; Armstrong, 2015;
Amel et al., 2009). In the contemporary consumer culture, in which “we are
constantly separated, even at the most basic sensory level, from the very
 Awareness as a Challenge: Learning Through Our Bodies… 71

systems we rely on, such that many of us do not even know we are in the
middle of environmental crises” (Amel et al., 2009, p. 14), that is, we do not
even feel or sense the crisis and how our habitual behaviour impacts on it,
cultivating awareness and gaining ‘sensitive attention’ through mindfulness
training might be useful if we are to increase sustainable behaviour.
This proposal has, however, its lights and shadows. In this final part of the
section, I would like to draw attention to the target of the two proposals—the
nudge-based and the mindfulness-based: in fact, both target isolated
individuals.
While the nudge theory sees individuals as consumers unable to choose
what is in their best interest and who must, therefore, be gently forced or
nudged towards certain options or actions, mindfulness-based approaches try
to make individuals fully aware of the impact, effects and consequences of
their own (habitual) behaviour, with particular reference, in this case, to envi-
ronmental and sustainability issues. But are we sure that, on the one hand,
maintaining individuals in their condition of unawareness, through nudging,
or, on the other hand, burdening them with the full awareness of the whole
chain of environmental consequences of their acts are the only two options
available to tackle the environmental crisis effectively? Let us consider, for
instance, the various plans and projects aimed at promoting pro-environmental
behaviour which have been carried out in the UK over the last few years by
the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) (see
Shove, 2010). The vast majority of these projects were inspired by the so-
called ABC approach, where A stays for ‘attitude,’ B for ‘behaviour’ and C for
‘change.’ As Shove (2010, p. 1274) argues, “the popularity of the ABC frame-
work is an indication of the extent to which responsibility for responding to
climate change is thought to lie with individuals whose behavioural choices
will make the difference.”
The point with approaches like this is that they place “responsibility squarely
on the individual CO2 addict and in the same move [deflect] attention away
from the many institutions involved in structuring possible courses of action
and in making some very much more likely than others” (ibid., p. 1280). This
is, in my opinion, a criticism worth considering which can be applied not
only to a nudge-based approach to climate change but also, at least to some
extent, to certain mindfulness-based approaches. Indeed, these new, embod-
ied, sensitive, habit-based strategies (such as nudges and mindfulness) can be
much more beneficial for the environmental cause if we bring to the fore their
potential to contribute to a sense of community and political belonging (broadly
understood), rather than just individualist thinking. Let us consider, for
instance, experiences such as the international Councils on the Uncertain
72 M. Portera

Human Future (https://councilontheuncertainhumanfuture.org), launched

in 2014 at Clark University, USA, and now internationally widespread, which
are initiatives of collective reflection relying on mindfulness techniques, medi-
tation, storytelling and the sharing of scientific data, with the aim of building
collaborative insight on climate change and the ecological crisis. Experiences
like these might help people truly share in the joint effort towards a more
sustainable way of living.

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 Building Blocks of a Historical Overview
of ‘Tacit Knowledge’

Kristina Brümmer, Thomas Alkemeyer,

and Robert Mitchell

1 Introduction: (Re-)Turning
to Tacit Knowledge
Since the 1990s, there have been a number of shifts in cultural studies that
have caused an upheaval, each (re-)emphasising elements of the social that
have either been forgotten or never quite recognised in a pivotal manner. For
instance, alongside focusing on language, signs and semiotic structures in the
so-called linguistic turn, since the 1990s there has been a move towards a
transdisciplinary methodological re-orientation around the terms ‘practice’
and ‘practices’ within the so-called practice turn. A central impetus of this
‘turn around’ is the rejection of an (over-)theorised perspective that only per-
ceives the ‘nitty-gritty,’ ‘real’ material and embodied being-in-the-world when
it happens to present an obstacle to cognitive and intellectual processes.
Instead, in a multiplication of different turns and resurgences, other aspects of

K. Brümmer (*)
University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: Kristina.bruemmer@uni-hamburg.de
T. Alkemeyer
University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
e-mail: thomas.alkemeyer@uni-oldenburg.de
R. Mitchell
University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 75

A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_5
76 K. Brümmer et al.

the social are given the limelight: the body turn focuses on the role of the body
as a mediator, while a renaissance of pragmatism also considers embodied
knowledge to be pivotal; the performative turn addresses the performative
nature of the social, that is, that it does not simply reside in structures, but
must be enacted; the spatial turn predictably puts the role of spaces in the
foreground, and the material turn looks to material settings and artefacts.
From a practice-theoretical perspective, the issue is then how all these aspects
(co-)constitute social order(s) and their human—and non-human—co-actors
participating in them. Thus, it is both a premise and a corollary of these theo-
retical (re-)orientations that humans are no longer viewed as rational reflexive,
primarily cognising entities, standing in opposition to the disorder of every-
day life, but rather “carnally” as entities of “flesh and blood” (Wacquant,
2015) who are anchored in multiple ways to their being-in-the-world, just
as—to loosely quote Marx—they equally make their own circumstances and,
thus, form themselves or, rather, their selves. From this perspective, all percep-
tion and knowledge—or in praxeological parlance, perceiving and know-
ing—is co-constituted by practical doing. Indeed, even thinking is conceived
as a component of ‘real’ practice.
In the sociology of knowledge, this re-orientation corresponds to the
replacement of the question “who knows something?” with the more funda-
mental question, “how can something be known in the first place?”
(Hirschauer, 2008, p. 87). Whereas a Platonic-Cartesian approach only
bestows the term ‘knowledge’ on what can be expressed in language and ter-
minology, thus exalting the theoria and its hard-earned glimpse of eternal
and immovable ideas as the highest of mankind’s achievements, practice
theories (re-)discover concepts of knowledge that were displaced or stigma-
tised as irrational by the epistemocentric mainstream of Western philosophy
(Hetzel, 2008, p. 29). A central aspect here is a re-turn towards skilful
embodied navigation in the world around and with things, people, spaces
and situations which is founded upon an intimate sense of being-in-the-
world. Such implicit or “empractical” (Stekeler-Weithofer, 2005) ‘know
how,’ which is intrinsically tied to practices being performed, has been pos-
tulated, among others, by such philosophers as Heidegger, Wittgenstein,
Fleck, Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty.
Thus, the approaches detailed here share the more or less strong program-
matic ambition to critique systematically the otherwise dominant assumption
that ‘theory’ takes epistemological precedence over ‘practice.’ Instead, the aim
is to rehabilitate “other knowledge” (Böhle et al., 2001), an aim which itself
could stem from current times and circumstances, living in a ‘second
 Building Blocks of a Historical Overview of ‘Tacit Knowledge’ 77

modernity,’ characterised by a resurgence of ambiguity and uncertainty aris-

ing in making conscious thought, intentional planning and reflexive regula-
tion seem less important vis-à-vis situationally adequate action via (socialised)
intuition and a ‘feeling for the situation’ (Beck & Bonß, 2001).
Such clarity of impetus notwithstanding, in the relevant (inter-)disciplin-
ary discourse it is not uncontroversial what the characteristic features of such
‘other,’ generally ‘silent’ knowledge are. Indeed, the question can even be
raised whether one is dealing with knowledge in a sensible usage of the term
at all, or whether the term ‘knowledge’ should be reserved for verifiable con-
tent that can be articulated (e.g., Schneider, 2012, p. 87).
Terminological disagreements aside, in our view, in the current re-
evaluation of what is known as tacit knowledge there are five fundamental
assumptions. First, it does not exist of its own accord in an independent,
purely theoretical state, but rather is entwined with practice. Subsequently,
second, human bodies are not mere executive organs of mental intentions
and intellectual planning, but rather themselves (co-)agents developing their
own ‘intelligence’ through practice (comprehensive discussion by Keller &
Meuser, 2011). Third, this embodied knowledge of skill (in the sense of a
strict concept of knowledge) cannot be represented or verbalised or only with
difficulty (Loenhoff, 2012, p. 62). As ‘silent knowledge’ in this sense, it can,
fourth, only be acquired via practical experience. Lastly, fifth, in contrast to
knowledge in line with the Platonic-Cartesian model, its value is not mea-
sured according to the criterion of universally and abstractly determined
truth, but rather exclusively according to its effects, that is, with regard to
whether it enables action which is adequate for the situation.
In sum, compiling a comprehensive conceptual history of tacit knowledge
poses an impossible task because it entails summarising a history of an episte-
mological issue that is present even when the term itself does not (yet) make
an explicit appearance. Thus, our contribution here must of necessity be
highly selective. Consequently, our aim is to provide an overview of the most
important aspects, especially of those approaches that have played and/or still
play a pivotal part in the current discussion. In so doing, this overview details
diverse approaches along three broad disciplinary boundaries depicting the
respective phenomena being focused upon and the solution which is being
sought by referring to this ‘other’ knowledge. Subsequently in the third and
final section, we consider critically the interconnected (new) concepts of prac-
tice and knowledge that are steadily gaining influence in the wake of these
cultural turns.
78 K. Brümmer et al.

2 Tacit Knowledge in Diverse Disciplines

2.1 Philosophy

In philosophy, with materialism, anthropology, phenomenology and pragma-

tism, there is no dearth of approaches providing a counterbalance to the
Cartesian conception of the subject.
Although Karl Marx was not primarily endeavouring to develop the con-
cept of implicit knowledge in his critical discussion of Feuerbach’s anthropo-
logical materialism, in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Marx nevertheless
postulates a primacy of practice, that is, sensuous human activity vis-à-vis
theoretical contemplation revealing a common denominator between his
practice philosophy and other anti-Cartesian philosophies similarly engaged
in locating the development of subjectivity, mind and meaning first and fore-
most in practice. Consequently, all knowledge is entwined in concrete enact-
ments of everyday life and is in this sense implicit in practice.
In his ontological hermeneutic, Martin Heidegger (2001, §§ 31–33) con-
ceives of one’s relation to and in the world not in a contemplative but a practi-
cal sense. As Loenhoff (2012, p. 50) emphasises, the main drive here is the
manual handling of everyday tools and instruments that bestows an under-
standing of the world upon actors before theoretical insight has even begun.
This primary mode of understanding proceeds as a practical orientation
towards a familiar world filled with objects which are ready to be handled
manually, that is, are ‘ready-to-hand’ in Heidegger’s terminology. Therefore,
primary understanding is a practical skill. The depth of this understanding
reveals itself in interpretative acts vis-à-vis the objects that are ready-to-hand,
not primarily formulated in lingual form but already expressed non-lingually,
for example, in the creative handling of objects in the world. Thus, Heidegger
subverts the widely held position of equating explication with verbality or
even linguality for that matter (ibid., p. 60). By reconstructing the origins of
theoretical discovery on the foundation of practical handling with what is
ready-to-hand, he succeeds in not completely untethering even the most
abstract forms of contemplation from their material prerequisites (ibid.,
p. 56). Cognition and reflexion are driven by real-world occurrences when
what is ready-to-hand becomes conspicuous, obtrusive or recalcitrant, for
example, by causing a disruption, thus stepping out of their otherwise incon-
spicuous standby-mode into the mode of being ‘present-at-hand’. Hence, the
foundation of all knowledge lies in such circumspect skilfulness in the world.
Moreover, the everyday handling of objects and language “already is with
 Building Blocks of a Historical Overview of ‘Tacit Knowledge’ 79

Others” (ibid., p. 162) is, in this sense, irreducibly social. Meaning that this
knowledge is dependent on intersubjective recognition so that it would be
fallacious to conceive of it as exclusively the corporeal skill of a single indi-
vidual or their body.
With the aim of understanding how humans orientate themselves in the
world, in his philosophy of perception the French phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1998) postulates the primordial interwovenness of the living
body1 and the world. He describes how, before any kind of analysis can take
place, we perceive objects via the medium of the lived body, in turn, creating
these objects in the first place (ibid., p. 92). All—even scientific—cognition,
thought and action are mediated via the anchor of the living body in contexts
of meaning. Perception is neither reduced in a sensory manner to a purely
passive reception of impressions nor idealistically to an accomplishment
exclusive to cognition, but is instead conceived of as a process filling the world
with meaning and, thus, constituting ‘world’. Vis-à-vis the body as an object
among objects, the lived body (corps vivant, corps propre) differentiates itself
analytically in that it is never fully in view, never fully in perception’s grasp,
featuring an “intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty, 1998, p. 137) of its own, an
“opening upon the world” (ibid., p. 117), a “being in and towards the world”
(ibid., p. 106): by ‘inhabiting’ the world, it co-develops the objects it perceives
as meaningful; they are immediately “present as the immanent term of [one’s]
practical intentions” (Wacquant, 1992, p. 21). Thus again, it is not theoretical-
abstract knowledge that is the primary access point to the world but rather
practical intentionality and practical knowledge housed in the living body.
A further important point of reference in current discussions around the
interconnectedness of practice, bodies and knowledge is to be found in
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work. Here (meaningful) order in thought and in
the world is conceived of as starting from the close relationship between an
active subject and the world (Wittgenstein, 1970, 1971). Following
Wittgenstein, subjects and their actions are structured according to the sug-
gestions and demands the subject receives from and in the world. The subject
does not primarily perceive objects in the world in an abstract manner, but
instead mainly from the concrete angle of how they can be used. In this sense,
action and understanding are viewed as practical responses to demands from
objects: practical understanding of their material-symbolic handling qualities
(Gebauer, 2009, p. 64). Pivotal here is the concept of the ‘language game’
1
Attempts to translate phenomenological terms for the lived experience of the body (e.g., Leib in German)
vis-à-vis the body as an object or instrument (e.g., Körper) are always somewhat fraught. Using ‘living’
rather than the more common ‘lived body’ follows Sara Heinämaa’s (1999, p. 128, fn. 6) suggestion for
translating Merleau-Ponty’s corps vivant.
80 K. Brümmer et al.

with which Wittgenstein underscores that lingual descriptions and words

accrue their meaning through their practical handling in the world, that is,
within a social usage context, and that such accrued meaning does not pre-
cede their usage. Thus, the acquisition of a language game and, concurrently,
of adequate rule-abiding behaviour goes hand in hand with the corresponding
constitution of the body. Ultimately, Wittgenstein (1970) traces back all cer-
tainties in our thinking and acting to language games, the material structure
of the body and its ability to (re-)act in and to the world.
For the American pragmatists William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and
John Dewey the important issue—this time more figuratively than literally—
is the ‘nature’ of knowledge. Their focus is not on abstract-theoretical knowl-
edge which precedes and guides action, but rather on knowledge with regard
to its practical effects in everyday life. Indeed, instead of locating mind,
knowledge, thought and subjectivity outside of practice, pragmatism focuses
on their practical social constitution (Hetzel, 2008). Critical in this regard is
the term experience, which is especially pronounced in Dewey’s (1929) work
which differentiates between primary experience as the “unanalyzed totality”
(ibid., p. 8) of unprocessed impressions in everyday life vis-à-vis secondary
experiences as “derived and refined products” (ibid., p. 4) that are “discrimi-
nated by reflection out of primary experience” (ibid., p. 8). By observing these
different types of experience, Dewey criticises the intellectualistic tendency to
place the products of reflection and the explicit articulation of knowledge
above primary experience.
Following in the tradition of both Wittgenstein and pragmatism, the
British philosopher Gilbert Ryle devotes a whole book titled The Concept of
Mind (2002) to the cause of elevating skill (‘knowing how’) vis-à-vis theoreti-
cal knowledge (‘knowing that’). Ryle charges (post-)Cartesian philosophy
with following the (categorically) mistaken and dogmatic ‘official doctrine’
that action can only be classed as intelligent if an actor considers plans and
rules ex ante, forms intentions and recalls theoretical knowledge (ibid.,
pp. 15–16). Ryle demonstrates how this dogmatic position leads to an infinite
regress by assuming that the practical performance of an intelligent action is
always preceded by some sort of “spectral” (ibid., p. 20), rule-like mechanisms
according to the “double-life theory” (ibid., p. 18) of mind versus body. Ryle
uses the fact that something can be done skilfully without the capability of
articulating explicit rules to re-evaluate the term ‘intelligence,’ assigning it not
to incorporeal acts of the ‘mind,’ but rather locating it in practice as the man-
ner in which acts are physically carried out. Consequently, here again, it is
practical performance which precedes theorisation. Moreover as, in this view,
skill is not the result of propositional knowledge, Ryle finds that skill is the
 Building Blocks of a Historical Overview of ‘Tacit Knowledge’ 81

result of “a disposition, but not a single-track disposition like a reflex or a

habit” (ibid., p. 46). It is a multi-track or complex disposition acquired by
practice which not only lays the foundation for routines, but also allows for
the variable adjustment in execution vis-à-vis demands in situ (ibid., 45ff.).
Within the philosophy of science, ‘other’ knowledge is primarily an episte-
mological issue with regard to studying the (pre-)conditions of (scientific)
cognition, knowledge and discovery. Here Michael Polanyi, one of the most
notable authors of the current re-discovery of ‘other’ knowledge, offers a
sound critique of what he described as an “erroneous scientific world view”
(Polanyi, 1970, p. 971) narrowing knowledge down to only that which is
scientifically substantiated. Polanyi begins from “the fact that ‘we can know
more than we can tell’” (Polanyi, 2009, p. 4, original emphasis) and builds the
argument that even explicit, seemingly objective and completely objectifiable
knowledge, for example, a mathematical theory, is built upon an epistemo-
logical foundation which it can never fully encapsulate. Polanyi calls this
foundation the ‘tacit dimension.’2

2.2 Psychology/Social Learning Theory

For psychology and social learning theory, tacit knowledge provides a path
on their primary mission of explaining how humans are enabled to act com-
petently in the world. With the intention of sounding out the boundaries of
artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the faculties of their human counterparts,
Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus put forward a model of skill acquisition following
the development from novice to expert, which was met with a positive
response in the psychological and educational study of expertise. According
to Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), the type of formal-analytical approach
deemed to be the highest form of intelligent action in intellectualistic theo-
ries absolutely does not represent how human expertise works, but rather
depicts the approach of beginners. The latter, namely, plan their course of
action and analyse situations thoroughly before doing anything; experts,
however, act based on a wealth of experience quickly and intuitively—instead
of being analytical and distanced their approach is holistic. When it comes to
experts, alongside case- and situation-specific tacit knowledge, there is a

2
A similarly positioned, albeit less often noted critique of the hypostatising of scientific thought
(Schützeichel, 2012, p. 118) is to be found in the work of Karl Mannheim (1982), specifically his distinc-
tion between conjunctive and communicative cognition. Whereas Polanyi views tacit knowledge in con-
junction with an individual body, Mannheim conceives of conjunctive cognition as a fundamentally
collective act, operating in communities and resting upon shared experience (ibid., p. 194ff.; also
Schützeichel, 2012).
82 K. Brümmer et al.

higher level of reflection at work: their actions are accompanied by “delibera-

tive rationality” (ibid., p. 36). Such contemporaneous thinking-in-action is
also described by Donald Schön in his book, The Reflexive Practitioner (2009,
p. 21), as ‘reflection-in-action.’ It enables adepts and masters to react instan-
taneously to contingencies in situ, adapting their actions accordingly, and
departing from established routine.
Whereas Dreyfus and Dreyfus focus on individual practitioners, Jean
Lave and Etienne Wenger (1997) adopt a collectivistic perspective in their
communities-of-practice approach. They begin by wondering how new-
comers learn to participate in practices and—eventually—become recog-
nised members of a community of practitioners. The authors analyse
practical knowledge as being shared between participants. A central concept
of this practice-theoretical learning theory is “legitimate peripheral partici-
pation” (ibid., p. 27), according to which practical competence is acquired
by being increasingly engaged in respective practice(s). In this view, learning
is not a top-down process of authoritative instruction, but rather occurs in
interaction in which all participants learn ‘communally’ together in prac-
tice. Here then, practical knowledge is framed primarily as a carrier of tradi-
tions. The strength of the communities-of-practice approach is describing
how novices gradually gain in competence, reproduce proficiency and
become carriers of established practices themselves. However, the concomi-
tant weakness of this approach with its emphasis on tradition is that it is less
well equipped to explain change vis-à-vis “persistence and perpetuation”
(Nicolini, 2012, p. 85).
Similarly, the assumption that learning and practice are inseparably con-
joined characterises activity theory. The starting point here is the observation
that the relationship of humans and their environment is mediated materi-
ally, that is, via artefacts and symbols. In this view, not only practical facul-
ties, but also ‘high’ mental functions are constituted in and by the handling
of objects (ibid., p. 103). This is exemplified by Alexei Nikolajewitsch
Leontjew’s (1973, p. 239) description of how a child’s hand movements
learning to use a spoon gradually succumb to the objective logic of handling
this object: while learning the child converts what are at first involuntary
movements into object-adequate skilful movements. By this, the child
unlocks the objective-social material meaning (Holzkamp, 1995, p. 282),
which is literally ‘objectified’ in and by the spoon, conforming to it and,
thus, gradually gaining competence in the practice of eating and, in turn,
displaying recognisable social form.
 Building Blocks of a Historical Overview of ‘Tacit Knowledge’ 83

2.3 Sociology

In sociology, ‘other’ knowledge is primarily discussed under the aspect of its

historical and societal contingency and its importance for the construction,
reproduction and transformation of social order(s). With regard to conceptu-
alisation and nomenclature of this knowledge, there are several different pro-
posals (see, e.g., Hirschauer, 2008 for an overview):
Marcel Mauss influentially speaks of “techniques of the body” to denote
people’s everyday actions by which social order is produced. Specifically, this
term refers to historically and culturally variable “ways in which from society
to society men (sic!) know how to use their bodies” (Mauss, 1973, p. 70).
Techniques of the body are socially regimented, becoming ‘second nature’
through drill and training, in turn securing the continuity of given order(s).
Ethnomethodology builds on the concept of tacit knowledge in that it
takes social order(ing) to be primarily created not by the “formal analytic”
(Garfinkel, 2002, p. 94) efforts of sociologists, but by the methodical work-
ings of people in everyday life. In this sense, founding figure Harold Garfinkel
sees sociality and social order(ing) as an interactive, local “practical accom-
plishment” (Garfinkel, 2011, p. 9) of members via specific ethno-methods
and skills (ibid., p. vii). Here, action, interaction and order are not attributed
to pre-existing structures or occult, explicit rules or knowledge. Instead, eth-
nomethodology pivotally focuses on how in the doing of members’ methods
they make themselves unavoidably, due to their social nature, “reportable and
observable” (Sharrock & Anderson, 1986, p. 56), that is, in ethnomethod-
ological parlance, “accountable” (Garfinkel, 2011, p. 33).
In a similar vein, albeit with marked differences, in his diverse studies of the
“interaction order” (Goffman, 1983), Erving Goffman gets to grips with the
“relations in public” (Goffman, 1971) of meaning and action. He considers
the processes by which humans navigate around each other and their social
surroundings, taking people at ‘face value,’ viewing their bodies as displays of
knowledge delivering information about emotional states, intentions and so
on to others, but also back to the body’s occupants (Hirschauer, 2008).
Exemplary here is Goffman’s depiction of people’s literal navigation of the
social world, namely, in pedestrian traffic. Here, order is constituted by an
interplay of mainly automatic bodily displays on the one hand—
‘externalizations,’ ‘body glosses’ or ‘intention displays’—which constitutes the
gestural pre-emption of practical intentionality, and ‘scanning’ on the other as
the practically embedded sensory-corporeal perception going beyond mere
visual observation (Goffman, 1971, p. 11).
84 K. Brümmer et al.

For the current re-orientating turns, Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeology is with-

out doubt highly influential. His concepts of habitus and ‘sens pratique,’ the
“logic of practice” (Bourdieu, 1990) sociologically re-utilise Merleau-Ponty’s
postulate of the primordial interwovenness of the lived body and the world,
albeit admittedly in a manner mostly incompatible with phenomenology
(Wacquant, 1992, p. 20, fn. 35). Similar to Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu does
not view the comprehending, ‘competent’ body simply as ‘a given,’ but
emphasises instead how it is first and foremost constituted out of relations in
practice. In practices of differently structured social fields, the human organ-
ism principally “open to the world” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 134) forms a net of
dispositions encompassing schemata of perception, cognition and judgement
which, in turn, for example, as milieu- or gender-specific habitus proceeds to
work as a motor of production of practices beyond conscious societal or self-
control. When the condition of a fit between incorporated structures of the
habitus and the objectified structures of a social field holds, the habitus func-
tions as a quasi-intuitive practical logic, enabling the creation of ways of act-
ing which are “[o]bjectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way
the product of obedience to rules” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53).3 The logic of
practice manifests itself at a basal level as corporeal intuition vis-à-vis expecta-
tions of a given social field, a feeling for the ‘correct’ gestures, stature and
movements fitting with one’s social status and the situation at hand, that is, a
socialised sensibility for a sensorially experienced world (also Wacquant,
1992, 20, fn. 36). Although Bourdieu’s primary goal was to understand the
reproduction mechanisms of social inequality, he nevertheless strives to
describe habitus as a source of creative and transformative power (e.g.,
Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 128–163), carrying the potential for “practical reflec-
tion” in moments of discord and disruption (ibid., pp. 162–163).
In the broad field of science and technology studies, sociologist Harry
Collins (2010) concerns himself explicitly with ‘tacit and explicit knowledge’
within his work on scientific expertise and describing scientific practice, espe-
cially with regard to artificial intelligence. A unique feature of his approach is
the critical attempt to take the term of tacit knowledge to its conceptual lim-
its, destroying his own “belief in tacitness” (Collins, 2001, p. 108). This
involves two steps: first is a demystification of the tacit, clarifying that what is
meant by ‘tacit’ “only makes sense when it is in tension with explicit knowl-
edge” (Collins, 2010, p. 78), and is, thus, “parasitic on the notion of the
explicit” (ibid., p. 85). Ultimately, this turns the relation of these two forms
of knowledge on its head, not focusing on the otherwise often prevalent

3
Anthony Giddens’ (1984) term “practical consciousness” is similarly conceived.
 Building Blocks of a Historical Overview of ‘Tacit Knowledge’ 85

fascination with silent knowledge but finding instead “nothing strange about
things being done but not being told […]. What is strange is that anything
can be told” (ibid., p. 7, original emphasis). Second, by considering tacit
knowledge with regard to what actually limits explication, Collins (ibid.,
pp. 85–138) attempts to get a better grasp of the concept. Thus, he distin-
guishes three kinds which are increasingly resistant to explication: relational,
somatic and collective tacit knowledge. In brief, relational tacit knowledge
remains tacit due to ‘contingencies’ of social organisation. Somatic tacit
knowledge is represented by the skills of bike riding, rock climbing, tap danc-
ing and so on. Considering the focus of other approaches on the body men-
tioned here, Collins sees no real obstacle to explicating what humans do with
their bodies as evidenced by the transfer of these skills to machines and robots.
Instead of the knowledge slumbering in human bodies, for Collins it is collec-
tive tacit knowledge “which is the irreducible heartland of the concept” (ibid.,
p. 119). This is knowledge which only humans acquire by virtue of their being
embedded in society, illustrated, for example, by the difference between the
somatic knowledge of learning a sequence of dance steps in contrast to know-
ing how to improvise these steps in a fitting manner (ibid., p. 123).

3 In Conclusion: Speaking for Silent

Knowledge in Current Sociological
Practice Theories
The re-evaluation of ‘other’ knowledge and the recognition of the body as a
carrier of and an agent in practices are at the core of current turns in the cul-
tural and social sciences, bringing practice(s) back in, which in many current
practice-sociological approaches are considered to be highly significant, if not
the basic building blocks of the social (e.g., Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2002;
Shove et al., 2012). These sociological approaches—at least partially—have a
tendency, as Andreas Reckwitz (2002, p. 255) succinctly puts it, to view prac-
tices as “routines: routines of moving the body, of understanding and wanting,
of using things, interconnected in a practice” so that, in this account, “[f ]or
practice theory, the nature of social structure consists in routinization.”
However, this equation of practical knowledge with routines harbours the
risk of functional reductionism in that it seems to lean heavily on the depic-
tion of the frictionless flow of practice(s) and, thus, primarily predict the
iteration of what has gone before. Focusing on the main flow of practice(s)
rather than, say, on distributaries or anabranches, entails viewing implicit
86 K. Brümmer et al.

knowledge only in contexts in which it ‘functions appropriately’ according to

whatever situative, systemic or theoretical goals one takes as a framework.
This is a somewhat surprising conceptual blind spot when one considers
the theoretical roots predating and often feeding into practice theories such as
Bourdieu’s (1977) Algeria studies, focusing on how practices break down.4
Such an understanding of tacit knowledge is the result of a specific external
perspective on practices from which they are hypostatised, frozen in time as
unitary entities that are performed on bodies or, more pointedly, “recruit”
(Shove et al., 2012, 63 pp.) bodies for their aims and goals in order to imprint
on them the requisite knowledge for their reproduction. This perspective
leaves other features and capabilities of tacit knowledge such as its moments
of reflection or its creative-transformative potential in the dark which are
indeed emphasised by, for example, Ryle or Dreyfus and Dreyfus, or Bourdieu
who attempts, alongside the consideration of pre-figuring social structures, to
also capture the participants’ perspective. Only by getting down into ‘the
trenches,’ and taking the (imaginary) position of ‘peeking over diverse partici-
pants’ shoulders’ does it become clear that practices do not present themselves
as identical entities, but rather are refracted in different ways depending upon
the standpoint whence they are viewed, and, moreover, their performance
continually produces the potential for conflict, confusion, problems and dis-
order (Brümmer & Mitchell, 2014), which, on the one hand, participants are
required to deal with and, on the other, offer the opportunity to seize the
“potential of the situation” (Jullien, 2004, p. 15) and to pursue one’s own
position-dependent interests. In this light, tacit knowledge appears as a factor
in local coping strategies and problem-solving, that is, as orientation-in-action
in which moments of reflexive corporeal feelings and of reflection are always
present.
Moreover, there is a concomitant risk of the frictionless depiction of prac-
tices, namely, an ableistic bias with regard to the bodies involved in them. This
is because there is then an in-built tendency to gravitate towards harmonious
performances of (hyper-)able bodies such as is the case when soldiers march,
acrobatic or dance troupes perform daring or visually aesthetic feats, or highly
skilled martial arts practitioners teach their techniques. There can be good
theoretical and methodological reasons for considering such perspicuous cases
of practices’ performance. Nevertheless, a course correction focusing more on
disharmonious, amateurish embodiments of practices and the concomitant

4
See also Judith Butler’s (1990) detailing of omnipresent “trouble” in everyday practices reproducing
gender, or, more broadly, Critical Theory emphasising that theories should not presuppose the workings
of the societies they observe.
 Building Blocks of a Historical Overview of ‘Tacit Knowledge’ 87

struggles, mismatches and failures involved seems prudent (Alkemeyer et al.,

2017, pp. 73, 76; Brümmer, 2015, pp. 66–70) as does moving away from
(hyper-)ability in bodies, towards moments when bodies are unable or unavail-
able with regard to the practical accomplishment of a given practice
(Alkemeyer, 2019), thus, considering “bodily inabilities,” aiming to focus on
how “(some) bodies cannot do (some) things” (Boll & Lambrix, 2019, p. 261)
rather than their moments of glory in meticulously put together and rehearsed
choreographies.
Conceptual issues aside, as far as the future of tacit knowledge goes, due to
its close ties with practice theories, the tacit dimension likely shares its fate
with them. Therefore, Collins’ previously detailed effort to dispense with the
tacit or fundamental debates regarding perceived flaws in practice theories
with regard to the transmission of knowledge (Turner, 1994) or neuroscien-
tific discoveries such as mirror neurons can all have serious repercussions for
how tacit knowledge is conceived, as can the development of artificial intelli-
gence and any other non- or post-human subjects for that matter.5 At the
same time, these issues provide the opportunity for further empirically
grounded contributions to the discussion of tacit knowledge with regard to its
explicability (re-)conceptualising it in the light of the ever-changing flow of
practice.

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 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias
of Embodiment: A Historical
and Phenomenological Investigation
Norm Friesen

1 Introduction: The Antinomies of Pedagogy

It may sound strange to think of possibilities for both educational theorizing
and practice as bound by antimonies, paradoxes, tensions and double binds.
To see education in this way is no longer to regard it as entirely germane either
to the gradual amelioration promised by progressive education or to claims of
functional optimization offered by (educational) psychology. Instead, it is to
see education as it has been depicted in both canonical and contemporary
sources in German and Northern European Educational sciences—in other
words—by continental pedagogy.1
Whether new or old, the idea that the practical pedagogical field is marked
by antipodes, paradoxes, tensions and aporia has long been important in the
history of educational ideas. It can be traced as far back as Socrates’ dialectic,
his method of arriving at knowledge or the ‘truth’ through question and
answer, dialogue and dispute. Referencing Socrates’ early exchanges in par-
ticular, Meyer (2018) explains:

1
For more about continental pedagogy, please see: Friesen, N. & Kenklies, K. (2023). Continental peda-
gogy & curriculum. In Tierney, F. Rizvi, K. Ercikan (Eds.) International Encyclopedia of Education 4th ed.
Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.03028-1.

N. Friesen (*)
Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA
e-mail: normfriesen@boisestate.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 91

A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_6
92 N. Friesen

In these aporetic dialogues, the double dimension of Socrates’ questioning is most

clearly revealed: on the one hand, questioning is used in order to reach the truth
about the question debated, on the other hand, when Socrates questions, he puts
the interlocutor himself in question by attacking his alleged knowledge. (p. 115)

Such dialogues are aporetic, expressive of contradiction and paradox, in

multiple senses: They not only show that truth and knowledge is reached
through its opposite—doubt, scepticism and ignorance—but they also expose
the ignorance and impotence underlying individuals’ presumed knowledge
and mastery. Often, the only certainty and knowledge that Socrates arrives at
in these dialogues is that he (or his interlocutor) doesn’t know and isn’t cer-
tain. Wisdom, paradoxically, arises through the realization of one’s own
ignorance.
A number of lesser-known links connecting Socrates with contemporary
understandings of education are of German origin; they include Kant and the
theologian and hermeneutician Friedrich Schleiermacher. Kant casts educa-
tion as intrinsically oppositional or paradoxical in a question for education:
“How do I cultivate [the child’s] freedom under [conditions of ] constraint?”
This question and Kant’s ambivalent response—“I shall accustom my pupil to
tolerate a constraint of his freedom, and I shall at the same time lead him to
make good use of his freedom” (2007, p. 447)—reappear frequently in edu-
cational discourses of Northern Europe. As Helsper (2001) has remarked of
the German context, Kant’s “paradox” has come to represent a “foundational”
opposition, one which has “repeatedly been seen as an object for reflection
and reformulation” (p. 85). Young toddlers must be barred from stairways
and other dangers to freely exercise their newly found ability to walk, just as
teenagers must first study (e.g., for the driver’s exam and other tests) before
they can go on to enjoy the privileges of driving or many other freedoms of
adulthood (e.g., to choose to go on to university).
Kant’s opposition has often been seen as constituting a paradox—rather
than an opposition or antinomy—with “paradox” implying a kind of mutual
exclusivity in which one side can be affirmed only at the expense of the other
(e.g., see Schlömerkemper, 2018, p. 29). According to this conception, the
removal of access to stairways and other dangers for the young toddler can
only be realized at the expense of their freedom to roam as they please.
However, to understand Kant’s question in this way can be seen as interpret-
ing freedom in a manner that is limiting—specifically as “freedom from,” as
what political theorist Isaiah Berlin refers to as “negative liberty” (1969,
p. 120). Freedom in this sense then can only be the absence of any constraint
and interference, with any degree of heteronomy or intrusion from outside
 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment… 93

deemed to be a limitation. On the other hand, ‘freedom to’ or what Berlin has
called “positive liberty”; Berlin, 1969, p. 121 sees such heteronomy as being
integral to freedom: One is free in this sense not simply to do something
according to one’s wishes; instead, one is free, for example, to have access to
higher education, to be protected by the law or to vote in elections. To enjoy
such freedoms not only presupposes a degree of heteronomy, external interfer-
ence or even constraint; it is also to see such heteronomy or constraint as posi-
tively constitutive of such freedom: To be protected by the law is to submit to
it, just as to cast one’s vote is to constrain oneself to a highly structured politi-
cal system. Similarly, a toddler’s freedom to walk (safely) is constituted pre-
cisely through certain safety measures or limitations—just as a teenager’s
freedom to drive or participate in higher education is meaningful only in ways
that involve rules and restraints.
Understanding education in terms of paradoxes and antinomies receives
its fullest and most sustained treatment only a few decades after Kant in
F.D.E. Schleiermacher’s Lectures on Education.2 The entirety of these lectures
can be seen as structured through a dialectic that works to define, heighten
and resolve the differences between the widest range of opposed terms. These
include the opposition or antimony of individuality versus collectivity (e.g.,
doing justice to both the unique student and the class as a whole) as well as
of the present and the future in the life of the child (e.g., as captured by
Dewey’s insistence that “education” be “a process of living and not a prepara-
tion for future living” 1897, p. 79). Of particular importance in this chapter
is Schleiermacher’s opposition of ‘support’ and ‘counteraction.’ Schleiermacher
understands this opposition in ethical terms, specifically in terms of what is
‘good’ and to be ‘supported’ and what is not and to be ‘counteracted’:

From one perspective we act according to the maxim that education should and
must be nothing but the awakening and the support of the Good in preparation
for the [child’s] entry to larger circles of life. … From the other perspective we
[should] act according to the maxim that education should and must be nothing
but counteract[ion] […] comprehensively counteracting that which is objec-
tionable. (Schleiermacher, 2000, p. 59; 2022, n.p.)

Both as parents and teachers, we go out of our way to encourage and assist
with words and rewards behaviour in children that we see as good; and we
counteract—discourage, correct, redirect—those things we view less

2
The fact that Schleiermacher also contributed substantially to theories of education—in addition to
theories of hermeneutics and to theology—is little known in English. Passages from Schleiermacher’s
Lecture provided here are from a translation that will soon be in press.
94 N. Friesen

favourably. Do we necessarily know in advance precisely how and why such

support or counteraction might occur? Theory, Schleiermacher admits, can-
not dictate precisely what should happen in practice. He concludes his initial
discussion of support and counteraction by saying that “we … have to leave it
to life itself to decide what should be done from moment to moment” (2000,
p. 62, 2022, n.p.). It is the realm of practice, in other words, in which the
opposition between support and counteraction is resolved.
A very similar approach to the practical antinomies and tensions of educa-
tion—one that includes Kant’s question and a number of Schleiermacher’s
oppositions—has been taken up in a range of contemporary sources on edu-
cational practice and professionalization, with a particular focus on teacher
education. Contributions by Werner Helsper (e.g., 1996, 2001, 2002) and
others (e.g., Hainschink & Zahra-Ecker, 2018; Schlömerkemper, 2018) posit
that such oppositions are constitutive of the structure of the field of pedagogi-
cal practice itself: “According to this understanding,” as Helsper (2001)
explains, “antinomies are constitutive for pedagogical teacher action. To try to
suspend them would be to eliminate the pedagogical nature of the action
itself ” (p. 87). Or as Hainschink and Zahra-Ecker (2018) say,

pedagogical action is comprised of constitutive contradictions and/or antino-

mies which cannot be suspended, but only engaged with reflectively […].
Learning how to balance their opposed polarities is a constitutive element of
[teacher] professionalization. (pp. 179, 182; for an English-language discussion,
see: Didolet et al., 2019)

Prominent in these contemporary discussions is an antinomy that is in

some ways already implied in the tensions between freedom and constraint,
support and counteraction as well as individuality and collectivity. This is the
opposition of proximity and distance. Again, with an unmistakable emphasis
on practice, Werner Helsper (2002) explains:

A problem of professional pedagogical action is also evident in the repeated

accusations that teachers neglect their educational duty through the distanced
“transmission” of curriculum content. But if they were to orient themselves
completely to the individual [student], then allegations would soon arise that
they are improperly inserting themselves in the private realm of the child and
their family. (p. 25)

To also invoke Schleiermacher’s oppositions of support and counteraction

and individuality and collectivity, one could say that the teacher must closely
support and guide students, and attend to them carefully—both as a group
 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment… 95

and as individuals. At the same time, though, the teacher must treat any one
student like any other and retain sufficient distance to effectively remain a
teacher rather than a friend—and be prepared to appropriately counteract,
redirect and correct the student.
In his 2017 book, Antinomic Interpretations of Pedagogical Processes,3 Jörg
Schlömerkemper outlines how pedagogical antimonies in general are to be
understood. In particular, he argues against a purely “binary understanding”
of pedagogical oppositions, as if dealing with opposites was just “a question of
alternative positioning and decision-making in the sense of ‘either/or’ ‘good/
bad’ or ‘true/false.’” Instead, Schlömerkemper continues,

From a more sophisticated perspective, it becomes a matter of situations and

structures in which two aspects, requirements or demands which are (almost) of
the same weight … but that are nonetheless dialectically intermixed. Briefly put,
one can at this point say: It should not be a matter of a polarizing ‘either/or’ but
of a consistent ‘also … but.’ (p. 28)

To understand freedom and constraint, support and counteraction or prox-

imity and distance not as an ‘either/or’ but as an ‘also … but’ is to understand
them as oppositions that can be addressed through a certain ambivalence in
pedagogical practice. Ambivalent awareness and practice is one which, for
example, presents to the child any offer of choice or freedom within a given
set of constraints. It is one that sees a moment of correction or redirection
(‘counteraction’) as something also containing an element of affirmation and
support. Schlömerkemper (2018) describes this type of ‘ambivalent’ prac-
tice as a

fluctuation between different perceptions and value judgments in which one

assesses matters first one way and then another, without desiring or having to
decide between them. Both can be seen as simultaneously valuable (‘-valent’).
Ambivalences can be seen as a more moderate form of antinomy, because the
two poles actually are not mutually exclusive. (p. 29)

For example, in the case of the freedom and constraint of the young child
learning to walk, a parent might well prefer greater restraint immediately after
the child suffers an injury while walking, but alternatively, might choose
greater freedom when the child is among family. Similarly, a teacher might
choose the ‘pole’ represented by the individual versus the collective (and also
support over counteraction) in order to give a challenged but hard-working

3
Pädagogische Prozesse in antinomischer Deutung.
96 N. Friesen

student a grade that is more generous than one that would be prescribed by
class evaluation curve or rubric. In any case, though, their affirmation of one
side will never be final or absolutely definitive, but instead ambivalent, one
that is well aware of the value of an opposite course of action (e.g., of evalua-
tion that does not take individual differences into account). It is this oscilla-
tion between the dominance and latency of one pole or another—or the
embrace of two opposed possibilities simultaneously—which then constitutes
what can be called the dynamics or ‘dialectics’ of pedagogical thought
and action.

2 The Aporias of Embodiment

If the dialectical structures and dynamics of pedagogical thought and action
can be seen as embedded in pedagogical situations, or as constitutive of peda-
gogical professionalism or the pedagogical ‘field’ itself, then the dialectic of
the lived body is manifest rather differently. As the study of lived experience,
phenomenology shows the body to appear as a kind of dynamic meeting
point or ‘nexus,’ more a verb or a process than an object or thing. In its dyna-
mism, the body appears to integrate and manifest opposed phenomena
simultaneously.
Phenomenology has conventionally understood the body in terms of the
foundational notion of intentionality; the idea that our awareness is always an
awareness of something, and that in everyday life, we regard this ‘something’ in
a particular way; we see this something-as-something: A tree is shade on a hot
summer day just as a doorway might be a place for refuge on a windy or rainy
one. The body is typically seen as having a mediating, enabling and sometimes
constitutive role in the subject’s engagement in ‘intentional’ action, not only
taking us to the cooling shade of a tree or protection from the cold and rain,
but also being literally the source of experiences of heat, shade, cold and pro-
tection to begin with. The lived body is, as Edmund Husserl says, a ‘point of
interchange’ between the physical and psychical worlds (e.g., see Cantista &
Martins, 2002, p. 537); it is part of our everyday projects and (in this sense)
of our “project-ions” in the world (e.g., Heidegger, 1962). Writing in 1945
in the Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty develops this fur-
ther in saying that “consciousness is being toward the thing through the inter-
mediary of the body”—with the body, in turn, presenting “our general means
of having a world” (1945/2012, pp. 140, 147). The body is expressive both of
nature and culture, and of biological necessity and human freedom:
 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment… 97

[E]verything [bodily] is constructed and everything is natural, in the sense that

there is no single word or behaviour that does not owe something to mere bio-
logical being—and, at the same time, there is no word or behaviour that does
not break free from animal life that does not deflect vital behaviours […]
through a sort of escape and a genius for ambiguity [équivoqu] that might well
serve to define man. Behaviours create significations that are transcendent in
relation to the anatomical structure and yet immanent to the behaviour as such.
(Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 195)

We are simultaneously biological and cultural, with our every word and
move expressing our anatomical and our physiological limitations and possi-
bilities—while also expressing something about our individuality, our kinaes-
thetic ‘style,’ our mood and about the culture into which we are socialized. In
initial congruence with the ‘dialectics’ of pedagogical practice, Merleau-Ponty
describes these opposites as being negotiated with an ‘ambiguity’ (équivoque;
a close etymological cousin of ambivalence) that, he emphasizes, may be noth-
ing less than definitive of what it is to be human.
Later, however, Merleau-Ponty rejects the mentalist bias implicit in the
primacy of ‘consciousness’ in our relation to the world and in seeing the body
(merely) as the ‘intermediary’ or ‘space’ for our more-or-less conscious plans
and devices. The body, as Merleau-Ponty later comes to see, can no longer be
viewed just as a meeting point for opposites like object and subject, mind and
world. In The Visible and the Visible, he instead casts the body as simultaneously
mind and world, object and subject, sensible and sentient. Body is flesh
(chair4), simultaneously constitutive of body, mind and world, marked above
all by its ‘visibility.’ To properly designate it, Merleau-Ponty (1968) explains,
“we should need the term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water,
air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing” (p. 139). The body,
moreover, is emergent as the ‘intertwining’ (entrelacs5) of self and world, char-
acterized as “two phases” in a single process or as the “obverse and reverse”
(p. 138) sides of a leaf or of two leaves:

We say therefore that our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing
among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them; we say, because
it is evident, that it unites these two properties within itself, and its double
belongingness to the order of the ‘object’ and to the order of the ‘subject’ reveals
to us quite unexpected relations between the two. (p. 137)

4
La chair, like the word ‛flesh’ has both material and also antiquated (mostly Biblical) connotations
regarding the body.
5
Entrelacs also refers to fine tracery, also suggesting things like a latticework, maze or tangle.
98 N. Friesen

The body is both subject and object, sensed and sensing, and it unites these
oppositions doubly—arguably in both material and experiential terms. And
the quite unexpected relations between the two orders can be seen to include
the oppositions of the “phenomenal body and objective body” (p. 136), “pas-
sivity” and “activity,” ‘the visible’ and ‘the seer,’ ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ (p. 139),
as well as the “In Itself ” and the “For Itself ” (p. 137). On its own, the body can
realize these opposed possibilities in multiple ways and senses; it shifts from
one sense modality to another; it touches, hears and sees itself and it combines
activity and passivity in myriad habits, dispositions and ways of “being.”
However, shortly after describing these aspects as the “two leaves” of the body,
Merleau-Ponty (1968) puts this initial characterization into question:

One should not even say, as we did a moment ago, that the body is made up of
two leaves … it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body sen-
tient are […] two segments of one sole circular course which […] is but one sole
movement in its two phases. And everything said about the sensed body per-
tains to the whole of the sensible of which it is a part, and to the world.
(pp. 137, 138)

Here, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis is not exclusively on the lived body itself,

but on this body’s relation to the world. World and body are the same visible
substance, mirroring each other not only in sensory and material qualities,
but also in these sense of the body as what Merleau-Ponty calls an “exemplar
sensible”—as the basis or the measure for what we see and experience in the
world. This can be seen to extend from the ‘foot’ of a mountain through the
‘torso’ of a work to the ‘head’ of a bed. The body, as Merleau-Ponty (2012)
says, is “caught up in the tissue of the things,” “draw[ing]” this tissue “entirely
to itself, incorporat[ing] it, and, with the same movement, communicat[ing]
to the things upon which it closes over that identity without superimposition”
(p. 138).
The oppositions of sensed and sentient, object and subject, touched and
touching, visible and seeing—together with the myriad complexities and per-
mutations to which they give rise—can be seen to form consistent antipodes
in Merleau-Ponty’s account. Insofar as the body is both nature and culture,
both enabling and constraining of movements and habits, one might add to
Merleau-Ponty’s oppositions a version of the Kantian paradox of freedom and
constraint as well: Our embodiment is the precondition for both our liberty
as well as our own ultimate limitation. However, unlike Schlömerkemper’s
account of antinomic ambivalences, Merleau-Ponty here is suggesting that we
do not fluctuate or switch emphasis from any one set of bodily aporia—whether
 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment… 99

between subject and object, nature and culture, sensing and sensed—at will.
Both in the Phenomenology of Perception or The Visible and the Invisible, the
body’s or the flesh’s ambiguity, its two sides or phases tend to appear less as a
“fluctuation … in which one assesses matters first one way and then another”
(as Schlömerkemper described the antipodes of pedagogical practice; p. 29)
and more as always-already interwoven and interlaced. The “genius for ambi-
guity” that Merleau-Ponty (2012) earlier says might well be definitive for the
human appears decisively aporetic—much more as a ‘both … and’ rather
than an ‘either/or.’ In The Visible and the Invisible, this ambiguity is arguably
expanded to become not simply a characteristic of the body, but as a com-
prehensive but fractured ontological paradox of fleshly existence as a whole.
Here, Merleau-Ponty describes the flesh as

a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence […] prototype of

Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but
whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible […] our body commands
the visible for us, but it does not explain it, does not clarify it, it only concen-
trates the mystery of its scattered visibility; and it is indeed a paradox of Being,
not a paradox of man, that we are dealing with here. To be sure, one can reply
that, between the two ‘sides’ of our body […] there is an abyss that separates the
In Itself from the For Itself. (p. 136)

Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, then, is one emphatically marked by

paradox, and the abyss or gap that characterizes it arises arguably in that any
opposition that it might integrate or manifest is never fully complete or sym-
metrical: As an ‘element,’ flesh is ‘decentered’ (p. 138) and the dynamism and
multiplicity of this decentring it is never fully self-identical. The interweaving,
interleaving and intertwining that is Merleau-Ponty’s entrelacs may be both an
intricate pattern as much as it also is a dynamic process or event. As I now go
on to show, this pattern, process or event unfolds in a way that suggests a
remarkable isomorphism with the antinomic polarities of pedagogical theory
and practice.

3 Pedagogy and the Body: A Video Example

Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the dynamism of the lived body-as-flesh and
Schlömerkemper’s (and others’) focus on the antinomies of concrete peda-
gogical practice suggest that both accounts are ripe for illustration and elabora-
tion through careful situational observation and interpretation. Theory alone
100 N. Friesen

can arguably only go so far in addressing dynamic, lived and concretely practi-
cal phenomena. Consequently, I briefly consider a 95-second video clip from
the 2002 French documentary of a one-room country schoolhouse, Etre et
Avoir—a film often noted for its intimate portrayal of teacher Georges Lopez’s
patient work with his young students (clip available at: https://vimeo.
com/223987444). This particular sequence shows Lopez at the right side of
kindergartner Letitia, sitting together with her peers. They have just learned
to write the number seven. The teacher’s arm rests on the back of Letitia’s
chair, and his left hand is close to Letitia’s left shoulder; his right hand is gen-
erally pointing at the worksheet in front of them both (Figs. 1, 2 and 3).6

Letitia counts slowly: One, two, … three, Six.

four, five, six … Letitia begins counting again: One,
Teacher: What comes after six? … What two, three, four, five, six …
comes next? …. What did you draw just —And then comes? …
now? … What was that red one? … What Marie: Seven.
did we learn today? What comes after six?
Student (off camera): She can’t remember? Marie just said it.
Teacher: Let’s try Alizé or Marie, then. What Teacher, forcefully (forming his hand
was the new number we just learned? into a fist and gently nudging
Marie (off camera): Seven. Letitia’s left shoulder while looking
Teacher: Who does seven come after? at her directly): Wake up, will you?
After? Seven!
Six? It comes … Letitia looks at the teacher briefly.
It comes after nine. Count again now.
All right …. Letitia: Six.
We haven’t learned nine yet. What did Marie say after six?
Teacher: After six! She said?
Letitia, very quietly: Seven.

Fig. 1 One, two, … three, four, five, six

6
Due to copyright restrictions, traced and sketched renderings of the original images are used.
 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment… 101

Fig. 2 Let’s try Alizé or Marie, then. What was the new number we just learned?

Fig. 3 Wake up, will you? Seven!

Lopez, to summarize, spends the 95 seconds of the sequence, nudging and

coaxing, trying to elicit the word ‘seven’ from little Letitia. He is met only
with meagre success when Letitia almost inaudibly articulates the word in the
final moment of their exchange (Fig. 3).
The delicate entwinement of subject and object, nature and culture, feeling
and felt, touching and touched, seeing and seen are instantiated in myriad
ways in this segment. This is perhaps best evoked by thinking of Merleau-
Ponty’s account of self and world as “two segments of one sole circular
course … one sole movement in its two phases” (1968, p. 138). With his arm
already around the back of Letitia’s chair, and his finger pointing on the work-
sheet, the teacher is in near tactile contact with Letitia for most of the clip.
This becomes direct—but carefully modulated—contact in the final third or
quarter of the video when the teacher’s left hand forms a fist which gently
nudges Letitia’s shoulder. This has the effect of transferring their communica-
tion to a visual modality, resulting in a moment of direct eye-contact.
Vision and visibility, subject and object undergo a similar mutual entwine-
ment as the teacher and Letitia look out to and communicate with the other
102 N. Friesen

children who are also at the table (but generally off-screen; Fig. 2). Again,
thinking of Merleau-Ponty’s description of the dynamics of the flesh, we
might—with some imagination—see this circular movement as being instan-
tiated between Lopez, Letitia, the sheet in front of them, as well as among the
other children in this scene on multiple occasions and in multiple ways. A
kind of fleshly circuit, both semantic and material, consisting of both gesture
and word, question and response, activity and passivity can be seen to traverse
this scene numerous times in the course of the 95 seconds captured here.
Particularly in the exchanges and contact between Lopez and Letitia, this tra-
versal becomes so rapid as to be effectively simultaneous. The equivocality or
paradox manifest in the body and the world, in other words, rapidly incorpo-
rates not only Lopez and Letitia, but also the others around them.
Beginning with Kant’s pedagogical paradox of freedom and constraint, one
could say that the tension between these two opposites is more-or-less palpa-
ble at every moment in this clip: Letitia is of course significantly constrained
by the exercise itself (only one correct digit follows the number six) as well as
physically by Lopez with his arm around her chair. At the same time, however,
Lopez’s aim is to have Letita say the number ‘seven’ in sequence, something
which would be meaningless if it were directly forced, or if someone else’s
answer were accepted in its place. The body (primarily Lopez’s) takes up, with
apparent and perhaps even conscious purpose, the valence of necessity, of
limitation and of constraint. But it does so in order that, in however muted a
way, its opposite—a voluntary moment of expression and freedom—might
be realized. In other words: Embodiment, like other communicative events, can
take up one valence in a pedagogical opposition while still not entirely eliminating
the other.
The opposition of distance and proximity both underscores and qualifies
this conclusion. Lopez’s physical proximity to Letitia, despite the insistence it
communicates, can only be justified—both institutionally and interperson-
ally—if it is not total, if it allows a particular degree of freedom and distance.
Lopez subtly modulates this distance in a number of ways: Approaching the
middle of the clip, Lopez can be said to figuratively expand the distance
between himself and Letitia as he adjusts his position and looks to the other
students for their answers. While his glance and his attention leave Letitia for
a few seconds, his left hand simultaneously comes closer to her shoulder and
it seems likely that she can sense this. The body can thus be said to enact both
distance and proximity in aporetic simultaneity.
Lopez’s gentle nudge of Letitia on the shoulder and the clear moment of
eye-contact that follows, however, rapidly collapse any distance between the
two, and it is at this significant moment that Merleau-Ponty’s dynamic of the
 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment… 103

flesh is most literally realized: Subject and object, touching and touched, the
visible and the seer literally become “one sole movement in its two phases”
(p. 138). Through mutual eye-contact in particular, a particular kind of
“mutual enfolding” can be achieved, as Merleau-Ponty (1960/1964, p. 17)
explains:

I look at him. He sees that I look at him. I see that he sees it. He sees that I see
that he sees it … even though in principle reflections upon reflections go on to
infinity, vision is such that the obscure results of two glances adjust to each
other, and there are no longer two consciousnesses with their own teleology but
two mutually enfolding glances.

At the same time, of course, such moments of mutually enfolded proximity

can also give way to responses of distantiation and withdrawal, as seems to be
suggested (on Letitia’s part) in Fig. 4. The body, in short, can move almost
imperceptibly between pedagogical antinomies and is capable not only of
moments of proximity and entwinement but also of distance and
disentanglement.
Needless to say, the univocal contact of touch and mutual eye ‘contact’ is
sustained for only a moment as the body’s aporetic character and the tensions
of embodied and pedagogical oppositions (or is it biological or psychological
necessity?) lead Lopez to sigh slightly and look away (Fig. 4). Considering
these and other moments from the clip specifically in the light of
Schleiermacher’s opposition of support and counteraction further underscore
the manifest ambivalence of Lopez’s actions—especially when they are viewed
both in terms of his pedagogical responsibilities and of Letitia’s own possible
experience: Is his arm around Letitia a gesture of support or is it a way of con-
fining and counteracting her inattention? Is his nudging of her shoulder a
moment in which she is encouraged and supported or when she is interrupted

Fig. 4 Lopez briefly looks away and sighs

104 N. Friesen

and reprimanded? Is his look into her eyes in the moment that follows one of
confirmation or correction? One might also ask something similar regarding
Lopez’s tone of voice, which is slightly more insistent with Letitia than with
the others. Does it provide a supportive emphasis, or does it have the effect of
a type of counteraction? Although Letitia’s shrinking or avoidant position in
Fig. 4 may suggest a certain refusal or withdrawal, we have access neither to
Lopez’s precise purposes nor to Letitia’s experience.
Regardless, the body in these senses is potentially expressive of a kind of
escape from determination, and of a particularly human ‘genius for ambigu-
ity’: It not only combines nature and culture as well as subject and object,
sensing and sensed, touching and touched, but in pedagogical situations, its
embrace of these aporia appears to waver equivocally between a definitive
manifestation either of support or counteraction, of proximity or distance and
of freedom or constraint. The body, in other words, is ambivalent and aporetic
in its expressions in a way that takes it beyond definitive meaning or decidability.
To reference Schlömerkemper (2018), the ambivalence of the body takes
on a form that is inextricably ‘both … and’ rather than ‘either … or,’ a peda-
gogical ambivalence which, through embodied engagement, “both poles can
[potentially] be done justice” (p. 28). At the same time, though, this embod-
ied ambivalence does not unambiguously indicate the kind of conscious
decision-making foregrounded in Schlömerkemper’s and others’ accounts of
pedagogical antinomies: It is neither a conscious “fluctuation between differ-
ent perceptions and value judgments” nor a matter of the explicit “recognition
[of ] and … reflection [on] which weight the poles retain or should be granted,”
as Schlömerkemper (ibid.) puts it (p. 32). In phenomenological terms, it is
not so much a question of the early Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) “consciousness …
toward the thing through the intermediary of the body” (p. 147) but rather,
of the body “unit[ing] … two properties within itself ” (1968, p. 137), exhib-
iting a kind of “double belongingness” to both support and counteraction,
freedom and constraint (p. 137). Although it readily gives expression to
ambivalence that can do justice to antonymic both poles, the body often does
not appear as the instrument of discrete conscious purposes.

4 Conclusion: A Fissured Intertwining

The character of the body as simultaneously sensing and sensed, receptive and
expressive, passive and active, material and spirit can thus be said to give it a
unique power to communicate ambiguity and ambivalence. It alone is argu-
ably able to grant space and freedom while remaining immediately (if not also
 The Antinomies of Pedagogy and Aporias of Embodiment… 105

insistently) present; only it can be supportive while at the same time redirect-
ing and counteracting. Only it can even form a fist but use it only most gently
to nudge the fledgling student. The body, moreover, accomplishes this in a
way that still leaves little doubt that it is indeed communicating. While we
can debate the precise meaning of their communications, we certainly cannot
question that the gestures and glances of Lopez and Letitia mean something.
At the same time, this ‘something’ is obscured not only by the body’s ambiva-
lent and aporetic nature, but also by what Merleau-Ponty has referred to as an
“abyss” or gap (1968, p. 146). Just as such a “fissure” (p. 235) separates what
can be seen as objectively given from what is subjectively taken up, so too does
the most palpable non-coincidence and non-identity separate Lopez’s overall
purpose from Letitia’s apparent detachment.
The body, to speak more generally, displays a striking isomorphism, and an
inextricable intertwining with pedagogical practice: Both are characterized by
types of aporia and dialectical patterns in which tensions between expression
and receptivity, word and action, support and counteraction and freedom and
restraint (and much more) all intersect and vie for significance. And the body
is doing this always already, exceeding both conscious intention and instruc-
tional planning. Finally, both the body and pedagogical practice are arguably
marked by a sort of non-coincidence—one that keeps an intercorporeal
dynamic in play, and the adult’s pedagogical responsibility continuously alive.

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 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological
and Pedagogical Interpretation
Christian Rittelmeyer

1 Regarding a New Research Field and Its

Significance for Education
For some decades, a new research-supported view of cognitive and learning
processes with titles such as Embodiment, Grounded Cognition, Corporeal Turn
or Embodied Cognition has been gaining importance and appears to be infor-
mative for education and pedagogical practice. The underlying assumption is
that the constitutive conditions of all our perceptive and cognitive activities,
even highly abstract thoughts, have their basis in elementary corporeal pro-
cesses outside of the brain (Nathan, 2014; Pecher & Zwaan, 2005; Shapiro,
2019; Sheets-Johnstone, 2009). Research in this area has made it clear that
our thoughts and imagination are to a considerable extent determined by our
gestures, gesticulations and body postures, by the way we move spatially, our
changing body temperature and heart function, our fine-motor skills and
many other corporeal activities (Goldin-Meadow & Beilock, 2010;
Rittelmeyer, 2010; Ruggieri, 2003; Simms, 2008). The basic concept of
embodiment of cognitive activities (including the emotions that are tied up
with these) consists of a body feedback hypothesis: Actual perception of or
empathetic feeling for our fellow human beings occurs, for example, not only
when we register gestures and gesticulations of the other person within the

C. Rittelmeyer (*)
University of Goettingen, Göttingen, Germany
e-mail: rittelmeyer@keerl.net

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 107
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_7
108 C. Rittelmeyer

brain but also through very subtly imitating or simulating these in a corporeal
manner that usually goes unnoticed. From an embodiment perspective, the
elegant hand movements of a lecturer as she explains her concepts are not only
an expression of a psychological disposition but always also an impression expe-
rienced by the speaker from the periphery of her body that will not least deter-
mine her thoughts over the course of the lecture.
Thus, embodied cognition is not about physical processes that accompany
perceptive and cognitive activities, but about certain mental and perceptive
capabilities that are made possible in the first place by such intentionally con-
trolled corporeal processes and postures. From the perspective of a psychology
of the senses, embodiment processes are an interaction between exteroceptive
and interoceptive senses. The former ‘externally directed’ senses allow us to
perceive the exterior world (e.g. seeing, hearing, smelling); the latter ‘inter-
nally directed’ senses relate to the perception of one’s own body (e.g. sense of
balance, sense of own motion, sense of tension and relaxation, sense of pain
or physical well-being). A person looking at the face of another sees the face
but also feels an empathetic gesture within his own body through physiognomic
imitation, which is also unconsciously transmitted to the motor area of his
brain via his sense of motion; he does not only see it but experiences it. Thus,
every external perception is always (usually unconsciously) accompanied by a
perception of one’s own body.
Contrary to traditional terminology according to which the brain or the
‘centre’ is differentiated from the rest of the body or the ‘periphery’, embodied
cognition states that messages of one’s own peripheral body constitute ele-
ments of thinking and perception; for example, the hand gestures of the lec-
turer will determine her unconscious self-perception and, thus, the cognitive
orientation of the lecture. However, embodied cognition is not only to be
understood as a whole-body phenomenon but also as a cultural phenomenon
since the talk is directed at a specific audience and the lecturer is acting inten-
tionally in a certain individual and social situation as well as within a specific
cultural milieu. This ‘environmental approach’ is not emphasised by all
researchers in the field but increasingly gaining significance within the
embodiment discourse. The body becomes the “extended mind” (Aizawa,
2014), its theoretical description an “enactive approach” (Paolo & Thompson,
2014; Varela et al., 1991). Points of contact exist with respect to cultural sci-
ence and philosophic descriptions of cultural patterns (e.g. as gender-related
role ascriptions) that are corporeally habituated and then also determine
thoughts and cognition (e.g. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre or
Michel Foucault).
 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical… 109

Some researchers regard this empirically substantiated anthropological

approach as a critical and new psychological paradigm, also for pedagogics.
According to the research team of Daniel Casasanto and Katinka Dijkstra, a
more humane and holistic view of the human being is taking the place of the
long-dominant computer-cognition analogy within neuro and cognitive sci-
ences (Casasanto & Dijkstra, 2010). Embodiment researchers Jaak Panksepp
and Colwyn Trevarthen similarly perceive a change from an “over-
intellectualised, computer-based view” to human cognitive activity and com-
munication for gaining insight into the original basis of all cognition within
our entire corporeality (Panksepp & Trevarthen, 2009, p. 110). In her empiri-
cal study on the impact of certain basic forms of movement (soft, angular,
flowing, growing, shrinking etc.) with respect to cognitive activities, psychol-
ogist Sabine C. Koch also postulated a mental change within psychology that
turns away from the computer analogy (the brain as the central information-
processing control organ) to a biological-organic epistemology without a neu-
rocentric narrowing of perspective (Koch, 2011, p. 39). With respect to
pedagogics, the Italian researcher Umberto Margiotta even refers to embodi-
ment theories as a ‘New Deal for Education in the XXI Century’ and a
‘Copernican Revolution for the Education Sciences’ (Margiotta, 2017). Time
and again, criticism of the brain-computer comparison that is common at the
moment is striking in connection with such statements: “The paradigmatic
disembodied, unembedded device is the digital computer, which has served as
a metaphor for a cognitive agent since the 1950s” (Michaels & Palatinus, 2014).
Meanwhile embodiment research is also discussed in education, albeit still
rudimentarily (Gomez-Paloma, 2017; Katz, 2013; Trumpp, 2012). The
necessity to overcome over-intellectualised learning methods in favour of
methods of learning which involve the body is often the topic within this
context. Although the ‘corporeality’ of educational processes has been
addressed more often in German specialist pedagogic literature and although
insights gained from embodied cognition research are increasingly being dis-
cussed from an educational perspective, to my knowledge there has been only
little attempt to provide a systematic analysis of these insights, in lesson plan-
ning for example (Bilstein & Brumlik, 2013; Hildebrandt-Stratmann et al.,
2013; Kraus, 2009; Laging, 2017; Wulf et al., 2011). Three problem areas,
which become apparent upon closer analysis of research activities, are most
likely the reason for this.
One problem is that numerous research findings are available in statistical
form and usually only apply to the specific social groups—this raises ques-
tions of the validity of theses findings for educational practice. Thus, some
studies show, for example, that teaching methods that use gestures seem to
110 C. Rittelmeyer

improve performance in arithmetic and language among subgroups of pupils.

Further in-depth studies would be needed in order to understand these cor-
relations and decide whether such research results are helpful for educational
work in primary schools. Indeed, there is currently much broad neurological,
cultural-historical and developmental-psychological discussion about these
effects offering explanations as to why learning-relevant impacts are only
observable in subgroups (Ifrah, 2000; Menninger, 1969; Roux et al., 2003;
Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). The connection between arithmetic or lin-
guistic abilities and motoric skills becomes apparent when children count
with their fingers and, for example, hold up three fingers to show their age
(Alibali et al., 2014; Armstrong, 1995; Bremmer & Roodenburg, 1991;
Corballis, 2003; Feyereisen & DeLannoy, 1991; Goldin-Meadow & Beilock,
2010; Kaschak et al., 2014; Macedonia, 2019). Rather, as will be shown later,
this empirical result concerns the challenge of developing a fundamental edu-
cational body posture/style aligned with the students’ individualities that are
expressed in the teacher’s gestures and gesticulations in a way that is appropri-
ate and makes sense for the learning situation; it is about cultivating embodied
cognition (see also Soliman & Glenberg, 2014).
A second problem for the educational evaluation of embodiment studies is
that research almost always seeks to answer very specific questions (Rittelmeyer,
2014, Chapter 5; Rittelmeyer, 2016, Chapter 4). How does body posture
influence thinking and how does thinking while walking compared to while
standing or sitting affect creative problem-solving? In the schoolyard: how
does the distance adolescents keep between each other while talking uncon-
sciously define their relationship to each other? How do short walks through
urban or natural areas affect metabolic processes in the brain or heart function
and what emotions of relaxation or stress and what kinds of lived experiences
of these environments are generated in the process? When hearing words such
as ‘kick’ or ‘catch’, why are precisely those motoric areas in the brain activated
that control actual kicking or catching motions? What does it mean for
embodied cognition that when we read those parts of texts where scenes of
movement are described, centres in the brain are active that go back to highly
subtle movements of the mouth and facial expressions, that is physical articu-
lation of what we are reading of which we are not consciously aware and
which is invisible to external observers? How can we explain that people
assume systematic and individualistic body postures and assert that they can-
not think properly when prompted to change their position? How can it be
that events associated with certain body postures are remembered better later
on when the same postures are assumed again?
 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical… 111

These few examples serve to show that it is not merely a multitude of

questions that make the research field increasingly confusing. Various research
methods are also used, each one of which has something special to offer. In
addition to classic survey and observation methods, we are thinking chiefly
of imaging and medical techniques such as functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) for examining the brain, electromyographic methods for
visualising highly subtle muscle activities, measurements of the heart rate
and breathing rhythm, transcranial magnetic stimulation for determining
motoric activities in the mouth area—such as the tongue—while reading
texts with strong emotional messages, examinations of blood flow in the
thoracic region or metabolic activity in the brain, for example by means of
laser infrared spectroscopy. According to the embodiment thesis, what is
most important is what happens to our perceptions and cognitive processes
when various physical activities take place and how these effects can be
explained. It is these newer scientific examination methods and apparatuses
with which we visualise body processes that are normally invisible such as
metabolic activities in the brain or micro-motions of facial muscles.
Although the embodied cognition theorem has a long history, which has
been referenced time and again in various publications (such as the phe-
nomenological studies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Martin
Heidegger or the German Lebenskraft [life-force] debate), it is only through
these measurement devices and procedures that have proved to us what pre-
viously was purely theoretical knowledge—that is mere assertions, self-
observations or assumptions. For this reason, we can understand why people
are talking of a new paradigm for pedagogics (Macedonia, 2019; McCarthy
et al., 2016; Shapiro & Stolz, 2018).
However, philosopher Shaun Gallagher has pointed out with good reason
that knowledge of this philosophical-phenomenological tradition can guard
against behaviouristic errors and narrow theoretical perspectives that some-
times occur within the context of embodiment research (Gallagher, 2014).
Thus, imitating another person’s happy or sad facial expression through fine-
motoric mimicry has often been examined by asking the question whether
this approach provides a better understanding of the other person’s emotions
and moods than without such corporeal resonances. However, other studies
have shown that one’s own—imitative or contrary—body posture, breathing,
heart rate, gestures and gesticulations are important for understanding and
empathising with another person (Nummenmaa et al., 2013; Oosterwijk &
Barrett, 2014). Thus, a summary of research results in regard to certain indi-
vidual questions would have to allow for an imagination of these various
112 C. Rittelmeyer

corporeal activities from many individual studies in order to arrive at a psy-

chological understanding.
A third problem when attempting to draw pedagogical inferences from
embodiment studies relates to some terminological and methodological ambi-
guities in the research. Such problems are raised time and time again by pro-
ponents of the classic cognition theory in particular (Shapiro, 2019). Thus,
the implicit assumption of embodiment proponents that the term body refers
to the whole physical body minus the brain is astounding. With respect to
numerous research projects, one must also ask whether this research actually
proves that a function of human bodies constitutively determines cognition. If
people who tend towards sociability tend on average to perceive objects as
being closer to them than unsociable people do, then the question arises
whether this actually supports the embodiment thesis or rather points to the
well-known fact that different people observe their environment differently
according to their individual personality, the way they live, their interests and
so on (Casasanto, 2014). This was extensively examined in the 1960s under
the title Social Perception Research and is also not contested by proponents of
classic cognition theories. From a cognition-theoretical perspective, the ques-
tion of who guesses distances with greater accuracy is also important; yet a
new form of cognition is not associated with this.
The philosopher and cognitive scientist Alvin I. Goldman offers an enlight-
ening and informative exposition of these controversies in his illustration of a
fundamental problem of many embodiment studies: “Opening or closing the
eyes affects one’s perception” (Goldman, 2017). In other words, many asser-
tions from the embodiment faction simply make the trivial statement that our
perception depends on our body organs (such as our senses). However, any
classic cognition theorist would also claim the same but then also emphasise
that the messages received through the body are processed in the brain as
cognitions and perceptions. Goldman therefore proposes to examine embodi-
ment research according to a logical procedure suggested by him as to whether
the results can be better explained by classic cognition theories or embodi-
ment theories. An example that is transferable to other areas of embodiment
research should at least visualise the outlines of this procedure and at the same
time elucidate that the reflections of Goldman clearly discern which perspec-
tives interpreted embodied cognition research uncovers for pedagogical prac-
tice and for education.
 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical… 113

2 What Special Learning Experiences Does

Embodied Cognition Make Possible?
So-called mindreading is specifically addressed in the third chapter of his
book: “the capacity to identify the mental states of others (e.g., their beliefs,
desires, intentions, goals, experiences, sensations, and also emotion states)”
(Goldman, 2017, p. 63). The perception of emotion in another person’s face
is highlighted as a special form of mindreading (Face-based Emotion
Recognition, FaBER), for example the ability to accurately detect expressions
of disgust or fear in the facial expression of another person. However, these
deliberations can also be related to other communication forms via which
‘mindreading’ is activated—gestures, gesticulations, linguistic intonation or
interaction partners (e.g. Stefani & Marco, 2019). Many classic cognition
theories assume that such facial expressions of other people are identified
based on previous knowledge as in regard to feelings of disgust, for example,
that is based on a certain theory about such feelings. Goldman (2017) refers
to this cognition theory as theory-theory (TT) since it is a theory about the
theoretical interpretation of such emotions in daily life. He refers to the com-
peting theory as the simulation theory (ST) since the theory assumes that one
can only understand another person’s emotions via visual mindreading if one
comprehends it physically within oneself, simulates or reproduces it sensomo-
torically—for example in the form of so-called facial mimicry, the mimicking
imitation of another person’s physiognomic expression. In other words, one
must reactivate one’s own emotional experiences sensomotorically in order to
understand another person’s emotional facial expression. Which of the two
theories better explains an expression of disgust or fear in the face of
another person?
Studies have also been performed on patients with brain damage in the
areas that are critical for the development of feelings of fear and disgust. These
people do not or hardly show any feelings of fear or disgust in situations that
would normally evoke such feelings. However, surprisingly, they were also
partially or wholly incapable of perceiving these emotional manifestations in
the facial expressions of other people. In further studies, brain scans have
shown that certain brain areas are active during face-based recognition of dis-
gust that also control these feelings—the authors conclude that “appreciation
of visual stimuli depicting other’s disgust is closely linked to the perception
(i.e., experience) of unpleasant tastes and smells” (Goldman, 2017, p. 67). It
must be pointed out that experience is referenced here as in many other studies
of this kind as a sensomotoric lived experience, which, as emphasised by
114 C. Rittelmeyer

Goldman, can hardly be explained with the TT assumption but quite well
with the simulation theory.
The research findings of Bruno Wicker et al. (2003), which Goldman also
incorporates in his conscientious step-by-step argumentation, are also inter-
esting in this regard. Wicker et al. (2003) report:

We performed an fMRI study in which participants inhaled odorants producing

a strong feeling of disgust. The same participants passively viewed movies of
individuals smelling the contents of a glass (disgusting, pleasant, or neutral) and
expressing the facial expressions of the respective emotions. (Ibid., p. 655)

According to the TT theory, one would expect that the real odour activates
the respective brain areas, for example for olfactory perception, but the obser-
vation of the respective facial reactions stimulates the visual and prefrontal
cortex. However, this was not primarily the case: The perception of facial reac-
tions, as of disgust for example, experienced by another person and the feeling
of disgust experienced in one’s own self activate the same brain region respon-
sible for smelling. “This suggests that the understanding of the facial expres-
sions of disgust as displayed by others involves the activation of neural
substrates normally activated during the experience of the same emotion”
(ibid., p. 657).
Thus, the group of researchers follows the simulation theory (ST) in this
regard (to which Goldman also subscribes) and sees its results as proof for “the
idea that we perceive emotions in others by activating the same emotion in
ourselves” (ibid., p. 660)—whereas the ‘activation’ is an actual sensomotor
(and not solely a mental) process. Studies cited by the authors in which elec-
trical stimulation of the brain regions responsible for feelings of disgust pro-
duced “unpleasant sensations in the mouth and throat” (ibid., p. 660) show
that peripheral body reactions are possibly also involved (see also Susskind
et al., 2008). As a side note it must be mentioned that the hearing of words
expressed with distinct tongue movements is accompanied by fine-motor
tongue movements—this as well can be better explained with the simulation
theory (ST) than with the theory-theory (TT) (Fadiga et al., 2002).
However, Wicker et al. emphasise that the processes described by them
refer to elementary corporeal activities in which the autonomous nervous sys-
tem plays a special role. If one specifically imagines the perception of foul-
smelling substances and the observance of facial reactions, one will certainly
discover that manifold thoughts and reflections experienced in daily life
become important that can more readily be ascribed to TT. Goldman also
emphasises this as he analyses these studies on face-based mindreading. He
 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical… 115

talks about ‘hybrid explanatory models’ within this context. The differentia-
tion of ‘cognitive and emotional empathy’ also calls attention to these connec-
tions of sensomotoric and theoretical-discursive perceptions of other people.
The former type of cognition deals with deliberations such as ‘What is making
this person so unhappy?’; the latter is about self-perceiving actual empathy for
the emotional state of another human being (Drimalla et al., 2019;
Drimalla, 2019).
As frequently referenced in the study by Wicker et al. as well as in Goldman’s
analysis, it is striking that an understanding of these emotions is only made
possible in the first place based on corporeal recapitulation of such emotions
observed in others. Goldman here even quotes the German word Verstehen
[understanding] as he references the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)
and his differentiation between ‘Verstehen’ [understanding] and ‘Erklären’
[explaining] (Goldman, 2017, pp. 176–181; see also Faulstich, 2014). He
grasps ‘the Verstehen heuristic as an alternative to TT’. Here Verstehen of
another person (also in regard to his emotional facial expressions) is to be
understood within the meaning of a deeper empathetic perception. This active
engaging with the other is to be differentiated from mere observation or
reflecting about another person. In this context it should be mentioned that
in the embodiment theory the Cartesian ‘I think, therefore I am’ is replaced
by ‘I act, therefore I am’ as attributed to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (e.g.
Gallagher, 2014; Vignemont, 2014). Reflections and research interpretations
of the described type therefore seem to substantiate the assumption that
embodied cognition does not necessarily lead to realisations that are inacces-
sible to perception in accordance with the mode of classic cognition theories.
In its hybrid forms as well, it rather seems to make a much more compassion-
ate, deeper understanding possible. In light of the volitional character of
embodied cognition, one may quote the often-translated saying of the Chinese
philosopher Confucius, which already contains an indication of the pedagogi-
cal aspects of embodiment theory: ‘Tell me and I will forget, show me and I
may remember; involve me and I will understand.’
However, in further activities of embodied cognition, this understanding is
articulated differently than in social interaction. For example, when I am
intensely reflecting while sitting on a chair and I observe myself, I notice that
my perception of the environment is blurred—accommodation and conver-
gence movements of the eyes have apparently ceased. As soon as I see clearly
again as I observe myself, I notice that the environment has a distracting func-
tion. Thus, the body ‘says’ on a highly elementary level of experience that it
partially retreats with its sensory organs from the environment and wholly
focuses on the thinking self. It is not a reflective but a pre-reflective
116 C. Rittelmeyer

understanding in the moment of concentration. The same is true for self-

observation while walking through altering changing natural landscape dur-
ing which I notice that my thoughts change from one idea to the next rather
than remaining focussed on a single topic (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014).
These deliberations also apply to other areas of embodiment, for example with
respect to physiological processes while experiencing colours in school build-
ings (Rittelmeyer, 2013), with respect to the role of gestures, body postures
and gesticulations during school lessons (Wulf et al., 2011) or with respect to
the change of heart and breathing function in certain positively or negatively
experienced natural environments (Frohmann et al., 2010). The previously
mentioned phenomenological self-observation with respect to certain phenom-
ena of one’s own body and its cognitions combined with research—critically
examined according to Goldman—seems very helpful to me. Finally, I would
like to give an example of this process which also demonstrates the educa-
tional possibilities (for teaching in schools for example) that are suggested.
Once again, I take the well-studied phenomenon of ‘facial/visual mimicry’ as
an example.
When looking at a sad or happy facial expression, one notices something
peculiar in regard to one’s own self. It is nearly impossible to produce a con-
trary emotional expression, for example a happy and exuberant mood when
seeing the (real or depicted) sad face of another person (Ekman, 2004).
One’s own facial expression seems to be constitutive for the perception of
another person’s emotional expression as well as for the development of
one’s own similar empathic mood. What happens in us if we observe the
laughing face of another person? (Rittelmeyer, 2014, Chapter 5). How can
it be that we perceive an emotional expression in this face? According to a
common neurological explanation, the same brain cells are active that also
control the real facial expression of the observed face when, for example,
looking at a laughing or angry face. These cells are therefore referred to as
mirror neurons, because the perceiving person mirrors or simulates the
observed facial expression in the motor brain area (Bauer, 2006; Decety &
Ickes, 2009). This neuronal mirroring is what allows us to empathise with
another person, thereby substantiating our empathic capability (Harmon-
Jones & Winkielman, 2007).
However, as previously mentioned, various studies have also shown that we
often activate exactly the same facial muscles that are needed to manifest the
observed expression when observing unambiguous facial expressions (or their
respective depictions). However, this real facial mirroring in the form of
extremely subtle muscle activities is invisible to external observers and only
verifiable by means of certain electromyographic measures (facial EMG
 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical… 117

responses: Ruggieri et al., 1986; Dimberg et al., 2000; Dimberg & Petterson,
2000; Oberman et al., 2007). Thus, by mimicking the physiognomy of the
perceived person micro-motorically, we corporeally experience the expressed
mood and do not merely register it apathetically; its physical incorporation
becomes an emphatic sensation. Numerous studies have meanwhile been per-
formed on ‘visual mimicry’ in regard to viewing emotional physiognomic ges-
tures of other people; a prominent assumption among these is that peripheral
motor activities are the trigger for central representations of emotional experi-
ences (Drimalla, 2019; Singer, 2006; Strack et al., 1988). The facial expres-
sion of the perceiver is therefore not merely an expression of cerebrally
‘processing’ what was observed, but at the same time also a director of thoughts
and emotions in a reciprocal process between the ‘centre’ (the brain) and the
‘periphery’ (the facial expression). Various electromyographic studies have
shown that such activities of visual mimicry can also be fundamental for
imagining facial expressions, for instance while reading a novel or hearing cer-
tain descriptions (Ito et al., 2009; Johnstone et al., 2006). It seems that so-
called deep reading, that is a pronounced and empathetic engagement while
reading is also promoted by such corporeal-mimetic resonances.
However, we must learn to activate these corporeal resonances in a manner
that is appropriate to the situation—strong imitative mimetic actions (e.g.
during intense grief reactions) limit the consciousness and thinking capacity
while weak imitative mimetic actions make us cold and apathetic to the world.
Both extremes are part of life—but lead to social malfunctions if allowed to
dominate the actions of the individual. A compulsive imitation of another
person’s facial expression is a symptom of echolalia. The opposite reaction,
that is remaining completely unaffected by the facial expressions of another
person, is generally referred to as social coldness but is perhaps also a specific
expression of behaviour referred to in specialist literature as aggressive conduct
disorder (ACD). There are indications that an unaffected, apathetic observa-
tion of pain inflicted on another person is partially due to missing mirroring
processes in the brain—and therefore presumably to a lack of corporeal reso-
nance and a lack of mimetic articulation of the expression of pain (Decety
et al., 2009; Likowski et al., 2012; Osborn & Derbyshire, 2010; Rymarczyk
et al., 2018).
According to the resonance model of embodied cognition, the multimodal
interaction of senses for the described empathy with a facial expression (e.g.
while seeing images of humans) can be characterised as follows: The face of
another person is received visually through the sense of sight; a mimicking
imitation follows, which is not consciously perceived by the perceiving or the
observed person but nonetheless registered by the kinetic sense and
118 C. Rittelmeyer

transmitted to the brain whereby empathy and thus a deeper realisation of the
happy or friendly mood of the other person is possible—not merely an apa-
thetic registration. One may presume that such empathy with the emotions of
another person is only made possible on account of these real micro-imitations
by means of a physical experience with the other person. Facial expressions are
only one element of mimicry, as it is also performed, as numerous studies have
shown, via other bodily organs such as arm movements, body postures, foot
placements and so on. The expression ‘kinaesthetic empathy’, which is also
used in research literature, thereby becomes understandable (Zaboura, 2009).
If facial micro-motions are so important for the perception of other people
and their emotional states, moods and so on, the following research question
arises: What happens with respect to social sensitivity when muscles that are
important for mimicking activities are dulled? We would expect that the
empathic abilities are lower when lacking this corporeal resonance (although
only statistical tendencies can be discerned due to the complexity of such
processes). Of course, experiments such as these have already been performed,
for example, by covering up certain facial areas with bandages (Oberman
et al., 2007; Ponari et al., 2012). For other studies, the cosmetic agent Botox
was injected into various facial areas. Among other uses, the medication Botox
reduces so-called crow’s feet by numbing or paralysing certain facial muscles.
These experiments actually showed a decrease in the empathic abilities of
many research participants. Thus, the injection of Botox into the facial mus-
cles that are also responsible for empathic mimetic reactions resulted in the
reduced ability among many research participants to properly discern emo-
tional messages in texts compared to untreated persons—which suggests that
there are micro-motor activities of facial expressions even for imagined moods
and feelings in other people. Similar effects have been demonstrated for the
identification of emotional messages in images (Davis et al., 2010; Havas
et al., 2010).
As already mentioned, some studies have shown that reading emotionally
engaging texts is accompanied by very subtle, specific muscle activities of the
face that, for some readers at least, seem to be important for understanding
what they are reading (Niedenthal et al., 2009). However, a person’s own
facial expressions can also change their emotional mood. Test subjects were
asked to hold a pen between either their lips or their teeth with their mouth
open. As they did so, they were supposed to evaluate how funny they thought
a caricature was. Statistics showed that the second group found the image fun-
nier than the first group. The researchers explained this effect by saying that if
you hold a pen between your teeth it is specifically the muscles that are used
for laughing that are activated (Koch, 2011, p. 55).
 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical… 119

As already stated, it is difficult for us to be sad when focussing on a happy

facial expression (and vice versa). As researcher David Havas stated in connec-
tion with the Botox study, when observing an unhappy face, the brain nor-
mally sends an impulse to the periphery to generate a micro-motor ‘frown’;
this fine-motor, facial mirroring, which outsiders cannot necessarily see, is
then transmitted as a characteristic impression of motion to the brain or mir-
rored back, whereby the emotional message becomes experienceable. However,
this corporeal gesture is inhibited by the medication given, and the ability to
understand the emotional message is impeded. These effects were very strong
in some persons but weak or even non-existent in others. For we must remem-
ber that our understanding of a facial expression or a described emotion, as
numerous research projects have shown, can also be moderated by other cor-
poreal activities such as how someone sits to read. Personal idiosyncrasies
seem to be important for visual/facial mimicry. For example, some studies
have shown that mimetic behaviour occurs more often with persons who,
according to tests, are especially empathetic as they react with strong imitative
fine-motor activity to the facial expression of fear or disgust in others
(Rymarczyk et al., 2016).
After this short excursion into studies on micro-mimetic resonance, the
initial example can now be analysed in greater detail and we will examine
what the implications are for education. For example, it is difficult for us to
produce a sad, angry or happy mood when we observe a contrary facial expres-
sion. The same is true for physiognomic expressions that we observe in other
people or images (whereas such micro-mimetic reactions are probably not
activated when we perceive them only fleetingly). However, the example of
the apathetic observation of pain in other people (Aggressive Conduct
Disorder) elucidates that not all individuals are capable of such mimicry. In
everyday social life it is also true to a certain extent that such imitation pro-
cesses can be moderated—for example, when a grieving friend speaks to us
with an unhappy facial expression, we unconsciously do not imitate this facial
expression but speak with a serious, yet encouraging facial expression in order
to comfort our friend—however, this presupposes that we are able to precisely
assume the socially appropriate mood. It is possible that this friend now gets
the impression of a comforting encounter when he reacts with at least slight
imitations to the facial expression (Drimalla et al., 2019; Hess & Fischer,
2016; Seibt et al., 2015). It is a question of reciprocal resonances although
corporeal social interaction also indicates a much more basic function of such
facial activities and, in a further sense, embodiment processes. If we look more
deeply at this tactful interaction we see that it is an expression of a process of
(self-) education that has already taken place. The socially appropriate form of
120 C. Rittelmeyer

interaction that is also articulated in the face is preceded by a life of relatively

complex experience and learning in the course of which the correlation
between such social and incorporated abilities has been developed. On an
abstract level it is possible to initially maintain that the forms of expression in
this bodily repertoire of behaviour and action, this bodily instrument of suc-
cessful communication must be developed. However, what needs to be devel-
oped cannot be separated from what can only happen within the context of
general (self-)education because it is always a more specific expression of one’s
own educational experiences. From this we see that a careful phenomenologi-
cal observation of an important individual example of Embodied Cognition,
the mimicking resonance of the facial expressions (and moreover certainly
also bodily postures, gestures, movement) of another person clarifies the
mind-body-environment-approach. The following example illustrates what
incorporation of culture or specifically also morals means. People living about
150 years ago were not disturbed by physical violence towards children in
families or schools nor by the sight of public executions. However, seeing
things like this evokes corporeal reactions of horror and empathy among most
people today. Moral convictions and cultural attitudes have ‘incarnated’
themselves (in the words of Merleau-Ponty) so that most people feel strong
empathetic resonances that also motivate them to intervene in such situations
(De Mause, 1974; Gersch, 2015; Soliman & Glenberg, 2014; Strejcek &
Zhong, 2014).
Based on research results, it seems to me that, whatever form it takes,
Embodied Cognition as cultural education that produces resonances expresses
the total education of head, heart and hand, of thinking, feeling and volition,
and of intellectual and aesthetic worlds of experience. This becomes even
more apparent when we look beyond facial expressions to body postures,
forms of movement, gestures, physiological processes and so on that form a
kind of ‘concert’ of these varied corporeal activities (Stefani & Marco, 2019).
In an article, neuroscientist Manuela Macedonia describes how insights
gained from embodiment research can inspire teaching and learning practices
in schools, highlighting the learning of foreign languages, mathematics and
also basic spatial thinking, which is fundamental for technical professions.

Most educational programs follow theories that are mentalistic, i.e. they sepa-
rate the mind from the body. At school, learners sit, watch, listen, and write.
The aim of this paper is to present embodied learning as an alternative to men-
talistic education. (Macedonia, 2019, online)
 Embodied Cognition: A Methodological and Pedagogical… 121

She views this type of more rationalistic teaching which ignores the body as
being part of the tradition of Descartes mind-body dichotomy (1596–1650),
which has also had a significant impact on the cognitive sciences of the cur-
rent time. We ‘still’ learn with the mind; the body contains our vital organs
and allows us to move around. However, embodiment research has made it
clear that our cognitive activities are interwoven into the sensomotor system
of the body. For example, numerous brain areas are activated when grasping
an apple with the hand and observing it. These brain areas are related to the
form, colour, odour, motor function while peeling, taste and so on of the
object. The renewed perception of the object is thus a reactivation of the mul-
tisensory or multimodal perception of the fruit. The perception as well as the
imagining of the object or of another person will be far richer and livelier if
comprehensive and numerous sensuous experiences that are essential for the
observed objects have played a role in what has been experienced before.
In a botany class, one can observe a rose on the computer screen or through
virtual reality goggles (Smart, 2014). One can observe it in nature from the
side, the top and as a shape in space by activating the sense of balance and
kinetic sense and thereby come close to the concept of the rose in accordance
with its ‘essence’ while also training one’s multimodal resonance capabilities at
the same time. One can also observe its metamorphosis from stem leaf to
flower more precisely and perceive the underlying movement pattern of
expansion and contraction; ultimately, one can also feel the prickly thorns and
capture the typical forms of the plant in a drawing: All this is meant by a
multimodal approach to reality (Blackwood, 2012; Bockemühl, 1997).
Observing resonances of the body and their cognitive function results in con-
crete demands for teaching that stimulates the senses but at the same time has
a phenomenological orientation, which again leads us to the question of
whether we have to fear deprivation of the senses and experience if the body
is left out of teaching and onscreen media, virtual reality goggles and so on
come to dominate (Rittelmeyer, 2018). Manuela Macedonia (2019, online)
summarises the mind-body dichotomy in these words: “All this is to say that
mind and body are intertwined with each other and that Cartesian theories of
the mind cannot be the reference for educationalists any longer”.
However, anyone who looks carefully at the international development of
preschool and school educational theory will notice that this change has been
coming for a long time. There are still educational theories which disregard
the body, which the author has described as ‘mentalistic’. At the same time,
there are many teaching methods being developed and tested in educational
institutions, without the protagonists being consciously aware of it, that are
oriented towards the insights of embodiment research and often have an
122 C. Rittelmeyer

artistic-craft emphasis. Such teaching methods often align with the saying of
the Chinese philosopher Confucius that I quoted earlier: ‘Tell me and I will
forget, show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand.’
Thus, German cultural schools, for example, attempt to create lessons for
science and mathematics as well that in an inspired way appeal to the whole
body through aesthetic elements (such as theatre, dance, music, landscape
painting, see Fuchs & Braun, 2018). Similar intentions are associated with
the so-called STEAM concept, whereby Sciences, Technology, Engineering
and Mathematics (the classic STEM concept) are complemented by ‘Arts’
(e.g. Skorton & Bear, 2018). And some schools in the U.S. are envisaging
how to design rooms as so-called Da Vinci Studios within the context of new
building planning in which the ‘hard separation of science and art’ is to be
suspended and it will be possible to experience “various paths of thinking”
(Nair, 2014, p. 94). Thus, awareness of the most important role of the embodi-
ment paradigm for education and teaching already exists to a large extent in
public or pedagogical institutions. However, both now and in the future edu-
cationally oriented embodiment research will have to perform the important
task of anthropologically substantiating more comprehensive and corporeal
didactics.

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 Part II
The Pedagogical Relationship and
Professionalism

Tactful behaviour is based on acknowledging the other person to be of equal

value, even if the other person is not (yet) able to behave as an equal in terms
of social responsibility, etc., as in the case of a child. Tact is a requirement for
the success of pedagogical actions. There is a close connection between tact
and behaving mimetically. Tact can lead to an exchange between people based
on mutual respect, in the course of which each person reveals herself in a way
that corresponds to her own conceptions and self-image, as long as this does
not infringe the rights of other people. Tact is associated with the aesthetic
side of pedagogical actions without which they are simply disciplinary mea-
sures. As in aesthetic action, also in tactful action there is a mimetic exchange
between the body of the person acting and the addressee of her actions. Such
exchange necessitates openness and a readiness to perceive the other person.
Tact as a body-based aesthetic sensitivity is a prerequisite of the social effect of
gestures, rituals and other social practices. The conscious use of gestures as an
aid in education and child-rearing involves bodily practices that become a
medium for teaching and learning. Vulnerability as a bodily condition of life
and as a form of knowledge delimits action.
Sensitivity and discretion must be exercised by adults towards children, and
this can be described as pedagogical tactfulness (Shoko Suzuki [Chap. 8]).
When being pedagogically tactful, a person responds in a caring way to the
circumstances at hand. Pedagogical tact arouses emotion. Tact functions as a
‘mode of knowledge’. In contrast to reason and cognition (logos), tact relates
to the body and its feelings. The author shows how the knowledge of pathos
of pedagogical tactfulness is related to other educational ‘techniques’, which
Suzuki explains as an expression of phronesis, which is a type of wisdom
130 The Pedagogical Relationship and Professionalism

relevant to practical action, implying both good judgement and good charac-
ter and habits. Suzuki also elucidates Kitaro Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ as being
determined by ‘the richness of the nothingness’. The logic of place constitutes
an ever-changing cosmos, ‘in which all things resonate’. In pedagogical tact,
bodies resonate with each other by encompassing all living things. This expe-
rience has an association with the tranquil state of Zen enlightenment.
In Chap. 9 pedagogical tact is identified as body-based mindfulness (Anja
Kraus and Thomas Senkbeil). Pedagogical tact involves assumptions that are
proved by practice. Instant judgements or decisions are made. The practitio-
ners steadily improve their tact in a non-quantifiable way, through tacit
knowledge. The authors present a small-scale empirical study. Finally, peda-
gogical tact is defined as corporeal social awareness for social equality, by
which offensive, defensive behavior or power games can be avoided.
However, as pedagogical tact is associated with proximity and touch it can, in
principle, also be associated with violation or harm. At the same time, tact has
the didactic function of changing the way students engage with the content of
a lesson so that superficial knowledge and confusion gradually turns into anal-
ysis and reflection. From the didactic perspective, the question is also raised
how the evaluation of performance and pedagogical tact can operate together.
Gestures are important means for enabling classroom communication to
function well (Regula Fankhauser and Angela Kaspar [Chap. 10]). On the one
hand, gestures are strongly related to language, thinking and imagination.
They ‘are not learnt through language and thought, but in performances and
mimetic processes’. Gestures do not merely follow and support verbal expres-
sions; they even have the potential to replace, resist and undermine language.
The authors’ videography on how teachers perceive and interpret certain
physical movements in the classroom shows the ambiguity of gestures. As the
meaning of gestures in social interaction is often unclear, a gesture can
also convey manipulative, debasing, harmful ways of dealing with the chil-
dren. This is the case, for example, when a teacher reacts to her own irritation
by a pupil’s disruptive signals by drawing on social and cultural stereotypes.
The authors conclude that gestures only then signify the school rules and the
sovereignty of the teacher, when the ‘hegemony of the linguistic is restored’
and when the gestures in the classroom follow an integrative institutional logic.
The incorporation of social power structures in educational processes is a
consequence of the potential vulnerability of the human body (Daniel
Burghardt and Jörg Zirfas [Chap. 11]). Vulnerability is an aspect of the human
body that is often overlooked. It is an anthropological fact. Vulnerabilty is (in
life and online) omnipresent in the face of harm, suffering and disaster.
Humans are, in a pathic way, exposed to their vulnerability. Vulnerability is
 The Pedagogical Relationship and Professionalism 131

corporeally, socially and culturally contextualised through an expansion of

experience, and involves the awareness of what might happen next in a con-
crete situation. In its situatedness, contingency, relativity and relationality and
in all its corporeal, social and cultural dimensions, vulnerability can be seen as
knowledge regarding ‘potentially harmful actions or cause-effect relationships’
that is required in order to prevent violence and harm. In pedagogical situa-
tions this is of special relevance, because ‘actual physical harm cannot be
attributed to a single cause’. An individual’s resilience and self-preservation
instincts are largely based on the ability to anticipate possible dangers. This, in
turn, assumes a deep sense of vulnerability as being the ‘dark side’ of ‘enlight-
ened’ times.
When tactful behaviour and gestures and rituals are used in an educational
way in institutions like schools, they take place in social fields that are perme-
ated by power structures (Kathrin Audehm). The author of Chap. 12 presents
well-known concepts about bodies as bearers of politico-cultural forces and
dynamics, not least in pedagogical contexts, namely the ideas of Max Weber,
Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Audehm elaborates their analytic con-
tribution to pedagogy. The exercise of power is defined as the ability to exer-
cise one’s will over others (Weber), as power of action, instrumental power
and authoritative power. Bourdieu and Foucault refer to the discursive means
of power and the mechanisms and formulae behind the ‘belief in the legiti-
macy of domination’. We can learn from them how power structures are prac-
tised and how they become absorbed into human bodies. Audehm is interested
not only in these interpretations of the networks of power and their role(s) in
the field of education but also in what is tacitly assumed and what is ignored
in each of the reference-concepts. At the same time, she stresses that pedagogy
must prove itself every day in terms of mutuality, recognition and trust.
Herein lies the opportunity for pedagogical authority and practice to prevent
violence.
 Knowledge of Pathos
Shoko Suzuki

The daily life of a school is a collection of inexpressible knowledge. For exam-

ple, it begins in the morning when we welcome students to school. They come
to school with the rhythms of life that they have developed in their own
homes. The student who leaves home to come to school having been in an
argument with his parents over something trivial. The student whose conver-
sation with a friend last night about something that’s bothering her has stuck
in her mind. Or the student who has spent some quality time with her family
and is excitedly anticipating the upcoming holidays. The mental rhythms cre-
ated by these various shades of emotions swirl around the classroom in the
morning. On the other hand, teachers, too, stand in front of their students,
tinged with the rhythms generated by time spent at home. The morning
‘homeroom’ time is a place to regulate and tune in to the complex rhythms of
the mind.
The teacher must keep track of what each student is doing through daily
interactions. Lately, a certain student has been having trouble concentrating
in class and is often defiant when I, as her teacher, pay attention to her. There
is something of a hidden anger that comes through. Why is it that she is
unable to listen to others honestly/openly? Is it because she is distrustful of the
people around her? Or she may have lost confidence in herself. Is she trying
to cope with sadness? The teacher must be sensitive to each student’s

S. Suzuki (*)
Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
e-mail: shoko.suzuki.ue@riken.jp

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 133
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_8
134 S. Suzuki

temperament and current situation when focusing attention on them in the

classroom. Also, when reprimanding a student in front of other students, the
teacher must be aware of the message of the reprimand in the eyes of other
students who are watching, who may perceive it as a message without hurting
the pride of the reprimanded student.
J.F. Herbart (1776–1841), a German philosopher who was a pioneer in the
field of philosophical psychology and established pedagogy as a discipline for
teachers, explored the practicalities of teachers’ judgements and decisions that
underpin daily school life and described it as ‘pedagogical tact’ (pädagogischer
Takt) (Herbart, 1802). Pedagogical tact, as a mediating term (Mittelglied)
between the theory and practice of education, enables teachers to make quick
judgements and decisions. This tact, he said, must be honed until it becomes
a skilful technique that works by synthesizing the teacher’s various techniques
for educational practice. Pedagogical tact, therefore, can be said to be a skill of
judgement, or ‘phronesis-techne.’ To become a master of tact, it is necessary
to start by noticing the function of tact in various aspects of practice, that is
to say, it is necessary to clarify the function of tact, to extract the various ele-
ments that compose it, and to clarify the network of relationships between the
elements in terms of how it functions. The first task is to discover the function
of educational tact in the daily actions of the school (Blochmann, 1950;
Heyd, 1995; Muth, 1962).
Pedagogical tact is a technical term used by Herbart to describe the profes-
sional skill of the teacher. In the same way, the tact of a great doctor can be
seen as a single glance to assess a patient’s condition in an instant. Tact, as an
everyday word, comes from the Latin word tactus, which means the sense of
touch. It also means an inner feeling produced by contact. In musical termi-
nology, tact means a conductor’s baton, the time signature, and rhythm. From
the eighteenth century onwards, the term ‘tact’ has been commonly used to
describe the delicate emotions necessary for social interaction, as well as the
ability to avoid harming others. As the urban concentration of modernization
progressed, new manners of socializing came to be demanded, and tact came
to attract people’s attention as a knack for human interaction. Being tactful,
or to be full of tact, was considered important in this context (Gödde &
Zirfas, 2012; Suzuki, 2014; Burckhardt, Krinninger, & Seichter, 2015).
The term ‘tactful teacher’ is also used to describe a teacher who can relate to
his or her students in the most appropriate way. It also works in relationships
between people. Tact is a measure of the distance between people, or in other
words, a measure of the heart. The distance between people is not visible, but
it is possible to measure this interpersonal distance through comprehensive
sensibility that mobilizes all the five senses. Tact is the ability to read the
 Knowledge of Pathos 135

invisible distance and the quality of the distance that lies between the self and
others, the atmosphere and mood of a place. We can perceive the subtle folds
of our mind such as mood, state of mind, and comfort of others through their
facial expressions, tone of voice, and the atmosphere of a place. Tact is a prac-
tical knowledge that enables us to take appropriate actions in our daily prac-
tice, and it is a physical knowledge that enables us to respond appropriately to
situations in a physical manner (De Certeau, 1980; Detienne & Vernant,
1974; Raphals, 1992).
Knowing and understanding a particular student is not enough to know
and understand her objective data, for example, date of birth, height, weight,
how many seconds she ran the 100 metres during the last sporting event, what
her marks were last semester, or any of the many other data accumulated in
student records. The teacher must have a comprehensive understanding of the
messages that this student sends out with her whole body—her words, expres-
sions, and attitudes, as well as her own experience of what makes her happy
and what makes her sad, what she looks at, and what she longs for. Moreover,
the teacher must know it not as a scientist observes and measures a subject,
but as a teacher, seeing a being of flesh and blood, who opens up and shows
her true face to the teacher. On the one hand, the teacher is trying to get to
know his or her students, and on the other hand, the students are also diag-
nosing how well the teacher has the ability and capacity to understand them.
The basis of this relationship is a mutual act of knowing.
In various scenes encountered in daily life at school, teachers and students
are (1) reading the backgrounds of the actions (performances) of the people
who compose those scenes, that is, the ambiguity of the actions; (2) seeing
how those scenes weave together into the present, tomorrow, and future of
the people in those scenes and positioning them in a time-space framework
(cosmos); and (3) understanding the meaning of the various elements that
make up the scene as symbols. The field of education is a vital, living thing.
It is a product of improvization. It is created by all the people in the room. A
place is created in such a way that it is impossible to know who intended to
create it that way. The power of the place is the situational power that makes
the relationship between teacher and student emerge. In this sense, tact can
be seen as giving power to the place while making use of the power of
the place.
136 S. Suzuki

1 Touch the World/Touch Life

Let us look more deeply at the function of tact from the phenomenological
point of view. First, the sense of touch is a fundamental sense for human
beings. I would like you to close your eyes, put your hands together, and enjoy
the sensation of the right hand touching the left hand for a while. After that,
try to feel the sensation of your left hand touching your right hand. With your
hands together, it is not clear whether your right hand is touching your left
hand, or your left hand is touching your right hand. Touching and being
touched happen simultaneously, which is a characteristic of the sense of touch.
The way you set your consciousness determines which hand you touch, and
which hand you feel is being touched. From a Descartes point of view, I am
on the side that senses and perceives the object. But my hand is not only on
the side of the perceiving subject, but also on the side of the perceived, or
perceived object, at the same time. Touching and being touched—isn’t this a
fundamental human trait? Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) focused on
the ambiguity and ambivalence of the ‘I’ as both the owner of the hand that
touches and the owner of the hand that is touched and tried to restore the ‘I’
as an entity (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). In the 1920s in Japan the Kyoto School,
which attempted to build up this school of thought, described the ‘I’ that
emerges in such ambiguous situations as ‘the unparticipating’ of the subject
and the object. They also called the experience that arises ‘the boundary of
consciousness and unconsciousness,’ where subject and object are undifferen-
tiated, ‘pure experience’ (Nishida, 1911; Suzuki, 2012).
Tactile sensation can be positioned as a common-sense or somatic sense
that cooperates with various other senses such as vision, hearing, and balance,
and coordinates these various senses with the body. Also, tact, as a sense of
touch, has a meaning similar to rhythm. Our internal rhythm is linked to the
external rhythms of the world through the movements of our bodies, includ-
ing dance. It is not a coincidence that various rituals and events have long
been conducted according to the rhythm of the changing seasons. We inter-
nalize the rhythms of the universe and nature through rituals and ceremonies.
As proof of this, events and rituals invite human beings to sense this rhythm
through dances and music, and the internal rhythm and the rhythms of the
universe and the natural world intersect and resonate with each other, creating
a world of resonance.
Moreover, tact does not work only in direct contact. It also has the function
of reproducing and recalling in an image the feeling induced by the sense of
touch as if we feel we were touching it without touching it. This is the reason
 Knowledge of Pathos 137

why tact starts from the meaning of touch, but also includes the meaning of
emotional change that occurs within oneself through contact with others.
New-born babies are held in their mothers’ arms, and while holding milk
in their mouths, feel the heartbeat of their mothers’ breasts. This contact with
their mothers, exchanged through skin-to-skin contact, is the beginning of
children’s contact with the outside world. As children begin to move around,
they experience the weight and texture of objects by grasping and holding
them. When they stand on two feet, they know where they are in the space of
the room, which is referred to as the spatial sense of knowing one’s place, the
balanced sense of being able to move around without falling, and the sense of
physical position. And at last, we come to understand the relationship and
distance between ourselves and the outside world. The function of vision not
only allows us to measure the distance between ourselves and an object with-
out touching it directly, but it is also related to our sense of touch and physical
balance. Tactile perception and physical balance are also related to spatial per-
ception. This leads to the sense of knowing one’s place in a society or group,
or even the sense of knowing the size of one’s existence, or the sense of being
able to move harmoniously and assert oneself in a place. It can be said to be
an organ in contact with the outside world, yet it is not only in direct contact
with things but also connects the outside world and the inner world through
its mediating action as a rhythm.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) referred to “the
tact of an acrobat walking a tightrope” because he believed that tact is a spon-
taneous power of judgement that acts anticipatively during an action (Kant,
1781). The acrobat walks on a single rope. He walks across the rope, keeping
his eyes on the path ahead and constantly making decisions as he goes. This is
the sense of always moving forward, rather than standing still and looking
straight down. Leading on from this, Kant thought of tact as the wisdom of a
tightrope walker’s synthesis of that instantaneous judgement and physical sen-
sation. In the classroom, the teacher makes countless instantaneous judge-
ments and decisions in order to create a flow. The wisdom used is probably
what Kant calls the acrobat’s tact. The movement itself is unstable, but there
is something stable in that instability, something vague, but we can say that
instability is the sense of securing a certain point. It is a function of maintain-
ing movement in equilibrium, in each moment of that movement. It is a kind
of dynamic equilibrium, a kind of false focus. In education, the teacher feels
the quality of time and space of time and their own position in the flow of
time and the field of education. They think about where they are in the field,
where their hearts are, and how to measure pauses.
138 S. Suzuki

The work of tact in harnessing the power of place is anthropological in

the sense that it is characterized by three elements: performativity, symbol-
ism, and cosmology (Wulf, 2013). To put it another way, tact transforms
the ordinary and commonplace into a place of resonance. The power of
rhythmic resonance echoes among all the people and things present, but
also generates special rhythms, repeatedly diffusing and converging in vari-
ous directions. What we experience in the here and now is not only one
immediately apparent meaning but may become a trigger for some kind of
awakening in the form of something gained or clarified today, tomorrow,
the next day, one year later, or ten years later in the lives of those who are
present. Through its rhythmic resonance, the tact submerges deep within
the human body and forms a cosmology that involves not only living things
but also non-living things.

2 Those Who Have Suffered, Have Learned:

Ta Pathemata Mathemata
The tact of judgements and decisions must be honed as a skill to increase the
probability that they will be successfully optimized. Herbart also shared this
thought.
Waza in Japanese (techne, ars, Kunst, skill) is honed through use in real situ-
ations. Tact is refined through actual use. No matter how much you learn the
theory of pedagogy, if you cannot apply it effectively in your daily practice,
you cannot say that you have learned it. It is important to analyse the experi-
ences encountered in daily educational practice and reflect on them not only
at the cognitive level but also at the emotional level. It is necessary to reflect
on the meaning of the experience for oneself and prepare for the next experi-
ence by activating the image and adjusting one’s psychological state for the
next practice. It is a practice that feeds on experience. The practice of waza
also requires another waza, ‘waza of wazas,’ ‘skill of skills,’ which entails look-
ing over the practice itself and assessing the process of its practice, called meta-
waza or meta-skill. In other words, e.g. a craftsman refines his craftsmanship
through the process of creating his work and tact can be seen as having a simi-
lar dual structure to waza (Suzuki, 2010).
To make experience a true source of sustenance, it is necessary to set within
oneself a fundamental principle, a rule or law of education, to analyse experi-
ence in the light of it, to anticipate the situation to come, and to make an
effort to open up one’s work prospects with it. It is not, however, something
 Knowledge of Pathos 139

that can be learned by following what one is told in a book. The fundamental
principle must be imbued in each teacher until he or she becomes an eye for
education, an eye for students, an eye for himself or herself, in other words, a
framework for seeing things, a framework for thinking (Gedankenkreis), until
the pedagogical horizon becomes a ‘home-grown’ one (Herbart, 1806). It is
just like extracting elements that are meaningful to you from the things you
encounter through your daily experiences and linking them to how you
should act in the future and how you should do your work and your work
prospects. It is a map in our minds, so to speak. Pedagogy and its theories
must be presented in such a way as to draw a single map on which we can list
the relationships between its core elements. With the map in hand, the begin-
ner walks around the unknown world, and in the process draws his or her
map according to personal interests and perspectives. The fundamental prin-
ciple of education is acquired through each experience so that the beginner
learns how to recognize and respond to situations in various educational situ-
ations, how to interact with students, and how to apply mental techniques,
that is to say, to develop a map in his or her mind, an eye for discernment
(Suzuki, 2007; Blaß, 1972).
What is noteworthy about the refinement of Herbart’s tact is that it encour-
ages us to look back at each thing we have experienced in the past, paying
attention to the buzzing of the emotional side of the mind, as well as the
images that prepare us for what we will experience in the future. The key to
action in any given situation, which unfolds through contact with the world
and the rhythms of resonance that arise within and outside the self through
contact with life, and the tact of utilizing the power of that situation, is the
key to the attraction of the imaginary world that takes place in the teacher
before the situation arises. Herbart knew that the emotional impact of the
experience was the key opportunity to imprint experience deep into the body.
This is exactly what the ancient Greek proverb says: ‘He who suffers will learn.’
Moreover, the imagery sessions of future-oriented experience require an
intense imagination, as if one were actually experiencing the scene. Herbart’s
creation of instructional plans for lesson development is adopted by teachers
in today’s Japanese schools and used in their classes. However, the lesson plans
are never a timetable. The lesson plans, which are used to imagine a particular
scene, serve as a compass in the preparation process and must be forgotten
once in the actual classroom. This plan, submerged in the body through for-
getting, is said to contribute to the optimization of action through the action
of remembering, to adapt it to the various modes of occurrence of the actual
situation, which are different from what was expected.
140 S. Suzuki

Images of future experience are inscribed in the body. When we summarize

what we experienced in words or tell a story to others, it is edited and remem-
bered as a story in a way that is appropriate to the place and the person to
whom it is told. On the other hand, what is felt through the experience is
submerged deep in the body without being verbalized. It can be said that the
experiential knowledge that escapes segmentation through language is stored
deep within the body. Even though we may not have done such things for
decades, we can suddenly find ourselves doing things we learned to do as chil-
dren, such as riding a bicycle or swimming. One day we can simply do them—
a physical memory. The lullaby your mother sang to you a long time ago
comes out of your mouth without you even knowing it. The body, more than
we think, underlies our experiences and the way we change and develop
through these experiences.
A technique is expressed through its use, or in other words through the
actions and behaviour of the user of the technique. It is impossible to separate
a technique from its user’s body and see it in isolation. Moreover, to master a
technique it is not enough to master the theory and principles behind it. If we
cannot make a technique work in the most appropriate way in the situation at
the very moment when it is needed, and if we cannot make it work as wisdom
through the body, it is necessary to learn to understand it through the body,
as the expressions ‘to acquire’ and ‘to know’ imply. If you don’t cultivate it,
you can’t say that you have acquired the skill in the true sense of the word. A
skill will blossom at the right time (Suzuki, 2019; Yuasa, 1993).

3 Knowledge of Pathos: Knowledge

of the Emotional and Physical Body
The knowledge that became dominant under the modern scientific worldview
was characterized by universalism, which presupposes a homogeneous time
and space, logicism, which emphasizes significance through linguistic seg-
mentation, and objectivism, which eliminates and demonstrates subjective
arbitrariness. In terms of clarification of the material world, the modern sci-
entific method has achieved great things. However, it must be admitted that
it has neglected to grasp in detail the situation of each person living here and
now, the specificity of each individual, the characteristics of the senses and the
body that mix subjectivity and objectivity, the realm of expression that is
beyond the reach of linguistic segmentation, and the ambiguity of situations.
 Knowledge of Pathos 141

Kitaro Nishida, the founder of the Kyoto School, who in the 1920s explored
the possibility of dialogue between Western and Eastern philosophy, regarded
the conscious field as a “field” and presented it as a “logic of place” (Nishida,
2011; Suzuki, 2012). Nishida, who studied Western philosophy and practised
Zen, presented the “logic of place” and the “actional intuition” that operates
therein. Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ was developed through his discussion of the
functioning of consciousness (awareness) in terms of a form of judgement.
Nishida was sceptical about the fact that epistemology had been developed
from the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity. According to him,
the root of cognition is to reflect the self in the self, and to be conscious is to
reflect the self itself in the field of one’s consciousness. This act of reflection is
the place of ‘at work’ where action-oriented intuition works. According to
Nishida, it is the logical form of judgement that expresses consciousness most
clearly.
In the formal logic, judgement refers to the inclusion of the subject, which
is the individual, in the predicate, which is the general, commonly referred to
as the universal, or in other words ‘the particular is in the general.’ It is inclu-
sion, but another way of looking at it is that the general particularizes itself,
or, in other words, it is self-limiting. For a judgement to be valid, this self-
limiting general, the concrete general, is necessary. This concrete general per-
son is exactly what Nishida calls ‘place,’ a place focus that reflects the self.
Self-awareness is the function of reflecting the self in the self. The human
knowledge system is composed of infinite layers of such ordinary people, and
in the direction of the subject, we can see an infinitely deep intuition, and at
the same time, in the direction of the predicate, we can recognize an infinite
number of generalities that surround it. Thus, Nishida attempted to turn
from the position of subject-logicism, which had been a common assumption
in Western philosophy, to that of predicate logicism. He grounded all exis-
tence in a predicative substratum, namely nothingness. For him, the place of
nothingness was not the absence of something but was presented as a bottom-
less and abundant world (Nishida, 1987; Nishitani, 1991; Pinovesana, 1997).
However, because his logic of place was conceived in the context of Zen
enlightenment in religious practice, Nishida’s logic of place itself cannot help
but be associated with the tranquil state of enlightenment. Nishida focused
on the comprehensive relationship in the formal logic to establish an intuition
of action as something that works at work, but it cannot be said that he was
able to sufficiently reveal the diversity and complexity of the richness of noth-
ingness as a dynamic system of places. The richness of the nothingness of a
place must be a cosmos that generates an infinite number of beings and mean-
ings, is always changing, and in which all things resonate.
142 S. Suzuki

The cosmos as an organic, qualitative space is ubiquitous. In the micro-

cosm of the individual body there is a concentration of the macrocosm, in
which dense meaning and specificity reside. Moreover, situations and things
are multifaceted, and various meanings are woven into a multi-layered tapes-
try behind them, in which it is possible to read various meanings according to
the angle from which we view them. Moreover, the composition of experience
through physical interaction is filled with the performative bodily expressions
of the people who participate in it.
If cosmology, symbolism, and performance-based knowledge are theatrical
or anthropological knowledge, and modern scientific knowledge is knowledge
of logos, centred on language and cognition, then we can say that this knowl-
edge is the knowledge of pathos that resides in feelings and bodies. This kind
of knowledge of pathos is often thought to be cultivated through practice.
Religious practices are attempts to lead to metamorphosis and to achieve
access to, or realization of, the divine through the application of certain pro-
grammed transformations to consciousness and the body. It is an attempt to
achieve metamorphosis with the awakening and expansion of the body and
mind through various attempts at fasting, meditation, zazen, waterfall, gyoza,
and so on. It seeks to escape from the control of the fundamental force that
regulates the daily rhythm and speed of the body, namely gravity, which is the
fundamental mechanism that controls the body. It can be said that it is an
attempt to free oneself from this gravity that regulates life’s inconvenience and
to obtain the purity and freedom of the spirituality and divinity of the inner
cosmos. Freeing oneself from the everyday speed of life through the reconfigu-
ration of space-time is nothing less than shifting one’s body and mind into a
completely different kind of pace and rhythm from the everyday speed of
enlightenment and mystical experiences by changing the mechanism and field
of intellect and sensitivity through the practice of intervention through the
body. Mystical and enlightenment experiences are made possible by removing
the boundaries of intellect and sensibility that are regulated by the speed of
daily life.
The world in which the rhythms of the universe (cosmos) called the body
resonate with each other will encompass all living things, and even non-living
things and objects. Today, when artificial intelligence is embedded in various
information networks, including computers, and constitutes a kind of infor-
mation sphere, humans will be positioned as actors in the environmental
intelligence that makes the information sphere function (Floridi, 2014;
Berberich et al., 2020). We humans, who are letting go of our attachment to
our bodies, are now eager to confirm our humanity through mindfulness,
connecting our bodies and minds. What another path is there for us to take?
 Knowledge of Pathos 143

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Anton Hain.
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Unordnungen in Kunst, Kultur und Therapie. transcript.
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Wood, W., Trans. and ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction
of a Bodily Moment of the Pedagogical
Relationship
Anja Kraus and Thomas Senkbeil

1 Topic
Pedagogy is broadly understood as a technique for teaching or a particular kind
of description of practices connecting actions with a pedagogical ethos. This
ethos contains the feeling for acting considerately and sensitively toward the
state of mind of each individual. Therefore, the pedagogical ethos is an integral
part of pedagogical practice. This contribution deals with the question of how
pedagogical ethos takes place in practice. The hypothesis is that by means of
pedagogical tact such conjunctive experiences are created in the classroom that
are supposed to awaken own purposes and tasks toward the school subjects
among the younger; pedagogical tact withdraws from standardization. In a first
step, in order to elaborate the empirical indicators’ respective criteria on which
one can draw this tactful behavior, the hypothesis will be approached by a case
study on filmed teacher practice, analyzed by using the Documentary Method.
In a second step, some of these criteria will be epistemologically tagged.

A. Kraus (*)
Department of Teaching and Learning (Ämnesdidaktik),
Stockholms universitet, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: anja.kraus@su.se
T. Senkbeil
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland,
Solothurn, Switzerland
e-mail: thomas.senkbeil@puk.zh.ch

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 145
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_9
146 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

2 The Pedagogical Relationship

The relationship between pedagogue and child follows a specific social ethos.
Even if this ethos is to a great deal imposed by a national government, in the
context of pedagogical practice the guiding beliefs and ideals are perceived
mostly as personal. Thus, “[…] ethos, first of all, refers to the character dem-
onstrated by the speaker—the person who is working through his or her
words (logos) to affect the thoughts and feelings (pathos) of the audience”
(Friesen & Osguthorpe, 2018, p. 257). In the case of the pedagogical ethos,
the “logos” of the teacher usually reveals concepts of right and wrong conduct,
as well as it systematizes ethical principles and imparts forms of defend-
ing them.
In Europe, one already looks back on a long tradition of the pedagogical
relationship being a central topic in interpretive studies of education; “[…]
themes of student-teacher relations and pedagogies of relation are common in
both empirical and theoretical literature” (Friesen, 2017, p. 743). The most
famous approaches to the ethos of the student-teacher relationship are Plato’s
didactics of maieutics as a form of a cooperative argumentative dialogue
between individuals, hereby exercising critical thinking and drawing out the
unproven opinions of an individual. Supposedly, up to today, the teaching
method to develop the content by asking the students questions, mostly fron-
tal instruction, is the most common form of teacher-directed classroom prac-
tice worldwide.
However, teaching does not only consist of stepwise knowledge building
and instruction. It also requires a sense for the individual. The difference in
age, maturity, and responsibility makes it necessary to act caringly and appro-
priately to the very capability and quality of experience of the under-aged.
The pedagogical ethos, thus, contains the feeling for acting considerately and
sensitively for the state of mind of each individual. As mentioned previously,
depending foremost on feelings and intuition—not in the least also giving the
reason for continuous reflection:

Situational predicaments that can be solved by techniques and procedures are

not ethical predicaments. And so pedagogy is both the tactful ethical practice of
our actions as well as the doubting, questioning, and reflecting on our actions
and practices. (van Manen, 2015, p. 33)

In this contribution, we focus on sensitivity and active thoughtfulness in a

pedagogical relationship and in the immediacy of the moment as grasped by
the concept of pedagogical tact. The term pedagogical tact was coined by
 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment… 147

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841). Herman Nohl (1879–1960) was the

first to give the term pedagogical relation explicit description and definition in
this sense, while the phenomenologist Max van Manen established the term
in the English-speaking realm by interpreting the pedagogical ethos as peda-
gogical tact. Van Manen is also one of the first educationalists who dedicated
his empirical scientific research on pedagogical tact as a relational phenome-
non. Friesen and Osguthorpe (2018) extended the phenomenological con-
cept of tact to research specifically on teacher-student relationships in the
so-called pedagogical triangle. We will thus foremost adhere to van Manen’s
concept on tact and Friesen and Osguthorpe’s adaptation of this concept to
didactics. According to van Manen, pedagogical tact is tentative acting,
prompt reflection, contemplation, as well as referring to the educator’s preun-
derstandings and orientations. van Manen (2015) highlights: “Tact is the
active embodiment, the body-work of thoughtfulness” (ibid., p. 105).
Our contribution is about highlighting pedagogical tact as permanently
reflecting ethical and moral standards in bodily terms, and as self-reflection.
Instead of regarding mind and body as separate spheres, the mind as moving,
hearing, seeing, and the body as getting moved, heard, and seen, phenomeno-
logically, the body is seen as both, as a sensorium and responsorium, at once;
bodily response ranges from sensations to spontaneous judgment (Waldenfels,
2002, 2011).

3 Tact as a Pedagogical Term

Etymologically speaking, tact derives from the Latin tactus, meaning touch,
from tangere to touch. In the context of pedagogy, this turns into a figurative
sense. Here, touch means to handle in order to interfere with, alter, or other-
wise affect another person; it means to come into, or be in mutual contact
with somebody. The purpose of pedagogy is to set goals within the school
subjects and tasks among the younger that they can regard as their own.
Therefore, the adult will always in a specific way orient his or her actions to
the child’s or adolescent’s; “[…] to be tactful is to be thoughtful, sensitive,
perceptive, discreet, prudent, judicious, sagacious, perspicacious, gracious,
considerate, cautious, careful” (van Manen, 2015, p. 103). Tact corresponds
with a mindful quality of reflection and perceptiveness, which van Manen
declares as the body-work of thoughtfulness in the uniqueness of the situation
of being and acting with a child. –
148 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

Related terms are intact, meaning untouched, uninjured, and tactile refers to
touch, which means to handle or feel something with the intent to appreciate or
understand it in more than merely an intellectual manner. We should notice
that touch can also imply violation or harm. (van Manen, 2015, p. 103)

We will come back to this. In the frame of classroom education, not only
the teacher-pupil relationship but also content learning plays a central role:
The students are expected to instantly connect to the content of a lesson
through their former experiences and knowledge, then via study and learning,
while the teacher is supposed to have an advanced and didactic knowledge
approach to the content. In the pedagogical situation, the teacher thus intends
to change the relations of the students to a lesson’s content from superficial
knowledge and confusion to stepwise analysis and reflection. The aim is to
develop the student’s subject knowledge and to replace unnecessary uncer-
tainty by (self-) confidence. The students, teacher(s), and the content form
the so-called didactical triangle, which is

[…] an elementary, heuristic structure that can be used to highlight and analyze
the specific interrelationships and interactions between teacher, student and
content (e.g., student lessons, exercises, and projects) in a given pedagogical
situation. (Friesen & Osguthorpe, 2018, p. 256)

Tact by then is present

[…] as means by which teacher candidates might navigate between the means-
ends thinking embodied in standardized teaching and testing on the one hand,
and the dangers of unsustainable demoralization on the other. (ibid., p. 256)

According to Meinert Meyer (2003), good—more modest, the most pur-

poseful—lessons have a well-recognizable structure, for example, there is a
common thread and the lesson steps, objectives, content, roles, and tasks are
clear. The teacher acts consistently. Rules, rituals, and open spaces are dis-
cussed with the students. The proportion of real learning time is high; the
atmosphere encourages learning. Meaningful communication, which gets
ensured, for example, through the participation of the pupils in planning, as
well as through a culture of conversation, allows the students’ feedback. Other
purposeful features are method variety, individual support, intelligent prac-
tice, and a prepared environment. Performance expectations are clear, the
tasks are adapted to the performance of the students. The students receive a
swift, subsidizing feedback on their learning progress. Some of the aspects of
 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment… 149

a purposeful lesson are actively directed by the teacher. Others are part of
school socialization. Others are mediated situationally, non-theoretically and
implicitly, being experience-based and physically mediated, action-guiding
orientations (Bohnsack, 2010), which are shared collectively. Such collective
orientations are generated on the content, as well as on the relationship level.
The ultimate aim of classroom education insists to let pupils experience and
learn things in order to make them their own. However, the educational will
cannot simply be transferred to the students’ minds. As far as pedagogical
aims and intentions foremost concern personality development, they do not
only presuppose the technological rules of a how-to-do. Every educational
situation is moreover about to create a conjunctive experiential space.

Conjunctive experiences are fundamental, existentially meaningful relation-

ships that determine the socialization of individuals and are shared with others.
These can be, for example, milieu, generation, gender or organization specific
experiences. (Asbrand, 2011, no page)

School education can generally be understood as

[…] group-specific conjunctive experiential space and individual lesson

sequences as situation-specific or object-related experiential spaces in which
processes of knowledge genesis occur. (Martens et al., 2015, p. 51)

Both, the initiation of orientation by the teacher and their handling of the
orientation figures of the children, proceed more or less tactfully in a peda-
gogical sense; thus, a special kind of knowing-in-action is involved. Donald
Schön (1987) coined the concept of educational practical knowledge and
reflection as follows:

Reflection-in-action has a critical function, the structure of knowing-in-action

[…] we may, in the process, restructure strategies of action, understandings of
phenomena, or ways of framing problems […]. Reflection gives rise to on-the-
spot experiments. We [teachers] think out and try out new actions intended to
explore the newly observed phenomena, test our tentative understandings of
them, or affirm the moves we have invented to change things for the better.
(ibid., p. 28f.)

According to the term pedagogical tact, such reflection-in-action cannot

be, in all regards, formulated in propositional terms but requires the norma-
tive quality of sensitivity and active thoughtfulness in the immediacy of the
moment. To be tactful, it is indispensable that someone is present, attentive,
150 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

and able to get the learner’s attention, cautiously triggering her/his affects and
concern, as well as responding to a situational need for creating some emo-
tional coolness and distance.

Often tact involves a holding back, a passing over something, which is neverthe-
less experienced as influenced by the student to whom the tactful action is
directed. (van Manen, 2015, p. 102)

By steadily holding a sensitive balance between tackling child and content,

and withdrawing from influence, attentive presence in terms of pedagogical
tactfulness (ideally) encourages learning.
However, under classroom conditions, pedagogical tact toward each indi-
vidual is done under time pressure and as successful sensitive handling with
certain unavailability, as well as with paradoxes and pedagogical aporia. Jörg
Zirfas and Günter Gödde (2012) translate the common predicates of Johann
F. Herbart’s lectures of pedagogy 1802 with a call for the principle of media-
tion characterized by “1. quick, 2. rational (‘evaluation and decision’), 3. flex-
ible (‘not uniform’) and 4. taking individuality into account” (1997, p. 1269).
Herbart (ibid.) describes that in pedagogical situations a decision or action is
required in case of lack of time. The temporal dimension of tact concerns
pedagogical methods, attitudes, and goals. However,

[…] to quickly sense or know the right thing to do in a particular situation

means to rely on knowledge or sense that is implicit, and even emotional, rather
than explicit and logical. (Friesen & Osguthorpe, 2018, p. 258)

As snap judgments or decisions may not always be right, practitioners

steadily improve their tact as quickly recallable tacit knowledge. Tact happens
based on their skills in anticipating the possible consequences of their actions.
The practical knowledge needed here gets embodied and imparted via mimetic
forms of adaptation to the environment, for example, in ritual settings and
dynamics in terms of cultural staging and actions.

Cultural staging and actions are understood less as performances of a psycho-

logical, social or religious text, but rather as an arrangement of social institu-
tions with a performative surplus, e.g., in the dramaturgy and organization of
ritual interactions and their effects, the scenic-mimetic expressivity, the perfor-
mance and staging character and the practical knowledge of social action. (Wulf
& Zirfas, 2005, p. 12)
 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment… 151

In incorporating knowledge through mimetic processes, emotions play the

central role (Gebauer & Wulf, 1996). Jakob Muth (1962) outlines the impor-
tance of mutual thoughtfulness in order to arouse (generate) tuned social
polyphony and a coherent choreography in pedagogy. However, as this tuning
also concerns the question of what it means to be human and to grow up
toward adulthood, it is always also up to discussion.

Pedagogical tactful action, for its part, can be described as the ability to [quickly]
see and make use of what is available in a given situation for ends that are spe-
cifically pedagogical—that are for the good of the student and for his or her
learning. (Friesen & Osguthorpe, 2018, p. 257)

To sum up, purposeful teaching means to authorize pupils to learn by

themselves through a clear structuring of teaching, a high proportion of real
learning time, learning-promoting climate, clarity of content, meaningful
communication, individual support, and transparent expectations of perfor-
mance. However, the pedagogical authorization of the learners depends on
pedagogical tact as not to be reduced to standardized requirement in properly
performing a pedagogue’s work, but the central quality in relation to what we
understand of being a good pedagogue and teacher (Suzuki, 2010).

4 Pedagogical Tact as an Epistemological Term

To make pedagogical tact an instrument for a precise definition, Immanuel
Kant’s student Herbart in 1802 describes the translation of abstract theory
into concrete pedagogical practice as pedagogical tact. This departs from the
argument that all the pedagogical concepts contain theoretically based
assumptions that wished education might occur. If an assumption gets
approved by practice, the concept in question gets justified by practical evi-
dence. At times it may also turn out that a concept needs to be changed,
refined, or supplemented. Tact is an important advisor in this.

Ever since Kant had discussed objections to his [Kant’s] moral doctrine from the
perspective of theory and praxis, and then spurned on again through the con-
troversies of the young Hegelians, it had become common to deal with the link
between theory and praxis as a relation, or even as a relation that mirrored itself.
(Luhmann & Schorr, 2000, p. 204)
152 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

Thus, in practical pedagogy the meaning of a concept is the result of clarify-

ing the more or less experimental elements of pedagogical reality by the capa-
bility of the pedagogue to recognize the own emotions and those of the
children, discern between the different feelings, and label them appropriately,
as well as to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.
Accordingly, one can regard pedagogical terms as heuristic hypotheses, char-
acterized by their own mode of evidence, as well as linked with alternative
concepts in an interpretative manner. This also counts for the specialist term
pedagogical tact. How do such heuristics proceed and how does their evi-
dence shape up?
In Herbart’s first Lecture on Pedagogy in 1802 (see Herbart, [1802] 1997),
he describes tact as

[…] a mode of action that is less the result of one’s thinking, but instead gives
vent to one’s inner movement, expressing how one has been affected from with-
out, and exhibiting one’s emotional state. (Herbart quoted by van Manen,
2015, p. 209)

van Manen (2015) with a phenomenological perspective writes, for exam-

ple, about student teachers:

By observing and imitating how the teacher animates the students, walks around
the room, uses the board, and so forth, the student teacher learns with his or her
body, as it were, how to feel confident in this room, with these students. This
confidence is an affective quality that makes teaching easier; rather, this confi-
dence is the active knowledge itself, the tact of knowing what to do or not to do,
what to say or not to say. (ibid., p. 183)

Confidence is active knowledge and becomes a habit and even skill. Then
it is a practical corporeal knowledge forming the basis of the capability to
communicate with others and, thus, allowing for original and spontaneous
access to the world; at the same time, it includes moral and ethical aspects (see
above). With a phenomenological perspective, the question will be asked how
confidence is obtained.
The most important reference point of the phenomenological perspective is
the learning-with-the-body approach oriented to the lifeworld as experienced
in an immediate way.

Phenomenology can be adopted to explore the unique meanings of any peda-

gogical experience or phenomenon, such as the experience of care, recognition,
patience, encouragement, hope, respect, humbleness, and so forth. (van Manen,
2015, p. 40)
 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment… 153

Moral and ethical dimensions of human existence in general can be

approached by the phenomenological concept of the alien—alien is not to be
misunderstood as deadly and aggressive extraterrestrial, as one might instan-
taneously think, but moreover as the other person as far as we cannot conquer
or grasp her as such. Waldenfels (2011) coined the phenomenology of the alien
by departing from the point that

[…] each order [also that of perceiving another person as somebody who is not
me] has its blind spot in the form of something unordered that does not merely
constitute a deficit […] In other words: the fact of reason is itself not reasonable.
(ibid., p. 13)

His idea is that we experience the other by realizing such a blind spot, that
is, the disruptions, fissures, and distances you feel within yourself. Here the
other appears to you as what s/he, in fact, is: not you. As the pedagogical rela-
tion is grounded in the respect of the other as alien, also the concept of peda-
gogical tact plays around just this blind spot of all human orientation and
thinking. This process of alienation of one’s own firm structures of performa-
tive forms of presentation and expression enables an extension of the inner
world “[…] through the aesthetic-mimetic recording of exterior and enables
vivid experiences” (Wulf, 2010, p. 292).
However, blind spots may at first glance imply the lack of the usual social
or ethical standards, that is, anomy (Durkheim, 1951), which overall lacks
scholarly sharpness. To not fall into this trap demands awareness of where
pedagogy ends, that is, its ethical limits and the pedagogical irresponsibility.

5 The Ethics of Pedagogical Tact

The limits of pedagogical tact are tactlessness as an intuitive deviation (Adorno,
1984); van Manen (2015) writes:

[…] someone who is tactless is considered to be hasty, rash, indiscreet, impru-

dent, unwise, inept, insensitive, mindless, ineffective, and awkward. In general,
to be tactless means to be disrespectful, ill-considered, blundering, clumsy,
thoughtless, inconsiderate, and stupid. (ibid., p. 103)

Someone is especially tactless and out of tact (even out of tactlessness) if his/
her action implies violence, deriving, for example, from ethnocentrism or rac-
ism, sexual harassment, or harm. Violence is usually connected to the visible
body. However, with the sign of human civilization,
154 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

[…] the rebellion against dominance, which due to its subtle institutionaliza-
tion and shifting from physical torture to civilized discipline has become increas-
ingly invisible and thus less transparent and eventual radical, continues to be
topic of critical thinking. (Meyer-Drawe, 1990, p. 41)

According to Foucault (1995), social control and authority are not just
imposed by social requirements or norms. Social violence inscribes itself on
human corporeality. Socially mediated emotions and judgment become
embodied, as part of our dispositions they form morality and routines. Such
bodily inscriptions are the main power factors and, in the first place, the most
effective instruments of authoritarian violence. Experiences of violence are
inscribed on the body and precipitate an individual self-dynamic. With this
perspective, e.g. child abuse can be theoretically grasped (Kraus, 2012).
Is it possible to react preventively in a situation of violence? Waldenfels does
not give a definite answer; he stresses that violence, quasi-anonymously, cre-
ates an impersonal social situation, which makes it difficult to react to it:
“Violence cannot be traced back to the initiative or property of individuals or
groups, nor to a mediating authority, nor to encoded rules” (Waldenfels,
2002, p. 174). Violence is, in a way, anarchist. It is a social happening. Violence
acts in a manner of its own and degrades all passively affected, and even the
active participants to silent figures. Even if the offenders are the initiators and
bear the social guilt for it, there is no possibility of winning over violence in
its own terms. In order to be able to enter a dialogue again, one must respond
to this stripping of authority and limited sphere of influence over violence.
Non-violent acting is not just a question of exercising the will to suppress
somebody’s urge to perform inner aggressions; it is rather an active battle with
a cultivated form of compulsion, which takes physical and also collective
shape (Butler, 2015). Accordingly, there are no other means than tact for
entering a dialogue again. Tact in the case of violence deals with forms of
alienation and social expectations by making tuned social polyphony, coher-
ent choreography, and dialogue possible again. However, tact is not measur-
able. One can also pretend tact, not least in order to hide one’s violent behavior.
To come back to the pedagogical practices in the classroom: Our hypoth-
esis is that in the classroom pedagogical tact is indispensable in creating con-
junctive experiences with the aim to awaken own purposes and tasks toward
school subjects among the younger. The questions to be answered by analyz-
ing the empirical material are: What are the empirical indicators respective
criteria on which we can draw tactful behavior? Is there any chance to tag
some of these criteria from the external perspective, for example, by observing
behavior or practices? How may violence and tact relate to each other?
 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment… 155

6 Case Study
The lesson in the subject cluster natural sciences, biology, in this case, took
place in March 2015 in the seventh grade (8 girls, 7 boys) of an integrated
comprehensive school in Cologne/Germany. There were in total 40 lessons
documented on film. All involved persons and teachers gave their permission
to be recorded; those persons whose permissions were not procured were not
filmed. For the case study, the sequence from minute 16:10 to minute 18:38
is chosen. The chosen sequence appears as characteristic of the entire lesson,
firstly, in terms of the characteristics of pedagogical tact as presented above.
The competence goal of lesson in grade 7 is: “Students can use microscopic
examinations to explain that plants and other living things consist of cells”
(MSW, 2013, p. 62); in the classroom, the technical term osmosis is
mentioned.
The analysis of the material is based on the Documentary Method
(Bohnsack, 2010) that departs from the assumption that the interlocutors
share common orientation figures and, thus, conjunctive experiential spaces
in their verbal contributions and gestures. Such orientation figures are gener-
ated by means of focusing metaphors as well as by negative counter-horizons.
The film sequence we have chosen consists of all these features. The analysis of
the lesson sequence is conducted in three steps: The transcription is inter-
preted in a formulating and then in an analytical-reflective way, together with
a type formation. The analysis follows the hypothesis, that in the classroom
pedagogical tact is indispensable in creating conjunctive experiences with the
aim to awaken purposes toward the school subjects and tasks among the
pupils that are their own. Hence, targeted teaching means authorizing the
students to learn for themselves through a clear structuring of the lessons, a
high proportion of real learning time, an atmosphere conducive to learning,
clarity of content, meaningful communication, individual support, and trans-
parent performance expectations.
Transcription of the film sequence:

T. Who dares to do this? (…) Maria, Daniel? () Pardon? Yes.

T. Very good. Maria is doing exactly right: one hand on the back: I_ Do
you remember what the part is called? () Christian?
Ch. _I Tripo::d.
T. () Exactly, the tripod and?
Ch. _I Foo::t.
T. _I Precisely.
156 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

T. Then we put- ah right Daniel, you still wanted (.) I_ ?

D. _I Should I now also say how we do that with the- ().
T. I_Maybe we’ll bring someone else to the front. Maria maybe you go to
your table again-. Who does it, the: Christoph, Could you do that?
C. _I What?
T. Over here, how to work with a microscope. You’ll get it explained, you
just have to (show it).

The addressed student Christoph gets up, comes to the teacher’s desk, and
stands with expectant expression and turned to class behind the electron
microscope. The teacher gives him some space.

T. What does Christoph do with the slide when the object is lying on it?
D. So first put the plug in properly.

The teacher steps aside and the student carefully unwinds the cable from
the electron microscope, not knowing where to look for a power outlet.

T. We put it in the pocket; (soft laugh in the classroom).

D. Then we rotate at the () I_lens
T. _I Exactly we rotate it around first so we have a little space to move,
therefore (.)
T. First we do the project? Exactly Daniel.
D. Yes, then we turn on the projectile on the side below.
T. _I Exactly, that’s the big pipe (). We look from the side; First take a
small magnification of the lenses of the lens revolvers, take a small size,
look that you get as close as possible. And then?
D. When it’s at the bottom, we turn on the light and see what happens.
T. Very good. Then it’s time, that we make a little drawing and then
comes our big change, namely the osmotic effect that we want to prove.
What are we going to do next?
C. Ma:y I go to my place?
T. Gladly.
T. What are we going to do next? What are we going to do then, Maria?
 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment… 157

6.1 Formulating Interpretation

At the beginning of the selected sequence, the teacher (T.) notes the name of
a student on a merit-board that is clearly visible on the edge of the blackboard.
The merit-board is used in all lessons as a pedagogical means of recognition,
or disapproval of student contributions. Accordingly, it is divided into two
columns. In the left-hand column many names are listed already for this les-
son; it is reserved for good performance. The right column for disapproval is
empty. T. asks if there is someone in the class who dares to demonstrate some-
thing to the class. As a matter of course, he names two female names and casu-
ally writes a name on the merit-board. The student Maria reports and gets
invoked. She hesitantly asks if she is allowed to demonstrate it, and when
prompted (yes please), she goes to the side table, picks up the electronic micro-
scope, and carefully places it on the teacher’s desk. For this she gets praised by
the teacher. He reflects her movements by saying: Very good. M. is doing exactly
right. Then he picks up the microscope, puts it on the floor, and keeps it in
sight for the class. The student Maria says something hardly audible. However,
T. directs the view to the class and asks for the correct designation. Christian
gets addressed and he gives the correct answer, slowly and with audible diffi-
culties in verbal expression. T. notes his name on the merit-board. T. requests
student Daniel to act; Daniel asks in an equally fragmented manner back
what he is required to do. T. leaves the question unanswered and addresses the
class. Maria is asked to seat herself and she is visibly satisfied with this task.
T. asks student Christoph to continue, whereupon Christoph reacts with an
astonished What? T. asks him with a firm and nice voice to show how to work
with the microscope and offers him his assistance. T. stands upright and
calmly directed to the class. Christoph comes to the teacher’s desk and looks
expectantly into the classroom. The teacher steps aside and Christoph takes
the position of the teacher, he looks satisfied, then following the instructions
of the pupil Daniel. The teacher asks the class how Christoph (correctly) uses
the slide. Daniel suggests first connecting the electronic microscope to a
power source. Apparently, there is no outlet, as Christoph searches for it in
vain. T. puts the power plug into his pocket, commenting this with a smile.
The students in the class start to laugh. The next instruction refers to the lens,
which is to be placed in a work-safe position. T. instructs the action itself;
although he praises Daniel, student Christoph takes the microscope and puts
it in front of him. Daniel and T. instruct Christoph to place the apparatus in
the correct position. T. praises Daniel’s remarks again, gives a thumbs-up, and
introduces the next lesson sequence by noting that it is time for everyone to
158 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

sketch the osmotic effect. At the same time, he announces something new and
asks the question what that could be to the class and then to Maria. Christoph
politely asks whether he can sit back on his seat and the teacher says gladly,
politely expressing agreement.

6.2 Reflective Interpretation and Type Formation

In this sequence of a lesson, we recognize the following conjunctive experien-

tial spaces, more accurate, the existential contexts of experience and practical
knowledge, out of which habitual correspondences and action-guiding, that
is, atheoretical sets of knowledge derive:

1. Good performance: This focusing metaphor manifests itself in the use of

the merit-board only appreciating the pupils’ performance. At the same
time, this creates a counter-horizon to the otherwise usual practice of using
the merit-board in class more likely to disapprove their lesson
contributions.
2. Confidence and gradual transfer of responsibility to the students: First, the
teacher gives the pupils an advance of trust, which he continues to increase
up to the point of co-operation and, in a way, even to hand over the
responsibility for the lessons to them. At the beginning of the lesson, he
tries to take the pupils out of reserve by asking for a brave one. After a brief
passage of instruction, he addresses a girl as a co-operation partner with an
own will (ah right D., you still wanted (.) I_?). However, T. does not (yet)
pursue it. Someone else is supposed to do the work. A boy gets addressed
who reacts ignorantly. The teacher offers him his assistance. The fact that
the boy then surrenders expectantly to the class can be read as a vote of
confidence based on previous experience. By stepping aside, the teacher
gives the stage to the student, and then even the role of an expert, when he
starts to act together with the female pupil who gives him instructions.
Thereby, the teacher solves small problems and gives some hints. However,
by asking whether he himself is correct and what is it that comes afterward,
the teacher plays the ball back to the students in the sense of you know bet-
ter. For the class, the performance of the specialist pupils thus must appear
as excellent. After completing the demonstration, the entire class gets asked
to make a drawing of what no one has seen yet: osmosis. The teacher does
not say exactly what to do but asks the students. They will maybe answer
that the microscope will make osmosis visible. This gives them certain
authorship about the further course of the lesson.
 Pedagogical Tact: Reconstruction of a Bodily Moment… 159

3. Harmonic teamwork: During the setup of the microscope, the two acting
students and the teacher make the impression of a perfectly coordinated
scientific team. Thereby, specialist knowledge gets focused in a mostly cor-
poreal way.
4. Counterbalance to school assessment systems: Due to the exclusively posi-
tive performance rating, the merit-board as a means of assessment
is used only for appreciation. Neither learning progress gets measured, nor
are support-oriented feedbacks on possible improvement given.
5. There is no violence to be perceived.

7 Summary and Outlook

Pedagogical tact cannot be rationally anticipated and measured. However, it
is a component of teacher professionality and of the theory-praxis relation
that is remaining an outstanding issue of research on education.

Concepts of learning and education that take their negativity into account has
already been the focus of extensive theoretical research […]. The empirical
application and further development of such approaches is still, however, miss-
ing. Pedagogically valuable areas of conflict, as well as the tacit dimensions of
pedagogy, must still be thoroughly investigated. (Kraus, 2016, p. 146)

In the analysis, the pedagogical tact of the teacher turned out as letting the
pupils experience and learn things in order to make them their own by hold-
ing back and successively passing over responsibility to them. The teacher
does this with words, movements, and gestures. It is obvious in the data that
the orientation frames of the pupils are mostly missing self-confidence, being
afraid of not to know, or of being held back. The orientation frames are taken
into account by the teacher by performing humbleness and understatement,
and by explicitly replacing their unnecessary uncertainty by (self-)confidence.
An important reference in this process is specialist knowledge that gets
ascribed to the acting students, and not the teacher, as it is usually. The learn-
ing demands are adapted to the pupils’ possibilities. However, there is no
transparency in terms of the performance expectations, and the pupils seem
to have done fine, however simple their contribution to the lesson was. There
are no proposals for performance improvement. The merit-board is used
rather to subvert the assessing function of school, and not to support it. This
can be read as a form of protest against the performance evaluation at school,
which would be violence degrading the active participants to silent figures and
160 A. Kraus and T. Senkbeil

undermining pedagogical tact. Indeed, pedagogical tact and violence form a

kind of gray zone in terms of reflection, as their corporeal dimension is not
easily graspable. Violence can be implicitly performed right within actions
that are explicitly declared as pedagogically tactful. At the same time, in a
pedagogical situation, one needs pedagogical tact to prevent violence. From
this point of view, the question for further (empirical) examination is how
performance evaluation and pedagogical tact can operate together.

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 Gestures in the Classroom
Regula Fankhauser and Angela Kaspar

1 Introduction
Gestures play an important role in everyday school and teaching, even if they
are rarely explicitly addressed. Gestures such as the pupils’ hands going up or
the raised index finger of the teacher are emblematic of teaching and learning.
Often, their meaning seems to be immediately clear. They are institution-
specific in nature; their use stands for the role-forming behaviour that stu-
dents and teachers perform every day. The student’s raised hand shows his or
her willingness to respond and desire to learn. With their raised index finger,
the teachers make it clear that they can demand the attention of the pupils
and rebuke inappropriate behaviour. The two emblematic gestures can easily
be translated into language by replacing them with a corresponding verbal
statement.
In contrast, other gestural actions that accompany, support or disrupt les-
sons are semantically more difficult to grasp. Is a glance at the clock or out of
the window an educational gesture? Is there something gestural about leaning
back on a chair or resting one’s head on the desk? And if so, what do these
gestures convey?

R. Fankhauser (*)
University of Teacher Education Berne, Bern, Switzerland
e-mail: regula.fankhauser@phbern.ch
A. Kaspar
University of Teacher Education Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 163
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_10
164 R. Fankhauser and A. Kaspar

In gestures, language and body interlock in a way that might be sometimes

entirely clear but not always. Therefore, we wish to examine the conceptual
question of what constitutes a gesture and what meaning it acquires in inter-
active processes of teaching. For this, it seems useful to establish a provisional
heuristic definition. In this article we understand gestures as a physical mani-
festation that occurs as part of a continuum of movement. A gesture is char-
acterised by the fact that it stands out or is accentuated, that is, it is an
interruption of the movement pattern that may be noticeable to a greater or
lesser degree (Luehrs-Kaiser, 2000). This physical accentuation is significant,
even if the meaning is not always clear and often remains unconscious.
Gestures are physical, non-verbal expressions and yet are inextricably linked
to language, thinking and imagination (McNeill, 1992; Wulf, 2011). Their
relationship to language, to a greater or lesser extent, structures the wide range
of gestures we are familiar with. At one end of the spectrum, we find gestures
which are clear and obvious in their meaning, and at the other end gestures
which remain opaque and diffuse and are difficult to translate into language.
School is a field characterised by the “hegemony of the linguistic”
(Falkenberg, 2013, p. 5). In other words, a world where language dominates.
The initiation into this world goes hand in hand with disciplining and immo-
bilising the child’s body (Langer, 2008). Nevertheless, silent practices such as
gestures are omnipresent in schools and lessons. They can support, replace or
undermine verbal expressions. As different as the relationship of gestures to
linguistic expressions is, just as different is their relationship to institutional
order. Gestural actions—both by teachers and by pupils—can follow
institution-specific objectives. Gestural expressions—especially from pupils—
can also compete with and disregard these objectives. Such gestural expres-
sions mark a boundary of institutional logic and force their representatives
to react.
In the following we focus on student gestures which are interpreted as
annoying or disruptive. We are focusing our attention on the perspective that
the teachers take. What gestural actions in the classroom do they find disrup-
tive or annoying? Why and in what respect do they feel disrupted or annoyed?
And what meaning do they ascribe to fleeting physical expressions?
To answer these questions, we will proceed in three stages. To begin with,
we will focus on ritualised gestures and the work done on them in educational
gesture research. The subject of our study came out of this research—student
gestures of resistance. Secondly, we will further differentiate this subject with
reference to theoretical concepts by Goffman. The third stage is to apply the
areas and questions that arise to empirical material and to refine them. Finally,
 Gestures in the Classroom 165

we will use our findings to expand the knowledge base of educational gesture
research.

2 Ritualised Gestures
In the German-speaking field of discourse, anthropologically oriented gesture
research, which emerged from the Berlin Study on Rituals, has a different
conception of gestures to linguistic approaches (Kellermann & Wulf, 2011;
Wulf, 2010, 2011). Linguistic, semiotic communications and media-
theoretical approaches typically consider the phenomenon of gestures as one
of many modalities involved in a fundamentally multi-modal process; the
body is conceived as part and parcel of language and communication (Müller
et al., 2014). Gestures are considered to illustrate, complement or counteract
speech. In contrast, Wulf (ibid.) and his research group emphasise the auton-
omy of a physical-gestural expression. Gestures cannot be replaced by lan-
guage. They are understood as fleeting but significant movements of the body
in which—often unconsciously—emotions and moods are expressed. Gestures
cannot be reduced to speech. But despite this autonomy, gestures are thought
as inextricably interwoven with language.
The Berlin Study on Rituals focuses on institutionally preformed gestures.
Many gestural performances that can be observed in school and education
have a ritual character. This can be illustrated by the example of a school
enrolment ceremony at which the new pupils are presented with a sunflower
(Wulf, 2011, p. 18): With the handing over of the sunflower the pupils are
accepted at school; the admission to the school is supposed to be the prelude
to a happy time at school. The different moments of the celebration are con-
densed and intensified in the gesture. The meaning of the gesture—a welcome
and congratulations—is immediately understandable to all those taking part
in the celebration, without having to translate it into language. This is an
emblematic gesture in Posner’s sense (Posner, 1986): the handing over of the
sunflower is a gesture that is consciously and intentionally used to convey a
certain message.
Ritualised gestures are omnipresent in schools and lessons. Kellerman and
Wulf (2011) distinguish different forms: space-constituting gestures define, for
example, where the stage and the auditorium are located. When the teacher
points to the blackboard with an arm movement, she turns the blackboard
space into a stage on which knowledge is brought out publicly, that is, in front
of the pupils watching. Gestures of institutional typification physically and
166 R. Fankhauser and A. Kaspar

symbolically indicate that someone is a student or a teacher. Pupils putting up

their hands can serve as an example here. Theatrical gestures in turn accom-
pany and intensify lecture and presentation sequences. And finally, gestures of
hierarchisation stage claims to authority.
The main function of school rituals is community building and initiation
into the institution. The repeated performance of ritualised practices generates
continuity and coherence; it has an inclusive character. In the performance of
institution-specific, ritualised gestures, the legitimacy of the institution and its
order is confirmed. Gestures are not learnt through language and thought but
in performance and mimesis. Through physical-symbolic reconstruction, the
validity of the institution is constantly updated anew. Students who imitate
and practise institution-specific gestures become part of the institution
through mimesis. Imitation has the function of initiation: practising and par-
ticipating in a collective social practice in which social positions are allocated
and stabilised. The power-related character of many ritualised gestures can thus
be obvious. The exercise of affirmative, institution-specific gestures is associ-
ated with a subjection to the institution and its normative logic (Gebauer &
Wulf, 1998; Müller & Posner, 2004). When students refuse, parody or coun-
teract ritualised gestures, this may easily be interpreted as resistance by the
teacher. Then, they call into question the legitimacy of the institution.

3 Disruptive Gestures
These ritualised, institution-specific gestures are opposed by many bodily
actions, whose semantic status is more difficult to determine. Many of them
are not obvious and therefore do not attract attention. They get lost in the
flow of permanent movements. Some, however, emerge from this flow. These
are mainly movements of pupils which are perceived as accentuated by teach-
ers who have to observe pupils as part of their job. For example, a pupil shift-
ing once on their chair is likely to go unnoticed, while a sustained rocking is
obvious and considered to be articulating something, which can be significant
for the teacher. Thus, under certain circumstances, rocking can lead to the
disruption of lessons.
Such expressions arise from a particular situation and cannot be read in
isolation. Many of them serve the purpose of community building among
peers: roving glances, a brief nod of the head, a fleeting turning towards or
away from the body. If these articulations are understood as ‘disruptive’ or
‘resistant’, they appear to interrupt the institutional logic of order. More
unspecific gestural practices are not always bound to language and often not
 Gestures in the Classroom 167

at all. They are silent articulations that react responsively to the language-
dominated teaching situation.
Thus, e.g. playing with objects during a lesson in the classroom can be a
gesture of resistance that marks the “boundary of the discourse in class”
(Falkenberg, 2013, p. 5). Even a brief high-five or a small kick—all these
“mini-performances” (Alkemeyer, 2000, p. 394) as they are common among
peers—can be a sign that the children are escaping the institutional require-
ments and trying to establish their own fleeting territory within the institu-
tional framework by means of peer practices. However, whether these are
conscious and intentional disruptions are not yet clear.
We are confronted here with a difficulty that affects gestures in general, but
which is particularly true in the case of rather diffuse, difficult-to-read gestures
among peers: their “situational contingency” (Kellermann & Wulf, 2011,
p. 27). In order to address this difficulty, we draw on theoretical consider-
ations by Irving Goffman.
In his microsociological studies Goffman observes gestural behaviour in
specific interactions (Goffman, 1974). Gestures here are practices that arise in
and from the situation. According to Goffman, gestures are expressive ele-
ments of an interaction and they have higher contingency as linguistic utter-
ances. However, Goffman distinguishes between gestures with less contingency
and those with more. The former are described as situated, the latter as situa-
tional (Goffman, 1981). Situated gestures can be dissociated from the situa-
tion in which they occur. One might say they have an emblematic character.
The raised hand of the pupil can again be taken as an example: although it is
paradigmatic for the situation of the pupil in the classroom, it can be taken
out of the classroom situation and be fully understood in another. By con-
trast, situative gestures originate in the situation; their meaning remains tied
to it and cannot be understood without it.
Perception and interpretation play a key role in the understanding of ges-
tures, especially situational gestures. Gestural actions in general appear as a
moment of physical presence, which can be read by the other person as a kind
of art display. The intention or even the calculation that lies behind a gesture
must be interpreted and anticipated by the interacting partner (Goffman,
1970). What is shown in the gestural representation gains its meaning firstly
in the way it is read and through the reaction of those that perceive and inter-
pret what is shown and to what it refers. What is crucial in the meaning of the
gesture is not only the intention of the originator but also the perception,
interpretation and reaction of the viewer. For the latter, the ‘frame’ is ineluc-
table: Goffman introduces the institutional concept of gestural meaning-
construction with the concept of the ‘frame’. Frames are schemes that organise
168 R. Fankhauser and A. Kaspar

experience. They define the situation in which an event occurs. Otherwise

meaningless aspects may become meaningful by a ‘frame’. A frame enables
“its user to locate, perceive, identify and label a seemingly infinite number of
concrete occurrences defined in its terms” (Goffman, 1974, p. 21). It helps
the individual “in deciding what it is that is going on” (ibid., p. 26). It is the
frame which—like a stage setting—situates, accentuates and dramatises the
events that happen within it. The frame predefines what type of situation the
events present and how it should be understood. Frames are models learnt
through socialisation which help ‘read’ situations as significant and meaning-
ful. The process of framing is indispensable, especially for situational gestures.
The framework determines whether the accentuated movement of a body or
body part appears significant.
Let us return to the mini-performances that take place in the classroom
among peers—all the short glances, the little pushes, the teasing articulated in
gestures—and ask ourselves to what extent these can be understood as class-
room disruption.
Educational teaching research, which deals with teaching disorders, speaks
of a ‘semantic instability’ of the subject and highlights the role of perspectival
perception (Makarova et al., 2014, p. 137). Actions that are perceived as dis-
ruptive could, for example, differ considerably depending on whether there is
a high or low level of disruption in the classroom. The evaluation of the dis-
ruption and the feeling of being disrupted are also dependent on underlying
norms (Walter & Walter, 2014). If we limit instances of disruption to motoric
phenomena and gestures, the lack of clarity is increased: the question as to
whether a certain movement is perceived as exposed and meaningful, and also
whether it can be ascribed the significance of a (deliberate) disruption, is
highly dependent on the perspective of the viewer and the underlying system
of values of the person who interprets the gestures. In other words, the mean-
ing of situational gestures is of high semantic instability. To decide what hap-
pens in the classroom during a small gestural intermezzo requires an
appropriate framing. It is the framework which helps to identify and name
the incident and thus to remedy its ‘semantic instability’.
Despite the lack of clarity in defining the subject, class disruptions are a fact
and teachers are given training to learn and practice gestures and body pos-
tures as a preventative means of avoiding class disruptions (Pille, 2009).
Having preventative and intervention options in relation to class disruptions
is a key part of classroom management and the subject of wide research.
However, less attention has been paid to the process of perception and inter-
pretation which leads the teacher to define an incident in the classroom as
 Gestures in the Classroom 169

class disruption. Why does a teacher perceive a certain physical movement in

the classroom as obvious and meaningful? And as disruptive? And how does
the process of verbalisation, in which a silent incident in the background
moves into the language-dominated foreground, take shape?
Or with reference to Goffman: which frame is applied by the teacher to
localise and identify a gesture of resistance? And what is the relationship
between this frame and the institutional system of logic?

4 Case Study
To investigate these questions, we will be considering empirical material from
a research project financed by Berne University of Teacher Education. The
study deals with the role of bodies in teaching. It focuses on the teachers’ per-
spective and examines how they perceive and interpret body-bound teaching
practices. We worked with the method of video elicitation (Henry & Fetters,
2012). Here, the videographic material serves to support processes of percep-
tion and interpretation that are bound to the filmed situation. An image is
used as a stimulus to recall scenes that occurred and to verbalise the tacit
knowledge that is activated. It is particularly the silent, body-focused practices
which come to the fore through the image, and whose meaning can be
reconstructed.
In our case, the informants, teachers, had their lessons filmed and then they
discussed scenes in a guided interview. The direction was left up to them in a
number of ways: firstly, they determined which teaching sessions were
recorded with which camera angle. Secondly, they selected sequences for the
interview from the extensive video material. It was therefore up to the teachers
which (body) practices were chosen. The interview guide was developed based
on the concept of ‘Professional Vision’ (Sherin, 2007). The test subjects were
each asked to freely formulate their thoughts on a sequence. This question of
associations with a ‘scene’ was followed by questions in which the video
sequences were described, interpreted, explained or evaluated. The transcrip-
tions of the interviews were openly coded according to the principle of increas-
ing abstraction in a first step, axially in a second, and selectively in a third. In
a contrasting approach, a typology was finally developed which generalises the
concepts of perception and interpretation of body-related teaching practices
across all analytic sequences (Glaser, 1965).
As we are focusing in this article on the subject of disruptive gestures, and
we are investigating just one aspect of the project, that is, how do social agents
170 R. Fankhauser and A. Kaspar

(in this case the teacher) construct meaning with regard to the perception of
gestures of resistance. We are interested in what physical movements are per-
ceived by teachers as obvious gestures, what meanings they ascribe to them
and, in doing so, what interpretive frames they use.
In the following case we begin by describing the generative normative con-
text. Including an extract from an interview, we look at the teacher’s/infor-
mant’s understanding of learning and what role she assigns to the body and
body-focused teaching practices. We then focus on interview passages in
which the teacher talks about gestures that she describes as disruptive and
analyse what she says in reply to the questions of the pupils.
The teacher, whom we will call Anna, has several years of professional expe-
rience and teaches at a primary school in an urban area in Switzerland. Her
class is an integration class, so the size of the class is smaller than a regu-
lar class.
Anna’s beliefs are based on progressive educational ideas and this motivates
the way she thinks and acts in a school-based situation. The pupils’ well-being
is the focus of Anna’s activities. She considers school often to be rigidly con-
trolled and regimented; she considers the discipline that is implemented
through, among other things, controlling the children’s bodies, to be detri-
mental to their development. Anna therefore considers it her task, to create a
space, in which children can feel free. She develops an idealised concept of the
body as the site where children experience the freedom to be themselves.
She considers those lessons that involve free sequences of movements or
dance improvisation in particular to be ideal learning opportunities, because
they give the children the space to discover and express themselves.
The following quotation demonstrates Anna’s fundamental ideas:

Anna: […] School is something very structured, where in a lot of things the
children have to always do what the teacher says. For me, I always try, in PE and
elsewhere, to create opportunities where they can do something themselves. So
that it’s not about always just following and doing what they’ve been told.
Within this frame I create and with the clearly set boundaries, I allow as much
freedom as possible. But just […], always within it, everyone can be free, with-
out disrupting someone else in their freedom. That’s what it’s about for me. […].

The quote illustrates that—from Anna’s point of view—school is generally

closely associated with order and discipline that limit the freedom of the indi-
vidual. She distances herself from this institutional demand to conform that
is imposed on the children by repeatedly arranging less-structured teaching
 Gestures in the Classroom 171

sequences in opposition to the movements that are imposed on them. Her

aim is to create more creative scope for children. She wants students not only
to practise institutionalised gestures but also to explore the expressive possi-
bilities of physical movement.
Particularly in PE, she wants to create the opportunity for less coordinated,
rule-free, gestural-physical expressions to allow them to support children’s
development. The freedom of pupils should be as comprehensive as possible.
It is only limited if the freedom of others is restricted. In a protected environ-
ment created by the teachers, and primarily through free movement, everyone
should be able to ‘express or find themselves’ equally.
Anna demonstrates to us during the research period with some of the video
sequences she selects for the meetings, how she implements her idea of ideal
teaching. For example, she focuses on a sequence from gymnastics in which
she gives the children the task of moving to a piece of music in the room and
using a scarf creatively. Anna sees this scene as an opportunity for the pupils
to experience themselves as being in charge of themselves through determin-
ing their movement themselves and ‘to find themselves’ through it.
In addition to these positive examples, Anna’s video elicitation repeatedly
focuses on gestures that she describes as disturbing. In the following we will
concentrate on interview excerpts in which she discusses such a scene. The
scene occurs at a moment of transition from one part of the lesson to the next.
The pupils are asked to sit down in a circle. The pupil Arsim uses gestures
to claim a specific space in the circle. He puffs out his chest and approaches
Jari, bumps him with his chest and slaps him lightly on the back of the neck.
While looking through the video material, Anna immediately got stuck on
this scene. She played it back several times and was horrified by what she saw.
The scene disturbed her so much that she turned away from it and watched
more footage before returning to the sequence and discussing it. In answer to
the question about the meaning of the sequence it becomes clear that Anna
understands this gestural behaviour as a crude demonstration of power and
locates its origin outside school.

Anna: For me that’s a typical breaktime/playground situation and I know that

these children and their fathers often act like that in conflicts. It is a display of
power, it’s about showing who’s top dog, marking their territory. I know that
these children grow up with posturing like that, that it’s part of their daily life.
Of course, as a teacher with my objective and my view of humanity: I don’t want
posturing like that in my classroom. They already have the awareness, but it’s so
firmly rooted, if the cousin behaves like that and achieves something, and the
172 R. Fankhauser and A. Kaspar

dad does it and achieves something, so of course it is very plausible that it’s a
behaviour that brings success and that you’ll do it too. Because a behaviour
that’s beneficial, you’ll keep it, no matter what the teacher says, and one that’s
not beneficial, you’ll give it up.

For Anna, the gestural behaviour of the pupils comes from spaces outside
the classroom, in particular from the family space, which she perceives as
being patriarchally structured. Anna interprets the gestures of Arsim as a dem-
onstration of power which he’s learnt from his father. In her interpretation she
uses metaphors from the animal world, so she reads his gestures as showing
who’s ‘top dog’ and marking their ‘territory’. The gestures are seen as animal
and uncivilised behaviours reflecting a child’s tough life. In Anna’s view, they
are gestures that are distant from school and inadequate, that express illegiti-
mate male claims to power and space. Such ‘posturing’ is learnt in socialisa-
tion processes in the family.
Anna removes the gestures from the specific situation and shifts in her
interpretation to a more general level. Arsim’s gestures become the gestures of
fathers and cousins. Anna focuses on the aspect of power that is demonstrated
in the gestures and states that she won’t tolerate behaviour like that in the
classroom, that is, in her territory. She justifies this by reference to her ‘remit’
as teacher—although it’s not clear what she includes in this—and also by a
conception of humanity that seems incompatible to her with the pupil’s dom-
inant behaviour. Her teaching appears here as a corrective to the (gestural)
behaviours acquired in the children’s social milieu. Anna considers it her duty
to prevent gestures entering the classroom from outside school that represent
(alternative) claims to power. So, the bodies of the two pupils are seen as con-
ditioned by family and gender-specific influences from which they must be
‘liberated’.
To Anna it’s clear that the pupils are in a field of tension: the behaviour that
is associated with success in the family sphere of influence does not belong in
the code of values at school. Moreover, at this point, for the first time it seems
that the pupils’ behaviour is not only a threat to the other pupils, but that the
gestures also question the authority of the teachers, whose voice is not heard.
In her description and interpretation of the gestures, which are understood
to be power-based, Anna has so far referred to the influence of social back-
ground and family environment and the gender norms that accompany them.
In the following passage Anna talks specifically about this aspect and men-
tions the family’s migration background:
 Gestures in the Classroom 173

Anna: Simply the posture, when he pulls back his shoulders, and speaks with a
stronger accent than he actually has: “What are you doing here?” [Speaks with
an aggressive, sharp tone with a foreign accent]. And his posture makes him
seem bigger than he is, with his body and his shoulders back, his head up and
an aggressive look. And then this gesture, a hit on the back of the head, is for me
a very strong demonstration of power. […] And his cousin once visited the
school […] And he is in the 4th class. And came into the classroom like this.
And then I said, “You are welcome to visit”, but then I also said how I’d like his
posture to be different, I’d like it different from that because I’m in charge here.
[GRINS] and it’s no one but me who can act like that here.

Alongside the boys’ gestures, which are discussed extensively here, Anna
refers to another characteristic, namely the foreign accent of Arsim. She not
only mentions but also imitates it. Through this re-enactment Anna empha-
sises the student’s ethno-cultural background. The gestures of Arsim (and
another student) are therefore turned into gestures shaped by socio-cultural
origin and gender.
The last part of text in the sequence reveals another key aspect in the analy-
sis: in her story about the cousin visiting the school it is clear that the power-
associated behaviour of Arsim is not only problematic because it affects one or
more pupils. What is revealed here is that Anna sees it as a threat to the
teacher-pupil hierarchy. By making it clear that she only acts ‘like that’ because
she’s the ‘boss’ here, she shows her own claim to power in the classroom. The
pupils’ behaviour is seen by her not only as an attack on the freedom of other
pupils, but also as an attack on her as a teacher.
In summary, it can be asserted that Anna considers free physical self-
expression to be the ideal. According to her conception, it is through this that
the real ‘self ’ finds expression. The aim of their reform-driven pedagogically
oriented teaching is to enable such free movement sequences again and again
and thus create an alternative to physical standardisation through school
discipline.
Anna engages with gestural behaviour in the video conversations, which
irritates or disturbs her. The analysis of such a sequence illustrates that Anna
understands the gestures of a student as an illegitimate demonstration of
power. Other interpretations, for example, that the slap on the back of the
head could be understood as a playful gesture among peers, are ignored. The
gestures are power-based in Anna’s perception because they reflect the space-
consuming behaviour of male family members. For Anna, these physical per-
formances by the student are shaped by his ethno-socio-cultural background.
174 R. Fankhauser and A. Kaspar

In this interpretation the bodies of the students become over shaped and thus
unfree bodies dominated by an archaic outside world.
The gestures are disturbing for Anna for various reasons: not only do they
oppress the classmate, but in Anna’s reading they also represent male domi-
nant behaviour which also attacks her as a teacher and thus the institutional
logic. Above all, however, the student’s behaviour undermines Anna’s belief in
the free, authentic self. She considers it her task to put a stop to these gestures
that she sees as power-infused and to release the bodies from their
conditioning.
In her interpretation, she does not reflect on her own involvement in the
school hierarchy. She is consistently critical of her students’ power-based
demeanour. Her claim to power as a teacher, however, seems to be unprob-
lematic for her. She reinstates her own defining power by devaluing the pupils’
gestures and their family background.
The micro-scene, which led to extensive explanations in the video elicita-
tion, provides the starting point for the discussion with the teacher. A brief,
silent incident between two pupils sets off an extensive discussion where the
teacher justifies her views. Her perception of the scene is connected with vari-
ous associations in the teacher’s mind. The silent scene between the two pupils
must, we conclude, represent a type of threat; the wilfulness evident in the
gesture provokes the teacher to define the incident by drawing on models
from her past experience.
As a teacher Anna functions within a specific pedagogical frame. She is
guided by progressive educational views and wants to create free spaces in her
lessons in which the children can develop with the help of free and improvised
movement sequences. In this way she wants to make it possible for an ‘authen-
tic’ self to express itself and grow. The short gestural interactive sequence
between the two pupils is seen by the teacher as an attack on this educational
model: the small scene questions its ideal of the innocent, free and authen-
tic child.
The teacher reacts to this irritation with the attempt to decode the body-
related, fleeting incident using concepts of social differentiation: she explains
the pupils’ behaviour in terms of their social and cultural conditioning. With
reference to Goffman, it can be asserted that she constructs a situated gesture
from a situative one. She disengages the gesture which the pupil performed in
the short interval, from the classroom situation and generalises it as a gesture
of a male from a migration background. Instead of understanding the small
mini-performance that takes place on the fringes of the classroom as part of a
peer situation into which she as a teacher may have limited insight, she turns
it into an emblematic gesture which she considers to be culturally determined.
 Gestures in the Classroom 175

In such a gesture, teachers are confronted with norms, values and behaviour
that are diametrically opposed to those of the school as an institution. The
teacher frames the gesture as an actualisation of an off-school code and there-
fore as a disturbance.
The teacher tries to explain the disruptive gesture she has observed as being
ethno-culturally motivated and she attempts to impose her norm-based school
rules of interaction. There are two mutually exclusive conceptions at play
here: on the one hand the concept of the free and authentic child that is part
of the liberal educational theory she espouses, and the other is the world out-
side education that impacts negatively on the children in a gender-specific
and socio-cultural specific way. The former is normalised, while the latter is
excluded as intolerable. Her evaluation can only be understood against the
background of certain values and norm systems, the questioning of which the
teacher experiences as an attack on her professional self-image, her authority
and the institutional order.

5 Conclusion
Our analysis focuses on how gestures are perceived and interpreted in the
context of school and education. By focusing on disruptive gestures, we were
interested in investigating what behaviour is perceived by the teacher as dis-
senting and why. Both, in drawing attention to the gesture and, in the way,
she describes and interprets it, the teacher draws on institutional framing to
re-establish the disturbed order.
The interlocking of feeling threatened and institutional framing in the per-
ception and interpretation of gestures of resistance seems to us to be an impor-
tant outcome of our research. The feeling of insecurity generated arises not
only from the disruption to the content of the lesson and the teaching con-
cept, but perhaps more from the physical performance of such gestures. In
our view, the fact that the micro-scene performed in gestures generates such a
heated discussion explaining and justifying the reaction is more to do with the
quality of the gestural action per se, that is, its physicality, than with the con-
tent of the gestural incident. This small gestural incident perhaps has such an
impact precisely because it is both silent and blatant at the same time.
Accentuated in its appearance, but diffuse in its meaning, it seems to threaten
not only the teacher’s self-conception, but also to challenge the institu-
tional logic.
Educational gesture research has hitherto dealt mainly with ritualised ges-
tures. Ritualised gestures confirm the institutional order; they stage and
176 R. Fankhauser and A. Kaspar

execute its norms and rules in an intensified way that can be experienced on
an aesthetic level as well. In this way they do not touch the ‘hegemony of the
linguistic’ or disrupt the world where language dominates, which character-
ises the institution of school. In contrast, resistant gestures elude this logic.
They call the institutional order into question and destabilise it. What hap-
pens silently backstage shows the limitations of the language-dominated front
of stage. In the interpretation of the event by the teacher, the events are
brought from the back to the front of the stage and the institutional ‘hege-
mony of the linguistic’ is restored. The aim of that is to stabilise the position
of the teacher and the order which he or she represents.

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 Vulnerability: A Basic Concept
of Pedagogical Anthropology
Daniel Burghardt and Jörg Zirfas

1 Introduction
In recent decades, the term ‘vulnerability’ has come to occupy a central posi-
tion in many areas of science. For approximately 30 years, the term has been
the subject of intense discussion around the world in areas of medical science
such as psychology, sciences such as economics, ecology and geography and
also in the technical sciences of computer science and engineering, in social
and cultural sciences such as sociology and political science, and lastly in areas
of the humanities such as literature, philosophy and theology. Finally, interest
in this term has been increasingly in evidence over the last few years in studies
of education in the German-speaking world (Burghardt et al., 2017).
It is possible to link the heightened interdisciplinary use of the term ‘vul-
nerability’ to a series of quite diverse developments in recent times that would
appear to make it necessary to devote increased consideration to the vulnera-
bility of objects, systems, groups or individuals. Without going into detail at
this point, we can cite the following keywords in regard to these develop-
ments: environmental catastrophe, poverty, financial crisis, international

D. Burghardt (*)
University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
e-mail: daniel.burghardt@uni-koeln.de
J. Zirfas
University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 179
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_11
180 D. Burghardt and J. Zirfas

terrorism, pandemic diseases, hacker attacks and the war and refugee situa-
tion. All these developments increase awareness of vulnerability because they
literally open our eyes to the fact that despite all our security systems, despite
advances in many areas of science and despite discernible economic, political
or educational improvements in many countries, vulnerability remains an
ineluctable fact of human existence.
In this respect, vulnerability can be identified as a trend in various scientific
disciplines beginning in the decade of the 1990s. This development is signifi-
cant, since it forms a counterpoint to the theories and concepts that have
dominated social and cultural studies for several decades. The ideal subject
projected in these theories can be roughly characterised by autonomy, compe-
tence, empowerment, personal responsibility and health. Pedagogy has been
no exception to this. Here too, the prevailing image is one of an autonomous,
strong, newly resilient and infinitely optimistic subject. We begin to suspect
that these qualifiers are less a description of the subject than a prescription for
the subject, inasmuch as humans appear in anthropological terms as vulner-
able beings: humans are subject to injury and violation; in many situations
their lives prove to be fragile and brittle; in their living conditions, they are
capable of both inflicting and suffering harm and, at the end of their lives,
they are inevitably confronted with their finite nature and mortality. It can be
stated as an anthropological premise that humans are vulnerable beings
because they are physical, social, cultural and reflective creatures. Humans are
susceptible to harm because they are both physically and emotionally vulner-
able, because they can suffer physical wounds or be deprived of recognition
and participation (Popitz, 1992, p. 43ff.). Included under the term ‘vulnera-
bility’ is the exposure or susceptibility of a person, social group, object or
system faced with existing dangers, risks, crises, stresses, shocks or recent
occurrence of harmful events (Bürkner, 2010, p. 24).
To date, therefore, systematic conceptualisation of pedagogical issues has
only partially conformed to debates within the discipline. Of course, many
pedagogical ideas broached by educational studies in recent years—such as
recognition, solidarity, inclusion or pedagogical rhythms—are often implic-
itly related to different forms of exposure. In this way, the vulnerabilities of
the addressees (such as pupils) as well as those engaged in pedagogical acts
(such as teachers) are negotiated; educational and instructional practices are
brought into focus; and institutional, organisational and societal conditions
that increase vulnerabilities of all kinds are analysed. Up to this point, how-
ever, scarcely any systematic attempts at a vulnerable pedagogy exist. Changing
this one-sided focus is the concern of the Cologne Vulnerability Research Group,
which for several years has devoted itself to the task of filling this research
 Vulnerability: A Basic Concept of Pedagogical Anthropology 181

need (Burghardt et al., 2016, 2017; Stöhr et al., 2019; Zirfas, 2017). The fol-
lowing discussion is intended to make this effort plausible through a historical
and anthropological approach.

2 Historical Dimensions
2.1 A Modern Debate

Vulnerability is an interdisciplinary term. Bürkner summarises the common

denominator of the various approaches as follows: ‘Vulnerability’ is under-
stood to mean

the exposure or susceptibility of a person, social group, object or system faced

with existing dangers, risks, crises, stresses, shocks or recent occurrence of harm-
ful events. The violation or injury generally refers to a situation where essential
functions are restricted or cease to exist. A key condition of vulnerability is the
insufficient coping capacity of individuals, groups or systems. (Bürkner,
2010, p. 24)

Moreover, the term is used metaphorically, displaying a broad spectrum of

meaning ranging from damage, loss, illness to fault, setback, shock or defeat.
Against this backdrop, it can be established historically that since the begin-
ning of the modern era, themes such as susceptibility, suffering, fragility,
frailty and finiteness have increasingly become topics for debate. These were
defined as expressions of a defect or unacceptable imperfection and as weak-
nesses to be corrected. To this end, an entire arsenal of “anthropo-techniques”
(Sloterdijk, 2009) was developed with the function—which they still pos-
sess—of immunising humans against their vulnerability, compensating for
defects, overcoming faults and breaking down social dependencies. In effect,
a systematic attempt was made to take preventive steps against all phenomena
that could be subsumed under the term ‘vulnerability’ by engaging individual
empowerment and legal measures to attenuate the force of their effects and to
overcome vulnerability through technological advancement.
This modern combat against vulnerability reveals a certain similarity to the
problem of theodicy. If God was responsible for vulnerability and suffering in
the medieval Christian world, modern humanism placed this responsibility
on human beings. If ‘God is dead’, as Nietzsche maintained, the consequence
of this fact was not merely that man was seeking to replace him but also that
man himself would now be responsible for the evil in the world. There was a
182 D. Burghardt and J. Zirfas

growing awareness that disease, suffering, poverty and violence no longer

need to be tolerated as immutable fate but are to some extent conditioned by
individuals and society and can be overcome. As a result, the assertion that
human suffering must simply be accepted or even understood as the purpose
or meaning of life finds little acceptance today. More common is the assump-
tion that human beings are creatures who generally do not want to suffer—
and many would add, do not need to suffer. And even more: at least under
modern conditions, the experience of harm, suffering, pain and so on is always
coupled with the demand to eliminate or overcome it. This observation is
related to one of the first main findings of our research: many descriptions
and interpretations of vulnerability have a normative dimension in the sense
that they characterise vulnerability as a scourge to be overcome. Vulnerability
appears as a double-sided concept directly linking facticity with normativity,
description with prescription. Those who detect vulnerability—of whatever
kind—are almost unanimous in their call for it to be ‘eliminated’. It is not a
coincidence that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra states it thus: “Woe saith: Hence!
Go!” Experience indicates, however, that, for its part, the strategy of ‘elimina-
tion’ not uncommonly produces new suffering and new vulnerability. In this
respect, vulnerability is a dialectical issue.
This becomes clear from current debates, which have to do less with reflec-
tions on theodicy than with a conception of pathodicy. These would refer to
René Girard’s conception of sacrifice and the sacrificial lamb in his historical
studies of violence, Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethical formulation of responsibility
in view of the susceptibility of the face, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive mar-
gins at the limits of life, Judith Butler’s political theory of a performative
vulnerability and, finally, the debates and developments taking place since
1947 in the area of human rights that imply the goal of a world ‘without fear
and misery’. In this respect, the modern era also writes a history of vulnerabil-
ity, but one that so far exists in ideas at best. This history describes a different
image of human beings and a distinct understanding of a subject not centred
on sovereignty and agency or on integrity, autonomy and authenticity, but
commencing instead with sensibility, passivity, fragility and decentrality. Such
a history would be required above all to emphasise physical susceptibility and
fundamental social vulnerabilities. It would also need to show, however, that
vulnerability is closely intertwined with other keywords, especially those of
the modern era such as contingency, plurality, complexity, openness, unpre-
dictability and flexibility, and that its link to these terms imbues it with
important but mostly implicit and hidden significance.
The increasing awareness of vulnerability, which is connected to the ambiv-
alence of uncertainty and risk, pain and suffering on the one hand and of
 Vulnerability: A Basic Concept of Pedagogical Anthropology 183

prevention and elimination of suffering on the other, is a product of the mod-

ern world. While many areas of life and certitude are brittle, fragile and sus-
pect, there is now also an increased awareness of their contingency and
vulnerability. What can be thoroughly significant for this development are the
important efforts undertaken by modern medicine to achieve as much free-
dom from pain as possible for sick (and even healthy) people. This nonethe-
less indicates that especially where potential or actual harm can be traced to
human actions or living conditions that society has created, the project to
overcome this harm is a political one (as is shown quite clearly by what is hap-
pening today and the current debate over ‘care’). The social movements of the
late nineteenth and twentieth centuries also illustrate how social inequity cre-
ates social vulnerability. Providing a perspective on this are the various ‘move-
ments’: the women’s movement, the ‘lesbian/gay movement’, the ‘disability
rights movement’ or the anti-racist movements, which also offer indications
of violated forms of self-esteem and the social exposure of certain societal
groups to political conditions.
The increasing awareness of vulnerability outlined here is also revealed in
the respective debates carried on in recent years in the social sciences. Especially
worthy of mention is Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” (Beck, 1992). In a modern
age that has become reflective, Beck identifies, two significant changes which
he seeks to define as signatures of the age—namely, that post-modern or post-
industrial society, along with its self-induced catastrophes, has itself led to a
change in the modern world. Yet these developments have a bearing not only
on society but also on its subjects. Beck brings this to a double risk: here the
risk society, there the risk biography (cf. Dederich & Burghardt, 2019).
Following the ideas of Beck, the discussion now includes the concepts of a
“fatigue society” (cf. Han, 2010) with its uncertainties and helplessness, an
“assisted society” (Brumlik, 2002), a “fear society” (Bude, 2014) and an
“imperilled life” (Butler, 2004), each concept with various means of social
fears, vulnerabilities and susceptibilities. Appearing now alongside the ideal
concept of the subject as the “entrepreneurial self ” (Bröckling, 2007) is its
exhausted and overwhelmed antithesis with disorders such as depression,
attention deficit syndrome, borderline status or burnout (Ehrenberg, 2010;
Fuchs et al., 2018).
As a result, it is probably not a coincidence that writings in critical sociology
such as those by Stephan Lessenich or Hartmut Rosa regularly evoke vulner-
able subject types. Lessenich writes of an activated self that nonetheless has a
tendency to make excessive demands, while Rosa, against the background of
his “acceleration society”, postulates a stand-off in which subjects appear
above all to have lost their vibrancy (Lessenich, 2008; Rosa, 2016).
184 D. Burghardt and J. Zirfas

These and other studies indicate that vulnerability has been seen by various
disciplines as a relevant topic for several decades and, accordingly, that it has
been the subject of research activities. The advent of explicit discourse on
vulnerability in these disciplines therefore constitutes a response to the dark
side of wide-ranging modernisation and civilisation processes and their effects
in diverse areas of life, especially in the twentieth century.

3 The Century of Catastrophe

The twentieth century is also termed the Century of Catastrophe. In the past
century, wars and episodes of terror and violence became the focus of history
to such an extent that the perspectives of victims and the afflicted, questions
of insecurity and risk, issues of fragility and passivity—in short dimensions of
vulnerability—were both explicitly and implicitly included as elements of dis-
parate theories and models of this period.
Chronologically, the century is also termed the ‘short’ twentieth century—
extending from the outbreak of World War I (1914) to the break-up of the
Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991; at the same time, we find expressions such
as the Age of Extremes (Hobsbawm) or even the Century of Genocide. When
we speak about this century, we are speaking about a hundred years of world
wars, world economic crises, atomic bombs and worst-case scenarios, of
Auschwitz, fascism, environmental catastrophes, hunger crises; of the Cold
War, the Third World and the Middle East Conflict. Following the dissolu-
tion of the USSR, however, the melodramatic announcement of the End of
History (Fukuyama) did not prove true. History took an uncertain step fur-
ther, and the end of the twentieth century was ultimately rocked by drifts
towards re-nationalisation and new forms of warfare. Once again, the trium-
phal procession of Western democracies was and is called into question, fol-
lowing in the wake of globalised capitalism.
We cannot, however, characterise the twentieth century as a coherent string
of disasters. Historians have now generally agreed that the decades between
the ‘seminal catastrophe of World War I’ (Kennan) and the end of World War
II indeed constituted a catastrophic era: a time in which very few contempo-
raries would probably have regarded the humanisation of the world as a good
bet. Yet the historic alliance against German fascism between liberal capital-
ism and socialism began a brief epoch—there are those who even speak of a
Golden Age—of economic growth and relative prosperity in the Western
world. It not only started a never-before-seen commodities and arms race on
a worldwide scale but also transformed space into a field of technological
 Vulnerability: A Basic Concept of Pedagogical Anthropology 185

conquest strategies, rang at the end of colonialism and cleared the way for
manifold local independence and emancipation movements.
Moreover, a technical revolution in communication technologies took
place in the final third of the twentieth century, and reference to the Digital
Age became increasingly part of the lexicon. The world had at last become a
‘Global Village’ (McLuhan) with its corresponding dependencies and interde-
pendencies. Finally, with the oil crisis and the reflection on the ecological
‘limits to growth’ (Club of Rome), an era of mastery of long-standing difficul-
ties and transnational strategic solutions was opened that still affects us today.
The twentieth century has taught us how people are capable of eradicating
their cultural achievements and themselves. It showed us that a large portion
of humanity continues to live under brutal and inhuman conditions in the
face of a wide range of advancements in political, economic, technical, medi-
cal and other areas. In the short twentieth century, not only did the world’s
population triple but more people perished and were systematically and
industrially murdered than ever before (Hobsbawm, 1994).

4 The Defenceless Subject

It is no coincidence, therefore, that even the problems of the ‘subject’ were for
the first time radically expounded in this century. In the studies of the mind that
were only established in universities in their present form towards the end of the
nineteenth century, this development (originally taken up by Sigmund Freud)
of the wounding of the subject, who is no longer the ‘master’ of its own con-
sciousness, proceeds through Critical Theory’s analysis of an authoritarian char-
acterology to the declaration of the death of the subject by several variants of
post-structuralism. One could speak of a ‘subject of extremes’, fitted out in the
twentieth century with narcissistic and technological fantasies of omnipotence,
stepping forward in self-justification and observing in the process that it could
never sufficiently safeguard the tenets of the self—whether these tenets were
now taken to include the unconscious, capital, power, language or the body.
In twentieth-century subject philosophies, the self-determined and ide-
alised subject of the Enlightenment is no longer the focus, replaced by the
death wish subject (Freud), the barbaric subject (Adorno), the stigmatised self
(Goffman), the face of the Other (Lévinas), the fragile subject (Butler) or the
foreign (Waldenfels). In the twentieth century, therefore, a new understand-
ing of the subject is discernible, a different anthropology in which human
beings take centre stage as a vulnerable subject in the drama of their own
story, a story no longer told solely from the optimistic perspective of progress.
186 D. Burghardt and J. Zirfas

5 A Different Anthropology
Against such historical backgrounds, anthropology too has altered its
approach. More recent research in the context of pedagogical anthropology
(Wulf & Zirfas, 2014) assumes that it is in many respects arguable to speak of
a human essence or core. A better approach is to widen our perspective and
ask, from a pedagogical-anthropological perspective, what constitutes human
beings and, in turn, to what extent these are tied to processes of upbringing,
education and socialisation. Up to this point, the following dimensions have
been singled out (with no claim to completeness) as essential anthropological
issues: spatiality, temporality, individuality, sociality, physicality, culturality
and liminality (Zirfas, 2004).
All these dimensions have their respective vulnerabilities. In spatiality, these
involve proximity and distance or constriction and dilation. Included under
temporality are time limits, finitude or, conversely, accelerations. With respect
to individuality, we can take as examples identities that foster either affiliation
or stigmatisation, while the vulnerability of the social being is characterised in
the modern age by the loss of traditions and the eroding of relationships.
Physical vulnerabilities are tied to pain and suffering; those in culturality to
symbolic and linguistic actions; and lastly, a liminality approach presents vari-
ous forms of boundary violations.

6 Dimensions of Physical Susceptibility

What follows is a focus on the physical dimension from an anthropological
perspective. Since the 1970s, the body has occupied a central place in social
and cultural studies. Pedagogical anthropology has likewise focussed its inter-
est on social issues. Accordingly, seeing the importance of the body in its
social context leads us to highlight questions concerning its vulnerability. In
this endeavour, following Plessner’s distinction between having a body and
being a body, Bittner’s triad of the human being’s sensual body, implement
body and appearance body, and Funke-Wieneke’s extension of this notion to
include the categories of symbolic body and social body, it therefore becomes
possible to consider physical vulnerability on additional levels.
At the outset, the Plessner conception can be employed to distinguish
between an external-to-the-body and internal-to-the body vulnerability. There
is a difference between speaking about the body using the medical categories
of possible damage and injury and discussing the bodily experience of this
 Vulnerability: A Basic Concept of Pedagogical Anthropology 187

vulnerability, as well as between observing the capacity for pain from the per-
spective of a third party and broaching the subject from the ego perspective
(Dederich, 2013, pp. 79ff.).
If we combine these two aspects under the term ‘physical vulnerability’, this
means firstly that people are susceptible as bodily physical beings, that they
can contract disease and suffer pain; in (disability) pedagogy, accordingly,
physical vulnerability is generally found under the heading of children’s health
or violence against children. And in pedagogy, the history of violence against
children is a long and sobering one: over the centuries, all manner of child
killings, mistreatment, selectiveness, exploitation, abuse and punishment have
been the constant companions of ‘pedagogical’ interactions with (disabled)
children. Since the eighteenth century, against the background of various
pedagogical reform movements (social developments related to children and
youth, didactics, learning theory etc.), there has been increasing acceptance of
the belief that children have a right to violence-free education.
Another form of vulnerability is sensual, extending in the broadest sense to
possible impairment of the sensory organs. In issues of vulnerability, the sense
of pain is arguably of greatest interest due to the specific information it can
provide regarding a person. Here it is possible to distinguish the experience of
ego-related feeling of pain from personalised suffering in relation to pain
(Diaconu, 2013, p. 79). People can feel vulnerable to pain but do not need to
suffer. Chronic experiences of vulnerability related to pain and suffering are
difficult to envisage. Above all, they refer to the fact that pain represents not
only a physical and physiological condition but also the negative physical
sensations linked to the attempt to alleviate and overcome this condition. The
ego’s passivity and feelings of impotence and helplessness are expressed in
pain. “The ego feels susceptible and abandoned to an alien power—an anony-
mous, impersonal agent” (ibid., p. 81). This connexion refers to the fact that
the very experiences of pain and suffering can also enhance sensibility to the
pathic and to vulnerability.
Perhaps the vulnerability of the body that we see is the most immediately
and commonly accessible anthropological form. This vulnerability is primar-
ily virulent in the ‘disabled body’ (Krüger-Fürhoff, 2001). The disabled body
can be identified from the following characteristics: injury, mutilation, frag-
mentation, violence, opening, death as well as transience, disintegration,
wounding, abuse, disgust and compassion. And it is not coincidental that
Goffman (1963) orients his studies towards the stigmatisation of features of
this body, which appears in a ‘conspicuous’ way. Persons with ‘disabled bodies’
frequently confront scrutiny of a pejorative nature on the part of those who
seek to demonstrate the inferiority and harmfulness of the one being
188 D. Burghardt and J. Zirfas

stigmatised. And this close examination will cause them problems in forming
a positive self-image.
Another distinction by Goffman takes place between the discredited (per-
sons with known stigmata) and the discreditable (those disabled by a potential
stigma not yet known in the environment). Anyone who has faced such
images of negative identity as ‘discredited’ or ‘discreditable’ but was unable to
ward them off through skilful identity and stigma management will have
scant opportunity to demonstrate the capacity to be more than that or other
than that—or to do more than that or other than that—which is defined
within this vocabulary range of institutional stigmatisation. Moreover,
Goffman makes it clear that divergence from normality and the stigmatisation
and labelling associated with such divergence basically affects everyone,
although of course in different ways and to varying degrees.
From an anthropological perspective, symbolic susceptibility, more recently
also frequently paraphrased as ‘emotional susceptibility’ and ‘degradation’, is
conditioned by our capacity to understand symbols. Communicative beings
who can comprehend signs and symbols are able to comprehend not only
(linguistic) actions by sympathetic others but also the actions of those who
wish them harm. This vulnerability therefore requires the ability to under-
stand other individuals as intentional persons who pursue specific goals
through their actions and to understand themselves as someone who can be
‘impaired’ by these actions. Individuals can be regarded as symbolically sus-
ceptible to the extent that they have a sense of self-esteem and can respond
resentfully to symbolic susceptibilities (Giesinger, 2007, p. 41).
When words not only function as weapons but are themselves weapons
that inflict harm based on “language as a thing” (Gehring, 2007, p. 213) and
experienced as a “blow”, the question then arises as to what kind of vulnera-
bility they encounter and what kind is generated by the language itself.
Assuming that people are symbolic beings that exist both in and through
‘language’ (in its broader sense as a system of signs)—a thesis that remains to
be spelled out in terms of language philosophy, phenomenology, development
theory and cultural theory—then relations to oneself, to others and to the
world are linguistic in nature: more specifically, they are an outgrowth of the
speech of others. This development can take a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ direc-
tion—that is, language would have the power to engender vulnerability
because, on the one hand, it would have a ‘homoeopathic’ effect: it produces
a specific (negative) understanding and a specific (negative) self-assessment in
us in the context of language. And on the other hand, it would also have an
‘allopathic’ effect because that which is physical, emotional and motivational
(also unconscious?) is also permeable with respect to language, is affected by
 Vulnerability: A Basic Concept of Pedagogical Anthropology 189

it, and can therefore be experienced as physical harm. In this respect, language
would have not only a linguistic but a somatic effect. Here, symbolic harm
would be relevant—not intrinsically but only for a particular individual in
situations where, under certain conditions, inclusion of a cultural parlance, a
special way of speaking, is also understood as an ‘insult’ (Herrmann
et al., 2007).
Finally, vulnerability as a social body applies to those linked to others
through relationships and for whom the permeability of their own body is
linked to others. Discrimination, stigmatisation and other forms of rejection,
especially in relationships that are meaningful for children and youth, gener-
ally have a significant impact on emotional, cognitive, volitional and
behaviour-related wellbeing—that is, on physical structures as well as on
physical and psychological wellness. These particularly affect the self-
confidence and self-worth of the one experiencing discrimination and create
conditions for rejection, devaluation and a perceived lack of belonging. They
therefore act counter to a basic human desire for social acceptance and inte-
gration into a community.
The results of relationship research, psychoanalysis and infant research
make clear that social relations are especially significant with regard to issues
of vulnerability. In turn, this is probably linked to social experiences in the
early stages of life. Infant research, which has continued to grow in impor-
tance in recent decades in the area of the human and social sciences, has
shown, based on the earliest childhood self-genesis, that from the very start,
relationships to other people and objects are constitutive in every respect, not
merely for the nascent relationship to self but also for the educational process.
The genesis of the earliest self-relationship in the form of a ‘proprioceptive
self ’ is directly linked to the experience of sociality even if this is addressed
here at a very proximal and otherwise quite undifferentiated level. Above all,
the issue of vulnerability must be broached against the backdrop of a physical-
social relationship; from an anthropological perspective, vulnerability arising
from physical relationships must be appraised as tremendously significant for
human life.

7 Conclusion
With a view to the lack of terminological precision revealed in many contri-
butions on the subject, we wish to stress yet again that the term ‘vulnerability’
refers to a potentiality—that is, to requirements, possibilities and prospects. In
concrete terms, this means the following: vulnerability is synonymous not
190 D. Burghardt and J. Zirfas

with being harmed or violated (an equation between the potentiality for vul-
nerability and the reality of harm having appeared quite frequently in relevant
literature) but only with the possible or probable capacity to be harmed or
violated.
This understanding of the term is also important for pedagogy because it
opens up the possibility on the one hand of inquiring about causes and
requirements both for specific susceptibilities or vulnerabilities and for poten-
tially harmful actions or cause-effect relationships. On the other hand, an
essential preventative feature is associated with it. Knowledge regarding
potentially harmful actions or cause-effect relationships is required if these are
to be alleviated and actual harm is to be prevented. Moreover, the understand-
ing of vulnerability as a potentiality stresses its relativity and relationality.
There is no vulnerability per se; it does not simply exist but is rather perceived
and comprehended only in specific contexts that are linked to corporeality,
sociality and culturality.
The previously explained understanding of the term has a further implica-
tion: that vulnerability must be recognised as contingent upon such contexts.
This means several things: first, that change from the possibility of harm into
the reality of harm is not inevitable but only potential. Even where all condi-
tions are present for the actualisation of vulnerability, the harm can fail to
materialise because of the affected individual’s pronounced resilience, for
example, or fortunate circumstances, or well-functioning protection factors.
But the opposite side is also conditional: since, in many cases, actual physical
harm cannot be attributed to a single cause, conditions of the potentiality of
harm based on processes of cognizance, assessment and decision-making or
even on recognition policies that make vulnerability visible. Because vulner-
ability itself is conditional, this makes it a problematic locus: questions about
who counts as vulnerable, how, to what extent and in what way, are consigned
to a system of discursive and non-discursive elements, of interests and power
configurations.
Among other conclusions, this leads to the insight that not all people are
vulnerable in the same way. In this respect, it is possible to make distinctions
between different types of vulnerability: children and the infirm, elderly or
disabled as well as persons labelled as having an ‘immigrant background’ and
currently refugees as well appear at first glance to be more vulnerable than
adult, young, healthy and able-bodied individuals. But what does this initial
impression tell us from an anthropological point of view? Adults can also
become ill, the youth can suffer from lovesickness, the healthy can be involved
in an accident and non-disabled individuals can become unemployed. In this
sense, vulnerability occurs as an experience to which people are ‘exposed’ even
 Vulnerability: A Basic Concept of Pedagogical Anthropology 191

under seemingly optimum conditions of resilience and empowerment.

Vulnerability appears as the latent ‘dark’ and pathic side that is recalled when-
ever any kind of harm or danger occurs. Vulnerability lies in wait like a shadow
in the brightly lit and fully enlightened modern age.

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 Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships
of Power
Kathrin Audehm

1 Perspectives on Power: From Property

to Network
Pedagogical relationships are power relationships. Not only do individuals
educate other individuals, but education can be understood, according to
Friedrich Schleiermacher and Émile Durkheim, as a social practice in which
the older generation bears the responsibility for conveying and passing on
cultural achievements to the younger generation and for educating them to
behave morally. Therefore, pedagogical relationships are based on the peda-
gogical generational difference, and at least asymmetrical to hierarchical rela-
tionship—classically expressed—between educators and pupils, which is
reinforced by pedagogical practice. If power is in education like ‘a stake in the
flesh’ (Mayer-Drawe, 2001, p. 12), this not only refers to the social entangle-
ment of the educational sector in power relations but also to the inherent
power form of educational practices and processes.
Following on Max Weber, the term ‘power’ is sociologically amorphous and
means in general every chance to enforce one’s own will against others (Weber,
1972, pp. 28 f.) and achieve obedience, whether or not it is grounded in vol-
untary submission or reached by means of compulsion or violence. Therefore,
the term includes a wide range of asymmetrical social constellations and

K. Audehm (*)
University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
e-mail: kathrin.audehm@uni-koeln.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 193
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_12
194 K. Audehm

phenomena (Paris, 2015, p. 7) like concrete and directly interpersonal rela-

tionships, relationships in organisations or institutions, state power, and social
relations in general.
In educational science, too, the concept of power is becoming increasingly
blurred, in the German-speaking discourse initially accompanied by a radical
critique of power in schools as an ideological state and coercive apparatus in
the 1970s (Wellendorf, 1973). In addition, canonical texts are subjected to a
critical re-reading (Rutschky, 1977) and since the 1980s and 1990s supple-
mented by (uncountable) educational-historical and empirical studies, which
refer mainly to the power-critical works of Michel Foucault and Pierre
Bourdieu. In the 2000s, the power-critical perspectives were belatedly but
finally complemented by in-depth investigations and reappraisals of sexual
violence, especially in boarding schools (Baldus & Utz, 2011; Thole
et al., 2012).
The ability to exercise power over others is based on fundamental human
characteristics. These include the fundamental dependence on material living
environments and living conditions, the vulnerability of the human body and
the need for recognition of one’s own social existence by others, the urgency
to be able to act in social situations, to orient oneself in the social living envi-
ronment, and to interpret it, thereby not only to exist but to lead one’s own
life and to help shape one’s own, individual, collective, and social future in the
course of life. Based on this, basic types of power can be identified: Action
power, instrumental, and authoritative power, as well as the power of data set-
ting (Popitz, 2009, p. 22ff.). Nevertheless, power is not an anthropological
constant; rather, historically and culturally different variants of power exist
that play out in the field-, organisation-, and milieu-specific entanglements
(Rieger-Ladich, 2014, p. 287).
Exercising power could initially mean gaining power over others. If asym-
metries are condensed into power hierarchies, one can speak of a domination-
like organisation of social relationships. Rulership refers to an institutionalised
relationship of superiority and subordination, whereby power initially appears
as a relationship of ownership and possession. From this point of view, ruler-
ship is exercised by those who succeed in using their economic, political, and
cultural resources profitably, accumulating them as capital, and thereby gain-
ing control over its purposes. In this perspective, the thoughts of the ruling
class are therefore also ‘the ruling thoughts in every epoch’ (Marx & Engels,
1962, p. 46). Domination depends on mutual recognition. Thus, someone is
only king or queen because their subjects behave like subjects and they in turn
do so because they believe they are subjects (Marx, 1962, footnote 21, p. 72).
 Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships of Power 195

Max Weber distinguishes between three ideal types of legitimate rulership

or authority (Weber, 1972, p. 124), whose characteristic features, occurrence,
and development he explains socio-historically and socio-theoretically in
Economy and Society. The type of charismatic rulership occurs primarily in
times of upheaval and is based on an extraordinary devotion with which vas-
sals, comrades, and conspiratorial communities recognise charisma as a super-
human gift of special persons such as religious and military leaders. In contrast
to this, traditional authority is based on everyday belief or an inner attitude,
guiding, for example, children, students, or journey(wo)men to recognise the
honour and prestige of parents, priests, or master teachers but also customs
and traditions. And finally, rational authority is based on an ingrained disci-
pline and refers to the set of rules of an organisation and its goals, such as the
Prussian bureaucracy with its files and official channels or scientific manage-
ment in a Fordist-organised company with its assembly lines and stopwatches.
Here, those who act in it serve not so much persons as a cause.
The type of rational authority in particular underlines, that the legitima-
tion of power is based not only on conscious recognition but also on social
experience or ‘discipline’ (Weber, 1972, p. 681). Furthermore, this type
shows, exercising power is not limited to interpersonal relationships.
Weber’s ideal type of rational authority has similarities with Foucault’s type
of disciplinary power. However, while Max Weber searches for legitimate rea-
sons for domination, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu show that the
legitimisation of domination cannot be detached from practical as well as
discursive means of power, because these secretly co-produce the reasons for
legitimisation. This makes the rationality of the recognition of power gener-
ally suspect, but especially the efforts of education and training become
suspect.
The belief in the legitimacy of domination does not dissolve into a ‘false’,
ideological consciousness, but is maintained, renewed, and stabilised by
incorporated knowledge of action, interpretation, and experience, which has
been laboriously and painfully practised—certainly on both sides of the power
relation. Thus, in all types of aristocracies (including educated aristocracies),
elites entrust their most valuable legacy and cultural heritage to the body and
bodily discipline (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 89). In this perspective, power works
with bodies and embeds itself in them. In this perspective, there is hardly any
room for resistance or any forms of autonomy; instead, power and the body
are welded together in mutual complicity. Nevertheless, the power form of
pedagogical relations is productive, and their disciplining effects enable both
educational processes and educational discourses.
196 K. Audehm

While Bourdieu hardly distinguishes (symbolic) power from violence,

according to Foucault, violence occurs in relation to persons when power is
not only directed at their subjugation, but at their destruction and destroys
them themselves as already subjugated subjects. Violence is not the antithesis
of power and relations of power do not suddenly change into relations of
violence. Rather, they are gradual, fluid transitions.

2 Incorporation as Disciplining and Educating

Effect of Power Techniques
Since the 1970s, Michel Foucault has developed a whole ‘toolbox’ (Lorey,
2015, p. 31) for analysing different technologies of power. In particular, in
Discipline and Punish, a theory of power unfolds which has challenged educa-
tional science (Rieger-Ladich, 2002, p. 360). In contrast to sovereign power,
which focuses on revenge and is directed at death, discipline or disciplinary
power is directed at the seizure, capture, and cultivation of human life
(Demirović, 2015, p. 73 f.). It unfolds in a multifaceted, diffused web of
power relations and possesses its own logic or political economy, which does
not so much punish as educate. The political economy of disciplinary power
is composed of a political and scientific register that are intertwined. What is
new about the techniques of discipline are their steadiness, detail, and
inescapability.
The political register includes (1) the distribution of bodies in space by
enclosing, parcelling, and assigning functional positions within the frame-
work of a hierarchy, with which the bodies are localised in a network of rela-
tions (Foucault, 1994, p. 188) and living tableaus are created; (2) the temporal
control of activities (ibid., p. 193ff.) through the narrowing of time grids, the
decomposition of activities into sequences of individual acts and their ele-
ments, whereby bodies and gestures are put together as in writing (ibid,
p. 195ff.) and bodies and tools are interconnected in manoeuvres. Added to
this are (3) the organisation of developments, achieved through exercises and
secured through examinations, which at the same time differentiate the abili-
ties of the individuals (ibid., p. 205) and finally (4) the combination of forces
in the form of the training of tactics.
The military and school techniques and exercises are linked to techniques
of control and normalising sanction, and the performance of individuals is
measured against norms along which their behaviour is aligned. If the disci-
plining efforts are successful, the individuals confined in hospitals, factories,
 Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships of Power 197

schools, and prisons are homogenised along the norms and in the process they
become efficient.
The scientific register includes (1) hierarchical surveillance in the form of
potentially permanent observation and a network of mutually controlling
gazes, as well as (2) normative sanction, which, through prohibitions and
subtle punishments, establishes a micro-justice of time, performed activities,
and sexuality, and in which punishment is always only one element in a sys-
tem of reward, dressage, and correction (ibid., p. 231), such as the donkey
bonnet or class of disgrace at school. Both techniques are combined (3) in the
examination as the great technique of disciplinary power. In examination the
practices of observational control and normalising sanction become inter-
twined. And while disciplinary power makes itself invisible in its techniques,
it imposes visibility on the bodies that are measured, tested, useful, and taught
(ibid., p. 241).
The political and the scientific register are interwoven and produce an
organic knowledge of the body (Foucault, 1976, p. 109), which becomes the
object of observation and control. The scientific register thus produces a dark
and secret archive of pedagogical knowledge. The ‘elegance of discipline’
(Foucault, 1994, p. 31) simultaneously subjects bodies and aligns and
enhances their performance. The disciplined, educated, efficient, and useful
bodies are machines that, by means of their activities, produce the effects
themselves to which they are subject. The individual bodies thus exhibit cer-
tain characteristics and subjectivise themselves in their subjugation. Thus, the
domination of persons has given away to the ‘power of the norm’ (ibid., 1994,
p. 237).
The immediate entanglement of objectified reification and subjectivising
submission is carried out in Bentham’s panopticon, an apparatus of power
characterised by greatest transparency, infinite control, and surveillance of
those who learn, work, recover, or are imprisoned within it. The panopticon
thus appears as a perpetuum mobile of the concealed power of discipline (ibid.,
p. 279) that knows no evasion.
Power no longer emanates from state apparatuses and strategic positions or
switching points of domination, but appears as a network of power tech-
niques and practices, effective as strategic dispositions of subject positioning
and self-regulation. Power is therefore not so much something that someone
possesses, but something that unfolds (ibid., p. 38). Power produces subjects
with particular characteristics as well as objectivated, scientific knowledge.
Power therefore does not mainly have a repressive effect but acquires a pro-
ductive character (ibid.).
198 K. Audehm

With disciplinary power, power acquires a material character and can no

longer be limited as an interpersonal relationship. Rather, it appears as an
incorporated relationship of norming and normalising factors of practical
exercise and discursive knowledge. These factors of subjection, which include
usefulness and performance, are based on constant, subjectivising practice
and assert themselves like an organically regulating functional compulsion.
Disciplinary power thus undermines the notion of an autonomously acting
subject just as much as it makes clear that subjects are not given as entities a
priori, but rather their capacities and action power develop within the frame-
work of processes of subjectivation, which are at the same time entangled in
and bound up with power relations.
Power becomes a productive force because it produces subjects capable of
action as well as discourses that functions as power-knowledge complexes.
This makes it difficult to distinguish between social exercises and discursive
practices as well as between techniques of power and practices of power.
Furthermore, the question of the extent of the impact of discourses on sub-
jects arises, how pervasive the power effects of techniques and discourses are,
and how they dock onto or generate experiential knowledge. Foucault, how-
ever, has no conception of the process of incorporation; the entanglement of
power techniques and subjective bodies remains an effect resulting from a
functional logic that no longer knows a justifying centre and yet asserts itself
as a general and total compulsion. Moreover, Foucault’s concept of disciplin-
ary power ignores the problematics of recognising power and bodies appear as
crucial media of unrecognised processes of subjectivation—in other words,
individuals become subjects ‘without a cause’.
Subsequently, Foucault elaborates an overall technology of power.
Disciplinary power is a subtype and, along with population policy, belongs to
bio-power, which is aimed at preserving and promoting life. Bio-power com-
plements sovereignty power and governmentality, and all three types of power
do not follow one another as hegemonic power blocks, but form an irreduc-
ible triangle. Finally, pastoral power is added to this triangle as a unique,
Christian occidental art of guiding souls and constantly intervening in the
conduct of life. This type of power in particular guides people to orientate
themselves to what is permitted without prohibitions and to follow it volun-
tarily. In the unfolding of the power types, it becomes clear that power rela-
tions are fragile, unstable, and reversible. And while the type of disciplinary
power knows no simultaneous disciplining and rebelling, Foucault will then
state: ‘Where there is power, there is resistance’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 92).
Foucault’s theory of power welds the body with power techniques. Although
the process of incorporation is described, a theoretical concept to explain this
 Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships of Power 199

process is missing. Such a concept, which also includes the problem of subjec-
tive (individual as well as collective) recognition of power relations, is pro-
vided by the habitus concept.

3 Education as a Social-Magical Process

of Habitus Transformation
The concept of habitus has many fathers. John Locke already introduced the
terms ‘habit’ and ‘disposition’ in his essay Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693). Education purposefully builds habits of thought and behaviour based
on repetition. Dispositions are internal habits that trigger actions and often
elude observation (Oelkers, 2004, p. 335). John Dewey also understands dis-
positions as basic mental attitudes that in turn guide and structure further
action. According to Karl Mannheim, all human knowledge is based on
bodily activities with their touches, sensual experiences, and emotional stim-
uli, which enable an existential absorption of a counterpart into consciousness
qua contagion and transmission (Mannheim, 1980, pp. 206 f.). This experi-
ence of contagion lies before the separating distinction between subject and
object, takes place in bodily co-presence, and is the background or a basic
mood in which all further knowledge resides (ibid., p. 215). The bodily exis-
tence and the bodily being-boundness of thinking create so-called conjunc-
tive knowledge as a component of a total mental habitus, whereby the
separation of body and mind is abolished.
Bourdieu’s concept mainly refers to Aristotle’s hexis, Panofsky’s habitus, and
Weber’s ethos, whereby, unlike John Locke, newborns are not considered
blank slates. Mannheim’s concept is ignored in Bourdieu’s writings; the main
difference between the two concepts lies in their treatment of power issues.
While in Mannheim’s concept the habitus binds itself to things through
bodily practice and thereby forms a capacity for their practical mastery—for
example, in riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument, in Bourdieu’s
concept the power relations are incorporated through bodily cognition and
transferred into the dispositions of the habitus, which are burned into them
like ‘indelible tattoos’ (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 181). In Bourdieu’s notion the
body itself becomes an instrument of knowledge and the recognition of power
at the same time (Audehm, 2017, pp. 173ff.).
According to Bourdieu, social and symbolic power are closely interwoven,
articulated through the habitus, which is both structured by the social struc-
tures of social fields of play and struggle and effective as a modus operatum,
200 K. Audehm

and in turn, as a modus operandi, structures practices and principles of classi-

fication, symbolic sifting, and ordering. Education contributes decisively to
the generation and transformation of habitualised dispositions and can be
understood as a practice by which social power relations are transferred into
the power of symbols, whereby symbolic power helps to disguise the social
power relations on which it is based. This applies to all social formations and
their forms of education, whereby the organisation of education in the form
of schools, which includes universities, does not differ significantly from
other forms.
In their Foundations of a theory of symbolic violence, Pierre Bourdieu and
Jean-Claude Passeron (1973) refer to the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber,
and Émile Durkheim. Similar to Marx, social and symbolic power are inter-
dependent, but in contrast to classical Marxist perspectives on ideology, they
stand in dynamic relations to each other and, symbolic power has a force of
its own that it adds to social power relations and is therefore not merely a
superstructure phenomenon. In contrast to Max Weber (excepted his version
of rational authority), symbolic power, which enforces meanings as generally
recognised and legitimised, is not reduced to interpersonal relations and thus,
for example, cultural artefacts are attributed authority—without conceding a
dynamic character to it. And similarly, to Émile Durkheim, it is assumed that
social facts become social constraints, but unlike Durkheim’s version, these
are not equally valid and compelling for all members of a society.
In Durkheim’s version, the moral authority of a society achieves resounding
effects, on the one hand through rituals, on the other through education.
Using the example of Australian totem cults, Durkheim underlines that col-
lective bodily performances—especially ritual dances—generate a special
‘electricity’ (Durkheim, 1998, p. 297) and that ritual gatherings of individuals
arouse in them ‘a common passion’ (ibid.). During the ecstatic invocation of
collective symbols, individuals go completely out of themselves and thus
become a collective body, and transforming themselves into a community,
whereby they would experience its moral authority with feelings of ‘awe’
(Durkheim, 1998, p. 285). However, the ecstasy does not last, so the ritual
gatherings would have to be repeated. Another form is education, where the
children to be educated appear strangely passive and educational practices are
compared to hypnosis (Durkheim, 1972, pp. 44 f.).
With Durkheim, education is directed towards the formation of a social
being, in that individual aptitudes are developed, and the socialised human
beings form enlightened moral behaviour. In this process, teacher’s authority
becomes the preferred means of pedagogical action. This authority is based on
a preconception of knowledge, experience (ibid., p. 45), and morality (ibid.,
 Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships of Power 201

p. 47), supplemented with—in this respect it is similar to priestly authority—

personal conviction in the task to which the teacher is called and commis-
sioned by virtue of his or her office (ibid., p. 48). Authority here is essentially
institutional authority, which is fulfilled through exemplary, neither vain nor
petty or reserved, pedagogical action (ibid.).
For Bourdieu and Passeron, too, those who act in the pedagogical field as
educators are charged with educating. Educational instances can be parents as
well as teachers. Educational processes are composed of pedagogical action,
work, and authority, whereby pedagogical work has a transformative character
(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1973, p. 51) in that it is directed towards the transfor-
mation of a habitus that is considered perfect, enduring, and transferable to
other fields, which in turn generates practices of a legitimate culture after
education has ceased. Education in general—as well in families or social
groups and communities as at schools—thus becomes the decisive basis for
the effectiveness of symbolic power, whose recognition is guaranteed in the
dispositions of the habitus. Insofar the individuals become subjects ‘with a
cause’, grounded in their social experience and practical knowledge—although
Bourdieu himself uses the term social agents and strictly avoids the term
subject.
The connection between education and the recognition of symbolic power
is elaborated by Bourdieu in discussion with Austin’s speech act theory,
whereby he generalises the social function of entrance examinations to French
elite universities in a social-functionalist perspective and calls them rituals of
institution. He thus directs the perspective away from the symbolic confirma-
tion of a social transition towards the aspect of the legitimising, sanctifying,
and traditionalising effect of rituals, whose main social function is to institu-
tionalise social differences (Bourdieu, 1990, pp. 84 f.).
Examination rituals separate those who just pass from those who have
already failed, that means they separate those, who are very likely to become
elites, and those who are at least handicapped in the capital-circuit and race
for social positions (Audehm, 2001, p. 150). Thus, like circumcision rituals
drawing an arbitrary boundary in a broad spectrum of behaviours:
Circumcision rituals separate practices of still childlike and female from
already male behaviour.
Moreover, in a theatrical and communicative act, the instituted are assigned
an identity that is imposed on them ‘in front of all eyes’ (Bourdieu, 1990,
p. 88) and defines a social existence like a categorical imperative. This defini-
tion encompasses the totality of social attributes and attributions produced by
the act of institution, which thus becomes a performative utterance intended
to produce what it signifies (ibid., p. 87).
202 K. Audehm

As exceptional and outstanding cases of social meaning-making, investiture

rites have a ‘performative logic’ (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 150) that is not easily
broken, its effectiveness depends on the magnitude of the authority with
which the utterance is performed (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 79). The recognition of
ritual as well as extra-ritual authorities is guaranteed in the dispositions of
habitus that secure the collective belief of the ritually acting in the social dif-
ferences institutionalised in the ritual (ibid., p. 79) and that result from peda-
gogical work as work on incorporation.
However, ritually drawn boundaries and identity assignments are not self-
evident. Rather, every setting of difference includes the danger of its transgres-
sion. By entrusting their cultural legacy to bodily disciplining, social groups
counter the danger of transgressing boundaries (ibid., p. 88ff.). This results in
a strange cycle of social magic (Audehm, 2008, p. 130): On the one hand,
rituals as symbolic action complexes attain their social efficacy due to incor-
poration work that has already been done; on the other hand, it is not suffi-
ciently secured by this, which is why further, disciplinary incorporation work
takes place that is not left to coincidence.
The social-magical process of collective recognition of symbolic demarca-
tions is dependent on bodily performances and their repetition. This opens up
performative gaps between the coincidence of symbolic sense-making and the
social understanding of meaning of the ritually acting, who are already edu-
cated and yet continue to be educated.
While the analysis of the functioning of entrance examinations explains the
effectiveness of symbolic power and seems to give it a resounding impact, the
question arises, especially from a pedagogical perspective, of subjective stub-
bornness, which can be based not only on a reflexive distancing but also on a
practical-strategic distancing. Docking on the levers of habitualised disposi-
tions to recognise authority can encounter un-adapted and incoherent habit-
ual dispositions (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 206ff.). Moreover, rituals become less
tangible as social-magical boundary barriers within a hierarchically ordered
context of instruction and interpretation but play out as dynamic practices of
institution within a complex and heterogeneous, social-cultural discur-
sive web.
In discursive webs, ‘struggles for the definition of “reality”’ (Bourdieu, 1990,
p. 99, emphasis in original) take place. Rituals as performative utterances
encounter ‘[…] the practical (i.e., unspoken, unsystematic and more or less
contradictory) schemata’ (ibid., p. 103) of the habitus, which in turn generate
classification practices and principles with which the powerful symbolic prac-
tices are individually and collectively evaluated.
 Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships of Power 203

Even if Bourdieu himself remains sceptical about the capacity for resis-
tance, the dispositions of the habitus, which—as misrecognition or belief—
lead to the delegation of power, through which the authorised discourse first
acquires its authority (ibid., p. 79), do not force social actors into a performa-
tive logic that would be all-powerful, it is just not easy to break through. With
recourse to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, both recognition and disregard,
obedience as well as opposition, approval as well as criticism can be explained—
also for the pedagogical field and its discourses and debates on educational
systems, concepts, and reforms and not least with regard to the inherent
power relations of pedagogical practice. Pedagogical authority, which, like all
recognised power, is based on the recognisers transferring their power of rec-
ognition to the commissioned and appointed, does not represent property,
but can rather be understood as an element of symbolic practice whose per-
formative logic cannot rely on fixed and institutionally secured hierarchies
and responsibilities.

4 Conclusion: Notes and Outlook

on Character, Materiality,
and Performativity of Pedagogical Authority
Pedagogical authority depends on recognition and trust and must prove itself
in everyday pedagogical life. Recognition refers to a hierarchical difference
between educators and those to be educated, whereby the pupils recognise the
responsibility and competences, especially the knowledge and experience
advantage, of the educators and follow them and their instructions more or
less willingly. Those who educate with authority can therefore, in principle,
do without coercion and violence.
The recognition of pedagogical power does not work unilaterally; rather,
educators must trust in the basic willingness of their counterpart to obey,
without being able to constantly demand or negotiate this or explicitly justify
its necessity and meaningfulness. Moreover, recognition knows different
degrees, ranging from absolute respect and obedience to just reserved willing-
ness and critical scrutiny, and it can be withdrawn at any time. Pedagogical
authority thus has a fragile, gradual, dynamic, and reciprocal character
(Helsper, 2009, p. 69ff.; Paris, 2009, p. 38ff.).
The pedagogical authority of schoolteachers, representing systems of school
rules and cultural values, consists of analytically distinguishable dimensions
that are, however, inseparably interwoven in pedagogical practice. These
204 K. Audehm

include the institutional dimension, which is manifested in the sanctioning

power of the teacher and consists mainly in his or her power to grade pupils’
performance, determined and secured by the teaching office. The pedagogical
expertise as the second dimension consists not only of subject knowledge but
is shown in the mastery of the didactic art of conveying educational content
as well as in classroom management, which includes both the organisation of
lessons and the ability to guide classes. Added to this is personal authority,
which manifests itself in the teacher’s exemplary and appreciative as well as
disciplinary behaviour and convincing appearance. These dimensions create
the teacher’s balance of authority and depend both on norms and values of the
concrete school culture and on norms and values outside the school.
Currently, a continuing crisis of pedagogical authority is observed, with the
discourse of crisis referring to various factors, disturbing the balance of the
teacher’s authority. Following the discourse, the crisis emanates mainly from a
crisis of the institutional dimension. The (claimed) historically declining radi-
ance of the school (Paris, 2009, p. 51) and the increasing insecurity of school
investments are cited, as are such contradictory factors as the advanced
democratisation of pedagogical generational relations and school-cultural
transformations with their declining ritualisations (Fend, 1998, p. 179), or
the constant, neo-conservative pressure on schools to constantly reform and
perform (Paris, 2009, p. 52 f.). In addition, youth cultural influences and
decreasing educational efforts in general would put pressure on the dimension
of subject matter competence (ibid., p. 54 f.), which is further intensified by
digitalisation and globalisation processes.
In addition to abstract-generalised assessments, assuming the integration of
the educational sector into socially effective power relations, qualitative and
ethnographic empirical studies assume both, the powerful social embedding
of educational sector (Helsper, 2009, p. 67) as well that teachers individually
as in the college, and schools themselves as institutions can react to changes in
social power relations and are not helpless in the face of these (ibid., p. 80).
Empirically, structural variants of dealing with pedagogical authority can
be identified, which play in different fields of force of pedagogical authority.
Teacher’s authority is straddled between the poles of ‘charismatic’ or compre-
hensive and ‘function-oriented’ or limited authority (ibid., p. 74), which
themselves are distinguished in the field of a lower and higher level. At the
lower level of an authority that is granted rather than demanded by pedagogi-
cal concepts and practices, the field of limited authority is exemplified in the
pedagogical figure of a virtuoso piano teacher, the field of charismatic author-
ity by a spiritual master (ibid.). At the higher level of a demanded authority,
the force field of limited authority is shown, for example, in the figure of a
 Pedagogical Relationships as Relationships of Power 205

competent mathematics teacher at the grammar school and in the force field
of comprehensive authority in the figure of the Waldorf teacher (ibid.).
Furthermore, considerations of educational theory recur by means of de-
constructivist references to the principally opaque, context-related, and
derived character of authority, whose origin cannot be determined, and which
thus cannot be justified (Wimmer, 2009). In this respect, pedagogical author-
ity is in a constant crisis and the current crisis scenarios can be read as a ‘crisis
of crisis’ (Reichenbach, 2011, p. 34).
The empirical studies in the German-speaking educational science dis-
course of pedagogical authority refer in particular to Max Weber’s consider-
ations but limit themselves to the interpersonal character of pedagogical
authority. Although the power of spatial arrangements, material props and
bodily practices is reflected in educational discourse, the interplay, overlaps,
and ruptures of the performative power of the spatial, material, and bodily
elements of pedagogical practice have only recently been focussed on in eth-
nographic studies.
The materiality and performativity of pedagogical authority co-determined
by bodily exercise, observation, and examination in power-knowledge com-
plexes as well as by practical recognition, which is generated and structured by
the habitus, require further reflection and investigation in educational sci-
ence. Through lenses, inspired by practice theory, educational investigations
note the historical character of power relations and fields and the power of
practical knowledge—in critical following and reflecting Bourdieu’s and
Foucault’s legacy. This can be executed in an undogmatic and doubly critical
manner, both inspired by a critique of domination and at the same time
remains sceptical of the resounding impacts of pedagogical power techniques
and practices, paying attention to both the dynamic relations between socio-
material and performative factors of pedagogical practice and the dynamic
relations between the pedagogical sector and other fields of power.

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 Part III
Body, Sociality and Learning

The human body is a social body: it learns through relating to other human
beings and testimonies of their culture. As soon as a child is born, from the
experience of birth onwards the child’s complete and lasting dependence on
other people is clear. From an early age our survival depends on other people
and, furthermore, on the community. Something that is often overlooked is
the fact that learning is more than an individual and fully governed process.
This is especially true of mimetic processes in which children begin to discover
the world. In these early processes, the body plays a central part.
Performativity, that is how cultural and social actions are staged and per-
formed, plays an important role in the success of mimetic processes. These
involve a productive imitation of the outside world in the form of other peo-
ple and cultural and social phenomena (Birgit Althans [Chap. 13]). In the
performativity of actions, corporeality, the event character of actions and the
cultural nature of dealing with the materiality of things are expressed. In the
performativity of actions, we find more than the mere realization of the inten-
tions that lie behind them. The quality and effect of actions depend on how
people use their bodies, what physical distance they keep, what stances they
adopt and what gestures they use. In conclusion, it can be said that performa-
tivity denotes the execution of a speech act (Austin), the ostentatious activity
of an individual (Goffman), the power of discourse in the constitution of
gender (Butler), the creation of the social world in rituals and gestures (Berlin
Study on Rituals and Gestures), and the aesthetic effect of artistic perfor-
mances. Through language alone the performativity of social action does not
lead to the experience of alterity. Althans analyses the role of the performativ-
ity of actions in the context of gender formation and focuses aspects of the
210 Body, Sociality and Learning

new materialism. ‘Learning by doing’ is examined as a performative practice

of embodiment.
Since pedagogy is a practical science, the practical knowledge and the per-
formativity acquired in mimetic processes play an important part in the edu-
cation of the next generation of children (Léonard Loew [Chap. 14]). The
interaction of body, consciousness and society results in the formation of an
individual’s identity. This forms the matrix for the way the individual sees the
world and humanity. Mimetic and performative processes make us familiar
with what is foreign to us, that is with the alterity of the world. Processes of
incorporation are initiated by physical desire, instincts and feelings. What
emerges is a somatic understanding of otherness that can only be partially
explained by language and that shows the importance of implicit knowledge
for social action. Thus, we appropriate the world not by the use of words but
by through techniques of our bodies. The repetition of social actions in cer-
tain social situations leads to the development of a habitus, which creates
coherence and similarity in mimetic social actions. In this appropriation pro-
cess, what is foreign to us becomes transferred into our inner world in a man-
ner that is determined by the habitus. The result is the gradual formation of
structures of both individual and collective identity.
On the basis of similar insights, Chap. 15 focuses on gender as embodi-
ment. In the practices of daily life gender-specific behaviour is learnt,
expressed, repeated and incorporated. Anja Tervooren shows how the embodi-
ment of gender starts in early childhood. Not only the characteristics of gen-
der are specific to each phase of life but also the social gender relations
transform during the life span. Especially to highlight is the physical depen-
dency of children. Enactments of gender and the analysis of gender hierar-
chies in society are done in dichotomous or in ambiguous terms. Tervooren
presents deconstructive approaches of gender research to analyse forms of the
embodiment of gender as empirical phenomena. She demonstrates the com-
plexity and the interweaving of differences and argues for gender research in
the framework of educational anthropology, in which gender as embodiment
is conceived as concern with the development of children.
Tatiana Shchyttsova in Chap. 16 illustrates the complexity of physical expe-
riences by looking at relationships between adults and children. She rejects
two common interpretations of this asymmetry: the presupposition of the
child’s immaturity combined with subordination, and the ideal of the ‘spon-
taneous natural creativity of the child, free from conventional social norma-
tivity’. She rejects both ideas and the corresponding pedagogical concepts as
being subject-centred thinking. Instead, she highlights the ‘being-with-one
 Body, Sociality and Learning 211

another’ of the adult and child and explains their ‘intriguing relatedness’ in
terms of emotions, using anxiety as an example. The child’s anxiety relates to
being faced with options that are as yet unknown. ‘Pedagogy as a science arises
out of the adult’s primary, pre-scientific concern about how to bring up chil-
dren.’ Pre-reflexive trust on the side of the child corresponds with patience on
the adult’s side. Shchyttsova draws the consequence: ‘It is the child’s being-in-
touch with the poetic that allows the child not to lose existential balance and
productive openness in his or her anxiously-curious state of mind’.
Anja Kraus in Chap. 17 investigates the idea that all humans are equal in
fundamental worth or moral status. This is expressed in the principle of ‘egali-
tarian difference’, according to which culture is conveyed less by cultural
authorities than by persons. Individuals are seen as recipients, as well as agents
of culture. An individual carries out culture with his/her unique blend of
experiences, perspectives and backgrounds, and culture links the innate dis-
positions of a person to his/her outer personality, and to generic potentialities
and specific performances. Corporeality, the body and embodiment as well as
historically created systems of meaning play a central role here. Involved are
not least challenges by alterity, violence and ‘the differend’ (Lyotard) as inte-
gral aspects of culture. As pedagogy is about enabling the young to eventually
take ownership of their learning and their lives, it is also about enabling them
to deal with the menacing experiences of alterity, violence and ‘the differend’.
In this contribution, the principle of egalitarian difference, as well as histori-
cally created systems of meaning, are presented as possible approaches to deal
with cultural difference in some of its facets.
We see through these chapters how body-based processes facilitate appro-
priation and esteem of the foreign, as well as a detachment from it. It is
through these processes that the conceptual world and the practical knowl-
edge of individuals are formed. For these processes to succeed, their body-
based performative aspects are essential. Instincts, desire, emotions and body
techniques all play an important role. Uniqueness and alterity are interwoven
in the learning individual and their corporeality.
 The Performativity of Learning
Birgit Althans

The complex process of learning, described in terms of neurophysiology and

cognitive science, is seen as the interconnection of certain muscular and motor
actions of the limbs of the learning body with the brain areas, neurons and
synapses responsible for them.—Theories on learning hardly fall within the
remit of educational science after the end of the twentieth century, but rather
within that of psychology or the neurosciences. After the corona pandemic in
2020–2021 revealed the need to catch up in the digital organization of knowl-
edge transfer, the subdisciplines of educational science, school pedagogy, teach-
ing science and didactics are currently dealing with the intensified organization
of the provision of learning environments and multi-media ‘learning settings’
in order to organize the daily routines of knowledge transfer as free of disrup-
tions as possible. The fact that this is not yet entirely successful from a media-
didactic point of view becomes apparent by the increasing number of children
and young people who use YouTube tutorials privately to help them with their
schoolwork. So, what has a performative effect on learning in the twenty-first
century? The techniques of teaching? Digital technologies or the mediating
bodily practices in learning situations? Or is it rather the interplay, the inter-
twining of digital technology and learning bodies, the use of knowledge scan-
ning and mediating technology or the bodies that absorb and process the
knowledge? “The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself—all

B. Althans (*)
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
e-mail: Birgit.Althans@kunstakademie-duesseldorf.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 213
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_13
214 B. Althans

can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways”

(Haraway, 2016a, p. 33). But even the bodies, according to Haraway, are now
generated with their needs by the technologies themselves: “Communications
technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies”
(Haraway, 2016a, p. 33). For postmodern biology, according to Haraway,
bodies are no more than organic-technological artefacts, biomedically repair-
able, neuroscientifically conditionally programmable:

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the differ-

ence between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and exter-
nally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and
machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly
inert. (Haraway, 2016a, p. 37)

Nevertheless, not only technologies but also human bodies act actively,
performatively in these environments dominated by (learning) technologies,
generating themselves, their materiality and difference from others again and
again in the processes of their processual ‘becoming’.
In its presentation of the performativity of learning, this article refers on
the one hand to classical concepts of the performative, but perspectively—
with a view to learning in increasingly digitally shaped lifeworlds—it incorpo-
rates approaches from Donna Haraway’s and Karen Barad’s feminist
philosophy of science and New Materialism (Barad, 2003), which assumes a
reciprocal performativity of human and non-human bodies.

If performativity is linked not only to the formation of the subject but also to
the production of the matter of bodies, as Butler’s account of ‘materializationʼ
and Haraway’s notion of ‘materialized refiguration’ suggest, then it is all the
more important that we understand the nature of this production. […] All bod-
ies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative
intra-activity—its performativity. (Barad, 2003, pp. 808, 823)

By all means reference is made to the breadth of theories of the

performative:

Indeed, performativity has become a ubiquitous term in literary studies, theater

studies, and the nascent interdisciplinary area of performance studies, prompt-
ing the question as to whether all performances are performative. […] I propose
a specifically posthumanist notion of performativity—one that incorporates
important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman,
and natural and cultural factors. (Barad, 2003, p. 808)
 The Performativity of Learning 215

On the other hand, this assumption of a reciprocal performativity of human

and non-human bodies is supposed to be illustrated using classical educa-
tional theories as well. Here, also, the article follows approaches of New
Materialism and its reception practice of a ‘diffractive methodology’ (Barad,
2013, p. 60), which advocates a respectful ‘thinking through each other’ of
different disciplinary approaches and knowledge practices that are not nor-
mally thought together. This is done especially in relation to the formula—
usually attributed to John Dewey—that almost imposes itself in regard to the
performative: ‘learning by doing’.
Surprisingly, Donna Haraway’s trenchant, ironic, late twentieth-century
analyses of a society on the verge of closely intertwining artificial and natural
intelligence, artificial and natural body parts, set out in her Cyborg Manifesto
(Haraway, 2016a), can be linked surprisingly well with the no less ironically
formulated positions of the philosopher of education John Dewey at the
beginning of the twentieth century, which he set out in Democracy and
Education (2004). He, too, addressed the handling of learning, knowledge-
consuming and knowledge-producing bodies in the educational and teaching
apparatuses of the schools he examined at the beginning of the twentieth
century. After the presentation of the performativity inherent in ‘learning by
doing’ (1), the performativity of learning will be differentiated by means of
two further examples of physical learning: Learning in the entanglement with
other species (2) and learning as a bodily experience of immersion into other
elements, in swimming and in imaginary and digital worlds (3)

1 Learning by Doing—Performativity
of Learning
The formula ‘learning by doing’, mostly attributed to the American educa-
tional philosopher John Dewey, can almost be used as a definition of the
concept of the performative: That one learns by doing, performing, practically
trying something out. Dewey used the formula extremely sparingly and rela-
tively late, a total of 11 times in the text Schools of Tomorrow (Dewey & Dewey,
1915), written together with his daughter Evelyn Dewey, and in a brief refer-
ence in Democracy and Education (2004). In his very detailed overview, From
Aristotle to Dewey. Vom Ursprung der Maxime ‘Learning by doing’ (2011),
Michael Knoll reconstructs the long genealogy of the formula, which can be
traced as an adaptation and translation practice from Aristotle via Comenius
and Friedrich Fröbel to the discourse production of the New Education,
216 B. Althans

Kindergarten and Progressive Education movements in North America in the

nineteenth and first half of twentieth centuries. Aristotle laid the foundation
of the formula in the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he stated his conviction
that virtuous, ethical behaviour and professional skill were rather learned
through practical (re-)doing, than through simple (theoretical) instruction:

For that which we must do after we have done it, we learn by doing it. Thus, by
building one becomes a builder, and by playing the zither one becomes a zither
player. (Aristotle., 1985, p. 27f., [author’s translation])

This describes for physical-practical actions in situations of learning or

instruction what the English philosopher of language John L. Austin stated
for use of language in 1961 in How to Do Things with Words: Even through
speech, when properly contextually framed, actions, acts are performed,
meanings are established. Austin called this process performing, performative.
The term, Austin said, “comes, of course, from ‘to perform’: one ‘performs’
actions. It is meant to imply that one who makes such an utterance is thereby
performing an action” (Austin, 1979, p. 27f.). At the centre of Austin’s con-
cept, then, is the focus on practical performance, in which concrete meaning
becomes visible: “by saying something, we do something” (Austin, 1979,
p. 33). For example, Donald Trump’s infamous “You are fired”, often uttered
both in the TV series The Apprentice and during his time as US president, is,
when uttered by a person endowed with institutional power to a person who
can be fired, a speech act that performs an action: The person thus addressed
is then in effect dismissed. The speech act is therefore about saying something
in a coherent context in front of an audience, in front of spectators or in front
of listeners, about performing an action in front of their eyewitnesses.
Therefore, in teaching-learning situations, in classical face-to-face teaching,
there are always performances in front of an audience. A school class consti-
tutes itself performatively new by saying its greetings: “Good morning, Mr/
Mrs …” and “Good morning, class …”, acts of demonstrating knowledge or
not-knowing by pupils become assessed performances through teachers’ com-
ments in front of class. Thus, if a situation of pedagogical instruction, or a
teaching-learning situation as outlined by Aristotle on the basis of building or
playing the zither, is regarded as a speech act, then it is split into a linguistic
and bodily consummation that is perceived as intertwined in the action itself.
Austin would emphasize the differently framed speech acts in learning situa-
tions, Aristotle the importance of bodily accomplishment, the ‘embodiment’
of knowledge acquisition. In this, the aforementioned focus on something
that was only explicitly articulated in the arts in Europe and the USA in
 The Performativity of Learning 217

performance art since the 1960s and 1970s. The theatre scholar Mayte
Zimmermann describes the focus on ‘performance’, the physical action, from
the perspective of theatre pedagogy:

a radical shift towards the performance of actual (physical) actions in a public

setting. What moves into the focus of the scenic event with these works is not
the meaning-bearing, but rather the meaning-generating or simply sensual
dimension of a scenic event as such, which is no longer measured by its func-
tioning (‘right/wrong’). (Zimmermann, 2020, [author’s translation])

Aristotle, and subsequently Comenius, Fröbel and, albeit in a limited way,

Dewey, did something similar with regard to pedagogical situations, empha-
sizing the importance of bodily action for learning, which will be shown later.
The philosopher Sybille Krämer points out that Plato, too, in his Socratic
dialogues, emphasized the importance of the physical accomplishment of
knowledge. The dialogues themselves represent a physical performance of the
staging of a pedagogically framed question-answer game, an obviously physi-
cally performed knowledge, presented in the form of a theatrical dialogue. For
Plato, as George Steiner pointed out in Lessons of the Master, had begun his
career as a dramatist (Steiner, 2004, p. 33). Plato also emphasizes the impor-
tance of physical comprehension in relation to mathematical knowledge, as
the philosopher Sibylle Krämer shows in her analysis of a famous example
from the dialogue Menon:

That mathematical knowledge can be acquired through one’s own activity is

demonstrated by the Menon scene. Socrates draws a square in the sand and a
slave boy is given the task of doubling it. In the first attempt, the boy doubles
one side and then sees from the resulting square that this is wrong because it is
too big. The next step of extending the side by half a distance also proves to be
wrong because—as can easily be seen from the drawing—a square much too
large is still created. The boy gets into an aporia, he confesses to not knowing his
way around. Finally, after several attempts, he finds the solution, which is to
build the square on the diagonal of the initial square, which then actually has
twice the area. […] In the course of his graphic experiments, the boy not only
develops a positive knowledge, but can also—in the first step—learn about his
ignorance, his error. What he finally acquires is a ‘knowledge of how’, a know-
how of how to perform the square mediation geometrically. Moreover, it is
revealing that Socrates actually compares this ‘knowledge how’ with a spatial
knowledge of movement, namely with knowing ‘the way to Larissa’. (Plato,
1990, cited in Krämer, 2018, p. 26, [author’s translation])
218 B. Althans

Krämer concludes from this that Plato thus not only introduces the ‘con-
ception of knowledge as wayfinding’ into philosophy but also emphasizes the
importance of the ‘embodiment of knowledge’, that it is precisely

the sensualisation of the senseless, the concretion of the abstract, the embodi-
ment of ideal objects, which constitute the artifice and analytical potential of
scientific—and precisely also philosophical—knowledge. (Krämer, 2018, p. 28,
[author’s translation])

But, once again back to Aristotle’s example, who relates his description of
learning to more manual arts, such as building and playing the zither, who,
however, in his description of learning to build, underestimates the part that
‘non-human actors’ have in the learning process: The materials involved in
building, such as sand, stone or wood, or the zither involved in playing the
zither, also have an influence on learning in their materiality and also have a
performative effect: “All bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter
through the world’s iterative intra-activity—its performativity” (Barad, 2003,
p. 823).
Aristotle’s focus on the physical process of learning was taken up again by
Johann Amos Comenius in his Didactica Magna (1657) in the section
‘Method for the Arts’:

Activity should be learned through activity. Craftsmen do not stop their appren-
tices by contemplation, but lead them immediately to work, so that they learn
forging by forging, sculpting by sculpting, painting by painting, dancing by
dancing. Therefore, in the schools, writing should be learned by writing, speak-
ing by speaking, singing by singing, arithmetic by arithmetic. (Comenius, 1982,
p. 142, [author’s translation])

In the US, this was first expressed as ‘learning by doing’ by Henry Barnard
in the Journal of Education in the nineteenth century:

Each study should be learned by practice; writing by writing, singing by singing,

etc. The master must perform the thing before the scholar, without tiresome
explanation. […] Rules should not be given without examples. Artisans under-
stand this well. None of them would give their apprentice a lecture upon this
trade, but would show him how he, the master, went about it, and then would
put the tools into his hands, and show him how to do the like and to imitate
himself. Doing can be only learned by doing, writing by writing, painting by
painting. (Comenius, 1858, pp. 266; 290)
 The Performativity of Learning 219

In further translations of Comenius, the formula is repeated and con-

densed: “Let things that have to be done be learned by doing them” (Laurie,
1881, p. 116). The often over-complex formulations of the German kinder-
garten inventor Friedrich Froebel and his theory of learning through the
materiality of play—according to Knoll, the third strand of the genealogy of
the ‘learning by doing’ formula—also became ‘education by doing’ and ‘chil-
dren learn by doing’ in the extremely successful American adaptation of
Froebel’s kindergarten movement, which was pushed by the women’s move-
ment as early as the 1880s (cf. Knoll, 2011, p. 5). In the American translation,
Froebel’s complex theory of ‘human education’ (1982) is so abridged that it
made kindergarten education downright ‘mainstream’ in cultural discourse.
Froebel’s ‘learning by doing’ in kindergarten became so popular that the
inventor of the ‘skyscraper’, the American architect Louis Sullivan, who was
also Frank Lloyd Wright’s teacher, titled his teaching instructions to young
architects, written in the form of fictional Socratic dialogues, Kindergarten
Chats (Sullivan, 1979). In his memoirs, Frank Lloyd Wright also emphasizes
the influence that the physical exercise and playing with Fröbel’s ‘materials’
had on his later artistic development:

My mother learned from Froebel that children must not draw according to the
random manifestations of nature until they have mastered the basic forms lying
behind those manifestations. First, cosmic and geometric elements had to be
made visible to the child’s mind. […] For several years I sat at the small kinder-
garten table, over which longitudinal and transverse lines were drawn at inter-
vals of ten centimetres, so that squares of ten centimetres were formed, there I
played, among other things, on these ‘unit lines’ with the square (cube), the
circle (sphere) and the triangle (tetrahedron or tripod)—they were smooth
maple blocks. Scarlet cardboard triangles (60°–30°), five centimetres long on the
short side, with white undersides, were smooth triangular sectors with which I
could lay patterns—make designs—according to my own imagination.
Eventually I had to make designs with other means. But the smooth cardboard
triangles and maple blocks were most important. Even today I can feel them in
my fingers. (Wright, 1966, p. 15f, [author’s translation])

Here Wright retrospectively describes something that John Dewey was to

work out in his use of the formula ‘learning by doing’: The importance of
cognitive reflection on the practical experience of physically carrying out the
learning process! Like Haraway, Dewey frames his observations of the school
system of his time quite ironically. In particular, he problematizes the constant
suppression of students’ bodily needs in the classroom situation.
220 B. Althans

The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having
fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. Something which is
called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity. The
former it then thought to be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an
irrelevant and intruding physical factor. (Dewey, 2004, p. 152)

At the same time, Dewey refers to the physical basis of all learning processes:

For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his mind. And the
body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it has to do something. (Dewey,
2004, p. 153)

Knowledge is absorbed with the body, but at the same time this body
repeatedly causes interruptions and irritations in the teaching situation, its
suppressed energies make students and teachers alike nervous. In the school
context, the body and its organs are regarded merely as ‘tools’ for the acquisi-
tion of knowledge:

Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned by the appli-
cation of ‘mind’, some bodily activities have to be used. The senses—especially
the eye and the ear—have to be employed to take in what the book, the map,
the blackboard, and the teacher say. The lips and vocal organs, and the hands,
have to be used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been stowed away.
The senses are then regarded as a kind of mysterious conduit through which
information is conducted from the external world into the mind; they are spo-
ken of as gateways and avenues of knowledge. (Dewey, 2004, p. 154)

Here it becomes apparent that Dewey, unlike his classical predecessors

Plato and Aristotle cited above, also sees the significance of ‘things’—in
Haraway’s and Barad’s understanding of the ‘non-human actors’—in situa-
tions of learning. In learning situations, he sees interplay with the sensory
organs of the body, also conceived as tools, in reciprocal performativity.
Although Dewey refers to the formula ‘learning by doing’ when he formu-
lates: “Experience is primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cog-
nitive” (Dewey, 2004, p. 152), something else is central to his theory of
education. In order to come to cognition, to the experience of thinking, which
he defines as “the discernment of the relation between what we try to do and
what happens in consequence” (Dewey, 2004, p. 157), it takes more than the
practical performance of an action. For him, the processual, unfinished think-
ing, the accomplishment of ‘thinking research’, seems to constitute the essence
of the learning process: “thinking is a process of inquiry, of looking into
 The Performativity of Learning 221

things, of investigating” (Dewey, 2004, p. 160f.). He relates this to the con-

ceptual history of learning:

The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we learn? For either we know
already what we are after, or else we do not know. In neither case is learning
possible; on the first alternative because we know already; on the second, because
we do not know what to look for, nor if, by chance we find it can we tell that it
is what we were after. […] Nevertheless, the twilight zone of inquiry, of think-
ing, exists. The possibility of hypothetical conclusion, of tentative results, is the
fact which the Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the situation sug-
gest certain ways out. We try these ways, and either push our way out, in which
case we know we have found what we were looking for, or the situation gets
darker and more confused—in which case we know we are still ignorant.
Tentative means trying out, feeling one’s way along provisionally. (Dewey,
2004, p. 161)

For Dewey, the ‘thinking experience’ or the ‘experience of thinking’ that is

central to learning arises at the moment when everyday routines and certain-
ties—as in the Menon example cited above—are shaken and real reflection
becomes necessary. This in turn initiates a different process of (bodily-sensory-
motorical) action and thought, both of which Dewey sees as constitutive of
learning in their interconnectedness. Asked in, 1949, on his 90th birthday,
about the formula ‘learning by doing’, Dewey replied:

I don't believe people learn merely by doing. The main points are the ideas that
a man puts into his doing. Unintelligently doing will result in his learning the
wrong thing. (Fine, 1949, p. 31)

Following this, two further perspectives on the performativity of learning

will be described.

2 Entanglements: The Performativity

of Learning With and From Others
Philosophical anthropology likes to cite the premature birth of humans and
the associated dependence on others as the reason for the ability to learn; or
the imageability of humans and the impetus for human sociality. In his
extremely popular evolutionary history A Brief History of Humankind (Harari,
2011), the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari describes the special neediness
of human mammals compared to other species:
222 B. Althans

[C]ompared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of

their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A colt can trot shortly after birth; a
kitten leaves its mother to forage on its own when it is just a few weeks old.
Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for suste-
nance, protection and education. […] Raising children required constant help
from other family members and neighbors. It takes a tribe to raise a human.
Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition,
since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialized to
a far greater extent than any other animal. (Harari, 2011, p. 11)

The resulting malleability or imageability of the human being in depen-

dence on recognition by others is described by Hegel in his Phenomenology of
Spirit as the master-servant paradox (Hegel, 1998). Judith Butler reads Hegel’s
famous scene about the emergence of human self-consciousness, the ‘struggle
for recognition’, as an educational novel, even as an educational journey, an
optimistic narrative of adventure and edification, a pilgrimage of the spirit
(Butler, 2012), which she also finds receivable as a theatrical production.

Hegel’s provisional scenes, the stage of self-certainty, the struggle for recogni-
tion, the dialectic of lord and bondsman, are instructive fictions, ways of orga-
nizing the world which prove to be too limited to satisfy the subject’s desire to
discover itself as substance. (Butler, 2012, p. 21)

She goes even further: Hegel’s descriptions of the subjects ‘tragic blindness’
in becoming a subject remind her in their predictability of comic scenes:

Like such miraculously resilient characters of the Saturday morning cartoons,

Hegel’s protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare a new scene, enter
the stage armed with a new set of ontological insights—and fail again. (Butler,
2012, p. 21)

An undoubtedly performative reading of the Hegelian master-servant para-

dox! Butler made the concept of the performative extremely popular through
her analysis of the emergence of gender identities in Gender Trouble (Butler,
1990): She described the emergence of gender identity as an entanglement of
speech act—‘That’s a girl’—and physical performance of social gender iden-
tity of the subjects themselves. It is precisely this treatment of the performa-
tive by Butler, as well as her theory of materiality, that is criticized by Karen
Barad and Donna Haraway’s New Materialism as being too limited “on the
materialization of ‘human’ bodies” (Barad, 2003, p. 825). For Barad’s concep-
tion of the performative has to be applied: “All bodies, not merely human
 The Performativity of Learning 223

bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity—its perfor-

mativity” (Barad, 2003, pp. 808; 823).
Moreover, according to Donna Haraway, taking her perspective on evolu-
tionary theory and pedagogies, we acquire knowledge not only from other
humans but also from other species. She links her earlier analyses of technology-
based entanglements of human and non-human actors to learning experi-
ences with other ‘companion species’, in her case with dogs. Haraway starts
her view of learning from others by looking at her early cyborg text, from the
perspective of technocultures.

In the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, I tried to write a surrogacy agreement, a trope, a

figure for living within and honoring the skills and practices of contemporary
technoculture without losing touch with the permanent war apparatus of a
nonoptional, postnuclear world and its transcendent, very material lies.
Cyborgs can be figures for living with contradictions, attentive to the nature-
cultures of mundane practices. […] However, cyborg reconfigurations hardly
exhaust the tropic work required for ontological choreography in technosci-
ence. I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer
family of companion species. (Haraway, 2016b, p. 102f.)

For Haraway, Companion Species means more than Companion Animals:

Companion animals can be dogs, horses, cats or other beings willing to make the
leap to the biosociality of service-dogs, family members or team members in cross-
country sports. Generally speaking one does not eat one’s companion animals (or
get eaten by them); and one has a hard time shaking colonist, ethnocentric, ahis-
torical attitudes towards those who do (eat or get eaten). (Haraway, 2016b, p. 106)

With the concept of ‘companion species’, she is more concerned with cast-
ing a common—human and non-human—perspective on living conditions
in technocultures and thereby also benefiting from the vitality, the different
sensory abilities and sensitivities of other species:

I take interpellation from the French poststructuralist and Marxist philosopher

Louis Althusser’s theory for how subjects are constituted from concrete indi-
viduals by being ‘hailed’ through ideology into their subject positions in the
modern state. Today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives,
animals ‘hail’ us into account for the regimes in which they and we must live.
We ‘hail’ them into our constructs of nature and culture, with major conse-
quences of life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction. We also
live with each other in the flesh in ways not exhausted by our ideologies.
(Haraway, 2016b, p. 108f.)
224 B. Althans

Haraway provides a very vivid example from her personal environment:

The joint ‘training’ of her godson Marco and her dog puppy Cayenne, which
at the same time points to the great importance of the performative framing
of teaching-learning situations. Both dog and child are ‘educated’ at the same
time. They learn together, as does the observer:

Like many of her breed, Cayenne was a smart and willing youngster, a natural
to obedience games. Like many of his generation raised on high-speed visual
special effects and automated cyborg toys, Marco was a bright and motivated
trainer, a natural to control games. […] Entranced, Marci at first treated her like
a microchip-implanted truck for which he held the remote controls. He punched
an imaginary button; his puppy magically fulfilled the intentions of his omnip-
otent, remote will. […] I, an obsessive adult who came of the age in the com-
munes of the late, 1960s, was committed to the ideals of intersubjectivity and
mutuality in all things, certainly including dog and boy training. […] Marco
was at the same time taking karate lessons, and he was profoundly in love with
his karate master: this fine man understood the children’s love of drama, ritual,
and costume, as well as the mental-spiritual-bodily discipline of his martial art.
Respect was the word and the act that Marco ecstatically told me about from his
lessons. He swooned at the chance to collect his small, robed self into the pre-
scribed posture and bow formally to his mater or his partner before performing
a form. Calming his turbulent first-grade self and meeting the eyes of his teacher
or his partner in preparation for demanding, stylized action thrilled him. Hey,
was I going to let an opportunity like that go unused in my pursuit for compan-
ion species flourishing? ‘Marco’, I said. ‘Cayenne is not a cyborg truck; she is
your partner in a martial art called obedience. You have learned how to perform
respect with your body and your eyes. Your job is to teach the form to Cayenne.
Until you can find a way to collect her galloping puppy self calmly and to sit
still, you cannot let her perform the ‘sit’ command. (Haraway, 2016b, p. 132f.)

What Haraway shows here is not only a productive interplay of different spe-
cies and generations, the interlocking effectiveness of different cultural values
and performative framings of a teaching-learning situation. She also presents
her conviction of the great importance of learning from and with other species:

It is also my belief that as he learned to show her the corporeal posture of cross-
species respect, she and he became significant others for each other. (Haraway,
2016b, p. 134)

Me, the author, experienced a similarly productive interplay of learning

when riding, together with the ‘companion species’ horse with which
 The Performativity of Learning 225

humanity shares a long stretch of its evolutionary history (Raulff, 2014). I was
lucky enough to be taken into the lessons of a well-known cross-country-rider
as a teenager. Here, together with the horses I trained and moved there, I was
always seen as part of an inseparable ‘structure’ by glances from outside. The
horses and I were, each separately, in the process of ‘becoming’. We were
‘nothing yet’, we were in training, in which we could only ‘become some-
thing’ in the eyes of the riding instructor if both sides made the necessary
effort. Horse-and-me were only perceived together, in the ritual staging and
performance of our joint learning in the riding lesson. When moving together
in the riding situation, ‘horse-and-me’ formed a ‘through-one-another-
through’ (Barad, 2013, p. 60) swinging unity in the joint forward movement:

Through their reaching into each other, through their ‘prehensions’ or grasp-
ings, beings constitute each other and themselves. Beings do not preexist their
relatings. (Haraway, 2016b, p. 98)

In the movement itself, ‘horse-and-me’ had different parts in the common

movement, which, however, changed both of us in every common hour,
formed our corporeality, and constantly (formed) in our respective individu-
ality as human and non-human actors.
However, according to the last thesis, we cannot only learn from other spe-
cies, but also from other elements.

3 Learning as a Physical Experience

of the Other: Immersion into
the Other Element
Something that is mentioned repeatedly in the context of ‘learning by doing’
is swimming. It is used again and again as a strong metaphor for learning a
skill or practice that has to be learnt immediately, performed immediately.
Already Dewey’s predecessors used it:

We learn to do a thing, by doing it, […] I learned how to fall into the pond, the
other day, by falling in; but I learned at the same time how to swim. That is the
way, he [the director of the school] says, to learn everything; by being pushed in,
as the little birds are pushed out of their nests to learn to fly. You can't learn to
swim without going into the water. (Brooks, 1882, p. 243)
226 B. Althans

Dewey points out in Democracy and Education that one cannot learn to
swim on dry land. John Maddox, one of his students and a curriculum expert,
explains this again:

As Professor Dewey insists, we learn to swim by swimming in water, not on a

bench in practice; to talk by talking to people about things that interest us and
them; we think by solving our own problems, not by exercises in logic; we acquire
skill as we work, not by preliminary formal exercise. (Maddox, 1924, p. 149)

The special thing about learning to swim is the associated immersion in

another element. The American digital media professor Janet H. Murray used
this metaphor to describe the experience of entering virtual reality simula-
tions, digital gaming practices, at the end of the twentieth century.

The experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasur-

able in itself, regardless of the fantasy content. Immersion is a metaphorical
term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek
the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a
plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a
completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our
attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. (Murray, 1997, p. 98f.)

That is why the passionate swimmer, author and playwright John von
Düffel focuses precisely on this very physical moment of immersion, the expe-
rience of the ‘performative materiality’ (Barad, 2003) of another element:

Whoever goes into the water must master a transition that should not be under-
estimated, a transformation from the solid to the liquid, from the reliable to the
unpredictable, from one form of existence to another. (Von Düffel, 2016, p. 16,
[author’s translation])

Although he was a competitive swimmer in his youth and has been in the
water almost every day of his life since then, the foreign, the materially quite
different element still frightens him. Von Düffel understands his physical
respect for exposing himself to this element while swimming as a transforma-
tional experience in which his body entrusts itself to the materiality of the
other element. Together, water and body create a new movement:

Every swimmer knows that. He knows that from the moment he dives in, he is
alone with the water, and he can only hope that it will carry him. He knows that
he has to summon up all his willpower in order to survive in this element, and
 The Performativity of Learning 227

he also knows that this is not enough. Ultimately, it is thanks to the favour of
the water that this will is transformed into movement and he glides through the
pool with swift, supple strokes, as if there were no resistance between the water
and his movement, as if swimming and being swum were one. (Von Düffel,
2002, [author’s translation])

Von Düffel compares this transformational option with the process of writ-
ing. This, too, resembles immersion in another element and must be carried
out physically.

In the beginning there is always immersion, the change from one familiar ele-
ment to another, foreign one. I were lying if I said it didn't cost me any effort at
all. On the contrary. Entering the world of water or a story always means saying
goodbye to the life one is living at the moment. And this farewell is not always
easy. Often you have to tear yourself away from the people and comforts that
surround you. There are many things one would rather do, because the element
of swimming and writing knows no more considerations from the moment of
immersion. One is at its mercy, completely and utterly. (Von Düffel, 2002,
p. 11, [author’s translation])

Similar to what Haraway described for the interaction with the ‘companion
species’, obviously the bodily experience of surrendering the floating body(ies)
to the very other element can enable an experience of thinking that Dewey
already described: “It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand”
(Dewey, 2004, p. 161) and: “the discernment of the relation between what we
try to do and what happens in consequence” (Dewey, 2004, p. 157). Even
when swimming in water, ‘learning by doing’ becomes performative. It
remains important to note: Learning results from the shared, reciprocal per-
formativity of non-human (water) and human (body) materiality. “Through
their reaching into each other, through their ‘prehensions’ or graspings, beings
constitute each other and themselves” (Haraway, 2016b, p. 98).

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Barad, K. (2013). Diffraktionen: Differenzen, Kontingenzen und Verschränkungen von
Gewicht. LIT Verlag.
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Brooks, B. A. (1882). Those Children and Their Teacher. Putnam.

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 The Embodied Other: Mimetic-Empathic
Encorporations
Léonard Loew

1 Introduction
In the following article, the processes of socialization and education are to be
shown as genuinely physical in a mimetic-empathic sense. The socialization of
the individual is ensured through the embodiment of the concrete others (in
representation of the general others), namely: through the mimetic incorpora-
tion of observed and imitated or appropriated body expressions. This includes
both, the pure body behavior and the somatic emotional correlates/semantics.
For this purpose, various theoretical elements should be used, including the
theory of body techniques by Mauss, Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, psy-
choanalytic considerations on ‘introjection’ and the mimesis concept. All
these theories show in addition to the meaningful aspects of mimetic-empathic
embodiments also their power-shaped character. Anthropological consider-
ations on the vitality and emotionality of the body as well as on the embodi-
ment of empathy serve to reveal the connection between (intermediate)
corporeality, imagination/simulation and social rituality/gestures.
The concept of the soma (German: Leib) is used here for the subjectively
perceptible body sensations, in contrast to the body (German: Körper). A
body is visible (e.g. in the mirror), e.g. in relation to the bodies of others

L. Loew (*)
Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany
e-mail: leonard.loew@htwsaar.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 229
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_14
230 L. Loew

(which one perceives as material-spatially founded objects). Robert Gugutzer

(2006, p. 4538) illustrates this difference as follows:

For example, the body of a blind person who walks down the street with his
cane ends at the hand with which he leads his cane. The soma of the blind per-
son extends beyond this bodily limit, namely to the end of the stick with which
he feels resistance on the ground.1

2 The Other
The other is always part of one’s own identity as far as the ego is originally
decentered, toward the social, in the form of the other. Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann (1967) therefore locate personal identity at the intersec-
tion of body, consciousness and society. Maurice Merleau-Ponty goes on the
search for traces of the other, who is neither only in things, nor in his body.
Therefore, according to Merleau-Ponty (1984), there is nowhere to accom-
modate the other; in fact, we are not settling him anywhere; he is nowhere
and at the same time always there, as a silent partner and guest inside, from
behind he slides into my perception. In this sense, Emmanuel Lévinas (1969)
describes the other as transcendence, which bursts open the ego by ruling over
me. Via his living in the ‘other’, a (social) processual decenteration and plural-
ization of the ego takes place throughout life, which at the same time gains its
identity. Because the other also has an original access to the world, he doubles
the problem of contingency (which can be described as the anthropological
cornerstone), because he could experience everything differently than I and I
can, therefore, become radically insecure (Luhmann, 1979). In this sense, the
other functions as the social antithesis of the individual, from whom the latter
draws its existence in an act of dialectical entanglement. The other is a mold-
ering underground, often unconsciously, in the form of a calming commu-
nity, but also as a disquieting difference, “as a subject at my back who (co-)
constitute my world” (Angehrn, 1999, p. 50).
In this sense, it is to speak of an identity-for-others, whereby the others,
according to Ronald D. Laing (1973) and his colleagues, are representing a
kind of identity construction kit of the ego. Each individual resembles a poly-
phonic jumble of voices that, in its deepest depths, drowns out, confuses and

1
For a more detailed reflection of this difference, see Lindemann (1996) and Gugutzer (2002); on the
phenomenology of corporeality, see Waldenfels (2000); on a theory of corporeal intersubjectivity inter-
ested in education, see Meyer-Drawe (2001).
 The Embodied Other: Mimetic-Empathic Encorporations 231

simultaneously produces all subjective expressions like he “obstinate murmur

of a language that speaks as if by itself ” (Foucault, 1965). In this sense, “the
unconscious […] is the other who speaks in us” (Ruhs, 2010, p. 43) or also:
the unconscious is the other’s discourse. Lacan (1988) speaks of the ego as an
object built like an onion from nothing but successive identifications. The
other therefore appears individually and at the same time in plural: as the oth-
ers who form the stumbling block for a 'game' of identity-difference, in which
the individual finds himself as an altered individual and at the same time as
the sum of identified, incorporated others. The ego is thus constituted in a
socially existential and anthropologically profound way through a multitude
of alterations (Laing et al., 1966). The other as the others finds lifelong and
everyday entrance into the ego, whereby he is “not only outside, but also
within the individual” (Wulf, 2002, p. 83). In doing so, according to Christoph
Wulf (2002, p. 88), in the act of mimetic adaptions and identifications, the
other will be physically “transferred into the own world of symbols; the rela-
tionship with him is embodied”.

3 The Desire of Body: Instincts and Feelings

According to Niklas Luhmann (1982) the consciousness is everywhere and
nowhere in the world; it finds its reference point in one’s own body and derives
its identity from it. The unconscious too, in the form of multifaceted, overlap-
ping and ambivalent, often paradoxical feelings, is reflected in the “social for-
matting of body states” (Fuchs, 2016, p. 228). Consciousness and especially
the unconscious are not structured egologically, but relationally. Therefore,
the affectivity of the human being, his instinct-determined experience is
always defined as a relationship event: “Instinct is […]: body need ‘in-
relation-to’” (Lorenzer, 1972, p. 17). The body, as an object of desire as well
as one’s own body as a subject of desire and at the same time as an object of
being desired, forms the matrix of affective sociality. For although the modern
psyche is shaped by processes verbalization, “[t]he physical needs […] remain
melted into the context of meaning formed by language” (Lorenzer, 1972,
p. 67). Nevertheless, it is precisely this fact that forms the ground for the
(political and social) instrumentalization of such embodied desire.
This form of “institutionalized body formation” (Busch, 1987, p. 107) can
be found in the “symbolic layers of communicative action”, that have been
growing since modern times, and “which […] put on to the intimate, sensual
figures of experience”, whereby “the pleasure of naming intimacy” appears as
the “burden of discursivation” (Busch, 1987, p. 112). The discursivation of
232 L. Loew

the body, with its affects, its instincts and desires and its irreducible sensa-
tions, objectifies the emotional-somatic subject to a body-object. In this way,
those ‘asocial’ vitality and affectivity of the individual that could put it in a
resistant relationship to society will be pushed out (see Foucault, 1976b). In
the history of mankind, the body has been tried again and again to control
precisely, because it is predisposed to resist the social order and rationality pat-
tern or, better said, to slip under them, as the other of social order, as the
downside of culture, as nature.

4 The Expression of Body: The Somatic

Understanding of the Other
In this sense, the understanding of the alien psychic, no less a form of exercise
of power, is conceived even in this way, by observation and decryption of bod-
ies. Because socialization consists in the fact that the individual “externalizes
his own being into society” and at the same time internalizes society in turn
incorporated its objective reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967), the body of
the other exercises social-epistemic control. This may cause the intention to
deprive the other of the disturbing, because of strange moment. The body as
the vehicle of being-to-the-world and pivot of the world (Merleau-Ponty,
1968) is accordingly discursively discussed and practiced as a medium of
empathy. Herder (1963, p. 16) already spoke of a “force in the soul” that
“works on other souls as well as on bodies” and thus views the psyche “not
[…] through such boards from the soul [as alien psyche, LL] divorced”, how
this, according to him, “separates the brackets of our metaphysics”. Gustav
Fechner (1907, p. 9) exemplarily illustrated (and confirmed) this
epistemological-ethical problem of the inside-outside split (which corre-
sponds to a subject-object dichotomy) when he wrote: “I show the soul with
one inward, the body with one finger turned outward”.
For this reason, the ‘inside’ of the other must be derived from its outside,
from the externally sensually objectified soma as body. For example, Husserl
(1987, p. 20) writes: “me, other people […] are only experiences through the
sensual experience of their physical bodies”. Since only one’s own body appears
as a feeling body, as a soma, according to Husserl (1987, p. 100), immediate
empathy with the other is impossible, “every meaningful reference to a pos-
sible us or we remains [eliminated]”. The personal ownership and authorship
of everything bodily donates individuality. On the other hand, the somatic
isolation is the reason why one has no direct access to the inner life of the
 The Embodied Other: Mimetic-Empathic Encorporations 233

other. To realize external psychic knowledge, “the thematic ray of activity is

initially straight to the body” (Husserl, 1964, p. 56). There is no other psychic
without a body. Empathy necessarily consists in the fact that “[t]he whole
inwardness of fellow human beings […] is ‘projected’ into them by the
observer, felt into them” (Volkelt, 1922, p. 41). It is only through this detour
of interpretation that “[t]he alien soul life […] becomes accessible through
empathy with the bodily exterior” (Volkelt, 1922, p. 41). The semantics of the
inside-outside duality causes and literally forces that empathy is played across
bonds. Understanding the psyches of others has hermeneutical status, as a
lifelong challenge of a process-related, constantly renewed and repeated (re)
construction of foreign meaning formation in the medium of one’s own
meaning formation.
The analytical evaluation of the corresponding empathy discourses (see
Loew, 2020a, 2020b, 2021) shows that the arguments are always based on an
astonishingly uniform pattern. Introspection is an evident means of knowl-
edge. Therefore, a classic three-rule method is used to resolve the unknown
variable of the alien psychic by means of this known variable and the corre-
sponding middle link, the body-soul mechanics of the human being, which is
assumed to be known. In this respect, there is always a conclusion from the
individual to the general and back again to the individual (by analogy). The
decisive ‘link’ is the body, namely in its unity as (1) individual body and (2)
‘collective body’, which, coupled to semantics of human being, contains gen-
eral functional laws apart from all idiosyncrasies. The assumption of a funda-
mental equality of human inner-outer mechanics is therefore very decisive for
the condition of the possibility of empathy: because all people show approxi-
mately the same body reactions to similar sensations, the individual can
deduce from his own sensations about the experience of the other (Merleau-
Ponty, 1986).2
Thus, the body of the other is also (imaginatively) “grasped as a soma and
not as a physical body among other bodies in the world”, in order to be able
to “comprehend foreign sensory fields” (Fidalgo, 1985, p. 81f.) (in fictional
sense) to come to a plausible interpretation of what is going on inside some-
one else. Johannes Volkelt (1920, p. 124f.) speaks in this context of trans-
subjectivity, which is supposed to guarantee this simulative access to the inner
side of the other. This super-subjectivity is, according to the idea, achieved by
starting from a general physicality, which is linked to human being, in
addition to the individual body. As a result, when one melts the affect of the

2
On the inner-outer duality, “The soul is planted in the body like a stake in the ground […] or better: the
soul is the body’s cavity, the body is the swelling of the soul”.
234 L. Loew

other into the perceived strange gesture, the individual behavior of the other
is associated with an ‘objective’ meaning of the gesture, whereby the melting
of the strange self into gesture will be realized and in this way the affect loses
its ego-affiliation. The body behavior of the other is therefore no longer under-
stood as completely individual, so to speak hyper-subjective and therefore
socially epistemically inaccessible, but as part of a bodily somatic intersubjec-
tivity, which is an act of incorporation mediated sensitively to the other
(Schmitz, 1997). Merleau-Ponty (2012) describes this process in an astonish-
ingly similar form. According to him communication, the understanding of
gestures, is based on the reciprocal correspondence of my intentions and the
gestures of the other, my gestures and the intentions of the other, which are
expressed in his behavior. Then it is as if his intentions reside in my body and
mine in his body. In this context, empathy also takes place in an act of uncon-
scious communication, which, precisely because of its somatic conveyed char-
acter, always manifests itself before all rational transformations and subsequent
narratives and undermines them. Merleau-Ponty points out, that generations
upon generations have ‘understood’ and performed sexual gestures before a
philosopher was able to define their intellectual meaning. Through the body
we understand the other (Merleau-Ponty, 2012).

5 The Incorporation of the Other

5.1 Body Techniques

Marcel Mauss (1936) describes how the act of understanding and incorpora-
tion of foreign gestures is concretely designed with his concept of body tech-
niques that explain why and how people in society traditionally use their
body. For example, different marches or gaits are learned and practiced in
different societies. As a further example, Mauss cites the specific posture of
clergymen, especially nuns, which can be recognized by the “closed fists”
(ibid.). In this context, Jean-Claude Schmitt (2000) also showed in his
cultural-historical study how one becomes a monk by unlearning everyday
gestures and learning sacred gestures.3 That the body techniques described by
Mauss can in extreme cases reach to the learning of killing-techniques is
shown in an impressive and entertaining way in the classic film Léon—The
Professional (1994).

3
For an anthropological and pedagogical analysis of these findings, see Gebauer and Wulf (1998).
 The Embodied Other: Mimetic-Empathic Encorporations 235

According to Mauss (1936), body techniques take place as an original and

existential act of imitative education, in which the not yet established succes-
sor generations, especially the children who are power-shaped marginalized,
imitate the behavior of the established adults that is promising and that is at
the same time so easily embodied. In this way, every day, self-evident and
unquestioned body techniques such as washing become social imperatives
that must be internalized. It is important to imitate physically, since these
techniques indicate what everyone knows and learns, and what he must do
under all circumstances. In this sense, body techniques function not only as
neutral structural forms of a society, but at the same time as micropolitical
practice of power-shaped systems of rule, which as systems of meaning and
behavior over the “security of ready-to-use movements” install a “domination
of the conscious over emotion and unconsciousness in the individual” (ibid.).
Nonetheless, as a complement to this aspect of power, a collectively coordi-
nated and ritualized body behavior such as “[r]hythmic […] shouting, drum-
ming, clapping” can also be a phenomenon of “solidary incorporation” that is
eminently important for social stability (Schmitz, 1997, p. 145).

5.2 Habitus

Bourdieu’s habitus concept is also suitable for describing the incorporation of

the other as a fundamental axiom of sociality. It is not just about the habitus
as the result of the social entering into the body (Bourdieu & Wacquant,
1992), but also can be said: the body is in the social world (Bourdieu, 1982).
Bourdieu (1977) defines the genuinely bodily part of the habitus, the ‘hexis’,
as an “incorporated myth, the permanent way of giving oneself, speaking,
walking, and in it: to feel and think”. The premise is as plausible as it is com-
plex: it is the unconscious, bodily somatic sensations and formations that
determine the social place and the identity of the individual, even before
rational narratives and controls begin. Because, according to Bourdieu (1977),
education uses the body as a memory aid, it trains the ‘wild body’, ‘the a-social
eros’, in order to impress a social structure into it, by means of which the
structured body forms the behavior and experience possibilities of the indi-
vidual socially compatible. The effectiveness of this social training is that one’s
own body, as a sensitive and feeling soma, is simply too close to one’s own
experience, to one’s own self, to defend itself against this imprint. Therefore,
the habitus inevitably remains unconscious, so that social ideologies and con-
cepts of order will be incorporated in the guise of an implicit pedagogy and its
“meaningless commands as ‘hold yourself straight’ or ‘don’t hold the knife in
236 L. Loew

your left hand’” (ibid,). Once internalized, one can then no longer so easily
free oneself from this unreflected, self-evident facts of bodily somatic being
(in the social world), which means being an ego. Social imprint has become (a
part of ) individual identity. The incorporation of the habitus encloses a repro-
duction of existing power and domination relationships and the resulting
constitution of unconsciously consensual spaces of possibility and normality.
The incorporation of the habitus implies collectivization in a repressive
sense and at the same time the condition for the possibility of social integra-
tion and stability. The commonly shared forms of subjectivity create a
habitual-social familiarity which, on the basis of shared behavioral expecta-
tions and modes of experience, generates an inclusive community conscious-
ness and reciprocal understanding. When the habitus enters into a relationship
with a social world of which it is the product, then it moves ‘like a fish in
water’ and the world seems natural to him (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).
Then, the other is perceived as a similar counterpart, as an alter ego.

5.3 Introjection

The psychoanalytic theory of introjection describes a process in which “objects

[i.e. people, LL] […] get from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’”, but “it does not necessar-
ily imply a reference to the body boundary” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1992,
p. 235), so can stay also imaginative/psychic. If one regards introjection in the
bodily sense as the assimilation of something previously foreign (Hirsch,
2000) and thus as a transformation of the ‘alien foreign’ into the ‘own foreign’
(Kämpfer, 1999), the result is the perspective of a psycho-somatic socializa-
tion and learning theory. The power effects that arise can be set analogously to
the theory of aggressor identification (cf. Ferenczi, 1933; Freud, 1936). They
imply the internalization and embodiment of those gestures and habitus that
were (forcibly) adopted by the powerfully experienced caregivers. The child
who is in psychological-emotional, political, economic and physical depen-
dency not only orientates itself on the bodily behavior of the significant oth-
ers, who embody the order of the generalized others (cf. Mead, 1967), but
also necessarily adopts this due to the lack of alternative possibilities. Because
the limited social field of the individual, especially the tight family space,
offers only a few possibilities of escape, so it is assumed that the incorporated
gestures and the associated identifications still exist when the pressure from
others has subsided. This type of embodied superego becomes increasingly
abstract over time from the specific reference persons and the (pressure)
 The Embodied Other: Mimetic-Empathic Encorporations 237

situations associated with them. It remains as an ‘impersonal’ component of

one’s own ego: as the other, which is now one’s own (Freud, 1969, p. 503).

5.4 Mimesis

The processes already described by the terms body technique, habitus or

introjection can also be combined with the concept of mimesis. The mimetic-
empathic incorporation of the other as appropriation of the symbolically
mediated, socialized body behavior can already be found in ancient theater
(cf. Plato, 2012; Aristotle, 1967) and takes place in modern times via analog,
but above all via virtualized others (Silverstone, 2008, p. 233) in literature (cf.
Jannidis, 2004, pp. 166ff.), television/cinema (cf. Eder, 2005; Wulff, 2005),
in computer games (cf. Herzig et al., 2018; Tillmann & Weßel, 2018) or on
the internet (cf. Döring, 2013; Flasche, 2018). The fact that “individuals do
not dispose of their bodies autonomously”, but rather have a habitually
stamped “social body” (Hirschauer, 1994, p. 673), is above all evident in the
virulent representations of the mass media, which guarantee “a permanent
scenic visualization of social reality” by “connecting bodies, people and knowl-
edge” (ibid., p. 675). In this way, given order patterns are represented in
socially pre-structured power relations and will be mimetically “learned and
experienced, but mostly not recognized” (Wulf, 2014, p. 100).
The mimetic-empathic incorporation of the perceived behavior has a per-
formative side in addition to the repressive side. The body behavior that has
been learned is not simply reproduced or copied, but rather ‘presented’ within
the framework of individual strategies of appropriation (Wulf, 1997b,
p. 1015).4 Although with it a “complex relationship [of, L.L.] imagination,
language and body” (ibid., p. 1016) condenses, “mimetic processes […]
mostly refer to existing settings” (ibid., p. 1021). Therefore, the mimetic-
empathic incorporation of the other always functions at the same time as an
“insertion into the […] [existing, LL] structure and power relations” (Wulf,
1994, p. 33). These microsocial processes of socialization could be, in a
socialization-theoretical reading of Foucault (1976a), viewed as ‘microphysics
of power’. The body as a medium of social inequalities and asymmetrical
power relations (cf. Mörgen, 2014) as well as a medium of self-discipline/self-
optimization was already instrumentalized in earlier times. Totalitarian
political systems in particular have made use of the body to establish and
stabilize their ideologies. According to the motto: ‘burn’ it into the mind
4
On the character of mimesis as (re)presentation, see also Scheffel (2006, p. 85f.) and Hamburger (1968,
p. 260).
238 L. Loew

through the body (cf. Schöpfs-Potthoff, 1984; Alkemeyer & Richartz, 1993;
Hermann, 1993; Peiffer, 1993).
It is and has always been the gestures in which ‘man [embodies]’ (Wulf,
1997a, p. 516), which at the same time only are established on the basis of a
“historical-cultural power-structured context” (ibid., p. 520). In this way one
becomes an ‘other’, a profound and fundamental transformation takes place:
an ‘alteration’ (Wulf, 2008, p. 345) of the ego and the body, through which
the individual is always the other. One is me and at the same time always the
other, the society. On the one hand, this represents a hard, violent act of
socialization and pedagogy, at the same time it forms the educational basis for
learning processes in the sense of mimetic-empathic incorporations. They
decenter and simultaneously enrich the ego through a plurality of different
perspectives. Showing and bodily demonstration and the previous and subse-
quent imitation are constitutive for the acquisition of new skills and the learn-
ing expansion of the ego (see Polanyi, 1966; Hirschauer, 2008; Keller &
Meuser, 2011; Schindler, 2011; Alkemeyer & Brümmer, 2016).

6 Conclusion
The body-sensitive mechanics of mimetic-empathic incorporation, with
empathy as its psychic-phenomenal correlate, are the “inner side of imitation”
(Lipps, 1923, p. 120f.). Physical imitation builds the foundation of an embod-
ied society/sociality. Embodied socialization happens through ‘othering’, that
is, through pluralistic, decentering and gestural-based ‘alterations’ of the ego.
That means that identification achievements are constitutive for the
educational-culture socialization of the individual. Embodied learning and
embodied sociality could be checked for plausibility with different theoretical
models. In any case, one can draw the conclusion from our considerations that
empathic-mimetic incorporations do not work exclusively through the
(directly) imitation of the other, but also through performative appropriation
and imaginatively simulated participation. Empathy turns out as the paradig-
matic base of a pedagogical link between the bodily somatic, emotional and
cognitive matrix of the human being. In this respect, embodied empathy
forms a highly effective social-anthropological foundation of learning, which
is exemplarily expressed in the following observation of a tightrope walker:

I perform the movements […] in the acrobat himself. According to my direct

consciousness, I am in him; so I’m up there. I am transferred there. Not next to
the acrobats, but exactly where he is. Now this is the full meaning of ‘empathy’.
(ibid., p. 122)
 The Embodied Other: Mimetic-Empathic Encorporations 239

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 The Embodiment of Gender in Childhood
Anja Tervooren

With respect to childhoods in late modernity, two contrasting observations

can be made regarding gender. On the one hand, gender difference is arguably
being enacted even more dramatically now than it was in the 1980s or 1990s.
In the interplay between merchandising and gender marketing that has
become increasingly established since the turn of the millennium, products
such as toys, food, and school supplies are now offered in versions for boys
and for girls. Aimed to appeal to children’s tastes, these products address chil-
dren as boys or girls. The children, in turn, learn through their engagement
with these products to present themselves as boys or girls and to embody these
genders.
On the other hand, there are signs of greater latitude in children’s enact-
ment of gender in both private and public spheres. For example, the topic
“My Child is Transsexual” is discussed in digital parenting forums and in
parenting advice literature, and the topic of intersexuality is also making its
way into political debates. A reorganization of gender relations can also be
seen at the legislative level, such as in 2017, when Germany’s Federal
Constitutional Court decided that too great an emphasis had been placed on
the assignment of an individual to one gender or the other, and that those
who did not accept or desire categorization according to the adjectives
“female” or “male” suffered discrimination as a result. This led to the

A. Tervooren (*)
University Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany
e-mail: anja.tervooren@uni-due.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 245
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_15
246 A. Tervooren

introduction of a third gender category: “diverse”. The multifaceted nature of

gender embodiment and the ways in which people learn to represent binary
conceptions of gender are thus very topical issues.
Theories of gender and embodiment should therefore permit the shedding
of light on both dichotomous and ambiguous enactments of gender and the
analysis of gender hierarchies in society while bearing in mind the character-
istics specific to each phase of life and the transformation of social gender
relations.
The following explains in four steps how the embodiment of gender in
childhood has been theoretically conceived and empirically investigated since
the 1970s. The first step introduces the theory of approaches to gender social-
ization as well as ethnomethodology. It can be seen from these approaches
that too little attention was paid to the body and embodiment. It is only with
the introduction of deconstructive approaches in gender studies that focus on
the performativity of gender and the materialization of bodies that gender and
embodiment in childhood have become understood as a cultural act—a point
which is elaborated in the second step. The third step introduces debates
about intersectionality that include criticism of approaches focusing on only
one social category and identify the interweaving of different social categories
as a desideratum of current research on embodiment and gender. The fourth
step concludes the article by pointing out new perspectives in research on
gender as embodiment and by addressing the topic of children’s vulnerability
and care relationships connected to them.

1 Beyond Embodiment: Socialization as Boys

or Girls
A distinction between sex and gender was first proposed in the 1950s by
U.S. psychiatrists who treated children born with ambiguous genitalia. Their
parents were advised to select one of the sexes, to have their child undergo the
relevant surgical procedure, and to raise the child unambiguously as the cho-
sen sex thereafter. This distinction between biological and cultural gender,
which had been developed with regard to the phenomenon of intersexuality
in childhood, was soon taken up by women’s studies, which was then emerg-
ing internationally, in order to denote that a person’s gender identity could
not be inferred by his or her corporality, but that it was instead acquired in the
process of socialization (Dausien & Thon, 2009). Thus, two things were
inscribed into the discussion of gender in childhood from its outset, namely,
 The Embodiment of Gender in Childhood 247

the question of how gender is to be thought of as embodied, and the proposed

division into body or nature on the one hand, and culture on the other.
The sociological and educational debate on the topic of “gender and child-
hood” began in the 1970s, when attention was drawn to the fact that belong-
ing above all to the female gender was systematically associated with
disadvantage beginning in childhood and continuing throughout the life
course. Against the backdrop of Talcott Parsons’s structural functionalism, a
teleological model formed a basis from which it was assumed that gender roles
are acquired primarily during childhood and adolescence and can then be
completed in adulthood. Early psychoanalytical and feminist research, by
contrast, followed Freud’s model of sexual development in childhood in
explaining binary gender development in terms of the cultural conditions of
early childhood in which women are primarily responsible for childrearing.
That research focused on the mother and child dyad and, later, on the primary
caregiver and child (Chodorow, 1978; Benjamin, 1988). There was not yet
explicit treatment of the body or of the embodiment of gender; it disappeared
behind an emphasis on structure in the first approach, and behind the triad of
parents and child in the second.
As early as the 1980s, there was criticism that these theories of gender
socialization lent from the outset greater significance to gender-specific differ-
ences in socialization between gender groups (i.e., between boys as one group
and girls as another) than to differences within each gender group. Their asser-
tion that the achievement of a coherent identity was a self-evident goal of all
children and adolescents also drew critique (Bilden, 1998, orig. 1991). Carol
Hagemann-White points out that neither gender nor sexuality is a “fact of
nature” that develops from corporality, but rather that the gender binary is
appropriated as a settlement specific to each culture (Hagemann-White,
1984). Children therefore learn firstly to recognize the gender binary and,
second, to present themselves in accordance with it. Thus, in stark contrast to
classical socialization theories’ strong emphasis on social structures, these
approaches grant children active participation in the process of socialization.
Empirical research in the narrower sense, focused on children’s growing up
and understanding children as active participants in the learning of gender,
was lacking at the beginning of this debate and has been developing since the
late 1980s (Thorne, 1993). Early empirical research examined girls’ lived real-
ities with the aim of reducing their disadvantage and thus proposing, for
example, appropriate ideas for advancing girls’ education. Gender was thus
defined as a category of social inequality which systematically produced a
disadvantage for girls and women in the educational system and in the sphere
of work in educational institutions, as well as in social relations of
248 A. Tervooren

reproduction and production. The viewpoint of disadvantage remained fun-

damental to this research approach, even when boys were identified as the
actually vulnerable group, as happened in the 1990s and was later extended
by the PISA studies since the turn of the millennium. The emerging boyhood
studies focused primarily on their experiences in school, asking how and by
what means boys become educational losers in educational institutions (e.g.,
Budde & Mammes, 2009). Studying boys exclusively makes it possible to
elaborate the different enactments of masculinity within a group of boys or to
compare the enactments of hegemonic masculinity in different groups of boys.
However, those in girlhood and boyhood studies who see their work as
research on differences always have to master a balancing act: on the one
hand, they have to take seriously the social and cultural peculiarities of girls’
and boys’ everyday lives and lifeworlds and examine them in detail, and on
the other hand, they have to avoid producing the gender difference qua
method. Even today, the concept of socialization that is used to describe the
socialization of girls and boys in relation to the category of gender includes
within it a bundle of theoretical and empirical approaches that engage with
the study of children and adolescents as they grow up—albeit from different
and even partly contradictory theoretical viewpoints (Bilden & Dausien,
2006). The strength of the concept of socialization lies in its description of the
reproduction of two genders that are understood to be distinct, whereby the
disadvantage connected with one or the other gender is understood as rooted
in culture and is not seen as explained by the nature of the gendered bodies
themselves. Body and embodiment are thus explicitly outside the focus of
these concepts of how gender is learned. Childhood studies research, too, has
long been based on a separation of culture and nature, and has rarely addressed
embodiment in order to prevent children from being equated with nature and
thereby with the immediacy and innocence often associated with it.

2 Generating Gender in Everyday Interactions

In the early 1990s, an extended theoretical and methodological debate devel-
oped in what has since become known as interdisciplinary studies around the
category of gender, in which there was vehement criticism of the reification of
the category that necessarily occurs when talking about female or male social-
ization. The core of the critique was that gender studies participate in the
reification of the differentiation of genders in their presupposition of the cat-
egory they claim to study. To avoid this, the critique allied itself above all with
those theories which specifically do not assume that gender is always already
 The Embodiment of Gender in Childhood 249

there, and which show that and how gender is “made” in the context of inter-
actions and institutions.
This process was described by Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1991)
in what they call their ethnomethodologically informed approach to doing
gender as the “socially organized achievement” of participants in interactions
(ibid., p. 14): “Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided percep-
tional, interactional, and micropolitical activities that casts particular pursuits
as expressions of masculine or feminine ‘natures’” (West & Zimmerman,
1991, p. 14). They explicitly criticized the concept of gender roles for down-
playing the active participation of subjects and emphasize that all action must
be understood as situated, as occurring in the context of virtual or real others
and of institutions in particular. Thus, gender does not emerge from the
actions of a subject, but is produced in a social arrangement and continually
performed anew and made present by all concerned.
Georg Breidenstein and Helge Kelle (1998) start from this theoretical basis,
combine it with an ethnographic research strategy, and elaborate practices of
gender differentiation among children in a primary school. Among other
things, they show how interactions in a purposefully pedagogically progres-
sive and gender-conscious school—such as when children are asked to call
upon each other and a girl always chooses a boy and a boy always chooses a
girl—actually reinforce dichotomous gender distinctions rather than weaken
them. Melanie Kubandt (2016) analyzes how “processes of gender differentia-
tion are carried out in the daily routines of child day care centers” (Kubandt,
2016, p. 48), both by the children and by professionals and parents. On the
level of the children, she elaborates a complex, variable, and flexible use of
gender grouping, for example, in processes of group division (ibid., p. 53),
and focuses on social practices in which the gender dichotomy is broken
down. One example is that of five-year-old Mia, who describes herself as a
“fan of boys”, behaves similarly to the boys, and whose status within the group
of children is acknowledged (ibid., pp. 53–54). Both studies flesh out how
gender is learned and how it is represented in everyday life. However, they do
not explicitly focus on how gender is embodied, and their emphasis on the
social construction of gender brings with it the danger of ignoring the mate-
rial side of embodiment.
The doing gender approach is still widely used in educational science,
although the catchiness of its name is in fact part of its problem, for the
approach, which is actually very well elaborated methodologically and theo-
retically, can be reduced to a catch-all term used to describe all social catego-
ries (such as “doing disability”) and pedagogical orders (as in “doing pupil”) as
well. But even if studies adequately take into account the complexity of this
250 A. Tervooren

approach, they are criticized for focusing on the “how” of producing gender
and for paying too little attention to societal level and the significance of gen-
der norms. This micro-sociological orientation of the oft-employed ethno-
methodologically oriented doing gender approach can explain the gender
binary as produced in interactions, and can also reconstruct it in empirical
studies without taking a given body or even psychosocial identities as a refer-
ence point. That makes it possible to explain the embedding of gender enact-
ments in their immediate, everyday contexts, but does not permit the
reconstruction of the relationship to social rules and norms to the same extent.
In addition, it fails to address the materiality of the body, its specificity at dif-
ferent ages, and the changes in it throughout the process of growing up. These
are pivotal, however, especially for a theory of embodiment as a process that
takes place differently at different ages.

3 Embodiment of Gender Norms

and Their Transgression
In the 1990s, the issue of transgressing gender boundaries became one of the
central topics of gender studies. On the one hand, research on the gender
transition of adult transsexuals reconstructed how they belatedly learn to
embody the gender with which they identify (Hirschauer, 1993; Lindemann,
1993). On the other hand, comparative cultural analyses found that many
cultures have gender models that go beyond dichotomies. For example, tradi-
tional Albanian cultures envisage a third gender, so that if no boy is born into
a family, one of the girls can assume a position from childhood on in which
she performs the traditional activities of a son and dresses accordingly. Sexual
desire, however, is denied to these “sworn virgins”, as it would be at odds with
a heterosexual order (Schrödter, 2002, pp. 128–129).
During this period, the works of the philosopher Judith Butler were widely
received in international and German-speaking contexts. She takes phenom-
ena of urban subcultures, such as drag, as her starting point to develop her
concept of the “performativity of gender identity” (Butler, 1990, 1993) and
also to make it possible to describe the transgression of gender boundaries.
Borrowing from phenomenology, performance studies, and approaches to the
performative rooted in the philosophy of language, Butler conceives of the
subject not as voluntaristically designing itself, but also as affected by
circumstances.
 The Embodiment of Gender in Childhood 251

In this context, Butler assigns central importance to what she later calls
gender norms (Butler, 2004). The subject is understood to relate to these
iteratively and—as poststructuralism would have it—in a way which is neces-
sarily always shifting. In this approach, the performative is situated in the field
of tension between material practices and logics of representation, and a sur-
plus of meaning is always produced anew. The repetition, which has an inher-
ent surplus of meaning, thus points to the possibility of constituting gender
identities that are different from what societal norms expect.
In order to describe the enactment of gender in late childhood and also to
focus on the change of the enactment from one generation to the next, Anja
Tervooren draws on this Butlerian concept of the performativity of gender,
conceives of “human action as performing cultural action” (Wulf & Zirfas,
2014, p. 515), and presents an ethnographic study of the enactment of gender
and desire in late childhood (Tervooren, 2006). On the empirical basis of the
rituals, games, and dances studied, she shows how such rehearsal takes place
in a three-step process that culminates in the embodiment of gender and
desire. First, the children are connected to cultural knowledge and body
knowledge in an iterative and changing way. Next, rehearsals of the body are
tested and shown in the context of the peer group. Third, if this performance
in front of an audience consisting primarily of peers is found to be good, this
way of moving the body is then enacted repeatedly in a stylized way and is
eventually embodied through this constant iteration (Tervooren, 2007).
From this perspective, Tervooren is able to analyze both the body and the
gradual materialization of gender in late childhood. Moreover, she focuses on
practices of crossing gender boundaries as “passing” between the sexes and
considers sexuality as a category in its own right. The point here is decidedly
not to impute sexual desire to children, but rather to understand the concept
of sexual desire “as an urgent desire to belong to each other, which can but
need not include physicality or the imagination of one’s first sexual acts”
(Tervooren, 2006, p. 174). This describes a relationship to a best friend and
one’s first time “being together” with a boyfriend or girlfriend; thus, desire in
this sense is not derived from understandings of desire in adulthood as it is in
talk of “homosexual children”. As a result, the question of the embodiment of
gender and the greater importance of a society’s (gender) norms are accentu-
ated more than in the ethnomethodologically influenced empirical works. In
addition, Tervooren’s work points out the transgression of gender norms and
gives greater attention to social discourses. As developed for the study of
childhood, this deconstructive approach to gender research has been taken up
for the study of the identities of adolescents who do not fit into the heteronor-
mative order (Kleiner, 2015).
252 A. Tervooren

4 Embodying Multiple Differences

and Debates About Intersectionality
The doing gender approach was soon developed further in response to criti-
cism. One critique held that gender could not be the one central social cate-
gory in the study of difference and the social inequality that emerges over it;
another was that the intersection of social categories needed to be the focus.
As Fenstermaker and West argued: “when we move from a description of the
reified categories of race or class or gender to a framework that reveals joint
action in specific situations, we can see how the doing of difference actually
happens, and how it might change” (2002, p. 214, emphasis in original).
Theoretical debates in interdisciplinary gender studies are now turning overall
to the topic of intersectionality (McCall, 2005; Walgenbach et al., 2007), but
often continue to take the category of gender and its complex scientific theo-
rization as a starting point for grasping the entanglements of categories both
theoretically and methodologically. The question now being asked is: “What
comes after gender studies?” (Casale & Rendtorff, 2007).
In childhood studies, theoretical and methodological findings from gender
research are increasingly being applied to other social categories. This is espe-
cially true in research done in the aftermath of the PISA studies, some of it
with qualitative designs, which interview children themselves in order to
study the effects of social class on children’s educational trajectories and their
experiences with migration. An intensive engagement with the category of
disability in childhood, which should also follow here, is still in its infancy in
the German-speaking world despite the fact that it has already reached con-
siderable sophistication in the international sphere (Runswick-Cole et al.,
2018). There are as yet few empirical works focusing on the entanglement of
lines of difference in childhood and adolescence, as the theoretical complexity
of such a perspective often cannot be realized on the methodological level
(Pfaff & Tervooren, 2022).
In his recent methodologically oriented works, Stefan Hirschauer rejects
the fact that certain differences are selected in advance, and thus that one
thinks in terms of structure theory instead of praxeologically reconstructing
the process of social differences becoming relevant or irrelevant. For
Hirschauer, the central question is which difference is in effect when, where,
and how. He criticizes theoretical approaches, such as that of Judith Butler, in
which there is no undoing gender. Ethnomethodology and poststructuralism
highlight the contingency of gender classification but insist on its omnirele-
vance. Instead, every concrete case of doing difference is “always a meaningful
 The Embodiment of Gender in Childhood 253

selection from a series of competing differentiations. Only this selection cre-

ates a difference that also makes a difference. It is not enough whether a cat-
egorization is perceptually or linguistically accomplished once: what is crucial
is whether it is connected to this point of contact in social processes—in
interactions, biographies, procedures, discourses, etc.” (Hirschauer & Boll,
2017, p. 12). It is still rare to find work in childhood and youth studies in
which a decision is not made in advance as to which are the relevant social
categories to be investigated, and so studies using the approach of un/doing
differences in childhood and adolescence are a current desideratum for
research.
The 2006 study “Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: Exclusions and
Student Subjectivities” by Deborah Youdell is an ethnography of one British
and one Australian secondary school. Youdell focuses on school processes of
inclusion and, based on interpretations of observation protocols and inter-
views, she is able to show the mechanisms by which identity as a more or less
good student systematically depends on several other categories of identity
(Youdell, 2006, p. 163). By looking at identities as constellations from the
outset, Youdell can also address the interaction of different categories in the
processes she focuses on.
For research on childhood, an interweaving of deconstructive and recon-
structive perspectives on gender could shed light on both the current present-
making of the category and, with critical intent, on practices of transgressing
gender boundaries. In my view, however, it would make sense in the debate
on intersectionality to revisit the now rather marginalized discussion of the
category of gender, to connect it with the complexity of the debate already
achieved at the end of the last millennium, and, above all, to focus on the
question of the embodiment of differences as “complex embodiment”
(Siebers, 2008).

5 New and Old Dimensions of Gender, Body

and Embodiment: Vulnerability and Care
in Childhood
In the German-speaking and in the Anglo-American and Scandinavian con-
texts, childhood studies is seen primarily as social scientific research on child-
hood. In many cases it ties in with sociological debates, only sometimes with
anthropological and philosophical ones. It primarily reconstructs social orders
in which the life phase of childhood is historically constituted in different
254 A. Tervooren

ways; the learning of gender is taken into account, but its embodiment is less
so. In as much as the establishment of childhood studies in the German-
speaking world began in the mid-1970s in an interdisciplinary manner, and
the historical, philosophical, sociological, and educational approaches were
noticed outside of the field and by the public at large, it is the social scientific
component that can assert itself most strongly in the context of the empirical
turn in educational science for the analysis of childhoods (Tervooren, 2016).
After a long period in which childhood was studied as a life stage and in a
diachronic perspective on the lifespan predominated, this new childhood
research considers childhood under the mantle of a social structural category.
This leads to the taking of a synchronic perspective, asking how children gen-
erate meaning in their activities moment by moment and how they position
themselves in the generational order. As in gender studies, the idea that the
difference—here between children and adults, there between girls and boys—
is a natural, that is, “biological” difference, has been sharply rejected right
from the beginning, and the concept of generational order has been explicitly
developed with reference to the relationality between generations (Alanen,
2001). Leena Alanen explicitly borrows the concept of generational order
from gender research that examines the mutual conditionality of genders
(Alanen, 1994).
In order to understand children as “participants in practices” (Bollig &
Kelle, 2016) and to understand their position within the generational order,
the level of children among themselves has been examined very closely; how-
ever, children’s fundamental dependence on care, especially from their pri-
mary caregivers, has received much less attention. Yet the central question of
educational research on childhood is how the task of educating and caring for
children and their bodies is organized in different cultures and at different
points in history. More strongly anthropologically oriented research on child-
hood (Blaschke-Nacak et al., 2018) places its particular emphasis on vulner-
ability in general (Burghardt et al., 2017) and includes child vulnerability in
particular much more extensively in its analysis of children’s social productiv-
ity, albeit so far without referring to the category of gender. This would have
to be based on a reciprocal interdependence of children’s vulnerability and
agency, without rehabilitating earlier paternalistic or maternalistic positions
via the topos of vulnerability (Heinze, 2017).
Vulnerability has not yet been systematically elaborated from the perspec-
tive of research on childhood and current gender research in relation to the
practices of care—the latter including the physical dependency of children
not only in their early lives, but later on as well. One opportunity for further
development is to take a closer look, empirically and otherwise, at the
 The Embodiment of Gender in Childhood 255

category of gender in care relationships, to reconstruct the care work that

parents, and especially mothers, still, take on in early childhood, and to ana-
lyze it with regard to the relationship between the autonomy and dependence
of all participants. Against the background of a relational concept of genera-
tions, this would mean making the mutual interdependence of generations
the focus of analysis, and examining both sides of the care relationship.
Discussions about the interdependencies in the dyad of primary caregiver and
child, as were had at the beginning of the debate about gender in psycho-
analysis (Benjamin, 1988), could advance this work. This is equally true for
bringing the topic of the body more fully into the debate, where embodiment
should be conceived of as a cultural phenomenon that is constituted in action
as a cultural performance and that continues to evolve and change throughout
the life course.

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 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry,
Emotions, Upbringing
Tatiana Shchyttsova

1 Introduction: Intergenerational Asymmetry

and Overcoming
the Subject-Centered Thinking
The adult-child relation is asymmetric due to the irreducible difference
between their respective life horizons and life positions. Such an intergenera-
tional asymmetry belongs to basic characteristics of conditio humana. It irre-
vocably implies that the adult has to bring the child up. Being thus a
fundamental feature (structure) of human social life, the intergenerational
asymmetry has been interpreted and experienced in different ways depending
on historical-cultural and social contexts. The classical Modernity
(Enlightenment), by elaborating and advancing the concept of the autono-
mous rational subject, had introduced a new paradigm of the adult-centered
thinking built on the idea of maturity (Kant). Within this paradigm, the child
had been conceived of as a not-yet-a-subject. Correspondingly, the adult-
child co-existence had been understood in terms of the moral and cognitive
subordination which meant that the adult subject had to help the immature
human entity to become a full-fledged (autonomous and rational) subject. It
is noteworthy that along with this subordinating vision there had been devel-
oped another one which interpreted the child as a symbol of spontaneous

T. Shchyttsova (*)
University of Vilnius, Vilnius, Lithuania
e-mail: Tatiana.shchyttsova@ehu.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 259
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_16
260 T. Shchyttsova

natural creativity free from conventional social normativity (Jean Jacques

Rousseau). However, regardless their seeming polarity, both these visions—
the subordinating and the idealizing—were dialectically complementary
within the classical modern paradigm of the adult-centered thinking, because
each of them, in approaching the otherness of the child, presupposed a par-
ticular mode of appropriation of the child’s perspective.
The two abovementioned attitudes toward the otherness of the child were
reflected then in corresponding pedagogical approaches. German philosopher
E. Fink defines them as the authoritative pedagogy and the sentimental one,
respectively (Fink, 1970, p. 222). The polarity of these approaches is clearly
articulated in the laconic antithesis between ‘leading’ (Führen) and ‘letting
growing’ (Wachsen lassen) as definitions of respective adult’s stance on the core
principle of pedagogical relation. Fink highlights that despite their opposition
both alternatives are characterized by one and the same logic, namely, that “in
the first case the freedom of the educator is thought irrelational, in the second
case the nature of the pupil is thought irrelational” (Fink, 1970, p. 222). In
other words, the difference between the seemingly alternative types of peda-
gogy is not truly paradigmatic, since each of them presents a kind of subject-
centered education. They differ only in terms of a ‘regulative idea’. Whereas at
the forefront of the former is rationality, at the forefront of the latter is spon-
taneous creativity. The ‘irrelationality’ at issue—both in the case of authorita-
tive pedagogy and in the case of sentimental one—indicates that both
approaches rely upon the concept of the subject developed in the classical
Modernity. Their difference is merely ideological since they differ on whether
the present adult subject or the future one (the newborn one) is preferred.
The chapter is motivated by the necessity of overcoming such subject-
centered thinking—be it performed from the adult-centered perspective or
the child-centered one, since neither allows to approach a genuine field of the
mutual interpersonal relatedness constituted by vivid asymmetry of the adult-
child co-existence. It follows, the very way how I am going to approach asym-
metry in this chapter is built on the theoretical premise of the intergenerational
decentration of the subject understood by me not merely as an attempt to go
beyond the homogenizing dictate of the adult rationality for the sake of
authentic articulation of the child’s perspective on the world, but as an attempt
to make a shift from the subject-centered approach as such to that one which
will concentrate on the asymmetrical correlation peculiar to the adult-child
co-existence (Shchyttsova, 2016). Trying to further elaborate this approach in
the given chapter, I follow the general lines of the Finkean new philosophical-
anthropological and pedagogical paradigm based on the idea of the intergen-
erational sharing the world (Fink, 1987, 1992, 1995). The paradigm is
 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 261

innovative with regard to the modern, both classical and very recent,
approaches in the humanities and social sciences aimed at clarification of the
unique value of the otherness of the child (the child’s perception and rational-
ity) (Merleau-Ponty, 2010; Meyer-Drawe, 1987; Meyer-Drawe & Waldenfels,
1988; Welsh, 2013) and, consequently, at interpretation of the world, social
practices and cultural meanings from the perspective of the child, given the per-
spective is irreducible to that of the adult (Corsaro, 2005; Hausendorf, 2001;
Heinzel, 2000)1. Fink outlines a pedagogy which arises from the intuition
that the old and the young can learn from each other and that the intergenera-
tional asymmetry inherently has a co-operative and con-creative potential so
that educational co-existence can be practiced as a mutual relation of the dif-
ferent periods of life (‘old and young’) where none has an absolute advantage
(Shchyttsova, 2019)2.
In this chapter, I will concentrate on the emotional dimension of the asym-
metrical being-with-one-another of adult and child. The general purpose of
the chapter is to elaborate some basics of the phenomenology of affective
asymmetry in the adult-child co-existence and to show communicative-
educational implications of such asymmetry. Educational relation will be con-
sidered as an elemental (basic) phenomenon of human being and human
social life. Indeed, the adult-child co-existence is educative (that is contributes
to child’s becoming), even if the adult does not develop special pedagogical
reflections characteristic of pedagogy as a scientific discipline. Pedagogy as a
science arises out of the adults’ primary, pre-scientific being concerned about
how to bring up children. The chapter deals with this pre-scientific everyday
experience of the adult-child co-existence as an asymmetric interpersonal rela-
tion genuinely implying an educative meaning. The analysis to be further
realized is philosophical-anthropological as for its theoretical framework and
phenomenological as for its method. There is a rich tradition of the phenom-
enologically oriented pedagogy (Brinkmann, 2016; Kraus, 2019; Lippitz,
2019; Meyer-Drawe, 2012) with which this chapter correlates. At the same
time, the philosophical phenomenological perspective to be developed here
differs from the perspective of the phenomenological pedagogy in that regard
that the former seeks to clarify constitutive conditions of upbringing as a pre-
scientific intergenerational experience whereas the latter focuses on pedagogi-
cal experience and learning process as a special practical field that already

1
Patryck J. Ryan (2008) discussing the recently introduced trend called the new social study of childhood
expresses serious doubts about the newness of the new trend and stresses that the childhood-centered
thinking is not yet per se “a paradigm shift”.
2
Friederike Heinzel seems to be much more closer to Fink when she suggests to replace the research about
children with a research with children (Heinzel, 2000). To this topic see also Christensen and James (2000).
262 T. Shchyttsova

presupposes corresponding theoretical reflections and didactic stance. By

revealing a certain affective asymmetry as a constitutive principle of the adult-
child educational co-existence, this chapter aims to contribute to philosophi-
cal rethinking of intergenerational experience in terms of mutual interpersonal
relatedness and open complementarity that lie beyond the subject-centered
ontology.
I'll start with one routine dialogue between mother and her child that indi-
cates certain crucial aspects of the intergenerational asymmetry. The first sec-
tion will be devoted to preliminary phenomenological analysis of this talk
aimed at revealing its particular emotional implications. In the second sec-
tion, I will clarify a fundamental difference between the existential anxiety
experienced by adult human being and the existential anxiety experienced by
child. I will argue then (in the third section) that this very difference defines a
primary existential task of upbringing and will tackle the problem of com-
municative fulfillment of this task. The fourth section will be devoted to clari-
fication of the essential complementarity between the child’s existential
anxiety and the adult’s patience. In conclusion, it will be shown that and why
the adult-child educational co-existence can be characterized by a shared joy.

2 An Intriguing Talk: The Mutual Relatedness

and the Asymmetric Concerns
I begin with a conversation of a two-and-half-year-old boy (Buddy) and his
mother published in the book The Sociology of Childhood by W. A. Corsaro. As
he clarifies a context of this communicative situation mother and her son
talked every weekday at this time as she prepared lunch. The day before the
boy had cut his finger. In the talk entitled Do Chips Have Blood on Them?
(Corsaro, 2005, pp. 20–22), Buddy is still curious about ‘blood’ from his
cut finger.

Do Chips Have Blood on Them?

Mother: What?
Buddy: Chips [potato chips] have blood on them? Do they have blood on ’em?
Mother: No, I don't believe so.
Buddy: Kids and people do.
Mother: Um-hum.
Buddy: And monsters.
Mother: Yeah.
Buddy: Like Grover has blood on him.
 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 263

Mother: Well, Grove's a pretend monster. He's really a puppet, you know?
Buddy: Yeah.
Mother: So he wouldn't have any blood on him.
Buddy: But Harry does.
Mother: Well, they're just like your puppets. Your Big Bird and your Cookie
Monster.
Buddy: Yeah.
Mother: They're made out of cloth and furry things.
Buddy: Yeah, like—
Mother: Somebody made them—
Buddy: Harry has blood.
Mother: I don't think so. Pretend blood maybe.
Buddy: Yeah, maybe—maybe Grover and Cookie Monster and Harry have pre-
tend blood. Maybe they do—maybe they have real blood.
Buddy: Mommy, someday I wanna go to Sesame Street and we can see if those
monsters have blood.
Mother: You do?
Buddy: Yeah.
Mother: I don't know. We’ll have to see about that. But you know what? Sesame
Street is really a make-believe land.
Buddy: Oh, I didn't notice that.
Mother: You can pretend a lot of things about Sesame Street.

I have called this talk an intriguing one because it indicates certain affective
and structural correlations in this mother-son communicative interaction that
appear important for the purposes of the chapter and are likely to have far-
reaching implications. In this section, I will set out, by means of phenomeno-
logical description, an elemental heuristics of the conversation, paying a
particular attention to mutual relatedness of what is expressed by mother and
son, respectively, that is to relational nature of each phenomenon which shows
itself in course of the dialogue.
First of all, we see that the child is deeply concerned about the very reality
of blood. What he insistently tries to find out is whether all beings around
him ‘have blood on them’. He shows an affective pre-disposition to make sure
that they do. Communication with mother is a way for him to receive a con-
firmation in this regard. Given his previous having been affected by cutting
the finger his curiosity manifested in the series of questions is not just a cogni-
tive intention (willing to know something new about the ‘objective world’),
but truly an existential one deeply rooted in his previous experience. He is
intrigued by the fact of having blood. On the one hand, this fact is inevitably
(even if only unconsciously) associated with violation of the bodily
264 T. Shchyttsova

boundaries and thereby with a possibility of destruction of his body. On the

other hand, the same fact motivates him to curiously examine various co-
beings in the world with regard to the same quality he just discovered in
himself. Thus, even if it’s an anxious curiosity, it manifests itself through an
insistent exploration of the world. Communication with mother serves as a
channel for such exploration. Furthermore, his communication with mother
is built on pre-reflexive trust in relation to her as his primary care person.
Describing the mother’s perspective in this communicative situation,
Corsaro says:

She takes the opportunity to display openness to his curiosity and concerns. In
fact, this routine of ‘talking at lunch’ may have been created by Buddy's mother
for this very reason. (Corsaro, 2005, p. 23)

By this comment he highlights the primordial ethical asymmetry in the

adult-child relation which is an asymmetry of the adult's absolute (irreplace-
able) responsibility in relation to the child on the one hand and the child’s
pre-reflexive trust in relation to the adult care person on the other hand. The
asymmetrical pair trust—responsibility3 reveals the original mutual related-
ness of the generations that define the primary ethics connecting the adult
and the child as the ethics of support. However, the ethics of support (taken
in itself ) implies a moral inequality of the child and the adult and stresses a
leading role of the adult. The same emphasis on the leading role of the mother
is made also in the Corsaro’s abovementioned comment. At the same time,
the presented talk indicates more than a supportive attitude of the care person
with regard to the child’s curiosity and concerns. Mother’s mode of commu-
nication is rather playful. She does not dictate and does not insist on anything
constantly avoiding such a communicative tactics as asserting an ‘objective
knowledge’. What is at issue thus is an intriguing mutual relatedness of the
child’s existential curiosity and the adult’s playful-careful attitude. In order to
clarify further emotional and communicative implications of this intriguing
relatedness I will address in the next section phenomenological interpreta-
tions of existential anxiety elaborated by Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Taking
my bearings from the theories of these two thinkers, I will show that the
child’s existential anxiety essentially differs from the adult’s one and will argue
then (in the third section) that this very difference conditions a primary task
of upbringing.

3
Comp. with H. Nohl’s asymmetrical pair of the adult’s love for the child and the child’s loyalty to the
adult (Nohl, 2020).
 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 265

3 Existential Anxiety: Care and Curiosity

We will approach anxiety as a fundamental existential feeling to be taken into
consideration in order to understand (co-)existential tasks and asymmetrical
constitution of upbringing. Kierkegaard and Heidegger are thinkers whom
we have to address in order to reconsider the question of existential anxiety
from the intergenerational perspective. My general thesis in this regard is that
their conceptions of anxiety are related to different life-stages of human being:
Heidegger’s conception relates to adult’s existence, Kierkegaard’s one—to the
child’s existence. In what follows, I will reconstruct a principal difference
between their descriptions of anxiety and, after this, clarify its fundamental
pedagogical implications4.
Heidegger analyzes existential anxiety in the context of his systematic phe-
nomenological account of mood or state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) as a primary
mode of how single individual as being-in-the-world is disclosed to itself. The
phenomenon of mood is conceptualized by him as an existential disposition
and affective force that thoroughly attunes human existence in its totality, that
is attunes the individual’s relation to itself and to all what is encountered in
the world. Anxiety is singled out in this connection as a distinctive state-of-
mind (Heidegger, 1962, p. 226). It must be stressed that Heidegger’s interpre-
tation of anxiety follows in many aspects the Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety
developed in his famous work The Concept of Anxiety. Both thinkers thematize
anxiety as an affective experience that in some exceptional manner reveals the
very constitution of human existence. According to both of them, anxiety
originates from that the existing self is related to itself as a capability of Being
and is individuated (singularized) due to (by) this very relation. This general
thesis is an existential apriori valid regardless the age of human being. However
there is a significant difference in their interpretations of the relation men-
tioned above and, correspondingly, in their concrete phenomenological
descriptions of anxiety as the individual’s distinctive affective disposition. The
difference at issue is precisely about the existential difference between adult
and child. As it will be shown further Heidegger’s and Kierkegaard’s descrip-
tions of anxiety presuppose respectively two fundamentally different modes of
self-relation—namely, care and curiosity.
According to Heidegger, person becomes anxious due to facing the neces-
sity to take over her existence as a potentiality-for-Being that has been merely
thrown in the world. That is, in experiencing anxiety, human being is

4
This and next section partly draw on my paper Anxiety and Upbringing: Rethinking existential anthropol-
ogy from the intergenerational perspective (Shchyttsova, 2021).
266 T. Shchyttsova

disclosed to itself as a thrown potentiality-for-Being (Heidegger, 1962,

p. 233). Anxiety reveals thus to the existing individual his/her ontological
constitution. Heidegger designates this constitution by the word ‘care’. It is
noteworthy that the notion of care while designating a structure of human
existence (Heidegger, 1962, p. 241) belongs at the same time to a dictionary
of emotions. ‘Care’ means a non-indifferent relation of the existing self to
itself. This non-indifference is captured in the basic formula of Heidegger's
existential ontology: human there-being (Dasein) is an entity which is distin-
guished by the fact that “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it”
(Heidegger, 1962, p. 32). Anxiety is conceived of as an affect which disposes
human being toward facing—realizing—this basic existential fact. Thus, anxi-
ety and care as affects are shown in Heidegger’s description as pushed into each
other and as mutually grounding. That they appear essentially complemen-
tary is peculiar to the adult human being and is connected with the phenom-
enon of guilt (a being-guilty)—to speak more precisely, with a role this
phenomenon plays in constitution of the individual’s existing. Taking adult
human being as a human ‘norm’ Heidegger shows that and why—due to what
ontological structure—the existing individual can experience her own exis-
tence as a burden to be taken over. One of the constitutive elements of this
experience is the fundamental being-guilty which means that the existing
individual is ‘always already’ responsible for both her past and her present and
her future. Thus, in case of the adult human being there is an essential con-
nection between anxiety, being-guilty and care. This trio forms an affective
dimension of the structural wholeness of the human existence of the
adult person.
In order to approach existential anxiety that belongs to child we have to
switch to Kierkegaard's analysis of this phenomenon. It is noteworthy that
both Heidegger and Kierkegaard investigate a phenomenon of primordial
being-guilty as the basis (as the condition of possibility) for the very distinc-
tion of morally good and evil, for morality in general (Heidegger, 1962,
p. 332; Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 44). However, unlike Heidegger, the primary
interest of the Danish thinker is transformations of human spirit5 which
happen due to its transition from innocence to the primordial being-guilty
(the last one is considered by him on the basis of its mythological portraying
as the original sin within the Biblical theological context). Anxiety is addressed
by Kierkegaard as a phenomenon playing pivotal role in these

5
Kierkegaard means by spirit a distinctive constitution of human existence which is defined by him also
as self (Kierkegaard, 1941, p. 17). Spirit or self is thought of by him not metaphysically-substantially, but
rather in terms of an open dynamics conditioned by a unique dialectical structure of self-relation.
 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 267

transformations. Thus, contrary to Heidegger, Kierkegaard describes the phe-

nomenon of anxiety that is characteristic of the human self (spirit) in state of
innocence. In The Concept of Anxiety, innocence as a special mode (stage) of
existence is analyzed by Kierkegaard predominantly on the example of the
Biblical Adam—Adam before the Fall. However Adam, although being a para-
digmatic figure for Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety peculiar to the spirit (the
existing self ) in the state of innocence, is not the only example he explicitly
discusses. Kierkegaard highlights that the phenomenon of anxiety he described
in the abovementioned work “belongs so essentially to the child” (Kierkegaard,
1980, p. 42). Child (being-a-child) is viewed thus as an embodiment of the
innocent mode of existence mythologically symbolized by Adam. In what fol-
lows, I will briefly reconstruct his core description of anxiety stressing its rel-
evance to the child’s existence.
Child’s innocence as a particular existential condition is defined by
Kierkegaard as “an ignorance qualified by spirit” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 44).
Like in the adult’s human existence, anxiety arises in the child’s existence out
of the relation of the self to its own possibility of being able. However, unlike
the situation with the adult, this possibility is initially completely obscure to
the child. As Kierkegaard puts it: child “has no conception of what he is able
to do” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 44). Thus, anxiety is an affect that manifests the
relation of the child’s spirit to nothing. Innocence, says Kierkegaard, is anxiety
“because its ignorance is about nothing” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 44). Therefore
the child’s innocent self (spirit) cannot be burdened with the being-guilty
described by Heidegger6. As Kierkegaard formulates it: “The anxiety that is
posited in innocence is in the first place no guilt, and in the second place it is
no troublesome burden” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 42).
It follows that Heidegger’s existential dialectics built on the opposition of
the pole of authenticity and that of inauthenticity cannot be valid as well if we
address the child’s innocent mode of existence. Instead of the dramatic
dilemma described in Heidegger’s Being and Time (the existing individual, in
being faced with anxiety, either resolutely takes her own being over or escapes
this task, dissolving into anonymous everydayness), Kierkegaard shows that
the child’s existential condition is characterized by an existential dialectics of
different kind. He defines anxiety as “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipa-
thetic sympathy” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 42). This definition describes the
relation of the innocent spirit to nothing, namely “to the enormous nothing
6
Heidegger builds his phenomenology of anxiety on the relation of the existing self to certain ‘nothing-
ness’. He shows namely that Dasein is essentially guilty due to the irrevocable nullity (Nichtigkeit) of its
factical existence (Heidegger, 1962, p. 330). It differs from the way how Kierkegaard interprets the very
place or existential function of nothing in the innocent spirit.
268 T. Shchyttsova

of ignorance” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 44). Thus, anxiety peculiar to the child’s

existence combines two opposite affective aspirations: affective turning away
from and being-attracted to the “anxious possibility of being able”. In other
words, that which fills with anxiety (the possibility of being able) is at the
same time a subject of passionate interest or curiosity. In Russian everyday
language, there is a very good expression that grasps such a controversial state-
of-mind: ‘uzhasno liubopytno’—‘anxiously curiously’. The expression seems
to be the most accurate description of the primordial affective disposition of
the innocent self. Child's spirit in facing ‘the enormous nothing of ignorance’
is anxiously curious about its being-in-the-world. Kierkegaard mentions in
this regard: “In observing children, one will discover this anxiety intimated
more particularly as a seeking for the adventurous, the monstrous, and the
enigmatic” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 42).
By having differentiated the anxiety of the child from that of the adult, we
clarified an affective dimension of that primordial existential difference
between being-an-adult and being-a-child that was very well indicated by
Mollenhauer when he pointed out that for the young, “that which is possible
outweighs that which is real” (Mollenhauer, 2014, p. 17). The phenomenon
of upbringing is to be considered now from the point of view of the affective
asymmetry in the adult-child co-existence described above. In particular, we
have to ask: How should upbringing look like in order to correspond to the
child’s existential anxiety?

4 A Primary Existential Task of Upbringing

and Fairy Stories
This section will be concentrated on what is required from adults insofar as
they have to do with children whose existence is characterized by the state-of-
mind ‘anxiously curious’. What is at issue thus is a primary task of upbringing
implied in the difference between the adult’s anxiety and the child’s anxiety.
Speaking more generally: What are the pedagogical implications of this
asymmetry?
The state-of-mind ‘anxiously curious’ is an existential a priori which implies
the child’s existential need to have such experiences that will tranquilize his/
her anxiety. Correspondingly, a primary task of upbringing is to satisfy this
existential need. We consider thus upbringing as a relational phenomenon
that is to be rooted in the adult’s having to respond to child’s existential anxi-
ety. Whether the adult succeeds in fulfilling the primary task of upbringing
 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 269

depends on a quality of response. It follows, the fundamental question of the

adult-child co-existence is how to respond—how to communicate with the
child—in order to cor-respond to his/her primordial affective disposition?
This question shall help understand the difference of the children's curiosity
analysis developed in this chapter from elaboration of this topic in pedagogi-
cal theories. It is obvious that children’s passionate searching for both new and
pedagogical ways of nourishing that search have been among the central issues
of systematic pedagogy starting at least from Montessori (Montessori, 2009).
In the contemporary pedagogical discourse some authors focus on positive
meaning of children’s ignorance and inability as constitutive elements of
learning (Benner, 2005; English, 2012), others inquire into the ways of culti-
vating and promoting curiosity (Clark, 2017; Lindholm, 2018; Lucas &
Spencer, 2020). This chapter helps to reveal (co-)existential affective precon-
ditions of upbringing as a pre-scientific educational relation. It adds a new
perspective on the phenomenon of upbringing by grounding adult-child
communication in structures and basic emotions of the existing self.
Kierkegaard appears in this context as a highly significant author because, in
addition to his work The Concept of Anxiety, he outlines in Journals and Papers
some basic ideas as for a way of communication that might be relevant to the
abovementioned primary task of upbringing. In what follows, I suggest a kind
of actualizing rereading—including interpretation and further develop-
ment—of his fragments on this topic.
Kierkegaard provides us with a very simple notion that describes what
upbringing should be in order to correspond to the child's primordial state-
of-mind. It is the notion of intellectual-emotional nourishment. This notion,
which might seem a commonplace idea in today’s pedagogy, implies that
adult’s communication with child can only fulfill the primary existential task
of upbringing if it addresses child’s existence in toto—not some particular
(separated) faculties. From the existential-phenomenological point of view
upbringing is a communication between two freedoms that essentially differ
with regard to their association with anxiety. In the child’s existence, actuality
of freedom is experienced anxiously curiously as a ‘possibility of possibility’. It
allows us to add a new interpretation to the very word ‘upbringing’. To bring
up means to help the child to be and to become oneself while having this
anxiously curious relation to oneself as a possibility of possibility. This mean-
ing is implied in the tranquilizing function of the nourishment of child’s anx-
ious curiosity to be provided by the adult. In other words, ‘bringing-up’ is
about helping the child to keep up his/her state-of-mind in certain balance,
that is in a condition that will enable the child’s further exploration-and-
manifestation of his/her own being-in-the-world.
270 T. Shchyttsova

All said above explains why Kierkegaard says that to bring up human beings
is a very rare gift. Indeed, in order to address—to approach—child’s anxiety,
(a bringing-up) communication must cor-respond to the dialectics of anxiety.
In this connection, Kierkegaard pays special attention to children's deeply
rooted desire to hear ‘fairy’ stories (Kierkegaard, 1967, p. 113) and, more
generally, to the art of telling stories to children. A masterful storytelling is
considered, thus, a significant mode of providing children with that
intellectual-emotional nourishment which is required in order to support
children’s existential constitution. Kierkegaard warns in this concern:

Not to tell children such exciting imaginative stories and tales leaves an unfilled
space for an anxiety which, when not moderated by such stories, returns again
all the stronger. (Kierkegaard, 1967, p. 118)

‘Exciting’ and ‘imaginative’ seem to be decisive qualities of the stories sup-

posed to correspond to the child’s primordial existential need. At issue is thus
a mode of communication that opens to the child a possibility to be touched
by the poetic, to exercise a power of enchantment (Kierkegaard, 1967, p. 114).
It is the child's being-in-touch with the poetic that allows the child not to lose
existential balance and productive openness in his/her anxiously curious
state-of-mind.
It is obvious that telling fairy stories as a way of upbringing (taken in the
existential meaning clarified above) is relevant only for a certain age of child.
Relying on developmental psychology, we can indicate some minimal, albeit
schematic, definition of the child’s age that might be recognized correspond-
ing to the idea of intellectual-emotional nourishment of the child’s existential
anxiety. I suppose that the lowest boundary in this sense can be set around the
second year of life. At this age, the individuation of the child is already mani-
fest in many aspects. Above all, I would like to emphasize a child’s mastery of
the ‘No’ (in gesture and word). According to René Spitz, “this is perhaps the
most important turning point in the development of the individual /…/ with
the appearance of semantic symbols it becomes the origin of verbal commu-
nication” (Spitz, 1967, p. 204). The child's mastery of the ‘No’ indicates not
only his/her primary acquaintance with the medium of language, but also a
particular intensity of existential anxiety. I mean that although what the child
is able to do still remains obscure for him/her such ‘No-s’, in being said many
times every day, already project latent unstable (temporary) outlines of the
child’s self-understanding.
 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 271

5 Child’s Anxiety and Adult’s Patience

Given upbringing is to be understood in terms of the adult’s communicative
cor-respondance to the child’s existential constitution—that is to the child’s
primordial state-of-mind—the question arises: What is an adult’s affective
disposition cor-responding to this communicative task? Indeed, there must be
a kind of asymmetric complementarity between the affective dispositions of
adult and child whose communication performs upbringing of the child. An
affective complementarity to be explored in this section will be considered as
a phenomenon of irreducible mutual relationality in the adult-child co-
existence. It means that we will proceed from that factical apriori that adults
always-already have to care about children or, as Mollenhauer formulates it:
“task of upbringing and Bildung … is a debt owed by the adult generation to
children” (Mollenhauer, 2014, p. 7). The co-existential structure ‘have to
bring up’ presupposes that interpersonal relations of adult and child are rooted
in emotionally attuned responsivity (Waldenfels) that by its very nature is a
kind of affective circle since the child is always already in need (i.e. being
entrusted to adult) and adult is always already in debt (i.e. charged with
responsibility). It follows it would be wrong to approach the adult-child co-
existence so as if there were first two separate subjects and then there must be
raised the question about their relation (Meyer-Drawe, 1987). On the con-
trary, respective subjectifications of the old and the young are to be considered
against the background of their being-with-one-another-in-the world. Thus,
given the adult-child mutual relationality I would like to clarify what affective
disposition (moral emotion) is required for supporting—nourishing—the
child’s primordial state-of-mind ‘anxiously curious’? I claim, it is a patience.
My general thesis in this regard is that child’s anxiety and adult’s patience are
essentially complementary affects in the intergenerational co-existence due to
its irreducibly asymmetric character.
Phenomenon of patience can be understood differently. For the purposes
of this chapter, I suggest to differ two meanings of patience—hierarchical and
co-operative. By the hierarchical patience is meant a popular interpretation of
patience according to which adult has to be patient in communication with
child because of child’s intellectual and moral deficiency. Such interpretation
is grounded on the adult-centered vision of child as not yet a full-fledged
subject. Within the frame of this vision, adult is expected to be patient while
explaining something to a child due to child’s temporary difficulties in under-
standing the messages conveyed by the adult. Although the hierarchical con-
cept of patience is justified to some extent and in certain aspects, it must be
272 T. Shchyttsova

emphasized that it is based on the reductionist vision of child’s existence.

Within the framework of this approach, patience’s immediate correlate is
child's behavior perceived as manifestation of his/her constitutive deficiency
(like a constant repetition of the same questions, mis- and non-understandings,
failures to follow general rules etc.). To be patient means thus to show toler-
ance of child’s deficiency (resp. of natural delay in child’s becoming-an-adult).
What is crucial here is that adult’s patience entails a willingness (a goodwill)
to endure communication with the deficient subject ‘for a good cause’ so to
say while by ‘good cause’ is meant a successful child's becoming a full-fledged
subject. In other words, hierarchical patience is peculiar to instructive (top-
down, didactic) communication of this or that knowledge recognized as ‘valid’
and ‘objective’ in “the world of adult people” (Husserl, 2006, p. 243).
Co-operative patience, in its turn, is peculiar to the poetic communication
used by the adult in order to fulfill the primary existential task of upbringing.
As we saw earlier, masterful poetic communication has another ‘good cause’—
the keeping up the balance and openness of the child’s existential constitu-
tion. It occurs by virtue of the child’s being touched and excited by the poetic
performed through various aesthetical forms (narratives, metaphors, images
etc.). Like in top-down instruction, in the poetic communication with child
an adult has to be patient as well. Yet the experiential field of the patience
underpinning the poetic communication has another structure. What is cru-
cial here it is that the poetic is at the same time content and medium of the
adult-child communication. Being a medium implies that the poetic is
approached and shared co-operatively by adult and child. It is an essentially
asymmetrical experience, but not a hierarchical one since to communicate the
poetic is only possible by performing it that is by co-participating in it together
with the child. Adult and child are engaged in the medium of the poetic as
irreducibly asymmetrical and nevertheless equally constituting participants.
Therefore to be patient in the masterful poetic communication does not mean
to show tolerance of delay in child’s becoming-an-adult. Patience is rather an
affective element necessary for creating a poetic medium that will be able to
captivate the child. In this regard patience is originally intertwined with a
hopeful anticipation of fulfillment of the poetic as an event shared by the
child and the adult. To sum up, both child’s anxiety and adult’s patience—as
essentially complementary affects—are to be thought of from the perspective
of their relation to the poetic which appears the most relevant medium for the
primary existential task of upbringing discussed in this chapter.
 The Adult-Child Co-existence: Asymmetry, Emotions, Upbringing 273

6 Conclusion: A Shared Joy—From Routine

Talks to Teaching Settings
From what was said above follows that the adult-child educational co-existence
can be characterized by a shared joy deeply rooted in its asymmetric constitu-
tion. Indeed, co-participation in the medium of the poetic (be it reading a fair
story or visit to the theater or something else of this kind) is an enjoyment for
both, child and adult. Bilateral joy appears as a genuine mood of the co-
participative sharing the poetic by the adult and the child. What is crucial
here: it is the very way of the intergenerational sharing of the joy, given the
latter is experienced both by the adult and by the child due to their respective
relation to the poetic. To put it laconically: a shared joy does not mean at all
a common—one and the same—joy. On the contrary, upbringing performed
by means of the poetic communication is joyful insofar as the joy concerned
is not about unification (totalization), but proceeds from the experience of
irreducible difference—from the asymmetric relatedness to one another in the
given communicative situation. Thus, the phenomenon of shared joy at issue
is possible insofar as the adult-child difference is displayed as a vivid interplay
of the mutually related positions. The sharing of the joy occurs (takes place as
an embodied co-existential experience) due to the asymmetric performative
sharing of the medium of the poetic by the adult and the child, respectively.
It follows the very feeling of sharing the joy arises as a kind of ‘added value’
that can be neither planned in advance nor controlled by any of the partici-
pants engaged. A joyful atmosphere shared by the adult and the child, respec-
tively, is related ultimately to what happens in/to their ‘togetherness’. At issue
is thus an intergenerational experience in which there is no subject in the
classical sense, that is subject as an instance which might underly the experi-
ence as a principle of its (total) conceivability. The shared joy is thus a unique
phenomenon that overcomes the subject-centered optic regarding the adult-
child educational co-existence.
In the routine talk we started with, the mother is far from insisting on the
‘objective knowledge’ about the things in question. Instead of a direct top-
down instruction, she carefully and at the same time playfully avoids repre-
sentation of the objective (ultimately valid) point of view using the relativizing
sentences I don’t believe so, I don’t think so, maybe. By so doing she allows for
the child’s question about the reality of monsters and their blood to remain
open—open not only for the child’s further investigations and inquiries, but
also for a possibility of shared intergenerational co-participation in the
274 T. Shchyttsova

medium of the poetic, that is in the realm of fantasy able to deal with any
anxious images and ideas in a very delicate manner.
Adult’s masterful poetic communication and performative intergenera-
tional sharing the medium of the poetic are the upbringing options open and,
undoubtedly, well known for ‘good parents’. However these options are not
easily cultivated within the institutional framework of scientific pedagogy
since it always implies a danger of what Meyer-Drawe and Waldenfels call
“Pädagogisierung”—pedagogization (Meyer-Drawe & Waldenfels, 1988,
p. 278)—an attitude which suppresses the otherness of the child. Given such
systemic danger in pedagogy, the efforts aimed at elaboration of this or that
kind of synthesis of phenomenological research of childhood and didactics
should be very welcomed7. Yet even such efforts concentrate as a rule on doing
justice to the specifics of children's exploration of the world and on revealing
an essentially participatory and not merely receptive manner of this explora-
tion. What I have tried to achieve with this chapter is to indicate a possibility
to think of the adult-child co-existence in terms of the nonhierarchical asym-
metry that, being deeply rooted in emotional dimension, implies a very par-
ticular ethos of sharing the world.

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 Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous
Learning Conditions and Embodiment
Anja Kraus

1 Pedagogy, Culture and Equal Freedom

Education is a human right, applying equally to all. In this regard, equality is
central to all pedagogy. Equality embraces social recognition (cp. Honneth,
1992). How can social recognition be qualified for the context of pedagogy?
While there is controversy about what is pedagogically desirable, there is a
broad consensus about the adult being responsible for the personal relation-
ship with the learner at its center. In the European humanistic tradition, a
pedagogical relationship is regarded as a natural component of education. The
pedagogical relationship is interpersonal, asymmetrical and, in principle,
intergenerational. However, the ultimate goal of pedagogy is—what else?—to
enable the learner to act independently, taking increasing ownership of his or
her own learning and life. Strictly speaking, pedagogy is about rendering itself
obsolete. The principal pedagogical means are the transmission of knowledge,
encouragement and guidance, as well the contestation of the learner’s endeav-
ors of independence.
Consequently, the right of all human beings to make their own decisions as
an equal right is arguably the main focus of social recognition in educational
contexts. Of central importance for pedagogy is, thus, to examine the options

A. Kraus (*)
Department of Teaching and Learning (Ämnesdidaktik), Stockholms universitet,
Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: anja.kraus@su.se

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 277
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_17
278 A. Kraus

for this in a learning situation, for example in a classroom. In this chapter, this
will be envisaged with an education of emotions perspective.
Equal freedom principally relates to the uniqueness of a pupil. Pupils in a
classroom differ in terms of their bodily dispositions, social skills and cultural
and transcultural imprint; they usually do not even share the same motivation
and background knowledge. However, collective happenings are customarily
in the foreground at school, and the personal and social disparities are usually
largely hidden, overshadowed, repressed or tacit. Nonetheless, the uniqueness
of each pupil is constantly triggered during the school day in terms of a broad
variety of emotions, and it is displayed foremost in embodied and vital terms.
Examples of this not least include the pupils’ individual, bodily and emo-
tional comportments toward going into breaks; e.g. during the school day, the
pupils follow their private dreams and daydreams. Pupils experience bore-
dom, or moments of passion, and they act expansively in many different ways.
Any of these actions could serve as approach to the individuality of a pupil
and his/her freedom. Before one approach is chosen, however, we must briefly
consider pupils’ uniqueness and heterogeneity in the classroom in its whole.
One can trace the idea of an inclusive classroom back to the tradition of
designing the classroom according to what benefits society, or a certain com-
munity. The students are then, for the most part, addressed as a collective. The
individual pupil is encouraged to align with a common project. Basically,
norms and comportments exist on the one side, and the individual’s adapta-
tion to them in the individual’s own terms exists on the other. In the fore-
ground of classroom education is, thus, whether and how an individual comes
to terms with the authoritative social norms and comportments. If addressed
in the classroom, personal and social differences are normally taken merely as
the pupils’ heterogeneous learning conditions. Attention is being paid to gen-
der, age, nationality, ethnic background, skin color, political opinion, gender,
religious belief or physical constitution. Attempts to meet the pupils’ unique-
ness and heterogeneity are related to learning objectives, approaches, content,
pace and tools that are in the best case tailored and optimized for each learner.
Pape and Vander Ark (2018) would speak here of ‘personalized learning’ as “a
path to actively engage, motivate, and inspire all learners to embrace differ-
ence, overcome challenges, and demonstrate mastery” (p. 8). ‘Personalized
learning’, in terms of taking the heterogeneous learning conditions of the
pupils into account, counts as a progressive and appropriate approach.
Seen from teacher’s side, respect for the learners’ particularity and individu-
ality is then more or less understood in negative terms. That is, the teacher
prevents the hierarchization of the pupil-based factors of social and cultural
 Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous Learning Conditions… 279

difference. At first glance, there is nothing problematic about being mindful

of the pupils’ heterogeneous learning conditions.
However, a second glance on research in this field reveals that as pupils’
participation is mostly restricted to given options, while their freedom to
make their own decisions is hardly noticeable in the school (Helsper &
Lingkost, 2013). Seen from the pupils’ side, their heterogeneous learning con-
ditions typically appear in terms of adaption, e.g. like ‘you are met as a migrant
now and, once, you will become like everybody else here’. Thus, personalized
learning usually does not come anywhere near to providing the freedom to act
without constraint. We, thus, do not know for certain that the pupils will be
enabled to gradually take ownership of their own lives exclusively by a peda-
gogy that is mindful of their heterogeneous learning conditions and make
provisions for meeting those. It can be reasonably assumed that the pupils can
see this inconsistency. Hence, in the following, the negative aspects of free-
dom will be scrutinized in order to prepare the ground for refining the idea of
‘meeting the learners where they are’.

2 Egalitarian Difference and Uniqueness

Honneth (1992) associates the development of a personal identity with social
recognition, arguing that self-confidence is generated and stabilized in love,
self-respect stabilized in law and self-esteem stabilized in solidarity. In his con-
cept of egalitarian difference, he combines the equality of freedom perspective
with social recognition of difference. The right to equality and the right to
difference are not seen as contrasts, but as mutually dependent on each other.
Their interplay is supposed to underlie all social development. Egalitarian dif-
ference therefore describes a desirable status quo, norm or standard, and a
category for the understanding of social situations, cultural features, ideas,
actions or relationships between people.
It was Prengel (2006) who adopted the concept of egalitarian difference in
the educational discourse. To her, it describes the equality of freedom, as well
as difference and diversity as educative resources. The latter are differences
between different social groups and subgroups and between individuals, as
well as the intrapsychic and even intra-somatic heterogeneity of different per-
sonality components. Thus, Prengel assumes that humans differ not only in
terms of social and cultural features, but also regarding emotions, hidden tal-
ents and abilities, and not least in their private interests and the thoughts each
one expresses or withholds. As we all undergo permanent change, ‘no one is
280 A. Kraus

ever the same as before, and, thus, we become even less equal to any other’
(from a non-political point of view).

The pedagogy of diversity is based on the ‘indeterminability of human beings’,

so it cannot diagnose ‘what someone is’, nor ‘what should become of him or
her’. […]. People can be adequately described only in terms of processuality and
environmental interdependence. (Prengel, 2006, p. 191, author’s transl.)

Thus, education is a matter of “transcending oneself into the unknown”

(Peukert, 2004, p. 382, own transl.). Consequently, it comprises freedom in
many more ways than those being balanced with the social recognition of the
heterogeneous learning conditions. The principle of egalitarian difference
incorporates the expression of the desire and will to see life in all its variety;
Prengel (2001, p. 93, author’s transl.) writes:

Life in all its variety is valuable, because suppression and hierarchization of the
expressions of life are experienced as loss, limitation, disruption, or even destruc-
tion of the riches of life opportunities, as ‘tort’. (Lyotard)

We will come back to Lyotard. Here, we note that factors of social differ-
ence cannot be clearly ascribed, nor can egalitarian difference be reached once
and for all. As a means of pedagogically supporting the pupils in taking the
ownership of their own lives, egalitarian difference is less a status quo and
more a process feature. According to Prengel, it is essential to educational
practice.
This chapter hypothesizes that how a teacher fathoms a learner’s uniqueness
is of central importance for the ultimate goal of pedagogy, that is for enabling
the learner to take ownership of his/her own learning and life. In what fol-
lows, pupils’ freedom to make their own decisions in a classroom situation
will be approached from an education of emotions perspective. From this
perspective, as we will see, practice comes into view as enacted via embodiment.

3 Uniqueness and Alterity

A short example may serve to illustrate the variety of pupils’ life expres-
sions at school.

A class of 6th grade pupils (12-year-olds) were asked to bring a toy to school for
their art lesson. Their task was, with reference to the artist Jeff Wall, to stage the
 Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous Learning Conditions… 281

toy in the schoolhouse in terms of what would happen to it at school, and take
a photo of their arrangement. The results were narrative assemblages, a scene
like a cabinet of wonder, or a still life. However, the majority of the pupils cre-
ated a scenario of violence.

Generally, a toy represents the playful side of a child. If there is some

authenticity in the pupils’ toy arrangements, and if the arrangements repre-
sented some aspects of the pupils’ personal, social and cultural preconditions
of learning, then their photos would represent what school does to the pupil-
photographers’ playful side. Not a few pupils staged their toy at school in a
violence scenario, that is threatened, and as a victim. The reason for this could
lie in the pupils’ age, as many 12-year-olds certainly say a bitter farewell to
their childhood; this also depends on other conditions in their private lives. In
any case, violence scenarios express the perception and experience of alterity,
that is of radical otherness, either as social experiences or as the experience a
person has within him-/herself. Thus, one can read such violence arrange-
ments as expressions of not being able to make the voice heard in a social
context—perhaps even in the school.
Lyotard (1993) raises his philosophy on humanity in referring to the expe-
rience of marginalization and of not being heard. He provocatively reformu-
lates the question of what forms the uniquely human as “what if what is
‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?” (p. 2) He sees
humanity in a person’s “struggle constantly to assure his or her conformity to
institutions and even to arrange them with a view to a better living-together”
(p. 4); however, he does not regard noble goals as decisive for humanity:

[O]ne can take pride in the title humanity for exactly opposite reasons. Shorn
of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its inter-
est, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the
child is eminently the human, because its distress heralds and promises things
possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult
community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is
suffering from, and which calls on it to become more human. (Lyotard,
1993, p. 4)

Humanity is explained here as the sensitivity for the not-yet, as struggling,

as difficulties and faults, a status for which the child is highlighted as an exam-
ple. At once, the attention is drawn to hegemonic discourses that silence the
voices that are not written into their scripts and that are not well-established.
282 A. Kraus

In this regard, the perception and experience of ultimate alterity can come up.
Lyotard creates his own term for this: ‘the differend’.

4 Hegemonic Discourses and ‘the Differend’

Lyotard (1993) takes in a linguistic perspective, when developing his concept
of alterity. Linguistically seen, one and the same thing changes its quality
when put into different phrases: There is a difference between something
being ciphered out, or being known, of being described, or being recounted,
questioned, shown or ordered. For example, depending on the context, the
utterance ‘Water!’ could be the answer to a question, an order or some other
form of communication (cp. Wittgenstein, 1958, §27). This is due to each
phrase following a set of rules, that is a phrase regimen, according to which
the phrase and its meaning are constituted. “A phrase ‘happens’” (Lyotard,
2002, p. xii). The phrase regimens, discourses or language games correspond
to phenomenologies; an event escorts, so to speak, a phrase regimen. The dif-
fering connotations of the phrases are linked to corresponding life scenarios,
which even derive from the differing connotations themselves. Seen from this
linguistic angle, all facts and all knowledge, thus, depend on the rules of lan-
guage. Lyotard (2002) refers to the “disentanglement of language games in
Wittgenstein” (p. xiii) when pointing at the phrase regimens being heteroge-
neous, and not translatable into one another. The phrase regimens themselves
cannot be expressed. Connotation, thus, happens in the face of what is not
presentable.
To take ownership of one’s own learning and life, it appears as important to
know about the heterogeneity of the phrase regimens, or language games, as
this plays an important role in a person’s aligning with and committing to a
community. One could easily draw didactic conclusions from that (cp. Kraus,
2016), but lesson planning is not the focus of the present discussion. Here, it
is expected that exploring the dynamics, strategies and power relations that
are related to the phrase regimens allows one—at least to some extent—to
define pupils’ freedom to make their own decisions in a classroom situation
and to take ownership of their own learning and lives.
First of all, Lyotard (2002) warns against universal discourses that seek to
ground themselves hierarchically and to place themselves above all others. A
universal, hegemonic discourse or grand narrative is a meta-narrative on cur-
rent affairs, creating some kind of interconnection between singular events;
‘class struggle’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘inclusion’ are examples. In daily contexts,
hegemonic discourses pre-program how certain phrase regimens are linked
 Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous Learning Conditions… 283

together or how this is supposed to be done. Mimetic processes make one join
a hegemonic discourse and act accordingly (Wulf, 2011). How the phrase
regimens are linked together is a “problem of politics” (Lyotard, 2002, p. xiii).
In reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment with Rocco
(1994), we can, for example, identify instrumental thinking in education and
society as hegemonic. Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 2002) point out the
symbolic violence that accompanies the Enlightenment’s postulate of reason
as ciphered out in terms of logical formalism. They criticize a “reduction of
thought to a mathematical apparatus” and contend that “the machinery of
thought subjugates existence” (p. 20). They explain their point as follows: The
discourse of Enlightenment confronts

the abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize
[…] by nothing but abstract material, which has no other property than to be
the substrate of that right. The equation of mind and world is finally resolved,
but only in the sense that both sides cancel out. The reduction of thought to a
mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure. What
appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the subjection of all existing things to
logical formalism, is bought with the obedient subordination of reason to what
is immediately at hand. (p. 20)

Various mechanisms of deception hide the reduction of thought as it is

unfolded here. A reduction of thought can be experienced as loss, a limitation,
a disruption or even as the destruction of the riches of life opportunities (cp.
Prengel, 2001, above).
Regarding pedagogy’s goal of enabling the students to take ownership of
their own learning and life, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) and Lyotard
would say that this is dependent at first glance on the compatibility of an
individual pupil’s approach with the corresponding hegemonic discourses.
However, when attention is placed on a pupil’s uniqueness, the incommensu-
rability of phrase regimens comes into relief. Lyotard (2002) calls attention to
the fact that the domination of ‘one’ way of understanding the world structur-
ally does injustice to other such options and other opinions by putting them
into the position of differends:

[A] differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that
cannot be resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both of the argu-
ments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy.
However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their
differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of
them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule). (p. xi)
284 A. Kraus

A differend is a clash, an incompatibility, incongruency and incommensu-

rateness. As we have learnt above, the child can be put in the position of being
differend in relation to the adult. Being differend means counting as incom-
mensurable, not equal, powerless and even as negligible. Lyotard likewise
gives the example of the colonized in relation to the colonizer, the proletarian
in relation to the ruling classes. What a child, a colonized person, a proletar-
ian says is not heard. How does such voicelessness come into being? Lyotard
(2002) explains it by relating to the statement of a professor of French litera-
ture, Robert Faurisson, who claimed in the 1970s that the only testimony of
the Holocaust he would accept would be that of someone who had actually
gone through the gas chambers. Since those who have seen the gas chambers
in operation are those who have died, this criterion for reliability in fact silences
all possible testimonies. Faurisson’s statement sets the victims of the Holocaust
off as differend. The example is quite extreme.
However, the phrase regimen that is put into effect brings a group of per-
sons into the position of being subordinated, passive, victims, the differend,
without giving them the possibility to defend themselves. Being set into the
position of not being heard in a social context brings about the perception
and experience of alterity, that is of radical otherness. This can be a social
experience or even an experience that one has within oneself. In any case, it
does a person or group wrong. “A wrong results from the fact that the rules of
the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre
or genres of discourse” (Lyotard, 2002, p. xi). Thus, a plaintiff is divested of
his/her voice in a merely structural way. There is no position from which s/he
can prove that s/he has been done wrong. Lyotard (2002) describes this in
many variants: There will be no understanding of the plaintiff’s idea of justice
by the ruling, if their understandings about justice differ. A victim will not
even be able to prove that s/he has been done wrong, “if the author of the
damages turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge” (p. 8), or if the
judge is already convinced of the guilt of the victim or “when no presentation
is possible of the wrong he or she [the victim] says he or she has suffered”
(p. 8). Lyotard calls it a tort, when one’s suffering is regarded as not existing as
long as it remains inexpressible.
‘Tort’ usually lasts until the wrong is put in understandable phrases accord-
ing to ruling discourses. Due to his conviction that it is language that makes
us fit to share in communal life, adult consciousness and reason” (Lyotard,
1993, p. 3), Lyotard stresses the significance of an appeal to a third party to
give a voice to the one who is put into the position of the differend. An autho-
rized advocate who is able to hear the victim and who can speak for him/her/
it. Besides that, the enforced silence can also become a transit situation, in
 Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous Learning Conditions… 285

which new discourses are developed.—What does the possibility and circum-
stances of the differend mean for education and pedagogy?
There is already a trace of the exclusion of the ‘other’ running through the
discourse of education theory, especially insofar as postcolonial perspectives
are taken as “not only an intellectual fashion, but the only access to world and
national history appropriate to the age of globalization” (Brumlik, 2016 in
Jörissen, 2019, own transl.). However, the agenda connected to a pedagogy of
the ‘other’ seems to make the mistake of taking the categories of social differ-
ence (ethnic background, gender etc.) for a respect for the uniqueness of the
pupils. Then, the possibility of being positioned as differend, ultimate alterity
and tort seems to not be considered to an adequate degree.
The pupils who experience ultimate alterity in the classroom may take the
on them enforced silence in the school context as a transit situation, in which
new discourses are developed. However, e.g. their teachers can also be poten-
tial advocates for them, giving a voice to the silenced. The urgency of the
problem of alterity and differend for the pupils, and the teacher’s potential
role in this, become obvious in a case study (Kraus, 2010), the result of which
is sketched in the following: In this study, the first 20 minutes of an art lesson
with ninth graders has been documented by film and analyzed with the ‘docu-
mentary method’ (Bohnsack et al., 2011) and with Lyotard’s terminology:

Light was shed on the attempt of all pupils in the classroom to provoke their
teacher in different ways to dismiss, or to turn them away. In direct and indirect
ways, the pupils display a whole spectrum of affronts, forms of disrespect, out-
rage and offense. In this way, they address their teacher’s position of power; in
addition, the hegemonic discourses of school regulations regarding general con-
duct are marked and accentuated. The rules envisage sending those who disturb
a lesson to a school helper. However, instead of reacting in the expected way, the
teacher masterly withstands the situation. By not punishing the pupils who are
provoking her, she avoids setting them up as differend, even if she is in the posi-
tion to do so. By not acting, the teacher becomes a victim. The power passes to
the unruly pupils; their rebellious phrase regimens put her into the position of
the differend. What follows next may appear as contra-intuitive: After a while of
setting the teacher into the position of ultimate alterity, the pupils finally calm
down and the teacher gains back control over the class, giving the lesson, in
which the pupils now participate in a constructive and friendly manner. An
apparently quite significant stage in this process of appeasement is the teacher’s
attempt to convince the pupils that the lesson is a common endeavor, demon-
strating the attitude of egalitarian difference as she does so.
286 A. Kraus

The teacher seems to be tested by the pupils, in the end giving them the
proof that she will not use her power and perform the ‘one’ way of under-
standing the world by setting the pupils into the position of differends. In this
way, she may, at least temporarily, have won against the violence of a collec-
tively shaped form of compulsion. In this regard, the actions of the teacher
were in a way proactive and not as passive as they may have appeared. It is
difficult to imagine that this teacher has given the pupils any reason to behave
as they did; one cannot even think of any other unequivocal reason for their
affronts. At the same time, the result of the teacher not acting according to the
hegemonic discourses was in this case obviously equivalent to ‘meeting the
learners where they are’, and led to the restitution of conversation. She suc-
ceeded by creating mutual consent about the lesson being a common under-
taking to their all’s best. She seems to have a silent understanding about that
the pupils will accept the offer.
What seems to come into effect here is what Krämer (2010, p. 32) describes:
“Violence turns out as the condition of the possibility of language and conversa-
tion”. At the same time, Krämer describes violence as a break in the intersubjec-
tive processes of making sense together and the disallowance of responses to
violence in the medium of language. Waldenfels (2002) elucidates the difficulty
of determining the origin of violence: “Violence cannot be traced back to the
initiative or property of individuals or groups, nor to a mediating authority, nor
to encoded rules” (p. 174). Violence acts in a manner of its own, degrading all,
those in the leading role as well as the passively affected to its statists. Even if the
offenders are the visible initiators and bear the social guilt for it, violence is bot-
tomless, so to speak. Nobody will ever win over violence in its own terms.
According to Waldenfels (2002), one must instead respond to this stripping out
of all authority and the limited sphere of influence over violence in order to be
able to return to a dialogue. Non-violent action is, thus, not just a question of
exercising the will to suppress somebody’s urge to perform aggressions but
might be the possibility to fight a differend.
The art education example, as well as the case study, conveys violence.
Nevertheless, the pupils seem to have come quite close to the goal of pedagogy
in terms of taking ownership of their own learning and lives. They convey a
differend, an enforced uniqueness, incompatibility, oddness that is related to
voicelessness and powerlessness. In so doing, they show general protest against
any disrespect of distinctiveness and thereby claim ownership of their own
learning and lives. In this regard, they de facto take for themselves the free-
dom to make decisions for their own lives.
At the same time, their behavior is only reactive. We may therefore recog-
nize here that “in speaking one does not basically practice autonomy but in
 Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous Learning Conditions… 287

fact experiences heteronomy” (Krämer, 2010, p. 41, own transl.). The disen-
tanglement of language games and the incompatibility of different phrase
regimens seem to effectively be bridged less by language than by practices and
embodiment—those of the teacher in the case study. In correspondence to
this, Krämer (2010) complements Honneth’s social recognition concept with
her concept of intercorporeal existence. The teacher shows us that one can
respond to the creation of a differend by being alert to whether and how it is
created, and also by being aware of the conditions under which the differend
becomes effective, true, valid and/or common sense—at the same time, pro-
posing an alternative to this, a shared classroom culture.
This chapter sought to scrutinize the negative concept of freedom in order
to prepare the ground for refining the idea of ‘meeting the learners where they
are’. An answer to the question of how a pupil’s uniqueness in the classroom
can be fathomed in terms of the ownership of the own learning and life, is still
pending, however.

5 Conclusions and Outlook

The aforementioned examples from everyday school life drew our attention to
concrete challenges and, concomitantly, to the fact that the body cannot be
relieved from its being located. It became clear that being alive means being
vulnerable (cp. Butler, 2004) and, potentially, being exposed to alterity, or to
being positioned as the differend. Alterity, violence and the differend appeared
as a sort of litmus test of personal freedom, as they seem to make visible some
neuralgic points, at which taking ownership of one’s own learning and life is
at stake. Egalitarian difference was identified as a way to pedagogically react to
alterity, violence and the differend, potentially disarming it. According to
Lyotard, the uniqueness of a person as the freedom to make one’s own deci-
sions is urgently faced with incompatible phrase regimens and easily ends up
in the state of differend.
However, drawing upon Geertz (1973), we can identify another possible
track for further research also on proactive decision-making, even if this will
stay rather abstract here. The anthropologist explains being human as becom-
ing a cultural being, linking this to becoming individual.

To be human here is […] not to be Everyman; it is to be a particular kind of

[hu]man, and of course [hu]men differ. (p. 53)
288 A. Kraus

Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual under the

guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms
of which we give form, order, point, and direction to our lives. [… Hu]Man is
to be defined neither by [her]his innate capacities alone, as the Enlightenment
sought to do, nor by [her]his actual behaviors alone, as much of contemporary
social science seeks to do, but rather by the link between them, by the way in
which the first is transformed into the second, [her]his generic potentialities
focused into [her]his specific performances. (p. 52)

Culture shapes communities, as well as it forms individuality. What is

more, Geertz describes culture as the link between the innate dispositions of
a person and his/her outer personality, and, thus, in terms of generic potenti-
alities and specific performances. Even if the use of the term culture usually
stresses historically developed commonality, the similarities of a particular
group of people and shared narratives, the display of cultural parameters is, to
a certain extent, dependent on the individuals. Culture is conveyed by per-
sons, and it is up to each individual with his/her unique blend of experiences,
perspectives and backgrounds to be the recipient and the agent of a culture.
The individual perceives culture as part of his/her identity. On these points,
even the founder of Cultural Anthropology, Edward Tylor (2010), agrees:

Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex

whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by [hu]man as a member of society. (p. 1)

In cultural contexts, one faces the fact that everybody is unique, and reacts
to cultural features in a unique way. At the same time, culture is learned, exer-
cised and practiced. It is imparted and developed. In order to enable the
young to eventually take ownership of their learning and lives, pedagogy
introduces culture to the next generation as, for example, the historically cre-
ated systems of meaning. Culture provides for some third party and may
even advocate for a differend, as well as it may enact it. Culture also offers
specific possibilities of a transit in silence in which new discourses are devel-
oped, or practices and embodiment that effectively bridge different phrase
regimens. The freedom of pupils to make their own decisions in a classroom
situation is, thus, directed to culture. Future empirical studies of correspond-
ing enacted practice and embodiment may provide a clearer picture of a cul-
tural determination of the differends and options for change.
 Alterity and Emotions: Heterogeneous Learning Conditions… 289

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 Part IV
Body, Space and Learning

Pedagogical activities focus on fostering the independence of young people by

supporting their learning and development, and enabling them to meet vari-
ous intellectual and real-life challenges. The task of education (Bildung) is to
enable individuals to comprehend, dispute and reshape their own existence
and the features of the world. Pedagogical practices aim to convey learning
content and to spark the child’s desire for the pursuit of knowledge as a life-
long endeavour.
According to the concept of embodiment, the involvement of the body in
thinking, sensing and acting conveys educational content. In a learning situ-
ation, always only certain knowledge, skills and attitudes are brought to the
fore while others are overshadowed; certain tools are used and other impulses
are avoided; certain structures and features are highlighted whereas others are
suppressed. Such profiling usually also involves the preferment of certain
conceptions of the human being to others. Gender, cultural background and
class play a role in such a profiling, providing criteria for the creation of
social structures, of a structure of knowledge, values, administration and so
on. The social structures are conveyed and mediated discursively, visually,
materially, spatially or bodily. They play a central role in our comprehension
of the world and our own existence and, thus, in processes of embodiment
and learning.
However, constellations of space, objects and bodies emerge foremost in a
material way. They affect life and education primarily without being expressed
in words—they are simply implied or indicated. Tacit knowledge serves here
as an umbrella concept. Examples of space-related tacit knowledge are envi-
ronments formed by architecture, cultural-symbolic constructs, socially
292 Body, Space and Learning

constructed space, as well as the impact of materials, technologies, virtual and

real-life connections. These real-life connections mingle with body-related
tacit knowledge, such as those of habitus, non-discursive practices, nonverbal
communication and interaction, forms of social agreement and contextual
influences on human behaviour. The classification of tacit knowledge creates
a backdrop for systematic and empirical research on forms of understanding
and practices. Knowledge about the impact of the tacit dimensions of life on
learning may allow for modelling supportive learning environments and
learning scenarios that foster the independence of young people by support-
ing them to meet various intellectual and real-life challenges.
The chapters in this section describe specific, explicit and tacit space- and
body-related knowledge that is important for initiating learning and for
enabling the learner to meet intellectual and real-life challenges. The focus is
on how subject matters and learning practices participate in the constellations
of space, objects and bodies, and how the learning is influenced by these con-
stellations. They also deal with related questions of power, hegemony and
exclusion.
In Chap. 18 that opens this section Gabriele Klein investigates the connec-
tion between movement and touch. Her basic premise is that bodily practices
and experiences are important in the formation of communities and cultures.
What are the consequences of the social distancing brought about by
COVID-19 for the way we use our bodies? In any event it is important to
rediscover and to live ‘movement’ as a key element of personal freedom, a
central characteristic of the modern age which, since the 1970s, has led to
powerful new bodily experiences. This presents the health service with impor-
tant challenges. Connections between the body and education have not only
been important historically—for example, in the early to mid-twentieth cen-
tury Swiss and German ‘Lebensreform’, ‘Rhythmusbewegung’ and
‘Wandervogel’ movements. Even today it is very important to be aware of the
reciprocal relationship between educating the body and developing a sensitiv-
ity towards differences in cultural and social life. The author then looks at the
systems of the body as systems of touch. She examines how important move-
ment and touch are for a fruitful way of understanding the world and our-
selves. Questions of embodiment are central not only in education but also in
the way we live our everyday lives in society.
In Chap. 19 on ‘Like Water Between One’s Hands’, Gabriele Brandstetter
describes the fluidity, transience and momentariness of contemporary dance
and performance as an ‘aesthetic of the ephemeral’. She contributes to the
concept of embodiment and learning by relating these spatial modes of
somatic experience to social terms, such as interaction and synchronization,
 Body, Space and Learning 293

memory, identity and transformation. Concepts of the embodiment of time

and temporality are examined by means of metaphors of the ephemeral and
vanitas, questioning how these ideas affect the phenomenology of body and
memory, identity and transformation. The idea of ephemerality is linked to
the social and aesthetic discourse of modernity. The chapter analyses the prac-
tices of somatic experience, of interaction and synchronization, and outlines
an ‘aesthetic of the ephemeral’.
In Chap. 20 on the ‘Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning’ Arnd-
Michael Nohl and Morvarid Götz-Dehnavi examine the material and spatial
aspects of learning and the significance of material things for processes of
learning. With the ‘material turn’, new theoretical opportunities arise for
grasping the complex process of learning. First, this chapter challenges the
anthropocentricity of conceiving human beings as subjects and material
things as objects. Second, it examines the constitution of spatially based
bodily learning. Spatiality is here conceived as the result of transactional prac-
tices between human beings and physical things. In an example of a videogra-
phy-based inquiry into educational interaction in a preschool, the authors
differentiate between the children relying on habituated space and their cop-
ing with emergent space.
Chapter 21 by Bernd Wagner on ‘Body-Related Learning Processes in
Museums’ concerns tangible cultural heritage, and here, body-related learning
in the museum. The author argues that museums and universities display or
preserve a vast part of our tangible cultural heritage that is still only rudimen-
tarily accessible to preschool and primary school children. The material turn
in cultural studies has led to an increased interest in object-related learning
processes in educational science. The study gives an overview of research that
focuses on children’s sensory confrontations with objects in collections and on
children’s performing with objects. The author describes body-related histori-
cal learning processes in the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin
and considers further perspectives on learning processes in museum collec-
tions, based on educational anthropology.
 Movement and Touch: Why Bodies Matter
Gabriele Klein

One of the basic premises of the sociology of the body is that bodies, bodily
practices and physical sensations and experiences are important and necessary
for the formation of sociality and culturality. This premise has been called into
question by the COVID-19 pandemic which, in 2020, sparked a global social
crisis of epic proportions. The pandemic has helped to speed up a greater
process of social transformation that had already been taking place for some
time, namely the digitalisation of society. It has also given rise to a number of
epistemic crises that have called former certainties into question, including
the increasing amount of attention being paid to the societal and cultural
significance of bodies and bodily practices, as well as the social relevance of
social fields relating to the body, like sport, dance and care work. Since the
1970s, bodies have increasingly become the focus of public and academic
interest, but they have gained new meaning since the beginning of the pan-
demic: now, they are both, dangers and in danger.
What kind of impact has social distancing, which is at its core physical
distancing (Klein & Liebsch, 2020), had on the body and bodily practices in
light of the digital society (Nassehi, 2019) that we live in? We should not view
the COVID-19 pandemic as a disruption, as a state of exception after which
we will be able to return to an ‘old normal’. Rather, there will be a ‘new nor-
mal’—and this will also be the case for the changed status of interaction

G. Klein (*)
Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: gabriele.klein@uni-hamburg.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 295
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_18
296 G. Klein

between bodies, which is generated through orders of touch that, in turn,

have led to changes in the formation of subjects. What do established theories
in the sociology of the body have to say about the societal relevance of bodies,
and what kinds of eruptions and confusions have been unleashed by the
COVID-19 crisis?

1 Movement: One of Modernity’s

Leading Concepts
Movement is good for you! Movement strengthens your immune system! Movement
promotes resilience! Movement keeps you young! Movement is slimming! Movement
makes you happy! In recent years and decades—more or less since the 1970s
and the birth of the fitness movement in the US and Europe—we have
encountered these kinds of sentences in all kinds of places. Health advisors
and nutritionists, fitness magazines, doctors’ practices and gyms, health insur-
ance providers and public health authorities have all been promulgating these
guiding principles. They seem to incite each individual to take action—and
they also address the individual explicitly. As verbalisations of a practice of
self-care, the responsibility for which is shouldered by the individual, these
principles are another component of a fundamental process of social
transformation.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, a process of restructuring has been taking place,
during which society has transformed from an industrial society into a post-
industrial society and therefore into a society with a growing loss of industrial
physical labour (with the decline of the mining and steel industries), accom-
panied by a rise in the number of people working in the service industry. At
the same time, unions have fought to reduce working hours, creating more
free time for the individual. This increase in free time led to the establishment
of a leisure market in the 1970s that has been increasingly commercialised
and eventified. Movement and physical activity have thus become important
economic factors in this new leisure market in post-industrial society.
The rise of the post-industrial society has led to the transformation of cities
from the functional cities of modernity to theatralised, museified and eventi-
fied urban landscapes. Here, it is above all the inner cities that have been
increasingly adorned with festivals, cultural, dance and sporting events, above
all in the field of popular sports like marathon, triathlon and bicycle racing.
All of these events have become important economic factors in the urban
tourism that is expanding with the theatralisation of the city.
 Movement and Touch: Why Bodies Matter 297

Relevant to the changes that have occurred to the status of the body is the
paradigm shift that has taken place in public health policy towards preventative
action strategies. Preventative healthcare is taking up more and more space,
and public health programmes that aim to get people to take preventative
steps and to take care of their own health are increasing in importance. The
neoliberal, governmental concept of self-care in post-industrial societies is
thus also asserting itself in the field of healthcare, which is reflected in the
incitements to physical activity described at the beginning of this chapter.
Related to these developments is the body boom, as it was referred to in
Germany, that began in the 1970s with the fitness and bodybuilding move-
ments. It has led to the Americanisation of European cultural traditions of
movement and, with it, the establishment of the commercialised exercise sec-
tor. At the same time, with martial arts, with popular dance cultures like
tango (Klein, 2009), salsa and lambada, with disco dancing and pop dances
like hip-hop (Klein & Friedrich, 2003) and techno (Klein, 2004), and with
meditation techniques like yoga, tai chi and aikido, alternative practices of
movement from Asian, South American and African cultures have conquered
the new leisure and fitness markets of the global North. In the 1990s, the
wellness movement injected established fitness culture with its own postulates
of mental health and inner balance. Awareness, mindfulness, resonance and
resilience—these are the essential terms that have also gradually found their
way into academic debates.
The new surge in attention being paid to the body has also led to the
increasing significance of social fields that are essentially body-based—like
dance. Be it contemporary stage dance, performance art (which is based on
bodily and choreographic practices), dance-education projects (such as com-
munity dance) or dance therapy—dance is now considered a bodily practice
that can be used to clearly illustrate just what kind of contribution physical
movement can make to processes of knowledge and education, sociality and
culturality, perception and experience. For, unlike sport, where aesthetic
movement can be present (e.g., in an elegant run) but is not constitutive of
the aims and purposes of the activity, in dance, movement itself is, in Giorgio
Agamben’s words, ‘pure mediality’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 58). From a micro-
sociological perspective, dance is a medium that can be used to show that
bodily communication is an independent action that shapes reality and allows
alternative bodies of knowledge to become apparent and visible (Klein, 2004).
This position is formulated in opposition to Jürgen Habermas, who, in his
‘Theory of Communicative Action’, characterises bodily movements as ‘non-
independent actions’ (Habermas, 1984, p. 97). In dance studies, dance is
considered an ephemeral art form and therefore a symbol of liquid modernity
298 G. Klein

(Bauman, 2000). It is viewed as a model of social and cultural reality (Klein

& Noeth, 2011), as it shows how people use bodily practices—gestures, poses,
movements and touch—to virtually ‘dance’ their way into conventions (like
in the conventional bourgeois dance form, the waltz) (Klein, 1994); or to
question, break and subvert patterns of everyday perception and experience
(Klein, 2020), as is the case in some forms of contemporary and modern
dance (Brandstetter & Klein, 2013).
Simultaneous with these developments was the ‘return of the body’
(Kamper & Wulf, 1989) to cultural studies and the social sciences in the
1970s, spearheaded in the German-speaking world by sociologist Dietmar
Kamper and pedagogue Christoph Wulf. Historically speaking, this was not
the first time that the body was making a return, as it had been a key element
in modern debates on the theory of education. As early as at the turn of the
nineteenth century, as the circulation of goods, people and information was
accelerating, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi introduced to the public debate on
education the idea that movement invigorates people ‘in mind and soul’
(Meusel, 1973). He had been influenced by the pedagogue Johann Christoph
Friedrich GutsMuths who, in one of his main works, the much-discussed
1793 Gymnastics for Youth (GutsMuths, 1800), laid the theoretical founda-
tions for adolescent physical education. GutsMuths understood physical edu-
cation as an essential component of a bourgeois upbringing and therefore as
something with clear goals of affective and self-control, which was also the
case regarding the premilitary training associated with apparatuses of self-
constraint. It was the age of burgeoning modernity, which Norbert Elias, in
his two-volume ‘On the Process of Civilisation’ (Elias, 2012), would later
describe as the decisive phase in the establishment of the psychological struc-
ture that characterises the modern subject.
The relationship between the body and the formation of the subject was
then taken up once more during a renewed surge in the critique of civilisation
at the beginning of the twentieth century: while movement was seen as a driv-
ing force—of the colonial circulation of goods, information and people as
well—physical movement became a credo for alternative lifestyles and a
medium that made it possible to escape the hectic pace of industrial society,
for example, in the German Lebensreform (life reform) movement and the
alternative movements that accompanied it, such as the Rhythmusbewegung
(rhythm movement), the expressionist dance movement and the Wandervogel
movement (akin to the Scouts movement). Movement, above all in the ‘great
outdoors’ and the ‘fresh air’, offered an alternative to life in sooty, congested
industrial cities and became the epitome of self-reflection and holistic bour-
geois lifestyles.
 Movement and Touch: Why Bodies Matter 299

With the return of the body in the 1970s, the sociological and pedagogical
relevance of the body once again stepped into the academic spotlight. A num-
ber of German pedagogues developed new school concepts that were also
realised in the 1970s, such as the Laborschule Bielefeld (Laboratory School
Bielefeld). But they also developed new physical education concepts, which
were now understood as lessons in which children could experience their bod-
ies (Funke-Wieneke, 1983). The bedrock of these concepts was above all the
idea that the physical development of children and adolescents plays a very
essential role in education and human development.
But the body returned to academic debates in the fields of sociology, phi-
losophy and cultural studies as well. Scholars turned to theoretical concepts of
which the academy had lost sight, such as those in Norbert Elias’ ‘On the
Process of Civilisation’, which had been published by a German Jew in
England in 1939. They also formulated a sociology of the body using the writ-
ings of anthropologists and phenomenologists Arnold Gehlen (1993),
Helmuth Plessner (2019) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012), as well as soci-
ological writings by Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and Michel Foucault (1979). The
sociology of the body sees the body as an essential component of sociality and
culturality—even as the foundation of social and cultural processes, practices,
techniques and orders, as Marcel Mauss argues (1973). To this day, it is con-
sidered self-evident in the sociology of the body that the body is a social
instrument, intermediary, medium, actor, symbol and representative all at
once, and that bodily practices are fundamentally at the heart of sociality
(Gugutzer et al., 2022).
In summary, we can say that certainties regarding the social and cultural
relevance of bodies and the essential role that they play in society have become
objects of discourse in the fields of education theory, cultural studies and the
social sciences when societal developments have led to the radical transforma-
tion of social dispositifs: during the societal confusion at the time of the
Enlightenment; with the rise of modernity, colonialism and imperialism, and
the outbreaks of war at the beginning of the twentieth century; and with soci-
ety’s transition towards becoming a post-industrial, global and, ultimately,
digital society.
Even if the approaches taken in different theories of the body vary, they
have always been based on several main arguments:

• that physical and corporeal practices provide elementary access to the world;
• that interactions and complexes of interaction, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and Erving Goffman (1967) have shown, are intercorporeal, that is, the
300 G. Klein

corporeal entanglement of subjects is not an effect of communication, but

its precondition and basis;
• that action does not, as in Max Weber’s conceptualisation, primarily take
social effect through its intentionality and rationality, but in and through
bodily practices (Klein, 2004);
• that the presence of bodies is a guarantee for the creation of intimacy and
trust, of recognition and affection; and, finally,
• that touch constitutes an essential component of orders of interaction,
which means that the latter are not just based on orders of the body, but
that orders of the body make orders of touch possible (Lindemann, 2020).

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing restrictions to interpersonal

contact have called these certainties into question. What are the implications
for the theory that bodies have an essential societal and cultural impact and
that they are fundamental to the generation of cultural formations and prac-
tices? Why do bodies matter? And how has our understanding of the body
and our relationship to the body (our own and the body of the other) changed
during the COVID-19 pandemic?

2 Bodies in Crisis: Orders of the Body

as Orders of Touch
The policy of ‘social distancing’ affects bodies: keeping a ‘safe distance’, wear-
ing face masks, working from home, learning online in schools and universi-
ties; the closure of all sites of leisure and physical encounter: pubs and clubs,
bistros and beer gardens, playgrounds and pools, football stadiums and golf
courses, churches and mosques, theatres and cinemas; the cancellation of fes-
tivals, private celebrations, culture and art festivals and sporting events; isolat-
ing the elderly; sick people and dead people; the invisibility of refugees, street
people and people affected by domestic violence, above all women and chil-
dren. Lockdowns and their social effects address the body, and do so paradoxi-
cally, for they have been enacted against the body and, at the same time, for
its own protection (for more detail, see Klein & Liebsch, 2021). During this
social crisis, which was sparked by a virus, it has become possible to see and
experience the fact that sociality is enacted physically and materially—and
that this has consequences that are becoming apparent, but that we still can-
not grasp to their full extent. For the imperative of distance, the prohibition
against touch, our ongoing worry about clean hands and hygiene standards in
 Movement and Touch: Why Bodies Matter 301

shops, the suspicions we harbour against other people as potential threats—all

of this is changing us, but we do not yet know how and whether these changes
will be permanent.
As of April 2021, there were only a few reliable studies available, but here
were a few figures from Germany relating to the situation of children and
adolescents, who had been hit particularly hard by the effects of social distanc-
ing. It was becoming apparent that the number of young people suffering
from anxiety, sleep and eating disorders, drug and tablet abuse, and depres-
sion was growing. The number of people being admitted to psychiatric emer-
gency departments was on the rise. Numbers from Germany showed that
before the COVID-19 pandemic, about 20% of children and teenagers had
psychiatric problems; the figures reveal that this proportion has climbed to
one-third. The German Federal Association of Contract Psychotherapists had
said that this is because children had lost social contact to their peers as well
as their access to music and exercise in clubs. In 2021, the German Catholic
Church alone had 4000 children’s and youth choirs that were no longer sing-
ing. In sports clubs, too, there had been significant declines in membership
and increasing numbers of above all children and adolescents cancelling their
memberships; the figures were as high as 60% in club sports for children and
adolescents (as of March 2021). Clubs and sports associations were justifiably
worried that they will lose these members in the long run.
Although there are not yet any reliable studies available on child abuse and
sexual abuse in lockdown, outpatient child protection clinics, social workers
and doctors suspect that even if statistical data suggests that there has been a
decline in sexual offences, this is probably because they have become even
more invisible than they were to begin with. The Outpatient Clinic for
Protection against Violence at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, for example,
registered 30% more cases of domestic violence and child abuse in June
2020 year on year. The closures of childcare centres and schools have played a
major role here, as this is where domestic violence against children is usually
discovered.
While the prevalence of violent touch has increased during the pandemic,
not being allowed to touch loved ones and the loss of the intimacy and affec-
tion that are expressed in touch are important factors that indicate that a
change is taking place in bodily practices. This is because separation, bans on
contact and quarantine have not just created social distance, they have also
changed how our facial expressions, gestures, body language and movement
express practices of touching and being touched (in both the literal and figu-
rative sense)—leading to what we might refer to as ‘distant socialising’. When
bodies are kept at a distance, when touch becomes threatening, and harmful
302 G. Klein

contagion is a potential consequence of that touch, everyday routines and

rituals and, with them, systems of figuration that are of major significance to
the formation of identity begin to unravel. In developmental psychology,
touch is considered fundamental to the constitution of the self, because it is
physical contact that forms the core of the experiences that inscribe them-
selves into the subject’s habitual dispositions and form their basis. It is, as
Carl-Eduard Scheidt, Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy
at the University of Freiburg, has said, ‘ultimately our early bodily experiences
that help us to judge the emotional significance of the sound of a voice, the
rhythm of language, the contour of a movement, a smell or a glance in a mat-
ter of milliseconds’ (Scheidt, 2020, p. 48).
The German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels has shown how the
tactile, the haptic and feeling converge in touch (Waldenfels, 2002, p. 64).
Touching is a motor, sensory and affective act all at once. This view is nothing
new in cultural history. Even Aristotle ascribed the tactile sense a special qual-
ity of meaning, as it takes effect not through a medium, but together with the
skin, the largest sensory organ in the body, as a medium itself (Aristotle,
1968). Touching and being touched in the twofold sense are bound to the
body and to physical movement. Touch takes place in (barely definable)
worlds between interacting bodies, whose boundaries and intersections,
degree of proximity and distance, affection and resistance, separation and gaps
become tangible in the act of touching.
The sociology of the body views touch as intercorporeal, that is, it fore-
grounds the bodily based complex of interaction in the act of touch and not
individual bodies. This is a perspective that is also shared by Brian Massumi
when he posits that it is the situated, relational entanglement of bodies that is
primary and not the feeling and thinking individual. For Massumi, the
embodied mode of human existence is ‘never entirely personal […]. [I]t’s not
just about us, in isolation. In affect, we are never alone’ (Massumi, 2015,
p. 6). Touch is thus also how we relate to the world; it requires contact—with
people, animals, things and objects. It is generated in and through interac-
tions, in intercorporeal figurations.
Just as touch requires bodily based complexes of interaction and acquires
connective, mediative and translative, that is, medial functions, touch can also
convey the cultural meaning of interactions and their orders, for example, in
greetings—through the now forbidden handshake or kiss on the cheek.
However, it is not just the COVID-19 pandemic, but the digitalisation of
society that has once more made touch and the tactile sense subjects of discus-
sion in media studies, medicine, the social sciences, technology and cultural
studies (e.g., El Saddik et al., 2011; Harrasser, 2017; Schmidgen, 2018; von
 Movement and Touch: Why Bodies Matter 303

Thadden, 2018). The Corona crisis and its distancing requirements have
forced both cultural studies debates and societal discourses in which touch is
ascribed a special significance to take place, for instance, in sport, dance and
acting, but also in nursing, care work and sex work. As conferences take place
by video and telephone due to the pandemic, once more taking centre stage
are media debates about how gestures are being transformed into standardised
emojis and clapping hands, and how changes are taking place in the way that
we touch devices—for example, how we have gone from performing writing
movements on paper or pressing movements on the touch telephone and TV
to swiping movements on the smartphone (e.g., Kaerlein, 2018), which
Marshall McLuhan was already addressing as early as in the 1960s
(McLuhan, 1994).
Moreover, the situations in which bodies are present that have accompa-
nied social digitalisation and that rely on touch—for example, the boom of
gentle, non-invasive healing methods and self-care practices that utilise the
techniques of touch and aim to improve how the body feels, like wellness,
chilling and cuddle parties—have been pushed to the sidelines during the
COVID-19 crisis.
The sense-making significance of art and theatre as sites of touch have also
been called into question, places that are not considered essential in the pan-
demic and that have been forced to close. A few more figures show that, in
Germany—like in all other countries in lockdown—people are singing, danc-
ing, making music and theatre less than almost ever before. The German cul-
tural sector, which employs approx. 1.8 million people—550,000 of them in
precarious work—generated about EUR 170 billion in 2019, meaning that it
created more added value than the chemical industry. It is now receiving aid
from the Neustart Kultur (New Start Culture) programme to the tune of
EUR 2 billion. This will indeed be a new start, as the performing arts alone,
after one year of closures, have recorded a sales collapse of 85% (as of April
2021). However, aside from these figures, it is above all vilification and the
loss of social significance that are plaguing culture. Art is the glue holding
society together, as politicians were wont to claim in their speeches before the
pandemic. Now this sense-making social bonding agent has been moved into
the same category as swimming pools and brothels in some state regulations.
But people working in the cultural sector are fighting to legitimise their (by
all means considerable) relevance. They are utilising an argument that was
established within the scope of the ‘performative turn’ in the 1990s as digitali-
sation was taking off, namely that theatre and artistic spaces foster something
that stands in opposition to digitalisation: proximity, uniqueness, unrepeat-
ability and co-presence. Accordingly, discussions in art theory, theatre studies
304 G. Klein

and, above all, dance studies have emphasised the role played by touch in
co-presence and stressed that art targets our perception and challenges our
senses synaesthetically (e.g., Klein & Haller, 2006; Brandstetter et al., 2013;
Egert, 2019; Fluhrer & Waszynski, 2020; Marek & Meister, 2021). They thus
consider theatre and artistic spaces to be sites of touch in a positive sense: they
aim to contaminate, affect. Above all participative theatre forms have asserted
the potential of the tactile and its special capacity for getting us to reflect upon
the relationship between culture, the environment and the world of things.
They have maintained that this quality is characteristic of contemporary the-
atre and essential to the functioning of society during the COVID-19 debate
as well. However, the way that we are affected in modern bourgeois artistic
spaces is generally by maintaining distance—which is perhaps why cultural
sites have not been hotspots of infection. Whether at the theatre or at an exhi-
bition, we are left to our visual sense; in order to be affected, we keep at a
distance that is already inscribed into the space through the architecture and
arrangements; the audience sits or stands—disciplined and silent. This sen-
sory experience, which—unlike at the sports stadium—leads to the dispersion
of little aerosol, is still something that is drilled into our bodies in bourgeois
cultural institutions and controlled socially. And it is secured by technical
means with, for example, the infiltration of technological touch media and
interactive exhibition formats in artistic spaces.
But even outside of theatre, dance and art, sites of touch have become rare
during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is evident that bodily communication is
being increasingly formalised, for example, due to face mask requirements
and social distancing rules. Moreover, the importance of visual communica-
tion in everyday interactions is growing, for example, due to video confer-
ences, and in portals and formats for virtual sexual communication. Both
changes—the formalisation and virtualisation of body-based communica-
tion—are reinforcing the experience of the ‘homo clausus’, a social figure that
Norbert Elias saw as one manifestation of modern sociation, where the We-I
balance shifts to one side in favour of monadic self-perception (Elias, 2010).
However, today’s monadic pandemic life is not taking place in social isolation.
Digitalisation and virtual worlds are making it possible for people to ‘meet’,
‘dial in’ and exchange views. But online interaction is reduced to affective
touch: for example, we perceive an interesting discussion to be less exciting
during a video conference, jokes seldom relieve tension and comedy is more
difficult to generate and less contagious (Kühl, 2020, p. 398).
The formalisation and virtualisation of body-based communication are
changing the micro levels of social interaction and their vitalising foundation.
Joy, empathy, arousal, touch and awareness are words that become subjects of
 Movement and Touch: Why Bodies Matter 305

discussion when bodily experience, the proximity to other bodies and the act
of sensorily experiencing (smelling, tasting and seeing) the other change, and
when alterity, a basal component of identity, is increasingly generated through
social distance and the digital image. The current pandemic and the ensuing
social distancing are thus not the first time that the issues relating to the
entanglements between the real and the virtual (Baudrillard, 1988), the physi-
cal and the imaginary (Kamper, 1986), the anthropological and iconographic
(Benthien, 2002) have been broached.

3 Conclusion
We could view the restructuring and changes that have taken place to the
social significance of bodies cultural-pessimistically as one more episode in the
history of the loss of corporeality. This interpretation would be another chap-
ter in an illustrious history of sociological thought about the body: for exam-
ple, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who write in the Dialectics of
the Enlightenment: ‘The body cannot be turned back into the envelope of the
soul. It remains a cadaver, no matter how trained and fit it may be’ (Horkheimer
& Adorno, 2002, p. 194). This cultural-critical theory, which posits an irre-
versible loss of bodily experience, was given a media theoretical twist in the
1990s by, for example, Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf in allusion to
Jean Baudrillard and accentuated in the theory of the disappearance of the
body in the image (Kamper & Wulf, 1989, p. 3) and as a simulacrum
(Baudrillard, 1988). The body that has been driven back by the COVID-19
crisis can be described in a similar way: as contact has been reduced and
people have been required to stay home, the digital image has grown in impor-
tance. This has also changed orders of touch: trust, proximity, compassion,
optimism, consolation, fear and care are now generated in and through
images—thus also changing their performative strategies of authentication.
As figurations of touch become images, we see ‘new bodies’ being created
using digital techniques of bodily communication. We are increasingly taking
it for granted that we communicate with and through digital bodies—video
conferences, Zoom yoga, Instagram fitness—which is forcing the practical
implementation of a concept of the body that has been in the works for some
time now: the ‘hybrid body’, whose bodily experiences can be localised on a
spectrum between the real and the virtual, the representative and the imagi-
nary. According to media sociology, this development harbours the potential
to expand our realm of experience with new hybrids of real and virtual (e.g.,
Fuhse, 2010; Krotz & Hepp, 2012). It therefore seems likely that hybridity as
306 G. Klein

a mode of sociality is being normalised, and that sensations, perceptions and

sensitivities are productively are being organised into a flexible constellation
of bodily feeling, media expression and virtual communication, as well as
representative and imagined forms (May et al., 2009), which many people
seem to find satisfying.
In all these developments, the contours of new orders of the body are
becoming visible: they are not individualised, insular ‘homines clausi’ (Elias,
1998) whose purpose is individual sense-making and self-staging. Rather,
they are relational bodies that are always conceived of in connection to others:
to other people, to the environment, to the climate, to the economic
community.
Overall, we can say that the COVID-19 crisis has set society the task of
redefining when bodies are dangerous or in need of protection and when their
physical presence is seen as necessary. This has led to discussions about the
relevance of the corresponding societal subsystems (such as art, sport, religion,
education and health), which have increasingly become the subject of public
debate. But it is not just the comparative significance of the individual societal
subsystems that is being rearranged, as the sociologist Rudolf Stichweh has
claimed. In March 2020 (Stichweh, 2020, p. 198), he said that religion, cul-
ture and sport would be the societal fields that would come out on the losing
side of the COVID-19 crisis, as they were not essential in the fight against the
pandemic. Religion, culture and sport—these are genuinely bodily fields for
which corporeal practices, in groups and masses as well, are constitutive.
The COVID-19 crisis has thus made it clear that bodies are the battlefield
on which the struggle to define the relationship between the subsystems and
their power structures is being staged. The disappearance of the collective
body in public space—like the mass body in sport, religion and culture—
indicates just how much significance these subsystems have lost. At the same
time, new forms of digital collectivisation are taking effect, changing the indi-
vidual’s opportunities to experience themselves corporeally as part of a collec-
tive: the digital society.

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 Like Water Between One’s Hands:
Embodiment of Time and the Ephemeral
of Dance
Gabriele Brandstetter

1 Introduction
Today, the familiar and established essentialist and naturalist view of the
objectified body is questioned by scholars pursuing diverse discursive lines
and utilising ethnographic, phenomenological, poststructuralist and dia-
logical approaches. Traditional physicalist and biological trajectories are
increasingly being replaced by dynamic conceptualisations that take into
account difference, hybridity, dissemination, interaction and multimodal-
ity. Inherited and adopted habitus also comes into play, as do diverse tacit
modes of the constitution of practices, such as emergence, reinterpretation,
differentiation and consolidation in somatic trainings and dance techniques;
together, these form social and educational relations and dispositions. The
ephemeral of movement and interactive performance is entangled within
these concepts and discourses of dance and transformative aesthetics.
The word ‘ephemer’ has its origins in the Greek ephēmeros and means
short-lived, alive for a single day, transient. For entomologists, mayflies fall
under the order of Ephemeroptera—reflecting the short lifespan of the
insects. Similarly, the term ephemerides originally referred to astronomical
tables in which the daily movement of the stars was tabulated. The format of
the desk calendar, where every day a page is ripped off to reveal the next day’s

G. Brandstetter (*)
Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: theater-tanz@fu-berlin.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 311
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_19
312 G. Brandstetter

entry, is also derived from this practice of recording day-to-day changes.

Likewise, notes, events and memories were retained as hypomnemata, creat-
ing the earliest forms of the diary. Crucial for these ephemerides, logbooks
and diaries—and later also for periodicals—is the temporal structure of the
transient, which protocols the moment as a strategy for ordering events.
Complementary to this daily record keeping of the ephemeral is the onto-
logical and aesthetic experience of the transience of time and the transience
of life as a whole.
In early modern times and during the baroque period, the ephemeral
was linked to the topos of Vanitas (Benthien & von Fleming, 2018), which
encompasses the experience and the metaphor-rich lament about the tran-
sient nature of life. Vanitas is associated with notions of “nothingness,
appearance, futility, dream, uselessness, senselessness, idolatry—but also
of the void, the ephemeral, the transitory, the fleeting” (Benthien & von
Fleming, 2018, p. 13). In the tension between a ‘memento mori’ and
‘carpe diem’, a rich iconography unfolds in art, wherein decay is reflected
in wilting flowers and rotting fruit, skulls represent the subject of mortal-
ity and fragility and volatility are mirrored in wafer-thin glasses and soap
bubbles.
In literature, visual art, music and dance (the danse macabre), the complex
time structure of Vanitas becomes the subject of various means of representa-
tion inherent to each medium: in the celebration of the here and now (carpe
diem) as a response to and consequence of transience; in the lament about the
fleeting nature of youth and beauty; and in the reflection of irretrievability—
in the intrinsic repetition and contradiction of repetition. Goethe’s couplet on
the transience of beauty thematises the aesthetic experience of the ephemeral
and its associated melancholy:

“Warum bin ich vergänglich, o Zeus?”, so fragte die Schönheit.

“Macht’ ich doch”, sagte der Gott, “nur das Vergängliche schön.”
Und die Liebe, die Blumen, der Tau und die Jugend vernahmen’s:
“Alle gingen sie weg, weinend, von Jupiters Thron.” (Goethe, 1998, p. 563f )

(Why am I mortal, o Zeus? was Beauty’s question./Answered the God: because

I only made mortal things beautiful./And Love, the flowers, the dew and youth
understood./Then departed, crying, from Jupiter’s throne.)
 Like Water Between One’s Hands: Embodiment of Time… 313

2 The Ephemeral, Embodiment

and Modern Arts
By 1900, the experience of the ephemeral had increasingly become a theme in
the arts—now within the context of symbolism, both, in terms of decadence
and in the celebration of youth. Hugo von Hofmannsthalʼs terza rima ‘Über
Vergänglichkeit’ (On transience) (1894) uses fragments of the Vanitas theme:
“Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt,/Und viel zu grauenvoll, als daß
man klage:/Daß alles gleitet und vorüberrinnt” (Hofmannsthal, 1984, p. 45).
(This is a thing that no one thinks out fully,/and much too dreadful to com-
plain about/That everything slips and flows away.) In her famous complaint
in Richard Straus’ ‘Rosenkavalier’ (1911) about the inexorable dwindling of
time and the transience of youth, the Marschallin interweaves melancholy
and a reflection of the ephemeral: “Die Zeit ist ein sonderbar Ding […]. Sie
ist um uns herum, sie ist auch in uns drinnen. In den Gesichtern rieselt sie,
im Spiegel da rieselt sie, in meinen Schläfen fließt sie. Und zwischen mir und
dir da fließt sie wieder, lautlos, wie eine Sanduhr” (Hofmannsthal, 1986,
p. 40). (Time is a strange thing […]. It is around us, it is also inside us. It
trickles over our faces, it trickles over the mirror there, it flows over my tem-
ples. And between me and you, it flows again, silently, like an hourglass.)
Although the ephemeral has been thematised in art and in the self-perception
of individuals since antiquity, only with the advent of modernity has the term
and its relevance within aesthetics become central to the theory and percep-
tion of temporality and being in time. With the rise of certain new dynam-
ics—the advent of traffic, industrialisation, the press and changes in fashion,
the experience of the ephemeral has become both intrinsic to and synony-
mous with the idea of modernity. In his famous essay ‘Le Peintre de la vie
moderne’ (The Painter of Modern Life) (1863), the French poet Charles
Baudelaire describes the experience and the art of portraying the ephemeral as
the very signature of modernity. Art is no longer defined by that which endures
and bridges time; instead, “La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contin-
gent” (Baudelaire, 1976, vol. 2, p. 691). (Modernity—it’s the transitory, the
fleeting, the contingent.) In the aesthetics of modernity, the transitory, the fleet-
ing and the contingent become key categories for understanding not only the
acceleration of daily life in the city but also the experiences of social and political
change (Simmel, 1995). The fleeting nature of movement in the rhythm of the
big city characterises the time-experience of the ephemeral: consider the figure
of the flâneur, highlighted by Walter Benjamin in his ‘Passagenwerk’ with refer-
ence to Baudelaire (Benjamin, 1982, vol. V, pp. 60–77), and the
314 G. Brandstetter

transformation of the cityscape portrayed by Louis Aragon in his novel ‘Le

Paysan de Paris’ (The peasant of Paris) (1926). Aragon was the first to use the
term ‘The Ephemeral’ as a nominalised adjective, in reference to the veritable
cult of the ephemeral in the early twentieth century, sparking the term’s even-
tual establishment in the discourse on modernity and its aesthetics. Joachim
Krausse distinguishes three areas in which the ephemeral plays a central role
in the theoretical discourse of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “one,
the acceleration of change and the temporalisation of the spatial; two, the
dematerialisation and devaluation of the physical; three, medialisation and
communicative networking” (1990, p. 241). In so doing, Krausse emphasises
the importance of the work of the US-American architect Richard Buckminster
Fuller, who first outlined a concept of ephemeralisation in his book Nine
Chains to the Moon (1938). In Nine Chains, the synergies of interwoven pro-
cesses of acceleration, dematerialisation and interconnectedness are linked to
a new model of architecture that is no longer conceived of as the enduring
oeuvre of building-creation, but as construction following the principles of
lightness, “ephemeralisation” and “tensegrity” (Krausse, 1990, p. 254). For the
arts as well as for the aesthetic discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies, this created new impulses, placing the temporality and dynamics of
fluid and volatile processes at the centre. Since the 1970s, theorists of all stripes
have addressed particular aspects of ephemeralism—Paul Virilio, for example,
on speed and disappearance (Virilio, 1986, 1997); Jean François Lyotard on
the fleeting, Les immatériaux (1996); Elizabeth Grosz on the volatility of a
globalised, networked world (Grosz, 1994); and Hartmut Rosa on acceleration
and deceleration (Rosa, 2013) as forms of the everyday experience of time.
With the development of media such as photography, film, radio, television
and electronic networks, social communication and aesthetic experience are
changing in specific ways: according to Ralf Schnell and Georg Stanitzek
(2005), the ephemeral is crucial for the perception and the time structures of
media disruptions. Inasmuch aspects such as acceleration, disappearance and
synchronisation are relevant to the perception of the ephemeral, so too are
fractures, distortions, cuts, cracks, blanks or tears (in the tape) of the passage of
time—all characteristic of the aesthetics of the ephemerality of modernity.
Correspondingly, aesthetic theories of the ephemeral highlight questions
about time structures in relation to both art and the body of the viewer. This
leads to strategies of dissolution of the concept of work all the way to the
destruction of the ‘works’ themselves—in action art, for example, in order to
highlight the event (John Cage, Yves Klein) or the ‘happenings’ (Goldberg,
2001; Schimmel, 1998), in the US-American painter Allan Kaprow’s 18
 Like Water Between One’s Hands: Embodiment of Time… 315

Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), for example, an ‘event’, in which those aspects

noted by Baudelaire dominate: what happens is transitory, bound to a place
and a situation; the structures of the event are contingent on those present
and have no further meaning beyond what happens in the here and now.
An aesthetic of the ephemeral is by no means limited to the temporal arts—
music, theatre, dance and performance—even though these disciplines have
played a decisive role, since the avant-garde, in the dissolution of boundaries
between all forms of artistic expression and between art and life. Within aes-
thetic theory, the opposition between permanence and the fleeting in relation
to works of art dissolves in the context of discourses on the ephemeral and its
associated economies of work, property and their capitalisation—especially in
regard to those art forms and pieces that are (ostensibly) permanent. Thus, in
his Aesthetic Theory (2002), Theodor W. Adorno describes the category of the
permanent, canonical, enduring of works of art and their ownership as a
fetishisation under the sign of capital:

As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope for their duration, they begin to
suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw
over themselves at the same time suffocates them. (Adorno, 2002, p. 28)

Of course, a cultural and art history of the ephemeral and its associated
experience of time cannot focus solely on Western philosophies and aesthetics
concepts. The manner in which transience is perceived and addressed in dif-
ferent cultures—for example, in Japan during the cherry blossom festival
(sakura), in which the viewing (hanami) of the short-lived flowers conveys
both beauty/blossoming and mortality—would have to be part of any com-
parative study on the aesthetics and embodiment of the ephemeral. The phi-
losopher François Jullien, in his study Du temps » (2004), compares the
conjugations of temporal structures between Western thought, influenced by
antiquity, with Chinese philosophy, which did not develop a transcendental
concept of time, and therefore understands the relationship between moment
and duration and processes of the decay (such as ageing bodies) in a dif-
ferent way.
Diverse concepts of the ephemeral have developed not only within differ-
ent philosophies of time and within the diversity of artistic expression (and
their materiality), but the epistemic dimension of the fleeting is also embed-
ded in the temporal structure of momentariness and duration, the fluidity of
phenomena and strategies of preservation: the transience of temporal phe-
nomena and their materiality (such as clouds, smoke and liquids), their
316 G. Brandstetter

aesthetic and/or experimental scientific observation, and the documentation

thereof describes a circle in which the temporal tension between event and
history, between material artefact and its transience must itself be part of the
perception and its reflection. Thus, a “topography of the fleeting” (Brandstetter,
2020) between movement and objectivity is always confronted with the
moment of withdrawal—the cloudy place—in the moment of recording,
retaining and preserving.
As an example for this constellation of the fleeting nature of phenom-
ena—their fundamental ‘untenability’—and strategies for fixing knowledge,
let the cloud be the tangible manifestation of the transitory. Goethe’s analysis
of the scientist Luke Howard’s 1815 Theory of Clouds points to this double-
sided phenomenon, reflected in the morphology of the cloud. Phenomenology
and epistemology work together to define the fleeting changing form, the
‘irregular nature’ of these structures as a ‘perforated continuum’, and to
describe the coincidental creation of these forms and states of matter as “limit
conditions [Gränz-Zustände]” (Vogl, 2005, p. 72). The purpose lies in spark-
ing in the viewer a notion of clouds as spectacular, dramatic theatre of the
sky. As dynamic bodies, unfinished, constantly in the act of becoming, sin-
gular and unrepeatable in form, they convey the aesthetic experience of the
“transitory” (Ibid.) and envelop the viewer in a paradox of seeing: the closer
one gets to these volatile bodies, the more they dissolve. On closer inspec-
tion, writes Goethe, this ‘object’ can no (longer) be observed: in the act of
observation, the thing, the body, becomes a ‘happening’—a fleeting, dissolv-
ing event. Such a configuration of withdrawing, ‘cloudy’ make these ‘bodies’
‘hypothetical objects’: “An aesthetics of form, of shapes and figures is thus
overtaken by an aesthetics of occurrence” [Ästhetik des Erscheinens] (Vogl,
2005, p. 78). The elastic and the mobile, the ‘floating’ inherent to the clouds
indicate a method of observation and analysis that sees itself as hypothetical
and processual.
Fleeting is thus the relation of the object—transformational morphology of
bodies—and the viewer: a constellation that implies not only the viewer’s
involvement but also their kinaesthetic experience as an element of ephemer-
ality. Clouds are, in this sense, a kind of placeholder; they are ‘allegories of
reading’ for art forms, events, processes of embodying the ephemeral. They
are ‘difficult objects’ because, as bodies without definite limitations and forms,
they challenge both the representation of the arts and the discourses of episte-
mology: they even occupy the place of an “epistemological emblem”, marking
the limits of knowledge and of representability (Vogl, 2005, p. 70).
 Like Water Between One’s Hands: Embodiment of Time… 317

3 Ephemeral Bodies and Memory

Within the context of the paradox already inherent to the concept of the
ephemeral exists the space within which the cultural techniques of preserving
and losing, remembering and forgetting, as well as their various storage medi-
ums, move: ephemera by definition embrace processes and things that are
transitory and determined for short-term use, such as tickets, daily calendars,
postcards and ad mail. The short-lived nature of these momentary media, as
well as the length of time collections and collectors (ephemerists) bestow
upon them (Richards, 2000), deftly mark this contradiction. The idea of the
ephemeral and the predetermined expectation that it will disappear is reversed
by an ‘Encyclopaedia of the Ephemeral’, which preserves the limited tempo-
rality of momentary existence in an archive for the future. A theory of the
archive and its structures of knowledge, a critique of “archive fever” (Derrida,
1997) and the canon, begins here in order to bend the temporality of the
ephemeral, long sedimented in collections and archives, back into the path of
movement, of disappearance, and finally into the transience, the ephemerality
of the archive itself.
Since the advent of postmodernism, the relationship between art, the
viewer and positionality [Situativität]/the event has been discussed in depth
in art and theory—as well as being critically analysed in terms of its politics of
historical documentation and the processuality of appropriation. In contrast
to the aesthetics of the artwork in art and performance, questions of an “aes-
thetics of the performative” (Fischer-Lichte, 2008) are now coming to the
fore. Simultaneously, questions of vitality and decay, liveness and media docu-
mentation, transformation and the transitory nature of media changes as well
as critiques of the institutions of preservation (museums and archives) and
practices of curating are being discussed in the context of the theory and the
practice of art. One example is the work of artists who stage the theme of
transience in their work as a process—in a contemporary revision of ‘Vanitas’,
by exhibiting the remnants of events or performances, displaying the waste
and its temporality and the relation between human-animal bodies
(Brandstetter, 2019).
In his installation Untilled (2012) at dOCUMENTA 13, Pierre Huyghe
addresses the circulation between garbage and the museum, as well as the
unpredictable and uncontrollable dissolution of the boundaries between art,
exhibition and nature or, more specifically, the processes of life. In order to do
so, he exchanges the exhibition spaces of the museum for open gardens. And,
as the artist, he busies himself with the processes of transformation between
318 G. Brandstetter

nature and culture: the creation and degeneration of a compost heap; bee-
keeping (and thus with the art of bees: honeycomb construction and bee
swarms/dance), which colonises the classical sculptures in the garden and
makes the artist appear not as Pygmalion with a female statue, but as a bee-
keeper. And finally, there is the albino dog named ‘Human’, whose pink-
painted leg looks like a play on the boundaries and transitions of human-animal
relationships: these components of what is usually called an art ‘installation’,
point in Untilled—it is already in the title—to a temporality that is not clearly
delimited—distinctly not ‘un-til’. It is instead overflowing, transient, acciden-
tal and dissolving. In a different way, the Swiss artists Dieter Roth and Daniel
Spoerri deal with the theme of transience, the ephemeral and the conditions
of art and the museum, by staging those processes of decay and chance in
which culture and nature are intimately interwoven: food and the perishabil-
ity of organic matter, intertwined with a fundamental questioning of the rela-
tionship between art and life, of the aesthetic boundaries between beauty and
waste/apostasy, the philosophical differentiations between the actual (res) and
the rest (akzidens), and with the economic themes of consumption and con-
servation. Roth explicitly designed his installation Selbstturm/Löwenturm
(1989) in and for the museum, as an artwork of decay, in order to directly call
into question the mission and the basic definition of the museum and the
storage magazine, namely, to preserve works of visual art and to exhibit them,
again and again. How then to store and exhibit objects and their material
disintegration (such as mouldy cheese or chocolate busts chewed up by
insects)? (Bohlmann, 2018). In contrast, the artist Daniel Spoerri developed
his trap pictures (Tableau piège, 1960) from the transience of a meal, by fixing
the remains and hanging them with the tabletop on the wall as a picture. The
Eat Art happening thus became an arrangement of remnants, wherein the
restoration and preservation for posterity is exposed as a practice of “substi-
tute immortality” (Groys, 1997, p. 198). With different emphases, artists and
historiographers both work on the challenges presented by the materiality of
things (objects) and events, as well as the preservation of the vestiges (proces-
suality) of their transmission. The challenge of these relationships between
event, history and performativity is illuminated in the act of dealing with the
works of artists who consciously depict the ‘remnants’, the materiality of rem-
nants, of garbage and of the organic—as well as its decay—during their trans-
fer to the archive, and thereby during their inexorable advance into history. In
so doing, these artists simultaneously trigger a critique of the institutions and
discourses of the ephemeral as well as memory and its storage media.
 Like Water Between One’s Hands: Embodiment of Time… 319

4 Movement and Embodiment:

The Ephemeral of Dance
Among the artistic disciplines, dance is traditionally considered the most vol-
atile art form—although this topos too must be questioned. How does pro-
cessuality—temporality as a structured sequence of movements—differ from
other performative arts? Is dance therefore considered more fleeting, because
the modes of memory, the methods and techniques of recording and trans-
mitting are less standardised than musical notations? And, at least in Western
culture, because (body) knowledge about dance is more marginal, incomplete
and less discursively powerful? The question here is not only about the tension
between the fleeting nature of a (dance) performance and the persistence of
diverse, medially and historically changing forms of recording (Brandstetter,
2004), but also about how the transitory nature of movement and contingen-
cies in the process of perceiving and remembering also mark the specific
aesthetic-temporality of the ephemeral. The time-experience of the ephemeral
is in the perception of the period, of the moment and its situativity, inter-
linked with the reflexive mode of the gaze. An aesthetic experience of sudden-
ness (Bohrer, 1981) is sparked (often illustrated with lightning or fireworks)
in the now of the moment, while simultaneously being erased and recursively
retrieved and repeated in the temporality of an afterthought. This characteris-
tic aesthetic self-temporality connects the temporal structure of the ephemeral
to the spatially defined aesthetics of atmosphere (Böhme, 1995). The respec-
tive subject’s perception is decisive for the sensory experience of a situation
and for the sense of its temporal dimension: its condensation or extension in
durational experiences of eternity in that moment. This aesthetic experience
of the ephemeral cannot be assigned to just single sensory organs; instead, the
quality of these time perceptions is multimodal. Time-forms and time struc-
tures—their movement, periodicity and the quality of their materiality (in
sound, corporeality or spatiality)—are physical, simultaneously and embod-
ied experienced through a kinaesthetic “listening” (Brandstetter, 2013) and
through a reflexive dimension, inherently linked to the ephemeral (and the
melancholy of transience), that reverberates with the afterimage and the after-
sound of the (just) past. This peculiar mode of perception, attention and sen-
sual resonance between a fleeting phenomenon and its perceiving subject is
also a fundamental characteristic of embodied aesthetic experience (Waldenfels,
2010; Mersch, 2015). The ephemeral thus not only encompasses the now of
an already vanishing moment, but is also intertwined with spatial experience,
the situativity and positionality, as well as the material and sensory qualities,
320 G. Brandstetter

of perception. The experience of lightness and “dematerialisation effects”

(Krausse, 1990, p. 250) in modern architecture or the effects of immersion
through virtual time-space experiences correspond to those perceptions that
Roland Barthes in 1964 called “coenesthetic” (Barthes, 1990, p. 301): the
fundamentally self-specific and self-temporal experiences of space, of the posi-
tion and gravity of the body, of its gravitational awareness and equilibrium in
regard to the momentary situation—in short, the moment of feeling and
emotional and cognitive processes associated with it.

5 Movement, Fluidity of Time

and (Physical) Transformation
After all, it is dance that brings together these experiences of aesthetic and
temporality in movement, in the temporal and material condensation of
ephemerality, in bodily and temporal transience.
In a scene by Lebanese choreographer and performer Rabih Mroué, from
the piece Water Between Three Hands (2016),1 the dancer Jone San Martin
steps into a bright circle lit by a spotlight and begins to tell a story in which
she transforms the ephemerality of the performance into a particular act of
conservation of her dance work: at the end of each performance, she says
laconically, she always ran immediately into the dressing room, where she
wrung out her clothes and collected her sweat in a bottle. She did this for over
20 years; she observed the changes in the secretions of her body in the bottles:
the colour nuances, the gradual evaporation and the thickening of the fluid,
the sedimentation of the liquid: “I collected the remains of all the bottles/and
put them in a little nylon bag./I weighed it/and there were about 11 grams of
‘sweat powder’.” San Martin goes on to explain how she came up with the idea
of returning this extract, this sediment of 20-years’ embodied (dance) work,
back into her body. She sniffs; she inhales the sweat powder like a drug; then
she restitutes this outflow/abundance of her enduring dance practice back
into her body in a mere instant. San Martin refers to this moment of self-
transubstantiation as occurring ‘like a flash’—a metaphor for a lightning-fast
incident. It is that metaphor of the lightning-fast occurrence that frequently
(see, e.g., W. Benjamin, Th. W. Adorno) frames the auratic, energetic moment
of stopping or condensing time and time perception. In San Martin’s mind’s
eye, precisely such a time-moment of the highest time-density occurs, in

1
Rabih Mroué: Water between Three Hands, UA Kampnagel/Hamburg, 23.04.2016, as the second pro-
duction of the Dance On/First Edition project; here: Scene No. 13.
 Like Water Between One’s Hands: Embodiment of Time… 321

which the memories of all her previous performances rise and are superim-
posed in a single image: “all in one image;/one big sublime image/holding
different years and different performances […]/an image that lasted for a few
seconds/before it disappeared” (ibid. Scene 13). The magic of this experience
drives her: she drinks the rest of the powder dissolved in water—and now she
does not see the performances as a single image all at once—they are instead
re-embodied. Re-embodied in a single moment—not in a dance of hours and
years, but a memory-move of “lost time”, condensed in “this moment”, in one
instant: “in an instant, it (my body) was dancing all the dances/that I had ever
performed in my whole life” (ibid., Scene 13). It is also the moment of col-
lapse: “Immediately, I died”—just as in the mythical dances during which the
dancers dance to death (in Giselle, in The Red Shoes, as in the poets H. von
Hofmannsthal’s Elektra or Paul Valery’s L’Âme et la Danse). The utmost and
most extreme moment of the dance is that particular intoxicated state in
which time and memory coincide, in ‘one shot’. Cardiac arrest and the stop-
page of time—a ‘Now’, a ‘Shot’—in that moment, they are one, embodied
and dissolved simultaneously. However, even this is not deliverable to poster-
ity. The trace of time—the movement—continues. The stopping of time (the
shot—of the photo or the rifle) is a leap across the fabric of perception. Or, as
dancer Amy Shulman in the same performance says, “I decided to stand still
and not to move at all./But that’s impossible. (She turns around)/because if
I’m still,/time is not.”2 These parts of the performance Water between Three
Hands are displaying and interweaving basic concepts of the ephemeral in
dance and performance: the tension between long duration (lifelong work on
the body and body techniques) and the density of time in the experience of
‘stand still’; the experience of the time passing and the transformation of the
(ageing) body (which was a motor of the dance-project of ‘dance on’); and the
experience of fluidity and ephemerality of movement in contrast with the
hard work of the dancing body with sweat and the power of physical energy.
In his interview on the question of Stop making art, Mroué refers to the
topos of the ephemerality of the performing arts: like the volatility and the
tangibility of a performance that flows like water between one’s hands, “we
can’t grasp the now in our hands. It is a moment that always flees” (Mroué,
2014, p. 23). Holding a performance in this now would, according to Mroué,
mean that this present would have to be put on hold indefinitely, “by keeping
it as a work in progress and unfinished” (ibid., p. 24). In a sense, Mroué’s own
work as an artist pursues this concept of an ongoing progress and a process of
constant re-appropriation, while also deconstructing the dichotomy, the strict

2
Script, Scene 10, Graph 3/‘No Face’.
322 G. Brandstetter

either/or of presence and representation. He implicates, indeed interweaves,

the temporality and the evidentiary potential of the performative present in
the processes and mediums of representation. In so doing, he corrodes, even
corrupts and traverses—in theory (which, in his opinion, belongs to the work
of the artist) and in performative practice—the opposition between presence
(performance) and representation, which has by now become a topos within
performance theory.
Across cultures and eras, the image of flowing water—in the flow of time as
well as in the paradox of Water between Three Hands—has characterised the
experience of the simultaneity of embodiment and untenability of the ephem-
eral. It is an inherent dimension of embodiment and the tacit knowledge not
only in dance but of any performative interaction. The parameters on ‘aesthet-
ics of the ephemeral’ (which is not yet written) could provide impulses and
new settings of exploration for a future research on embodiment, body and
memory, social interaction and practises of transformation.

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 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily
Learning
Arnd-Michael Nohl and Morvarid Götz-Dehnavi

Bodily learning is, eo ipso, a matter of materiality and space. How can human
beings learn anything relevant to their body without getting in touch with
material things? And how can we understand ‘getting in touch with material
things’ as a process without taking into account the space that is its very basis?
Educational science, however, has only recently started to pay due attention
to the significance of the material and spatial dimensions of learning. The
‘material turn’ that has overwhelmed social sciences in recent years, created
new theoretical opportunities to grasp the materiality of learning (cf. Fenwick
& Edwards, 2010). However, spatiality, as a highly complex theoretical prob-
lem, is still not included in a systematic way in educational thinking. While
acknowledging that there exist various theoretical approaches that take into
account the materiality and spatiality of bodily learning, this chapter proposes
to view this subject from the angle of Pragmatism. The chapter will draw
mainly on the thinking of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, who were
strongly influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce.
To answer the main question of this chapter, that is how can we conceive of
the materiality and spatiality of bodily learning, we begin by challenging the
anthropocentricity of conceiving human beings as subjects and material
things as objects. As an alternative, we use Dewey and Bentley’s ‘trans-action’
perspective to rethink learning as a process that inseparably involves both

A.-M. Nohl (*) • M. Götz-Dehnavi

Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: nohl@hsu-hh.de; dehnavi@hsu-hh.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 325
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_20
326 A.-M. Nohl and M. Götz-Dehnavi

human beings and material things. Key concepts of Peirce’s semiology will
help us to understand the significance of the direct embodied nature of learn-
ing (Sect. 1).
Next, in line with Mead’s thoughts on spatiality we elaborate further on
learning via the body. According to Mead, spatiality is the result of transac-
tional practices between human beings and physical things. Spatiality is thus
constituted by the (temporal) opposition of things which we touch directly,
and distant things, whose essence we anticipate—like the taking over of the
perspective of the human other—as an impulse for action based on previous
experiences of manipulation. A possible discrepancy between experiences of
anticipation and experiences of contact then constitutes an opportunity for
bodily learning (Sect. 2).
Based on this theoretical argumentation we then, in a third step, demon-
strate its usefulness with an empirical example that we take from an inquiry
into educational interaction in child care centres. As the materiality and spa-
tiality of bodily learning is a genuinely multimodal process, videography of
children’s everyday practices would appear to be the most valid source of
empirical data. After some notes on the interpretation of videography, we
focus on the analysis of an intriguing scene: a group of children carry chairs
through a narrow door and are advised by their teachers to hold the chairs so
that they point in a specific direction (Sect. 3).

1 ‘Transaction’ and the Materiality of Learning

Advocators of the material turn in social and educational sciences often refer
to the influential works of Bruno Latour (1999) who, in Pandora’s Hope, not
only challenged the Cartesian dichotomy of the cognizant human subject and
the recognized material object but elaborated on the intermingling of things
and humans from which so-called hybrid actors (ibid., p. 180), such as a
driver-and-a-car or a lecturer-and-a-beamer, emerge. Such an epistemological
perspective, however, was already developed half a century earlier by John
Dewey and his co-author, Arthur F. Bentley, with the concept of “trans-
action”. Introducing their main point, Dewey and Bentley challenge the read-
ers’ habits of perceiving and thinking by giving a new account of the notion
of ‘hunter’ and ‘rabbit’:

If we watch a hunter with his gun go into a field where he sees a small animal
already known to him by name as a rabbit, then, within the framework of half
an hour and an acre of land, it is easy—and for immediate purposes satisfactory
 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 327

enough—to report the shooting that follows in an interactional form in which

rabbit and hunter and gun enter as separates and come together by way of cause
and effect. If, however, we take enough of the earth and enough thousands of
years, and watch the identification of rabbit gradually taking place, arising first
in the sub-naming processes of gesture, cry, and attentive movement, wherein
both rabbit and hunter participate, and continuing on various levels of descrip-
tion and naming, we shall soon see the transactional account as the one that best
covers the ground. This will hold not only for the naming of hunter, but also for
accounts of his history back into the pre-human and for his appliances and
techniques. No one would be able successfully to speak of the hunter and the
hunted as isolated with respect to hunting. Yet it is just as absurd to set up hunt-
ing as an event in isolation from the spatio-temporal connection of all the com-
ponents. (Dewey & Bentley, 1989, p. 125; italics in original)

Whereas from the epistemological perspective of “interaction” (ibid.) the

hunter and the rabbit are conceived of as given entities, a focus on “trans-
action” (ibid, p. 101) means refraining from pre-defining any entities and
epistemologically suspending the dichotomy between humans and non-
humans. This enables the inquirer to observe the “common system” (ibid.,
p. 114) of practices (e.g. of hunting) in which actions and operations emerge
that eventually shape the entities involved. As Dewey and Bentley demon-
strate with their example, this “common system” unfolds in space and time.
The notion of a “common system” reminds us of Latour’s (1999, pp. 66
and 180) concept of the “network” of “actants” (as he calls the human and
non-human agents). To “describe the strange situation” (such as hunting or
experimenting) “in which an actor emerges out of its trials”, Latour (1999,
p. 308) proposed the term “name of action”. In this situation, the human and
non-human actants do not yet “have an essence” but are “defined only as a list
of effects—or performances—” (Latour, 1999, p. 308). At this point, Latour
explicitly refers to Pragmatist thinking. As he acknowledges, the “term ‘name
of action’ allows one to remember the pragmatic original of all matters of fact”
(ibid.).
Indeed, the founder of Pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, proposed that
our concepts are genuinely connected with practices and their effects:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we con-
ceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects
is the whole of our conception of the object.1 (CP, 5.402)

1
We cite Peirce’s Collected Papers (Peirce, 1931–1935) by volume followed by paragraph number.
328 A.-M. Nohl and M. Götz-Dehnavi

If we assume that the object of our conception is a “trans-action”, a “com-

mon system” (Dewey and Bentley), or, in the words of Latour, a “network” of
“actants”, its naming combines both (human) constructions and real conse-
quences. Peirce argues that the connection between a material object and its
concept is based on the entire previous experience of humanity. These previous
experiences, all the already-accomplished practical exchange processes between
humans and the world, suggest specific qualities of material things or at least
they suggest their possibility. Hence, we connect to a physical thing, for exam-
ple a train, such that if we were to board it, “a certain kind of sensible result
would ensue, according to our experiences hitherto” (CP, 5.457), for example
that the train brings us to another city. Hence, when we relate to physical
things (or other living creatures) we anticipate the probable outcomes by lean-
ing on the past as the “storehouse of all our knowledge” (CP, 5.460). At the
same time, this grasp of the material object is open to the future. The Pragmatist
maxim includes the future in which new experience may emerge and may
induce us to change our conception of the qualities of the material object.
These theoretical considerations have a great bearing on learning theory.
Basing our approach on Dewey and Bentley’s trans-action perspective and
Peirce’s Pragmatist maxim, the following questions regarding the theory of
learning guide our inquiry: How do human beings become competent parts
of a ‘common system’ of ‘trans-actions’? How do their bodies relate to other
human and non-human entities so that a proper ‘hybrid actor’ (Latour)
emerges? A ‘hybrid actor’ is a composition through which human and nonhu-
man components interact, exchange properties, support each other, etc.—
Furthermore, during such (bodily) learning processes, the following questions
emerge: How do human beings learn what effects must be ascribed to the
respective hybrid actor or its parts, which may have a practical implication?
How do human beings connect these effects to the conception of the object?
As regards human learning,2 we find important answers to these questions
in Peirce’s semiology, especially in his trichotomy in which he occasionally
refers to learning. Peirce differentiates three categories of consciousness:

First, feeling, the consciousness which can be included with an instant of time,
passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; second, con-
sciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resistance,
of an external fact, of another something; third, synthetic consciousness, bind-
ing time together, sense of learning, thought. (CP, 1.377)

2
A more symmetrical approach to learning in trans-action would also have to consider non-human
learning.
 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 329

With this trichotomy we can capture several processes of bodily learning in

which material things are related to human beings in various ways. We will
use practical examples to explain this.
Although it is difficult to imagine a situation in which one has a pure ‘feel-
ing’ in the sense of Peirce, a boy’s first attempts at riding a bicycle might give
an impression of what this ‘feeling’ is about. The moment in which the boy,
released from his parents, who previously guided him, experiences the combi-
nation of horizontal balance and forward motion, a “passive consciousness of
quality, without recognition or analysis” (CP, 1.377), comes into being. Peirce
would conceive of such an experience (e.g. of the combination of horizontal
balance and forward motion) as Firstness, that is “the idea of that which is such
as it is regardless of anything else” (CP, 5.66). This “simple positive character”
(CP, 5.44) refers to the possibly most immediate contact with things that lie
ahead of any symbolically structured constructions. If the boy pushes down
on the right pedal while simultaneously leaning his body to the left of the
bike, he notices that these transactions with the bike maintain the simultane-
ity of balance and forward movement. This intersection of “action and reac-
tion” (CP, 5.45)—the movements of the boy and the resistance of the bike—is
a manifestation of Secondness: it is specific, existential and without any gener-
alization. But if these movements are repeated, step by step a certain expecta-
tion arises (which, in this case, is tacit and embedded in practices). This
practical expectation is what Peirce calls Thirdness. Thirdness concerns the
practical and theoretical convictions of human beings. These may be verbally
expressed in propositions but more often than not they exist as habits. As a
proposition, we would express the conviction of the boy as “if one presses the
pedal and leans his body to the other side, both balance and forward motion
are secured”. We suggest calling this first form of bodily learning ‘Constituting
Thirdness’.
This Thirdness is soon differentiated. The boy, when pedalling, encounters
things that offer resistance, such as when he simultaneously turns the handle-
bars too much in one direction. In this situation, after a short moment of
Firstness, already overlapped and reshaped by the tacit expectation (in the
sense of Thirdness) of being able to keep one’s balance, Secondness follows.
This time Secondness offers a modification of experience—a reaction to the
initial action, which turns out to be different than expected. Thus, the unex-
pected arises—the combination of balance and forward motion is interrupted
when the handlebars get jammed, followed by a crash. According to Peirce, in
Secondness reality enforces itself on cognition. The trans-action of one’s body
and a bicycle, previously experienced as combining forward motion and bal-
ance, is fundamentally altered when one abruptly turns the handlebars. As
330 A.-M. Nohl and M. Götz-Dehnavi

Peirce reminds his readers, “it is by surprises that experience teaches all she
deigns to teach us” (CP, 5.51). In this moment of surprise, “the real is that
which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the
mind’s creation” (CP, 1.325). Secondness, in this sense, is then pivotal for
bodily learning because it is the moment in which bodily movements and
cognition intersect. This Secondness, after being repeated, is again turned into
a Thirdness: the initial expectation of the boy that he can push down on the
pedals and thereby guarantee balance and forward motion is now differenti-
ated in the sense that a sharp turn of the handlebars will immediately bring
this down.
This second form of bodily learning with things may be called ‘Extending
Thirdness’. The new expectation is directly connected to the previous expecta-
tion (that one can combine balance and forward motion by pushing down on
the pedals and leaning to the opposite side) and differentiates the latter. In the
end, both expectations are merged, and a synthesis evolves (cf. CP, 1.381). If
we imagine how constituting and extending Thirdness goes on and on, practi-
cal expectations and convictions come into being during these learning pro-
cesses, which spin the “thread of life” and provide it with “continuity” (CP,
1.337). In this sense, Peirce describes ‘Thirdness’ as a “synthetic conscious-
ness” and a “sense of learning” (CP, 1.377).
Inasmuch as learning is concerned with appropriating propositions, that is
a language-based statement with a claim to truth (e.g. learning the theory of
bicycling), this refers to the acquisition of explicit knowledge. If the learning
process involves the body and leads to appropriating habits of action (e.g.
actually riding a bike), this refers to the acquisition of capabilities. As proposi-
tions always refer to other propositions (e.g. if one is not to turn the handle-
bars too far in one direction one may not know what ‘too far’ is), Peirce argues
that the “real and living logical conclusion” is the “habit” (CP, 5.491).
Moreover, propositions usually imply a cognizing human being and a rec-
ognized other. In contrast, habits connect human beings to the regularities of
the world. Habits are repertoires of actions which have been constituted in the
“trans-action” (Dewey & Bentley, 1989, p. 125) between human beings and
the world and which have finally been stabilized. These habits endow life with
continuity and, as in the example of the hunter and the rabbit, constitute a
connection of human beings and the world in time and space. Learning in
general and bodily learning in particular means to grow into these habitual-
ized trans-actions.3

3
At this point, another rather complex mode of learning that one could describe as ‘altering Thirdness’
and that is often referred to as ‘transformative learning’ must be mentioned but cannot be elaborated on
here (see Nohl, 2009).
 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 331

2 Spatiality and Temporality:

A Multimodal Process
Time and space play a major role in all those bodily learning processes in
which people encounter the world. It is, therefore, necessary to complement
the argumentation for a learning theory based on Dewey, Bentley and Peirce
with a theory of space and time. Albeit not referring to learning, George
Herbert Mead’s thinking is ground-breaking in this regard.4 In short, Mead
argues that space is constituted by the temporal and ontological antagonism
between contact and distance experience, whereby experience here, in the
sense of Pragmatism, refers to the encounter of organism and world—not, or
not only that is, to a level of consciousness anchored in the human subject.
Starting with Mead’s complex reflections on the constitution of things5 we
now elaborate on his ideas including learning-theoretical issues.
According to Mead, and to put it simply, at the beginning of ontogenesis
the newborn still lives in a complete “trans-action” (to use Dewey and Bentley’s
term) with the elements of its environment, without being able to distinguish
them from itself. Only in the processes of exchange with the closest reference
persons, which Mead interpreted as gradually becoming significant interac-
tions, does a person learn to distinguish him or herself from other people and
to take over their perspective (cf. Mead, 1913). This ability to take over the
perspective of others, developed during socialization, is then also the prereq-
uisite for the baby not only to perceive a surface in things but also to attribute
to them a resistant inner being. Mead assumes “that the organism in grasping
and pushing things is identifying its own effort with the contact experience of
the thing” (1932, pp. 120–121). Quite analogously to the significant interac-
tion with human beings, he writes: “One arouses in himself an action which
comes also from the inside of the thing” (ibid., p. 121).
Of course, this only works as far as a contact experience occurs at all, that
is as far as a human being and a thing get in direct touch. In the distance
experience, on the other hand, the resistant inner being can only be antici-
pated against the background of previous experiences, that is hypothetically.
Mead explains this with the example of a book:

4
Although first published in 1980, Hans Joas’ (1997) work continues to provide the authoritative recon-
struction of Mead’s extensive but scattered published work. Sons (2017) is also helpful for understanding
Mead’s thoughts on spatiality.
5
See Joas (1997, pp. 145–166) and Nohl (2011, pp. 141–160).
332 A.-M. Nohl and M. Götz-Dehnavi

If I see a distant book an indefinite number of manipulatory responses are

aroused, such as grasping it in a number of ways, opening, tearing its leaves,
pressing upon it, rubbing it, and a host of others. One, picking up the book, is
prepotent and organizes the whole act. It therefore inhibits all others. (Mead,
1932, p. 127)

As far as previous experiences of contact and ways of using the object are
available, the object triggers (in a similar way to an interaction partner) domi-
nant as well as marginalized impulses for action. To use Peirce’s terms, each of
these impulses refers to a respective Thirdness as a way of relating to the book.
The person will then approach the book and do what they want with it—
according to the dominant impulse. Only now, in this contact experience
following the distance experience, can the thing be grasped as such, whereas
before it was a hypothetical anticipation. According to Joas’ interpretation of
Mead, a “permanent space … is constituted through relating all distance
experiences to contact experience” (Joas, 1997, p. 150).
However, the contrast between distance and contact experience is not only
space-constituting but also temporal. A person can make a contact experi-
ence, that is a trans-action based on direct contact, only with a finite number
of things at any given time. In contrast, this person perceives the majority of
things and people from a distance. Because of this distance, the person can
only reach these distant things with a time delay. In this person’s view there is
indeed a simultaneity of all visual perceptions, but only with those things with
which he is directly connected (such as the chair on which he sits, the floor on
which he stands) does a co-presence take place (cf. Joas, 1997, p. 193).
Distance experiences, on the other hand, draw on past contact experiences
and refer to contacts that are still in the future. “One can remain unaware of
this [expectational character; the authors] as long as the interplay of expecta-
tions and the subsequent perceptions function smoothly, with no problems”
(Joas, 1997, p. 193). For example, one enters a classroom, sees a chair oppo-
site the door, perceives it as a seating device and approaches it to sit
down. Where the anticipation of distance perception corresponds to the sub-
sequent contact experience, where the distant things, as soon as they have
moved closer, can be used in the same way as anticipated (for example, if one
can sit down on the chair), the temporal character of this experience is over-
shadowed. But if this does not work, that is if the distance things are falsely
anticipated (if, for example, the chair was only a dummy chair), it becomes
apparent that these things are “in an immediate sense both spatially and tem-
porally distant” (Joas, 1997, p. 189; emphasis in original). Moreover, as Sons
(2017) shows, one must imagine this contrast between contact and distance
 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 333

experience against the background of a whole ensemble of things (and people)

that can be included in the practices, but also can be ‘left out’, for example
when a person walks through a room—past chairs, table and cupboard—to
the window to open it. In such “temporal-spatial chains of actions” all partici-
pants then get into a “spatial sequence relationship” (ibid., p. 249).
Where space is constituted based on stabilized and habituated human-
thing connections the way we anticipate distant things and the way we treat
them are largely identical. Here, one could say, a continuous presence is repro-
duced in the habituated space; the human being lives in what Mead calls the
“undifferentiated now” (1967, p. 351). If we transfer these thoughts to the
trichotomy of Peirce (see Sect. 1), we could speak of a spatio-temporal
Thirdness based on habits. But at the moment when the way we anticipate the
distant thing and the way we eventually react with it fall apart, that is when
space is no longer habituated, something new appears, an event that makes a
difference in the connections between people and things. At this moment, a
more or less new space emerges. Then a new spatio-temporal Thirdness needs
to be acquired or an old one to be extended. The spatial learning process that
is prompted by the emergent space may involve cognitive perception (the
acquisition of new knowledge), but it is certainly based on a new practical
relation of the body and the world in which, eventually, new habits are
constituted.
Where the practical anticipations of distance experiences do not corre-
spond to the subsequent contact experiences, where the distant things, as
soon as they have moved closer, cannot be manipulated in the same way as
anticipated, previous habits are going nowhere. Then the body has to learn
new ways of dealing with the things that were previously distant. Spontaneous
impulses, as well as reflective thinking, may inspire new modes of manipula-
tion (cf. Nohl, 2009). Trial and error, mimesis (Gebauer & Wulf, 1995), and,
as we will see in the next section, teaching and education help to tune into the
right way of handling things. As soon as a new way of manipulating things has
emerged and has been turned into a routine, a new habit, in the sense of
Thirdness, will then guide the practical expectations with which the human
being approaches such distant things. Bodily learning, therefore, in a way that
is complementary to a new consciousness of spatiality (and temporality)
caused by cognitive learning, leads to practical expectations towards the
objects (be they human or non-human) in time and space. It is by bodily
learning that the body is readjusted in space and time.
We have introduced this distinction between the space we are used to and
newly emerging space here with analytical intent. Space and time, however,
are not constituted in this stringent absoluteness; rather, one must assume
334 A.-M. Nohl and M. Götz-Dehnavi

that our anticipation of the distant things always correspond more or less to
what we do with them when we reach them (cf. Joas, 1997, p. 193). Also,
because space is usually formed by a multitude of relations between humans
and things (cf. Sons, 2017, p. 249), the habituated space and the newly
emerging space are always in a mixed relationship, to be empirically identified
in each case. For this reason, the habituation of space and the need for
(bodily) learning are always present.
Similar to Dewey and Bentley’s ‘trans-action’ perspective as well as Peirce’s
Pragmatist maxim, Mead’s considerations do not refer to a solipsistic indi-
vidual, but to social practice. The fact that we live at the same time and in the
same space is connected with “the construction of the world not from every
individual perspective separately, but rather in a common praxis as a common
world” (Joas, 1997, p. 181). As far as the constitution of space is concerned,
Joas also points out that Mead did not understand sociality solely as an inter-
action between people, but proceeded from a “general sociality also in the
domain of the relationships of such physical objects among themselves” (Joas,
1997, p. 185).
Although human beings are by and large socialized collectively in time and
space and although the world is a shared one, as Joas says, there are issues for
which socialization, as the natural process of growing into the collectively
shared time and space, does not suffice. In the next section, we will inquire
into how small children learn to adjust their bodies to each other and to
physical things and are also guided by their caregivers to do so.

3 A Bodily Learning Task: Manoeuvring Chairs

Through a Door
The materiality and spatiality of bodily learning are not only complex theo-
retical issues but also present a challenge to empirical research. A close account
of bodily practices in space and time needs to be combined with a longitudi-
nal perspective on changes in the capabilities and knowledge of the learners.
Far from meeting these requirements (especially that of a longitudinal
inquiry), in this section, we only wish to give a brief insight into the intrica-
cies of bodily learning. We will inquire into how teachers educate infants to
collectively manoeuvre chairs through a door. Before we turn to our empirical
analysis of bodily learning, we briefly mention the empirical methods used.
 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 335

3.1 Multimodality and Videography Research

To empirically investigate the bodily learning of infants and their interaction

with teachers in a child care centre, we follow up on the approach proposed
by Asbrand and Martens (2018) for video-based classroom analysis. Such vid-
eography enables a “multimodal interaction analysis” (Asbrand & Martens,
2018, p. 109) that does not only consider the verbal components of the inter-
action but also the bodily movements and material things involved.
In 2019 a student assistant spent two mornings in a child care centre located
in a village in Saxony, Germany, videotaping the interaction in a group of
about 15 children, aged 3–5 years, and their teachers almost continuously.
Using a thematic log, we then identified sequences (of approximately one and
a half minute) that seemed particularly useful to interpret due to what the
children were doing (eating, playing, etc.), their interactive density and theo-
retical considerations. Our main research goal was to empirically analyse how
educating and teaching were accomplished and how they intermingled. The
verbal interactions of the selected sequences were subsequently transcribed.6
For the interpretation of videographies with the Documentary Method (see
Bohnsack, 2020), Asbrand and Martens (2018) proposed taking into account
the sequentiality of the videographed interactions. In a ‘formulating interpre-
tation’ the non-verbal events (bodily movements and material things), sepa-
rated from the (previously transcribed) verbal interaction, are put into words
in such detail that the sequence and the mutual relationship of the individual
movements become evident even below complete (institutionalized) actions.
In the ‘reflective interpretation’, it is then a matter of analysing how the par-
ticipants manipulate things and interact verbally and non-verbally with one
another (cf. Asbrand & Martens, 2018, p. 121; see also Nohl et al., 2021).

3.2 The Empirical Example: Bodily Learning in the Child

Care Centre

The video recording starts when the children have already lifted the chairs and
are about to walk towards the door. It remains unclear what they have done
before and whether the teachers have asked them to carry the chairs (which is
very likely).

6
In addition to the child care centre in the Saxonian village, we have also videographed five mornings in
a child care centre in Hamburg. This project was financed by the Helmut Schmidt University. Members
of the project group were Susann Schmidt, Steffen Amling and the authors.
336 A.-M. Nohl and M. Götz-Dehnavi

E1
C4
C6

C3

C1

C5

C2

Fig. 1 Photogram at 00:01 (copyright: the authors)

The following photogram (Fig. 1) gives an idea of the complexity of the

tasks the children are confronted with: They have to lift and carry their chairs,
they have to manoeuvre their chairs through the door to the second room
and, last but not least, while doing so, they have to coordinate with the other
children. Whereas the first task brings to the fore the materiality of learning,
the latter tasks are concerned with spatiality, too. All three tasks, however,
involve bodily learning, either already accomplished previously or to be per-
formed in this very situation.7
In the first five seconds, the following interactions take place:

Child C1, who at the beginning of the shot passes through the door frame and
has her gaze directed forward towards the second room, holds her chair by the
backrest and the seat while the chair’s legs are pointing down. The wooden chair,
like all other chairs carried by children, consists of a square seat with an approxi-
mately 5 cm rim, to the front of which two round chair legs are attached. At the
back, the chair legs continue about 30 cm above the seat. The right and left
struts are connected by a backrest which is conically bent backward and slightly
conical at the top and bottom and is about 10 cm wide. When teacher E1 asks
C2 to hold his chair differently, C1 turns her head to E1, looks at the hands of
C2, turns back again, continues walking and steps out of view of the camera.

7
Admittedly, the following analysis is subject to an ‘interactive’ perspective in the sense of Dewey and
Bentley (1989). A ‘transactional’ perspective should not be based on given “children” and “chairs,” but
should, in particular, put our knowledge of these fixed concepts in the background and describe objects
and people in detail (see Nohl, 2018).
 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 337

At the same time, C2 holds his chair with its legs pointing upwards at about
80°. E1, while talking to C2 (saying: “not forward like that if you bump you
(…) put it right in your stomach”), bends forward and grabs the foot of C2’s
chair with her left hand, with her right hand she touches C3’s chair briefly and
then pulls the back of C2’s chair towards her with her right hand, so that the
chair is turned and its feet point downwards at about 45°. C2 holds his chair
firmly and lifts it a little further. As he now continues towards the door, E1
briefly touches his left upper arm.
C3 stands in the funnel-shaped queue before C2 and observes how E1 cor-
rects C2. To this he adds, echoing E1, “not forward”. C3 holds his chair to the
backrest and seat so that the chair legs are directed downwards, and he looks
down too. E1 reaches briefly for C3’s chair with her left hand, while C3 contin-
ues walking towards the door and finally enters the second room.
Behind and slightly to the left of C3, C5 follows him slowly, holding his chair
by the backrest and its seat, while its legs are pointing down. Whereas C6, who
just enters into view of the camera and holds his chair similarly, is positioned
behind and slightly to the left of C5, C4 stands just to the left of C5 so that she
is almost out of view of the camera.

The very fact that the teacher stands at the doorway and observes the chil-
dren, intervening in their handling of the chairs every once in a while, shows
that she perceives them as persons who still need to learn. However, these five
seconds of video recording reveal that the majority of these children have
already acquired two important ‘Thirdnesses’ that help them to accomplish
their tasks:
First of all, without any guidance from their teacher, the children have
positioned themselves in a funnel-shaped queue that allows them to walk col-
lectively through the bottleneck of the door. Each child moves forward by
following the preceding child, walking slightly to its left or right and slowly
but surely heading for the middle of the door (zipper principle). This is not,
or not only, an individual capability but reveals a collective appropriation of
the space in which the movements of most children are adjusted to each other.
The main point of this adjustment is to correctly anticipate the moving dis-
tant objects (the other children and their chairs) while one is moving in the
space oneself and to keep the right distance to them. That this habituation of
a spatio-temporal Thirdness is not a matter of course can be seen both in the
warning of the teacher (“if you bump”) and in the fact that C4 falls out of this
collective appropriation of space. Later it will take E1 some effort to get C4 to
carry her chair through the door. The other children, however, have appar-
ently performed this bodily learning task before. Whereas C4 is confronted
with an emergent space, for the other children this space is already habituated.
338 A.-M. Nohl and M. Götz-Dehnavi

Secondly, all children have already learned to carry a chair, that is, they have
established a ‘Thirdness’ that relates their body to this piece of furniture.
While they are not faced with any practical obstacles that would make them
learn to hold the chair differently (as they do not bump into each other), fur-
ther bodily learning here is initiated by the teacher’s warning to point the legs
of the chair downwards. The verbal warning is, however, not sufficient: the
teacher changes the direction of C2’s chair in the space, touches C3’s chair
and, later, also realigns C6’s chair. Apparently, the teacher does not trust that
her verbal warning is enough and, therefore, resorts to these bodily interven-
tions. By doing so, she instigates bodily learning on the part of the children
who begin to extend their previous Thirdness (their previous way of carrying
a chair).

4 Outlook
If we wish to understand bodily learning, we must take account of its material
and spatial dimensions. As this chapter argued, Pragmatism, and especially
the works of Peirce, Mead, Dewey and Bentley, offers congenial basic theo-
retical concepts that help us to grasp the phenomena with which we are pre-
sented. Videography, then, is a suitable method of producing data on the
multimodality of bodily learning.
The videography-based research on educational interaction in the child
care centre may have given an idea of the usefulness of the theoretical perspec-
tive outlined in this chapter. However, more research is needed. There is a
broad range of subject matter that is awaiting further research, for example
the habituation and emergence of space during the transition to primary
school, the material and spatial dimensions of digital learning, the interrelat-
edness of spatiality and temporality in adult learning, or issues of bodily learn-
ing in adventure education. Such empirical analyses will not only shed light
on aspects of the educational field that are as yet unknown. They will also help
us to further develop the basic theoretical concepts with which we try to
understand the intricacies of bodily learning and its material as well as spatial
dimensions.
 Materiality and Spatiality of Bodily Learning 339

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 Body-Related Learning Processes
in Museums
Bernd Wagner

Educational science research indicates that children from preschool to pri-

mary school age create meanings in terms of their personal relationships and
interactions in their physical surroundings that they often express through
bodily postures. This can be observed in museum visits that are the subject of
video-ethnographic research (Amann & Hirschauer, 1997; Wagner, 2013).
Young children initiate subjective practices and relationships both within
their peer groups and with collection objects.1 For those creative activities that
are connected to forms, senses and emotions, objects with concrete and tan-
gible properties are needed so that preschool and primary school children can
create meaning through artistic expression and play (Isenberg & Jalongo,
2000). Developing an exploratory relationship with objects in a museum
exhibition can be described as a form of learning process. Early social science
education in Germany, founded on the discipline and teaching methods of
Sachunterricht, is processual and based on the way preschool and primary
school children interact with different materials (Pech, 2009; Pech &
Rauterberg, 2007, p. 3). Within these learning processes, educational
strategies that focus on the discursive dimensions of learning with objects in

1
“Up to primary school age children live in a world of relationships and develop theories to understand
their place in the world, some are more useful than others. The discussion of these theories and paying
attention to their function is tangible early childhood learning” (Scholz, 2010, p. 39).

B. Wagner (*)
University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
e-mail: bernd.wagner@uni-leipzig.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 341
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_21
342 B. Wagner

school, especially in the primary school subject (Sachunterricht), are high-

lighted (Pech & Rauterberg, 2008). The approach sees the interests and ques-
tions of children as a starting point of learning and relates this to the childhood
educational science known in German as Kindheitsforschung (Heinzel, 2010)2.
The approach places less emphasis on particular skills and formal knowledge,
and instead stresses the need to facilitate the individual child’s processes of
figuring out and interacting with objects.
First, the following chapter describes the research field: children and their
physical access to objects in collections (Sect. 1). Then learning processes of
preschool and primary school children in museums, with reference to anthro-
pological studies and the concept of contact zones, are described (Sect. 2). As
an example, research in performative play stations for preschool children in
the permanent exhibition German History in Images and Artefacts of the
German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin is presented (Sect. 3). Finally,
results from the research project are shown in the context of body-related
learning processes of preschool and primary school children (Sect. 4).

1 The Research Field: Children and Their

Physical Access to Collection Objects
A short overview of educational research based on publications in the field
with an emphasis on preschool and primary school children in museums is
given in this section. First, we look at the discourse in English-language pub-
lications. This discourse is dominated by many authors who criticize learning
theories for their strict cognitive focus, thereby neglecting learning approaches
with the body. Richard Jordi (2011), for example, describes body and mind
interactions in his article ‘Reframing the Concept of Reflection: Consciousness,
Experiential Learning, and Reflective Learning Practices’. This is based on a
theoretical approach. From Jordi’s point of view, these interactions can lead
to more holistic learning experiences. He postulates that the use of all human
senses enriches the learning experience, and that inclusive learning environ-
ments benefit from physical activity and the spirit of discovery. Joanne Yoo
and Sarah Loch (2016), in ‘Learning Bodies: What Do Teachers Learn from
Embodied Practice?’, reflect on the Sky High program for teachers, which was
designed to raise the awareness of body language and to show ways of

2
“That’s why education processes are perceived as subjective genesis processes only when answers to ques-
tions are given that the subject, from a need to find things out and to understand the world, has discov-
ered for him or herself ” (Schäfer, 1999, p. 119).
 Body-Related Learning Processes in Museums 343

increasing the learning motivation of socioeconomically disadvantaged stu-

dents. In their ethnographic research, Yoo and Loch find that a visit to a
museum can be a motivating experience with experiential learning approaches.
These experiences can help to diminish prejudices, for example that museums
are only accessible for intellectuals. Because of long distances or small budgets
in some rural areas, museum visits are almost impossible. An alternative is to
offer a museum experience in school, for example by ordering selected collec-
tion items in what is called a museum carrying case, or by collecting objects
which provide a special learning experience. In ‘Beyond the Walls with
Object-Based Learning’, Cassandra Barnett (2019) outlines how collections
and exhibits can be moved around in order to offer a museum experience to
remote schools. This requires professional networks and training for teachers
to enable them to discuss the provenances and properties of objects with a
school class and create mind-opening experiences. Studies of learning materi-
als and environments show that interventions are open to historical, artistic
as well as physical and chemical elements. Steven Murow and Arnold Chavez
(2017), in ‘Exploring Matter: An Interactive, Inexpensive Chemistry Exhibit
for Museums’, reflect on field reports about a modest college exhibition.
Through interactive activities and learning through examples, students are
challenged and can become enthusiastic about chemistry: an area in which
large museums often fail.
Body-related learning processes integrating experiences and the senses are
not limited to analog learning arrangements; digitalization and digital culture
require new competences and perspectives too. In ‘The Interactive Museum:
Video Games as History Lessons Through Lore and Affective Design’, Sky
Anderson (2019) deals with the controversial topic of integrating computer
games into educational contexts. Even though most computer games have a
commercial background, their interactive potential and the emotional involve-
ment of the players can be used in pedagogical contexts. The author analyzes
contents of computer games and compares players’ experiences to analog
learning methods. He finds that some give the impression of being an interac-
tive museum. Also, combinations of digital and analog elements are thought
to expand educational value and learning. Maria Dardanou (2019) focuses
ethnographically on that point in ‘From Foot to Pencil, from Pencil to Finger:
Children as Digital Wayfarers’ by describing how children can intensify the
museum experience with digital devices during and after their visit. Like an
interactive computer game, they can use their photos, videos and notes/draw-
ings to develop a story with their tablet that involves them emotionally and
leads to connections between the different things they are learning. It is not
only that the children experience the museum through interacting with their
344 B. Wagner

bodies, but the fact that they document it via digital devices and develop sto-
ries which can be experienced even after the museum visit.
Different kinds of involvement and perspectives during learning processes
are the subject of Amy Chou and Janet Shih’s article ‘Show Me What You See:
An Exploration of Learning in Museums and Learning in Theatre’ (Chou &
Shih, 2010). The authors’ qualitative research, based on semi-structured ques-
tionnaires, focuses on individual learning strategies. The authors argue that
performance techniques and storytelling in museums and theaters are suitable
in contexts of individual learning strategies. They find that, through narrative
approaches and personal involvement, the impact of museum visits is intensi-
fied. Ran Peleg and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari (2017) discuss in their qualitative-
and quantitative-based research (391 questionnaires and 67 interviews) the
performances that are put on in museums to create a learning environment.
Personal involvement in a story can help and hinder learning at the same
time. On the one hand, clear and explicit information is absorbed easily
through the personal link with the audience; on the other hand, some infor-
mation or aesthetic elements are interpreted by audience members, opening
up the possibility of facts being misinterpreted. That is why a play put on in a
museum must be directed in a way that is more than just entertainment; it
must provide educational value too. Nevertheless, playing and performance
are thought to be central elements in museum education. Pamela Krakowski
(2012) observes in ‘Museum Superheroes: The Role of Play in Young Children’s
Lives’ how children who are still in kindergarten can benefit from a visit to an
art museum when they experience the exhibition by playing. In particular,
connecting children’s personal environment and interests, for example super-
heroes, to a museum’s topic will motivate the children and the experience may
enrich their knowledge.
Another way for children in kindergarten or preschool to connect with
museum educational offers is through role-play, in which the children create
their own exhibition and guide the visitors. Alice Hope’s case studies in ‘Young
Children as Curators’ (Hope, 2018) raise the idea that, in contrast to a passive
reception, children give meanings to objects or displays when they create their
own scenarios. When they have experienced that perspective, children are bet-
ter prepared to visit a museum and understand other concepts. Because the
possibilities in one’s own exhibition are almost endless, children can use their
imagination and give objects fantastic meanings, what stimulates them to play
with all the senses. In contrast to Cassandra Barnett’s (2019) approach, not
just the collection objects are introduced in school, but rather the idea of cre-
ating museum scenarios and presenting collections. Recently, reactions to
nationalism and learning experiences that relate to a complicated globalized
 Body-Related Learning Processes in Museums 345

world have become more important. Museums with a multicultural orienta-

tion can provide learning environments that support transcultural awareness.
In her article ‘Black Museums and Experiential Learning’, Cheylon Woods
(2018) describes the history of exclusion in museums. She argues that
more space should be given to the initiatives of Black communities and other
minority groups to enable them to show their culture in appropriate ways.
According to the author, this approach ontributes to the idea of a demo-
cratic museum.
In Germany there is not a great deal of research on museum education for
children. Early childhood education studies in Germany address children’s
negotiation processes with objects. They show that testing out and exploring
objects, even if they irritate children or result in failure, is vitally important for
the acquisition of knowledge and problem-solving skills (Nentwig-Gesemann,
Fröhlich-Gildhoff & Pietsch, 2011a). This can also be seen in the context of
personal experiences, in which mimetic self-formation processes are created
(Gebauer & Wulf, 1992; Schäfer, 2011; Nentwig-Gesemann, Fröhlich-
Gildhoff, & Pietsch, 2011a). Mimetic activity is defined as the ability to use
one’s senses to creatively and physically imitate cultural expressions. Subjective
perceptions are stored as internal images and then reproduced physically. This
process is not just simple imitation but involves imaginative expression and
interpretation. Mimetic processes are a necessary part of the informal condi-
tions that foster development and learning. They characterize an environment
in which children are dynamically involved in their surroundings and can
familiarize themselves with collection objects.
The Swedish model of integrating preschool and primary school shows that
it is not beneficial that professionals in social science teaching methods
(Sachunterrichtsdidaktik) bring concepts from primary school into early years
learning. Instead, issues of early years learning should also be considered as
the task of primary schools; comprehensive coordination is needed between
preschools and primary schools (Scholz, 2010, p. 34). However, transitions
between kindergarten and primary school are non-linear and thus require
coping strategies and transitional phases. Exactly how such transitional phases
can succeed and how procedural knowledge about them can be expanded may
have important implications for future research. Further studies of the experi-
ence horizons of preschool children dealing with collections can be applied to
this field of research (Duncker & Kremling, 2010). Educational Science con-
ceptions of early years education, such as the importance of mimetic learning,
offer insights into concepts and methods of learning in the social sciences. In
particular, early years education can be considered as the focal point of social
sciences teaching methods. Tangible learning opportunities can
346 B. Wagner

mediate children valuable impressions of history, social change, different

actors and stakeholders. These impressions are based on relevant objects—for
example a piece of the Berlin Wall as a source of contemporary history—that
can be incorporated into social science teaching. A focus in social sci-
ences teaching is the participative role of the child actively developing and
presenting ideas—more detail will be given in the empirical material of the
following chapter. For preschool and kindergarten children, historical changes
can be explained less by conceptual arguments than by physical respec-
tively hands-on processes in which emotional connections are created (Wulf
et al., 2001). In the following chapter, early childhood educational practices
such as the development of experience horizons are shown in the context of
the German History in Images and Artefacts exhibition. Connections are drawn
between the scientific discipline of early childhood education and the meth-
ods used in social science teaching.

2 Contact Zones with Collection Objects

The learning processes of preschool and primary school children are tied to
personal interpretations of situations as well as affective creations. Possible
meanings are tested out through subjective experiences and performative self-
portraits (Wagner, 2013; Stauber, 2004, 2006).3 The performativity of this
process is seen in spontaneous interactions with museum objects.4 For exam-
ple Marie Louise Pratt (1996) develops the idea that contact zones in a
museum establish a distance from everyday interpretations of things and
encourage situations of negotiation and testing. This idea calls for interactive
spaces in museums to add experiential dimensions to exhibits. Pratt points
out that a contact zone provides visitors with insights into unknown or past
worlds; as such a zone ‘is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copres-
ence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunc-
tures, and whose trajectories now intersect’ (Pratt, 1992, p. 7).
Reflections on the performative nature of contact zones in museums expand
and fundamentally challenge our approaches to teaching in primary schools;

3
Stauber (2004) emphasizes the interactive body-related aspect of self-dramatization in peer groups. She
sees the importance of the production of action communities, embodying meanings and opening up
spaces. In addition, Stauber addresses presentation of the self, forms of recognition and membership
of groups.
4
“If human action is perceived as cultural acting and cultural performance, changes in understanding of
social and educational processes arise. In this case the physicality of the actors, the event and directorial
character of the actors deserve greater attention” (Wulf et al., 2001 p. 9).
 Body-Related Learning Processes in Museums 347

they also challenge current educational concepts for non-formal education,

which revolve around models of concentric circles, original movements and
conceptual change. Pratt favors a performative concept of learning in muse-
ums as part of an interactive process that can lead to students’ broader under-
standing of content. Performative forms of learning as directorial, active social
practices can be understood within Judith Butler’s (1990) framework—for
example in negotiating the meaning of museum objects. These practices help
describe the activity of children where they express themselves through body-
related mimetic actions. Contact zones, as described by Pratt, are designed as
a kind of performance-like museum visit for primary school children. Contact
zones in a museum should have flexible arrangements of objects to allow
groups of children to move and act with them. This gives children room to
playfully approach objects in the exhibition whose materiality arouses curios-
ity (Nohl, 2011). Performative games support viewers in negotiating asym-
metric meanings, which Pratt considers as constitutive for contact zones5.
Spontaneous moments of play in the museum can be analysed from a peda-
gogical perspective and can be made fruitful for educational purposes, such as
creating a multi-perspective understanding of objects.
For several years there have been efforts to welcome children more in muse-
ums and exhibitions. This includes providing educational materials for learning
purposes. Several prominent Berlin museums, such as the Ethnological Museum
of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, have a children’s museum with
activities tailored to primary school classes. There are hands-on play and experi-
mentation stations. But many of our museums’ educational activities for chil-
dren are only installed for short-term projects and do not have sufficient space.
In the next section we will look at research with a long-term learning environ-
ment, linked to a permanent collection in the German Historic Museum and
based on the anthropological concept of contact zones. The learning environ-
ment with several stations allows small, accompanied groups of children to
explore objects for themselves, as accompanying researchers observe the way
children learn as they are confronted with these objects. The resulting stations
are tailored to explorative learning and offer thus predominantly sensory experi-
ences. When children try things out and negotiate at the stations, even when
they get annoyed or fail, these are considered to be vital stages in the acquisition
of procedural knowledge and problem-solving skills.

5
A previous research project developed contact zones for groups of children in the exhibition American
Indians in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The study focused on pupils’ intercultural dialogues at the
museum and in its storage rooms (Wagner, 2010).
348 B. Wagner

3 Example: Contact Zones in the Permanent

Exhibition German History in Images
and Artefacts at the German Historical
Museum (DHM)
The empirical examples presented here show that stimulating objects encour-
age physical and sensual exploration among preschool children (Koester,
2006). Generally, children first observe the tangibility of an object in an
exploratory phase followed by conceptual contemplation. Accompanying
adults often offer conceptual classifications and contexts too early and disrupt
children while they are testing out objects. The route through the exhibition
has interactive stations which are intended to be places where children can
have both an aesthetic and a hands-on experience. Questions as to how chil-
dren learn can be answered here. The preschool children participating, for
whom this is often their first visit at the DHM, have contributed to formulat-
ing these educational principles. Some parts of the exhibition, intended for
adults, have been adjusted or altered for children’s sections. For example a
large painting from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from
the DHM that was considered important in the design of the exhibition was
hardly noticed by the visiting children. However a car prototype, not origi-
nally intended to be included, has been met with broad interest. The stations
are designed as contact zones where the objects’ materiality lends itself to
historical learning.
The contact zones promote discovery and learning by drawing attention to
selected objects from the collection and by opening up certain niche show-
rooms for small groups. In the resulting spatial contact zones, the children can
intensively examine the exhibition objects and then relate them to things from
their everyday lives (Treptow, 2005). The visiting preschoolers compare what
they experience here with things they know from everyday contexts, as observed
in the discussions about the lyre, the car prototype and a model of Berlin tene-
ments. The empirical material shows that exhibits that encourage comparing to
and contrasting with life-worlds by means of familiar objects are of particular
interest. For example the station that focuses on children’s fashion in 1900 based
on two sailor suits stimulates a playful exchange. Children can try on the clothes
and compare themselves with a large mural and the items in the showcases.
Preschoolers produce play structures with reference to their living environment
and find historical traces in the present. Change and continuity is experienced
in relation to historical objects, helping children to mediate themselves the con-
texts and usage patterns of things they see.
 Body-Related Learning Processes in Museums 349

4 Prospects for Body-Based Processes

of Learning About Objects in Museums
Striking about the video-ethnographic material is that the extra-curricular
learning center of the museum could be a valuable space for the informal
education of five-year-old children, in contrast to processes that often are
preoccupied by instruction and interactions that are part of the school as an
institution. Throughout the film material, there are scenes that can be identi-
fied as group formations related to the home or to childcare facilities. It seems
that productive learning situations cannot be produced by explanatory
remarks or the question-answer games that are often played in schools but
through non-formal group interactions in the five-year-olds’ physical sur-
roundings. This type of learning is not necessarily led by the guides in the
museum, though this obviously depends on the group’s learning stage. The
visiting children are expecting to learn about the things on display. This
reflects what they are used to when they engage in educational activities.
Preparatory work with children groups can provide suggestions how object-
oriented disputes about meaning are reconciled. In addition to the school-
related learning processes described, there are other developments to be seen
in the following encodings.

4.1 Open Coding: Physically Testing Out and Selecting

Unfamiliar Objects According to Their Use

Passing through the route of contact zones, the groups of children repeat ways
of dealing with objects in the collection. The footage shows that in the nego-
tiation processes, children show that they can work and act independently
and demonstrate subjective learning strategies (in German: Selbsttätigkeit:
Klafki, 1998) inspired by the objects in the exhibition. Particularly impressive
in this regard are the sequences at the Hunting station (Picture 2). Museum
staff offers children stick figures of humans and animals (some of which can
be seen in historical paintings in the collection room) before they reenact
hunting stories. The stick figures are used for historical and present-day hunt-
ing scenes. In these sequences, all seven groups displayed the same forms of
interaction: the children listen attentively to the museum guides, move
together in a tight circle in order to participate in the activity, view the mate-
rial and await the stick puppets. While the museum guides point out repre-
sentations in the subject area and describe the various roles of the figures, the
children grow increasingly restless. The children of the sample groups appear
350 B. Wagner

to be particularly interested in animal figures. Many children become active

immediately and test out the didactic material. They want a closer look at the
stick puppets straight away and express wishes about the roles they would like
to perform in the play. The museum guides respond to these pleas and start
the game phase. In that performative acting phase the comparison of multiple
groups of children shows some differences at this point. There are nonetheless
the following similarities: the children involved listen to the introduction by
the museum educator and there are few signs of spontaneity or the wish to
develop new forms. As preschool children, they demand that play material is
provided at an early point. The aim of the station, a comparison of historical
and contemporary hunting forms, is not a priority and does not capture the
attention of the children.
Other footage shows that unusual objects in games (e.g. the stick puppets)
trigger bodily impulses and the need to conduct body-based experiments in
children’s groups. In practice, particular objects that point to possible ways
they might be used, but still seem strange and elude categorization, attract
children and lead to physical interactions (Serrell, 1996; Norman, 1999).
These objects are not totally extraneous, but they cannot be compared directly
to a familiar object or to everyday contexts. The objects are unfamiliar and
lead to explorations and tests. This is in particularly evident at the Living sta-
tion. In addition to the model of a Berlin apartment building, which is dis-
played in a showcase, there are two kettles hidden inside covered boxes, with
porcelain and enamel cups and pieces of coal. All the children see the covered
boxes and then reach in without being able to view the contents. They make
immediate guesses about what they can feel. Often they look to the adults,
seemingly seeking confirmation. Once the covers of the kettles, cups and coal
are removed, the children reach out to feel the objects in order to examine
what they are made of. In four out of seven videos taken at the station, chil-
dren visibly and spontaneously try to drink from the cups, but also smell and
test the weight of the objects, such as the piece of coal. The concrete objects
provoke body-related investigations about what they were used for and simi-
larities in the living environment of children are discussed.

4.2 Open Coding: Approaching the Meanings

of Objects via Everyday Experience

The children involved in the sample tap into the meanings of unfamiliar
objects. The objects are found in everyday contexts and scenes that are associ-
ated with known worlds. At the play stations, the children initiate their own
 Body-Related Learning Processes in Museums 351

re-creations of things used in daily life, regardless of the intentions of the

museum guides—only in rare cases they are instigated by accompanying
teachers. A very good example is the comparison made by one preschool
child, when he feels a piece of coal at the Housing station. The child describes
a family experience where the use of coal is of great importance. He tells of a
family barbecue on the Tempelhof field, a Berlin city park. The child develops
spontaneous associations with the everyday use of this particular object and
moves away from what the museum intended it to signify. Through using
their bodily senses, the children manage to figure out the everyday uses of
objects. Many children imitate drinking from the porcelain or enamel cup. A
film sequence shows one child who, in the context of testing cups, offers a cup
of coffee to his teacher. Habits of acquaintance, including those of adults, are
connected to objects that are unfamiliar. In the context of testing out objects,
children create connections between objects and arrange them in relational
object environments. This aspect gains more importance when a series of
interactive stations is designed, as the objects displayed are linked to the activ-
ities of collecting in order to produce object relationships (Duncker, 2007).
The children of the sample groups also have the opportunity to present their
own collecting activities in the structured game Collecting6. Their own under-
standing of the way objects relate to each other helps them to understand the
collections of the museum.
Although communication is largely guided by the museum staff, commu-
nicative interactions also develop among the children. In the footage we can
see that these interactions cause disputes about property. Four selected video
segments show that the way children communicate in small groups involves
physical exploration, which strengthens their understanding of objects. In the
sequences, very many children try out the shapes of objects and comment on
their own experiences of what the items are used for. These situations are
observed by other children, who are then encouraged to relate the objects to
their own bodies or to other objects in the room. In addition to the usual
behavior of children in a group, for example playful self-representations, these
games that involve moving around, the body, clothing and language, also
involve unusual things in the exhibition. Preschool children gain an awareness
of social reality and learn to test out spaces physically by, for example, moving
around the photomontage of a forest to test out what their body movements
mean. A result is that educational events that the children organize themselves
6
“However, what emerges here is a highly differentiated picture of childlike world appropriation.
Children become interested in things through a methodical process of acquiring knowledge, and they
maintain and strengthen these interests through collecting things as a means of social integration and
developing social relations” (Duncker & Kremling, 2010, p. 63).
352 B. Wagner

pave the way to experiencing the exhibits. For these performative experiments
to take place, children need a space where they are free of the interpretations
of adults (Foucault, 2001; Stieve, 2012). This gives children the opportunity:
‘to wrest a new order of the things’ (Treptow, 2005, p. 803), and allows them
to make their experiences of things more tangible as well as gain a belief in
their own ability to do things (Selbstwirksamkeitsüberzeugungen) (Nentwig-
Gesemann, Fröhlich-Gildhoff, Harms & Richter, 2011b) in non-school envi-
ronments. The collaborative study designed a research field of interactive
stations in which the observation and analysis of video ethnography-based
data interpretation gives hints on the vital importance of mimetic, body-
related learning processes. The objects from the collections of the DHM chal-
lenge children and cause performative interactions which can be thematized
in following more formal learning courses.
The performative practices in museum collections point to the disciplinary
links between early years education and social science education, which have
been reflected in this research. These practices can be anchored in the concept
of early years social science teaching (Frühe Sachbildung) and used in the
development of concepts that assist the transition from preschool to primary
school. In several European countries, such as Switzerland, initial trials with
joint modules and study phases for preschool and primary school teachers
have been launched. The use of educational spaces with physical access to col-
lection objects is beneficial for such a joint training of the two professions.
Museums, which are open to both preschool and primary school groups, offer
object-based, body-related learning experiences, combined with approaches
to cultural heritage. These experiences can be reflected in both educational
institutions and can serve as a common ground of further projects.

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 Part V
Body, Virtual Reality and Mindfulness

This section examines the processes of embodiment that have arisen as part of
the digital transformation of society as well as the extent to which mindfulness
can help us to deal critically with virtual reality. To a large degree, the traditional
division between online and offline has become irrelevant in the lives of young
people. Both forms of being and acting are equally familiar to them and are
essential in their everyday lives. A life that is not ready to communicate online
is almost inconceivable for the young. Through being both users and producers,
the digital natives and other users develop new forms of digital productivity and
creativity. They are comfortable with sending screenshots and selfies and using
the diverse forms of digital communication, etc. It is hard to say what the poten-
tial and also the limitations of these new forms of communication, information
and entertainment may be. New connections between distance and traditional
classroom learning are constantly being developed. Many of these developments
have come about or have been accelerated as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
Michalis Kontopodis and Kristiina Kumpulainen in Chap. 22 describe “a
radical shift in the lives of children and young people” in the new media era.
The ‘internet’ or ‘App generation’ share ever more ideas, thoughts and infor-
mation within virtual networks and communities, and also engage in
e-learning. They play games and use digital collaborative work spaces with
virtual reality tools, thus co-creating, locating, filtering, editing and re-using
media content. The boundaries between ‘being online’ and ways of life that
are ‘not directly technical’ are increasingly blurred. Multiple interrelations
between technical devices and human actors shape, transform and diffuse the
actions by means of technical mediation. Engagement, completeness and
coherence are replaced by confused entanglement, multimodality and speed.
356 Body, Virtual Reality and Mindfulness

As a consequence, Kontopodis and Kumpulainen see education today as

enabling multiple connections between various types of media, as well as
between different spheres of life and diverse cultural and socio-economic
milieus. Two case studies show that habitual users find it natural that pro-
grammes of action and ‘compositions’ of life settings and interfaces deprive
them of control and agency.
This leads into Chap. 23 by Benjamin Jörissen, Martha K. Schröder and
Anna Carnap in the field of aesthetic and arts education. The authors describe
the use of the ‘OpenSpace method’ in the frame of s.c. BarCamps, i.e. partici-
pative conferences, to investigate young people’s activities in post-digital cul-
tures. Their wide-ranging quantitative and qualitative study shows that
temporary forms of “networking and expressive articulation, play and work,
individuality and collectivity, remix and originality” are combined with “the
externalization of memory practices, sociality as a networked attention econ-
omy, creativity imperatives or hyper-individualized information and commu-
nication styles”. They describe how bodily practices are intertwined with
technology. ‘Traditional’ theatrical and musical performances are adapted to
forms of digital and post-digital creativity and new digital-aesthetic practices
emerge. Non-digital practices are restaged and new value is given to the forms
of real-life physical action that once have been quite prosaic. Digital transcul-
tural countercultures arise.
Another angle is to be found in Chap. 24 by Andreas Nehring on mindful-
ness, a practice that is beginning to play an increasingly important role in
education and therapeutic processes. Mindfulness is a metacognitive state of
awareness that is reached by purposely refraining from judgement and by
bringing one’s attention to the present moment. The aim is to attain self-
perception through introspection and increased awareness of the body through
the interweaving of thought processes with physical states. There is an assump-
tion that “the body is able to adapt to its environment in a reactive and self-
organizing (autopoiesis) way which connects all systems with each other”.
With its roots in Buddhism, mindfulness training is directed towards the defi-
ciencies of the Western lifestyles, especially in the business world. It aims to
compensate for adverse effects of civilization, such as burn-out, painful rela-
tionships, poor concentration and mindless distraction. Furthermore, in
mindfulness approaches, finding meaning in one’s life as an individual and
self-management is linked to popular culture, lifestyle and to a clear narrative
dramaturgy. Nehring reminds us of the need to “develop a systematic cultural-
analytical understanding of mindfulness”, also of the reception of mindful-
ness from a historico-cultural-comparative perspective.
 Technical Mediation of Children’s Onlife
Worlds
Michalis Kontopodis and Kristiina Kumpulainen

1 Blurring Children’s On- and Offline Worlds

Increasing numbers of children and young people from across the world are
engaging in speedy communication which takes place through interactive
media devices. Present-day technologies enable the distributed production
and peer-to-peer circulation of advanced audio-visual designs and bits of
information across different geographical areas—the prediction being that by
2025 every child and young person in the planet will have daily access to the
Internet at a speed of 1 MB per second (ITU, 2019). Numerous digital solu-
tions have also been taken into use across the world, as to mitigate the prob-
lems created by school closures during the recent COVID-19 outbreak.
Much research has explored the role media and digital technologies play in
everyday lives and learning of children and young people, inside and outside
of school (cf. Kontopodis et al., 2019; Kumpulainen & Sefton-Green, 2014;
Pachler et al., 2010; Selwyn, 2013). Terms such as the ‘net generation’
(Tapscott, 2009), the ‘App generation’ (Gardner & Davis, 2013) and

M. Kontopodis (*)
University of Leeds/GB, Leeds, UK
e-mail: m.kontopodis@leeds.ac.uk
K. Kumpulainen
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
e-mail: kristiina.kumpulainen@helsinki.fi

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 357
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_22
358 M. Kontopodis and K. Kumpulainen

‘networked teens’ (Boyd, 2014) have been introduced to describe a radical

shift in the lives of the children and young people in the new media era.
While the first wave of relevant scholarship mostly explored online learn-
ing, communication and gaming, a second wave of research argues that the
boundaries between life online and life offline are increasingly blurred, to an
extent that the original meanings of the words online and offline seem to be
diffused, both in theory and in practice. Luciano Floridi (2014) introduced,
in this frame, the term ‘onlife’ to account for the contemporary ways of living
in which humans are endlessly surrounded by smart, responsive objects when
they play, shop, learn, entertain themselves and conduct relationships or even
wars. Being ‘onlife’ is indeed a fundamental dimension of the everyday lives
of children and young people—particularly of those in North-Western urban
settings, as doing things online and offline is merely a matter of swiftly switch-
ing between the different modalities of everydayness. At the same time, it
seems that media scholars are moving from a focus on so-called new media to
exploring how older and newer forms and means of communication and
learning may be intertwined (Debray, 2000; Jenkins, 2006; Leander, 2008).
Central in understanding how new media operate and how they may affect
children’s everyday lives and learning is the notion of ‘technical mediation’
(Latour, 1994). While the concept of ‘technical mediation’ has often been
used in a rather generic way, Bruno Latour (1994, pp. 32–29) identifies four
distinct modes of ‘technical mediation’ in his analysis of the multiple interre-
lations between technical devices (so-called actants) and human ‘actors’:

• ‘black-boxing’, which renders invisible the role of technical devices

• ‘translation’ of a programme of action to another one
• ‘composition’, that is relating of things that were previously different
or unrelated
• ‘delegation’ of action from a certain actor to another one (e.g. from a devel-
oper team to software)

According to Latour, all these modes of technical mediation work through

human actors and technical devices symmetrically, that is without that human
actors always have the central role, as other paradigms would presume. Latour
argues that technical mediation shapes, transforms and diffuses action, so that
understanding who or what is acting is not always straightforward.
The work by Bruno Latour did not refer originally to interactive, fast and
mobile audio-visual media designs—nor did it refer to children’s and young
people’s learning and corporeality. We propose that this analytical concept can
be useful when trying to understand how children’s bodies, media and digital
 Technical Mediation of Children’s Onlife Worlds 359

technologies and other devices relate to each other as to produce the blurred,
contemporary, ‘onlife’ worlds, which children and young people inhabit. In
this frame, we will employ below Latour’s concept of ‘technical mediation’ in
order to analyse two empirical examples from our recent research projects.
The first example explores various forms of technical mediation between a
two-year-old girl and a music-making App in a home setting. The second
example highlights the interrelations between a five-year-old boy and virtual
reality technologies in a Makerspace workshop associated with the FabLab
Berlin. The analysis of the two empirical examples leads into a broader discus-
sion about learning and education in the contemporary ‘onlife’ worlds.

2 Emilia with a Music-Making App

During one of our recent European projects, Kristiina, the second author,
studied a home setting in a suburban metropolitan area in southern Finland,
with a Finnish-speaking family consisting of a mother, father and one two-
year-old child Emilia.1 The child’s name has of course been replaced with a
pseudonym to ensure anonymity. The empirical data collection followed the
principles of the ‘day-in-the-life’ methodology developed by Julia Gillen and
her team (Gillen et al., 2007; Gillen & Cameron, 2010), and combined inter-
views with parents, photography, video recordings and field notes of children’s
digital literacy practices at home (Kumpulainen et al., 2020).
Emilia was sitting on a sofa using a music-making App that she had inde-
pendently located online, while she was glancing through the different appli-
cations, which her parents had allowed her to search on a tablet. In this App,
different pictures make different sounds. At first, Emilia was just going
through the pictures, tapping them one by one and listening to different
sounds. The sounds made her laugh, and she became interested in tapping
different sounds. Her father then joined in to see what she was doing, and for
a while, they together explored the functions of the App and how it worked.
In doing so, Emilia and the father engaged, to some extent, in unpacking the
‘black box’ of the invisible ways in which the technology worked. They
explored the various options of the App interface; however, they could not
intervene in the design of the App or the mechanics of the tablet, which
remained ‘black-boxed’ in Bruno Latour’s (1994) terms.

1
We refer here to the ‘Digital Literacy and Multimodal Practices of Young Children’ COST Action (Nr.
IS1410) led by Prof. Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield).
360 M. Kontopodis and K. Kumpulainen

Eventually the dad left Emilia and she continued to produce sounds with
the App on her own. Emilia’s engagement was in this case mediated by the
App, that is followed programmes of actions and rules, which the App devel-
opers created as well as rules, which her parents have set for her usage of the
tablet and technology, in general. These rules—that is her parents giving her
a certain amount of freedom in using the tablet—allowed her to explore dif-
ferent applications and resulted in Emilia locating and using a music-making
App that attracted her attention. Neither the App developers nor the parents
needed to be constantly present for Emilia to follow the rules, as the initial
programme of action set by developers was ‘delegated’ to other actors, that is
parents, Emilia and the device itself and then to the device and Emilia alone.
Soon Emilia became distracted, and she changed places from the sofa to the
floor. After this, her mother joined her to see what she was doing. Emilia started
to play the sounds to her mother, and together, they got seemingly excited about
tapping the pictures and creating the sounds, and they shook their bodies to the
rhythm of the sounds that they had created. Here, both Emilia’s and mother’s
online/onscreen activity became blurred with their offline/offscreen body move-
ments. This could be the beginning of a ‘composition’ in Latour’s terms, that is
of a specific combination of previously unrelated App sounds and Emilia’s and
her mother’s body movements. These findings also evidence, in Latour’s terms,
how a programme of action, that is music-making with the App, that is onscreen,
was ‘translated’ into another programme of action, in which Emilia and her
mother were no longer making music on the tablet but moving and dancing to
the sounds, which the App was playing back in the ‘onlife’ space emerging out
of the ‘composition’ of the sitting room (offline/offscreen) and the App interface
(online/onscreen). If repeated, this composition could eventually turn in the
future into a trivial family dance or become part of some wider ritualised family
activity, such as dancing in front of guests, dancing as a way to begin the day in
the morning and so on (Wulf et al., 2001).

3 Jörg in Engagement with Virtual Reality

and Immersive Technologies
During another recent European research project,2 Michalis, the first author,
followed ethnographically Jörg (pseudonym), a five-year-old boy, who partici-
pated in a virtual reality workshop, one form of Makerspace associated with
the FabLab Berlin (cf. Kontopodis & Kumpulainen, 2020). A fab lab, that is

2
We refer here to the project Makerspaces in the Early Years: Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity
(MakEY) led by Prof. Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Nr 734720).
 Technical Mediation of Children’s Onlife Worlds 361

fabrication laboratory, is an open digital fabrication studio where one can

learn how to use 3D printers, laser cutters, computer numerical control
(CNC) routers, design software and electronics. The FabLab Berlin consisted
of so-called Makerspaces, that is collaborative work spaces for making, learn-
ing, exploring and knowledge sharing with the available tools and technolo-
gies. It also offered access to a professional Do-It-Yourself studio and was not
only open to children and young people but also to adults and, in some cases,
to professional entrepreneurs.
In one of FabLab’s collaborative working spaces, a female facilitator, who
was about 30 years old, asked Jörg to create with cardboard and a variety of
other tools such as scissors, paint, pencils that were provided a world for a
wooden doll, which she had brought to the FabLab. After Jörg created the
world of the doll with cardboard and painted it, he was asked to also create a
similar environment for the doll by means of virtual reality tools. Other chil-
dren were present, including Jörg’s older brother, who was producing his own
version of the virtual environment for the same doll. Jörg could see the doll
(offscreen) on a desk alongside the painting materials as well as the doll’s vir-
tual replication on a 2D laptop screen. For 3D vision he was required to wear
the HTC VIVE headset, which was connected through cables to two control-
lers, one for each hand as well as a set of sensors and a data processing unit.
When he did that, he could no longer see anything offscreen.
While Jörg tried the HTC VIVE headset, he stepped on the (offline/off-
screen) cable connecting it to the processing unit and almost fell on the floor.
The facilitator quickly supported him so that he didn’t fall and moved the
cable further away, so that Jörg could focus on the virtual environment as it
appeared through the HTC VIVE headset. Then the facilitator invited Jörg to
use the mouse, select a virtual brush and move it in a certain direction so as to
further paint, modify and design the doll’s virtual environment. The facilita-
tor explained to Jörg that he could move his whole body and even walk
around, if needed, during the painting, but within the provided virtual room
space, which was marked by virtual walls. Two minutes later, Jörg was crossing
the virtual wall, which meant that he also moved out of the offline/offscreen
marked workshop area; without realising it, he slightly touched a (real) chair
with his back, which he couldn’t have seen as he was wearing the HTC VIVE
headset. This was unexpected for him and created some confusion; the facili-
tator intervened again, Jörg removed the headset, with everybody—him and
the other boys—bursting into laughter.
How virtual reality and immersive technologies work is not of importance
to the average modern-day user, it is usually ‘black-boxed’, as also had been
the case in the previous example with Emilia. Little is known on how the
362 M. Kontopodis and K. Kumpulainen

processing unit processes the recorded data, the coding behind the rather
user-friendly painting interface or the multiple connections between all dif-
ferent parts (cables, sensors, controllers, PC and VR headset). When Jörg
stepped literally on the cable and metaphorically out of the virtual reality envi-
ronment some of this ‘black-boxing’ was reversed—but not for long (Latour,
1994). If Jörg, as it often happens in FabLabs, would engage for a longer
period of time in the coding of the software and/or in the production and
design of the hardware, this black-boxing could be entirely reversed and re-
programming could take place.
The ‘composition’ of software + PC + virtual reality headset + cables + sen-
sors + controllers + chairs did not just do more or better of what Jörg would
anyway do, it did different things: Jörg spent a while walking around and mov-
ing his hands offline/offscreen, an action which was ‘translated’ through the
sensors into online/onscreen brushing, painting, deleting and finally into
designing a virtual 3D environment for the doll in ways that neither Jörg nor
the software programme (and its developers) would have necessarily envisaged
in advance. The environment initially designed for the doll on cardboard with
standard (offline/offscreen) painting tools was then ‘translated’ into some-
thing quite different: a 3D space on screen, mediated through software as well
as through a series of offscreen cables, sensors, controllers and other devices.
Jörg could after a certain point leave the space and ‘delegate’ (in Latour’s sense)
his programme of action to the software, which would continue providing the
3D-designed/immersive environment for the doll in Jörg’s absence.

4 Outlook: Learning, Teaching and Schooling

in Contemporary ‘Onlife’ Worlds
As the two cases in these brief extracts evidence, children’s bodies and every-
day lives are nowadays becoming more and more intertwined with technical
devices. Different modes of technical mediation (‘translation’ of a programme
of action to another one; ‘composition’; ‘black-boxing’ and ‘delegation’ of
action from humans to software and vice-versa) are continuously at work, so
that the boundaries between life ‘online’ and life ‘offline’ are becoming increas-
ingly blurred. Contemporary children’s and young people ‘onlives’ unfold
within complex on-/offline/ on-/offscreen, technically mediated environ-
ments. Ever more frequently, children and young people move across multiple
technical interfaces, devices and designs—sometimes they even create new
ones—as to share with others their knowledge, feelings, dreams, phantasies
and concerns. As opposed to listening to commercial music or to watching
 Technical Mediation of Children’s Onlife Worlds 363

mass TV programmes, they thereby often become ‘digital makers’, that is to

say co-productive and transformative in co-creating, locating, filtering, edit-
ing and re-using media contents. They sometimes even (re-) programme soft-
and hardware and create new platforms and interfaces (Kajamaa &
Kumpulainen, 2019; Kontopodis et al., 2019).
When considering the relevant research findings and the two aforemen-
tioned examples from our studies of children’s everyday lives and learning, it
becomes evident that formal education can no longer remain a secluded space.
The technical devices and communicative resources that teachers and students
use inside and outside the classroom mediate the communication and learn-
ing between teachers and students in quite different ways than classic school
curricula, textbooks and notebooks did. Images have always, of course, played
an important role in education as they can shape and transfer human imagi-
nation to other places and times (Wulf, 2022). The new element in contem-
porary Bildung, that is enculturation and formation through images (in
German: Bilder), is speed and multimodality, as Arnd-Michael Nohl and
Morvarid Götz-Dehnavi (this volume) also argue. Images with multi-sensory
effects, often in 3D formats, are technically mediated, edited and circulated in
speedy ways, thereby capturing children’s and young people’s attention, imag-
ination and learning. To respond to and build on the technical mediation of
children’s everyday lives, it is important that contemporary schooling and its
teaching and learning practices will similarly transcend online and offline
spaces and, when relevant and possible, enable multiple connections between
various types of media and literacies, as well as between different (on-)life
spheres and diverse cultural and socio-economic milieus.
Even if children and young people are often offered more possibilities to
engage creatively with technology today than with the commercial music or
TV programmes in the past, technical mediation is not as neutral as digital
industry suggests that it may be: it enables certain actions to happen and pre-
vents others from happening. Much attention is given in the relevant litera-
ture to the various layers of knowledge-power relations incorporated in
‘black-boxed’ technology—be it racial, gendered, age-related, capitalist and/
or geo-political (Banaji, 2015; Selwyn, 2013; Taylor & Hughes, 2016). Seen
from such a perspective, there is a need to move away from learning existing
ways of doing things with technology; rather, the emphasis can be placed on
how children may experiment with the mediating technologies and the vari-
ous ‘onlife’ environments, which children, researchers, programmers, facilita-
tors and various non-human actors co-create and co-inhabit, so that plural,
inclusive and sustainable virtual realities emerge (Hasse, 2015;
Kontopodis, 2019).
364 M. Kontopodis and K. Kumpulainen

It is clear that education today should recognise the different forms of tech-
nical mediation, as part of (trans-) literacies that create opportunities for chil-
dren’s and young people’s communication and learning in and across their
onlife worlds. This equally applies to assessing learning achievements that
clearly can no longer rest on narrow and pre-defined assessments that by large
rely on the notion of completeness and coherence in learning (Kumpulainen
& Sefton-Green, 2014). Instead, here, we should cherish unpredictability and
possibilities that arise both for teaching and for learning. Hopefully, in this
way, formal education can support children and young people in their (learn-
ing) ‘onlives’ while further co-designing and even transforming the contem-
porary, messy and unstable, technically mediated environments, in which
they find themselves entangled.

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 Creative and Artistic Learning
in Post-digital Youth Culture: Results
of a Qualitative Study on Transformations
of Aesthetic Practices
Benjamin Jörissen, Martha Karoline Schröder,
and Anna Carnap

1 Introduction
Digitalization and mobile networking have changed our lives and the lives of
children and young people enormously (Hugger et al., 2013; Aufenanger,
2015; Calmbach et al., 2016; Kontopodis et al., 2017; Feierabend et al.,
2018; Albert et al., 2019). Digital networks, apps, and algorithms permeate
the lives of children and young people. In both, systematical and historical
perspective, genuine digital or ‘online cultures’ (see, e.g., Rheingold, 1994;
Turkle, 1995; Sandbothe & Marotzki, 2000; Marotzki, 2003; Boellstorff,
2008), which arise from specifically structured socio-technological contexts
and platforms located ‘on’ the Internet, can be distinguished from the cultural
effects of digitalization that take place outside the online sphere, respectively
(and nowadays in particular), in hybrid environments permeated by digital

B. Jörissen (*)
Universität Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
e-mail: benjamin.joerissen@fau.de
M. K. Schröder
Institute for School Quality and Teacher Education, Leipzig, Germany
A. Carnap
Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: anna.carnap@hu-berlin.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 367
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_23
368 B. Jörissen et al.

technology. If we speak of a ‘post-digital’ state or ‘post-digital culture’ in the

latter sense (Cramer, 2015; Jörissen, 2019; Stalder, 2016), then this refers to
the fact that structures resulting from digitalization dynamics—such as the
externalization of memory practices, sociality as a networked attention econ-
omy, creativity imperatives or hyper-individualized information, and com-
munication styles—have begun to structure or restructure even ‘non-digital’,
that is, not directly technical, ways of life. The ‘non-digital’ realm suddenly
not only needs a name of its own for the first time, but increasingly it can no
longer be explained without referring to digital terms such as software (Kitchin
& Dodge, 2011), algorithms (Pasquale, 2015), and platforms (Srnicek, 2016).
In this contribution, we refer to aesthetic and arts education as a paradig-
matic field with regard to the complex relations of bodies, embodiment, and
learning practices. Under post-digital conditions, as we will demonstrate, the
conditions of aesthetic and arts education are changing significantly for chil-
dren and young people. Digital social network platforms such as Instagram,
Snapchat, and TikTok have significantly transformed aesthetic and artistic
practices. Paradigmatically, this had already become apparent in the ephem-
eral creative and collective design practices on the Minecraft game platform,
where a considerable number of children and young people create often highly
elaborate structures that are constantly being built over and thus exist on the
platforms for only a limited time. Networking and expressive articulation,
play and work, individuality and collectivity, remix and original appear to be
intertwined.
In the period 2016–2019 the research project “Post-digital Cultural Youth
Worlds—Development of New Methodological Instruments for the Further
Development of Research on Cultural Education in the Digital and Post-
digital World” investigated how digital change has affected the current artistic-
creative practice, cultural education, and participation of young people.1

2 Research Design and Core Results

In two sub-projects, changes in aesthetic and creative practices have been
studied in an intertwined mixed-methodological research design that encom-
passes extensive qualitative as well as quantitative data collection. The
quantitative-representative part of our study covered 2067 face-to-face inter-
views with young people between 14 and 24 years (Keuchel & Riske, 2020),

1
Funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education; Reference number: 01JK1605B;
Acronym: DiKuJu.
 Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture… 369

whereas the qualitative part covered online-ethnographies, expert interviews

with professionals in the field of arts and cultural education, group discus-
sions with young people, as well as a series of case studies. Additionally, a
methodological conceptualization of the innovative, OpenSpace-inspired
method of an explorative Research BarCamp bringing together young experts
and professionals was developed and realized. In the following, we will pro-
vide an overview of core results of the qualitative part of the project.

2.1 Ethnographic Research in Online Networks: Levels

of Post-digital Transformations of Creative Practices

Our ethnographic research on online platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram,

and in the (still existing) informal network of weblogs formerly called the
blogosphere (Herring et al., 2005), brought to light different practices of digi-
tal and post-digital creativity.2

1. ‘Post-digital transformations of expressive articulation and experience’ can

be found online on different levels of reference:
(a) In relation to traditional, that is, ‘pre-digital’, aesthetic, and artistic-
creative practices, we find a ‘transfer into digital environments’, where,
for example, theater performances take place in virtual worlds or tradi-
tional practices of music making take place in the digital sphere—for
example, in the context of virtual choirs.
(b) ‘Emergent new digital-aesthetic practices’, such as independent game
programming, performative practices of live-coding, circuit bending,
generative algorithm-based artistic practices, can be distinguished
from these.
(c) The nature of ‘post-digital creative activities’ becomes particularly evi-
dent in distinctly non-digital practices that exhibit a ‘vintage’ character
(explorations of mechanical, electro-mechanical, or analog-technical
creative practices such as analog photography, instant photography,
instrument crafting, rediscovery of old analog synthesizers, etc.) but
which are nevertheless always (re-)staged in digital networks and thus
relate to digitally networked forms of visibility, presumably also sub-

2
We have prepared a continuously updated YouTube playlist on the topic of (post-) digital aesthetics and
creative practices (Jörissen, 2019) and refer below to the list position of the respective linked videos. Cf.,
for example, for (a) Jörissen (2019), nos 54, 61, 62, 64, 70; for (b) Jörissen (2019), nos 14, 16, 20, 26,
30, 40, 65, 67; for (c) Jörissen (2019), nos 63, 66, 71.
370 B. Jörissen et al.

stantially made known through networking platforms and thus even

may be part of viral (retro-analog) trends.
2. ‘Post-digital transformations of forms of communication and performative
enactment’
The dissemination and visualization of creative practices already played
a significant role in the ‘digital cultures’ of the early Internet and World
Wide Web. In contrast to such digital or online-centered contexts, such as
those that took place within online communities (Turkle, 1995), gaming
communities (Jörissen, 2004), and virtual worlds (Boellstorff, 2008), post-
digital transformations of forms of communication and staging of aesthetic
and artistic-creative practices are characterized by seamless integration as
well as by the elimination of the difference between ‘online’ and ‘offline’.
Since the spreading of affordable mobile devices, mobile data plans, and
cloud computing solutions, the state of ‘being online’ deeply embedded in
everyday life and in particular plays a special role in youth’s peer cultures
(cf. phenomena like Lets play, Vlogger, Hauls, Memes, Foodies, do-it-yourself,
etc.) as well as on the level of informal cultural peer education (tutorial
videos and other ‘HowTo’ offerings). Here, online networking platforms
based on user-generated content such as Instagram, Twitch, and above all
YouTube are of considerable importance (see also Rat für Kulturelle
Bildung, 2019).
3. Finally, a third aspect is the post-digital transformation on the level of
social forms and cultural orientations of aesthetic and artistic-creative
practices. The transcultural and also transculturalizing effects of the glob-
ally networked cultural space of the Internet were already emphasized in
the early phases of its development and dissemination (see, e.g., Sandbothe
& Marotzki, 2000; Poster, 2001, 2006; Jörissen, 2003). Accordingly, in
our online research we found numerous transcultural creative practices,
ranging from aesthetic-artistic practices with specific cultural references
(e.g., furry, quilting, manga, and cosplay) to forms of globally oriented cre-
ative activism, digital countercultures, and other aestheticized forms of
political-actionist practices, such as flashmobs/smartmobs.
 Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture… 371

2.2 Group Discussions with Young People

and Interviews with Experts in Cultural Education:
The Digital as a Challenge

A total of seven group discussions (Loos & Schäffer, 2013) with young people
were conducted with the goal to gain first insights into digital or post-digital
creative practices in current youth culture. Furthermore, we conducted 26
interviews of experts with professional teachers, cultural workers, and youth
leaders in various fields and institutions of cultural youth education. The
expertise of the interviewees results from their work-related familiarity with
the peer-cultural, digital practices of the young people, their aesthetic work
with the target group itself or (on the management and program planning
level) from their industry-specific knowledge and their knowledge bases based
on ‘insider experience’ (cf. Meuser & Nagel, 2009). The core results of both
surveys can be summarized as follows:

1. Post-digital ‘background noise’: For young people today, digitality is largely

not a subject of discussion, but rather a constitutive, ‘inescapable’ back-
ground to the world in which they live (Baym, 2015). Consequently, it is
difficult to ask young people directly about digital transformations of their
creative practices—on the one hand, because of the ‘naturalisation’ of digi-
tal transformation due to its seamless embedding in everyday life, and on
the other hand, because of the limited experience of children and young
people with regard to the rapid pace of digitalization that has been taking
place since the 1990s.
2. Visibility in digital networks: Issues of visibility, media exposure, as well as
effects of power and surveillance that come along with digitalization pro-
cesses are addressed as problematic. Techniques of limited persistence and
tactics of limited visibility to selective publics in network platforms are
strategically used by young people to gain more control over their own vis-
ibility (e.g., the platform Snapchat with its ephemeral images or the
Instagram Stories, which are automatically deleted after 24 hours; see also
Engel & Jörissen, 2019). At the same time, however, visibility is an identity-
relevant currency in the digital attention economy (also in the ‘star system’
of today’s networked worlds; see Reckwitz, 2017).
3. Complexity and contingency: Both young people and experts consider the
effects of digitalization to be quite contingent and therefore hardly foresee-
able; at the same time, however, they are dealt with by young people in
everyday creative activities. In both groups (young people and experts) the
372 B. Jörissen et al.

‘micro-generational’ differences are only addressed implicitly; moreover,

we found no explicit engagement with somewhat invisible and difficult to
understand phenomena such as algorithmicity and artificial intelligence.
4. Critique and encouragement: While negative effects like ‘hatespeech’ on
the net are clearly addressed as a problem, the potential for inspiration, on
the other hand, especially with regard to practical knowledge and skills, is
emphasized. On the one hand, the digital availability of foreign-language
content helps language learning in schools, while at the same time encour-
aging participation in a wide range of models and models of creative activi-
ties (how to, life hacks, etc.). For example, in a group discussion with three
teenagers aged between 14 and 16 growing up in an urban environment
(our translation):

[A]: Yes, it’s generally the case with me, I’ve noticed that lately, everything I do
with my cell phone is mostly in English, that is, me, most of the videos I watch
are in English, and most of the time I also watch tips for handicrafts and ideas,
because I often like to do that when I have time. And as I said, this also helps
with school and it certainly determines, in—it’s already a big part of my free
time, Youtube, unfortunately [A and B grin]. [B]: Yes, but you can also get
inspired somehow, for example, if you want to do something, for example, yes,
as A already said, like making something or presents for family or friends [nods
and shrugs his shoulders]. (Student, PG270717_G2; lines 126–137)

2.3 The BarCamp as a Network-Based Research

Instrument: Performative Transgressions
of Traditional Genre Boundaries in Digital
and Post-digital Settings

The BarCamp we conducted, which was at the center of the explorative

method development already announced in our project title, was originally a
conference method from technology research. As a participatory format it was
adapted in the context of the US-American ‘Web 2.0’ scene in the 2000s;
from here it has established itself first in net-savvy scenes, then in educational
scenes (Educamps), in the context of digital (youth) media culture, in eco-
nomic and non-profit innovation areas and other fields. As a so-called ‘uncon-
ference’, the BarCamp has no predefined lectures and workshop topics, but is
rather designed in a participatory manner by the participants (who by defini-
tion participate in the BarCamp as experts) in the form of topic-centered ‘ses-
sions’. Clearly, BarCamps are all about collective, networked, and
 Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture… 373

non-hierarchical ways of imparting knowledge, but also the BarCamp itself, as

a whole, can be understood as a collective learning process where unexpected
developments, questions, and insights are already laid out in the temporal and
spatial structure. The session topics are proposed on site by the participants
and chosen in (different) selection procedures, so that the topics or actions
that are of greatest interest finally reach the panels. From a methodological
point of view, the BarCamp can be understood as a “transformative large
group process” (Weber, 2009), which is characterized by processes of collec-
tive negotiation and, above all, collective relevance-setting. The conducted
sessions can be regarded as the result of a group dynamic validation and, to
this extent, as collective “focusing metaphors” (Bohnsack, 2017, p. 92), even
outside of the interactions within the sessions. This selectivity is further con-
densed in successive session phases of the BarCamp, so that topics, questions,
and insights from previous sessions can lead to further, more in-depth, or
(transformatively) differently positioned thematic settings. Our preliminary
explorative methodological assumption was that BarCamps should therefore
express collective layers of experience in a condensed form which can be inter-
preted through reconstruction, whereby the underlying social form is essen-
tially based on the principle of the social network (White, 2008; Fuhse &
Mützel, 2010).
In our case, our project partner, the Academy for Arts and Cultural
Education of the Federal German Government and the State of North Rhine-
Westphalia in Remscheid, served as a very well-established and visible net-
work hub in terms of cultural activities and topics. A BarCamp topic chosen
by the participants (Who are we?) offered, in line with a group discussion that
delivered the original idea for this, a balanced amount of participation (in
terms of the interest of the intended target groups) on the one hand and mini-
mal exertion of influence on the topics to be raised on the other hand. The
three-day BarCamp was conducted with 46 young people from different
regions of Germany (North Rhine-Westphalia, Berlin, and Bavaria). The
young people were aged between 13 and 27, with the majority between 13
and 17 and still attending school (29 persons). With regard to age, formal
educational qualifications or types of school attended, gender and migration
experiences, the aim was to achieve a diverse mix of participants in order to
bring together as many different perspectives as possible. In the following we
summarize our evaluation results firstly with regard to the session topics and
secondly with regard to the implicit collective (post-) digital positions within
the sessions.
374 B. Jörissen et al.

2.3.1 Session Topics as Focus Metaphors: Transgressions

of Traditional Boundaries of Cultural and Cultural
Education Genres

In the session planning phase of our BarCamp, aesthetic practices became

detached from their traditional institutional settings. Classical genre designa-
tions of creative and leisure activities, such as dance, target shooting, and
cooking, were initially proposed, but were not chosen to be realized as session
topics by the participants. Instead of the topic ‘target shooting’, for example,
games are categorized as eSports. The proposed and chosen session topic
OnStage refers to any kind of performance, such as theater, comedy, musical,
and dance, but also standup comedy, poetry slams, and pechakucha. English
terms that probably have been mainly acquired on the Internet are often pre-
ferred to German terms, especially to institutionally established genre desig-
nations (e.g., ‘Performance im Haus’ instead of ‘Aufführung im Haus’, ‘Poetry’
instead of ‘Dichtung’, ‘Storytelling’ instead of ‘Geschichten erzählen’). The
OnStage session particularly caught our attention, since it signifies a transfor-
mation and transgression of the traditional concept of a stage (in the sense of
a tangible, spatially delimited stage of a theater) to an imagined, open, impro-
vised stage that corresponds to the situation of media presence and loss of
control over one’s own visibility that we already found in our group discus-
sions. Shared imagination and performative practice are suffice to be (or feel
to be) ‘on stage’. Formerly indispensable roles such as ‘the director’ or ‘the
actress’ are replaced by an artistic-creative hybrid subject. This rather sponta-
neous form of staging oneself as part of a shared social experience contrasts
with the painstaking preparation and performance of a classical (e.g., theater)
production at the end of an arduous rehearsal phase. Following a similar logic,
the keyword #poetry proposed (in English, in the place of traditional German
terms like ‘Poesie’, ‘Dichtung’, or ‘Lyrik’) for another BarCamp session stands
for the performative, situational performance in the sense of a ‘poetry slam’.
In its stage-like, public and improvisational character, it is juxtaposed with the
‘poetry’ as a matter of written or printed constellations of text, as well as jux-
taposed with the more intimate connotations of ‘poetry’ in traditional youth
culture, such as poems written into an autograph book or poems written as a
part of love letters—poetry album.
Although it is worth noting that such practices are not necessarily accom-
panied by a break with more traditional forms of expression, what we find
here is a shift from creative practices and the subject configurations that
accompany them to more spontaneous, collective, and performative logics.
 Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture… 375

Classical artistic and creative activities such as acting, painting, making music,
and dancing, which follow the traditional model of artistic subjectivity which
is individually developed and ‘educated’ in the sense of the German term
‘Bildung’, are practiced and also discussed by some of the participants.
However, in the collective process of choosing the BarCamp topics of highest
interest, traditional formats were dismissed as topics in favor of the new and
emergent formats of a networked era. Instead or in addition to traditional
forms of creative (individual) subjectivity, these practices correspond to
community-oriented and emancipatory creative processes, and also to hybrid,
networked, and collective forms of creative subjectivity.

2.3.2 Four (Ideal) Types of Implicit Collective (Post-)

Digital Orientations

The whole session schedule of our BarCamps can be seen as a range of the situ-
ated interests of the BarCamp participants. We used a reconstructive com-
parative analysis of the session plannings with regard to the media-structural
logic of the individual sessions in order to distinguish differing media- and
technology-related modes of sense-making and learning. We discovered col-
lective forms of practice that range from the traditional to the new, among
which we identify four different ‘ideal types’ (in a Weberian sense, cf. Swedberg
& Agevall, 2005, p. 120):

1. Predigital mass media practices are characterized by sessions with a classical

media orientation, such as television formats or chart or popular music, as
well as by a tool-like access to media. These practices can be digital but do
not have to be. The session ‘Listening to Music and Painting’ (the music
was streamed, but could also have come from an analog medium) or the
session ‘Talk Show Love’ with its explicit mass media reference falls into
this category.
2. Digital technology-centered practices have an explicit focus on digitality.
Sessions such as ‘E-Sports’, ‘Artstyle and Storytelling in Video Games’, or
‘Net Activism’ focus on digital-cultural expertise, digitally situated creative
practices or forms of reflexivity related to digitality.
3. Post-digital spill-over practices introduce (whether implicitly digital or
explicitly digitality-related) action into non-digital, material, and physical
action contexts. These sessions, in which the structural embeddedness of
digitally related gaming and performance formats in everyday life can be
clearly seen, are modeled on Internet or digitally based formats, such as
376 B. Jörissen et al.

(adventure and jump’n’run) video games or digital interactive storytelling.

But they transfer their fascination into performances that are bodily co-
present and thereby expand them, as in the sessions Exitroom, creepypasta,
and #poetry.
4. Post-digital, partly inverse hybridizations were shown in sessions that are
action-, space-, and body-oriented while at the same time situative and
transient. In the post-digital state, the explicitly ‘analog’ element and the
emphasis on the body receive special attention (again) and must be named,
distinguished, and thus delimited from digitalized or, so to say, ‘digitally
contaminated’ practices. At the same time, visibility, hybridity (e.g., also
remix aesthetics), and affectivity are central points of reference, as they are
in the culture of digitality. The sessions ‘On Stage’, ‘Performance in the
House’, and ‘Laughter Yoga in the Forest’ can be categorized as such.

2.4 Case Studies: In-depth Analyses of Hybrid

Creative Practices

In our study, we discovered a discrepancy between our observations on online

platforms and teenage live environments. Whereas our online-based research
uncovered a broad range of digital and post-digital creative practices, the
group discussions we conducted as well as our quantitative data show that
those kinds of active creative practice (as opposed to receptive practices) are
much less frequent and much less common in (at least German) youth cul-
tures. In order to better understand the nature of those active practices, we
conducted case studies on digitalized and post-digitalized creative practices
within teenage live environments. In the process, we specifically targeted par-
ticipants of a local ‘digital festival’ organized by the city of Nuremberg in 2019.
Using the method of ‘transactional interviews’ and respective group set-
tings, which is sensitized to the role of material and media artifacts for educa-
tional and social processes (Nohl, 2011; Nohl & Wulf, 2013), we researched
the interconnectedness of subjects, media, spaces, and temporalities. The case
studies show how digital, socio-technical architectures of computer applica-
tions (such as social media platforms) shape or preform aesthetic practices.
Figure 1 shows an exemplary process sequence for hybrid creative practices.
Lara and Lara (names are pseudonyms; both girls have the same first name),
two 12-year-old neighbors whom we met in the context of a so-called coder-
dojos, presented to us in the interview, among other things, their short videos
produced on and with the social media platform TikTok (about 12 seconds
long). In some of these videos, humanoid cat figures appear that move
 Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture… 377

Fig. 1 Hybrid creative practices using the example of the case vignette ‘Lara
and Lara’

synchronously to music or spoken dialogues in the computer world of the

online multiplayer game Minecraft. The videos flicker and abruptly change
brightness and color. Lara and Lara staged them in collaboration with their
Internet Best-Friends on Minecraft and took a video of this in-game perfor-
mance directly off their computer’s screen using their smartphones. The short-
est videos are part of a hybrid creative practice in which “human and
non-human actors” (Nohl, 2014, p. 29) are significantly involved as follows:

1. The multiplayer online platform Minecraft, on whose servers the filmed

events are interactively staged, has a specific affordance character that is
attractive to young people due to its combination of manageable, reduced
(retro) pixel aesthetics on the one hand and highly developed but easy-to-
use crafting tools on the other hand (Niemeyer & Gerber, 2015). Creative
actions can already be understood on this level as a socio-technically dis-
tributed process (implicit aesthetics and encoded action possibilities).
2. A socio-technical network emerges centered around the hashtag Minecraft
on the platform TikTok in the form of a diffusely delimited collective that
tends to be globally connected. From an ontological point of view, such a
hashtag network consists, among other things, of actant-actor interactions
of network protocols, data formats, and (prod-) user interactions (Galloway
& Thacker, 2007), as well as ‘memes’ that possess both an aesthetic con-
nectivity and a performative challenge character and are thus an essential
378 B. Jörissen et al.

characteristic of distributed creative processes in social networks

(Shifman, 2014).
3. With its audio-visually centered interface structure, which is internally
strongly based on Artificial Intelligence and personalizing ranking algo-
rithms, TikTok itself represents a platform-specific field of appearance,
which, even before any active interaction or selection, offers users specific
videos and sound tracks for imitation or further use.
4. The chosen interface or hardware, the computer on which Minecraft is
played, and the smartphone used to film the computer screen, trim the
video, link it to the soundtrack and hashtag, and upload it to TikTok, are
all essential to the creative process.
5. Within these interconnected socio-technical constellations, Lara and Lara
bring in aesthetic and staging decisions that correspond to a habitus
marked by youth culture, playfulness, and the love of games, while at the
same time testifying to a high level of reflexivity marked by (self-)ironical
elements of their stagings.

3 Conclusion
In post-digital culture, the familiar, institutionalized, and established bound-
aries, for example, between disciplines such as dance, music, or theater, but
also between audience and creators, the subjects of experts and lay people,
between the activities of making, marketing (sharing), and receiving, are
increasingly dissolving—or else they are being reframed and acquiring new
meanings in networked practices.
Staging, performativity, and enactment—a life OnStage—become basic
elements of a post-digital dispositive, and thus may often serve as a purpose
and motivating factor, for creative activities. Against this background, the
long-term build-up of expertise with relatively steep learning curves, as is
usual in the context of classical cultural pedagogical learning fields (such as in
the music, art, or dance school paradigm), seems to be replaced or at least
supplemented by temporary, project-like, more flexible network logics with
flatter learning curves.
Material and traditional aesthetic-creative and artistic practices are inter-
twined in different ways with digital technologies and applications. An appli-
cation in the sense of hybrid creativity arises where algorithms actively
incorporate aesthetic knowledge into design processes; a collective and col-
laborative creativity arises where networking technologies merge with net-
cultural practices (hashtags, memes, and channels). Overall, algorithmically
 Creative and Artistic Learning in Post-digital Youth Culture… 379

organized commercial platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat,

or Twitter play a central, practically ineluctable role in this process. This indi-
cates a significant shift. In classical (Western) forms of individualized creative
practice, the creative subject appears at the same time as the expert subject of
a specific (aesthetic) knowledge, ability, and judgment. The creative process
then appears as an inner-subjective process of decision making, which is artic-
ulated in the efficacious engagement and effort put into the artistic work.
Knowledge and ability thereby refer to historical, institutionalized, discursive
aesthetic practices (e.g., ‘the arts’).
In post-digital forms of creative practice, aesthetic expertise seems to be
increasingly hybridized (implicit aesthetic knowledge of software, apps, and
gadgets); the incentive to create seems to be governmentalized (creativity
imperative and attention economy); institutional practices give way to far
more fluid forms: memes, remix materials, and platform trends (e.g., influ-
encers). Post-digital artistic authorship refers (increasingly with the new gen-
erations) to post-anthropocene, socio-technical hybrid subjects (collective,
networked, and algorithmized). This implies that learning (at least with regard
to aesthetic practices) should be observed not only as an individual but as a
collective process that includes also non-human actors (such as observing and
learning algorithms, observing and learning digital and material designs).
When bodily practices become ever more, and in ever more complex ways,
not only intertwined with technological designs and interfaces but also defined
by the technical and logical conditions involved in those processes, in the
sense that those processes contribute to the formation and habitualization of
bodily practices in general—and especially with regard to young people—
than the question of which actors have the power to define those conditions,
and thus define the bodies and subjects we may learn to be(come), is a cru-
cial one.

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 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation
as a Spiritual Practice Between
Neuroscience, Therapy and Self-awareness
Andreas Nehring

The Buddhist concept of mindfulness meditation (Conze, 1969; Anālayo,

2017; Williams & Kabat-Zinn, 2013; Bhikkhu Sujato, 2012; Cousins,
1994–1996; Crosby, 2013; Gethin, 2011; Jordt, 2007) is currently being met
with broad receptivity in various social functional areas. Understood by its
advocates as a non-denominational practice of self-awareness, mindfulness
meditation is one of the most important phenomena of what various socio-
theoretical approaches call ‘spirituality’, as distinguished from ‘religion’.
Against this background, mindfulness meditation can be seen as a magnifying
glass for the socio-cultural figurations of ‘spirituality’ in Western societies
(Nehring & Ernst, 2013). Oscillating between therapy and religious experi-
ence, scientific subject matter and pedagogical concept, mindfulness medita-
tion offers a way to ask how the added value of an implicit ‘spiritual’1 certainty,
practised and transformed in meditation, is expressed discursively in different
social functional areas.

1
John Welwood has coined the term ‘spiritual bypassing’ (Welwood, 2002). See also: Sherrell & Simmer-
Brown, 2017; Fossella, 2011).

A. Nehring (*)
University of Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 383
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_24
384 A. Nehring

1 General Aspects of Mindfulness

The term ‘mindfulness’ describes a self-reflexive form of attention control in
which one’s own experience of a situation is reflected upon from the perspec-
tive of a second-order observation within the framework of a meditative prac-
tice. The aim is a non-judgemental, neutral attitude in which thoughts and
feelings are observed in the process of their coming into being and pass-
ing away.
As an attitude of emotional and rational acceptance of a given state, mind-
fulness results in insight into the dynamics of conscious thought processes
and a deeper awareness of the interweaving of thought processes with physical
constitutions (psychosomatic feedback).
Through its connection with the experiential situation of a meditative prac-
tice, that is a ritualized technique, the concept of mindfulness represents the
possibility of a conscious experience of the interweaving of habitualized and
automatized evaluational and emotional patterns with an implicit knowledge
of the body. This experience is supposed to open up scope for shaping and
changing them in everyday experience.
Borrowed to a large extent from the Buddhist tradition of Vipassanā
(Anālayo, 2006), these qualities of mindfulness have been made available for
therapeutic purposes in medicine and psychology by the American molecular
biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, among others. Since the late 1970s, these qualities
have formed a therapeutic programme called ‘Mindfulness-Based-Stress-
Reduction’ (MBSR) and have been used with great success in the treatment of
a wide range of psychosomatic and physical illnesses (Kabat-Zinn, 1990;
Badham & King, 2019; Hickey, 2010).
Although the exercises used today are derived from the Buddhist medita-
tion techniques, they have only found their present form through encounter
with Western culture and its understanding of individual experience
(McMahan, 2008; King, 2019; Husgafvel, 2016). Both a philosophical con-
cept and a meditation practice, mindfulness has been appropriated in the
West since the early twentieth century and is currently receiving considerable
attention in science, religion, the educational system and popular culture, far
beyond medicine and psychotherapy. It is no exaggeration to say that mind-
fulness is currently the most popular buzzword when it comes to the training
of consciousness.
In the business world, mindfulness meditation is recommended to stressed
employees and managers as a means of burn-out prevention. In medicine,
psychology and cognitive neuroscience, research is being conducted into the
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 385

health-promoting effects of mindfulness meditation. Philosophers such as

Thomas Metzinger call for mindfulness meditation at schools to familiarize
children with the dynamics of their own consciousness and its physical effects
(Metzinger, 2017; Metzinger, 2009). In pedagogy, mindfulness is discussed as
a practice of self-care and a tool for preserving the joy of learning (Bache,
2008; Flores, 2017). In conferences between Buddhists and neuroscientists,
the effects of mindfulness meditation on the brain are debated,2 and in the
media landscape, where the increased public attention towards mental illness
is translated into questions of personal lifestyle, mindfulness meditation is
presented reflexively as a contemporary offer of meaning to life. This area can
be described as ‘popular mindfulness discourses’.
In order to adequately assess the variety of references to mindfulness in sci-
ence and society, it is necessary to focus on the interaction between the vari-
ous socio-cultural receptions and applications of mindfulness. This focus,
which is missing from some of the previous research, is necessary not only to
deepen our knowledge of the (empirically validated) psychological effective-
ness of mindfulness (Sauer, 2011), but also to better understand the social and
cultural prerequisites of the concept.
The acceptance and effectiveness of mindfulness overlap in the therapeutic,
religious and educational functional areas. Acceptance, in turn, can only be
explained by highlighting the cultural prerequisites. An approach into this
discursive field from the perspective of cultural studies can, to my mind, show
more than just the crispness of empirical research. Therefore, I attempt to
look at the enormous amount of research that has been done in this field in
recent decades from an abstract perspective by taking into account the inter-
actions of psycho-social dynamics. The question of why mindfulness medita-
tion in particular is so popular at present is thus seen as highly relevant in its
apparent simplicity. As a step towards an understanding of what makes this
meditation practice so attractive in contemporary culture, I will address a few
key considerations.

2 Cultural Studies Approaches

A cultural studies approach considers the concept of mindfulness under con-
temporary conditions. Mindfulness as a practice is interwoven with discourses
of its legitimation and interpretation, that is with explicit semantics. It is an

2
See a critical review of the Mind & Life conferences with the Dalai Lama (Samuel, 2014; Lopez
Jr., 2008).
386 A. Nehring

epistemological triviality, but in contrast to positivist attempts that empiri-

cally confirm the often unquestioned ‘effectiveness’ of mindfulness, it should
be emphasized that these semantics are not only derived from interpretations
of what is ‘experienced’ in meditative practice, but they also structure the
experiential dimension of an engaged meditation practice in the form of
expectations and pre-settings. In a way, albeit from a different perspective, this
has also been highlighted by David Chalmers (Chalmers, 1997) in his discus-
sion on the methodological problems of the neuro-phenomenological
approach suggested by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch
in their book The Embodied Mind (Varela et al., 1991). In this highly influen-
tial publication, they argue for an ‘enactive approach’ which could bridge the
third-person perspective of science and the first-person perspective of indi-
vidual experience. The authors explicitly refer to Buddhism as a means to
overcome the gap “between the human mind as studied by science and the
mind as personally experienced” (Rosch, 2017, p. 1). Chalmers argues,

Of course, there are deep methodological problems here. The first is the old
problem that the mere act of attention to one’s experience transforms that expe-
rience. As we become more patient and careful, we may find that we are study-
ing data that are transformed in subtle ways. This is not too much of a problem
at the start of investigation—we have a long way to go until this degree of sub-
tlety even comes into play—but it may eventually lead to deep paradoxes of
observership. (Chalmers, 1997, p. 39)

I will argue from a different perspective. What makes the phenomenon of

the multidimensional reception of mindfulness so exciting is that in the dis-
cussion on mindfulness, we can recognize the application of a superordinate
social and cultural studies question. That is the question of how, in a given
historical situation, the boundary between an experience accessible only to
the individual consciousness (from the perspective of the first person) and its
re-presentation in communication, i.e. externalized, stabilized and objectifi-
able for reflective observation (from the perspective of the third person), is
drawn by means of media such as language, visual media and bodily practices.
The question is whether mindfulness as a sensory experience (consciousness)
that can only be experienced privately has something to do with public forms
of negotiating mindfulness in social discourses (communication). This relates
to one of the core questions of methodology in Religious Studies with regard
to the analysis of religious experience (Proudfoot, 1985; Taves, 2009;
Sharf, 1998).
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 387

Every cultural studies approach to mindfulness must develop not only a

systematic cultural-analytical understanding of mindfulness but also a
historico-cultural-comparative analysis of the reception of mindfulness in
‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ discourses.
The contemporary reception of mindfulness in North America and Europe
is, in many ways, layered by cultural exchange and transfer relations. One recalls,
for example, the great line of reception of Buddhism since the nineteenth cen-
tury (Prebish & Baumann, 2002; Batchelor, 1994; Coleman, 2001; Prebish &
Tanaka, 1998; Tweed, 1992). But this is only one dimension of the phenome-
non. For not only are the sources of the respective Buddhist interpretation of
mindfulness itself extremely heterogeneous; mindfulness is not even necessarily
Buddhist, and therefore it only fits to a limited extent into the stereotypes of a
West-East cultural transfer. The reception of mindfulness in Europe is not
directly ‘Asian’ in its essential parts, it is moreover mediated through discourses
from the cultural area of North America (which is different from Europe).
Similarly, in a systematic cultural-analytical perspective, the reception of
mindfulness cannot be reduced to the functional area of the religious sphere
and its discourse on the quality of religious experience. Rather, mindfulness
stands for a subsystem-wide offer of meaning that can be addressed as ‘spiri-
tuality’ (Carrette & King, 2005). In the background here is a term borrowed
from the sociological research of knowledge: ‘spirituality’ (Knoblauch, 2009).
Spirituality in a sociological understanding describes various forms of search-
ing for personal meaning that are not bound to organizations and that can be
defined as ‘religious’ but do not have to be.
Following Thomas Luckmann (Luckmann, 1967), Hubert Knoblauch has
argued that the plausibility of the term ‘spirituality’ lies in the offer of a
deep existential personal experience to the individual. This happens within
the framework of a popular form of communication, that is a highly general-
ized, broadly connectable cultural form open to various interpretations, which
is easy to learn, does not require any special prerequisites for participation and
can be applied to almost all areas of life.
The concept of spirituality can epistemologically be conceived as an experi-
ential dimension of implicit certainty, which is experienced and brought to
life as the basis of a process of interpretation based on meaning.
Mindfulness aims at the development of the first-person perspective and
thus at a self-perception through introspection. Introspection, however, is
considered an inescapably subjective phenomenon that is not valid in scien-
tific argumentation because it is not subject to observation and intersubjective
comparison. This becomes very clear in a conversation between Mattieu
Ricard and Wolf Singer. Ricard argues:
388 A. Nehring

It is not enough to think hard about how the mind might function and then
come up with complex theories, as Freud did, for example. Such intellectual
adventures cannot replace 2000 years of direct exploration of the workings of
the mind through thorough introspection by experienced practitioners who
have already achieved stability and clarity. Even the most sophisticated theory of
a brilliant thinker, if it is not based on empirical evidence, cannot be compared
to the accumulated experience of hundreds of people, each of whom has spent
dozens of years exploring the most subtle aspects of the mind through direct
experience. (Singer & Ricard, 2008, p. 11f.)

This statement shows that it is not appropriate to speak of a lack of observ-

ability, but one has to focus on the positions of observation, since the phe-
nomenologically interesting potency of human consciousness consists in
being able to observe itself self-reflectively. Consciousness is always conscious-
ness of something and therefore of oneself as well. The problem that arises is
the insertion of subject and object of observation. How can people cognitively
perceive, classify and symbolically transform the world, and at the same time
apply these processes, which let reality come into being, to themselves? The
human being draws a picture of him/herself as a subject equipped with a con-
sciousness. These basic assumptions of phenomenology are now reactivated in
various ways in the mindfulness discourse: For example human beings tran-
scend themselves through this ego-centrism, or in the conception of the
‘mind’ as a counterpart to the ‘brain’, as is discussed in detail in the debates on
the philosophy of mind and for the freedom of will.

3 Meditation as a Body Technique, Connection

to Neuroscience
In mindfulness meditation, however, introspection takes place on two recip-
rocally restricted levels, the physical and the mental. As already mentioned, it
is a physical technique that seeks to influence consciousness through the body
by first placing the body in the focus of attention, that is in the meditation
terminology ‘experiencing mindfulness’. The two central techniques are respi-
ration and body scanning, somatically comprehensible for example in the
measurement of heart rate and oxygen consumption. In this revitalization of
the body-mind relationship, a closure to the inside is carried out in such a way
that an interruption of the continuity of constant further differentiation of
the self through new experiences is carried out through the interaction of
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 389

body and mind, which is usually associated with the charged concept of the
‘holistic’.
A central assumption in the popular discourse on modernity is now that a
new quality of a claim to self-location within one’s biography is emerging for
individuals, within the framework of differentiation processes on a social
level. Due to the demands of contingency compensation, the decision-making
processes become more complex, etc. it becomes more difficult to maintain
the unity of the self or of ‘wholeness’ postulated as existential. Pathologies
such as depression and burn-out emerge and are attested to as symptoms of
social change, especially in working conditions. Meditation is supposed to
offer a problem-solving strategy as well as a preventive measure at this
very point.
Of course, the functionality of introducing meditation practices into every-
day life can be questioned. As a social practice, mindfulness, despite its sup-
posed distancing from all claims and dogmatic positions, is far from being a
non-normative practice. In every discourse in which mindfulness meditation
is received, this meditation practice is ideologically enriched according to the
rules and guidelines of the respective discourse; that is it is placed under the
conditions of that discourse. As mentioned above, this can include a definite
reference to Buddhism but does not have to. Accordingly, the high adaptabil-
ity of mindfulness is a socio-cultural indicator, namely an indicator for not
least being attractive for various ideological enrichments in contemporary
society.
A central prerequisite for the highly discursive adaptability of mindfulness
seems to be that mindfulness as a practice of reflexive self-correction can be
applied in everyday life. Whether in a medical, psychological or pedagogical
understanding of therapy and education or as a philosophical-ideological con-
cept, the tenor is that mindfulness increases the distance to ‘faulty’ states of
consciousness, such as those caused by illness, painful relationships or atten-
tiveness disorder.
Popular culture helps to control processes of individual self-management,
that is to make offers in relation to lifestyles and so on, which are a special
form of communication because they usually have a very clear narrative dra-
maturgy. In mindfulness meditation, for example, one finds above all a seman-
tics of benefit for health, the psyche, but also for the individual meaning of
life. As a form of spirituality, the successful model of mindfulness meditation
consists of making a promise within the framework of one’s own individual-
ization, one’s own ‘personality development’ and one’s own ‘bio-graphy’,
which refers to the function of the ‘popular’ (Knoblauch, 2009, p. 152).
390 A. Nehring

This theoretical framework—that is understanding spirituality as a popular

form of semantization and explication of individual experiences—allows us to
elaborate the special nature of mindfulness meditation between religion, ther-
apy, education and ‘technologies of the self ’ (Foucault et al., 1988). The refer-
ence to Buddhist traditions of self-liberation or self-redemption is obvious here.
Significantly, Buddhism is understood to promote a subjectivist approach,
something which is reinforced in interpretations intended for Western read-
ers. The subject, it is emphasized, is the ultimate foundation of Buddhist reli-
gion, both the starting point of the perception of reality, which is understood
as suffering, and the potential for salvation from it (Wallace, 2004; Reddy &
Roy, 2019). According to Nyanaponika Thera (Nyanaponika, 1965), whose
works were fundamental to the reception of mindfulness meditation in the
USA, the subjectivist perspective of Buddhism culminates in its self-
understanding as “the doctrine of mind” (Nyanaponika, 2007, p. 14f.), which
is about recognizing, forming and liberating the mind—which Nyanaponika
synonymously describes as ‘consciousness’—through the practice of mindful-
ness. In discourses on mindfulness meditation, this subjectivistic character of
the teachings of the Buddha is emphasized in a specific way by referring to the
personal-individual character of the knowledge acquired through meditation.
Nyanaponika speaks of mindfulness meditation as the ‘path of self-help’,
which he considers to be the actually real help.
However, that this is already a normative construction becomes clear not
only from Nyanaponika’s resolute dismissal of teachings “which claim that
human beings can only be redeemed by the grace of a God” (Nyanaponika,
2007, p. 165), but rather from the fact that the ‘path of self-help’ requires
explicit legitimation, which consists in seeing mindfulness meditation as one
of the remedies against the ‘degeneration of humanity’, against the ‘catastro-
phes’ of self-destruction that were to be observed in Christian Europe in the
twentieth century, as well as against the ‘mindless distractions’. Mindfulness,
on the other hand, promotes the “unfolding of a high and supreme humanity,
the true superhuman, of whom so many spirits have dreamed and to whom
so many misdirected efforts have been made” (Nyanaponika, 2007, p. 21f.).
It would therefore be naïve to believe that mindfulness meditation is only
about the subjective path of self-liberation. Mindfulness meditation is a col-
lective practice that aims to train a form of certainty that is socially predeter-
mined and thus also under ideological assumptions. Mindfulness is a state of
certainty.
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 391

4 Thich Nhat Hanh: Mindfulness

and Interbeing
In the broad reception of the writings of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat
Hanh, a ‘spiritual’ interpretation of mindfulness in the religious sense pre-
vails, whereby the boundaries between the therapeutic scene and the esoteric
scene that refer to him must be described as fluid. Thich Nhat Hanh adapts
practices and teachings from the Theravāda tradition as well as from
Mahāyāna, both of which are represented in his country. Known as expres-
sions of a politicized ‘engaged Buddhism’, his books are dedicated to the con-
nection of the concept of mindfulness with the holistic philosophy of
‘inter-being’, a mystically accentuated theory of conditional emergence.
‘Interbeing’ is an artificial term coined by Nhat Hanh himself and is meant to
express the mutual connectedness of all beings. Nhat Hanh’s claim is to
rehearse the experience of that connectedness through mindfulness medita-
tion. As early as 1966 he founded his own order, the Tiep Hien Order (Order
of Interbeing), which can be considered an important nucleus of mindfulness
centres throughout the world today.
Through the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, alongside those of authors such
as Alan Watts, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein or Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindful-
ness has become so popular that in the meantime it does not seem possible to
identify clear lines of reception, nor does it seem sensible to assign it to one
religious tradition. For it is precisely in mindfulness centres that the concept
of mindfulness has been decontextualized in such a way that it can be devel-
oped into a unified doctrine of contemplation that combines Western and
Eastern mystical traditions. A well-known example of this in Germany is the
former Benedictine monk Willigis Jäger, who represented a mystical form of
spirituality based on a universalistic concept of religious experience (Nehring,
2005). Mindfulness centres are thus places where therapeutic and religious
practice overlap to such an extent that it seems more appropriate to speak of
‘popularized spirituality’ (Knoblauch, 2009) than of Buddhist tradition in the
narrower sense.
With the concept of mindfulness, Nhat Hanh tries to fructify the practice
of meditation for positive change in everyday life, especially in social relations.
He argues that, as a form of emotional and rational concentration on a given
state, mindfulness results in insights into the dynamics of one’s own thought
processes. The aim is to achieve a deeper awareness of the interweaving of
thought processes with the object world and the social environment.
Accordingly, mindfulness not only causes fundamental changes in the
392 A. Nehring

perception of one’s own self and its relationship to reality, but also a changed
practice of relating to the world resulting from this perception. With the help
of the observer position, which can be taken up in meditation through intro-
spection, the unity of reality should be realized/experienced.
The decisive factor for Nhat Hanh is that this experience is an intentionally
aspired-to state within the meditation practice, a state which on the one hand
was promised in advance in the mediation of the technique, and on the other
hand is intended to evoke the living connection with reality as an ethical atti-
tude. One can therefore speak of an initiated translation process from explicit
to implicit knowledge. The propagated All-unity is to be internalized to the
extent that it becomes physically manifest:

You are conscious of the presence of bodily form, feeling, perception, mental
functionings, and consciousness. You observe these ‘objects’ until you see that
each of them has intimate connection with the world outside yourself: if the
world did not exist then the assembly of the five aggregates could not exist either
[…]. You meditate on them until you are able to see the presence of the reality
of one-ness in your own self, and can see that your own life and the life of the
universe are one. (Nhat Hanh, 1976, p. 47f.)

Nhat Hanh develops mindfulness meditation, which focuses on the emer-

gence in interdependence and the interrelation of reality, as a method of intro-
spection. “It is a penetration of mind into mind itself ” (Nhat Hanh, 1976,
p. 45). This penetration is decidedly delimited from rational approaches:
“Meditation is not a discursive reflection on a philosophy of interdependence,
but rather one’s own powers of concentration should be developed to reveal
the real nature of the object being contemplated” (Nhat Hanh, 1976, p. 45).
In this way the first-person perspective, self-perception through introspec-
tion, becomes the starting point for the perception of reality. Introspection—
as an inescapably subjective method of observation—is thus removed from
scientific observation from the third-person perspective and thus also from
intersubjective discourse. It aims at an experience that can only be undergone
by oneself or at a qualitative ‘perception’. Nhat Hanh spuds in at the interface
of the observer position in the first-person perspective and the second-person
perspective. Consciousness is, as mentioned above, always consciousness of
something and also of oneself. Starting from a certainty of reference to one’s
own thinking and consciousness, Nhat Hanh sees meditation as a method to
guide human consciousness to reflexively observe itself and connect to one’s
bodily experience.
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 393

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your
body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath
as the means to take hold of your mind again. (Nhat Hanh, 1976, p. 15)

The unity of body and thought cannot be achieved in conceptual reflec-

tion, but in the holistic meditative practice of perception and experience,
which interweaves the perspectives of the first and second person. The
meditator creates a self-image as a subject endowed with consciousness.
This consciousness can reflexively refer to the subject as well as to the world
as an object in such a way that the meditator transcends them through
meditative self-reference—that is, that reflection is suspended in
self-reflection.
Nhat Hanh has formulated this process in the theses of the ‘Seven Miracles
of Mindfulness’, which have become basic articles on the websites of numer-
ous mindfulness centres throughout Europe:3

1. Mindfulness is about bringing out our authentic presence, making us alive

in the here and now and getting in touch with things.
2. Mindfulness makes us realize that life is already there. We can really be in
contact with it and give it meaning and depth.
3. Mindfulness gives life force to the object of our contemplation, touches
and embraces it. This makes ourselves alive and life becomes more real.
4. Mindfulness mediates concentration. When we concentrate in our every-
day life, we will be able to look at everything more deeply and understand
it better.
5. Mindfulness enables us to look deeply and allows us to better recognize the
object of our observation outside and inside ourselves.
6. Mindfulness leads to understanding that comes from deep within our-
selves. We gain clarity and thus the readiness for acceptance is encouraged.
7. Mindfulness leads to liberation through the insights thus gained. Wherever
we practice mindfulness there is life, understanding and compassion.

What is interesting about these statements is that the experience itself is

made a guarantor of presence and co-presence against an observer position
from outside, which Nhat Hanh attributes to the natural sciences. The seman-
tics of ‘presence’ takes on a central function in Nhat Hanh and in the further
reception of his approach. Mindfulness is supposed to enable a sense of self as

3
Since formulations differ and there are several versions of the seven theses on the web, I offer a sum-
marized version here. Cf. http://www.intersein-zentrum.de/thich.html.
394 A. Nehring

release from ego-centrism and, at the same time, a higher degree of empathy
and social competence.
The Seven Miracles of Mindfulness describe a state that is supposed to be
achieved through meditation practice using certain techniques. The aim is not
so much the classical liberation from the karmic process of coming into being
and passing away through insight into the nature of the dhammas, but rather
a change in everyday practice in dealing with oneself and one’s environment—
increased self-perception becomes a guarantee of increased self-awareness in
one’s own social relations. The promise is well known: The difference between
subject and object is to be overcome through this interaction of body and
mind. This state of perception is described in the texts on mindfulness medi-
tation under the label ‘holistic’, a term which at first sight can hardly be con-
veyed with the ideas of transience, suffering and non-self-ness from the texts
of the Pali Canon. Nhat Hanh sees in this the special contribution of
Mahāyāna:

When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner

has reached a level of wisdom called non-discrimination mind—a wondrous
communion in which there is no longer any distinction made between subject
and object. This isn’t some far-off, unattainable state. Any one of us—by persist-
ing in practicing even a little—can at least taste of it. (Nhat Hanh, 1976, p. 57)

5 Jon Kabat-Zinn: Mindfulness

as Therapeutic Buddhism
Mindfulness meditation has become widely known in recent years, especially
in therapeutic contexts. In particular, the method of Mindfulness Based Stress-
Reduction (MBSR) developed in the USA by the American molecular biolo-
gist and physician Jon Kabat-Zinn has advertised this type of meditation as
effective method for treating a wide range of diseases. From stress-induced
mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety disorders and somatoform pain
disorders such as fibromyalgia and burn-out, to pain caused by illness, mind-
fulness meditation is praised as being successfully used to build greater toler-
ance for illness and improve pain management strategies.
Mindfulness Based Stress-Reduction is conceptualized as an eight-week
course that combines elements from different meditation techniques. Kabat-
Zinn has presented his approach in his book Full Catastrophe Living (Kabat-
Zinn, 1990), which was published in Germany under the (somewhat more
mundane) title Gesund durch Meditation (Kabat-Zinn, 2006). If one follows
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 395

the instructions of this book, then mindfulness is seen by Kabat-Zinn as an

exercise or path that should lead to inner peace and to insights. “Cultivating
mindfulness can lead to the discovery of deep realms of relaxation, calmness,
and insight within yourself ” (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 12).
A ‘new territory, previously unknown to you or only vaguely suspected’ is
to be opened up to patients through mindfulness meditation. The path to a
‘real self-understanding’ promises healing. “The path to it in any moment lies
no farther than your own body and mind and your own breathing” (Kabat-
Zinn, 1990, p. 12). With the MBSR method, Kabat-Zinn decidedly refers to
the Buddhist tradition and to Vipassanā meditation in particular, and empha-
sizes that he is thus taking up a practice which “has flourished over the past
2,500 years”, and was not only practised in monasteries and among laypeople,
but which is particularly widespread among the Western youth today “drawn
by the remarkable interest in this country [US] in meditative practices”
(Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 12).
While the reception of the concept of mindfulness in psychology focuses
on the description of an attentive state of consciousness, Kabat-Zinn is aim-
ing at more than that: Mindfulness is a ‘path’ or ‘life path’ that one has to
follow. Kabat-Zinn sees himself as influenced by ideas of Buddhist ethics, but
emphasizes that mindfulness meditation is an approach of universal validity.

It can be learned and practiced, as we do in the stress clinic, without appealing

to Oriental culture or Buddhist authority to enrich it or authenticate it […]. In
fact one of its major strengths is that it is not dependent on any belief system or
ideology, so that its benefits are therefore accessible for anyone to test for himself
or herself. (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 12)

As I already pointed out, the universalization and especially the de-

contextualization of Buddhist meditation practice by American meditation
teachers such as Kabat-Zinn, or Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon
Salzberg prepared the ground for the adaptation of the practice into the thera-
peutic context.
There are various interesting aspects of Kabat-Zinn and his reception of the
meditation practice. The discrepancy between Buddhist religious and non-
Buddhist scientific contextualization of the programme is obvious. In analys-
ing MBSR, one can investigate the borderlines between religion and science.
MBSR is the key phenomenon of what might be called ‘therapeutic Buddhism’.
Mindfulness is described by Kabat-Zinn as a holistic body experience that
differs from a state of ‘dis-attention’, whereby, according to the (controversial)
parapsychologist Gary Schwartz, inattention—thinkably vague—is defined as
396 A. Nehring

“not attending to the relevant feedback messages of our body and our mind
that are necessary for their harmonious functioning” (Kabat-Zinn, 1990,
p. 228). Kabat-Zinn sees the disregard of physical signals to the psyche as the
cause of most diseases and therefore conceives of MBSR as an attempt to sen-
sitize the patient to interactions between psyche and body. As a central insight,
Kabat-Zinn teaches an ‘interconnectedness’ not only of body and mind but,
by means of ‘feedback loops’, of all individual systems in the body and the
environment, which leads him to a theory of the embedding of the body in
the environment and to the definition of health as a ‘dynamic process’.

If connectedness is crucial for physical integration and health, it is equally

important psychologically and socially […]. The web of interconnectedness
goes beyond our individual psychological self. While we are whole ourselves as
individual beings, we are also part of a larger whole, interconnected through our
family and our friends and acquaintances to the larger society and ultimately to
the whole of humanity and life on the planet. (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 157)

The personal-individual disposition is seen as an activating potential for

self-healing powers. A prerequisite for this is the perception of the body as a
“universe in itself ” that organizes itself and is equipped with cells that have the
ability to

regulate itself as a whole to maintain the internal balance and order […]. The
body accomplishes this inner balance through finely tuned feedback loops that
interconnect all aspects of the organism. (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 155)

With the help of a scientific superstructure, Kabat-Zinn designs an image

of a human being as an entropy-producing system and establishes the ‘holis-
tic’ perspective with the help of an analogy between the Buddhist concept of
emergence in dependence (Pali: paticca-samuppāda; Skt: pratītya-samutpāda)
and the so-called Gaia-hypothesis from systematic ecology, which is based on
a systems-theoretical understanding of life. According to Kabat-Zinn, the
body is able to adapt to its environment in a reactive and self-organizing
(autopoiesis) way by means of the ‘feedback loops’ which connect all systems
with each other. Kabat-Zinn thus ties in with approaches that have been
developed in the environment of structural-functional and constructivist con-
cepts in biology, anthropology and cognitive psychology by Gregory Bateson,
Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch. The Dutch scholar
of religious studies Wouter J. Hanegraaff has aptly described this field of the-
ory as New Age Science (Hanegraaff, 1996).
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 397

The central concept of Kabat-Zinn is, as already mentioned, ‘interconnected-

ness’, which marks the connection of mind and body and thus the ‘wholeness’
as well as the connection to all living beings. According to him, these idealistic,
natural-philosophical speculations about ‘being whole’ make the difference
between mindfulness meditation and other stress management techniques.
(Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 164)

What is striking is not the attempt to scientifically enrich the MBSR con-
cept, but that the MBSR programme combines the life form of mindfulness
with a very strong concept of individuality. On the one hand, it uses the affir-
mation of stereotypical ‘Eastern’ ideas and practices to distance itself from
stereotypical ‘Western’ concepts of individuality, but on the other hand, it
formulates nothing but a promise of salvation for the individual, in so far as
the individual has to “walk the path of mindfulness” (Kabat-Zinn, 1990,
p. 441) in order to reach the state of ‘being whole’ with him- or herself.

6 Mind and Body

Three aspects I would like to highlight as results from the reflections above.
Deepened everyday experience—mindfulness as reframing of everyday
experiences: Whether it is interpreted as ‘just being’ or as a radical acceptance
of one’s own existential ‘Geworfen-Sein’ into existence, mindfulness always
carries with it the promise of an experience that is ‘purer’ precisely because it
is ‘unconditional’. It is interesting to note that it is not the moment of experi-
ence itself that is conceived as something ‘deeper’ (e.g. as in mysticism), but
that the results of meditation should allow for a ‘deeper’ way of life. It is not
the practice itself that is the plunge into a deeper layer of experience, but the
results of the practice that lead to a changed and ‘deeper’ insight. Mindfulness
does not refer to elevated or transcendental experiences of presence, but it
promises a new framing of everyday presence, that is new perspectives on
everyday life, which is to be achieved above all by training greater tolerance
towards everyday states of consciousness.
Embodied consciousness—mindfulness as a consciousness technique of
embodied experience: Meditation practice promises the prospect of a changed
life practice through the perception of consciousness as embodied conscious-
ness. Mindfulness is intended to provide the individual with ways and strate-
gies for dealing with the states of consciousness on the basis of his/her implicit
knowledge that is initially explicitly learned and then habitualized. For this
398 A. Nehring

purpose the embodiment of these states is made tangible, that is presented in

meditation practice.
Difference-knowledge—body/mind—mindfulness as an insight into the
transience of conscious states: Mindfulness meditation can be seen as a prac-
tice that provides the late modern subject with a difference-knowledge of the
interaction of consciousness and body through the technique of conscious-
ness conveyed in it. Consciousness is experienced as somatic consciousness.
The sense and purpose of this practice seems to be to practice the phenomenal
transience of states of consciousness and in this way to achieve a higher toler-
ance of affects and knowledge of dysfunctional states of consciousness. The
existential self-presentation of motives such as transience is seen as an antidote
to such dysfunctional states. What dysfunction is, however, is highly depen-
dent on the respective discursive appropriation of mindfulness.

7 Conclusion
From the point of view of cultural studies, what is remarkable about mindful-
ness and its reception is that and how it is adapted in various discourses.
Mindfulness obviously hits not only one but several nerves of Western life-
style, it also carries an implicit normativity. As a social practice, mindfulness
is, as mentioned before, anything but a non-normative practice despite its
distancing from all claims and dogmatic positions. Mindfulness discourses
take on a non-normative character that can be reflected upon precisely in its
promise of purity, that is in the suppositional experience of ‘pure perception’,
‘mere existence’, ‘immediate presence’.
The normative tenor is that mindfulness enables distancing from ‘faulty’
states of consciousness. Faulty attitudes and convictions must—in order to be
recognized as faults—deviate from a norm. The obvious question, of course,
is: Who defines the norm? Who defines what is ‘dysfunctional’? In other
words, the problem here is not that mindfulness as a social practice is neces-
sarily normative, but the explicit attribution that mindfulness as a practice is
‘neutral’. It is also striking that the correction achieved through mindfulness
as practice is designed as a self-correction. As a popular form of spirituality,
mindfulness can be read as a practice of self-care, which—like all conceptions
of the self—is subject to historical-contingent conditions. Mindfulness is at
the centre of the concepts of how individual self-care is normatively conveyed
and conceived in late modern Western society.
 Mind the Body: Mindfulness Meditation as a Spiritual Practice… 399

Mindfulness meditation, as a physical practice, is a technique of conscious-

ness that has undoubtedly therapeutic value. From an ideology-critical point
of view, however, it presents itself as something like a problematic self-
interpretation of today’s Western societies, and especially of the demands that
arise for the individual.

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 Part VI
Classroom Practices

When entering a classroom during a break, we see many different activities

going on: pupils talking to each other, or interacting in other ways, playing
games on their mobile phones, reading, preparing for the next lesson; the
teacher opens a window, starts the PC and rushes around getting teaching
equipment ready. In the ‘liminal situation’ of a school break, bodies ‘act’ on
their own, introducing thoughts, agency and personality to the social situa-
tion, playing with things and identities. In the liminal state, even the ‘turbu-
lent noise’ of one’s body and the body’s ‘subliminal murmurs’ may be perceived.
The primacy of the senses, the multifaceted mixture of sensations and the
authenticity of the experiential are expressed, before control and observation
shall bring about organized school-based learning processes. Before ‘nature is
catalogued’, and before technology, prevailing forms of knowledge and social
organization annex the sensing bodies, before marginalization of singularity is
brought about, a veiling and taking over of experience occurs. In the class-
room, this take-over happens by means of analysis and observation, the sci-
ences and technology. The world of the senses is then transformed, e.g. by the
sciences, as they establish what counts as truth: by an administration that
rules social and cultural processes, and by media that are exercising influence
through their seductive power.
Indeed, when the school bell rings, this signifies that the classroom rules,
that is waiting for one’s turn, power relationships and codes of behaviour, are
to be established. However, even if the well-organized classroom is declared to
be an optimal arrangement for learning, usually, there are also clear signs that
the pupils want to revert to the exciting conditions of the liminal situation.
The more fluid, malleable state is thus not completely replaced by the orderly
404 Classroom Practices

classroom situation. The liminal situation continues, at least in the minds,

ruling the everyday world as classroom settings, as a constant dream scenario.
During the lessons, this dream scenario may reveal itself as ‘revolt’, i.e. in
disruptive behaviour, in pupils covertly talking to their neighbours, in dis-
tracting activities, in cheating and so on. The hidden, unobserved space is a
‘backstage’ in which the pupils interact peer-to-peer. Here, their individuality
comes into play; sensory perception, words and community join. Sometimes,
on the ‘backstage’ even an intense focus develops, and complete immersion in
an activity takes place. Diverse practices, symbolic fights and negotiations
between the individual, their peers and the norms of the institution occur. If
we look at the impact of these ‘backstage’ happenings on the education taking
place in the classroom it turns out that the subversive happenings play ‘an
active part in the institutionalisation of the pupils into schooling’. It makes
sense to talk about a ‘pedagogy of the third space’ (Gutiérrez), which builds
on learners’ participation in the construction of learning activities through
multiple voices, that is not only institutional ones. The pedagogy of the third
space envisages a dialectic between the individual and the social, between the
world as it is and the world as it could be.
In educational research, the endeavour to harmonize classroom education
with the polyphony, diversity and contrast of its ‘backstage’ happenings is not
new. Most discussion concerns here the ambiguous relationship between the-
ory and practice. There is a well-established consciousness that educational
practice derives from a broad range of imaginative, intuitive and rational ele-
ments. It requires a practical knowledge to grasp them; for richer and more
inclusive practice, aspects of learning in the classroom need to be drawn from
various sources and diverse instances. Classroom education is dependent on
how the above-described fleeting experiences are linked to official teaching
and learning. Is there any room left for imagination, for random thoughts,
agency and personality in the classroom, playing with identities and so on, or
is a pupil’s relationship to his or her own experiences marginalized or veiled?
In Chap. 25 Staffan Selander starts with the observation that in education
and in most studies on education the body has been perceived as a prerequi-
site for the development of theoretical knowledge. Practical knowledge with a
focus on sport, art, music and vocational education has been considered less
important. In this chapter this division between theory and practice is dis-
cussed in order to develop a more satisfactory understanding of learning,
based on the importance of bodily experiences for learning. Learning is under-
stood as a complex multimodal social practice. It is often characterized by
mimetic, performative and emotional aspects. Since it takes place in this way,
 Classroom Practices 405

learning contributes to the personal development of young people, in which

meaning making is of central importance.
Nathalie Sinclair and Eva Jablonka in Chap. 26, in their investigation of the
material aspects of mathematical practice in the classroom, connect mathe-
matical activity with gestures and movements of the body. They investigate
how mathematical, ‘abstract, static and disembodied thought’ is applied,
structured and developed by operations in which embodiment, bodily actions
and tools play a central role. They draw consequences for mathematics educa-
tion and acquisition of knowledge that happens through oral transmission
and mental operations. They employ three examples of mathematical activi-
ties—counting, cubing and computing—using these to show the importance
of physical activities in different mathematical practices.
Cornelie Dietrich and Valerie Riepe in Chap. 27 show that when children
learn in school their experience becomes concrete through a process of
embodiment. This is why staging and repeating the performance of teaching
in social choreographies is of central importance for school learning. These
choreographies structure the movements of groups of pupils in time and
space. Firstly, therefore, the authors elaborate on the concept of social chore-
ography, a term that is commonly used in the teaching of dance. Secondly,
they use two examples from primary school lessons to clarify the concept of
social choreography. The first of these is circle time, which demands equal,
participatory communication between pupils and teacher. The second is the
choreographic arrangement of the hierarchical order that exists between the
teacher and the pupils in terms of space. The task of circle time is to create
order through a disciplinary choreography, through the inter-responsiveness
between order and disorder, between rule-governed behaviour and vitalistic
dynamics. In the third and final part the authors reflect upon the results of the
empirical research in conjunction with theoretical observations.
Juliane Engel and Cristina Diz Muñoz in Chap. 28, both theoretically and
empirically, address the question of how (postcolonial) subjectivation pro-
cesses take place in glocalized classrooms, that is in classrooms where both
local and worldwide perspectives play a role. By focusing on socially asym-
metrical, powerful classroom relations, they investigate the physical negotia-
tion of experiences of difference that cannot be expressed verbally. They
examine the strengths and weaknesses of videographic research in this area:
first, by discussing how embodied learning can be made accessible through
videography (1), then by exploring the implications of postcolonial cultural
theories on the epistemological potential of videography when it comes to
embodied learning processes (2), and finally by explaining how the
406 Classroom Practices

embodiment of social norms can be understood as subaltern processes of sub-

jectivation (3).
Chapter 29 by Tiago de Oliveira Pinto is based on the hypothesis that play-
ing a musical instrument naturally leads to increased physical activity, while
the results of the music played vanish in time. Instrumental music also reveals
extensive possibilities of expression, learning and experiencing, whereas it
does not have an obvious semantic content. Thus, in terms of embodiment
and learning, organized sound relates to the physical body, to transience and
to social attributions. When it comes to performance or to the process of
learning musical skills, the sensual spectrum necessarily expands from sound
and hearing to embodiment, revealing more extensive possibilities of expres-
sion, all associated with the phenomenon of music. Indeed, the process of
learning and experiencing music, regardless of its social and cultural context,
is essentially one that relates to physical practice. Music expresses itself in a
social context and in the physical body at the same time, that is music lives as
a social activity, while certain instrumental techniques also depend directly on
physical skills. Musical practices are always grounded in an embodied learning
experience.
 The Role of Bodily Experience for Learning
Designs
Staffan Selander

1 The Role of the Body for Learning

The understanding of the role of the body for learning entails many possible
aspects in a spectrum from the training of the body itself to the role of the
body for all kinds of learning, from the body as a ground for phenomenologi-
cal experiences to its social role in terms of how we communicate and position
ourselves in the situated, social room (Merleau-Ponty, 1999; Werler & Wulf,
2006). And to understand the brain, lots of metaphors have been used, based
on dominant technologies at the time: for example, a clock, a machine, or a
computer. But the brain is not anything like this: it is not a mechanical thing,
nor a time-coded computer; it is an organ within a biological body. And it is
an active organ, not a passive receiver of stimuli, which over time develops
stable patterns in relation to the environment by way of iterative network
connections (Changeux & Ricœur, 2002).
In this chapter, I would like to focus on one of the contemporary challenges
concerning learning in a hybrid, complex society (Brooks et al., 2021; Gee,
2004; Kress et al., 2021; Morin, 2008; Selander, 2008b; Selander, 2015). This
discussion needs to, as I see it, embrace a multifaceted, multimodal under-
standing of knowledge representations and learning, but also the performative
aspects of learning in different micro-arenas, as well as a critical view on the

S. Selander (*)
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: staffan.selander@dsv.su.se

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 407
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_25
408 S. Selander

(often taken for granted) dichotomy between theoretic and practical knowl-
edge. I will do so out of a design-theoretic, multimodal perspective.

1.1 The Body and the Soul—And the Question of Social

and Individual Discipline

Ever since the Greek philosophers, we can notice a deep interest in the ques-
tion of the soul, either as a part of the body (Epicurus) or as an entity of itself
(Plato). This divide of body and soul has ever since had a strong influence in
the thinking about learning in schools, not the least in terms of a need to
discipline the body in the formal, compulsory educational system from the
end of the nineteenth century.
The understanding of the upbuilding of formal, compulsory education
could start with the following question: Why did our societies build schools
at the end of the nineteenth century? A common answer is that this was
because of the industrialization. The problem with this explanation is that
industrialization came much later in most of our societies. Another possible
answer is that this was a way to create social order in the bigger cities, where
hordes of young people who went around and created troubles of different
kinds (Sandin, 1986). To create social discipline was a strong first argument
for the building up of schools. Still another answer, of course, is that techno-
logical development makes life more complicated, and it will take longer and
longer time to train young generations. However, this will also lead to another
question: If more and more people today will be out of the labour market or
only do simple work, and more and more people will have more leisure time,
why would they need a longer education? An answer to this would be: because
of our democratic intentions to involve everyone in the organization and
maintaining of our societies and cultures. If working conditions change, more
time would also be available for meaningful work (Hägglund, 2019).
The existing educational system in the midst of the nineteenth century in
Europe was the Lancaster system, where older children educated the younger
at different work-stations, and the role of the teacher more or less was to walk
around and keep the order. With the beginning of formal schooling, the
architectonic panopticon became an ideal, for schools as for prisons. From a
central place, the teacher—or the guard—could see what everyone was doing.
The school panopticon—the classroom—had a somewhat elevated teacher’s
desk and benches for the pupils. From this central position, the teacher could
see everything that happened in the room, and he (or she) could steer all
activities in terms of content (the book), time (lessons), working space (the
 The Role of Bodily Experience for Learning Designs 409

classroom), and discipline. In this environment, the pointer was important. It

was a tool for pointing at the central aspects of for example a map or of what
was written on the blackboard—and a symbol for the right to speak (the scep-
tre). However, it was also the tool for punishment and keeping order.
Today, much is different, since much teaching is digitally based and possi-
ble to carry out as distance education (not the least during the years of
COVID-19). Furthermore, content is based on digitally distributed sources
of information (not one central book) and we can see an increasing interest in
simulation programs and (serious) games of different kinds, as well as in out-
of-school activities (like maker-spaces) and outdoor learning (Graeske et al.,
2020; Kress, 2010; Nouri, 2014; Selander et al., 2019). In our late modern,
hybrid society, teachers do not control the time, the content, and the learning
space the way his or her predecessors did. And he or she is not any longer (in
most countries) allowed to physically punish youngsters. Instead, teachers
develop a new capacity to orchestrate digitally based schoolwork, with a focus
on both epistemic and social dimensions. And we can notice a shift from the
teacher in the centre to the pupil in the centre (Collins & Halverson, 2008).
The social discipline in schools went hand in hand with the discipline of
individual bodies. In the panopticon-school, discipline was explicit and hard.
It was important for the pupils to sit still with the hands on the bench (we can
here get a hint of the undertones of sexual discipline). There was also a special
kind of work-oriented body-discipline. As for example, when Pestalozzi talked
about drawing, he emphasized the importance of training how to depict
things correctly, as the stove at the end of the classroom. And even if it took a
semester to learn this, the pupil had at least been disciplined, since he had
been sitting still and worked (Pestalozzi & Buss, 1803; Johnsen et al., 1997).
Pestalozzi and Buss (1803) also describe the explicit social training, for exam-
ple how pupils should sit in line and loudly, in chorus, say what they were
doing: ‘I draw a straight line,’ and then, ‘Under the first line I draw a second
straight line,’ and so on.
Another example could be seen in writing in early schooling. It was impor-
tant to learn how to write elegantly (without any ink plumps) and perfect (in
the same kind of style). Why so? Well, mainly because this was the way that
society could store its collective memory in such a format so that everyone else
could read it. With new technologies, this special skill disappeared. Now we
can notice a renewed interest in handwriting, but from a totally different
point of view, namely that it is good for the training of the brain. Taking notes
by hand helps (most) individuals to remember better than only listening is the
argument.
410 S. Selander

Social and individual discipline seems today to be a bit of a different char-

acter, and in many of our social practices more incapsulated and inherent. So
is the case with a growing, centralized control of educational content and
testing, where the steering and control mechanisms are built into digital, edu-
cational programs. And this is done with arguments like the more impersonal
the teaching and testing is, the more objective and just it would be (as if
knowledge was a specific entity that could be measured objectively, see further
arguments below). This kind of ‘impersonalization’ can also be noticed in
many other relations between a social/political institution or an enterprise
and the individual users/clients/customers/pupils, and so on, who are sup-
posed to manage most of the communication themselves, by way of computer
programs, and where it in many cases is almost impossible to get a personal
contact by way of for example a visit or a telephone call.
In line with this, we can notice a new emphasis on self-control, with argu-
ments like young children should be trained for being able to collaborate,
being responsible, chevaleresque, and being creative individuals who can take
initiative—in other words, trained for a late-capitalist society in flux, where
they are supposed to act as entrepreneurs (Lindstrand et al., 2016). It seems
like automatic subordination in relation to AI (Artificial Intelligence) goes
hand in hand with individual self-regulation. However, this contradiction
does not mean that AI could not be a help for individual development and
support learning based on individual variations and interests. It is rather the
opposite, but it takes a democratic political leadership to develop this aspect,
which also would entail a clearer trust in professional competence and
communication.
Thus, new ideals do not mean that the discipline of the body—in its social
and individual meaning—has disappeared. It has only changed and become
more internalized. Already Jackson (1990) talks about ‘the hidden curricu-
lum,’ by which he meant the kind of social discipline that was incorporated
and not overtly seen in symbolic control and the classroom rituals (see
Bernstein, 1996 on symbolic control and Wulf et al., 2010 on rituals). To
these aspects, we could also add the social and cultural mechanisms for domi-
nance, control, and subordination (which Bourdieu, 1977, 2010, talked
about in terms of habitus).

1.2 Knowledge and Knowing

Let us for a moment reflect on what it means to learn and to know something.
For example,
 The Role of Bodily Experience for Learning Designs 411

• I learnt a new word in Portuguese.

• I learnt to play the clarinet.
• I learnt a new profession.

Obviously, learning here refers to very different kinds of capacities and

activities. But let us add something more:

• I leant to how to use the Portuguese word correctly in a conversation.

• I learnt to play the clarinet with modulation—together with others.
• I learnt a new profession and have worked in this profession for a cou-
ple of years.

In the first case, learning a new word here also entails a deeper understand-
ing of its possible nuances and its social and cultural connotations. In the
second case, learning an instrument is not only about playing the right tone,
but to coordinate the playing with others and being able to express varia-
tions—an aesthetic judgement. And in the third case, learning a profession in
formal education is not really the same as to learn to coordinate all different
professional aspects in relation to a specific case in situ.
These examples point at the fact that words/terms like ‘learning’ and ‘know-
ing’ do not refer to fix entities or things. Rather, they refer to culturally spe-
cific ways of talking about, and recognizing, learning in different settings
(Kress et al., 2021; Lim, 2015; Selander & Kress, 2017; Selander, 2017). We
can for example make distinctions between scientifically based knowledge,
procedural knowledge, and knowledge based on reflected experience (Rolf,
2015). Aspects of knowledge entail facts and scientific knowledge (Greek:
episteme) and knowing how to do things (Greek: techne). However, learning
also entails vaguer, but still essential, aspects like identity building and the
development of self-regulation (Nussbaum, 2011), judgement (Greek: phro-
nesis and phronimus; Ricœur, 2005), Bildung or perspective on the world and
understanding the frontlines of knowledge, a capacity to seeing things in their
context, self-understanding, and cultivating of oneself (Gadamer, 1975), col-
laborative work and co-creativity (Hansen et al., 2015), and (in more modern
terms) to meta-reflect and develop a personal way to constantly learn anew
(generic learning). Learning can therefore also mean to re-learn, as when you
go from playing the flute in the compulsory school to playing it at the musical
academy. More seldom we talk about the ‘shadows of education’ or the ‘black
learning’—‘the Lucifer effect’—as when people are educated to be grim or to
torture, or are indoctrinated to believe only in a certain ideology (Selander,
2017; Teistler, 2006; Weizer, 2007; Zimbardo, 2007).
412 S. Selander

All in all, these different aspects on learning see learning as a capacity that
is rooted in our biological body and carried out by using or exploring material
and semiotic resources in the environment. Thus, learning can be seen as an
increasing capacity to use (and elaborate) these cultural resources and tech-
nologies (for good or bad). To know more is to know more variations, to
develop more elaborated stories and explanations, techniques, and method-
ologies. And this is the (only) way we can understand learning, by way of its
material and semiotic manifestations, since we can never see what is going on
inside the head of the learner (Säljö, 2005). It also opens up for an under-
standing of learning as a result of contextual, mimetic, and sequenced prac-
tices over time. This is, as I see it, a far more dynamic understanding of
learning than seeing learning as a result of the capacity to remember facts
(Kress et al., 2021).

2 Theoretic and Practical Knowledge

An often taken for granted division is that between theoretic and practical
knowledge. For example, you learn theoretic knowledge in school, but practi-
cal knowledge at the working place. The first problem here is that ‘knowledge’
and ‘learning’ are not very well-defined concepts. As we have seen above,
learning and knowledge can be defined or specified in many ways.
To say that theoretic knowledge is learnt in schools (or universities), and
practical knowledge outside these institutions, is a misleading dichotomy.
Every kind of learning (however most obviously so in professional education)
entails both theoretic and practical aspects (even if we analytically can sepa-
rate them), and it would be more to correct to say that theoretic and practical
knowledge are intertwined. Every theoretic knowledge entails a practical side,
and every practice has more or less conscious connection to a theoretic para-
digm or model.
Let us just mention one example. A traditional sheet of music entails tones
and semitones, as well as different clefs, and so on. And most of us learn this
in school, at least on a basic level. But how shall we interpret dasia-notes,
neumes from the Medieval Ages, Japanese shamisen-note, or modern serious
music with ‘carpets’ of tones, where the precise tone is not clear, rather the
interval in which the tone could be played? And so is the case in all knowledge
domains: we ‘know’ how to interpret information when we have an interpre-
tative practice to relate it to. This also points at the performative aspect of
learning, not only in music and arts, but in all possible knowledge domains.
Information-linking and action-linking goes hand in hand in learning and
 The Role of Bodily Experience for Learning Designs 413

meaning-making (Selander, 2019; Wickman, 2006; Østern & Knudsen,

2019). This also leads us to the next step: designs for and in learning.

3 Designs for and in Learning

The design-perspective entails a multimodal understanding of knowledge rep-
resentations, sign-making, and signs of learning in different formal (e.g.
schools), semi-formal (museums), or non-formal (as learning at home) set-
tings. It focuses on situated sequences over time (see Learning Design
Sequences: Selander, 2008a; Selander & Kress, 2017; Selander et al., 2021),
and how signs are transformed and transducted in the making of sketches and
new representations (Kress, 2010; Selander, 2013). It also focuses on institu-
tional and individual framings and interests. Furthermore, we can add an
interest in taking part in different processes to change and develop teaching
and learning—design as function and meaning, and collaborative design and
design patterns as an elaborated methodology (however, still with different
roles, where the researcher is the critical partner for discussion, who can intro-
duce new concepts and transgress taking-for-granted explanation or ideas of
how things should be) (Dorst, 2015; Glawe & Selander, 2021; Knutsson
et al., 2021).

3.1 Designs in Learning

‘Designs in learning’ is a conceptualization of individual learning paths, ways

to think and solve problems. Learning can (metaphorically) be seen as an
activity that develops alongside different, rhizomatic threads, depending on
interests and choices in relation to material and semiotic resources (Lindstrand
& Selander, 2022). Thus, if we see learning in this way, we can see a difference
in how things are learnt and in what ways learning about something has been
transformed and shaped anew (or re-designed) into a new knowledge repre-
sentation. I would also argue that this way of looking at learning goes deeper
than the idea of a fixed knowledge entity that could be objectively measured.
A sensitivity for how things are learnt and represented also gives more inter-
esting clues for a teacher to think of in what ways he or she could support and
challenge a pupil/student to develop further. If, for example, a group of stu-
dents learn about X by way of school textbooks and pen and paper, and
another group of students learn X by way of dynamic, digital programs, they
would be able to show their learning in different ways, with an emphasis on
414 S. Selander

different aspect. This will be noticed in terms of how different modes are used
and how different multimodal resources are orchestrated (Bezemer & Kress,
2016; Kjällander, 2011).
I would like to give two different examples of this. The first one is a study
about learning music by way of composing with the help of the program
GarageBand and iPads (Bandlien & Selander, 2019). Different ‘stop moments’
in the learning process were here in focus, where both risks and opportunities
could be detected, in other words significant moments in the learning-design-
sequence (Selander, 2008a). In a creative, learning design process, it is not
clear—from the beginning—which choices the learners will make and which
routes they will take. In this case, the technology made it possible to track
these choices and routes, and thereby get a clearer picture of the pupils’ knowl-
edge and what they have learnt compared to earlier sequences.
The other example is a project where pupils were asked to interpret a poem
and represent their new understanding by way of making a film (Höglund,
2017). This transduction (changes of representations by way of different
media; Kress, 2010) and the ways the students represented their new under-
standing became, of course, also a challenge for the teacher’s interpretation of
their new knowledge and their learning (Kress & Selander, 2012). What for
example would be able to explicitly argue for in an essay will in the film rather
be presented as a narrative. To be able to follow the learning, the teachers have
to be able to follow the arguments and choices that were taken during the
process (also see Lindstrand, 2006). As I see it, both these examples point at
an understanding of learning as a multifaceted and multimodal communica-
tive activity, where the richness of information about the learning that has
taken place and the new knowledge that the participants have acquired could
not be tracked by a standard test.

3.2 Sketching as Transformation and Transduction

of Information

Sketching is here understood as a (bodily and epistemologically based) process

of choices and the creation of tentative fixing points within a learning
sequence. I would like to make a difference between sketching as exploration
and sketching as formation of knowledge. The first one is characterized by curi-
ous exploration of phenomena, the second by adapting the new findings to
possible forms for finalizing and representing the findings of the explorative
process—as in the form of an essay, a film, a PowerPoint presentation, a dance,
or for example an exhibition.
 The Role of Bodily Experience for Learning Designs 415

Sketching is used in different ways in different areas. In dance courses,

sketching is as an assemblage of possible dance elements to create and try out
a reconfiguration of signs in order to express an attitude, a feeling, or a mood.
In filmmaking, sketching is used in the work to present the script, in the ten-
tative draft of scenes. In writing, the sketch is the first draft, the first configu-
ration of the structure or the tentative formulation.
The sketch is used to fix certain aspects, but also to elaborate on possible
variants and expressions. Sketches are seen as assemblages of modes within a
selected medium. The sketch is here understood as the vehicle in the moti-
vated action to select signs and transform (and transduct; Kress, 20101) and
re-configure or re-design them into full representations. Thus, the sketch is an
important tool in a design process for shaping, negotiating, and making
choices. It is an important tool in the learning process for elaborating possible
meanings.

4 Designs for Learning—Conclusive Remarks

Learning (from a design-theoretic perspective) is a perspective with a focus on
designs for and in learning, where learning could be understood as an increas-
ing capacity to incorporate, make meaning and use of a rich variation of mate-
rial and semiotic resources (Selander, 2017; Selander et al., 2021). This
perspective combines a socio-cultural understanding of knowledge represen-
tations with a multimodal understanding of sign-making, within formal,
semi-formal, and non-formal institutional framings. It is a perspective that
can be used to analyse conditions for research, teaching, and learning
(Björklund Boistrup & Selander, 2022).
This perspective is a clear epistemological standpoint, coupled to a method-
ological approach—Learning Design Sequences. But it is also based on an
ontological understanding of learning as incorporated and performative act-
ing, intertwined with theoretic insights and reflections in processes of change.

1
‘Transformation’ is a change of representations within the same modes and medium (as text to text),
whilst ‘transduction’ is a change of representation between modes and media (as text to film; Kress, 2010).
416 S. Selander

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 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways
of Moving With
Nathalie Sinclair and Eva Jablonka

1 Introduction
We open with three examples of mathematical activity from a range of contexts.
As you read through them, consider how they compare with your own experi-
ences of mathematics, particularly in relation to the various ways in which the
body—the senses and various body parts—are at play in the mathematical activ-
ity. We will use these to highlight some of the material aspects of mathematical
practice, aspects that are sometimes overlooked when, in pedagogical contexts,
attention is focused on knowledge acquisition through oral transmission and
mental operations. In the following sections, we use these and further examples
to structure our discussion of mathematical embodiment.

1.1 Counting

[…] The meanings

a language must have are the meanings
it lacks: located outside it, like sunlight

N. Sinclair (*)
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
e-mail: nathsinc@sfu.ca
E. Jablonka
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 419
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_26
420 N. Sinclair and E. Jablonka

and grass. So together with meaning

there has to be pointing at meaning.
Excerpt from Language Poem (1). (Bringhurst, 2013, p. 173)

A four-year-old child is sitting on the floor in front of a bunch of marbles. She

is asked how many there are. We know what to listen for: ‘one, two, three’ and
so on. We know that some children will peter out after saying ‘three’ or ‘four’
and that others will not say the number words in the right order, or decide to
count just some of the marbles or not match the number of the number words
with the number of the marbles. But we also know that a significant quality
of the counting can involve the child pointing to the marbles, one at a time,
sometimes even touching the marble as the number word is uttered. In this
mathematical practice, the finger both draws attention to the marble and
helps track the passage from one marble to another. We know this moving of
the finger becomes more reliable over time—early on, the finger may point
more than once at the same marble; it may skip some marbles along the way;
it may even point without having a detectable target. Learning to count
thereby involves both saying number words in a certain order and moving the
finger in a certain way, as well as co-ordinating the two. Recent research has
shown that this finger-speech practice of counting persists into adulthood.
When asked to count a large number of dots, adults will perform better when
they count using their fingers to point at the dots; and if they are prevented
from doing so, they will move other parts of their bodies instead, such as a
chin or a foot, in rhythmic accompaniment to their speech (Carlson
et al., 2008).

1.2 Cubing

[…] there is nothing in knowledge which has not been first in the entire body,
whose gestural metamorphoses, mobile postures, very evolution imitate all that
surrounds it. (Serres, 2011, p. 70)

The Romanticist Froebel developed a box with a cube composed of eight smaller
wooden cubes. With reference to this box, Froebel depicted 71 ‘forms of beauty’
[Schönheitsformen] and 22 ‘forms of knowledge’ [Erkenntnisformen], in addition
to 100 ‘forms of life’ [Lebensformen] (Reimers, 2014). According to Froebel, the
‘forms of knowledge’ (as depicted in Fig. 1a) are actualised by pulling apart the
whole cube, rearranging the parts and creating the original whole. As such, the
whole and its parts, form and size, relative position and combination emerge as
 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 421

Fig. 1 Exhibits in the Friedrich-Froebel-Museum in the Thuringian town Bad

Blankenburg, in the house that the practitioner and theorist of early pedagogy used
for his first kindergarten. The images refer to the Spiel und Beschäftigungskasten
No. 3 (play and activity box No 3). (a) Some of the forms of knowledge and gestures
used to interact with the cubes; (b) some of the forms of beauty. (Source: Authors’
own photos)

‘perceptible facts’ (Froebel, 1897, p. 119). The symmetric ‘forms of beauty’ are
created by systematically moving and turning to the right or the left some cubes
from one initial position around a centre of cubes in a fixed position, in a ‘dance
of shapes’, as shown in Fig. 1b (Froebel, 1897, p. 134).
In terms of these variations of ‘forms of beauty’, it is not unjustified to
associate Froebel with experimentation in geometric forms as found in con-
crete art. Indeed, Cross (1983) traces the educational influence of some prin-
ciples of the Bauhaus Basic Course in design to the Froebelian tradition
amongst other developments in progressive education, in particular via the
Bauhaus’ teacher Johannes Itten’s background in childhood education.
Childhood education in the romantic era, avant-garde art in the twentieth
century and mathematics, all share the intention of exploring properties in
structures and compositions. The example shows the recognition (both by
Froebel and by the artists) that engaging in bodily activity shapes perceptual
interaction. The cubes themselves are important, so is the way that the hand
manoeuvres as it grabs the cube by its flat faces, slides it into place to align
with other cubes along edges and vertices and turns the cube to expose differ-
ent orientations (see Fig. 1a). The example also hints at a double foundation
422 N. Sinclair and E. Jablonka

of the visual in the tangible as per Merleau-Ponty’s writings, at the perceptive

and productive hand’s position between the senses, including the visual per-
ception of the hand itself as external to the body.

1.3 Computing

Of course, these algorithms ‘work’, they can be useful, but there is also some-
thing more to them, something enjoyable beyond the mere reach of an arith-
metical solution. […] Algorithmic play excites the kind of challenging pleasure
essential to gaming. (Maheaux, 2019, pp. 419–420)

Computational tools (such as sets of counting tokens, rods, sandboxes, abaci,

tables and diagrams) have a long and culturally diverse history. The evolution
of methods for computation and their conceptualisation in different mathe-
matical activities is associated with the evolution of material devices; the
inferred mental scheme is tied to the observable physical operation in han-
dling the tool. Another interplay concerns the operations performed with a
particular device and their records on a writing medium, which in turn might
become a tool not only for recording but also for producing results (e.g.
Freiman & Volkov, 2018).
These mutual relations can be seen in the use of Chinese counting rods.
These are sticks made of varying material. Volkov’s (2018) account of their
history reveals that the oldest rods are from tombs of the second or first cen-
tury BCE and their usage evolved over a couple of centuries, until the count-
ing rods disappeared in the second half of the second millennium CE. The
length and diameter of the rods changed; the older versions were compara-
tively longer. In the seventeenth century, the counting rods were used in Japan
with (modified) Chinese procedures (Fig. 2).
The numbers or coefficients of equations were represented on a counting
surface (or board), often with some grid-like structure, in the form of configu-
rations of rods in particular ‘cells’; pictured in mathematical treatises, the rods
were represented as lines.
A place-value system with base 10 was chosen. Colours were used for dis-
tinguishing positive and negative numbers (black rods for positive, red or
white rods for negative numbers). For each digit, a configuration of horizon-
tal and vertical rods is placed in a cell on the counting surface. The horizon-
tal/vertical orientation alternates for each digit (possibly for visually separating
these, even without a visible underlying grid). So, there are different configu-
rations depending on whether the digit is in positions for 102n or for 102n+1.
 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 423

Fig. 2 Picture of a master and disciples using counting rods from the Seijutsu Sangaku
Zue 1795; according to Volkov (2018, p. 152) a collection of pictures related to compu-
tation methods by Miyake Katataka (1663–1746). (Source: Public domain, Wikimedia
Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Counting_
board.jpg))

Table 1 Counting rods used for digits in different positions in a place-value system
with base 10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Position 102n
Position 102n+1

A rod perpendicular to the convention for the respective position stands for
five rods if the digit is in the interval between 6 and 9 (Table 1).
Algorithms are performed through shifting and turning rods (for some
examples of arithmetic operations, see Volkov, 2018). Notably, if there is some
carry over, the representation of a digit in a higher position can be easily
changed (by putting additional rods into the ‘cell’ and by substituting five
rods by a perpendicular rod). The tabular format of the counting surface,
which allowed for two-dimensional representations, together with the sim-
plicity and flexibility of the device enabled the development of some mathe-
matical methods that are easy to apply also in learning contexts: not only were
algorithms for arithmetic operations (including common fractions) performed
with the counting rods, but also procedures for solving quadratic and cubic
equations and simultaneous linear equations with up to five unknowns
(Volkov, 2018; Pollet, 2018).
424 N. Sinclair and E. Jablonka

2 From Tool to Body to Tool–Body

In the examples provided above, a shared feature of the mathematical activity
was the specific ways in which the body acted on or with physical tools. In broad
terms, the Cartesian insistence on isolating the human subject as separate from
the environment, and isolating the cognising mind as separate from the body,
has had the effect of diminishing the perceived relevance both of the environ-
ment and of the body—both in thinking and in learning. This is particularly
true in mathematics, which has, since the advent of modern mathematics in the
nineteenth century, pursued the fantasy of total abstraction (which, as Gray,
2004, shows, produced much anxiety, even amongst mathematicians).
Interestingly, while attention to the role of tools in learning, as well as to
the embodied nature of knowing, has grown in the educational research lit-
erature, these have often been pursued as separate strands of research. We will
briefly discuss each strand and then propose that a more complex, combined
attention to tools and the body may provide insight into issues such as the role
of affect and memory in mathematics learning, as well as production of math-
ematical inscriptions. Moreover, we argue that the independent interest in
tools and in the body reflects analytic tendencies in mathematics education
research that work against the mangle of practice, as Pickering (1995) describes
it, which is the intertwining of individual, material and disciplinary agencies
of mathematical activity.

2.1 Tools and Manipulatives in Mathematics Education

As chronicled by Kidwell et al. (2008) in their book, Tools of American

Mathematics Teaching, 1800–2000, ‘tools’ have long been an important aspect
of the material culture of mathematics classrooms. These tools included ones
that mathematicians also used, such as compasses and tables, tools used in
everyday settings (abaci and calculators) and also tools of explicit pedagogical
design, such as Caleb Gattegno’s geoboards. Physical objects such as Froebel’s
so called ‘gifts’ were of great pedagogical significance to their inventors and to
kindergarten activists in Europe and USA. But, arguably, this did not occur
until the post-war era of the twentieth century, when pedagogical tools were
called ‘manipulatives’, and became of widespread use in elementary school
classrooms. Their perceived value was linked to the ‘hands-on learning’ advo-
cated by progressive educators such as Piaget and Dewey.
 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 425

As research on the use of manipulatives grew, in the 1980s and 1990s (and
continues today, with a particular focus on so-called virtual manipulatives),
attention narrowed in on the manipulatives themselves, often locating the
mathematics within them—manipulatives became seen as concrete instantia-
tions of concepts. While some studies have pointed to the positive benefits of
the use of physical manipulatives such as Dienes blocks (for place value),
geoboards (for geometric explorations) and Cuisenaire rods (for number rela-
tions) in the mathematics classroom, provided they are used intentionally by
teachers, over an extended period of time (Laski et al., 2015), there have also
been critiques, particularly in relation to the time it takes to learn how to use
the manipulative and the questionable effectiveness of transferring from a
manipulative setting to a paper-and-pencil one (Uttal et al., 1997).
For the past two decades, researchers have studied the additional affor-
dances that virtual manipulatives may have for learning (Sarama & Clements,
2009; Moyer-Packenham et al., 2015), particularly in terms of providing
links between visual models and their associated mathematical symbols. More
recently, the concept of a ‘duo of artefacts’ has been introduced into the
research literature, which involves the use of co-ordinated physical and virtual
manipulatives that not only help teachers build upon their existing practices
with physical manipulatives but also provide learners with non-overlapping
affordances that can help them develop deeper understandings of a school
subject (Soury-Lavergne & Maschietto, 2015).
In all these studies, which gain in sophistication in terms of identifying
increasingly effective ways of supporting students’ mathematical learning, the
research focus remains on the pedagogical tools. In terms of our examples in
the previous section, this would amount to studying the marbles, the cubes
and the rods as potential mediators of mathematical meaning. The question
of how the body takes up these tools remains implicit.

2.2 The Body in Mathematics Education Research

With the publication in 2000 of Lakoff and Núñez’s book Where Mathematics
Comes From, attention to the particular role played by the body in mathemat-
ics learning became a central focus of research. The authors emphasise the
sensorimotor experiences that can give rise, through s.c. ‘metaphoric map-
ping’ (creating a basic schema of mathematical thought), to the development
of certain mathematical concepts. For examples, actions such as gathering a
bunch of things together or walking along a path can entail bodily experiences
that act as metaphors for the concept of addition. The authors sought to
426 N. Sinclair and E. Jablonka

account for the emergence of mathematical ideas, but also managed to moti-
vate research on the design of particular bodily experiences that could be
metaphorically mapped, as well as other concepts, such as an arithmetic as
motion along a path, or fractions as containers (Wood, 2010).
A particular class of body movements has gained even more attention,
which is the movement of the hand and in particular movements of hands,
i.e. gestures. For example, Sinclair and Pimm (2015) take the pinching ges-
ture as an instantiation of the grounding metaphor of object collection. The
role of gestures in mathematics thinking has been studied extensively, with
many results of improved performance of students who are encouraged to use
gestures (Cook et al., 2008), and by teachers who use gestures in the class-
room (Singer & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Gestures offer a complementary,
spatial and temporal means of communication to language, and can thus
supplement and enrichen linguistic meanings (Núñez, 2003).
While acknowledging the important role that the body plays in shaping
mathematical understanding, this research treats the body as if it were an
intransitive verb, that is by focusing more on its movements alone than on its
movements with or on things. Most of the research on gestures, for example,
treats them as an accompaniment to speech and as a movement that occurs
‘in-the-air’, and thus at a distance from the material world.

2.3 The Body–Tool in Mathematics Education

This sub-section explores the shift from isolating the body or the tool to con-
sidering the body–tool interaction. Some researchers, for example, have stud-
ied gestures not just for their communicative potential but also for their
manipulative or epistemic value (Streeck, 2009). When a child uses Froebel’s
box to manipulate a cube, she is using her hand as a tool to operate on the
world, and not necessarily to communicate meanings to others. The fingers
and hand become tools, in the same way they do when we count on our fin-
gers. Yet these hand movements on the cube, particularly as they are repeated
over time, can become communicative, either as part of an imaginative replay-
ing of the event or in order to describe or recount events to others. The gesture
used to indicate the opening of a jar has become a gesture after repeated per-
formances of opening actual jars. The gesture of many quick finger-pointings
has become a gesture after repeated counting experiences.
With new touchscreen technologies, these types of gestures have changed,
not only in terms of the particular movements that are enabled by the inter-
face, but by the fact that they are often encountered and repeated, as in the
 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 427

zooming-in gesture of a smart phone. Here too the gesture can be seen as a
tool—but a special tool that is part of the body yet operates on the tablet. For
example, Sinclair and de Freitas (2014) describe the new gestures that arise
when a young learner interacts with TouchCounts, a multi-touch learning
application, gestures that begin as movements of the finger on the screen, but
can then turn into gestures ‘in-the-air’. Such situations help draw attention to
the trace of the structured movement with/on objects that give rise to ges-
tures, and may help explain their relevance to learning.
Before the advent of touchscreen technologies, the work led by Ferdinando
Arzarello on the different ways patterns of dragging geometric objects on the
screen helped to crystallise this manipulation-communication function. In
Arzarello et al. (2002), the authors identified several different operations of
the computer mouse—called drag modalities—that seemed to matter to the
cognitive experience of solving problems in a dynamic geometry environ-
ment. For example, ‘wandering dragging’, which involves dragging an object
haphazardly on the screen, was used when no hypothesis had been made
about the relationships between geometric objects. But ‘dummy locus drag-
ging’, where the mouse followed a certain path, was used when a hypothesis
had been made. Although these findings were offered within the context of
research on the use of dynamic geometry environments, the relevance of theo-
ries of embodiment is hard to overlook, since each of these drag modalities
relates to not only constraints of the tool but also the structured ways of mov-
ing the body.
The focus on manipulatives as concrete representations could thus be seen
as shifting, with the main reason for their use being “more to do with struc-
tured acts of moving than with acts of moving structures” (Ng et al., 2018,
p. 568, emphasis in original). As these authors state,

the main purpose of a manipulative is not to (re)present mathematical concepts,

but to mould the learner’s motions, in the process occasioning opportunities for
learners to expand and interweave their repertoires of mathematically relevant
structures. (p. 569)

As movement becomes more and more structured, the environment

becomes more orderly and perhaps more mathematical. At the same time, the
body becomes more and more integrated into the structured tool environ-
ment in such a way that it becomes difficult to separate these three compo-
nents. Instead of the emergence of an autonomous mathematics learner, we
might instead talk about the individuation of a body–tool–mathematics
assemblage, which not only refuses to position the tool as being exclusively
428 N. Sinclair and E. Jablonka

instrumental but also imagines a more permeable body–tool dyad. As in

Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) conception of the blind man and the cane, it becomes
difficult to see where the body–tool interface lies—is it where the hand
touches the cane, or at the tip of the cane, which ‘sees’ the ground it touches?

3 Motion and Inscription in the Mangle

of Tool–Body–Mathematics
Motion in the three introductory examples means performing, observing and
sensing tool–body relations in ways that stabilise into some pattern that
becomes an operational template, such as counting or algorithmic calcula-
tions. Executing operational templates supports and often precedes conceptu-
alisation (as the Serres quotation cited above suggests).
For example, in a study by Johnson et al. (2019), children were asked to
count an unstructured pile of 31 pennies. About 40% counted farther in the
number sequence when asked to count this larger collection than when just
asked to count out loud and to go as high as they could. Some children started
with an inconsistent co-ordination of numerals and objects, but then, pre-
sumably due to the rhythm of sliding pennies across the table while saying
each number word, swung into a successful pattern. A similar phenomenon
has also been observed in children’s use of TouchCounts, as they tap the screen
repeatedly to generate successive ordinal numbers (shown symbolically and
stated verbally)—with the added phenomenon of changes in speed accentuat-
ing a shift of attention from units to tens places (Sinclair & de Freitas, 2014).
In educational research, Palatnik and Abrahamson (2018) stress the epis-
temic function of

temporal-spatial movement patterns and sustaining the learner's attention to

these patterns […] as a means of alerting the learner's attention to latent irregu-
larities in the enactment that result from encountering in the workspace unfa-
miliar information structures. (p. 306)

Temporality has been explored as well through the concept of rhythm. For
example, Ingold (2011) has argued that rhythm is a “dynamic coupling of
movement” (p. 60) that provides an accessible accounting of the interfacing
of human and material. In mathematics education research, Bautista and
Roth (2012) have suggested that “it is precisely in rhythm that we find the
inseparability of affect and cognition” (p. 93). Indeed, Sinclair et al. (2016)
showed how rhythm could be used to study not only cognitive and affective
 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 429

aspects of learning but also social ones, and found how the changes in rhythms
over time related to new mathematical understandings.
We want to point out that when subprocesses enacted in the operational
template become incorporated into symbolic tools (i.e. mathematical nota-
tion), which then can be manipulated on a writing medium, mental opera-
tions evolve from the template and the concomitant visual and motoric
sensations. The example of the Chinese counting rods shows that their use led
to a particular mathematics that could not have emerged without them. A
more contemporary example that was studied by Menz (2015) shows how
this also occurred amongst a group of topologists working at a blackboard to
compile a list of obstructions for the projective plane and to classify these
obstructions for 2-regular directed graphs. The gestural template they devel-
oped as they drew, re-drew and mimed the embedding of an octahedron in a
torus eventually became a symbolic tool. While the visual and motoric sensa-
tions of the published diagrams (Fig. 3a) may be difficult to appreciate, its
traces are easier to follow and even mimic in any one of the 122 diagrams
drawn in chalk on the blackboard during the nine hours of collective mathe-
matical activity (Fig. 3b).
Some notations in the context of permutations offer a more accessible
example of how the traces of an operational template on a drawing medium
become a tool not only for recording a process but also for producing new
templates, new routines and new concepts. A permutation can be seen as the
process of rearranging a set of different objects. For example, when looking
for anagrams or playing Scrabble with the letters e v l i (four different permu-
tations of these produce meaningful English words), one may immediately see
that exchanging the last two letters l and i produces the word e v i l. To keep
track of this pair-switching that leaves the rest of the arrangement untouched
(a type of permutation that is called a transposition) one can, for example,
write (3, 4) where the numbers here refer to the previous position of the sym-
bols of the switched objects. Another way of keeping track of the movement
is to compare the original with the new arrangement, symbolised as a form of
mapping, by writing the new below the initial arrangement (Fig. 4). In this
notation, the import of bodily action in the form of spatial arrangements and
exchange of two objects is obvious.
To keep track of a sequence of transpositions a diagram such as in Fig. 5
can be produced. It shows all six permutations of the three letters a, e and r
(four of which make meaningful words). The six vertices (the dots) of this
graph are the permutations; edges (the lines) are drawn between the vertices
when one ‘word’ can be formed by a pair-switch from the adjacent word as
shown by the labels of these edges (see Clark, 2005). Starting with the ‘word’
430 N. Sinclair and E. Jablonka

Fig. 3 (a) A 2-regular orientations of C26 in their stylised form; (b) the drawing on the
backboard. (Source: diagram by graduate student Finn, Menz (2015), Figs. 6–18 (left)
p. 199; Fred’s diagram, Menz (2015), Figs. 6–16 (right), p. 196)

e v l i
(3,4)

e v i l
Fig. 4 A permutation of four letters achieved by swapping the last two. (Source:
Authors’ own diagram)

aer at the top, one arrives at the ‘words’ in the second ‘row’ by one transposi-
tion and at the ones in the last ‘row’ by two transpositions. This notation has
features both of an array and of a graph. Clark (2005) calls it a ‘transposition
graph’ and uses it to proof the parity theorem in a “pictorial, constructive, and
immediate way” (p. 124). There are many ways to arrive, through a series of
swaps, at a particular permutation. In the diagram, this can be explored by
moving along the edges and taking different paths from the initial word to the
target permutation (including some ‘detours’, going up and down or moving
in a zig-zag). While these paths consist of different numbers of swaps, they
have something in common, which is expressed in the parity theorem. It states
that either all such paths (sequences of transpositions) consist of an even
number of swaps or all such paths consist of an odd number of swaps. When
trying some different paths in the diagram (e.g. by moving along with a finger
 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 431

Fig. 5 A diagram showing all six permutations of the letters a, e and r in a transposi-
tion graph. (Source: Authors’ own diagram)

while counting on when moving between ‘rows’), it becomes obvious that it

is impossible that one path would consist of an odd number of steps and
another of an even number.
Similar pictorial, constructive and immediate approaches can be found
e.g. in the Cayley diagrams used in abstract algebra (group theory), where the
reasoning occurs not only visually through the graph, but temporally, as the
eyes or the finger move along edges from vertex to vertex. With these images,
mathematicians (and students) can perform complex mathematical proce-
dures even the absence of a visual stimulus. In such cases, the manipulative
operations of the hand, which moves along actual edges, become gestures
used to perform (for oneself or for others).

4 Some Futures of Embodiment

in Mathematics Education
In considering embodiment in relation to body–tool–mathematics, we have
come across a few interesting new areas of research. For example, in relation
to the discussion on rhythm, we have become interested in considering the
432 N. Sinclair and E. Jablonka

affective, perhaps even psychodynamic, dimensions of the kinds of opera-

tional templates we have been discussing. There could be, on the one hand,
the comfort and power of carrying out these structured routines, where the
hand seems to know where to go, as when one multiplies two three-digit
numbers on paper. Alternatively, and perhaps intensified around the tool
itself, it might be worth exploring the affective relations that arise from body–
tool interactions. Four decades ago, Papert (1980) was already talking about
objects-to-think-and-feel with, when discussing his own attachments to gears
as a young child. Turkle (2011) explored this idea further, studying the rela-
tionships that people developed with various types of tools, relationships she
terms ‘evocative’, and that were far from being merely instrumental or cogni-
tive. What tools and objects do we offer children in the mathematics class-
room? Do they stand a chance of being similarly evocative? Certainly, the
aesthetic considerations of Froebel’s ‘gifts’—not only in terms of their beauti-
ful design but also in terms of the attention to sensory knowing—are rarely
discussed in contemporary mathematics education literature on manipula-
tives or digital tools, but perhaps they could be.
From a more psychoanalytic point of view, Donald Winnicott’s (1953)
concept of a transitional object may also provide a fruitful avenue of research.
At the very least, it would challenge the customary assumption that manipu-
latives and digital tools are discardable after the required learning has taken
place. But it could also offer another image of the relationship that learners
and teachers might develop with mathematical materials, not only as provid-
ing physical and symbolic structures, but also as offering affective ones. At a
very basic level, for example, what are the affective structures at play when
children are asked to interact with very big objects, like the straight-edges and
compasses that teachers often use at the backboard, compared with the much
smaller versions of these tools? In the former, the whole body would be
involved in drawing the circle; the torso would be called upon to draw the
line; the eyes would have to move along the line and around the circle instead
of seeing it all at once. Gerofsky (2011) has conducted explorations in this
vein, studying how the size of students’ gestures relates to their own comfort
with and understanding of the graph of a function. While the causal links are
difficult to establish, it seems that gesturing a function with your whole body
can improve conceptual understanding. While Froebel’s ‘gifts’ tend to be quite
small, we are interested in the body-size rods of our third example and what
they entail in terms of large-scale operational templates.
Recognising the significance of performing and sensing patterned tool–
body relations also has implications for the way in which we might conceptu-
alise (cultural and individual) memory in mathematical practice. For example,
as Kiesow (2016) has observed, the extensive use of gestures in structuring
 Mathematics Learning: Structured Ways of Moving With 433

mathematical work with symbolic representations reveals the moving hands’

function as part of a ‘processor’. Further, we can think of (some) mathemati-
cal concepts as emerging from a reconstruction of a (cultural) repertoire of
gestural templates in the form of the mimetic memory of a practical activity
involving touch and a co-ordination of the movement of hand and eyes (e.g.
counting, or the concept of a circle from making pottery on a potter’s wheel
while keeping the same distance from the centre, as well as getting rid of
‘edges’). Then the function of manipulatives or mathematical tools for re-
activating these templates and their aesthetic effect can be explored—aesthetic
because they constitute part of mathematical sensing. This has political reper-
cussions as well; as per Rancière’s (2004) work, the aesthetic operates through
the conjunction of sensing and of ‘common’ sense, conditioning our modes of
perception, as well as our social institutions.

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 Social Choreographies in Primary School
Education
Cornelie Dietrich and Valerie Riepe

Scholastic and classroom instruction, with its specific social forms and forms
of communication, is, on the one hand, produced and shaped by the bodies
of the actors involved and, on the other hand, itself produces the latter pre-
cisely in their corporeality as scholastic actors. The becoming of the body in
and through school can be described as a “materialization of experience”
(Butler, 1993), in which, however, “bodies never quite comply with the norms
by which their materialization is impelled” (ibid., 2). The tension displayed
here between materialization, materialized experience and the dynamics and
resistance inherent to the process is the subject of this contribution. Living
human bodies are always bodies in movement: even during work requiring
great concentration, even during sleep. These movements—as an expression
of the human ability and need for movement—are given a scholastically con-
densed form that is suitable for teaching and that we will discuss in what fol-
lows as social choreography. The aim is to make the dual significance of the
moving body for everyday life in the classroom comprehensible and suscep-
tible to empirical research: as both formative and formed, as both implement-
ing pedagogical orders and commenting upon them (Hewitt, 2005; Klein,
2010; Dietrich & Riepe, 2019; Riepe, 2021). What we called social

C. Dietrich (*)
Humboldt Universität of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: dietricc@hu-berlin.de
V. Riepe
University of Applied Science Europe, Hamburg, Germany

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 437
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_27
438 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

choreographies are regularly occurring forms of movement that are (by virtue
of having become) self-evident for all participants. As dependable orders, they
structure the movements of a group in space according to certain rules, and as
such, they are also significant for each social order in the pedagogical domain.
We discuss the connection between the two aspects: the rule-governed move-
ment and what it says about the pedagogical setting or how it helps to bring
the latter into being. We proceed in three steps in what follows.
We first present the theoretical concept of social choreography, as it is used
in dance studies and the social sciences (Sect. 1). We then elucidate this con-
cept by way of two empirical examples: firstly, that of circle time in primary
school, a configuration that is widespread in many pedagogical settings (Sect.
2.1); and, secondly, that of the choreographic treatment of the hierarchical
order between teacher and pupils by virtue of their positioning in space (Sect.
2.2). What interests us here is not only the creation of order by a disciplining
choreography but also the inter-responsiveness between order and disorder,
between rule-governed behaviour and vitalistic dynamics, out of which a
being-in-movement that is proper to schooling emerges in turn. Finally, we
will summarize the results of the theoretical and empirical investigations
(Sect. 3).

1 Social Choreographies
Choreography is colloquially understood as the conception, notation and
study of patterns of movement. Within dance studies, on the other hand,
there is constant debate about what choreography actually is (cf., e.g.,
Siegmund, 2010; Quinten & Schroedter, 2016). From the very start, what is
at issue here is the tension between the notation-centred, prescriptive aspect
and the performative, process-oriented aspect of choreography. The term cho-
reography was introduced at the court of Louis XIV and, starting in the late
seventeenth century, it was understood and used as synonymous for “dance
notation” (Brandstetter, 2005, p. 54). The emergence of the term can thus be
understood as an attempt to record the practice of dance at the royal court
using the medium of written language. Furthermore, the “art of dancing
according to choreography and writing dances” (Feldtenstein, 1972) served—
in the context of choreography treatises—as instruction for fitting courtly
behaviour in the public space (Brandstetter, 2005). Thus, since the beginning
of the history of choreography, there has been a connection between educa-
tional aims and the objective of giving the fleeting quality of dance a fixed
form and making it permanently visible.
 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 439

If, for dance studies, choreographies thus represent “the basic material for
studying concepts and practices of movement” (ibid., p. 53), Andrew Hewitt
tries to bring about an interweaving of aesthetic and sociological interpretive
models in his concept of “social choreography” (Hewitt, 2005). In so doing,
Hewitt opposes the one-sided reference to two different ‘body ideologies.’ One
of these he calls a materialistic ideology, which regards the body as material for
the implementation of pre-scripted discourses and social orders. Starting from
a materialistic concept of the body of this sort, one would try to explain how a
given social order would be inscribed in bodies, which then reproduce and
reify this order on a daily basis. Hewitt refers to the other ideology as that of
physical immanence, within which the body forms the final point of resistance
against social and discursive determinants. The point of departure is a vitalistic
view of the body, which, in following its own impulses, is continuously decid-
ing for or against a social order. According to Hewitt, the challenge would
consist of resisting these two competing ideologies of body politics:

We need a semiotic that articulates their interactions and collisions. The critical
challenge is to marry text-based analysis to the analysis of performance; a chal-
lenge that is not simply for dance historians but also for those cultural historians
who wish to learn from dance and who are dissatisfied with their discipline’s
tendency to reduce aesthetic phenomena to the status of document, to its sim-
ple sociological determinants. (ibid., p. 10)

He treats social choreographies here not as a metaphor, but rather as the

aesthetic medium for rehearsing social order:

This study differs in substance from the writings on the dance metaphor cited in
an earlier note by stressing the social and political function of choreography—
its disposition and manipulation of bodies in relation to each other—over the
metaphysical resolution that dance offers. Rather than being interested in ques-
tions of how the metaphor, or even the practice, of choreography resolves prob-
lems of metaphysical subjectivity, this study will concern itself instead with the
historical emergence of choreography (within modernism broadly defined) as a
medium for rehearsing a social order in the realm of the aesthetic. Particularly
when dealing with performative genre, moreover, that constantly demarcates its
own artistic borders even as it acknowledges what its material (the body) has in
common with the extraaesthetic—“metaphor” is an inadequate model for
understanding the relationship of aesthetics to politics. (ibid., pp. 11–12)

He thus also opposes the view that performativity does not follow a script,
but rather first emerges in doing: “you think you are acting spontaneously, but
440 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

look, let me show you the script” (Hewitt, 2005, p. 46). What is at issue for
him is not dissolving the dichotomy between determined script and freedom,
but rather uniting the two poles: “Bodies are not writing. This being said
however, they clearly do signify; the challenge is to understand how they do
it” (Hewitt, 2005, p. 8). For what we say about a movement should also
express the mobility of the movement and thus open up as wide an array of
interpretive models as possible.
The dance scholar and sociologist Gabriele Klein further develops Hewitt’s
concept in relation to the public space and, using examples drawn from every-
day culture, illustrates “how the social as a choreographic order is already
inscribed in the public space” (Klein, 2010, p. 97). According to Klein, the
concept of social choreography “thus does not primarily relate to the social
aspect of choreography in the sense of a social aspect of the aesthetics of dance.
Rather social choreography relates to the aesthetics of the social as a performa-
tive order of space, body, movement and subjects” (ibid., p. 101). Drawing on
Hewitt, she assumes that social choreographies create reality: a reality that
comes into being in the process of giving order to bodies in movement, fol-
lowing predetermined rules or rules that they have themselves created. For
Klein, social choreography could thus become an

analytical category that allows us to think the spatiality and temporality of the
social as a mobile, but in its mobility still structured pattern of inclusion and
exclusion, of marginalization and power, but also of subversion, transformation
or revolution. (ibid., p. 101)

In what follows, we want now to look more closely at the aesthetic-analytical

category within social choreography that Hewitt and Klein emphasize. Social
choreography can thus become an analytical category that aims to uncover the
aesthetic in the social. We follow Hewitt here and look for moments of inter-
action and collision between the vitalistic and materialistic dimensions: we
take the mobility of movement particularly seriously even where it eludes
unambiguous ascriptions of meaning.

2 Studying Social Choreographies

in Primary School
We now present two phenomena in which pedagogical order, social choreog-
raphy and the vitalistic obstinacy of children are intertwined: on the one
hand, the choreography of the circle, which is extremely popular in German
 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 441

primary schools, and, on the other hand, the regulation of the relationship of
above and below in the classroom, which is played out both at the blackboard
and physically and in the visual axes to which the physical movements give
rise. The following analyses were developed in the context of ethnographic
studies that were carried out in four primary schools (Dietrich & Riepe, 2019).

2.1 Circle Time

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the strict seating arrangement in classrooms, in
which children sit in rows at single or double desks, has gradually become
more varied. Thus, group tables (with four to six children) were introduced,
and the circular formation has been introduced more and more frequently as
well. All more recent choreographies involve the same programmatic objec-
tive of allowing children to see (and look at) one another better and promot-
ing discussion-based activities and cooperation among the pupils. Circle time,
in particular, favours equal, participatory communication among pupils and
between pupils and teachers. Thus, Peterßen’s Kleines Methodenlexicon notes
that in circle time [Kreisgespräch: literally ‘circle talk’]:

[C]hildren and teacher sit together in an open circle of chairs …, so that every-
one can look as one another. […] It should always be used when genuine discussion
is sought, in order to translate what has been learned or even merely thought
into words, in order to gain mutual familiarity with different views, etc.
(Peterßen, 2001, p. 168 [our emphasis—C.D./V.R.])

In the presentation, we focus here on those dimensions of circle time that

have coalesced into key categories (Breidenstein et al., 2013, p. 157) in the
course of the material analyses:

(a) the circle as a geometric figure in Euclidean space,

(b) the circle as a moving line in the practical space of the actors and
(c) the circle as a figure enclosing a middle or an object (of learning).

Whereas the first dimension, as the imagining of an ideal equality, is par-

ticularly frequently mentioned and invoked in the linguistic and visual docu-
ments, the two latter dimensions first emerge from the ethnographic studies
of the concrete practical approaches to and ways of thematizing circular
seating.
442 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

2.2 The Circle as a Geometric Figure in Euclidean Space

As a geometric figure formed from the children’s bodies, we encounter the

circle in all sorts of pedagogical contexts, from pre-school and primary school
to adult education: as circular seating or a morning circle, a discussion circle,
singing in a circle or a circle for reflection. Heinzel (2001, 2016) mentions the
symbolic significations of the circle: community, connectedness, a wholeness
that is greater than its parts and equality. She interprets the “triumphal march”
of circular seating in the primary school of the 1990s as a form in which hier-
archies can be dismantled and in which democratic learning processes, as well
as conflict mediation and problem-solving, can succeed. According to
Peterßen (2001), circular seating was transferred from the family table to
school in reform pedagogy and has been regarded ever since as a stable com-
plement to individualized and competitively organized scholastic learning
(Fig. 1).
In the ethnographic study of everyday school life, however, this equality in
the circle appears to be far less complete than the discussed programmatic

Fig. 1 Source: Authors’ own picture

 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 443

writings suggest. In their ethnographic research, both de Boer (2006) and

Kellermann (2008) have noted how merely by way of the organization of
speaking turns, the asymmetrical generational and role difference between
teacher and pupils is constantly maintained and the claim to an “egalitarian
exchange among children and with the teacher” (Kellermann, 2008, p. 190)
is thus belied. Whereas previous research usually examines the speech acts
within the circle, but assumes the circle itself as a given, in what follows, in
addition to looking at the linguistic level, we will undertake corporeally based,
choreographic analyses of movements.
From an observation record, school A:

Then Ms. Schuhmann announces that the children should sit in a circle. But she
says that the circle has to look a little different than usual: “the circle has [to be]
less circular,” “more like a rectangle,” “no one is permitted to sit here,” “there has
to be place here for a line of people,” she instructs and indicates a gap with her
arms, like a flight attendant, making large movements—arms outstretched and
hands held straight at almost a 90 degree angle from the elbow—while the chil-
dren sit down on the floor […]. Using additional slow arm movements—arms
and hands held parallel and close to each other in front of each child and stand-
ing with legs and feet parallel to one another—she assigns the children at the
openings of the circle a kind of ‘parking space’ on the circular line.

The teacher’s instructions about ‘a circle, but less circular, more like a rect-
angle’ must seem contradictory to the children. She thus starts to get the
children organized using bodily gestures to make clear what she wants. Her
movements are reminiscent of those of a flight line marshaller at an airport or
a parking lot attendant, who direct the arriving planes or cars to their places.
The large arm movements first serve to demarcate a (restricted) area, where
the children are not allowed to be. Using language and bodily gestures, she
thus establishes her position as a possessor of knowledge, while, at the same
time, addressing the children as unknowing tools to carry out her conception.
Within the process of producing the circle, she has thus again displayed the
asymmetrical difference in roles between the children and her.

2.3 The Circle as Moving Line in the Children’s Space

of Action

Further interpretive horizons are opened up when we look at the circle as the
arena for the children’s action. The children themselves first create the circle
by forming its outer line and turning towards the interior. If we focus our
444 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

attention on how such circles come into being, how they are dissolved again
and everything that happens on the line of the circle during circle time, we
find interactive movements between two or three neighbours, playful horsing
around in ‘make-believe’ mode, pensive interactions with one’s own body or
its accessories (watch, bracelet, shoes, hair, face, shoulders and legs) as well as
with what is outside the line of the circle: desks, pens, folders, books and so
on. The children know the choreographic rules: you are not supposed to have
anything in your hands, knapsacks are put behind the chairs and you do not
touch your neighbour. But, at the same time, the children are constantly play-
ing with these precepts of circle time at the border between inside and outside
that they themselves form. In its mobility, this line appears fragile and highly
demanding (Fig. 2).
The circular seating can be grasped as a dynamic process in this dimension,
inasmuch as both the circular line, by virtue of comings and goings, and the
circle as a whole—say, due to the formation of pairs—is repeatedly com-
mented on, called into question or even negated. For the children, the circle
is not only a geometric figure, which is imposed on them as ordering structure,
but rather it is also and perhaps above all a moving line, which first emerges
from the children’s bodies.
The following excerpt from the observation record describes how the circu-
lar seating arrangement comes into being in a third primary school class:

Fig. 2 Source: Authors’ own picture

 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 445

T.: “So, I’d like you now to sit in a circle” […]. The children react in very
different ways. Some push desks toward the walls to create an open
space in the middle. Two children sit on one of the tables and begin to
talk to each another and to horse around playfully, while keeping an eye
on what is going on in the emerging middle of the circle […]. Other
children take their chair, put it somewhere in the open space […], take
another chair, and so on. Still others push three or four of the chairs that
are jumbled together in the middle toward the imaginary line, one next
to the other; then they sit down. While this collective work is happen-
ing, there are many brief encounters between two or three children who
look at each other, touch each other, talk and coordinate. […] This goes
on for 90 seconds and then all of them sit down in a circle on their
chairs and—little by little—turn their heads toward the middle. In the
meanwhile, the teacher has taken several objects from a canvas bag and
placed them on the floor in the middle; she wants then to show and
discuss them in the circle. As she marks the end of the transitional situ-
ation by saying “So, I’ve brought you different things here,” the way in
which the children move changes. They are now sitting one by one on
their chairs. Their movements and physical interactions can all be situ-
ated on the depth axis (front/back), but hardly any more on the breadth
axis (right/left). It is striking how often the children touch themselves on
legs, shoulders, head and hair. Their upper body tilts forward or they
lean backwards, sometimes with the chair rocking back and forth a lit-
tle. They scrape their feet, back and forth, on the floor and cross them.”

In the 90 seconds that it takes to form the circle—the liminal, weakly

structured transitional phase between two lesson sequences (Göhlich &
Wagner-Willi, 2001)—the space of the children’s action is more open and
multidirectional than in the situation of the established circle. The task of
together forming a circle gives an impetus to move in the group of children.
Phenomenologically, a collective circle subject, in the sense of an intercorpo-
reality (Waldenfels, 2015, p. 215), can be assumed. The movement-events
that result from the intermediate spaces between the children, from the “inter-
twining of one’s own and the other’s movements” (ibid., p. 216), form a spe-
cial field of forces, in which there is a collision between what is one’s own and
what is in common; we would otherwise be dealing with a “frictionless pro-
cess of assembly line work” in the classroom (ibid., p. 215). The individual is
here a point in a common line; it is only possible to understand and experi-
ence the line, however, by expanding the boundaries of one’s own body
towards one’s neighbours, so that the line can be closed. This is easier to
446 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

understand on the background of the children’s experience, which includes

not only circular seating in the form of a circle of chairs (which is already
known from pre-school) but also circle games, in which children play both
with the fragility of the circular line and with alternating between a radially
centred and decentred focus of their attention: this alternation is often what
makes the game interesting.

For example, in ‘Plumpsack’ (a German game similar to ‘Duck, Duck, Goose’),

all the children stand in a circle, except for one who walks around the outside of
the circle, drops an object behind one of the children as discreetly as possible,
and then runs once around the circle. The child who has thus been marked has
to catch the runner in time; otherwise, he or she is the next one who has to run
around the circle and try to become part of it again. “Don’t turn around, because
the Plumpsack is going around. Whoever turns around or laughs, gets a knock
on the back.”

There is a tension between the prohibition on turning around and the need
to do just that, if you do not want to be the loser or, in other words, excluded
from the circle. Each current movement in these games arises out of the inher-
ent choreography, which is the product of various fields of tension: between
inside and outside (front and back), closed and open circle (right and left),
staying still and moving (standing and running), touching and not touching
one another. In every circle game, this necessarily gives rise to permanent
micro-movements, which transcend and comment on the order of the geo-
metric figure shown in the first section. Considered from the point of view of
the phenomenology of the body, a circle can thus only arise and be main-
tained, if the breadth axis (right/left) is continually secured; but the pedagogi-
cal order, on the other hand, requires an orientation to the radial depth axis
that is as rapid and exclusive as possible.

2.4 The Circle as Figure Enclosing a Middle

The circle always encloses objects: for example, playthings in discussion time
or objects that the teacher brings to illustrate something she wants to talk
about (Fig. 3). But there are also invisible objects in the middle: for example,
topics that the class council wants to discuss, contentious points or stories that
are being presented.
This still from a teaching video shows a religion lesson about the foods that,
in the Jewish tradition, form part of the Passover meal, which, from the point
of view of religious history, exhibits a close relationship to the Christian
 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 447

Fig. 3 Source: Authors’ own picture

Eucharist. The teacher has placed the foods, which are unfamiliar to the chil-
dren, in the middle of the circle. They include salt water, unleavened bread, a
dark brown apple mash, bitter herbs and so on. In the first part of the circle
time, she discusses the symbolic meaning of each of the foods with the chil-
dren. As the lesson continues, the children are encouraged to taste the foods
in the middle and to share them with others. The lesson thus runs, in the
spirit of practically oriented teaching, from discussion of the object to be
understood, by way of the remote sense of vision (looking at it), to direct
contact with the object in the form of touch and taste. The children’s reactions
are highly varied. Some of them are seemingly unreservedly open to what is
new and alien. The boy raising his hand at the back left of the picture has even
slid forward on his chair, and his eyes, arms, torso and even his legs are open
towards the middle: he has put himself in a kind of starting position, as if he
wanted to get going into the middle of the circle right away. And he is in fact
the child who first takes a piece of bread afterwards. Other children also raise
their hand, but with the other hand they encircle their own body: they main-
tain a balance between reserve, trying to reassure themselves, and their curios-
ity. And, finally, children can also be seen who—at least at this point still—are
crossing feet and hands, arms and legs, and who thus maintain a more closed
posture towards the foods, which are addressing them here in a materiality
that is both familiar and unfamiliar.
In terms of cultural history, however, the circular arrangement around an
object has much deeper roots. Sachs (1933) traces it back to the basic human
448 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

need “to measure and shape spaces with the body” (ibid., p. 100). Precisely in
early circle dances, the dancers do not only frequently encircle (imaginary)
centres, but also objects or persons to be found there. To encircle an object
here means “to take possession of it, to incorporate it, to bind and exorcise it
(‘spell circle’)” (ibid.). On the one hand, the dangerousness of what is danced
around is exorcized; on the other hand, it is brought into the community of
the dancers.
In circles that are organized for pedagogical purposes, the stimulation and
tension created by the alien object in the (thematic) middle are preserved
inasmuch as what is discussed in the circle always has a certain novelty. This is
also the case in the scene shown above. The objects that the teacher brought
with her were already mentioned in the story that the children heard previ-
ously, but in their sensory reality, they are new. In a group discussion, the
children said that they found what was discussed ‘exciting,’ ‘unusual,’ ‘cool’ or
‘funny.’ The alien object in the middle of the circle appeals to the children to
move towards it and to enter into communication with it. This centring
movement does not only occur mentally, however, but also has a corporeal
side, which can readily come into conflict with the conversational rules: one
of the most remarkable findings from the group discussions was that in
responding to the question about the rules of conduct during the story circle,
all the children mentioned keeping their feet still. You are not allowed to create
‘a disturbance with your feet’ when someone is talking. It is evidently hard for
the children to respect this keeping of their feet still when reacting to the
unsettlingly new and alien object in the middle of the circle.

2.5 Choreographic Height Axes and Hierarchical Rank

If up to now we have considered the breadth (right/left) and depth (front/

back) axes, we want now to supplement the latter by the dimensions of the
(power) axes above and below (Riepe, 2021). The regulation of heights in the
classroom here reveals a choreography that defines ‘permitted’ and ‘prohib-
ited’ levels:

Hylia seems absent. She rests her upper body on her thighs, so that her long,
dark hair falls forward, and she is shaking her hands, arms, upper body and
head. She carefully sits up while making this slow shaking movement, rounding
her shoulders and her hair falling over her face. When she is sitting upright
again, she now lets herself slowly slide backwards over the bench. First her hair
touches the floor and then her head. Her hands remain on her hips. Alessandro,
who is sitting next to her to the left, leans down toward her and smiles. No one
 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 449

else pays attention to her. She looks at me—I am sitting behind the rows of seat-
ing on a single chair—and laughs. Then she also puts her hands on the floor,
next to her head. Ms. Knapper now asks the children to count the syllables in
the words on the blackboard. Hylia then sits up straight again on the bench and
participates. Alessandro also counts, first kneeling on the bench; he then stands
up behind it and rocks back and forth from one leg to the other. He raises his
hand and is also called on by Ms. Knapper. Then Hylia stands up on the bench.
After just a few seconds, Ms. Knapper screams “Hylia sit down!” and she moves
her name down on the blackboard. “Where am I?” she whispers to Alessandro.
“You’re slipping further and further down!” he answers. “You’re at ready to
learn!” Ardi whispers. “Ah ok,” Hylia replies with a dismissive wave of the hand.
Hylia sets herself apart from the static formation by being one height line differ-
ent from the other pupils. She rests her upper body on her thighs, so that her
long, dark hair falls forward, she closes her hair-curtain to the scene in front of
her or opens up contents that are all her own to the observer: Hylia deprives
herself of the view of the blackboard and all her surroundings, veiling her eyes
and forming a self-enclosed unit unto herself, in a kind of ‘introspection.’ In
terms of the overall picture, from the observer perspective, she clearly sets herself
apart physically from the group. From the teacher’s perspective, she simply dis-
appears behind the backs of the people in the rows in front of her. As the sliding-
forward movement becomes a shaking articulation of hands, arms, upper body
and head, she is, moreover, the only dynamic aspect in the picture. The vigorous
gestures make her isolation now seem more aggressive and like a form of tense
refusal of her surroundings. She carefully sits up while making this slow shaking
movement, rounding her shoulders and her hair falling over her face. She thus
cautiously and tensely approximates the position of the other pupils, but—in
terms of her view—still remains shut off. She now repeats her movement from
above, forwards and downwards and then back to the starting position, but in
the other direction, backwards and downwards (Figs. 4, 5, 6, and 7). When she
is sitting upright again, she thus lets herself slowly slide backwards over the
bench. First her hair touches the floor and then her head. Her hands stay loosely
on her hips. Her arms are not placed on the hips with fingers visible from the
front, so that the gesture takes up less space or appears less aggressive, but rather
as maintaining contact with the requisite bench (Fig. 4). The connection to the
floor and the simultaneous revealing of her face now bring her back into the
overall picture, also because Alessandro leans down over her and smiles at her.
The rest of the situation continues to be unaffected by her activity. The tension
involved in Hylia’s movement reaches its highpoint when her gaze is now clearly
directed at the observer and she laughs. Her focus on herself, seemingly inwards,
is thus turned outwards again. By addressing the observer, a person who is not
directly involved in the scene, via eye contact and the laughter that follows it,
she presents herself not as caught-in-the-act and abashed, but rather as defiant
and motivated.
450 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

Fig. 4 Source: Authors’ own picture

Fig. 5 Source: Authors’ own picture

 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 451

Fig. 6 Source: Authors’ own picture

The moment is interrupted by the teacher, who asks Hylia to count the syl-
lables in the words on the blackboard and thus to put herself back into the
overall picture. Hylia then sits up properly on her bench and, actively cooper-
ating, disappears within the homogeneous formation. A common rhythm of
all the students is restored and yet each of them acts for him- or herself.
Alessandro, who up to now has been the only pupil to respond to Hylia’s
movements, also actively counts the syllables. Now, he becomes the dynamic
corporeal focus, first kneeling on the stool, then standing up behind it—thus
opening up what is so far the highest level beneath the standing teacher—and
rocking from one leg to the other, back and forth in rhythm with the syllable-
counting class. He raises his hand and is also called on. His departure from
the overall arrangement is thus marked as ‘seen’ and acceptable, since his body
is in uniform rhythm with the situation.
452 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

MOVEMENT DIAGRAM IN HEIGHTS

HIGH
MAX STANDING ON THE STOOL

EYE-HEIGHT TEACHER

“READY TO GO” SITTING

LOW
MAX LYING ON THE FLOOR

Fig. 7 Source: Authors’ own diagram

As if she had to surpass his ‘height,’ Hylia now stands up on the bench, thus
constituting the corporeal and dramaturgical apex of the arrangement. This is
underscored by the teacher’s screaming “Hylia sit down!” and then moving her
name down on a list on the blackboard (Fig. 6). Her highest point is thus fol-
lowed by the steepest fall: physically, from standing up on the stool to sitting and
as evaluated by the teacher on a hierarchical measuring rod on the blackboard.
Hylia’s corporeal uprising is interpreted as provocation or crossing of a line by Ms
Knapper. But why did she get up on the stool? Did she want to provoke Ms
Knapper? Did she want to have a better view of the board? Did she want to
outdo Alessandro? Or did the tension simply burst out of her at this point?
If, up to now, all the other movements in the class were tolerated by Ms
Knapper, she clearly marks standing on the stool as breaking the rules. The
sharp disciplinary reaction can thus clearly be attributed to the teacher’s eye
level. Her eyes are above those of all the children (including those who are
squatting or standing; Fig. 4). The highest height and power axis in the class
is reserved exclusively for her or is exclusively embodied by her.
The ‘list’ that is used in the class also alludes to the hierarchical height axis
in the room. It can be understood as the changing of a traffic light in which
the children start at green (ready to learn) and could slip down to yellow
(warning, reprimand) and red (time out) or, alternately, move up to more
intense green (good, super, fantastic). As invocation of a “doing equality”
 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 453

(Dietrich, 2017), in the sense of a (supposedly) homogeneous starting posi-

tion, all the children begin each day at ‘ready to learn’ and move ‘up’ or ‘down’
from there. At the end of the school day, the children in the ‘fantastic’ and
‘super’ range then receive a sticker on a special index card. There are only
consequences in the lower part of the list in the lowest, red ‘time-out’ cate-
gory, since the child is then brought to the so-called island: a room with
monitor, in which the child has to read the class rules again and write down
which rule he or she has broken.
The relative terms ‘above’ and ‘below’ prove to be particularly relevant in
communication, which makes Hylia’s corporeal dialogue with the height lev-
els even more plausible.

“Where am I?” Hylia whispers to Allesandro, thus returning to the self-involved,

introspective picture from the beginning of the scene and simultaneously, by vir-
tue of the low voice in which she speaks, resubmitting to the rules of her sur-
roundings—and the disciplining of the list. “You’re slipping further and further
down!” the latter replies, thus summing up the curve of her movement. If, at first,
Hylia only moved her body ‘downward’ (and later ‘upward’), she is now ‘pushed
down’ the blackboard in front of everyone by Ms. Knapper. A parallel could be
made here between the expressions ‘slipping down’ and ‘getting on the wrong
track’: as the taking of an undesirable ‘bad turn’ or as a moral fall. “At ready to
learn!” Ardi whispers from the row in front of her. “Ah ok,” Hylia replies with a
dismissive wave of the hand, since “ready to learn” is the zero-line from which all
curves of movement, both upwards and downwards, are possible again.

In the other material as well (Riepe, 2021, p. 161f ), the body levels between
above and below become apparent as a permanent controlling instance of the
hierarchical distribution of the situations and thus, on the one hand, include
lying, sitting and standing postures. On the other hand, it is constantly repro-
ducing both the homogeneous (zero-)line of the targeted mean of the normal
distribution—as seated pupils—and the power axis of the teacher’s line of
sight, which is always (physically) superior to the children.
As against the participatory ideal of a ‘pedagogy of equals,’ which is also
repeatedly mentioned as goal in such discussions with the teachers:

T: So, I always try (--) how can I say it (-) at the same level, eye-to-eye; (-)
it’s important to me (.) that I have a good relationship with the children-
(-) that they (.) so, I take the children as (.) they are ….

It is, nonetheless, apparent here that the line of sight of the—above all,
standing—teacher is a non-negotiable upper limit of the height and power axis.
454 C. Dietrich and V. Riepe

3 The Organization of Equality and Hierarchy

as Two Examples of a Corporeal
Pedagogical Dynamic
Using the examples of the corporeal order of the circle and the exploration of
new (lesson) objects in ‘the middle’ and the axes between ‘above and below’ in
rehearsing and reflecting on linguistic phenomena, the focus on social chore-
ography serves here to broaden our perspective on the production of order via
space and time in a pedagogical setting.
Thus, the body formations discussed and their pedagogical intentions are
characterized by different either tightly meshed or loose systems of (corporeal)
rules; it is apparent in them, however, that considerably more than just an
arrangement of children’s bodies for the purpose of facilitating orderly or
instructive discussion is realized in practice.
The circle is not simply the contours, comprising children’s bodies, of a
stage for social interactions, but is itself a form of interaction and brings its
own dimensions of meaning into play. In circle time, a series of axes of move-
ment are created, which call, in varied and ambivalent ways, on the children
involved to move between inside and outside, between centre and periphery,
as individual body and simultaneously as an intercorporeal subject amidst the
other children, to position themselves and thus to behave as being-positioned
by the teacher and the things. This ambivalent variety of movement axes and
possibilities is inherent to the choreography of the circle. From the point of
view of cultural history, it was possible to illuminate not only the sense of
community and the idea of equality and wholeness, but also the fascination of
the alien object in the middle, which wants to be incorporated, but to which,
at the same time, a certain distance must be maintained. Thus, scenes of
movement and contact (between one another) arise in every chair circle, dis-
cussion circle, morning circle, even though precisely these two things, move-
ment and contact, cannot be permitted. A ‘semiotics of collision’ (Hewitt,
2005) comes into being here: a fabric of meanings in which very heteroge-
neous elements are brought into relation with one another.
Thus, on the one hand, the symbolic order of equal participation in the
sense of a ‘doing equality’ was apparent. This order can best be grasped by the
Euclidean figure of the circle, which gives expression both to cultural symbol-
ics of equality and, in the scholastic context, to symbolics of the child-friendly
opportunity to contribute one’s own topics and standpoints. On the other
hand, the corporeal-intellectual order of behavioural dispositions towards
productive discussion in the sense of a ‘doing sameness’ also became apparent
 Social Choreographies in Primary School Education 455

(Dietrich & Riepe, 2019; Riepe, 2021). The latter includes the rules, which
apply in the circle, of speaking in turns and of keeping quiet, in linguistic
terms, and, above all, still in physical terms. This demands restraining sponta-
neous ideas, as well as minimizing body movements: in particular, sideways
movements and movements towards the exterior. But it also includes the
expectation that all children should relate in a similarly engaged, interested
and curious way to the alien object (of learning) in the middle of the circle.
If these dimensions appear in the circle primarily in relation to the physical
spatial level, the guided exercise on the blackboard can be assigned to the level
of temporal rhythming. Thus, variations in the movement of the students’
bodies continue to be accepted by the teacher, as long as they, on the one
hand, fit into the rhythm of the situation and, on the other, remain subordi-
nate to the height axis of the teacher’s line of vision.
Finally, all the dimensions of pedagogical order are met by vitalistic-
spontaneous responses of the children. Here, instead of speaking of a ‘doing
something,’ we need to speak of a ‘being my lived and answering body.’
Whereas the children are engaged in the production of—two, in themselves,
contradictory—equalities in the above-mentioned dimensions, they are
always already corporeal beings in their dual form of having a body and being
a body. Whereas the explicit pedagogical intention addresses the child’s body
as an instrument for creating and maintaining pedagogical orders, the impe-
tus to move that is inherent to the process stimulates the children in expressive
and corporeal terms. This can also be read, with Butler (1990), as the reitera-
tion of a resistance that is inevitably contained in the process: as the redirect-
ing of the norm that is always inherent to every repetition of the norm.

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 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial
Subjectivation: Educational Videography
Research in Glocalised Classrooms
Juliane Engel and Cristina Diz Muñoz

Based on the results of an interdisciplinary project on glocalised living envi-

ronments1 this contribution discusses how students locate themselves rela-
tionally in the face of new relational possibilities. In accordance with current
demands, which emphasise that the image-like (and already existing, finished)
subject can no longer be used as the starting point for education theories (cf.
Thompson et al., 2017; Tervooren & Kreitz, 2018), it addresses the question
of how (postcolonial) subjectivations take place—how the pupils’ subject-
hood in glocalised classrooms is performatively assumed as an ongoing pro-
cess (Butler, 2015). In this perspective it can be analysed how the unspeakable
is articulated relationally, for example physically, and how the ambivalence
between the undermining and the recognition of globalising norms of one’s
own and of others, for example as relations of domination, as powerful,
productive, optimising, and submissive positioning of the pupils, is also phys-
ically negotiated. It can be understood in terms of the (subaltern) subject’s

1
Funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG: ‘Glocalised Environment: Reconstructing the Modes
of Ethical Judgement in Geography Lessons’. (Prof. Dr. Juliane Engel, University of Bamberg; Partners:
Prof. Dr. Rainer Mehren, University of Gießen, PD Dr. Stefan Applis, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg),
Term: 2015–2019. “The term ‘glocalization’ […] describes this increasing complexity of potential interrela-
tions as a dynamic process of local and global developments. By indicating complexity or rather by showing
the multi-directionality of the globalization concept itself, locality and globality can be understood in their
syncratization, and thereby counter widespread notions of globalization created by a mostly eurocentric
perspective.” (https://www.paedagogik.phil.fau.de/dfg-research-project-glocalized-living-environments/)

J. Engel (*) • C. Diz Muñoz

University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
e-mail: j.engel@em.uni-frankfurt.de; c.diz@em.uni-frankfurt.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 457
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_28
458 J. Engel and C. Diz Muñoz

agency (Spivak, 2012): what is mostly discussed within discourses on achieve-

ment’s optimisation as a lack of competence of individual students could be
then thought and revised in its postcolonial dimension.
Whose bodies are being taught and sustained in the classroom arises at this
point as a central aspect to be considered in our investigation. The basis for
this shift is a relational praxeology which, as an innovation in education the-
ory, opens up new access to the physical level of subjectivation processes in
glocalised classrooms.
The insight into the relativity and materiality of educational processes is based
on empirical observations. It in turn creates a need for a corresponding system-
atic further development of educational-qualitative methodology (Althans &
Engel, 2016; Engel et al., 2021). If one looks, for example, at current discourses
of video-based learning and teaching research, it is surprising how the visualisa-
tion procedure of videography is attributed an objectifying character in many
places—both in quantitative and in qualitative studies—and how the construc-
tional achievements of videographies for the innovation of educational science
objects are often neglected (Engel, 2015). With Hall (1997), practices of repre-
sentation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write. In our
work we therefore start from the question of how something is made visible
through educational videographies and how structural invisibilisations (must)
therefore occur (Engel, 2016a, 2016b). We aim to interrogate the particular
understanding of what a coherent image construction is—which goes back to
Greek antiquity and has been increasingly conventionalised. Against this cul-
tural-historical background and in view of their (methodologically mostly
unquestioned) dominant subject positioning, methodological and practical defi-
nitions in discourses of videography research can therefore be critically interro-
gated and reformulated. We will demonstrate this in three steps in the following:
First, by discussing how embodied learning can be made accessible through vid-
eography (1), then by exploring the implications of postcolonial cultural theories
on the epistemological potential of videography when it comes to embodied
learning processes (2), and finally by explaining how the embodiment of social
norms can be understood as subaltern processes of subjectification (3).

1 On the (In-)Visibility of Learning Processes:

Videography as a Way of Seeing
in Education Research
What do we see when we talk about learning, educational processes, or teach-
ing? How do identify the active parties in these processes? And how do we
define the beginning and end of the processes we observe? These questions
 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation… 459

have been debated since the dawn of research on learning and education; they
come up again in the context of classroom videographies when the research-
ers’ analytical attitude is to be destabilised and the various entities are not
fixed from the outset. Researching body-related learning and educational pro-
cesses means going beyond considering them solely on the level of student-
teacher interaction and as something that can be easily captured on camera.
Instead, the research takes a broader perspective and examines these processes
in their spatial dimension, in the relationship between human and object, in
the performativity and materiality of the event (cf. Engel, 2019). But to avoid
centring anthropocentric epistemological logic as a given, we must reexamine
the methods of data collection and evaluation of classroom research focused
on educational investigation on “qualitative meaning-understanding meth-
ods” (Proske & Rabenstein, 2018, p. 7)2 insofar as, in keeping with the per-
formative, practical, and material turn, learning practices are conceptualised
as processes of relationalisation rather than as exclusive attributes of a ‘strong’
subject, in the sense of an anthropocentric logic of knowledge (Jörissen, 2015;
Rabenstein, 2018a).
In German-speaking education science, the concept of subjectivation is pri-
marily discussed in connection with Butler’s and Austin’s theories on processes
of discursive invocations (e.g. Rose & Ricken, 2017).3 In contrast, the term
subjectification is used more in connection with investigations of socio-material
dimensions (e.g. Gelhardt et al., 2013; Alkemeyer & Buschmann, 2016;
Rabenstein, 2018a, 2018b). The present text interrelates these two approaches;
that is it discusses how things or spaces can be modalities of invocation and
how they too have the potential to subjectivise. In order to operationalise
both epistemic qualities in our analysis, we trace the interplay and relational-
ity of processes of subjectivation or subjectification in their performative,
socio-material, and spatial levels.
In European iconography, the golden ratio has been tied to anthropological
or subject-theoretical positionings of normative provenance since the Ancient
Greek statues and even more so since the Renaissance (cf. Belting, 2011 for a
discussion of the golden ratio in relation to bodies and de Campos et al., 2015
in relation to bodies and space). To expand this historico-cultural

2
All translations of hitherto untranslated quotes from sources in German are by the authors. Please com-
pare the information in the bibliography.
3
In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), Judith Butler summarises this argumentation
scheme, which is relevant for education theory, as follows: “no subject emerges without a ‘passionate
attachment’ to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent (even if that passion is ‘negative’ in
the psychoanalytic sense). It is the formation of this unconscious attachment through dependency that
leaves the subject open to ‘subordination’ and ‘exploitation’ and which supports the order of power”
(1997a, p. 7).
460 J. Engel and C. Diz Muñoz

argumentation we should note that the idea of optimisability qua media-

based observation was established in pedagogy from an early stage, since it can
already be found in the time of panoptism (Jörissen, 2011, 2014). The
Meritentafel (honour roll plaque) for example can be interpreted as a technol-
ogy to visually objectify inner moral states (ibid., 2014). This also means that
in the European cultural sphere, a basic panoptic structure has been inherent
in pedagogy since its (modern) emergence and informs certain discourses on
classroom videography research.
From the perspective of subjectification theory, our text reflects on this
(very condensed) historico-cultural analysis of the discursive connections
between imaging procedures in pedagogy and the phantasms and semantics of
subject-centred optimisation and related practices of disciplining bodies.
In the following, we ask how “in our culture, human beings are made sub-
jects” (Foucault, 1983). With attention to the dynamics of power, we analyse
the sociocultural conditions and possibilities (Gomolla & Radtke, 2002) that
produce people as unequal subjects through processes of invocation and dis-
ciplinary practices of governance (Keller, 2017; Bosančić & Keller, 2019;
Alkemeyer & Brümmer, 2019). From an education theory perspective, we are
interested in how unequal subjects are produced and how they are “integrated
into discourses and power relations” (Keller et al., 2012). For some time now,
there has been a new surge of interest in educational theories of subjectiva-
tion/subjectification4 (Ricken et al., 2019b; Fritzsche, 2012; Tervooren,
2006). In both school pedagogy (Reh & Rabenstein, 2013; Rabenstein,
2018a, 2018b) and general pedagogy (Rose & Ricken, 2017; Ricken et al.,
2017), research has been conducted that focuses on the phenomenon of sub-
jectification from the perspective of education theory (Rieger-Ladich, 2004,
2012; Kleiner & Rose, 2014). Compared to approaches in cultural studies
and sociology (cf. Amling & Geimer, 2016, 2017; Traue et al., 2018; Spies,
2019), which can empirically show how practices of bodily (self-)government
are entangled in social discourses (Bröckling, 2007), the perspectives of edu-
cation science raise awareness of transformational potentials and open up
space to reflect on changing bodily practices of subjectification, or on how
pedagogical processes are made possible by practices of subjectification.
Hence, thinking with Foucault, ‘being made a subject’ goes hand in hand
with the idea of

4
Butler uses the term subjectivation to analyse the discursive production of the subject, while Foucault
uses the term subjectification. Both of these traditions are relevant to our approach. In this text, we are
mostly using the term subjectification, as we are concerned with the dynamics of power at play in pro-
cesses of discursive production of the subject.
 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation… 461

fashioning oneself into a subject—but it is also precisely the intersection of

these two aspects that constitutes a particular challenge that calls for further
inquiry that is not only categorical and theoretical but also empirical and meth-
odological. (Ricken et al., 2019a)

Based on this genetic approach to analysis that calls attention to the bodily
processes of subject formation, our text builds on empirical studies that focus
on how practices of (unequal) subjectification through placement in space
have been transformed and transmitted.
We are interested in these signifying placements in space as (re)addressing,
from the perspective of education theory, as this allows for an analytical per-
spective on the questions:

As whom is someone addressed, how is that person addressed as someone spe-

cific, and whom does this addressing turn them into? And to whom do they turn
themselves into in response to that addressing? (Ricken & Kuhlmann, 2019, p. 3)

Our reconstructions of subjectivising practices of bodily signifying are

based on videography studies and are particularly attentive to the dynamics of
addressing. On that basis, we have developed videography research that
attends to how looking through the camera is itself an event marked by power
relations. We discuss it as a sociocultural practice of rendering visible (Kolbe
et al., 2008; Kravagna et al., 1997). From a postcolonial perspective, render-
ing visible vulnerable groups or groups that are othered is particularly impor-
tant (cf. Spies, 2018; Traue et al., 2019). This is because relations of recognition
are based on visibilities in which visuality itself is given an epistemic status, as
Traue et al. (2019) explain:

In other words, our analytical task is not a matter of looking harder or more
closely, but of seeing what frames our seeing—spaces of constructed visibility
and incitements to see which constitute power/knowledge. (Traue et al.,
2019, p. 327)

From a perspective of postcolonial analysis, practices of (self-)designation

are key here because they allow for (bodily) educational processes through acts
of (re)addressing and recognition. Considering this in the context of video, in
the following we will discuss the epistemological potential of videography
research that attends to dynamics of power (2) on the one hand, and object-
related epistemological potentials using the example of videographic
approaches to subaltern processes of subjectification (3) on the other hand.
462 J. Engel and C. Diz Muñoz

2 On the Epistemological Potential

of a Videographic Focus on Embodied
Learning Processes
In her epistemological reflections, Spivak exposes the epistemic violence of
scientific politics of epistemology and their claims to validity (Spivak, 2012;
Castro Varela & Dhawan, 2010). In education science as well, engaging with
the epistemological implications of research approaches and methodologies
shows that

knowledge and cognition not only cannot be separated from social, i.e. political
and societal contexts, but that this is precisely where they are found, which is
why they (can) never exist in a ‘pure’ form. (Reichenbach et al., 2011, p. 12)

This is how we understand the methodological and research angle of our

videography as an act of seeing and focusing on embodied learning and edu-
cational processes. While reconstructing the (re)addressing in the classroom as
everyday practices of subjectification, we reflect on the epistemic violence
inherent in our research methodology of videography as an act of knowledge
politics. Understanding the camera’s gaze as a focus on embodied learning and
educational processes entails paying close attention to their performative
power. Hence, by exploring new fields of research and research perspectives in
an approach that is critical of hegemonic power, the camera allows for a
sharper awareness of (critical) social contexts of method development
(Bachmann-Medick & Kugele, 2018; Göttlich et al., 2001). This sharpening
occurred particularly at the level of developing new research methodologies
following the critique of cultural representations of familiar research subjects
and methods (Hall, 1997). It has shaped our videography research insofar as
the crisis of representation can be considered an important momentum for
education research on the body-related emergence of subjects and associated
educational figures. It stresses the importance of critical perspectives on famil-
iar phenomena and cultural representations of (eurocentric) representations
of bodies (ibid.).
In The Spectacle of the ‘Other’ (Hall, 1997), Stuart Hall discusses how hurt-
ful photographic depictions of the body (seen here in the context of advertise-
ment) can be when they represent the vulnerability of subject positionings.
Consequently, we have experimented with new possibilities of representa-
tion in our work, in order to, for example, productively destabilise the trained,
conventional view of subject-centred educational processes and the associated
 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation… 463

representations of embodied learning and educational processes, thereby

opening them up to the relationality of subjectification (Engel, 2020a, 2020b).
Unlike the high-angle shot (Seidel et al., 2003), which usually represents
the students’ bodies (relatively passively) sitting at tables as part of a disci-
plined complete system of interaction and which focuses primarily on cogni-
tive learning processes, the following photographs show bodies participating
in learning processes and educational processes that make it possible to study
subjectification processes in a way that is attentive to the dynamics of power
at play.
All photographs reproduced here are stills from videography-based studies
conducted as part of the DFG research project on Glocalized Lifeworlds. They
offer the potential to critically examine how bodies participate in educational
processes at school and to analyse subjectification in this context also on its
non-verbal, performative level (Fig. 1).
Photographic representation of subjectification in the context of overstep-
ping boundaries (Fig. 2).
Photographic representation of subjectification through technology and
media, showing subjectificating practices of mise-en-scène and interaction
with the audio recorder and the camera (Fig. 3).
Photographic representation of subjectification in the context of (sexual-
ised) violence (Figs. 4 and 5).

Fig. 1 Physical learning and education processes in the classroom’s world trade game
are here portrayed from a high-angle camera shot: wide shot of the classroom from
above. (Source: Authors’ own picture)
464 J. Engel and C. Diz Muñoz

Fig. 2 Touch: A student is holding her breath while trying to stop a hand reaching for
a piece of paper. (Source: Authors’ own picture)

Fig. 3 Body and technology: An isolated, lonely student interacts with the audio
recorder and then addresses the camera directly. (Source: Authors’ own picture)

Thus, the relevance of relationality of body-related educational processes to

education science can be affirmed on two levels: First, they shed light on how
education theory can build on cultural studies insights about processes of
subjectification in the interplay of bodies, spaces, and objects (Engel, 2020a,
 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation… 465

Fig. 4 Wanting to participate in class activities, a student reaches for a pair of scissors.
Another student wants to push the first one out of her territory; her hand gestures
express distancing attempts. (Source: Authors’ own picture)

Fig. 5 A student holds another in a headlock while looking at a girl. Neither of the
girls at the table looks at what the other students are doing; they smile and keep on
working. (Source: Authors’ own picture)
466 J. Engel and C. Diz Muñoz

2020b). Second, the example of vulnerable and marginalised subject position-

ings outlines the socio-critical dimension of these insights (Engel, 2017; Engel
et al., 2019a).

The question that comes to the fore in the current debate about education—a
rather tense debate largely based on supposedly obvious self-understandings—is
what is ‘constructed’ as educational reality by whom with what means and to
what end. (Reichenbach et al., 2011, p. 7)

Thus, following the work of Sabine Reh (2012) and Bina Mohn (2002) on
(self-)reflexive videography research, we ask: What is it about our focusing
gaze through the camera, looking at embodied practices of signifying, that can
recognise, acknowledge, and show appreciation, while also possibly having a
subjugating effect? This approach to videography research allows us to think
about the way we look at someone through the camera as marked by both
recognition and subjugation (Tsang, 2020).5 How, then, can we use the cam-
era to look at, for example, embodied processes of learning and education,
which on the one hand are validated in this way but also subjected to our gaze
on the other hand? We recognised that unequal subject positionings are
brought forth not only by practices of body-related designation, which also
occur on the level of language, but that placement in space also operates as a
form of addressing, as that socio-material relationalisations, in short, the
entanglement of bodies, things, and spaces are crucial factors (Engel, 2019).
Certain subject positions reveal themselves to be particularly vulnerable in
light of the interplay of bodies, materialities, and relationalities. Therefore,
videography research that incorporates postcolonial insights focuses not only
on linguistic practices of signifying and being signified but also on where
subjects are placed in space or in relation to space, on spatial processes of
invocation, and on the entanglements of people and things, that is on the
socio-material dimension of invocations and of these entanglements.
Reconstructing implicit structures of invocation (as is commonly done in
documentary subjectification analysis) has proven to be particularly insight-
ful, as it constitutes the groundwork for showing how bodies are addressed
and produced as specific and unequal subjects on an implicit level, even if

5
According to Wu Tsang, this is the case particularly in the context of migration and flight, because these
vulnerable groups of people, Tsang explains, are particularly dependent on relations of visual recognition:
“Documenting within this context, Wu Tsang employs a magical realist approach, allowing the boundar-
ies between fact, fiction and surreal narrative to be intentionally fluid. What has commonly been referred
to as a ‘refugee crisis’ is structurally encountered in the film as a crisis of representation” (https://www.
berlinerfestspiele.de/en/berliner-festspiele/programm/bfs-gesamtprogramm/programmde-
tail_277205.html).
 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation… 467

there is no explicit invocation to that effect. This raises critical questions about
power relations that a research approach inspired by postcolonialism engages
with: Who is seen and how? To what extent do hegemonic structures of per-
ception determine the field of what can be seen and put into words?

If research in the fields of the sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture

that explores (audio-)visual phenomena wants to engage with the state of con-
temporary media relations, it should also engage with the fundamental levels of
the socio-techno-symbolic process. It should begin by developing interpretive
analytics for describing the relationalities of what can be seen and what can be
said, concerning the alliances of image, text, sound, and materiality. (Traue, 2013)

A self-critical reflection on the interplay of mediality and aesthetics in this

context requires taking decisions on how to sift through, sort, and edit the
material. For example, are we showing the system(s) of interaction between
students and teachers and discussing it as ‘teaching’? Does our camera angle
emphasise certain things? Are our questions and approach in keeping with
subject-relevant didactics? Hence, the central methodological question is how
to use the medium of videography to aesthetically represent research objects
in such a way that they open up new possibilities for thinking about embod-
ied learning and processes of subjectification. A postcolonial angle further
explores how videography as a medium offers representational possibilities
that allow it to develop an aesthetic that includes diverse cultural representa-
tions of embodied learning processes while allowing for self-critical awareness
of the epistemic violence tied to these learning processes. In terms of visual
regimes, this means investigating how practices of making visible and making
invisible emerge. In this context, Santos (2007) refers to hegemonic thinking
as ‘abyssal thinking’:

Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It consists of a system of visi-

ble and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the
visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that
divide social reality into two realms, the realm of ‘this side of the line’ and the
realm of ‘the other side of the line’. (Ibid., p. 45)

Our seeing is also overlooking, blocking out, looking away; our line of
sight also obscures things. Seeing, then, emerges from the conflict between
the visible and invisible aspects of embodied learning and educational pro-
cesses, a conflict that is inherent in all seeing—even through the camera—as
we have demonstrated in our empirical studies (Engel, 2019, 2020a, 2020b;
468 J. Engel and C. Diz Muñoz

Engel & Diz Muñoz, 2021). This allows for (self-)critical reflection, at the
level of methodology, on the sociocultural form of looking at practices of
bodily signifying, placement, and entanglements.

3 Whose Bodies Are Taught

Theorist Sylvia Wynter (2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) explores the con-
cept of ‘the human’ and the epistemological establishment of its meaning. She
notes that some subject positionings are excluded from this category through
discourse. In an exchange with Katherine McKrittick (2015), Wynter defines
the Western concept of ‘human’ as “the measuring stick through which all
other forms of being are measured” (ibid., p. 3)—resulting in certain bodies
not being produced as bodies, but as something ‘other’. In the course of our
analysis, we have explored how the bodies of students are constructed (Engel
& Diz Muñoz, 2021) as “less-than-human” (Wynter, 2003) or “something
other than human” (Snaza, 2018, p. 343) by practices of signifying, place-
ment, and entanglement. They are marginalised in the social life of the class-
room and are dehumanised and minoritised in verbal addresses (Engel et al.,
2019; Engel, 2020a, 2020b).
Our work echoes Wynter’s as well as Mignolo’s: “The Human is therefore
the product of a particular epistemology, yet it appears to be (and is accepted
as) a natural independent entity existing in the world” (Mignolo, 2015,
p. 108). Whose bodies, then, are taught? Whose bodies are addressed and how
(respectfully or disparagingly)? How are they thus (re)presented or (re)signi-
fied, that is given validity and charged with meaning, in the context of seating
arrangements, systems of interaction, discussions in class, and didactic mod-
els? And which bodies are neither seen nor heard in the process? Wynter’s
project is one of cognitive transformation towards a new understanding of the
human origin story—a reading that has been characterised as decolonial by
authors such as Mignolo (cf. Mignolo, 2015).

4 Videography and Subaltern Subjectification

We compared 27 group discussions before the treatment (a course module we
developed as part of our research project) and 27 group discussions after.
These insights, combined with a triangulated video-based investigation of the
performative level (Engel, 2015) of judgement logics (Engel, 2020b;
Rabenstein, 2018a), allowed us to critically discuss changes in bodily
 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation… 469

positioning of self and other in the context of the students’ global networking
processes (Engel, 2020a, 2020b; Thompson, 2019).6 The typification that
emerged points to the correlation between implicit attitudes about value and
the students’ spaces of experience (Engel et al., 2020).
This made it easier to understand that, for example, some students’ atti-
tudes and body postures expressing powerlessness, resignation, or anger are
rooted in concrete everyday experiences.
This analysis of perspectives is in line with current demands that have been
stressing how outdated it is to develop body-based education theories around
the notion of a malleable (and already existing, complete) subject (cf. Jörissen,
2015; Thompson et al., 2017; Rieger-Ladich, 2012; Nohl, 2017; Tervooren
& Kreitz, 2018).
Asking how (postcolonial) subjectifications—that is specific practices of
bodily signifying, placing, and entanglement—emerge and how they operate,
in short, how people and their bodies are in a process of continually becoming
what they are (Engel, 2020a, 2020b), can open up wider critical reflection at
the intersection of education science and cultural studies. By paying attention
to the various perspectives, it is easier to understand how that which cannot
be said in words is articulated in terms of relationality7 as well as how the ten-
sion between recognising globalising norms of self and other and subverting
them, for instance as relations of dominance, are negotiated in terms of pow-
erful, productive, and/or subordinated bodily positionings (Engel & Fritzsche,
2019). By focusing on the relationality that comes to the fore in this process
as an emphasis on the wider fact of the ‘entanglement’ of educational pro-
cesses (Ricken, 2013, p. 35), it becomes possible to explore—using video as a
tool—bodily processes of subjectification even beyond anthropocentric epis-
temological logics (Engel, 2015, 2020b).
The epistemological and pedagogical arguments involved in this process
can be connected to Judith Butler’s cultural theories on the matrix of intelli-
gibility and Michel Foucault’s on the archaeology of knowledge.

6
Christiane Thompson (2019) for example points out that “a new form of subjectification had emerged
under the rubric of ‘global expertise’ that increasingly binds addressees in education to using output-
based data sources that are made available digitally” (p. 299). Our research project also traced the close
link between issues of globalisation and competitive and performance-oriented forms of subjectification
of students and teachers (Engel, 2019).
7
It is crucial to note that the relationality of subjectification processes does not operate on the level of
linguistic or non-linguistic utterances, but is rather determined by whether the articulations in the dis-
course are or can be heard. “In terms of the concept of conflict, reinventing discourse thereby implies an
ethical position at the same time, insofar as it is about acknowledging the conflict by keeping it open. As
much as possible and for it to attend to plurality it should be about ‘expressing what was previously
unsayable’ (Koller, 1999, p. 150)” (von Rosenberg, 2011).
470 J. Engel and C. Diz Muñoz

Elaborating on their concept of a cultural matrix of intelligibility, Butler

highlights the interplay between phenomena that, being recognised by soci-
ety, are (hegemonically) perceivable and how they materialise in discourse in
the process of (re)citing social norms (Butler, 1991, 1997b). In The Archaeology
of Knowledge (1972), Michel Foucault emphasises how crucial it is to critically
reflect one’s own methodological positionality and the inevitable (re)produc-
tion of knowledge and (powerlessness) it entails. He stresses how important it
is, with regard to research methodology, to “uncover cultural facts that, as
‘conditions of our rationality’ (DE I, 776), shape our contemporary thinking
and language. Hence the point is also to question our thinking and our lan-
guage” (Kammler et al., 2014, p. 51). As we also have explained in our work,
it is therefore not only possible but necessary to nurture open spaces where
the findings of research methodology on embodied learning and pedagogical
processes and their already socially accepted norms can not only be ‘cited’ and
repeated but where they can also be subverted and rethought. In our work we
have discussed this process as a crisis of representations of education science
approaches to how learning and pedagogical processes are embodied and how
they are (re)signified (Hall, 1997). Analysing (re)signification in terms of the
dynamics of power and difference at play yields insights about how body-
related pedagogical processes are given meaning or granted validity (Engel
et al., 2021), pointing the way for how researchers can focus more on how
familiar (hegemonic) categories are reproduced and consolidated or indicat-
ing ways of analysing change and development of diverse or pluralising
research objects. These questions have been central for researchers whose work
is about vulnerable groups and hence draws on postcolonial, gender-sensitive,
and/or queer perspectives. This opens the way for a “persistent critique”
(Spivak et al., 1996) that does not produce a “coherent narrative” (ibid.), but
rather recognises “that networks of power/desire/interest are so heteroge-
neous” and attempts “to disclose and know the discourse of society’s Other”
(Spivak, 1988). In the course of our research, we have developed a relational
methodology—an innovative approach in terms of education theory—based
on new (video-based) approaches to embodied processes of subjectification.
Because vulnerable, precarious subject positions are not due to individual
cases of certain students (Engel, 2019) but could be traced as structurally
identical in cross-case studies (Engel et al., 2020), our research pays particular
attention to practices of marginalisation and subalternity (Engel, 2020b).
Students who cannot be classified into familiar categories of difference accord-
ing to their physical appearance are excluded, marginalised, and minoritised
by their classmates and teachers on a daily basis. Their bodies are addressed
violently (Butler, 1997a). Triangulated analyses of the videographies and the
 On the (In)Visibility of Postcolonial Subjectivation… 471

questionnaires show that the othering of certain students in the classroom

(understood as a space of interaction or as a sub-organisation) was also related
to their collective affiliations, which the other students and the teacher seemed
unable to neatly classify into their usual social categories of difference:8 These
students do not fit in into their group. The typifications we have developed
show that students often have multiple collective affiliations.
In a relational analysis of subjectification, implicit normalisation processes
and how they are embodied in the context of learning processes are taken into
account, allowing for structures and relations of inequality that emerge in this
process to be recognised more clearly. Espousing a postcolonial perspective, it
pays attention to “the different starting conditions in plural societies to reflect
global interconnections and interdependencies rather than identifying other-
ness” (Messerschmidt, 2018, p. 573). In this sense, Sylvia Wynter interprets
being human as a praxis (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) and calls for a new
worldview that would produce other social bodies and other social imaginar-
ies (cf. Wynter, 2003). In this context, and following Judith Butler’s episte-
mology, it is crucial to note that something can only be perceived and
recognised if it is socially intelligible, that is if it already exists as a cultural
imaginary construct. It is at the level of reflection on a given structure that
discourse or regimes of looking can be critically shifted. However, it is not
only discourses that regulate zones of intelligibility by themselves; they “also
produce spaces of exclusion by identifying and recognising certain subject
types” (Rieger-Ladich, 2012, p. 63). This is because, as discussed in theories
about inequality, subjects are positioned within contexts of empowerment
and/or disempowerment (Engel et al., 2019b; Beach, 2017; Beach &
Johansson, 2017; Rose & Ricken, 2017).

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 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience
Tiago de Oliveira Pinto

To the memory of
Anna Kerekes Wittmann (1900–1984), my first music teacher

1 Introduction
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was completely deaf in the last decade of
his life and is still considered one of the greatest musicians who ever existed.
Throughout his life he searched for new sounds and sound combinations,
explored what is special in the intermingling of different melody lines, and
created a music that was previously ‘unheard of ’. In addition, he constantly
tried out new technical possibilities on the piano. Beethoven’s tragic fate as a
musician—because deafness seems to be fundamentally opposed to music—
already indicates two aspects that must be considered when defining music:
Music is not limited to the dimension of sound, nor is music something to be
experienced simply and exclusively by listening. Although the acoustic dimen-
sion is central, “even if music is necessarily organized sound, it is plain that
this is not sufficient for something’s being music” (Davis, 2003, p. 491). If
that were different, at some point there would have been no more composing

T. de Oliveira Pinto (*)

University of Music Franz Liszt, Weimar, Germany
e-mail: tiago.oliveira@hfm-weimar.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 479
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_29
480 T. de Oliveira Pinto

Beethoven, we would not be able to enjoy his 9th Symphony today, for exam-
ple, because he himself conceived his last three symphonies in almost com-
plete deafness and could no longer hear them in concert.
While a certain physical materiality had let him down with his deafness,
Beethoven was able to create his works with the help of another material
aspect, namely thanks to the Western practice of writing music, which cap-
tures the fleeting sound on a material level. Beethoven himself had brought
musical notation to the greatest possible perfection in his time. In this con-
text, the written form seems particularly removed from the fundamental
physicality of the body, when producing music. In other words, music nota-
tion is itself materialized music, which allows a purely intellectual compre-
hension of the same. This musical materiality of the writing, in its way remote
from direct relationship to the bodily senses, was the ‘salvation’ for the deaf
Beethoven, whose body had lost the ability to express music directly. Only his
intellect had to express itself through his musical writing. At this stage, noth-
ing else was possible for him.
At the moment when it comes to sound implementation and to perfor-
mance, especially to the process of learning musical skills, the sensual spec-
trum necessarily expands and reveals those much more extensive possibilities
of expression that are associated with the phenomenon of music.1 Indeed, the
process of learning and experiencing music, regardless of its social and cultural
context, is essentially one that relates to physical practice. It is the combina-
tion of physical experience with a specially trained hearing that comes to life
in music as a universally existent but always distinct phenomenon that can be
recognized, interpreted, and thus also lived. In this sense, music practice is
always accompanied by a physically supported learning experience. This chap-
ter is about that particular learning experience.

2 Music as an Intangible
Human Manifestation
The first problem that arises is understanding the immateriality that music
represents. An intangible nature of something like music and physical corpo-
reality seem to be two dimensions that initially are opposed one to another, as
body is first of all matter. But music proves that it only exists based on an
indirect immateriality, because it always needs something tangible in order to
arise and to be passed on. Listening to music alone may seem immaterial, as
1
A selection of introductory papers on musical performance can be found in Rink, 2002.
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 481

it is about a process that is exhausted in time, is neither visible nor palpable,

and always comes to an end, which is expressed in its silencing. However,
making music sound on an instrument is simultaneously a physical act, as is
singing, which is ultimately the basis of the comprehensive physical dimen-
sion that characterizes learning and teaching of music, and its ultimate mas-
tership. In a study on music as living heritage, I summarized the somehow
paradoxical musical phenomenon in one short sentence: “Therefore, music is
‘undetectably material’ and, simultaneously and in apparently contradictory
terms, ‘substantially intangible’” (de Oliveira Pinto, 2018, p. 50).

3 The Formal and Its Context—Body and Mind

What about the identity of music if it is understood as ‘musical art’? In Western
tradition a musical piece is already present in its written representation:

According to the formalist, one piece of music is distinguished from another in

terms of its pattern alone. When we are acquainted with a work’s sound struc-
ture, there is nothing more to be known about the basis for its identity. (Davis,
2003, p. 492)

This identity will of course always be connected with the context in which
music is created and in which it is played. In such a juxtaposition of formal-
ism and contextualism, the duality of mind and body that is expressed in
music becomes recognizable. However, some music aestheticians see it differ-
ently. For them the context is a music-historical one in which the musical
work is initially embedded in its ‘disembodied’ form (Hindrichs, 2014).
However, it can be argued against this that if music-historical epochs include
certain traditions, practices, and conventions, physical aspects also gain
importance. Context refers to spatiality, not only the temporal but also the
local, and living bodies are always located and moving in both. In a historical
musical context understood in this way, embodiment plays an important role.
Singing, listening, and rhythmic movements are universal musical abilities
of humans. All three presuppose physical actions, justify the physicality of
music, and above all form the basis of its learning process (Busch, 2016). The
human body and embodiment are subjected to a constantly changing use of
body and corporeality in connection with cultural expressions, especially with
performing arts. Both—the body itself and the embodiment—adapt to the
given circumstances and contexts. ‘The body making music’ always tells us a
lot about this music.2
2
“The body obviously has vast potential as a source of information on music” (Grupe, 2010, p. 74)
482 T. de Oliveira Pinto

While in the Brazilian province of Bahia, in the town of Santo Amaro in

the region of Recôncavo, on a certain occasion with the musician and long-
term research partner Vavá (Evilásio de Andrade), we approached the city’s
central market place. From quite a distance we saw a group of people gathered
around a capoeira event. In the middle of the performing group, three berim-
bau musical bows could clearly be seen in action. They protruded from the
crowd in a coordinated, that is joint up and down, movement, which Vavá
immediately recognized: “Look, there they are playing São Bento Grande.
And how wild they play it! It’s sure to be a tough capoeira fight.” Nothing
could be heard of the so-called São Bento Grande berimbau pattern yet, we
were too far away, but the movement sequences of the musical bows were
enough for the connoisseur to identify the musical repertoire, especially that
it was already at an advanced stage. An experienced instrumentalist can see
how something is being played from the physical use of the instrument. In
addition, she or he will also be able to judge whether the musician observed is
competent, plays correctly and well, even if without hearing anything. Music
is thus primarily produced physically and can also be assessed in relation to it,
by observing this physical action.

4 Movement Sequences as Musical Activity

It can be assumed that any kind of music writing derives from a physical
action in performance. Pre-forms of European musical notation and also
notations in other written musical cultures gave priority to the articulations
that are performed on the instrument: guitar and lute tablatures, Chinese
musical notation, transcriptions, and so on. European music notation began
in the ninth century with the fixing of melodic configurations with so-called
neumes, by the use of short lines, arcs, and signals. These graphical symbols of
the Gregorian chant were noted directly above the biblical text. These signs
represent the conducting movements by which an ensembles leader directed
his Schola Cantorum. So, music notation is first of all the graphic implementa-
tion of a physical sequence of movement patterns. It illustrates how music is
fundamentally controlled by the body’s actions. It has therefore always been
very useful for music teaching and has supported the musical learning process.
Beethoven always related the possibilities of the notation to the greatest
possible perfection of musical expression. Perhaps his deafness was partly to
blame for the obsession with trying to capture the sound of the music as
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 483

precisely as possible.3 To a certain extent, he transferred the inaudible to the

visual; that is he moved from the lost physical to the spiritual-mental.
Ultimately, he transferred the immaterial hearing to the equally immaterial
inner sound experience of his ‘spiritual eye’, supported by what was material-
ized in music writing, since the specifically physical (the hearing organ) which
could no longer be used. In the end, the material serves the immaterial.
An example from African music research corroborates the importance of
physical action as departing point for musical sound. Attempts to transcribe
musical phenomena from Africa, in particular percussive music in conven-
tional staff notation, had to fail gloomily again and again. Not only in musico-
logical treatises, especially in school books of music education, one consistently
encounters completely inadequate representations of African and other music.4
This continuing misunderstanding is contrasted with the musical transcrip-
tions by musician and cultural scientist Gerhard Kubik, who in his research
was able to make musical transcriptions from silent films based on his own
learning of African musical instruments, such as the xylophones from Uganda
amadinda and akadinda. Kubik had filmed the musicians in such a way that
one can exactly follow the movements, especially the impacts of the beater on
the xylophone plates, in the sequence of the movie picture. With a so-called
frame-to-frame analysis of the film strip, Kubik (1984) was able to create a
precise and complete transcription of the music. The transcribed piece can
then easily be played from this notation. It was not the sound of the music,
absent in the silent film, but only the sequence of movements of the instru-
mental performance that gave rise to this kind of musical notation (Fig. 1).
Captions to Fig. 1:

1, 2, 3, and so on = different movements patterns (as in Kubik, 1984, p. 213)

x = hand clapping
o = silent movement
,______, = duration of metric circles

Music results from sequences of movements, while, at the same time, it

stimulates further movements again. It brings together the motoric skills of
different bodies (in rowing, military marches, etc.), its rhythm coordinates
complex collective actions (in ballet), and so on. Basically, only music or
acoustically rhythmic processes enable the movements of a larger amount of

3
With the invention of the metronome in 1815 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, which Beethoven pro-
moted quite intensely, he was able to specify a precise definition of the tempo for his works and prescribe
it for future interpreters.
4
See my critical remarks on this behalf in Tiago de Oliveira Pinto, 2011.
484 T. de Oliveira Pinto

Fig. 1 Short extract of a transcription of a drumming piece sequence from a silent

film, based on a ‘frame-to-frame’ analysis (Kubik, 1984, p. 216)

different participants to be synchronized. This is to say that the actions of the

body are responsible for making a collective music-gathering possible: in the
string quartet it is the body sign as ‘visual signaling’ (Grupe, 2010) of the first
violinist, in the orchestra that of the conductor, which warrant an exact col-
lective start of the piece. With the conducting, the question sometimes even
arises who goes ahead of whom: are the musicians just following the conduc-
tor visually, or isn’t he also driven by the development of the music by control-
ling the musical flow with his feedback?
Additional examples from all over the world prove that constant feedback
between musical sound and movement sequences is essential. Furthermore,
when expanded to gestures, these movement sequences built the bridge
between music and narrative art, as I witnessed in Amazonia among the
Aparai indigenous people:

In 1993, I had the opportunity to copy and to archive the sound collection of
German technician Manfred Rauschert, who had spent almost 25 years among
the Aparai-Wayana people in Northern Brazil. The objective was to return these
cultural documents to the people, presenting them some samples of the songs
and instrumental music that Rauschert had collected decades before. Thus, I
travelled together with Manfred Rauschert, who at this stage was almost 80
years of age, to the Aparai-Wayana in the Bona village, Tumucumaque National
Park, close to the Brazil-Surinam border. Trials made with a number of music
cassettes from the Rauschert collection played in the village on a tape recorder
proved instructive. The original intention was to find out whether there still
existed, among the present generation of Aparai-Wayana, reservations in the
sense of ancient taboos, in particular regarding mentioning the names of
deceased persons. This was no longer the case. But listeners did object to the
imperfect nature of several recorded presentations of even the best story tellers
of the generation next to the last. The reason was quickly found: what were
missing were the explanatory gestures, e.g., round, curved, far, very high, from
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 485

east to west, and so on. Rauschert then imitated the gestures during the presen-
tation of the tape, e.g., in rendering the myth of the wind-born creator. He
completed the sound from the tapes, with the missing gestures and movements.
From this moment on the spectacle was received by all with much enthusiasm.
Sound and movement proved to be indissoluble for this people. (cp. de Oliveira
Pinto, 1995, pp. 127–130)

From the twelfth century onward, European musical notation passed over
to neglecting the physical articulations, fixing the sound phenomenon alone,
away from the motion sequences, and primarily moving the fixed pitches into
the main focus of the notation.5 This form of music notation neglects the
body making the music. This separation of practice and intellect, of body and
mind, followed by that of emotion and the rational conception of music, of
technical execution and expression of feelings, and so on, is what distinguishes
so-called Western art music culture from others.6 And the musical parameter
‘harmony’ seems to be even the furthest away from the human body. Tonality
and the functional harmony of Western music have been intellectually drained
in such a way that the only consequence of this linear and progressive histori-
cal development was the path to a completely ‘disembodied’ atonality.
But let’s get back to certain types of music in Africa. Here the separation
between the musical, intellectually conceived work and the pure musical-
practical exercise is constantly bridged and summarized in the course of the
performance. If, from the point of view of research, there is a mental-spiritual
distance from musical practice, then this can only relate to the functions
assigned to its representation: religion, ritual, festival, and so on. But here,
too, a unity is sought in the performance. A holistic musical system is revealed,
which is always about the entirety of a sound-body-movement-collective
action. In contrast, European art music, which from the sixteenth century
onward was gradually based on written form, is progress-oriented. It seems to
be backed on a formally linear pattern of development, whereas music in
Africa tends to obey a cyclical principle:

Differing views on Music

in Africa
• Holistic Musical Systems(sound-body-movement-collective)-based

5
Only with the possibilities of sound software can the tonal musical events be visualized even more
comprehensively.
6
The music critic and musicologist Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) goes so far as to recognize the beauti-
ful in music alone in its abstract configuration, independent of performance and emotion (Vom
Musikalisch-Schönen, 1852).
486 T. de Oliveira Pinto

• Cyclic perception of music

./.

in Europe
• Written and progress-oriented music
• Linear perception of music

Seen in this way, it is misleading if one very often ascribes a disproportion-

ate amount of ‘rhythm’ to the music in Africa and its outcomes in Latin
America and the Caribbean. The reality is different: music is not primarily
played rhythmically in Africa, but in Europe this element, which was strongly
represented in the past, has withered more and more in the course of history,
especially in its ‘art music’ format. This development can be observed in the
notation and the related musical conception. It was not until the twentieth
century that lack of rhythm was somewhat overcome in Europe. Composers
like Stravinsky or Bartók have given more space to the rhythmic component
in their instrumental works. However, it is above all the most important musi-
cal phenomenon of the twentieth century, the worldwide disseminated pop
music, that brought rhythmic elements from Africa into the global musical
panorama via the North American continent.
In general, one can say that the rhythmic component is emphatically physi-
cal, the harmonic component more conceptual.7 The physical part of pop
music in particular leads to its smooth adoption and dissemination. The phys-
ical perception is more immediate than the abstractly intellectual one. The
ability to move collectively to the music is crucial here. Nevertheless, this
categorization is not absolute, because ideally the body-mind balance is estab-
lished with pure music-making. Ultimately, it shows itself in all music-making,
in its mediation, as in its reception, with different weightings. The importance
of musical embodiment as a distinct learning mode lies in this balance.

5 Body in Anthropology
The human body was a central subject already of early social anthropology
(Mauss, 1936, and others). Ethnologists and social scientists observed that the
body not only provides support for habits and customs, but is also changed,
adorned, and repurposed for special activities and modeled anew. In short, the
use of the body is always characterized by symbolic behavior and social role
ascriptions.

7
Harmonics is an element closer related to space, rhythm is closer to time. Movement occurs in
space + time.
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 487

The anthropologist Mary Douglas investigated this emphatically social role

of the human body. In the chapter ‘The two bodies’ of her epochal book
Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology (Douglas, 1970), Mary Douglas
comes to different evaluations of the human body by dividing it into two
distinct units: the social and the physical body:

The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical
experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which
it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange
of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces
the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction the body itself is a
highly restricted medium of expression. (Douglas, 1970, p. 69)

This conception of the bodies’ role initially fits well with the definition of
the body in the area of the musical learning process. However, music plays a
special role here, doing it possibly better than most forms of cultural expres-
sion, namely by connecting the two bodies that Douglas particularly empha-
sized. Music expresses itself in the social and in the physical body at the same
time. On the one hand, music lives from its social attributions, but certain
instrumental techniques also depend directly on the physical skills of a body.
The lesser a portion of physical ability is present, the more instrumental tech-
niques must be learned and practiced with great effort. This very culture-
dependent physical learning process leads Mary Douglas to criticize other
authors of her time. Especially she disagrees with the Structural Anthropology
of Claude Levi-Strauss (1958), because of its apparent lack of concern for
cultural variants. This reluctance must also be observed in music research
since, on the one hand, music is a universal phenomenon, while, on the other
hand, distinct musical cultures deal with music very differently.

6 Embodiment and/as Music

The embodiment’s perspective demands that psychological processes are
explicitly seen and examined with reference to the body. It is assumed that
psychological processes always correlate with physical reactions (Storch et al.,
2010). On closer inspection, embodiment concerns a fundamental question
of both philosophy and psychology: the so-called body-soul problem. The
question of how one should grasp the connection between ‘body’ (i.e., body,
matter, brain) and ‘soul’ (i.e., cognition, psyche, thinking) is a fundamental
488 T. de Oliveira Pinto

one that runs through the entire history of philosophy.8 The focus of current
social-scientific interest in the body is the relationship between socio-cultural
structures and the self-education of people as social persons or subjects. The
theoretical instruments used to analyze these relationships are diverse, because
the body is still viewed as a platform for identity representations, self-
expression, and self-staging that communicates context-specific signs (Stangl,
2021). Early research on music-related bodily behavior was undertaken in
German-speaking countries as early as at the turn of the twentieth century.
After his death in 1895, Joseph Rutz, a German singing teacher, left behind
a comprehensive musical ‘type theory’ without ever having fully recorded this
theoretical structure. His son Ottmar Rutz made this his life’s work. In 1908
he made his father’s teachings on the physiological determination of the sound
character of the human voice public under the title of New Discoveries of the
Human Voice. In the following 40 years, Ottmar Rutz presented numerous
other monographs and essays in which he further differentiated the ‘Rutz
typology’ and developed theories of expression and physiognomy that went
beyond music. Rutz’ theory was based on the discovery that when singing and
speaking, not only the organs of speech come into action, but other parts of
the body as well, such as the core muscles, all working together. As a tenor,
Rutz Senior noticed that he could sing certain works better in certain postures
than in other poses of the body. He recognized that the entire physical effort
is required to do justice to music performance. Therefore, Rutz proposed a
systematization of the body’s basic posture while performing (singing):
As the four ‘types’ (Typen), Rutz distinguishes between the following body
postures during the singing act:

1. Push the abdomen horizontally forward and keep this curvature. This gives
the voice a dark and soft sound. Breath deep.
2. Push the abdominal muscles just above the hips horizontally backwards
and arch your chest. The voice sound light and soft.
3. Push the muscles on the sides of the torso at an angle, either downwards
forwards or downwards backwards. Voice light and harsh.
4. Slant the muscles on the sides of the torso, either forward upward or back-
ward upward. Voice sound dark and hard. (Rutz, 1911, 8, 9)

It is important to note that Rutz used famous personalities from history to

illustrate three of his four types of body posture: type 1 corresponds to Caesar,
Goethe, Napoleon, among other personalities; type 2 is best represented by

8
Gallagher, 2011. On the dynamics of body cognition, see also Shapiro, 2011, p. 124.
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 489

Frederic the Great, Schiller, and Beethoven; type 3 reminds one of statues of
the old Greeks and of Franz Liszt; while type 4 has “not been observed so far
in real life”.9
An opposite pole to the body holistic postures in order to better express
music, is the hands of musicians, especially of instrumentalists. According to
the psychologist G. Révész, hands are of utmost importance in any instru-
mental performance. They have created entire civilizations and cultures, as
Révész observed in 1944 (Révész, 1944). However, hands also express thoughts
and feelings with gestures. So, here the coexistence of the material and the
spiritual applies, materialized and expressed with the hands. The scope
becomes even broader if we don’t limit the hands’ role to playing alone and
include the craftsmanship of musical instruments, where highly skilled man-
ual techniques are likewise required.
In the past, instrumentalists believed that the hand had to be better pre-
pared for technical use in playing an instrument. In the nineteenth century,
special devices for strengthening and agility, or for the extraordinary stretch-
ing of the full palm—in a sense a ‘balancing act’ of the hand—were devel-
oped. The devices produced for this purpose were Dactylion, Chiroplast, or
simply the ‘finger supporting device’ by Atkins.
In 1881 Benjamin Atkins patented this “new and useful device for support-
ing and exercising the fingers of players on keyboard instruments”. Essentially,
it is a series of rings suspended from springs, “so as to compel the user to put
forth unwonted strength” in depressing her or his fingers. In time this would
foster “a superior decision of touch with greater flexibility and rapidity of
motion”.10
But Chiroplast, Dactylion, and other devices for exercising pianist’s hands
could not accomplish what sports equipment can do for the fitness of its
users. In the long run, these devices proved to be unusable for instrumental
play. The young Robert Schumann (1810–1856), who absolutely wanted to
become a piano virtuoso, ruined the index and middle fingers of his right
hand with excessive physical exercise with devices, similar to the ones men-
tioned above.
Even if the hand-training devices are no longer in use nowadays, many
instrumental and vocal teachers regard almost everything that happens on the
instrument to produce music as technology or ‘technical ability’. This has to

9
It is probably no coincidence that Rutz’ physiological studies on the human body as a cultural instru-
ment would bring him later close to nationalistic and even antisemitic ideologies (in Menschheitstypen
und Kunst, Jena 1921).
10
https://www.sciencesource.com/archive/Atkins%2D%2DFinger-Supporting- Device%2D%
2D1881-SS2607561.html
490 T. de Oliveira Pinto

be learned and often comes before the final work on the musical piece as such.
The ability to overcome instrumental difficulties stays in the foreground, or,
to come straight to the point, the ability to accurately reproduce many, even
uncomfortable notes and fingering sequences in a short time is paramount.
And this short time makes pure mental remembrance in music almost impos-
sible. The renowned Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires is quite clear about it:

I don’t believe in the head so much as I believe in the body's ability to remem-
ber. I don't care much about what my fingers do! If you only practice with your
brain and fingers, it is very one-sided and makes you vulnerable in precisely such
situations.11 The connection is too simple and takes up too much space in the
brain! You have to literally wake up the memory with your body, because only
it remembers all gestures and movements. (Pires, 2014)

The training of pure instrumental technical skills remains an individual

practice. One of my colleagues from a course in brass instrument performance
at the University of Music Franz Liszt in Weimar once mentioned to me:
“What I expect from my students is that 95% what they do in their studies is
‘sport’. Only the remaining 5% of their activity on the instrument can be
expected as ‘art’.”
In fact, sport and musical performance are driven by the unspoken similar-
ity between the mechanical (physical training) and the individual musical
rehearsal. In both cases the body is in the core of the musical activity, and
practicing is a rather ‘body-driven’ than embodied learning process. Both,
training in sport and practicing in music, are directed toward the perfect prep-
aration for specific and outstanding goals, with much outcome for the public
and empowered with exceptional professional excellence. Both rely on high
emotional input and mental control at the same time, both attract the atten-
tion of an audience, who expect a great show, without ever foreseeing the real
outcome of it, until the ‘performance’ has not come to a complete end.
Unlike most professions, but similar to sport, the learning process in music
cannot start as an adult. This illustrates the long-term body relatedness in
musical practice. It is the same with cycling or swimming, for example: both
are ideally learned in childhood, not as a grown up. In the case of music, this
is paired with the cognitive perception that is also prevalent in languages:
music must be learned and practiced from an early age. Interestingly enough,

11
Mrs. Pires refers to a situation in which she had to play a different Mozart piano concerto than that she
had prepared for the occasion, because of a previous lack of communication with conductor Ricardo
Chailly. On stage she had to switch and play a concerto, she had played in the past, but not expecting to
perform it in that concert night. She managed to do it completely by heart.
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 491

this applies to both technical ability (body) and musicality (mind). It means
that if you had never touched a piano key before the age of 20, you won’t ever
be able to master Beethoven’s Appassionata or Liszt’s B minor Sonata. “Manual
skills” (cf. Révész, 1944) are based on both, on training that is decoupled from
the music and on intensive music-making.
If the hand is of central importance from a technical point of view, the
entire body is necessary for making music in its full sense. Watching the musi-
cian performing you can literally hear the music, since body movements are
also transmitted to the audience. After all, dance is the immediate physical
reflex of music—but this opens up a new topic, going beyond the scope of
this chapter.

7 Rehearsal, Education, and Music-Making

Where, however, does music begin to disconnect itself from sport, and where
is practicing and rehearsing no physical or mechanical activity by itself any
longer? The Swiss cellist and instrumental pedagogue Rudolf von Tobel com-
mented on this in 1969:

We only master a work when we can actually play it, i.e. reproduce it without
noticeable effort. So we have to achieve the greatest impact with the least amount
of effort and avoid any unnecessary effort. Pablo Casals on this: “Ce n'est pas un
effort, c'est un plaisir”. “Relaxation and suppleness are my only tricks.” We
achieve this with those energy factors that do not cost us any effort, and even
offer opportunities to rest: with the weight of our limbs and their fall, as well as
with sweeping movements. (von Tobel, 1969, pp. 4–5)

Rudolf von Tobel’s instrumental pedagogical approach therefore focuses on

the elements of its own weight and the fall, an arm, for example, and then also
the swinging movements that go with it. He insists that “swing movements
are never broken down, but always holistic, flowing” (von Tobel, 1969, 5).
The use of these three economic energy factors—dead weight, uninhibited
fall, and swinging movements—moves the entire body of the musician. In the
end, this will lead to learning to sing and play correctly, promoting self-
control, as well as “accuracy and concentration, perseverance, balance and
devotion”. Tobel is certain that this is a path to human perfection, we would
say a process, in which body and mind are perfectly coordinated.
While the dilemma in Western academic music education is the lack of
consensus on essential basic issues such as the balance between artistic stan-
dards and educational excellence, as well as in dealing with current social
492 T. de Oliveira Pinto

challenges (inclusion, cultural diversity, making music with everyone, new

media), this is a conflict hardly manifest in other musical cultures, because
practicing and making music do not necessarily represent different or even
opposing activities. If they are assessed differently, then not on the stage,
because it goes without saying that due to the close teacher-student relation-
ship in traditional Indian music, for example, the student may sit next to his
or her master on stage when having reached a certain level of proficiency.
To make music and to practice an instrument (or the voice) are two differ-
ent approaches to music, although both belong to a process which must be
considered and learned within the broad scope of music education. Practicing
can be defined as turning away from the ritual, based on the remarks by Mary
Douglas, whereas playing on stage for an audience rather represents a genuine
ritual—the concert ‘ritual’ itself.
In a musical exchange project involving Germany and Afghanistan which
lasted for several years between the Afghan National Institute of Music Kabul and
the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar, different music masters from Kabul,
invited for a tour and workshops to Germany, came accompanied with two 12-
and 13-year-old students. The rubab lute player and musical leader of the
ensemble would position his young pupil right at his side on stage. This was an
extraordinary recognition and reward, given to the young musician by his mas-
ter in public and even in a performance abroad (photo). What was going on in
this musical setting on a very high level was what Christoph Wulf has called
“cultural learning as mimetic learning” (Wulf, 2016, p. 374) (Fig. 2).12

8 Musizieren/‘Making’ Music
If we combine what has been said above, we come to a dimension that is
beyond the written scores: the act of making music. In German there is a term
clearly expressing these concepts, the word ‘Musizieren’. Because of the lack of
such a term in English, the musicologist Christopher Small coined the verb
‘musicking’. Small argues that the essence of music lies not in musical works
but in taking part in performance, in social action (Small, 1999). For him
music is thus not so much a noun as a verb, ‘to music’. It is the action of
‘music’, the action of performing or setting to music. Furthermore, according
to Small, the meaning of ‘musicking’, as he likes to put it, also lies in the rela-
tionships that are established between the participants and the performers.

12
A few of the public presentations of the Afghan ensemble of the Safar-Project (Weimar-Kabul) can be
found in the YouTube Chanel of the University of Music Franz Liszt. See, for example, http://www.amrc-
music.org/mediathek/videos-safar-2012/
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 493

Fig. 2 Photo: Rubab master Ustad Ghulam Hussein with pupil, from Kabul: the master
and his student on stage in Weimar (University of Music Franz Liszt, 2015)

Making music in groups and ensembles is the rule worldwide, despite the
occasions for solo performances (e.g., by a pianist or by an organ player). As a
largely collective event, the aforementioned anthropological approach by
Margret Mead comes into play, because the music-making body simultane-
ously determines the spatial demarcation from others within the same event.
The human body is itself an instrument that confronts the social world of and
with people. In a figurative way, each individual instrument in the larger
group of a symphony orchestra relates to many different musical instruments
in use and being sounded. In such a group, the musical self-determination of
each of the instrumentalists leads to an exchange with the ensemble and at the
same time to the development of an awareness of the whole, in contrast to
their own sounding world. The reflection taking place in this social context
leads to the establishment of a unique collective musical body.

9 Musizieren as an Educational
Cultural Practice
Intergenerational transmission of cultural practices and of tacit knowledge
through mimesis and other forms of learning by direct participation13 is one
of the most important elements of musical learning and also of cultural
13
See, among others, Gebauer & Wulf, 1998; Wulf, 2014, 2016.
494 T. de Oliveira Pinto

maintenance, contributing essentially to its social relevance. How this can

develop to true musical mastery has briefly been mentioned with the example
from Afghanistan above.
We have emphasized previously that playing musical instruments requires
expertise. Learning and teaching are closely linked to musical expertise.
Expertise, learning, and teaching are essential in cultural heritage. The dynam-
ics of cultural transmission rely on different forms of educational strategies
within the community or the social context of informal education. These
strategies of passing musical and performing skills and techniques to the
younger generation demonstrate much about the cultural practice itself.
Studying the methods and practices of transmitting cultural knowledge gives
insights into the culture itself.14
Intergenerational transmission is therefore an important issue in the
UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage (2003). Safeguarding measures in general are very much focused on
cultural transmission. Transmitting musical skills goes far beyond technical
details of instrumental performance, for instance, because it encompasses
basic cultural knowledge, aesthetic principles, and a great deal of social infor-
mation. Research on educational aspects of a musical culture will contribute
to formal music education and lead to increased interest in the diversity of
educational systems in the world for the benefit of the research itself and for a
more global-oriented discipline of musical pedagogy.15
Therefore, music educationists in schools and institutions of higher learn-
ing in Western and other countries have stressed the importance of fostering
a deeper understanding not only of musical structures but also of the need to
pay attention to the implications in music from a global perspective.
Globalization is seldom so clearly perceptible as through musical diversity.
Music educator and ethnomusicologist from Seattle, Patricia Campbell, is
convinced that “it is vital for (music) teachers to teach musically and cultur-
ally” (Campbell, 2005, p. 36). This approach is well on the way to being
widely recognized.
Music taught in a community and anchored in a traditional setting, how-
ever, without being bound by an official and formal curriculum, can allow the
study of music to play an integral part in a broader pattern of education,
bringing about an in-depth immersion in a whole tradition or life style. In
Bahia, Brazil, for example, this can be found in the candomblé religion or in

14
The importance of performance for musical transmission and educational purposes has been discussed
for a long time from the most different angles in music research. Regarding musical pedagogical research
in contemporary traditional Southeast Asian context, see Ramón Pagayon Santos, 2012, p. 53.
15
In this regard, cf. Dargie, 1996.
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 495

samba de roda. In the Bahian tradition, a young candomblé drummer will not
restrict his learning to specific sound patterns and to playing techniques alone,
but must also learn about the right way to react to dance movements. Above
all the neophyte drummer will gain an understanding of the entire complex
of religious foundations. This educational process is holistic, in the end giving
the pupil a proper place in society, providing him/her with a profound aware-
ness of a specific cultural heritage and the world view associated with it. In the
broad sense, such a traditional music education is the pathway to social
achievements that will distinguish him as an educated person.
Ideally a socially grounded music education is focused on a total involvement
of the pupils through different forms of learning, practices, and performance.
To act and to think as a performer will also be important in academic music
studies in contexts of living heritage. Music research closely involved with edu-
cational concepts and skills has the potential to become an endeavor that directly
refers to questions of basic social relevance (Bleibinger, 2018, p. 273).
A more specific focus of our research is located in the field of performance
studies, covering approaches within the social and art sciences, as well as in
anthropology and global history.16 Musical practices are considered as social
phenomena to be studied in any geographical and/or economic environment.
The approach is a transcultural one, trusting in the plurality of cultures, rather
than in the authenticity of any absolute nature or single cultural existence.
Thus, Western musical theory, for instance, is not seen as a main or autono-
mous research subject but as part of the general global musical diversity, like
any other musical tradition. Therefore, a primary concern is focused on
human beings as performers holding and transmitting cultural knowledge.
Furthermore, transculturation clearly embraces a non-segregationally
approach in cultural theory. This is why music, as a phenomenon that most
outstandingly covers both material and intangible cultural aspects, relates in
almost every way to transcultural processes, independently of specific societies
or of any time period or stylistic epoch.

10 The Musical Instrument as Extension

of the Body
A musical instrument can be understood as the extension of a musician’s body
(de Oliveira Pinto, 2004). To play on it and to express one’s own ideas, skills,
and sentiments through music is a strong embodied experience, much closer
16
I’m referring here to the program of the UNESCO Chair on Transcultural Music Studies, University of
Music Weimar, Germany. See, for instance, Tiago de Oliveira Pinto, 2016, 2018.
496 T. de Oliveira Pinto

to one’s own body than using any other device—a typing or a drilling machine,
a computer, and so on. The musician’s body resonates in the instruments’
sound and voice.
In many cases this instrument is so intimately related to the personality of
its player, that the instrument keeps his or her name, even decades and centu-
ries after the musician’s lifetime—this is the case with famous Stradivari vio-
lins and other instruments named after one of their former owners or players.17
Also, when an instrumental teacher chooses one of his or her preferred pupils
to hand over the musical instrument, a part of the body of this teacher is being
transferred, symbolically substantiating all the learnings and musical skills
internalized during the previous learning process. And when being played
afterward, this instrument will be part of a new body, that of the former pupil,
keeping its attributes from the previous musical generation to which it had
belonged before. The musical instrument becomes a cultural body, transcend-
ing wood, metal, and so on, the specific matter it is constituted of. To learn
how to handle it is a most enduring and enormously rewarding experience
that reunites human body and mind alike.
At the end, a personal recount:

By the age of eight I started studying violin with a Hungarian teacher, Dona
Ana (Ana Kerekes Wittman), from Budapest, who emigrated to São Paulo,
Brazil, in 1956 to escape from the Soviet occupation of her home country. I
realized later that much of my career as a musician, anthropologist, and cultural
producer goes back to the foundations Dona Ana gave me as a child and teen-
ager until my 18th year of life.
The perception I had was that my teacher’s instrument was intimately related
to her. I remember when giving classes and holding her violin in her hands,
Dona Ana would illustrate what she just had said before by playing. Especially
in moments of verbal restriction, when her Portuguese language skills were not
enough to express what she intended to say, she would communicate with her
instrument. These are unforgotten remembrances of an early stage of my musi-
cal learning experiences.
Later, when I was already studying at university, and shortly before her pass-
ing, Dona Ana handed on her instrument to me, an absolutely unexpected,
enormous honor! This violin, which since then is in my possession, was made by
the Austrian Hof Lauten und Geigenbauer Johann Joseph Stadlmann, Wien in
1776: a precious old instrument, which has certainly experienced much won-
derful music. Ludwig van Beethoven was only six years old when Stadlmann
completed it. This luthier probably delivered it to the Habsburg court, where
17
For instance, Israeli-French violinist Ivry Gitlis (1922–2020) owned Sancy, a Stradivarius violin made
in 1713. It was named after its first-known owner from the Leloup family of Sancy in the Auvergne,
France, in the first half of the nineteenth century.
 Music as an Embodied Learning Experience 497

the Vienna court orchestra was officially supplied with his stringed instruments
(as stated in the inner label of most of Stadlmann’s instruments). Or it might
even be that Stadlmann sent the violin to the court of Prince Esterhazy,
Bratislava/Pressburg/Pozsony, who also ordered Stadlmann’s instruments for his
orchestra, which in those days was directed by Josef Haydn. In this latter case,
the violin would already have started its musical life in Hungary or at least in a
Hungarian context. It would leave the country involuntarily almost 200 years
later, as the only piece of luggage Dona Ana could take with during a precipi-
tous night getaway from Budapest in 1956.
My teacher studied with the internationally renowned Jenö Hubay (1856–1938),
violin virtuoso, composer, and rector of the Liszt Ferenc Academia in Budapest.
Dona Ana graduated from this Music Academy in the 1920s. Most probably
Hubay, her teacher, had also taken the instrument in his hands. There are certainly
many stories around my violin made by Stadlmann, as with any other historical
musical instrument. Unfortunately, we can only imagine that these stories exist,
without ever being able to unearth them all.
Today, when making music, I perceive my instrument as a part of my own
inner feelings. As it probably always did for generations of musicians, this violin
continues playing its role as an extension of a body: not as a prosthesis, in order
to overcome some physical incapability, but to give strength to emotions, to
self-fulfillment and to the pure joy of an aesthetical outcome. Above all, though,
‘my Stadlmann’ supports me today by becoming a ‘musical self ’, with the same
strength and brightness of a sounding moment, as it did before, with my teacher
and with so many previous musicians. To play an instrument is a sensitive
emotion-based expression of mutual commitment, a very special and unique
one between a human and a musical being, and a most vibrant living evidence
that music in fact is an embodied experience for life.

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 Part VII
Bodies in Times of Glocalizations

In the many different processes of embodiment and of learning we find uni-

versal elements that are characteristic of Homo sapiens and, at the same time,
elements that are particular to different regions and cultures. There are effects
of religion, colonialism, racism, violence, poverty and many other frameworks
of life that become inscribed into our bodies as we are social beings. An exam-
ple of the huge diversity of cultures and different ways of understanding the
body is Sub-Saharan Africa where there are almost 2000 languages and 3000
ethnic groups. Many of the body features which are characteristic of these
ethnic groups are the result of complex social processes and are unknown
outside of the particular region or locality. There is often a clash between local
and global or Western forms of learning. Conflicts are inevitable. In Africa,
the Islamic world, Latin America, India and China, concepts of the body and
embodiment have emerged, in which commonalities and differences to
Western ideas and practices are interwoven. For example, for the Yoruba who
live predominantly in Nigeria, Benin and Togo, the word omoluwabi denotes
an embodiment of values (integrity, courtesy and discipline), of a sense of
justice, craftsmanship, tolerance and sensitivity, that is essential for ‘an educa-
tion of the heart, mind and hands’ in which different elements are integrated
(Michael Omolewa and Adetola Adejo). Chapter 30 shows us how the body is
a key medium of education in the indigenous society and culture of the
Yoruba, and it reflects the impacts of religious and other cultural aspects on
embodiment and bodily processes of learning.
Whereas the case study of the Yoruba showed the importance of embodi-
ment in cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa, Chap. 31 approaches our topic from
a different angle (Reza Arjmand). This chapter analyses the key importance of
502 Bodies in Times of Glocalizations

Islam for the conceptions of the body in many African and Asian cultures, at
the same time as there are diverse cultural practices. As far as Islam is not only
a religion but a way of life, the conceptions of the human body in the Qur’an
have a powerful influence on people’s everyday lives and the realm of educa-
tion in the Islam world. The body is a sign of God; in the words of the Prophet
Muhammad: “God created Adam upon His image”. The human body has two
spheres: the first consists of the physical parts of the body such as ears, eyes,
mouth, heart and so on; the second includes anatomical experiences such as
speaking, listening and dying. The interconnectedness of body and spiritual-
ity is central. The chapter also shows how the microcosm of the human body
relates to the macrocosm, which leads to the discipline and control of bodies
in the everyday lives of Moslems. Finally, Sufism serves as an example and
illustration for the significance of embodiment for education.
Chapter 32 examines the effects of slavery, colonialism and racism on how
human bodies and body images are formed in Brazil and Latin America
(Karina Limonta Vieira). From a phenomenological viewpoint, the bodies of
the indigenous population can still be distinguished from those of the descen-
dants of the three million African slaves and from the people whose ancestors
once emigrated from Portugal and Spain. The complex make-up of the body
or bodies in Latin America is due to their commonalities and their differences.
The way children are taught in schools, particularly in their sports lessons,
shows how in Brazil an attempt is made to standardize the many diverse forms
of bodiliness. Here the aims and values of liberalism and capitalism play an
important role. The various body types and conceptions of the body are
important for creation of a national identity, and all the more so since the
physical differences are associated with social differences which are used for
the creation of social hierarchies. Normative body images are not least impor-
tant in the fields of sexual attraction and gender differences. The form and
appearance of the female body, under the rule of machismo, to a large degree
still determines female identity and attractiveness.
Chapter 33 uses a historical case study to consider the characteristics of the
body in Ancient China and the importance of embodiment for human devel-
opment and education. In the view of Hongyan Chen there are substantial
differences between the Western and the Chinese conception of the body.
Whereas the West was governed for a long time by mind-body dualism, she
argues that one can find the tradition of a holistic view of the human being
and the relationship of the body to the mind in China. On both sides we see
an increasing interest in the body, and scholars from different language and
culture areas attempt to construct a paradigm shift of body studies. This chap-
ter focuses on the anthropological aspect of the body in traditional Chinese
 Bodies in Times of Glocalizations 503

discourse. A historical-cultural approach has been applied to trace back the

influence of Ancient China on the conception of the body and to identify the
differences to Western understanding. In this case, time (Shi), repetitive exer-
cise (yangsheng, Li) and harmony (yin and yang, Qi) are essential for the nur-
ture and development of an energetic body, without the need for strength. In
the field of Chinese pedagogy and education there is a growing interest in a
consciously body-based learning in which our attention is drawn to the influ-
ence of Chinese traditions.
The last chapter (Chap. 34), concluding this section of the handbook,
examines Hindu education in India (Srajana Kaikini). It shows that crucial
for learning to act and to behave in a way that is ethically correct is the
embodiment of aims and values and the attainment of practical knowledge.
The chapter shows that the abasement of the body, of the Dalits for example,
serves to create working bodies and (hu)manpower for in terms of social rec-
ognition ‘low’, yet necessary social jobs. The article shows that in large sec-
tions of Indian society the dignity of the human being and a person’s social
status is controlled by valuing or devaluing the body. Colonialism and caste,
the gender and class system have led to the discrimination of large sections of
the population. This has resulted in a differentiation between several body
forms, such as the suffering body, the labouring body and the discriminated
body. There have also been efforts to develop the concept of a sensing, think-
ing and acting body, which has met with a great deal of opposition. In this
process Kaikini sees a relationship between embodiment, metaphysics and the
social framing of learning, which she regards of central importance for the
quality of education in Indian democracy.
 Embodiment of the Values System
in Indigenous African Society
Michael Omolewa and Adetola Adejo

1 Introduction
It is important to state from the outset that there is no uniformity in the cul-
tural or traditional practices of the Africans, although there may be similari-
ties. This is because Africa, as a region, comprises such vastness in size and
cultural differences, even in sub-Saharan Africa with an estimation of 2000
languages and 3000 peoples. It is, of course, also true that there are some
broad similarities in cultural practices, especially South of the Sahara Desert
where intangible cultural traditions and practices are most common. In the
entire region, however, there is a commonality in the use of the body as con-
veyor of information, values and attitudes and in being groomed to adopt
specific measures of transforming the individual, the community and the
wider society.
In African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Malawi, among
others, traditional education of youngsters involves intellectual, physical and
attitudinal training in order to develop fully into acceptable adults in the
society. In addition, different kinds of games, including wrestling and run-
ning, training for healthy living, cooking, dressing, hunting, farming, carpen-
try, training to become a smith, drumming, dancing, marriage counselling

M. Omolewa (*)
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
A. Adejo
Babcock University, Ilishan-Remo, Nigeria

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 505
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_30
506 M. Omolewa and A. Adejo

and critical thinking, form part of the traditional curriculum at different

stages of the life of the youth. Even on becoming an adult, and after the usual
rites of passage, the average African continues to learn from traditional educa-
tion through a lifelong process. This process fosters unity and citizenship in
the African man’s or woman’s immediate environment (Adeyemi &
Adeyinka, 2002).
The interactions of Africans with Islamic and Western worlds introduced
literacy and the knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic. The injection
of literacy into the indigenous African system has led to a general disappoint-
ment that many of the core African values have been eroded by the indis-
criminate response of Africans to the external systems that are found more
attractive. Therefore, this study aims at examining how the body is used both
in the training and in the transmission of African values, from one generation
to another. It will also identify the parts of the body that are involved in the
process of the teaching and imparting of knowledge, and the cultivation of
core African values.
We shall use the Yoruba as a case study for our discourse. One reason for
this choice is that the Yoruba are among the most widely dispersed peoples in
Africa, as their presence continues to be evident even in Europe, the United
Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, El Salvador, Cuba and, of course, in
African countries including Togo, Benin, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Liberia
and Nigeria, where they are domiciled in the South West (Akintoye, 2010). A
further attraction for the choice of the Yoruba is in the availability of ample
literature and resources by scholars such as Ayo Bamgbose, Olabiyi Yai,
Akinwumi Isola and many other researchers on aspects of the Yoruba lan-
guage and culture. It must be noted that Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel
Laureate in Literature, is Yoruba.
In addition, we have relied on interviews with persons who we regard
as custodians of the indigenous traditions in the absence of written evidence.
These custodians have served as informants who have benefited from the
wealth of oral traditions passed on through generations. Our selection of
informants has considered the differences in age, religious affiliation and gen-
der. Moreover, the evidence from interviews has been supplemented by ample
materials in form of articles and books published by African scholars of differ-
ent faith and persuasions.
We have also used materials in the form of written comments and observa-
tions of foreigners who visited Africa and who keep in touch with the local
practices in the communities visited. An example of these foreigners was
J. D. Y. Peel, an English person who specialised in the study of Yoruba and
became Professor of Sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies
at the University of London (Marchand, 2016). Another example was Ulli
 Embodiment of the Values System in Indigenous African Society 507

Beier, a German, who was recruited to the Department of Extramural Studies

of the University College, Ibadan, (UCI), in Nigeria (Ogundele, 2003, 1998;
Abiodun, 2011; Breitinger, 2011). UCI was Nigeria’s first and oldest
University, founded by the British colonial government. Peel lived among the
Ijesa people, a branch of the Yoruba of Western Nigeria, and taught at the
University of Ife founded in the city of Ile Ife, considered the cradle of Yoruba
civilisation. Beier arrived in Nigeria on 1 October 1950, and it is interesting
to note that the country was later to be granted political independence by the
British government exactly ten years later, 1 October 1960. Both Peel and
Beier became close friends of the key traditional rulers among the Yoruba of
Western Nigeria who in turn began to give them their trust and confidence.
Both Europeans identified with the culture of the Yoruba people. Beier went
deeper in his relationship with the core cultural group of the Yoruba. Thus,
after his arrival, he chose to be initiated into the traditional cults. Ulli Beier’s
decision demonstrated his respect for the traditional system and made him a
total insider, with unlimited access to “the mundane and celestial worlds of
the Yoruba … ritual performances and traditional festivals to ‘orisa’ (deity)
tradition and worship, poetry, local priests and everyday ordinary peoples”
(Raheem, 2019). He, in particular, “had the singular honour of being trusted
by the diverse cultural agencies with even the smallest of details handed down
from their forebears” (Raheem, 2019).
Both Peel and Beier were also physically and emotionally connected with
the local people and visited Yoruba towns where they mingled with people
from all social classes. Their observations of the practices of the Yoruba were,
therefore, intimate and reliable. However, it is important to note that the
practices of the people have not been static. Thus, Jacob Ade Ajayi, a leading
scholar in African historiography, in his seminal study of change and continu-
ity, observed that there has been a consistent evolution of the several features
and elements of the use of the body (Ade Ajayi, 1969).
This discourse about the body in Africa is arranged chronologically, com-
prising the pre-literate, industrial and technological periods. The pre-literate
educational provision was done wholly in the non-formal setting. The discus-
sion on the status in Africa in the pre-literate setting is followed by the descrip-
tion of the change which was introduced by the coming of foreign cultures
and practices and led to cosmopolitanism and the attraction of the Arabic and
Western culture through the Islamic and Western education. Even at this
time, the education in the non-formal setting continued. Finally, we explore
the post literate, industrial and technological phase of the embodiment of the
African culture or value system, which was again dominated by non-formal
education components.
508 M. Omolewa and A. Adejo

2 The Mission of the Body

Broadly, the body has remained the key instrument used by Africans in many
directions and for a variety of purposes. The body of the African, in its physi-
cal form, in colonial times was reported as strong and virile, and this would
explain why Africans were preferred as slaves when there was competition
with other ‘races’ for access to powerful workers on the farms and industries
in America and the Caribbean (Horton, 2003). Africans were found to be
resilient, powerful and adaptable, and that is why they have been acclaimed as
being capable of both simultaneously suffering and smiling in many parts of
the world, including their own homeland Africa.
The body, however, transcends the physical form and is used through the
process of learning to convey a message, develop some competence and be
used for more lasting goals. Basically, therefore, the use of the entire body has
been geared ultimately to produce an ‘omoluwabi’, an embodiment of values,
the person of integrity, a perfect gentleman, well bred, courteous, disciplined
and endowed with competence, compassion and character—the 3Cs.
The ‘omoluwabi’ is groomed to possess an independent spirit, defiance of
inequity and social injustice; demonstration of aptitude in craftsmanship,
integrity, valour, honour, knowledge of traditional history, traditional medi-
cine, norms and practices, and investment of the talent, as well as skill for the
advancement of the individual and the wider community. The ‘omoluwabi’
was predictably known for tolerance and sensitivity to differences.
Competence, compassion and character were the core values of the ‘omolu-
wabi’. Money or the accumulation of wealth was not the priority or preoc-
cupation of the noble Yoruba person. The ‘omoluwabi’ was particularly
expected to possess character. The development of character is, therefore,
mandatory. As the elders of Africa put it, “if there is no character, beauty
becomes ugliness” (Olagunju, 2020). Similarly, it is strongly argued that a
person’s character will always expose his or her identity. The attribute of a
steady and dependable character was appreciated by Heraclitus the Greek phi-
losopher, who was credited to have argued that character is destiny. The
Yoruba contend that ‘iwa’, character, is ‘ewa’, beauty, thus the emergence of
the word, ‘iwalewa’, character is beauty.
Ulli Beier observed that character, ‘iwa’, is the key product of sound train-
ing, and that its possession is the source of beauty, victorious living and suc-
cess in every undertaking. This philosophy about the value of character was
summarised in the saying, ‘iwalewa’, or character is unquantifiable beauty. On
his return to Germany, Beier founded the unit for the propagation of African
 Embodiment of the Values System in Indigenous African Society 509

culture, which he named Iwalewa House at the University of Bayreuth. It is

interesting that Beier became so intensely attracted by the concept and prac-
tice of ‘iwalewa’, thus sharing the profound faith in the quality of character
(Ogundele, 1998). For as the Yoruba put it, “It is your character and character
alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy”, and “If you have a good
head but lack character, the head will soon lose its goodness” (Olagunju, 2020).
The story of Ulli Beier is interesting. Attracted by the Yoruba philosophy of
the development of the person, he was ardently fascinated by the ancient
Yoruba culture and its powerful agencies. He was disturbed by the threats
posed to the Yoruba rich traditions by the new religious movements,
Westernisation and colonial rule. He was particularly disappointed by the
ardent admiration the emergent educated elites had for Westernisation, while
at the same time showing less concern for local traditions and cultures (Beier,
1957). His mission to give the deserved respect and recognition to the rich
African culture was already being pursued by the Yoruba cultural reawakening
and rebirth that had begun around the early decades of the twentieth century.
This was the time of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, a cultural group composed of
Western educated elites of Yoruba extraction, which later led to the formation
of the Action Group, a political party which was led by Chief Obafemi
Awolowo, the Premier of Western Nigeria (Arifalo, 2001).
Another significant core value of the ‘omoluwabi’ is compassion.
Compassion is a deeply ingrained value in the African worldview, practiced in
every social, economic, political and religious structure of a community.
Compassion gives the community its identity. It is an ethical duty, a way of
life. This virtue of compassion is so deeply rooted that it withstands the pres-
sures of modernity, even among the youth. Because of the deeply ingrained
community value in Africans, compassion seems to have survived the
onslaught of individualism as well. For instance, there is no limit to the sacri-
fices the ‘omoluwabi’ can make for a visitor. African elders have a saying that:
‘The hen with chicks does not swallow the worm’. This means that an African
would rather cater to the needs of the guest first before meeting own needs.
According to Chief Abiodun Adejo (personal communication, 21 November
2020), if a guest were to visit and there was only a plate of food available, the
‘omoluwabi’ is expected to share the food with guest or give up the food so
that the guest is fed first before any other person. He added that the best parts
of anything—clothing, food and shelter—were to be offered to the guest first
and then the ‘omoluwabi’ will make do with whatever is left.
510 M. Omolewa and A. Adejo

3 The Process
The body is used both in the training and in the transmission of the values of
‘omoluwabi’ from one generation to the other. Thus, the purpose for which
the Yoruba is weaned from birth is to bring the ‘omoluwabi’ out of the baby,
by bringing the beauty out of the baby through the stage of acculturation and
sustained teaching and learning. This process of weaning is also made the duty
of all stakeholders, the parents, the peers and the wider community, charged
with bringing up the next generation through inspiration, guiding and instill-
ing values. Of course, while bringing up the child and younger adult, there
could be some scolding, in which corporal punishment is administered.
However, the end product has been noted as salutary as the standards of eth-
ics, integrity and sensitivity to differences have been successfully transmitted
(Omolewa, 2007). Parts of the body are identified as part of the process of the
teaching and imparting of knowledge and cultivation of the values of the
‘omoluwabi’. For example, the head is a major component of the components
for successful living: the use of the Head, the Hand and the Heart, the 3Hs.

3.1 The Head

The head, ‘ori’, is the first instrument for learning the basic value of integrity.
The head is accepted as the first and leading part of the body. It is believed
that the head determines the destiny of the individual. The Yoruba, in their
prayer ‘ori mi gbe mi lo siibi ire mi’, confess that it is the head that can sup-
port their dreams and translate their vision to a mission and progress: ‘ori mi’.
Thus, special attention is paid to the nurturing of the head, taking care of it
and investing in its nourishment. The head is adorned with care and atten-
tion. Likewise, the husband and father is accepted as the head of the family
with the responsibility to guide and guard other members of the family. The
head is venerated. In similar ways, the elders in the society are venerated and
accepted as ancestors at death. The masquerades are believed to be spirits of
the ancestors who are on a visit to the earth. Thus, no disrespect is to be
accepted. The head is given special greetings in the form of poetry known as
the ‘oriki’. The ‘oriki’ is chanted or sung to welcome a person of all ages,
social class or professional choice. It is usually in the form of praise, ascribing
to the recipient of the ‘oriki’ some past noble deeds of the individual or the
family. ‘Oriki’ is also a form of exaltation and encouragement. Sometimes, it
takes the form of prophetic declaration. When you praise a person from a
town, they get happier and closer to you. People will be friendly with you if
 Embodiment of the Values System in Indigenous African Society 511

you know their ‘oriki’. It has been observed that crying children stop crying
when someone sings their ‘oriki’ (Oyedele, personal communication, 27
November 2020).
The head, so appreciated and given due recognition, is expected to strive to
attract the best to the entire body: good deeds of kindness, sacrifice, love,
compassion and sensitivity. Another part of the body that is often invoked in
the learning process is the hand.

3.2 The Hand

The Yoruba take special interest in the development of the interest of the
young ones in their use of their hands, accepted as special gifts of the Supreme
Being. Learning to do something with the hands is vital. To this end, serves an
apprenticeship system in which a young person is attached to a trade, a profes-
sion or business such as such as hunting, building, traditional medical prac-
tice or knowledge of the herbs. The master craftsman supervises the apprentice
over the period of learning the craft or profession. Beginning from the lowest
level of attachment, the apprentice is supposed to perform menial jobs in
obedience and humility and surrender. In learning by doing, simultaneously,
the apprentice is actively taught to use the hands. This is much unlike the
system of Western education where ‘book knowledge’ precedes the hands-on,
that is the doing of the work. In the Yoruba context, there is flexibility in the
duration of the apprenticeship. Basically, however, learner performance is
determined by aptitude, skill and ability.
In the indigenous system, there is no question of first learning and later
getting prepared for employment. Learning and working happens simultane-
ously. This arrangement ensures that there is always some job to be performed.
Therefore, no question of unemployment arises. Laziness and indolence are
seen as unacceptable to the society.

3.3 The Heart

The heart, ‘okan’, with its intangible mind, ‘emi’, is recognised as perhaps
the most important part of the body that dominates the other parts. It is
believed that once the mind is touched, all other parts are affected by the
touch. It is, therefore, assumed that the mind can be used as the medium
with which to reach other parts: hence, the decision to give prior attention
to the mind. The mind is to be cultivated to learn about the virtues of
512 M. Omolewa and A. Adejo

purity, nobility, holiness, sacredness, love, mercy, compassion, dedication

and personal sacrifice to which it must dedicate itself never to desecrate.
The mind also remains at the centre of use for the cultivation of values, and
the grooming for acceptance of goodness and righteousness. During the
training of the mind, there is a deliberate rejection of those temptations
and pressures such as sin, immorality, corruption, wickedness and other
possible prevailing iniquities of the age.

3.4 The Body Language: The Eye and the Nose

as Non-verbal Communicators

In addition to the focus on the separate parts of the body, there is body
language, which is not verbal; it does not involve talking but includes the
instrumentality of the movement of a part of the body, mostly the eye and
the nose, and the face, in such a way that it communicates a message to the
onlooker, without making a sound. One’s thinking, positive or negative, is
reflected in his or her emotions, moody or excited, and a smile says that
one is happy.
The interpretation of the unspoken message by the person involved leads
to a response required by the sender of the message. For example, a frown
would be used for expressing displeasure, quiet for insisting on silence.
When a question is asked, or a shaking of the head an objection to a
request is indicated. Mothers are often associated with the use of body lan-
guage, e.g. gestures to be silent, by this, conveying a message, taught or
developed naturally.
Through body language, communication is carried out and one is able to
talk without sound. We can instruct, direct, inform and address an individual
using body language, as well as communicate to the target what is required to
do. If the person to whom the message is sent fails to respond or react, in
Yoruba the recipient is mocked as ‘Ko m’oju’, one who is deficient in the
knowledge of body language.

3.5 Learning Through Music and Dance

Almost all the parts of the body are used in the body movements, which
involve music and dance. The art of dancing is used to instil values that are
fundamental to the African ways of life. Music and dance are introduced to
equip the learners with the ability to function effectively in other areas of
 Embodiment of the Values System in Indigenous African Society 513

learning such as language acquisition, speech, literacy, numeracy and other

related themes. They are given to learners to enjoy, thus providing them
with an artistic outlet and a way to relax. Learners often anticipate the
music and dance sessions with excitement because compassion and choice
are usually encouraged and nurtured. Through carefully planned music
and dance programmes, learning takes place during initiation, festivities,
the age-grade system, home education and community education where
everyone is encouraged to learn the norms and values of the society
(Omolewa, 2007).

3.6 Integrated Learning

It is important to note that learning in the indigenous system does not leave
room for compartmentalisation in the sense of separating learning into
branches of science and arts. The child gets exposed to all branches of learn-
ing. Similarly, the separation of learning into the primary, secondary and ter-
tiary levels is not known, as education is considered to be lifelong, unbroken
and continuing throughout life. Indeed, there is a curriculum available
even after life on the requirements for successful living after death, as the dead
are reminded, ‘a j’okun, ma jekolo, nkanti won ban je lohunni ko ma ba won
je’: don’t eat worms, nor millipedes, get to know what the requirements are
there yonder and adapt (Adesegun A. personal communication, 27
November 2020).
Another characteristic of the indigenous education is the community-
focused system. The upbringing of the child is not exclusive responsibility of
the parents, but of everyone in the community. Everyone is involved in bring-
ing up the child: communal system, interaction. The welfare of others is
important, and individuality was discouraged. This is different from the
arrangement of examination preparation and ‘rat-race competition’ in Western
education.

3.7 Learning in the Indigenous Society

The body parts are supposed to convey the message of the values acceptable to
the Yoruba society, the goal of the Yoruba knowledge system is the cultivation
of basic values for the benefit of the individual and the wider society, as stated
earlier. The question can be asked about why Africa has been able to sustain
the tradition of producing a people like Yoruba who, until today and despite
514 M. Omolewa and A. Adejo

of colonialism, have remained rich in culture, facing the struggles of life with
determination and strength and ensuring the continuity of the life that is
founded on communal living? Many African communities have sustained the
culture of caring for one another, not allowing government to take on the
role, as is done in the technologically and industrially developed parts of the
world, consciously and by education avoiding being too self-centred or think-
ing only about one’s self instead of the collective population. Africans have
also been found to enjoy living a simple life, being contented with sharing the
little each one has with others, compassionate and filled with love. It is amaz-
ing and often inexplicable how the ordinary and usually extremely poor peo-
ple choose to offer services to neighbours, shunning the temptations of
accumulating material possession.
The explanation is found in the inculcation of the basic discipline of faith
in the afterlife, the home of the ancestors where rewards are given to those
who have lived a good life of service to others and sacrifice involving denial of
self. At the centre of the process of acquiring this discipline is the invocation
of the knowledge of the Supreme Being, given several names such as God, and
descriptions such as the Almighty, and recognised as the Maker and Creator
of the universe who knows all things because He has made them all. He is
believed to be capable of doing all things because His authority is unlimited
and unstoppable. The efficacy of the belief in the power of the spirit world has
been noted by Ulli Beier from the vantage position of his initiation. The
knowledge of the Supreme Being is, however, accompanied by sanctions for
failing to adhere strictly to the demands for living a life of decency, fairness
and firmness. The instruments for enforcing these sanctions included appeals
to the spirit world sometimes in the form of masquerades who were believed
to be visitors from the outer space who have come to ensure that social justice
and equity were practised. Those found wanting were compelled to face the
prescribed punishments, some of which were as humiliating as ostracism from
the wider society of individuals or families that were deviants. Again, Ulli
Beier ensured that he had adequate knowledge of the forces which held the
people together. To this end, he got initiated into the secret society, the
Ogboni cult (Morton-Williams, 1960). The implication was that by becom-
ing a member of the Ogboni cult, and a devotee, he had unlimited access to
the priests, priestesses, healers, traditional rulers and devotees of several Yoruba
religious cults from which he learnt about deeper issues or “the categories that
embody the macrocosmic world of the Yoruba” (Raheem, 2019).
The potency of the indigenous African culture may be explained by the
system of sanctions that were put in place. For example, in the process of the
choice of a marriage partner, each family of the proposed couple would
 Embodiment of the Values System in Indigenous African Society 515

conduct an in-depth search of the antecedents of the individuals concerned.

Questions would be asked about the antecedents of the parents, and if there
had been incidents of criminality, insubordination and related anti-social
behaviour, and if any family had been associated with stealing, there would be
an opposition to the association with such a family. It is the cultivation of the
tradition of transparency and nobility of character that would explain why
homes were built in the indigenous community without the modern burglar-
proof windows and doors, as well as walls that now look like prison houses. It
was inconceivable to allow a lady to be married into any family where there
was indolence or laziness, as everyone was expected to have cultivated the
tradition for hard work and industry. There were objections to homes with
any trace of cowardly behaviour, as courage and chivalry were applauded by
the society. The society was groomed to appreciate nobility of character involv-
ing selflessness and dedication, accountability and transparency, and to shun
materialism and the pursuit of personal interests, which are often associated
with corruption. In later years, the society had been transformed into a
corruption-infested, acquisitive, materialistic community where self-interest
prevails over the collective interest of the indigenous society.
Later in the history of Africa, the interaction with the Islamic and Western
worlds introduced literacy and thus the knowledge of the 3Rs involving read-
ing, arithmetic and writing. It has been argued that the injection of the 3Rs
into the indigenous system of the 3Cs did not necessarily lead to an improved
performance of the expectations of the indigenous society. Rather, it has been
noted that products of the 3R became arrogant and disrespectful of their illit-
erate elders. Consequently, there has been a general disappointment that
many of the core values have been eroded by the often indiscriminated
responses of Africans to the external systems that are found more attractive,
and subsequently the adoption of European modes of dress, language, eating
style and greetings. It has been observed that many of these African tradition-
ists have continued to live the indigenous way with the long greetings, dress
codes and the showing of respect to elders by acknowledging their wisdom
and experience and bowing to salute them.
There are some Africans who have continued to resist the foreign incursion
and who lament the wholesale adoption of the foreign dress codes, such as the
Arab purdah and shawl, the European suit and ties, the greetings of ‘hi’ instead
of the longer version of asking for the state of the health of the neighbour and
how he slept and whether he dreamt or not.
Many of these Africans attracted by the Western cultural practices have
been tempted to look down on the illiterate population as unfortunate human
516 M. Omolewa and A. Adejo

beings robbed of the light of civilisation. Arrogant and self-conceited, they are
known to show off their knowledge in an arrogant manner (Ayandele, 1974).
However, the ‘omoluwabi’ traits of character, compassion and competence
have substantially remained. Thus, among the Yoruba, it was common for the
community to accommodate the religious differences introduced by the com-
ing of Islam and Christianity. For example, during Muslim celebrations,
Christians joined in the celebration of the festivities and shared in the joy that
accompanied the slaughter of rams. Similarly, Muslims joined in the celebra-
tion of Christian festivals including the Christmas and Easter celebrations.
The gulf and hostility experienced in other societies were generally unknown
among the Yoruba and certainly were not acceptable.
It should also be noted that in spite of the glorification of the changes
brought by the connection of Africans with the Arab and European civilisa-
tions, it is clear that the culture and values of hard work, industry and honesty
was eroded by the contact with the foreign influences.
In contemporary society, many of the basic expectations of the indigenous
system remain in the society to varying degrees. The body continues to remain
a composite of tangible things, which display physically some potent messages
that are systematically intangible and represent something that is abstract. The
body serves as the conveyor of the values of the society, which rejects anti-
social values and practices of cruelty, ignorance, corruption, incompetence,
carelessness and disloyalty, while extolling the values of strong character where
character continues to matter and be considered a desirable end of a person’s
destiny. For any learning among the children and younger adults to be sus-
tainable and efficient, the indigenous education systems must be constantly
taken into consideration.

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 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic
World
Reza Arjmand

Have We not lay open thy breast. (Qurʾān1, XCIV, 1)

Islam is perceived not only as a religion but as a way of life with detailed
directions for its adherents, and the human body is among the areas that are
explored and discussed extensively. While the body is certainly an essential
aspect of human existence, treating it as an object of study is no easy matter.
Despite the wealth of literature on the body in Islam, embodiment in educa-
tion is a rather neglected topic and, except sporadically in various texts, is not
properly addressed. Indeed, the body as a physical and conceptual tool is
implicated in all human attempts to construct knowledge, which means that
it can be intrusively ever present or frustratingly transparent depending on the
epistemological vantage point one chooses to employ in discussing a topic
(Bashir, 2010).
This chapter begins with a brief account on the body and embodiment in
Islam based on the Qurʾān as the common denominator for all Muslims and
on which, despite variations in exegesis, all Muslim doctrines rest. The chapter
then continues with the discussion on the notion of embodiment and
education in Islam by examining some of the theories underpinning it from

1
The terms in other languages are usually Arabic or Persian. The transliteration of Arabic and Persian
terms in this chapter is based on ALA-LC Romanization Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts (1997). Familiar
variant names, however, follow the official spelling of the individuals or sites, even though they may not
fully comply with the ALA-LC system.

R. Arjmand (*)
Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
e-mail: reza.arjmand@lnu.se

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 519
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_31
520 R. Arjmand

various perspectives. Evidently, given the heterogeneous contextual character-

istics of Muslim cultures and societies, both temporally and geographically, it
is impossible to achieve a coherent and comprehensive theory of embodiment
from an educational perspective. This account, hence, is an attempt to show
clearly and concisely the diverse theoretical views that exist across the Muslim
intellectual world on the notion of embodiment and education. The chapter
therefore discusses various dominant philosophical and educational schools.

1 Body and Embodiment in Islam:

An Ontological Account
Qurʾān as the primary source of religious knowledge in Islam contains the
term ‘nafs’ to denote the human person in their entirety, usually without spe-
cifically differentiating between soul and body (Calverley & Netton, 2012),
while likewise there are exclusive references to the physical corpus as well. This
is specifically more discernible in verses where the Qurʾān mentions the cre-
ation of human beings from dust or clay or various human organs. An impor-
tant feature of the Qurʾānic view of the human body is that it is put forth as
‘ayah’ (sign of God), “It is among His Signs that He created you from dust”
(Qur’an XXX, 20). It also addresses creation and physical constitution
(‘khalq’) (The Qurʾān, XLV, 3–4). Moreover, it is stated that God has created
man “in the best of moulds” (XCV, 4). The Islamic version of the concept of
‘imago dei’, expressed by the saying of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘God created
Adam upon His image’ should be seen and understood in this light (Shahzad,
2007). The Qurʾān mentions different body parts many times, spread through-
out the text and particular terms do not always convey the same meaning in
different contexts. In some parts of the Qurʾān the human body is treated as
a functional element and in a metaphorical sense aimed at encouraging the
pursuit of an ethical and pious life. The body parts in the Qurʾān are cited in
conjunction with the faith of believers to ensure that there is a complete
understanding of the harmony between the workings of the body and the
message of the Qurʾān. In the Qurʾān, the human body can be seen as two
divided spheres. The first consists of the various physical elements, such as the
flesh, fluids, eyes, ears, head and heart. The second includes anatomical expe-
rience, such as speaking, weeping, eating, fasting, listening and dying, and
what the body experiences in the light of religious faith (Huda, 2017).
The wellbeing of the physical body is deemed significant for Muslims who
recognize it as a vessel of spirituality. According to Islamic tenets, the human
body in its physicality is made of clay, completed by a process of ensoulment,
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 521

not earlier than four months after conception.2 The flesh is not seen as evil,
and its needs and desires should be fulfilled in reasonable moderation. The
Islamic tradition insists overwhelmingly on the connectedness of the human
body and spirituality (Hoffman, 1995). As Bashir (2010) puts it, the body
appears as a lynchpin within Islamic cosmological thought, holding the cos-
mos together by mediating between its physical, metaphysical and social
aspects.
The body in Islam is seen as a microcosm which reflects the cosmos in its
entirety. This notion, which is more pronounced among Sufi scholars, has
resulted in a Muslim cosmological scheme and affects various social as well as
epistemological domains. If we consider the physical quality of corporeality,
however, the theory of microcosm and macrocosm forms the basis of two sets
of correspondences: (1) the equivalence between the different components of
the material world and the various elements of the human body, which often
amount to seven—hence the link with the astrological seven planets; and (2)
the way in which the four cosmic elements (water, fire, air and earth) corre-
spond to the four bodily humours (blood, phlegm, red bile and black bile);
the elements of both groups have contrasting qualities—humidity, dryness,
heat and cold (Gignoux, 2004) which correspond to the body as a complete
whole. The Muslim philosophers al-Kindi, Avicenna and Fakhr al-Din al-
Razi, all of whom are known for their distinctive approach to education, con-
nected the four elements with the four qualities (‘ṭabāʾiʿ’) heat and cold (the
active force), and dryness and moisture (the recipients) (Rafati, 2002), which
affect not only the physical body but also the intellect and habits of learning.
There is a large amount of material on the taxonomy of the body and its
respective terminology within the Islamic philosophy and subsequently edu-
cation and this is beyond the scope of this concise chapter; however, a brief
reference to human body typology in Islam seems necessary. The Islamic
metaphysical body is composed of ‘jirm’ (mass), a higher component of the
celestial bodies,3 while mundane bodies are composed of the four classical
cosmic elements (‘al-basāʾiṭ’). ‘Badan’ and ‘jasad’ are used as synonyms of
‘jism’ (anatomical body); whereas the former is also used for the bodies of
animals, the latter is reserved for the bodies of higher beings. In addition,

2
Among other implications, this means that from a Muslim juridical perspective (except for the Mālikī
school among Sunnīs) contraception is not murder and abortion is permissible during the first four
months of pregnancy.
3
The idea is originally attributed to Pythagoras and his notion of the ‘harmony of the spheres’, which
maintained that informed by their jirms, the celestial bodies move according to mathematical equations.
Jirmiyyūn are philosophers who, as followers of Pythagoras, argue that in the same vein as the celestial
bodies, the human soul is the harmony of its body (the doctrine of i ʾtilāf or ittiḥād).
522 R. Arjmand

‘haykal’ is a gnostic term to connote the physical world as a whole to include

planets, since the world-soul and the spirits of the stars dwell in them like the
human soul in its body (Nicholson, 1998).
Muslim scholars have often discussed the notion of the body in dichotomic
conjunction with the soul—a subtle form or substance infused within or
inhabiting a physical body. The significance of corporeality and the way the
human body is fashioned has resulted in an ontological perspective among a
group of Muslims who followed the literal meanings of passages in the Qurʾān
that likened God to humans. Utilizing such Qurʾānic verses which suggest
that “God is seated on a throne” (II, 255) and others that suggest “God has
hands” (III, 73; V, 64; XLVIII, 10) and “eyes” (XX, 39; LII, 48; LIV, 14), the
school of ‘Mushabbihūn’ (anthropomorphists) was formed who believe in
‘tajsīm’ (Corporealism) (Martin, 2018). The philosophical foundation of
Corporealism is based on the premise that only that which has a physical
extension can exist and thus, as the Qurʾānic descriptions suggest, God must
have a ‘jism’ (physical body) to exist. Studies based on such anthropomor-
phism form a large part of Muslim literature on corporeality and embodi-
ment, and Muslim scholars across various disciplines are divided on this. In
point of fact, most of the speculative theologians and their opponents who
disputed this doctrine found ways to hedge extreme positions of totally affirm-
ing or totally denying the human attributes of God. ‘Tashbīh’ and ‘taʿṭīl’
became terms of opprobrium used ascriptively, rather than descriptively, as
accusations against theological opponents (Martin, 2018). The outcome of
the contentious polemics regarding Islamic anthropomorphism on epistemol-
ogy also highlights the similarity between divine knowledge and scholastic or
mundane knowledge, between which there is a clear division. The latter is
subordinate to the former. Divine knowledge is present and solely accessible
through ‘waḥy’ (revelation), while mundane knowledge is acquired by scho-
lastic means. Divine knowledge is also of a higher order, both quantitatively
and qualitatively, but nevertheless ultimately identical with human knowl-
edge (Arjmand, 2008). Thus, there are different ways of attaining the same
knowledge and hence various approaches to knowledge acquisition are
required: through direct divine illumination, a prophetic approach for which
human spiritual development is required, or alternatively through philosophi-
cal inductive methods. While the latter moves from the imagination upwards
to the theoretical intellect, the prophetic illumination approach goes in the
reverse direction, from the theoretical intellect to the imagination.
The Muslim body is heavily regulated, and there is a long line of corporeal
rules and regulations which stipulate various aspect of embodiment both in
private and in public domains. In certain schools of thought within Islam,
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 523

Shiism and Sufism for instance, the body of certain figures becomes a source
of grace and bounty even after death. This explains the abundance of shrines
across parts of the Muslim world. The graves are perceived as the

sites where divine favour and blessing occur, where mercy and grace descend;
they are a refuge for the distressed, a shelter for the despondent, a haven for the
oppressed, and a place of consolation for weary hearts, and will ever remain so
until resurrection. (Qomī, 1961, p. 562)

As beings mired down in the material world, humans cannot but think
with and through the body. This fact, a truism in the modern study of corpo-
reality, can be illustrated in the Islamic context by considering God’s anthro-
pomorphically corporeal description of himself in the Qurʾān that amounts,
from the internal Muslim perspective, to a self-portrait (Bashir, 2010). The
extensive use of corporeal metaphors in the works of Muslim scholars under-
scores the comportment of the body as an a priori fact of life. The variation of
perspectives and the association of the body and its taxonomy as a means for
understanding the cosmos, from celestial beings to society, deserve a system-
atic approach to its understanding.

2 A Functionalist Approach to Embodiment

in Islam
Apart from the widely debated theological doctrine of ‘tashbīh’ (anthropo-
morphism) and the notion of ascribing human attributes to the divine body,
which is more pronounced among some schools, for instance Ash’arīes,4 al-
Farabi’s (872–950) theory of functionalism is one of the earliest endeavours to
utilize embodiment to explain the role of social and political institutions. In a
similar vein to its Western equivalent, which appeared much later in nine-
teenth-century Europe, al-Farabi employs organic analogy as a method to
decipher and explain how certain social practices or institutions serve to
further the survival of the social system in its entirety. In his magnum opus,
The Perfect State (1985, p. 23), al-Farabi notes that

4
The Ash‘arī is a school of Muslim theology whose main ideas, mostly concerning the notion of divine
corporeality, are formulated as a response to the theological doctrines of the Mu‘atazilīs (rationalist school
of Islamic theology who emphasize the supremacy of human reason and free-will) (Watt, 2008). Whereas
the Mu‘atazilīs endeavoured to apply reason and rational argumentation as a methodological tool to
religious knowledge, Ash‘arīs maintained an orthodox and literal approach to the interpretation of the
Scripture. The difference between the two schools of thought is more pronounced in the notion of cor-
poreality and divine anthropomorphism.
524 R. Arjmand

the excellent city5 resembles the perfect and healthy body, all of whose limbs
cooperate to make the life of the animal [man] perfect and to preserve it in
this state.

Using the corporeal metaphors, al-Farabi provides a detailed argument for

the theoretical underpinning of functionalism: differentiation, (secondary)
socialization and social solidarity:

The city and the household may be compared with the body of a man. Just as
the body is composed of different parts of a determinate number, some more,
some less excellent adjacent to each other and graded, each doing a certain
work, and there is combined from all their actions mutual help towards the
perfection of the aim in the man’s body.—Yet there is combined from these dif-
ferent aims, when they are perfected and combined, mutual help towards the
perfection of the aim of the city. This again may be compared with the body,
since the head, breast, belly, back, arms and legs are related to the body as the
households of the city to the city. The work of each of the principal members is
different from the work of the other, and the parts of each one of these principal
members help one another by their different actions towards the perfection of
the aim in that principal member. Then there is combined from the different
aims of the principal members, when they are perfected, and from their differ-
ent actions, mutual help towards the perfection of the aim of the whole body
(Farabi, 1961, p. 37).

Al-Farabi’s functionalist view defines education as a route towards the real-

ization of ‘al-insān al-kāmil’ (the perfect human being) who has obtained
theoretical virtue through intellectual knowledge and mores through prac-
tices. Similar to Western functionalism, ‘al-insān al-kāmil’ is a building bloc
of ‘al-madīna al-fādilah’ (the perfect society) and defines the aim of education
as the attainment of ‘sa’ādah’ (happiness).6 ‘Sa’ādah’ is the ultimate aim of

5
Although it implies state, the ‘city’ or ‘polis’ was used for such city-states as Athens and Sparta which
were relatively small and cohesive units, in which political, religious and cultural concerns were inter-
twined (Aristotle, 1984). Despite the functional resemblances, the extent of their similarity to modern
nation-states is controversial.
6
Often translated literally as ‘happiness’, sa‘ādah (the highest aim of human striving) is a comprehensive
concept including happiness, bliss, wellbeing, prosperity, success, perfection, blessedness and beatitude
(Ansari, 1963). Sa‘ādah can be achieved through ethical perfection and education. Thus, sa‘ādah some-
how becomes close to the notion of Platonic ‘Good’. Seen in such a way, Saʿāda could be translated as
‘political happiness’ or the public good. An educational perspective, however, bestows a unique attribute
to the term, making it closer to the notion of ‘education as a public good’. Given such an inclusive defini-
tion of sa‘ādah, the investment in education benefits both the society and the individual, economically
and otherwise. While a wide array of interpretations is provided for sa‘ādah by Muslim scholars, some,
such as for instance Miskawyah in his treatise Kitāb al-Sa‘āah (The Book of Happiness) (1928), consider
sa‘ādah to be a moral condition which may be achieved through tahdhīb (moral cleansing).
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 525

al-Farabi’s utopia where the sole distinction between inhabitants comes from
their function including the meritocracy. Al-Farabi’s Neo-Platonic epistemol-
ogy, which is still in practice throughout the Muslim world, sometimes in
combination with other schools or intellectual trends, endeavours to reconcile
‘’aql’ (reason) with Islamic dogma. Informed by the Muslim ‘kalāmī’ frame of
reference, al-Farabi’s epistemic functionalism produced a practical result.
Throughout his trilogy7 he formulated and presented the first comprehensive
taxonomy of knowledge in Islam (Arjmand, 2008). Intriguingly, ‘kalām’ (the
science of the word of God) discusses the content of faith and prophecy, in
order to block the doors of falsification (‘taḥrīf ’), and deviation is another
instance of the use of organic allegory and anthropomorphism in which the
corporeal attribute of the divine as the form of utterance is emphasized.
Al-Farabi’s functionalist theory and the role of education and its respective
institutions are a reminder of contemporary social psychological theories of
education such as discursive institutionalism, development theory and its
subsidiary modernization theory, which maintain that in order to build an
ideal society, modern institutions with specific functions are required and
education and its institutions bear the task of moulding the ideal human
being functional in social arenas.

3 A Peripatetic Perspective on Embodiment

and Education
The Peripatetic approach to embodiment as suggested by Avicenna (980–1037)
and Averroes (1126–1198) sees the body as a pyscho-philosophical composi-
tion of matter (‘hayūlā’) and form (‘ṣūrat’). From a cosmogonic view, the birth
of the body from an active male principle (form) and a receptive female prin-
ciple (matter)8 posed a substantial problem for Neo-Platonist Muslim phi-
losophers in their attempts to derive the material, corporeal world from the
incorporeal and effect a reconciliation with the absolute doctrine of creation
(de Boer, 2012). The Aristotelian expression ‘forma corporeitatis’ (‘ṣūrat
jismīyyah’) suggests that the form of the body is one of the five continuous
magnitudes (along with line, surface, space and time). This means that

7
The trilogy consists of: Kitāb iḥsā’ al-‘Ulum (The Book of Taxonomy of Sciences), Risla fī al-’Aql (Treatise
on Reason) and Kitāb al-Ḥ urouf (The book of Letters).
8
Similarly, theories about gender difference in cosmological accounts portray the earthly hierarchy
between male and female as a reflection of grander cosmic principles. According to Bashir (2010), the
contrast between male and female bodies in such schemes indicates, simultaneously, a complementarity
and a hierarchy between the two types of bodies.
526 R. Arjmand

continuity (‘ittiṣāl’) is perceived as the form of the body (de Boer, 2012). The
dichotomy of form and matter is also an important issue in Avicenna’s theory
of knowledge, one of the dominant schools of education and acquisition of
knowledge in Islam. Avicenna elaborates that knowledge comes about by
abstraction (Avicenna & Rahman, 1952), through a process of sense-
perception in which the matter of the perceived object is left out, while the
form is perceived. The next step in the process of abstraction is reached in the
imagination, which can preserve an image that is free of matter (Rahman,
2012). The process of abstraction is concluded in conception which makes
the particular universal. Hence, knowledge acquisition is a multi-layered pro-
cess beginning with sensory perception for which the various faculties within
the human body are used. Avicenna’s quintuple process of learning is initiated
by ‘sensus communis’ which fuses information coming from different external
senses into an object or a percept. Then ‘khayāl’ (memory-image) is set to
work: a faculty which contains the image of the object perceived after that
object is removed from direct perception. Third ‘takhayyol’ (lit. imagining) is
a faculty which combines images retained in the memory and separates them
from one another, thus making a distinction between the visual attributes of
the specific thing perceived and others. Thanks to this faculty, eccentric images
can be formed, for example, that of a golden mountain by combining the
image of gold with that of a mountain. While much of the activity of this
faculty is non-rational and, in fact, recalcitrant to the control of reason, it
plays a fundamental role in rational activity because thinking never comes
about without the interplay of image. The fourth faculty ‘wahm’ (estimation)
helps the external perception to perceive the physical form of the thing, while
its inner meaning is perceived by an internal sense (Avicenna, 1964). Lastly,
fifth is a faculty which retains the forms of perceived things, and their mean-
ings and ideas as perceived by ‘wahm’. This faculty, which is a storehouse of
ideas and meanings rather than that of externally perceived forms, is very
important because it retains individual meanings, just as the faculty of memory
preserves individual forms (Rahman, 2012). According to Avicenna sensory
knowledge is acquired knowledge, its source being the sensed stimuli, and it
means the external and internal faculties of the sense. The subject of intellec-
tual knowledge is then the thing perceived, and its means is the human’s spec-
ulative faculty entrusted to him by God, which is capable of acquiring that
rational knowledge. In order that intellectual knowledge be effective, it must
have a particular structure and an instrument to regulate its operation, and
likewise to verify the soundness of the thought and reasoning, this instrument
is logic. Logic is the theoretical art or the instrument which protects the intel-
lect from making a mistake (Al-Naqib, 1993).
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 527

To Avicenna, the soul, which is different from the substance of the body
and is intangible, and the faculties required for the acquisition of knowledge
are merely different functions of the human soul (Avicenna, 1994), which is
perfected in knowledge, wisdom and good deeds, and is drawn towards the
divine light. For Avicenna education’s goal is the development of the indi-
vidual, not only morally but also physically and mentally. Bodily mundane
practices such as nutrition, wellbeing, leisure and resting are considered
important prerequisites for learning. Avicenna’s views granted him the ability
to develop his theories of learning from a pure philosophical to a social and
psychological approach. Thus, in the Peripatetic tradition the body along with
the psyche was considered the subject matter of learning and education.

4 A Sufi Approach to Embodiment

and Education
Sufism as a philosophical school appeared as response and rival to
Peripateticism. Its efforts were devoted to an alternative philosophical
approach to replace Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic logics and metaphysics.
The new approach was “based on the relationship between Light as the main
principle of creation and knowledge, and that which is lit up—the rest of real-
ity” (Leaman, 2000, p. 408). This tradition led to various theories by such
Shiite philosophers as Mullā Ṣadrā, Mīr Dāmād and Mullā Hādī Sabzivārī,
mainly in the Persianate world. It is referred to frequently as Ḥ ikmat-i
Muta’ālīya (Transcendental Theosophy), a rather novel discipline within
Islamic philosophy. Contemporary with the emergence of European rational-
ism by Grotius, Descartes and Spinoza, this intellectual movement left its
imprint on the epistemological debate among Muslims. The ‘new wisdom’ as
it is called, on the one hand, borrowed Mu’atazilī’s position in ‘kalāmī’
debates, and on the other hand, the entire philosophical tradition from al-
Kindi to Avicenna, and to these were added the elements of mysticism and the
Sufi notion of ‘direct vision’ (Arjmand, 2008). This reintroduced such old
intellectual debates as the dichotomy of body and soul among the Muslim
philosophers and the essential question of the role of body as the vessel of soul
in the process of receiving knowledge.
Sufism considers the human body as a doorway that connect the exterior
and interior aspects of reality. In material terms, bodies are objects like any
other, subject to generation and corruption and enmeshed in relationships
with other material forms of the world of appearances. The less agitation the
528 R. Arjmand

body shows during and after crossing over the threshold, the more the embod-
ied person can be said to have mastered the transition. The classical Sufi
notion of knowledge acquisition is based on the unveiling of truth to recipi-
ents who have developed the capacity, through both corporeal and spiritual
means, to receive it. Sufi attention to the structure of the human body as a
form is particularly cognizant of the body’s double meaning: on the one hand,
the body is seen as the ultimate source of most problems since its instinctive
appetites restrict human beings from thinking beyond their immediate desires;
on the other hand, the body is a seat of the human capacity to theorize and
explore because it enables human beings to transcend materiality. The con-
trast between the two functions endows the body with a complete ambiguity
that makes corporeality an advantageous lens through which to appraise Sufi
ideas and social patterns (Bashir, 2011, p. 28).
The ‘Ishrāqī’ (Illuminationist) epistemology, as one of the instances of
Sufism, is formed after the notion of ‘knowledge by presence’, a kind of
knowledge that takes place within its own framework, such that the whole
anatomy of the notion can hold true without any need to an external objec-
tive reference calling for an exterior relation. It is “the knowledge of Truth” to
which the criterion of truth or falsehood is not applicable (Ha’iri Yazdi, 1992,
p. 43). Although the notion of ‘presence’ has a specific connotation, meaning
a cleansing of the soul, preparing it to stay connected to the host of knowl-
edge, the body is concealed as a vessel in order to receive it. It is a reminder of
the Socrates analogy on the role of educator as a midwife where the body is
used to allegorically evince the process,

My art of midwifery is in general like theirs [midwives] […] and my concern is

not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth. And the highest
point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a
young man’s thought is a false phantom, or instinct with life and truth.
(Plato, 1861)

This, in the Sufi tradition, is achieved through a ‘murād’ (master) and

‘murīd’ (disciple) relationship, based on a confined apprenticeship. Although
the soul is the recipient and the host of knowledge by presence, it exists
through bodily practices. The spiritual experience of receiving knowledge,
however, requires a process of analysis and systematization for it to ensue from
the sensory experience. The approach reveals “the distinction between knowl-
edge by ‘conception’ and knowledge by ‘belief ’” (Ha’iri Yazdi, 1992, p. 46).
Thus, embodiment lies at the core of the cultivation and refinement of the
soul, which is made possible with the extensive Illuminationist symbolic
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 529

anecdotal approach of Suhravardi. There are “guides to the kind of experi-

ences to be encountered by the seeker and to their interpretation; indeed, a
central figure in these narratives is often a guide” (Cooper, 1998); sometimes
a master and sometimes a Muse, they often symbolize the Angel Gabriel who
mediated the revelation of divine knowledge through ‘waḥy’ (intuition).
Whereas the Peripatetic notion of knowledge is based on a move from known
components towards unknown ones, just as a mental process in the human
mind relied on sensory perception, for Illuminationists such knowledge
merely guarantees certainty. Suhravardi argues that there exists a more funda-
mental kind of knowledge that does not depend on form and which is, like
the experience of pain, unmediated and undeniable. In this, Suhravardi chal-
lenges the Avicennian inherent form of knowledge which maintains that the
knowledge as it is held by the knower is true only when it corresponds to
reality.
Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) develops a systematic ‘irfānī’ (Gnostic) approach
to ontology and epistemology. In his al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyya (The Meccan
Illuminations) Ibn Arabi argues that the body constitutes the medium between
the self and the outer world (Shahzad, 2007). Likewise, Ibn Arabi’s doctrine
of ‘waḥdat al-wujūd’ (the unity of existence) focuses on the ‘bāṭin’, the eso-
teric reality of creatures instead of ‘ẓāhir’, the exoteric dimension. Thus, in the
unity of existence realities are ‘tajallī’ (mere appearances) of the One, or the
essence of the original. Therefore, nature and all that is in it is only a shadow
of the One who has ‘wujūd’ that is intrinsic, absolute, unlimited and infinite,
that is God (Sumbulah, 2016). In Ibn Arabi’s own words (1974, p. 88),

O Thou Who hast created all things in Thyself,

Thou unitest that which Thou createst.
Thou createst that which existeth infinitely
In Thee, for Thou art the narrow and all-embracing.

Using the theological attributes ‘tashbīh’ and ‘tanzīh’ (distance and tran-
scendence) as philosophical devices, Ibn Arabi portrays his unique view of the
human body and its venerability. Despite the centrality of soul in Ibn Arabi’s
works, there is an abundance of allegorical allusions to the body in its physi-
cality: “God created man’s body in the form of the scale. He made the two
panes his right hand and his left hand, while He made the tongue the pillar of
himself. So, man belongs to whichever side he inclines” (Ibn al-Arabi, 1994,
p. 3). Ibn Arabi likens the world-Perfect Man relationship with various states
of human body and maintains that the state of the world before its appearance
was like a proportioned body, before the soul was breathed into it (Shahzad,
530 R. Arjmand

2007). Like other Sufi scholars, the notion of the human body as a microcosm
of the macrocosm (the universe) which fashions the foundations of his theory
of ‘waḥdat al-wujūd’ is significant in two ways, as a hierarchy of existence and
as a divine form and theomorphic entity. There are three basic worlds of the
macrocosm—the spiritual, imaginal and corporeal, which are represented in
humans by the spirit (‘rūh’), soul (‘nafs’) and body (‘jism’). That the spirit
should be spiritual and the body corporeal presents no difficulties (Chittick,
1989). However, as Bashir (2010, p. 77) puts it, since the general pattern is
that God is said to have created the human being simultaneously in the image
of the world and as its centrepiece, the body is seen as a blueprint for the cos-
mos as well as society. The scope of this perspective is enlarged further by
reference to the statement, found in ‘ḥadīth’ literature, which states that Adam
was created in God’s image. Here too, what is most significant is the body’s
mediating function since it both represents God and constitutes the human
being, the species situated at the centre of the created world.
For Ibn Arabi, therefore, knowledge acquisition is a process of increasing
illumination, gradually

raising the possibilities eternally latent to a state of luminescence, for which

‘qalb’ (the heart) is the organ which produces true knowledge, comprehensive
intuition, the gnosis (‘ma’rifa’) and everything connoted by ‘’ilm al-bāt ̣in’ (eso-
teric science). It is the organ of a perception which is both experience and inti-
mate taste (‘dhawq’).

Nevertheless,

we are reminded at every turn, this ‘heart’ is not the conical organ of flesh, situated
on the left side of the chest, although there is a certain connection, the modality
of which, however, is essentially unknown. (Corbin, 1969, pp. 234–235)

Corbin (ibid.) maintains that

this ‘mystic physiology’ operates with a ‘subtile body’ composed of psycho-

spiritual organs (the centres, or Chakras, lotus blossoms) which must be distin-
guished from the bodily organs.

The very pillar of ‘true knowledge’ is imagination and the type of knowl-
edge acquired is the knowledge that is ‘ma’rifa’ (gnosis), without which there
would be only knowledge without consistency. Imagination enables human
beings to understand the meaning of words, in the esoteric as well as the
physical sense. Ibn Arabi argues that, by giving an objective body to
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 531

intentions of the heart, this creativity of the imagination fulfils the first aspect
of its function, which comprises a large number of phenomena designated as
extrasensory perception.
Through the representational faculty (‘wahm’) every person executes Active
Imagination to ‘create’. Such creative operation implies the manifestation of
an outward existence that is conferred upon something which already pos-
sessed a latent existence. Seen in this light, thus, in the process of learning and
knowledge acquisition, the organ of creativity (the Active Imagination) serves
to enable the process of creating objects and introducing changes to the out-
side world. Ibn Arabi presents the ‘subtile body’ as an exact non-material
counterpart tethered to the physical body.

This body cannot be apprehended by the physical human senses; however, it

does have definite reality to it, which is felt during dreams and visions. These
experiences are not mere mental projections but real encounters with other cor-
poreous rather than corporeal bodies. (Bashir, 2011, p. 38)

Albeit practiced among vast groups of Muslims in various ways, the Sufi
approach to embodiment and learning remains much at an abstract theoreti-
cal level and was never afforded the chance to find real application.

5 A Kalāmī Approach to Embodiment

and Learning
Al-Ghāzali or as he is known in Western Latin literature, Algazelus
(1058–1111) is regarded as one of the most influential Muslim philosophers
(although he rejected his affiliation to philosophy9) who attempted to make
the Sufi tradition of mysticism more recognized within scholastic and scien-
tific circles. Through his magnum opus, IḥyāʾʿUlūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the
Religious Sciences), al-Ghāzali embarked on a new methodology based on a
synthesis of various modes of Islamic thought reconciling Sufism and theol-
ogy in an endeavour to make Islamic mysticism an acceptable part of the
Sunni orthodoxy.

9
Al-Ghāzali considered philosophy to be foreign knowledge and thus problematic for Muslims, due to its
affiliation to the Greeks. For al-Ghāzali, philosophy is acceptable to the extent that it is in agreement with
Islam. He summarized the philosophical polemics of his age in Maqāṣid al-Falāsifa (The Aims of the
Philosophers). Following this demonstration of his intellectual mastery over philosophical questions, he
composed his famous work Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherences of the Philosophers), where he discusses
the notion of God as the Ultimate Knower of the universal as well as the particular.
532 R. Arjmand

Departing from such a premise, he defines the human being as

a spiritual substance (jawhar rūḥānī) not confined in a body, nor imprinted on

it, nor joined to it, nor separated from it. It possesses knowledge and perception,
and is therefore not an accident. (Calverley & Netton, 2012)

Al-Ghāzali identifies the non-corporeal ‘rūḥ’ (soul) with ‘al-nafs

al-muṭmaʾinna’ and ‘al-rūḥ al-amīn’ of the Qurʾān and then uses the term
‘nafs’ also for the ‘flesh’ or lower nature, which must be disciplined in the
interests of ethics (Calverley & Netton, 2012). In his Al-Risālat al-Laduniyya
(1938) al-Ghāzali explains that the terms ‘nafs’, ‘rūḥ’ and ‘qalb’ (heart) are
names for his simple substance which is the seat of the intellectual processes;
he differentiates these from the animal ‘rūḥ’, a refined but mortal body in
which reside the senses. In his Kimīyā-yi Sa’ādat (The Alchemy of Happiness),
al-Ghāzali provides a description of the body as a cosmos that straddles theo-
logical and social concerns. He urges his readers to scrutinize the human body
as a first step in exploring more distant realities. They are advised to go beyond
their intuitive sense of how their limbs and sensory organs work in conjunc-
tion with the others to sustain life, and to come to know these is to know the
world (Bashir, 2010). For al-Ghāzali the body as a microcosm prefaces his
larger discussion where he proclaims the clearly natural basis for human con-
duct (Al-Ghāzali, 2008).
Al-Ghāzali’s epistemology is not limited to the classic notion of Sufi attain-
ment of knowledge based on the unveiling the truth to the recipients who
have developed the capacity to receive it; rather it includes the means by
which knowledge could be attained through the senses, reason and intuition.
This results in a dichotomic line of philosophical abstraction in al-Ghāzali’s
notion of embodiment and his epistemology.
Al-Ghāzali divides knowledge into the science of transaction and the sci-
ence of unveiling. While the former deals with behaviours and actions, the
latter is knowledge of reality and the essence of things. It is the supreme, true
knowledge which is not possible to attain through scholastic practices but
needs a purification stage, both corporeal and spiritual, through which the
soul reaches the phase where it receives the knowledge. Following this, the
heart of the recipient of the light will be illuminated with divine knowledge.
As Bashir (2010) argues, al-Ghāzali’s taxonomy of the body is noteworthy
for intermixing physical and social aspects of experience. He thus relies on the
body as a system to legitimize his conception of nature and society as struc-
tures that require the maintenance of a balance between their various parts.
Al-Ghāzali’s hybrid approach, as an amalgam of ‘kalām’ and mysticism, results
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 533

in a social functionalist approach to embodiment in which all human activi-

ties are represented in the functions of the body’s parts. Al-Ghāzali’s works are
prime instances of a connection between the body and society which can be
seen in most Islamic cosmologies that invoke the body.

6 Islamic Didactics and Corporeal

and Cognitive Development
Ibn Tufail’s Ḥ ayy ibn Yaqẓān (Philosophus Autodidactus), a piece of philosophi-
cal and literary work and an allegorical novel inspired by Avicenna and Sufism,
is a classic work in Islamic philosophy of education, its focus being the corpo-
real and cognitive development of human beings. The book is the story of
Ḥayy, an autodidactic feral child, raised by a doe and living in isolation on a
desert island, who, without contact with other human beings, discovers ulti-
mate truth through a systematic process of reasoned inquiry (Ibn Tufayl &
Goodman, 2009). Albeit concise, the book addresses various approaches to
knowledge acquisition in Islam each of which is developed through a different
school of thought. The significance of the book is that both forms of educa-
tion, scholastic and experiential, are regarded as complementary. Training in
one aids understanding the other.
In the 12th century, Ibn Tufail in his novel Philosophus Autodidactus elab-
orates Avicennian epistemology and gives a vivid example of the harmony
of philosophy and religion, where Ḥ ayy, the sole inhabitant of an uninhab-
ited island, a microcosm of the real world, encounters natural phenomena
first through corporeal contacts and then sensory perceptions and moves
beyond this to answer such complex questions as creation, soul and so on.
His philosophical approach leads him to the knowledge which in the neigh-
bouring island has been achieved through religious practices and scholastic
education. The book emphasizes the role of the body in cognitive develop-
ment and is the manifestation of the alternative paths to truth which other-
wise is dominated by religious education. The deductive reasoning in
Philosophus Autodidactus is fashioned around two axes. The first is the transi-
tion from the premises to logical argumentation and the arrival at a conclu-
sion (using the example of Ḥ ayy and his surroundings as a microcosm of
human history, social life and knowledge); the second is the progress from
body to soul, that is from physics to metaphysics (where the body and all its
physical features are described in order to discuss the soul, the animated
component enclosed within it):
534 R. Arjmand

Upon this [the death of the doe] the whole Body seem’d to him a very inconsider-
able thing, and worth nothing in respect of that Being he believed once inhab-
ited, and now had left it. Therefore, he applied himself wholly to the consideration
of that Being. What it was and how it subsisted? What joyn’d it to this Body?
Whither it went, and by what passage, when it left the Body? What was the
Cause of its Departure, whether it were forc’d to leave its Mansion, or left the
Body of its own accord? And in case it went away Voluntarily, what it was that
render’d the Body so disagreeable to it, as to make it forsake it? And whilst he was
perplext with such variety of Thoughts, he laid aside all concern for the Carcass,
and banish’d it from his Mind; for now he perceiv’d that his Mother, which had
Nurs’d him so Tenderly and had Suckled him, was that something which was
departed; and from it proceeded all her Actions, and not from this unactive
Body; but that all this Body was to it only as an Instrument, like his Cudgel
which he had made for himself, with which he used to Fight with the Wild
Beasts. So that now, all his regard to the Body was remov’d, and transferr’d to that
by which the Body is govern’d, and by whose Power it moves. Nor had he any
other desire but to make enquiry after that. (Ibn Tufayl & Goodman, 2009, p. 64)

The body lies at the heart of learning for Ḥ ayy through which Ibn Tufail
engages in the classic debate on the Islamic notion of knowledge acquisition,
its typology and the role of education throughout the human lifespan. His
study moves from the outer world to the inner and from the observation of
physicality towards invisible spirituality where corporeal development leads to
cognitive progress. Ḥ ayy’s development, as a representative of any person, and
consequently any human society, is schematized in seven stages, each of seven
years: an approach to education which was maintained in practice across the
Muslim world. The first stage is childhood in which the approach to learning
is based on intuition and physical imitation:

[H]e went on, living only upon what he suck’d till he was two years old, and then
he began to step a little and breed his teeth. He always followed the doe. … By this
time, he began to have the ideas of a great many things fix’d in his mind, so as to
have a desire to some, and an aversion to others, even when they were absent. He
saw that it must be like those bodies, which had a threefold dimension, length,
breadth, and thickness and differ’d from them only in those acts which proceeded
from it by means of animal or vegetable organs. […] He proceeded to examine
whether they did belong to Body quatenus Body, or else by reason of some prop-
erty superadded to Corporeity. (Ibn Tufayl & Goodman, 2009, pp. 51–53)

At the age of seven, childhood is over and adolescence starts. From seven to
twenty-one is the period of learning based on methods of practical reasoning,
the kind that finds means to ends, first through experimentation and later
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 535

through more complex deductive argumentation. The first signs of spiritual-

ization appear around the time of puberty which develops throughout the
next stage when the human being begins to think seriously about metaphys-
ics. From twenty-one the age of wonder starts, when the soul addresses the
abstract questions to which it cannot respond and struggles for their answer
(Arjmand, 2018b) through new means. Then at twenty-eight the age of rea-
son starts, when the paradoxical unity and diversity of the world is put into
focus. This is a level beyond the abstraction which paves the way for the rea-
son to develop into wisdom. At the age of thirty-five, when the soul begins to
search deeper, wisdom awakes. The relation to metaphysics is not merely
through knowledge, but through the emotions. The last stage, the spiritualiza-
tion of wisdom, its growth from practice to experience, marks the end of
tutelage and beginning of maturity, the fulfilment of self-awareness in the
realization that all that has gone before is a ‘ladder of love’ towards union with
God; for at the end of his seventh set of seven years, Ḥ ayy attains beatific
experience (Ibn Tufayl & Goodman, 2009). The process of corporeal matura-
tion and its resolution with the soul and the spiritual is the main tenet of the
Islamic theory of human development; however, one can also see certain ele-
ments of Hellenistic philosophy, not least through the idea of the formation
of various stages and the age of mental maturation. For Ibn Tufail the ultimate
aim of education is the achievement of ‘sa’ādah’ (happiness) which is defined
as the goal of education in Islam, be it physical or spiritual, both on an indi-
vidual and on a societal level.

7 Corporeal Practices in Islamic Education

Memorizing is often described as the main feature of Islamic education which
as an educational method has provoked both criticism and praise from various
scholars.10 Known as ‘dhikr’, the practice of memorizing and subsequent
remembering, often associated with certain corporeal movements, is recog-
nized as a distinct practice among Sufis. This practice which involves repeat-
ing a piece of text accompanied by certain body positions or movements is

10
As the central feature of Islamic education, memorizing is often criticized as a method which is said to
weaken critical thinking and problem-solving and encourages obedience and the absence of participation
in the society (Arjmand, 2018a). On the other hand, it is given credence by some scholars who argue that
in the absence of an inclusive education system and where there is a dysfunctional infrastructure, memo-
rizing has served as a method to make the education of students with disabilities and from disadvantaged
groups possible. Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī the Muslim blind philosopher and Taha Hussein the blind
Egyptian educator and minister of education are among instances of scholars who have praised memoriz-
ing as a didactic method to set the scene for their, otherwise unattainable, education.
536 R. Arjmand

common in elementary stages of education in such institutions as ‘maktab’ (in

Persianate lands), ‘kuttāb’ (Arab countries) and ‘mektephane’ (Turkish/
Ottoman). Here Taha Hussein explains the practice in his village ‘kuttāb’ in
Upper Egypt:

‘Our Master’ did not sing [The Alf īyyah11] with his voice and tongue alone, but
with his head and body also. He used to nod his head up and down and waggle
it from side to side. Moreover, he sang with his hands also, beating time upon
the chests of his two companions with his fingers. Sometimes when the song
was particularly agreeable to him, and he found that walking did not suit him,
he would stop till it was finished. (Hussein, 2001, p. 43)

Body movements, while memorizing the text, often used to facilitate learn-
ing religious texts is not exclusively Islamic. Coming from Yiddish, ‘shuckling’
(to shake, to swing), the ritual swaying during Jewish prayer or study, usually
back and forth but also from side to side, was also used in such educational
institutions as the ‘heder’ (old-fashioned elementary school for teaching
Judaism). As some historical evidence suggests, various studies (Arjmand,
2008; Goldziher, 1908; Landau, 2003; Pedersen & Makdisi, 2003) consider
‘heder’ to be the source of inspiration for Muslim ‘kuttāb’, where similar prac-
tices were tailored accordingly. While some scholars argue that historically the
practice was performed “to afford the body exercise during study and prayer,
which took up a large portion of the time” (Jacobs & Eisenstein, 2002), oth-
ers (Karo et al., 1921) see it as an expression of the soul’s desire to abandon
the body and reunite itself with its source.
Despite this, the practice is widely ascribed to the Sufi practice of ‘dhikr’,
the performance of which involved a body-based relationship with the outer
world, explained by theories regarding the exterior-interior divide. The issue
of how the body could represent internal states while acting in the external
world is implicated in stories about masters’ ‘samā’ (listening, performed as a
mystic dance). When performed with religious sanction, Sufi ‘samā’ involved
moving bodies as conduits between an interior world and an exterior cosmos
that was filled with movement (Bashir, 2011). Bodily movement, be it in the
form of ritual daily prayer (‘ṣalāt’) or ‘dhikr’, is perceived as an act of submis-
sion to God. When put in an educational context movement is seen as the
facilitator of memorizing and learning, through concentration and devotion.

11
The Alf īyyah is a rhyming book of Arabic grammar written by Ibn Mālik in the thirteenth century, still
in use as a textbook for beginners in many Islamic educational institutions. The Alf īyyah is one of the first
books to be memorized by students after learning the Qurʾān.
 Embodiment in Education in the Islamic World 537

The dichotomy of body/soul, and the notion that chastising the body con-
tributes to the purification and perfection of the soul, is shown clearly in the
use of physical chastisement (‘t’dīb’) in education. As Ariés (1996) puts it, the
concept originates from the separate nature of childhood, of its difference
from the world of adults, and the elementary concept of its weakness, which
brought it down to the level of the lowest social strata. The insistence on
humiliating childhood in order to mark it out and improve it led to stricter
discipline in education and hence to greater infliction of corporal punish-
ment. In Islamic literature on education we find several attitudes towards
corporal punishment approval, albeit with certain qualifications, proposals for
alternatives to physical punishment and its integration into a more sophisti-
cated method of dealing with children’s behaviour, and criticism of excessive
corporal punishment based on psychological insight (Gil’adi, 1992).
Al-Ghāzali is a proponent of corporal punishment as an educational
method and argues for the moderate use of chastisement of the pupils with
the argument that

[j]ust as the believer will ultimately thank God for putting him to the test, so
will the child, when he gets older, thank his teacher and his father for beating
him and educating him because, in his maturity, he will be capable of discerning
the fruits of such an education. (Al-Ghāzali, 1998, p. 162)
Yet this does not prove that excessive beating is praiseworthy. This is also the case
with [causing] fear [as an educational means]: it can be divided into [three
grades, namely] little, excessive and balanced. The most commendable balance
and the middle way (between the two extremes). (Al-Ghāzali, 1998, p. 194)

Conversely, Ibn Khaldun (1980, p. 305) disagrees, finding that

severe punishment in the course of instruction does harm to the student, espe-
cially to little children, because it belongs among (the things that make for a)
bad habit. […] Their outward behaviour differs from what they are thinking
[…] and they are taught deceit and trickery. […] Indeed, their souls become too
indolent to (attempt to) acquire the virtues and good character qualities. Thus,
they fall short of their potentialities.

Analysis of the connection between concepts of childhood and corporal

punishment in the medieval Islamic context shows that discipline and bodily
punishment could coexist with the treating children and childhood in a posi-
tive way, both intellectually and emotionally (Gil’adi, 1992). Corporal pun-
ishment, even if applied with moderation as a recommended measure by
538 R. Arjmand

some Muslim scholars, despite the diverse views for and against it, rests on the
primacy of soul over the body and the (also puritanical) premise that chastis-
ing the body elevates the soul. Thus, the body as the vessel of the soul shall
endure to safeguard the precious gift with which it has been entrusted.

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 The Body in Education: Conceptions
and Dimensions in Brazil and Latin
America
Karina Limonta Vieira

1 Introduction
Although the body has been a subject of study in the human and natural sci-
ences for a long time this has been less the case in Brazil and Latin America.
The challenge in studying conceptions of the body is mainly due to the new
conditions in which human beings find themselves in the world. Against the
background of the Anthropocene and current scientific knowledge, body
studies require new approaches and new methods. Some authors working in
groups in their own countries and even in collaboration with Brazilians and
Latin Americans, or in interdisciplinary studies in areas such as education,
anthropology, and sociology, are attempting to overcome epistemological
obstacles and develop theoretical perspectives. Some are also attempting to
research phenomena specific to Brazil and Latin America, but there are few
studies devoted to the process of researching the body. On the other hand,
there are great social, cultural, and symbolic differences that mark the history
of Brazil and Latin America, such as the indigenous, African, and European
influences. Colonization by the Spanish or Portuguese contributed to the
constitution of the body on this continent. In Latin America there was a
forceful, violent colonization process of the indigenous people; Brazil was
marked by the enslavement of the Africans. Therefore, it is the aim of this

K. L. Vieira, Dr. (*)

Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Cottbus, Germany
e-mail: vieirkar@b-tu.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 541
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_32
542 K. L. Vieira

study to understand the conceptions of the body in Brazil and Latin America.
There are two key questions: What are these conceptions? How do concep-
tions of the body in Latin America and particularly in Brazil differ from those
of the rest of the world? Are these conceptions of the body of importance in
the field of education? The subsequent aim is to understand the conceptions
in the Latin American education system as well as differing body images in the
Brazilian school system in particular. This chapter is divided into four sec-
tions: the body in Latin America, the body in Brazil in particular on the basis
of Brazilian culture and education, the discussion of the ‘corpus absconditus’
in Brazil and Latin America, and the prospects for mimetic processes, embodi-
ment, and cultural learning.
In Latin America, the conceptions of the body are understood from a bio-
political perspective, in which the body is shown to be resistant to coloniza-
tion and to European influences. However, in the fields of education and in
particular, it appears as a body that is rather more compliant. In Brazil there
is a great diversity of body concepts. Studies note that in school the body
appears as disciplined and conforming to norms. In the field of Physical
Education, the understanding of the body is broader. Concepts from different
cultural and ethnic backgrounds, that is from Afro-Brazilian or the indige-
nous traditions, influence Physical Education. The conceptualization of the
body in Brazil shows many different traditions and approaches, which cannot
be integrated in a single concept. Therefore, the concept of the ‘corpus abscon-
ditus’ is used to describe the complexity of the human body (Wulf, 2013).

2 The Body in Latin America: Differences

in Conceptions in Social
and Educational Contexts
The body of the learner in social and educational contexts shapes up in a bio-
political and aesthetic way, i.e. being homogenized and regulated; the educa-
tional context forms a disciplined normative body.

2.1 The Bio-political and Aesthetic Body: Homogenized

and Regulated by Latin American Society

Body studies in Latin America present several diffuse and superficial perspec-
tives involving historical processes, methodological orientations, theory, local
 The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil… 543

reflections, and social and symbolic conditions. They broach identity and
alterity, power and conflict, gender and sexuality, health and illness, art, and
media (Pedraza, 2007a; Ramos, 2011). However, most researchers consider
these body studies important. Thinking about the body in Latin America goes
back to the sixteenth century, a period in which colonized bodies were con-
vinced that identity is forged in a process that occurs in and with the body,
built from the distinction between body and soul, influenced by Christian
tradition in exposing dress code differences between the colonizers and the
colonized. The colonizing project of the division of labor imposes a racial and
sexual division that includes forming subordinate subjects and reproducing
hierarchies through education, language, gender difference, work, catechiza-
tion, humiliation, and cultural annihilation. During the nineteenth century,
national identity is related to the social representation of the body. It is
expressed in physiognomy, people’s appearance, dress, physical expressions,
gestures, words, and power relations. During the republican period and the
first decades of the twentieth century, the social experience of the body is
linked to the norms and values expressed in the constitutions of the national
states (Pedraza, 2007b, 2014).
According to Rodas and Pedraza (2014), colonizers seek to homogenize the
anatomical and physiological body of medicine, the process of individualiza-
tion, privatization, sanitation, and the development of urban life and capital-
ism. It is a dichotomous body, built historically and socially on biological
characteristics and shaped by the social order (Scribano, 2016). It is a bio-
political body, which involves science, medical knowledge and power prac-
tices that shape the colonized people through the advent of a bourgeois way
of life with its schools, gymnastics, sports, and consumption. The conceptual-
ization of the body is marked by two major trends. The first one shapes the
modeling and imposition of order and discipline developed in the nation
states in Latin America from the nineteenth century onward. The second one
is created by aesthetic-political experiences related to the emergence of con-
temporary subjectivity (Pedraza, 2007a, 2014).
The concept of the body is based on subjective experience (taking in a phe-
nomenological perspective), interaction (appearance, gesture, and rituals),
body practices (the role of the body for the creation of practical knowledge),
institutions (the body disciplined in institutions such as school, hospital,
work), aesthetic and social representations (body images as being beautiful,
healthy, useful, and competent), and affective bonds (Ramos, 2011). The
body in Latin America is a mechanical, subjective, and bio-political organism.
Its conceptualization and understanding are based on a variety of social dis-
courses. These discourses also influence the way people understand their
544 K. L. Vieira

corporeality and influence how the body is dealt with in schools and educa-
tional institutions. Here control and discipline play an important role.

2.2 The Body in School Education and Physical

Education in Latin America

School education and Physical Education at school are equally important.

However, in each field there are different conceptions and dimensions of the
body of the learner. In the school situation, the body has to be disciplined and
standardized, mainly within the classroom. In Physical Education the body of
the learner is conceived as a supporting factor of the modernization process.

2.2.1 The Body in the School Situation: From Being

a Well-Disciplined Body to a Body Experiencing
New Things

In Latin America, the body of the learner is supposed to contribute to the

growth of the country and the consolidation of the nation state. It should
contribute to the development of a democratic system, to the evolution of
rationality, civilization, and citizenship. Since the European colonialization,
disciplining and standardizing the body of the learner were important goals of
education (Giménez, 2007). Education was, and is still linked to the princi-
ples of citizenship, liberalism and capitalism (Pedraza, 2011). The school is
the most important place for the formation of citizens. It functions as a bio-
political institution that realizes the principle of surveillance of the learners’
bodies, according to Foucault. As Bourdieu has shown, it also incorporates
the forms of symbolic violence implicit in the habitus and its formation
(Pedraza, 2007b).
Many devices are used for the creation of social affirmation and body
remodeling, such as gender relations, corporal punishment, rituals, gesture,
sport, technology, school subjects (curriculum), teacher training, and teach-
ing methods. The ways to remodel the body depart from eugenic theories,
with the construction of school architecture (clarity, ventilation, furniture,
workspaces, recreation, etc.), school time (rational distribution of materials,
pauses, recreation, stay in school, etc.) (Oliveira, 2007), and the school matrix
of presenting the human body (marches, uniforms, rhythm, voice command,
rituals, the sacrosanct nature of a well-trained body) (Gómez, 2009). The
social construction of the learning body in, through, and for school takes
 The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil… 545

place throughout history and reinforces the conception of a disciplined body.

School education becomes an institution that disciplines and standardizes
the bodies of the learners; i.e. with the help of rules students must learn to
control their bodies (Muñoz, 2005).
The field of education does not question its formation of the body (Crisorio,
2016). Body studies in Latin American education focus on anatomical-
political concepts in relation to phenomena such as school and pedagogy,
hygiene and medicine, sexuality and youth. Research focuses on the forma-
tion of nation states and the processes of their consolidation in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, in other words, on the evolution of biopower mecha-
nisms. The analyses focus on the school and its micropolitical competences in
pedagogy, teaching, curriculum development, and instructional psychology
(Pedraza, 2007b). This also means considering the body of the learner as an
object of collective policy and examining the formation of subjectivities at the
interface between body, politics, culture, and knowledge. However, there
is growing criticism and critical stance toward the homogeneity of modern
subjectivities (Gomes et al., 2019), and the investigation of interconnecting
subjectivity, diversity, and interculturality (Palacio, 2015).
Galak and Gambarotta (2015) distinguish conceptions of the body in Latin
America as follows: the body reduced to natural instance, to body techniques
(Marcel Mauss), to representation (David Le Breton), to performance and
discourse (Judith Butler), and to the concept of corporeality. These concep-
tions of the body intertwine education and politics as an application of power
and consider the body to be a historical and social construction.

2.2.2 The Body in Latin American Physical Education

The body has five epistemological conceptions: (1) the biological or organic
body, (2) the schooled and disciplined body, (3) the body as a social and cul-
tural construction, (4) the phenomenological body, and (5) the somatic body.
The conception of the organic or biological body emerges from Physical
Education as a discipline in the school curriculum. This discipline prepares
people for a modern, urban, and industrial life, whose physiological and evo-
lutionary theoretical approach proposes an anatomical-physiological inter-
vention in the organic body (Giménez, 2007). Physical Education as a
discipline aims at seeking a balance between intellectual work and physical
training, in order to generate productive people, whose objective is to govern
people by means of mechanical restraint. From the conception of the indi-
vidual as a living organism (and regarding its reproduction, regeneration, and
546 K. L. Vieira

production), Physical Education develops a process of normalizing students

and standardizing their movements (Aisenstein, 2007). This conception of
the body has a political-anatomical bias involving the concepts of ‘biopolitics’
and ‘biopower’ to use Foucault’s terminology (Galak et al., 2018), which leads
to the school-based production of a disciplined body (Gambarrota &
Galak, 2012).
However, a turnaround takes place in Physical Education with a critique of
Foucault’s perspective of the political body; the body is rediscovered and seen
as part of culture. Bodily culture and motion culture lead to the creation of
the term ‘bodily education’ (Varea & Galak, 2013; Galak et al., 2018). From
an anthropological perspective the body as a social and cultural construction
questions the universality of behaviors, emphasizes the relativity of its social
representations, and accentuates the body-related networks of symbolic signi-
fication. This means that knowledge applied to body is first and foremost
cultural and that everyone makes sense of the body according to the world-
view of the society in which they live. In this sense, each society builds its
body knowledge from ideas, concepts, ways of thinking, behaviors, meanings,
and values (Hurtado, 2008). Paradoxically, in this conception everything is
explained as based on culture.
The phenomenological point of view rescues the dimension of what has
been lived, felt, enjoyed, thought of, and experienced and refers to ways of
educating from the angle of the experience of one’s own body through forms
of teaching such as free exploration, problem-solving, experimentation, and
‘livingness’, or living our real selves (Gallo & Urrego, 2015). This conception
relates to the use of the senses and somatic education, as it recognizes the
subjective activities and the decolonial use of the senses (Pedraza, 2010).
Action is understood as a subjective instance that links people through sen-
sory, emotional, cognitive, and social ties to the world around them. However,
currently the use of the senses in education serves to assure one’s own percep-
tion and knowledge, correct understanding, or correct moral judgment, that
is to assure the acquisition of knowledge. In the following, I will examine
different conceptions of the body in Brazil. The fact that they are so varied is
significant for the multidimensional character of Brazilian culture and its
development in the field of school education and Physical Education. This
will help us to better understand the body, bodily culture, and the way it is
continually changing.
 The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil… 547

3 The Body in Brazil: Conceptions in Brazilian

Culture and Education
Instead of talking about the body in Brazil it is more appropriate to talk about
different concepts of the body that have come about in the course of the his-
tory of social and cultural development in Brazil. Understanding the body of
the learner in Brazil involves multiple cultural and social conceptions of body
images and concepts dealt with in education.

3.1 The Body in Brazilian Culture: From the Body

as an Expression of Mixed Racial Heritage
to the Body as Capital

As the Brazilian constitution reflects the different ethnic origins of Brazil, the
concepts of the body in Brazil also have a variety of cultural and ethnic ori-
gins. The Brazilian is a mixture of diverse ethnic groups such as indigenous,
Portuguese, Africans, Italians, Germans, Japanese, Poles, Lebanese, and Turks
(Diégues Junior, 1954). According to Rocha (2012), the conception of the
Brazilian body has their specific physical appearances, gestures, and mimetic
processes from that ethnic mixture. Their specific character defines their ways
of thinking, their cultural inventions, and manifold constructions of identity.
The body in Brazil is understood as the result of miscegenation, as rascal,
Dionysian, sacred, as capital, the origin of sin and pleasure, as well as being a
social construction and having complex corporeality.
Initially, the understanding of the Brazilian body comes from its concep-
tion and historical origin. In the colonial period, in contrast to the Christian
principles, the naked body of the indigenous people were seen as representing
innocence and naturalism. This pure body image coexists with the image of
the body of animal-like and uncivilized ‘black’ people (Del Priore & Amantino,
2011). In this sense, thinking about the Brazilian body is a matter of examin-
ing and recognizing Brazilian identity, for the Brazilian body is a racial mix; it
is a mestizo body (Freyre, 1987). For example, the body of the Brazilian
woman may seen as one of short stature, dark skin, long, black curly hair, thin
waist, big bottom, and small breasts, as well as typified by the beautiful body
of the actress Sônia Braga. For a mestizo body, Rocha (2012) conceives three
Brazilian body images: the rascal (‘malandro’), the Dionysian, and the sacral-
ized. The ‘first image’, the rascal or bad-boy (‘malandro’) body, suggests the
idea of a ‘sensual gait’, of a ‘seducer’, of ‘tripping someone up’, whose
548 K. L. Vieira

bodily hexis expresses virile sexuality, indolence, gestures of both game and
fight, as in the Capoeira fight performance, symbolized by a swinging walk, in
short in manners that symbolize a personal character (Rocha, 2012, p. 86).

The ‘second image’ refers to the body of a Brazilian woman—mulatto, sen-

sual, mestizo, and vibrant, who is presented together with the body of the
man, the rascal (‘malandro’), in Dionysian dances, such as ‘Umbigada’,
‘Maxixe’, ‘Pernada’, ‘Samba’, ‘Batuque’, ‘Candomblé’, and ‘Capoeira’. The
‘third image’ is the sacralized body, represented in soccer and carnival—the
body in these cultural practices works as a transversal symbolic operator in the
constitution of the imaginary of national identity (Rocha, 2012).
The body as a social construction questions whether the body is the image
of a whole society. The ‘carioca’ body has a value for embodying an ideal of
perfection. This body must be exhibited, molded, manipulated, worked,
sewn, decorated, chosen, built, manufactured, and imitated. Brazilian society
develops this type of a body as a standard to be followed; it is regulated by the
values of dominant men and submissive women who define the ideal body for
each one based on patterns represented in the man’s virile body or in the
woman’s delicate body (Goldenberg, 2004). Another aspect here is the body
as capital whose power is to standardize the aesthetic models of corporeal
beauty of men and women according to the social models imposed by the
fashion market. It has a high degree of control over the body’s appearance
(Goldenberg, 2010). The same applies to the sin body and pleasure body, split
between bondage and freedom (Del Priore, 2019). Brazil is one of the world’s
biggest markets for cosmetic surgery; and the strongest motivation for this is
the quest for a perfect body.
The essence of the Brazilian body is the pulsating body of miscegenation
and it bears the marks of a construction process, in which the idealized body
is transmuted into strategies of domination and control over the individual
bodies through processes of hybridization as a show, where it reveals the
Brazilian identity, memory, and subjectivity (Velloso et al., 2009). Finally, the
conceptions of the body in Brazil see the body foremost as a cultural artifact,
which involves biological and cultural aspects, and, as well an aesthetic quality,
the body expresses biological unity and is a social construction (Queiroz, 2000).

3.2 The Body in Brazilian School Education

The body as an object of education is a challenge. Research in this area refers

to care, leisure, and the cult of the body. I will examine to what degree the
body is considered in education. The existing research focuses on disciplining
and standardizing the body at school.
 The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil… 549

3.2.1 Conceptions of the Body in Brazilian Education:

Corporeality as a Criticism of the Disciplinary Nature
of School Culture

Understanding and giving attention to the body of the learner in Brazilian

education is closely linked to the role of the body in school. Here the focus is
on the school and classroom culture as something which involves discipline
(Louro, 2000).
Brazilian schooling is based on the principles of individuality, rationality,
and civilization that we find in European culture and education. The social
function of the school consists in transmitting knowledge through reason;
consequently, it leads to disciplined bodies. According to Tiriba (2008), this
involves using forms of surveillance such as control of movements, schedules,
rituals, hygiene measures, diet standardization, and so on to shape and control
the body. The school undertakes the task of cleaning, training, correcting,
qualifying, and preparing the body of the learner for work.
Control of the body refers to the conception of a body that submits, is
trained, transforms, and is prepared for work (Probst & Kraemer, 2012). In
this concept of education there is a distinction between body and mind. This
leads to the expansion of science, education, and civilization as related to the
urban-industrial model of knowledge (Soares, 2007; Ayoub & Soares, 2019).
In the case of Brazil, body education was part of the project of ‘civilizing’ the
Brazilian nation (Oliveira, 2006). However, some studies criticized the way
the body was treated in school. They realized that a dialogue was missing
between different areas of knowledge. Biological, psychological, social, anthro-
pological, economic, and historical dimensions of a body-based education are
interrelated (Farah, 2010; Mendes & Nóbrega, 2004). One recognized
the need of better perception of the body and corporeality in its relationship
to the subjectivity of young people (Nóbrega, 2005). Aesthetic experiences
shall help to avoid the dichotomy of mind and body.

3.2.2 The Body in Physical Education: Body and Mind,

Corporeality, the Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian
Cultural Body

The aim of discipline at school is related to the development of the bourgeoi-

sie in the nineteenth century with its interest in health education. For medi-
cal, biological, positivist, and hygienist sciences, Physical Education is one of
the key issues in medical institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries and the mainstay of the health of society (Silva, 2020). In Brazil,
550 K. L. Vieira

moral and social training of the body is performed (Soares, 1994, 2005). In
Physical Education, the conception of the body has its origin in the physical
and natural sciences and their anatomical and physiological models that were
related to the model of the ‘machine-body’. In accordance with the mechanis-
tic and rational concept of the body, the body was manipulated, dominated,
and objectified (Silva, 2020).
In Brazil, a quite different body concept was developed in Physical
Education in the 1980s. During that time the debate focused on the body/
mind dichotomy, criticized instrumental rationality and questioned policies
that saw the most important thing as being generating knowledge on topics
such as health, power, and language. Philosophical and sociological studies on
the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of bodies were applied (Galak et al., 2020;
Soares, 1999). Approaches to the relationship between nature and culture, as
well as to biological/cultural aspects of the body, gained in importance, also
referring to the epistemological perspective of phenomenology, post-
structuralism, and complex thinking (Nóbrega, 2006).
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to the body departs from
the problem of the human body/mind split and develops the idea that the
phenomenon of consciousness is much closer to the concrete organic body
than to abstractions and isolated considerations of spirit, mind, or soul.
These ideas underpin the notion of a global human body that involves
thinking, feeling, and movement (Medina, 1983). The body shall not be
seen as a sum of the parts and the soul as something that controls this set
but should rather be understood in its entirety (Moreira & Simões de
Campos, 2017). As a result, the division between body and mind through
power games, truth regimes, cultural symbols, and social imagination are
criticized. This takes place not least in the field of Physical Education. The
practices of conditioning minds, immobilizing and controlling the school
environment, sport itself, as well as the biologization of Physical Education,
human biologization, and the machine-man are fundamentally questioned.
At the same time, the critique contributes to maintaining the system (truth
regimes etc.) (Zoboli, 2012).
The human being is complex. The conception of the body considers human
corporeality as ‘physis’, ‘bios’, and anthropo-social. According to Moreira and
Simões de Campos (2017), corporeality relates to the body and its place in the
world that can be examined from an objective perspective (matter) and a sub-
jective perspective (spirit and soul). Corporeality has the following insepara-
ble dimensions: physical (organic-biophysical-motor), emotional-affective
(instinct-drive-affection), mental-spiritual (cognition, reason, thought, idea,
conscience), and socio-historical-cultural (values, habits, customs, senses,
 The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil… 551

meanings, symbolisms) (Brito & Bastos, 2004). Research on body and corpo-
reality in Physical Education associates movement with intentionality and
stresses the corporeal existentiality in time and space, as well as the biographi-
cal, historical, cultural, and social complexity of the body.

4 Body Culture: Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian

Body Practices in Physical Education
Brazilian Physical Education makes use of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian
body practices in formal school education as a way of expanding the concep-
tion of the body. In these practices, the conception of the body is seen as body
culture and body in motion. Anthropological, sociological, historical, and
philosophical knowledge is combined, based on an intercultural perspective.
In the consequence, educational models are derived according to which
Physical Education and the conception of body culture embraces the cultur-
ally shaped body of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian people in their customs,
beliefs and rituals, habits and values, and their symbolic and sociocultural
traditions in terms of an ethnic alterity that constitutes the manyfold Brazilian
identity (Camargo et al., 2011).
The indigenous body is a body that jumps, dances, plays, runs, moves,
walks, or swims. The games of the Kalapalo people form the identity of the
indigenous person and are playful ways of capturing reality: ‘Kopü Kopü’,
‘Ukigue Humitsutu’, ‘Heiné Kuputisu’, ‘Emusi’, ‘Oto’, and ‘Hagaka’ (Corrêa,
2009). In the Baniwa ethnic group that lives in the Amazon, games such as
‘tapuchuca’ (blind man’s bluff), ‘esconde-esconde’ (hide-and-seek), ‘jogo do
palito’ (to draw lots using toothpicks), and others with no equivalent in
English, as ‘onça e cutia, caiu no poço, balanço de cipó, gato e rato, ciranda-
cirandinha, brincadeira da abelha’, and ‘avião’ are examples of these bodily
practices (Grando et al., 2010). The indigenous person assumes certain roles
in his or her social context when he or she plays games; thus body practices
reflect traditions, behaviors, memories, knowledge, and identity (Castro &
Neira, 2009).
In Afro-Brazilian culture dance and games are part of Physical Education as
body culture in motion. Recognizing movement, dance and games contribute
to the construction of racial identity, the cultural rescue, and interculturality
of Afro-Brazilian culture. The most well-known Afro-Brazilian dances and
games are ‘Capoeira’, ‘Congada’, ‘Jongo’, ‘Maracatu’, and ‘Samba de Roda’.
These cultural performances are linked to religion and resistance and are
552 K. L. Vieira

characterized by the variation of movements, inherited from African ancestors

through oral tradition. For Africans, the body is supposed to be a place of
memory in performances (Santos, 2002). ‘Capoeira’, for example, is a dance
and the most common game for bodily exercise in Physical Education classes.
The body in ‘capoeira’ is a dialogic body (‘corpo-dialogia’), that is a body that
performs dialogues; therefore, it is a social and multifactorial process of inter-
action between a body and the bodies of others. ‘Capoeira’ involves ‘ginga’,
‘negativas’, ‘meia lua de frente’ (dodges, twists, related moves), where every-
thing mixes in improvisation, in interaction with the partner, and creates a
bodily dialogue (Silva, 2008).
This conception of the body as part of body culture supports transforma-
tive bodily practices in Physical Education in school that offer students an
environment where they learn to socialize and respect social differences. They
consider the cultural background of the other, thus enabling those who take
part in the practice to construct their reality; creativity and imagination are
active elements in the dynamics of playing games (Neira & Nunes, 2006).
Each gesture, each move has a language with different senses and meanings
expressed through the different bodies and determined by the social and his-
torical background (Silva, 2011).

5 Discussion: The ‘Corpus Absconditum’

in Brazil and Latin America
In Latin America great social, cultural, and symbolic differences have devel-
oped during the history of the continent, coming from the direction of the
indigenous people, the Africans, and the Europeans, either through the forced
attempt to make Latin America a nation or through submission to keep Brazil
as a Portuguese colony. The conceptions of the body in Latin America and
Brazil are the result of this social and cultural development. Furthermore,
these studies arise from theoretical debates, surveys, and the analysis of arti-
cles, dissertations, and theses. Nowadays we are presented with the challenge
of studying the body of the learner always also as a ‘corpus absconditus’ in
Brazilian and Latin American education. Two aspects are important in this
understanding of the body: firstly, the approaches presented in texts studied,
and secondly, the body as an epistemic object.
The first point draws attention to texts on the body in Brazil and Latin
America which criticize its image and standardization. There are several stud-
ies examining the complexity of bio-political impacts, according to which the
 The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil… 553

body of the learner at school is mainly seen as to be disciplined and standard-

ized. Only in Brazilian Physical Education the body is conceived as part of a
more complex body culture.
Bio-politically, the body in Brazil is understood as the result of miscegena-
tion, as rascal, Dionysian, sacred, as capital, the origin of sin and pleasure, as
well as being a social construction and having complex corporeality. This may
be the case because of the crossbreeding between the bodies of the Europeans,
Africans, and Indians in Brazil (Freyre, 1987; Rocha, 2012). At the same
time, the imposition of images and norms of European approaches to the
human body is problematic as there is a struggle to form a Latin American
identity and corporal subjectivity by excluding or at least reducing the
European influence (Pedraza, 2007a; Cabra & Escobar, 2014). In Latin
America, the bio-political body is formed by power and values that regulate
the actions of the people in the consolidation of the nation state and the mod-
ern capitalist society. The dichotomies, homogenization, disciplining, stan-
dardizing, and aestheticization of the body are, since some decennia, criticized
from a Foucauldian, phenomenological, and somatic perspective. Criticized is
also the disciplining, homogenizing, and standardizing of the body for the
labor market in classroom, school, and education. This means that the docile
and thought-to-be passive body of the learner at school coexists with the
political, aesthetic, and miscegenated bio-political body. However, in educa-
tion in Brazil some practices from the indigenous people and the Afro-
Brazilian tradition enlarge the above described restricted concept of the body.
All perspectives presented here do not adequately consider the body as
being both a producer and also a product of culture and society (Gugutzer,
2004), i.e. the body is seen as the interface between nature (biological aspects)
and culture (constructions and sociocultural aspects). However, images of the
human body are dynamic; they develop and change meanings according to
the very historical situation (Wulf, 2013). As an amalgam between subject
and object the body is idiosyncratic. A large number of fragmented and dis-
jointed images and concepts of the body can be distinguished (Ternes, 2005).
At the same time, the influx of the traditional images of the body annihilates
the physicality and materiality of the body to a certain degree (Kamper, 1999).
Since a long time, there has been a strive towards overcoming the distinction
between the external bodily world and the internal bodily world (Plessner,
1983). The idea gains ground that ‘Körper’ (German for physical body) and
the ‘Leib’ (German for lived body) are interwoven and form a unity. The
‘Leib’ (lived body) with its individual history and memory is the central
dimension for the perception and understanding of the world.
554 K. L. Vieira

Lately, in Brazil one can recognize a changing view of the school space, as a
locus of rituals, knowledge, social action, imagination, learning to learn,
human development, teaching, and cultural learning. To prepare a child for
the labor market is not any more regarded as the only function of the school.
As the body of the learner is transformed in line with the complex challenges
of the society, developing it is complex and challenging.
The body is also an epistemic object. Most research is based on documen-
tary sources, and theoretical reflections, without empirical research (Cabra &
Escobar, 2014). How is a conception of the body based on reductionist, uni-
versalist, and representative perspectives to be avoided? What is the role of
field work in the conception of the body? Too often there is an absence of
empirical research and the use of a variety of methods to examine the consti-
tution of the body. No forms of representation should be excluded in our
efforts to comprehend the complexity of the body. There is a need for more
empirical field studies. We need to consider the dynamics and many different
types of body there are in school. These types may differ from those we find
in Brazilian Physical Education based on the body practices in indigenous
games and Afro-Brazilian dances and games. Considering the biological,
social, and cultural dimensions of Brazilian and Latin American bodies, we
must reconstruct the interdisciplinary and intercultural concept of the body.
We need to consider the influence of the particular phenomena of each cul-
ture and society on social interactions. Otherwise, there will be a determinis-
tic and non-dynamic concept of the body (Vieira & Queiroz, 2017).

6 Perspectives for Mimetic Processes,

Embodiment, and Cultural Learning
Human beings learn by assimilating what is external to them in order to sur-
vive and find a place for themselves. This assimilation is a mimetic process, a
process of creative imitation. Human beings take an imprint of the outside
world and incorporate it in their imaginary. They also use the body to take on
the context of the imitated person or object, and to incorporate their implicit
knowledge, values, and norms. As soon as a human being is born, she or he
engages in mimetic processes and continues these ways of learning during the
whole course of their life. In these processes, gestures, emotions, and ritual
actions are performed and an interwoven relationship between body, lan-
guage, and imagination is established (Wulf, 2022, 2013). Some research on
these matters is carried out in Latin America; it makes clear that no simple
 The Body in Education: Conceptions and Dimensions in Brazil… 555

understanding of the body is possible. However, to a large degree, the body

seems to be a ‘corpus absconditus’ which raises many unanswered questions.
New forms of knowledge, research perspectives, and methods are necessary
to develop comprehensive body studies (Michaels, & Wulf, 2020; Arabatzis,
2019), to better understand the human body in the Anthropocene amidst
phenomena such as globalization, digitalization, artificial intelligence, robot-
ics, new media, genetic research, and environmental problems (Wulf, 2022;
Wulf & Zirfas, 2020). There is a great need for the development of new
research questions, and new research methods on practical knowledge, cul-
tural learning, and mimetic processes in gestures, rituals, and performances
studies.

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 Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese
Perspective
Hongyan Chen

1 Introduction: A Forceful Re-discovery

of the Body
The sudden outbreak and global spread of the new coronavirus forces us,
worldwide, to revisit and reflect upon the human body as being ‘a multiple
one’ (Mol, 2003): a fragile body, which can easily be attacked by the virus
transmitted through small drops of saliva; a powerful body, which mirrors
world politics; a quarantine body, which has been marked by an era of ‘no-
touch’ (no kisses on the cheek, no handshakes or other bodily contact while
greeting); a trackable body, where the location of the body can be easily
‘traced’ by the modern technology track and trace system; a sanitized body,
which is often warned by the medical authorities to “wash your hands before,
during and after preparing food for at least twenty seconds”; a suppressed and
repressed body, which needs to learn how to live well with the virus. Given
this developing crisis, human beings have and are bodies at risk.
In the period of post-COVID 19, when people tend to slow down the
routine of their daily lives, it may be the occasion to reflect on what was going
on before this viral outbreak, and how the relationship to the human body
changed (Marder, 2020). For much of the history of western philosophy,

H. Chen (*)
Institute of International and Comparative Education, East China Normal
University, Shanghai, China
e-mail: chenhongyanup@126.com

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 561
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_33
562 H. Chen

there has been a sharp dichotomy between mind and body. Body has been
conceptualized as biological object. It is only in the last century that the
‘nature’ of the body was questioned as being the main issue and systematically
examined. Merleau-Ponty (1962), as the leading proponent of body-
phenomenology, reminds us that the ‘fundamental philosophical act’ would
be to ‘return to the lived world beneath the objective world’, where experience
of the own lived body becomes a vital situation for understanding the ‘phe-
nomenal field’. For him, the relation between objective world and experi-
enced world as expressed in language and art, history, politics and nature can
only be properly interpreted and clarified by focusing on the issue of percep-
tion and embodiment.
Unlike the negative attitude towards to the body in classic western philoso-
phy, Chinese ancient texts have clearly referred to the body as a way of think-
ing. The human body has been considered as the most basic point of departure
of meaningfulness. As Zhang argued, while “the classic western philosophy
which attempts to comprehend the world begins with ‘think’, traditional
Chinese philosophy starts with ‘body’” (张再林, 2018, p. 316). Unfortunately,
as modern academic discourse is strongly based on western principles, the
body aspect in China remains a more or less unspoken field. Also in China, it
is only the last decades that there has been a re-discovery of the body by local
scholars. Until now, in their studies of the body as a subject, Chinese scholars
have depicted a very different picture from the western scholars. One of the
radical differences is that traditional Chinese thought has never been gov-
erned by mind-body dualism as in the West; rather, there is always a holistic
view of mind-body whereby the body is the dynamic of the mental processes
(张再林, 2018). Uncontroversially, a holistic position can be found both in
Daoism and in Confucianism, where it is also essential to acknowledge the
body as secular and sacred.
To give a systematic view of the traditional Chinese conception of the body,
this chapter develops a case study and focuses on the holistic aspect of the
body. It firstly addresses how the body has been historically discussed in dif-
ferent dynasties and educational systems. We argue that the body in China
can only be understood as the common bond between family and state. We
then highlight three features of the Chinese body, namely regular and repeti-
tive exercise (without considering the physical rigour as western philosophy
might do)1, time (seasonally appropriate, rhythms, namely Shi) and harmony

1
Yangsheng, however, emphasizes not physical rigour, but regularity and repetition (Farquhar & Zhang,
2012, p. 66).
 Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese Perspective 563

(this must be achieved rather than being a natural state2). Ultimately, we argue
that all three aspects can only become effective when we include the element
of ritual, which finally aims to shape a ‘soft’ or gentle body. It is also worth
noting that there is a significant difference between Chinese views on body
and the phenomenological views of western contemporary philosophy. In
Chinese thought, the lived body is always in continuity with the collective
body, the ritual body and the time body. In addition, in contrast with the
prevailing western viewpoints, Chinese discourse about body is beyond hav-
ing and being, but a ‘doing body’, a body which enacts and performs.

2 The Body in Early Chinese Texts

Unlike the hiding of the body in western philosophy, the ancient Chinese
classics are rich in discussions of the body. An accurate idea of how the body
was conceived in early China can be found in different philosophical schools.
Regardless of their difference concerning human nature, both Daoism and
Confucianism share a common interest in the body. In both schools, the body
is not treated as an object that one ‘has’, but rather associated with the process
of unfolding, that is something is doing and also being done. Such an idea is
often associated with the pattern of the family-self-state collective structure.
Some of the recent studies have even considered the body as the starting point
for understanding Chinese philosophy. As Zhang (Zailin & Shaoqian, 2009)
argued, Chinese philosophy does not focus on universal categories of con-
sciousness—as it is proposed by Immanuel Kant; rather, it follows the dual
path of family and clan. Zhang provides various discussion on how the body
can manifest the philosophy of existence, in an ethical and transcendental way.

2.1 The Physical Body as a Site of Family Heritage

Holding a holistic view on the body is epitomized in the Chinese reference to

the body as zonghe ti, namely a “composite or synthesized corpus” (Farquhar
& Zhang, 2012, p. 280). The most significant feature of this synthesized cor-
pus lies in its physical existence. In Ancient China people did not feel hatred
towards the body because of bodily pleasures and satisfaction such as food,
drink and sex. On the contrary, they considered this process to be an

2
When harmonizing is understood as the weaving together of many streams of activity and as the man-
agement of a relation between yin and yang tendencies in the dynamics of life, it becomes quite a complex
concept (Farquhar & Zhang, 2012, p. 153).
564 H. Chen

automatic happening (Wu, 2003). When hungry the body needs food and
eats, it develops an understanding of taste; when tired the body falls asleep
and knows the body’s limitations; when amused the body laughs; it senses the
interaction with the world and its social environment. As Confucius said,
“there is no body but eats and drinks. But they are few who can distinguish
flavors” (Legge, 2016). By this, Confucius was reflecting on the physical needs
of body; however, he also attempts to seek an optimal level of bodily practice,
so that the body is trained as an intelligent one. It articulates the fact that
there is no human nature apart from the physical body and its needs (Confucius
in Slingerland, 2003, Analects, P259).
Such an acknowledgement of the material aspect of body endowed it with
a positive meaning. The essential of ‘I’ is nothing more than what the body is
doing and has done, as is written in the ancient text ‘Qin ji zhi qie, wu zhong
yu shen’ I feel deeply the existence of myself; nothing is more divine and
closer than my own body ( 亲已之切, 无重于身, quoted by Zailin &
Shaoqian, 2009, p. 346). Moreover, it would be naive to see the physical body
as belonging to one individual person. The existence of the physical body is
often associated with the family. As the classic of Filial Piety articulates,

One’s body, hair, and skin are a gift from one's parents—do not dare to allow
them to be harmed, this is the beginning of xiao (filial). (The classic of Filial
Piety, 8.3, Analects, P79; Ames & Rosemont, 2009)

Here, the body has been considered as the extension of one’s parents. In
this case, the individual is not the only owner of the body, and he or she is also
prohibited from hurting the body. In the day of one’s death a person must
reflect on his body and whether he has made it through life without disre-
specting his parents. In many cases, the body has been compared to a family,
and it is the representation of the family. A linguistic observation can also
provide a good way of understanding how the body shares the same purpose
of family. In Chinese, the parents call their children their ‘flesh and bones’
(Gu Rou), and the children will practice ‘regurgitation-feeding’ on the parents
as ‘my birth body’ (Sheng shen); hands and feet stand for brothers (Shou Zu),
ears mean friends, thighs and upper arms stand for right-hand man, and the
cells we have in common stand for brothers. Thus, since birth, the body has
been inextricably entangled with the family and brothers. As we read in
Confucius’ writings,

A gentleman is respectful and free of errors. He is reverent and ritually proper in

his dealings with others. In this way, everyone with the Four Seas is his brother.
 Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese Perspective 565

How could a gentleman be concerned about not having brothers. (Confucius in

Slingerland, 2003, p. 127)

Thus, the body is not a private thing owned by an individual. The body is
not at the disposal of the subject. A body born in brotherhood practices a
culture of respect for the body, and even worships the living body. This is
articulated by Slingerland when he interprets Confucian’s Analects:

Respect for certain parts of the body is a metaphor for discipline. For instance,
Master Zeng was gravely ill and called his disciples to his bedside: “Uncover my
feet! Uncover my hands.” (Confucius in Slingerland, 2003, Analects 8.3, P79)

Zeng was particularly known for his filial piety, one of the main principles of
which was preserving one's body intact. It is only now, on his deathbed, that
Master Zeng can be sure to have made it through life without disrespecting his
parents in this fashion. (ibid.)

Another statement has a similar meaning:

We have had the imperishable Way, and yet there have never been imperishable
people. Therefore, to allow one’s body to die is not to necessarily to sacrifice the
[true] self, while to keep oneself alive at any cost in fact involves losing oneself.
(Confucius in Slingerland, 2003, Analects, p. 129)

Because of the understanding of body as a family category, it is not difficult

to understand the statement ‘Morality is body’ (德也者, 得于身也, 《礼
记.乡饮酒》). And such a pattern of exchanging and creating the body is
analogous with the movement of the cosmos and also the flow of virtue or
morality (Miller, 2001).

2.2 The ‘Self-Cultivated’ Body: From Qi to Xiushen—A

Double Transformation: Xiushen Yang Xing

If the family shapes the whole body, where is the ‘creation’ of a body? If we
look at the significance of the physical body in ancient Chinese texts, we find
the existence of the body is often the objective part of the subject ‘I/me’ with
the responsibility of self-cultivation. “The staging of the body as an extension
of family directed to a large extent the performance of the body in daily per-
sonal and communal life.—The life of the human body is generated from the
movement and development of Qi” (Farquhar & Zhang, 2012, p. 256):
566 H. Chen

Despite the high value placed on the physical body, it should not lead to the
misunderstanding that the body is purely an object. Instead, ancient Chinese
emphasized the unity between the physically existing body and the subject.
How to ‘take care of the body’ has been a recurring public issue, as the body
is not only the individual’s responsibility. “Thus, the learning of gentleman is
used to improve the person, while the learning of the petty man is used like
gift” (Mei qi shen, Xunzi; Hutton, 2014).
In general, two aspects of the ‘caring body’ can be differentiated in accor-
dance with Chinese ancient culture: one aspect regards the ‘physical good
shape of the body’ (Yangsheng, xiushen), and the second is the ‘self-cultivated’
nature of the body (Yangxing). Often, the body is the basis of analysis. For
instance, in Chinese traditional medicine, the basic physiological principle of
keeping the body alive is the continuous exchange of vital energy (Qi) between
Yin and Yang.

In the human body there are the nine orifices of ears, eyes, nostrils, mouth,
anus, and urethra; the five zang organs of kidneys, liver, heart, spleen, and lungs;
and the twelve joints of elbows, wrists, knees, ankles, shoulders, and hips, which
are all connected with the universe. (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine,
1995, p. 26)

In Chinese traditional medicine, the human body is regarded as a network

of Qi (namely energy flow) which embraces two basic physiological dynam-
ics: yin and yang system. The former’s function is to ‘store the potential energy
to maintain the dynamic homeostasis of the body’, and the latter is responsi-
ble for ‘transmitting this energy’. For the Daoist, then it is the body, not just
the heart-mind (xin), that must be cultivated and imaged in order to realize
the unity of humans and the cosmos (Miller, 2001). However, Confucius
requires a ‘transformative’ change from heart and embodiment:

When a man is rebuked with exemplary worlds after having made a mistake, he
cannot help but agree with them. However, what is important is that he changes
himself in order to accord with them. When a man is praised with words of
respect, he cannot help but be pleased with them. However, what is important
is that he actually live up to them. A person who finds respectful words pleasing
but does not live up to them, or agrees with others' reproaches and yet does not
change—there is nothing I can do with one such as this. (Confucius in
Slingerland, 2003, Analects, 9.24, p 94)
 Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese Perspective 567

Here, the Master criticized those who consent superficially but do not
transform their hearts. Nominal assent to the Confucian way is insufficient—
one must love the Way and strive to embody it in one’s person. The Master
effortlessly embodies “in his words, behaviour, and countenance the lessons
imparted throughout the rest of the text” (Confucius in Slingerland, 2003,
Analects, p 98).

2.2.1 The Collective and State-Owned Body: A Devoted Body

in Different Dynasties

The body has further associations as described here:

From the body to the family, from the family to the nation, from the nation to
the whole world—the body, family, nation and the whole world are different
representations, but they have the same essence. Broadly speaking, the affairs
dealt with by the saints cover the whole universe; but to speak narrowly, these
matters do not go beyond the human body. (Zailin & Shaoqian, 2009)

In the third century B.C.E. in the Springs and Autumns of Mr Lü (Lüshi

Chunqiu) we find the following:

Human beings have 360 joints, nine bodily openings, and five yin and six yang
systems of function. In the flesh tightness is desirable; in the blood vessels free
flow is desirable; in the sinews and bones solidity is desirable; in the operations
of the heart and mind harmony is desirable; in the essential Qi regular motion
is desirable. When [these desiderata] are realized, illness has nowhere to abide,
and there is nothing from which pathology can develop. When illness lasts and
pathology develops, it is because the essential Qi has become static. … States too
have their stases. When the ruler's virtue does not flow freely [i.e., if he does not
appoint good officials to keep him and his subjects in touch], and the wishes of
his people do not reach him, a hundred pathologies arise in concert, and a
myriad catastrophes swarm in. (Miller, 2001)

As Miller put, “the free flow of virtue (de) is not to be understood in terms
of moral philosophy but by analogy with what is necessary to keep the body
alive. Just as the circulation of bodily fluids is necessary for human survival, so
also the free flow of ‘virtue’ is necessary in the state” (ibid.).
In the medical text Huangdi neijing suwen (Simple Questions on the Yellow
Emperor’s Internal Classic) we find the following (Miller, 2001):
568 H. Chen

The cardiac system is the office of the monarch: consciousness issues from it.
The pulmonary system is the office of the minister mentors: oversight and
supervision issue from it. The hepatic system is the office of the General: plan-
ning issues from it. The gall bladder system is the office of the rectifiers: deci-
sions issue from it. … [and so on for the twelve systems of body functions
associated with internal organs]. It will not do for these twelve offices to lose
their co-ordination.

As Miller says: ‘Here we see how the physiology of the body was correlated
with hierarchical configuration of the state’ (Miller, 2008).

3 Nurturing the Body in the Chinese

Educational Context: Time, Repetitive
Exercise and Harmony
When we conceptualize the Chinese body in terms of family, collective and
state, we must not confuse this by the fact that in China it is assumed that the
body itself has an imitative, a mimetic power (Gebauer & Wulf, 1995).
Overall, it is necessary to differentiate the body as an individual existence and
the body of a family state. Only with such consciousness of the body as being
something that belongs can we understand why the body in ancient texts has
widely been seen as subject for ‘deliberate cultivation and nurturing’ (Farquhar
& Zhang, 2012), in Chinese Xiushen Yangxing (cultivate the body/self, nur-
ture one’s nature). To attain the status of an educated human being, people
need extra effort, regulation, discipline and also self-discipline. As we noted
above, since the body in China is often conceived as rooted in the family and
state framework, the criterion of family has great generative power for the
next generation. In Chinese tradition, self-control/discipline is the best path
to attain the being of an educated person.

Study this Inner Canon, savor this; under the guidance of sages, explore and
attend to the secrets of the body and soul—in this way, we can again perfect
human life and complete the central voyage of human life.—Qu Limin, The
Yangsheng Wisdom of the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, savor this; under the
guidance of sages, explore and attend to the secrets of the body and soul—in
this way, we can again perfect human life and complete the central voyage of
human life. (Farquhar & Zhang, 2012, p. 125)
 Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese Perspective 569

3.1 Body and Time

No doubt time is a starting point of modern western philosophy. However,

unlike the western emphasis on the linear aspects (three modes of time: the
past, the present and the future), the Chinese discuss time in a cyclical and
dynamic way. It is not measurable clock-time. Like all other agricultural
countries ancient China tends to follow the rhythmic changes of the four
seasons and is maintaining an intimate relationship between the activity of
human beings and the natural environment. “The human body depends on
the natural world for its nurturance and cultivation, in accord with the natu-
ral regularities of life” (Farquhar & Zhang, 2012, p. 256). As is advocated in
the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon,

The three months of the spring season bring about the revitalization of all things
in nature. It is the time of birth. This is when heaven and earth are reborn.
During this season it is advisable to retire early. Arise early also and go walking
in order to absorb the fresh, invigorating energy … on the physical level it is
good to exercise more frequently and wear loose-fitting clothing. This is the
time to do stretching exercises to loosen up the tendons and muscles.
Emotionally, it is good to develop equanimity. This is because spring is the sea-
son of the liver … violating the natural order of spring will cause cold disease,
illness inflicted by atmospheric cold during summer. (Ni, 2011)

In general, there are three dimensions of the Chinese conceptions of time

and body. Firstly, the whole world is controlled by the change of time, espe-
cially the change of the seasons; secondly, the recovery of each body part has
its time, such as the liver in spring, heart in summer, lung in autumn and
kidney in winter; and3 thirdly, there is a need of timing, to unite the change
of heaven/season, adjusting the needs of each body part.
Time is something that shows ‘changes’ and ‘dynamics’ than measurement.
For instance, “Tianzhishi (heavenly time), Shixing (act or move in accordance
with time), Shiming (time and destiny), Sishi (four seasons), Yushi xiexing (to
go along with time), and Cheng Tian Er Shi Xing (to comply with heaven to
act or to move in accordance with time)” (Chen & Bu, 2019). The concept of
time here can be generalized as “timeliness, timing, opportune moments,
proper timing, and availing oneself of the gathered momentum” (ibid.). This
kind of multidimensional quality of time is often emphasized in ancient
Chinese texts.

3
For details check pp 23–24.
570 H. Chen

Time adjusts the body’s rhythm (Farquhar & Zhang, 2012—the four times
of the year). There are two dimensions of time: (1) the time of the body and
(2) the time of nature (environment). As for the time of the body, there is a
need to “harmonize the numbers” (Farquhar & Zhang, 2012). People use the
concept of ‘demon time’ to identify when the body is in a vulnerable time:

The ‘demon times’ of each day: it is when you first wake up from dreaming in
the morning that you enter on the first demon time of the day (6:00–9:00 a.m.).
This is the point at which things like heart disease, stroke, bronchitis begin to
act up in your body.

Such kind of thinking is analogous with the concept of the ‘rhythm’ of the
body. As Farquhar and Zhang also argue, “even on the scale of a life, there is
a ‘demon time’, middle age, when physiology is turning away from its youth-
ful vigor, but the pressure of social responsibility is at its highest” (Farquhar &
Zhang, 2012).
In Farquhar and Zhang’s research on Yangsheng, they also refer to the
importance of the adjustment between body and time:

We Chinese have a saying, ‘eat turnip in the winter, ginger in the summer, no
need to get a doctor's scrip’. Why do people say this? In the summer, our yang
qi rises and floats toward the surfaces of the body, so the inner parts of the body
develop a pattern of cold-damp; [under these conditions], the spleen-stomach
system is at its weakest, and our digestive functions are thus also at their weak-
est, so in the summer, we want to eat warming and heating, lightening and
dispersing things such as ginger and can't eat moistening and tonifying things—
our body’s insides don’t have the power to digest them. But when winter comes,
our yang qi is entirely retreating, and the inner parts of the body develop a pat-
tern of inward heat, so we can eat moistening and tonifying things. Thus, eating
turnip can clear [heat] and cool [the inside], and make qi flow along its pathway
[qingliang xunqi]; it can help our body maintain a condition of coolness, with
easy and smooth circulation. (Farquhar & Zhang, 2012, p. 152)

The relationship between yin and yang are so intimately interactive, their antin-
omies so complexly nested in rank of ever more finely differentiated lights and
darks, potentials and actuals (every yang aspect incorporates yang and yin
aspects, every state of initiating entails its imminent completion, every com-
pleted thing holds within it the seeds of a new initiation), that the achievement
of harmony is far from natural. (ibid., p. 154)

Time enables the body to renew itself: when looking at time with respect to
its endless change, we only see things constantly renewing themselves; yet that
things ceaselessly renew themselves is the very nature of time.
 Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese Perspective 571

The yangsheng of the seasons in one year, the yangsheng of the monthly
phases of the moon, the yangsheng of the four temporal turning points of the
day—these are all versions of one another. The general principle is that of fol-
lowing along with heaven’s timing (tianshi 天时). Zhang Qicheng calls “the
three treasures of human body: Jing-essence, qi-energy, and shen-spirit”
(Farquhar & Zhang, 2012, p. 35).

3.2 Repetitive Exercise

While ritual is considered as symbolic activity in a religious context in Ancient

Greece, ritual is considered as an activity which aims to cultivate the self in
Chinese culture. “The form and meaning of ritual are determined by tradi-
tion; they are malleable according to the needs of any present situation, as
long as the performers understand them as being traditional” (Wulf, 2022).4
According to Confucius, education involves not only words but takes place
most importantly through the medium of the body. Such ideas are often artic-
ulated in his Analects, as here: Confucius said, “[D]o you disciples imagine
that I am being secretive? I hide nothing from you. I take no action, I make
no move, without sharing it with you. This is the kind of person that I am”
(Confucius in Slingerland, 2003, Analects, 7.24 p. 72). Confucius is often
said to ‘speak too little’, and some of his students criticized that he may have
hidden some sort of esoteric knowledge from them. The Master then claims
that what he actually taught is not what has been said, but rather to ‘do with
learning from the ancients and putting this learning into practice’. Such kind
of body-based practice has been summarized by Wang Yangming, an extraor-
dinary later Confucius scholar5: shenjiao, literally body or personal teaching
(it contrasts with yanjiao, namely teaching through words). According to
Wang, compared to theoretical teaching delivered by words, body teaching
can arouse and touch the deeper emotions, via how the Master behaves, with
the Master acting as a model or example to emulate. The response given by
the Master is a reminder to the student of the significance of the body in our
perception of the world. As he also said, “I wish I did not have to speak (yan),
what does Heaven ever say?” (Confucius in Slingerland, 2003, p. 24, p. 72.)
Such training of the body is often connected with Li. Li is an ambiguous
word, although it is significant in the analysis of the body in Ancient China.

4
cf. Christoph Wulf, Education as Human Knowledge in the Anthropocene, especially chapter 9 on
Confucianism. (2022) Fritz Graf. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.5600
5
Ching, J. (1972). The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming. Canberra, Australia: Australian National
University Press.
572 H. Chen

Primarily, Li referred to the practice of making sacrificial offerings to the spir-

its of the ancestors. Later, in Zhou, the scope of Li extended as far as “daily
lives that we might to be tempted to” (Analects). It relates not only rites, cer-
emonies and decorum, but also regards to specific rules applied in certain
social intercourse. “Training the body to be at peace, harmonizing the percep-
tions, making the self learn to respond to stimuli in certain way, and (for
Confucians) ‘straightening’ it with ritual propriety are the immediate goals of
these early practices of self-cultivation in China” (Judy, 2011).
At first glance, the illustration of ritual might seem to control the corporeal
body within certain rules. However, it is worth noting that ritual has two
meanings. Confucius’ well-known statement about ritual can be found in
Analects, as follows:

Restraining yourself and returning to the rites (keji fuli) constitutes Goodness.
If for one day you managed to restrain yourself and return to the rites, in this
way you could lead the entire world back to Goodness. The key to achieving
Goodness lies within yourself—how could it come from others? (Confucius in
Slingerland, 2003, Analects 12, p 125)

Ritual here is a prescriptive set of bodily instructions used to shape and

transform one’s behaviour. In this sense, it can easily be misunderstood that
the ritual is a way to restrain and regulate human nature. However, we find
that Confucius’ contemporaries tended to be extravagant and arrogant,
exceeding the limits of ritual, which is why he mentioned the rites. When
Confucius talks about ritual, it is to remind people to look within themselves
rather than looking to others. He means the same when he says, “[D]o not
look unless it is in accordance with ritual; do not listen unless it is in accor-
dance with ritual; do not speak unless it is in accordance with ritual; do not
move unless it is in accordance with ritual” (Confucius in Slingerland, 2003,
Analects 12.1). In other words, looking, listening, speaking and moving are all
things that come from oneself, not from others. While Confucius used ritual
as a noun, Xunzi, one of his followers, used ritual in a developmental sense, as
he claims in his Discourse on Ritual (Watson, 2003). And further,

Ritual means to nourish. The flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, rice and
millet, properly blended to create the five flavours nourish the mouth. The
aromas and fragrances of spice and orchids nourish the nose. … Therefore, rit-
ual means to nourish.” Xunzi uses metaphor to show how we should treat ritual
as serving human needs, as flavour for the mouth, aromas for the nose, embroi-
dery for the eyes, ritual is a way to nourish the body. When we read Xunzi’s
 Cultivating a Gentle Body: A Chinese Perspective 573

writings, we find that he attempts to show that “bodily transformation that

leads a person to perceive the world differently is connected to the aesthetic
quality of the ritual experience”. (Tavor, 2013)

3.3 Harmony

It is only through the body that harmony can be produced. If the body is in a
harmonious relationship with its environment, it will be filled with a har-
mony that pervades the whole person. Harmony is thought to spread through
the body of the individual and connects with the body of the family and the
body of the state. It is seen as the task of human beings to create harmony
between the body of the individual, the family and the community, the world
and the cosmos. Harmony is thought of as something physical, arising through
the resonance of human bodies with the environment and with the cosmos,
when being in the right place, fulfilling their tasks. The harmony of the body
is expected to develop over time by expanding it. Education, embodiment
and learning all strive to acquire the capacity of creating harmony and human-
ity. From early childhood on, this ability is supposed to be acquired in rituals.
From childhood on, rituals are a way to connect individuals with one another
and are capable of creating harmonious communities. In their embodied, per-
formative character, rituals create a public space which they make their own
through their adherence to rules and through repetition. This requires bodily
practice, repetition and the acquisition of practical knowledge from
childhood on.

4 Discussion and Conclusion: Towards

a ‘Gentle’ Body
In the last two decades, the human body has gained its central position in the
academic discourse of modern social sciences and the humanities. The issues
such as the political body, the gender-based body, racial bodies, masculinity
and sexuality, the sacred body and religion, consumption and beauty, technol-
ogy and body and so on contribute to the debate. Unlike the ‘discovery’ of the
body in the western world, Chinese scholars believe that it is time to ‘return’
to the body. Many scholars believe that in contrast to the formal and abstract
thinking of the West, traditional Chinese thinking is based on concrete roots
in the practice and needs of the body. For instance, by comparing the different
attitudes in the East and West towards the body, the historian Kuang-ming
574 H. Chen

Wu articulates the fact that in Ancient China ‘body thinking’ was holistic.
According to Wu (Wu, 2003), ‘body thinking’ has two meanings: firstly, it
refers to thinking through the body, namely bodily thought. In this sense, the
body is an instrument that represents thought, and expresses the thinking;
secondly, the body itself is a thinking subject, namely bodily thinking. Both
aspects are essential for understanding why the body can be considered as the
a priori of all thinking (Wu, 2003, p. 309). Such body thinking relates not
only to personal life but also to communal interaction and in the cultivation
of the arts of civilization. Such kind of thinking is beyond ‘the differences
between having a body’ and ‘being a body’. Ancient Chinese texts present a
perfect image of the body as being what we do in and through our daily
actions. In and through our bodies we perform, enact and stage our thoughts.
An educated person was often considered as somebody ‘without any strength
to truss a chicken’. To understand the meaning of this sentence, it is necessary
to trace our understanding of the body back to the classics and use the discov-
ery of the traditional knowledge for the creation of new perspectives for
embodiment and learning in the future.

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Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 4(3), 343–359. https://doi.org/10.1007/
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张再林. (2018). 作为身体哲学的中国古代哲学 Tending towards ‘the Philosophy of
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北京: 中国书籍出版社.
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical
Experience of Education: A Perspective
from South Asia
Srajana Kaikini

The concept of education demands a balancing act between offering a stabilis-

ing environment in which the learner grows through knowing and at the same
time necessitating a dynamic environment that must continually re-invent
itself to push at the very boundaries of knowledge. This task is made even
more complex when the question of education is entangled with embodi-
ment. Embodiment as a concept is not new in the philosophies of education
in the South Asian region. However, the role of embodiment and its status in
education is wrought with several problems given the region’s complex socio-
historical constitution. Embodied education in the South Asian and particu-
larly the Indian context is marked by colonial heritage. This has resulted in
mainstream modern school education systems carrying forward these legacies
and categorisations resulting from the syncretic influence of a Victorian edu-
cation system, instituted in India during its colonisation, on the indigenous
education systems existing in the region.
In this chapter, I articulate the relationship between embodiment and the
process of learning in the Indian1 context in an attempt to understand the

1
I use ‘Indian’ in this chapter as an indexical geographic term to talk about certain situated traditions that
have their socio-political histories entangled with India as a place. The term is not a representative index
of the nation’s identity which is constituted by various plural metaphysical frameworks from the Islamic,
Zoroastrian, Atheistic and Indigenous traditions, which have not been addressed within the scope of this
research.

S. Kaikini (*)
SIAS, Krea University, Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, India
e-mail: srajana.kaikini@krea.edu.in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 577
A. Kraus, C. Wulf (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93001-1_34
578 S. Kaikini

possibilities of offering an ethical experience of education to learners. In the

context of Indian education, the body becomes a highly contested territory
which is ridden with colonial histories as well as sociological inequalities. This
has led several social reformers and philosophers to actively talk about new
imaginations in education as a central goal for social life in India. Some of the
foremost thinkers widely discussed in this regard include Gandhi, Tagore,
Ambedkar, Phule and J Krishnamurti who were, in turn, informed by varied
metaphysical frameworks in subtle or explicit ways (Baniwal & Sharma,
2020). These intersections between pre-modern and modern thinking resulted
in the articulation of several contextually specific problems peculiar to the
Indian sub-continent.
In the following sections, I first address the problems of embodied edu-
cation in India by looking at the social process of learning and the purpose
of the body in learning. I then explore the relationship between the body
and the mind within various metaphysical frameworks, thereby articulat-
ing the learner in terms of a body-mind complex. The contemporary con-
ceptualisation of the body, although diverse, is also deeply troubled. The
troubled body in the form of the suffering, labouring and discriminated
condition of a mere body—separated from the mind—is seen as a violation
of the otherwise integrated body-mind ideal. When the capacity to affirm
the body as a sensing, thinking, acting body is in the focus, which, once
defined and recognised, can enable the pursuit of ethical ideals for the col-
lective ‘social’2 through the experience of education; this does not foremost
amounts to an education promising a good life to particular educated learn-
ers. The focus is instead on the obligation of education towards the weakest
and most vulnerable learner whose integrity as a sensing, thinking and acting
body is at stake—a body that has been consistently violated at the cost of
education and one that education cannot afford to ignore if it must stay true
to its intended purpose. These are living conditions of the lower castes (e.g.
Shudras) in the hierarchy of the Indian caste system with quite hard job
duties. I am interested in that social characteristic of non-substitutable and
unique difference in learners that education often fails to address and yet is
currently most required to address in the context of a very disparate nature of
‘socials’ in India. Before we address the ethical challenge of a person’s
unsafe social situation, it is helpful to understand the necessary conditions
that enable learning.

2
I employ the term ‘social’ as used by Guru and Sarukkai (2019) to refer to distinct collectives that
emerge through various processes in society.
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 579

1 The Social Process of Learning

What happens when learning occurs? If we look at the ample literature on the
teaching techniques, methodologies and tools employed in various educa-
tional practices, it is clear that there should be a focus on the process of learn-
ing and its relationship with the human body. Does the body have anything
to do with the process of learning? What does it mean to conceptualize learn-
ing in terms of place? More fundamentally, is the mind synonymous with the
body? Let us address these questions by first tackling certain foundational
conditions, given by society and intended by learners with which education
operates.
The first condition is that of difference or radical plurality, that is the inevi-
tability of difference in each learner in the classroom space. In short, the con-
dition of difference makes it imperative for the people in the learning
environment to recognise each learner as unique, particular and distinct from
the other. This means that the process of learning is an attempt at making
certain kinds of universals possible from these particularities that come
together in the classroom or any learning environment. The second condition
is the potential for transformation, that is learning presupposes transforma-
tion and a possibility of change, growth and movement. This transformation,
promised by learning, is not possible without a clear intention or purpose of
learning. An articulation of the intention will help one understand what
exactly does the process of learning do to the learner? Keeping in mind these
necessary conditions of learning, I posit further two essential characteristic
conditions without which learning cannot take place: one, that we cannot
learn without the presence of others; and two, that we cannot learn if we do
not know why it is that we must learn something, that is learning must have
a purpose.
A possible objection to the first essential condition—the necessity of the
presence of others—may be posed by auto-didacticism, wherein one claims to
learn all by oneself. However, this objection is quickly defendable in terms of
relationality of the learner, suggesting that the auto-didact is inherently depen-
dent on various others as ‘sources’ of learning and therefore cannot claim to
be able to learn in isolation. Auto-didacts often create their own systems of
learning and evaluation from these network of recognised sources. In other
words, auto-didacticism is only possible through an alteration of the self as
multiple learners. This possibility of learning as an auto-didact can be found
in the figure of Ekalavya in the Mahabharata, who, having been denied formal
training in archery from the teacher Droṇā because of his caste, teaches
580 S. Kaikini

himself archery by adopting the image of Droṇā as his teacher (Sarukkai,

2018). In this context, Sarukkai (2018) argues that the non-substitutability of
the learning subject implies that the only way in which Ekalavya could have
learnt anything is by becoming his own teacher and adopting a symbolic
image of Droṇā, thereby finding agency of learning in the possibility of
becoming an alterity or another self.
A possible objection to the second essential condition, the purposefulness
of learning, may come from those who argue for ‘learning for the sake of
learning’.3 In the age of innumerable online courses and degrees on offer at
the click of a button, ‘learning for the sake of learning’ is a trend where knowl-
edge is consumed much like in the entertainment industry—one shops
around, signs up for a course, one learns something new and then one moves
on. This learning, however, does little to transform us in any essential way. By
this, I mean that learning which has no intended purpose and that is really not
put into empirical practice or application, does little to contribute to an edu-
cation that seeks to transform us as human beings. Such a lack of purposeful-
ness finds addressal in the educational philosophy of Gandhi where vocation,
practice and action play as big a role in the process of an education as textual
and verbal knowledge. A purposefulness of learning in order to engage with
the world, therefore, necessarily implies giving importance to theories of
action and ways of acting in the world. A practice- or application-oriented
education is one that uses these approaches as educational methodology. The
irony of purposefulness in learning is that the purpose is often conflated with
being job-oriented, which defeats the purpose of engaging with learning as a
process rather than a commodity, as is often the case in contemporary contexts.
As is often seen across student population in India, learning is geared
towards a pre-determined, mostly vocational purpose. Some commonplace
examples in India include the straightjacketing of education tracks into disci-
plines such as engineering, medicine, banking, corporate sectors and so on.
The irony of such an approach is that it becomes an instrumentalisation of
education, furthering existing hierarchies in the social space. For example,
students in India who are considered ‘bright’ often end up taking science-
based courses whereas those deemed ‘average’ are often implicitly compelled
to take up arts-based or humanities-based courses, both determined by a
quantitative marking system that does not take any account of differences in
the subjectivity of the learners. These strange systems of socially pervasive
norms have been so deeply entrenched in the post-colonial Indian socials that

3
See Bowden and Marton (1998) for an account of the shift in focus in pedagogical vocabulary from
teaching and knowledge transmission towards learning and learning environments in education.
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 581

a break from these very norms is often considered a radical act, instead of
being standard practice.
In response to this problem, various alternative schooling models were set
up during Indian renaissance in the 19th century (Mehrotra, 2007; Baniwal
& Sharma, 2020). Mehrotra (2007, p. 26) outlines certain common charac-
teristics of the educational commitments of alternative schools in India.
These include a focus on overall development of the human being, focussing
on the relevance of education, ecological and aesthetic awareness in educa-
tion, acquiring life skills and particularly paying attention to the needs of
learners with different needs. Thus, experiential learning and an emphasis on
acquiring creative skills are brought back into focus in these alternative
schools. While current trends show a substantial change in students’ inter-
ests and choices, these changes occur only in very specific niche classes and
sections of society that are not representative of the plurality of the
Indian social.
The curatorial turn in education signals a shift in focus of education from
simply being a business of knowing to enabling experiences of education
(Ruitenberg, 2015). This also posits the educator as one who caters and cares
for the interest, abilities and possibilities of the learners, thereby being need-
based and inherently interested in addressing the distinct differences and par-
ticular natures of the learners—something that is gaining currency in
contemporary teaching vocabulary as the “student-centric” approach
(McKinnon & Bacon, 2015). Acknowledging that student-centrism is a nec-
essary condition and not an added asset of education, learning as a social
process cannot ignore the body4 alongside the mind as an integral constituent
of the learning environment. Further, given that learning is dependent on an
experiential transformation, it can occur only as an embodied process. This
necessary relation between the body and the process of learning has been
highlighted by several modern educational philosophers in India, informed
by various metaphysical conceptual frameworks.
The history of education in the South Asian context is deeply entwined
with the education of philosophy and various practices of thinking at large.
This implies that all those who took an active interest in the practices of think-
ing were also deeply invested in educating others as part of their practice
(Baindur, 2020). Given that philosophy as a practice is concerned with the
nature of knowing about the world and is in pursuit of understanding the way
4
I use the mere word ‘body’ in this context to refer to the corporeal, living, breathing, physical body of
us as human beings which is defined by its subjective experiences and has the capacity to have knowledge.
The mere body is distinct from the ‘body-mind’ as used further in the chapter, which is used as a complex
concept to refer to the body that senses, thinks and acts.
582 S. Kaikini

things are, the purposes of learning often implicitly have overlaps with pur-
poses of philosophies.
In the South Asian context, we can draw instances of purposefulness from
various socio-historic trajectories. Philosophical traditions, be it the Vedic,
Upanishadic, the ‘Darsanas’ or the Buddhist or Jaina, have clearly articulated
soteriological goals. The ensuing/desired liberation or emancipation was
enabled by the process of an education aimed towards enlightenment. While
enlightenment also played a key role in post Copernican Europe, bringing
about a general cultural renaissance, it is important to note that these two
enlightenments were distinctly different in their contextual histories and phil-
osophical presuppositions, each being informed by their own situated meta-
physical frameworks (Nola, 2018). This is especially important to note in the
context of India’s colonial past and its heritage which is still present today.
The education bills established by the British in India were drafted in the
hope of being a means for their own colonial ends. One such example is the
Education Bill of 1835 articulated by Thomas Macaulay. The bill reflects the
colonial interest in ‘civilising’ the ‘natives’ through an active education in not
just “the poetry of Milton, the metaphysics of Locke, and the physics of
Newton” but also English as a language citing that “the dialects commonly
spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor
scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are
enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable
work into them” (Macaulay, 1835).5 However, it is not just this colonialism
that has pervaded the learning landscape in India. There has always also been a
longstanding form of ‘internal colonialism’, given the social inheritance of
inequality in the form of caste and gender, informed by the modern concept of
class.6 This in turn translates into subtle implicit biases that make education in
India often a privilege as opposed to a necessity, even today. This form of inter-
nal colonialism is tougher to outgrow unless actively and consistently addressed
over a long and consistent period of time by both government and social groups.
This complex entanglement between practices of thinking, metaphysical
determination upon purposes of learning, effects of colonialism and the

5
The colonial mission of educating the colonised natives was directly politically motivated with a goal of
establishing power. “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us
and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes,
in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay, 1835). The use of education as an instrumental politi-
cal device, motivated by intentions that were far from caring in nature, has been recognised, challenged
and subverted in the years to come through the innumerable social reformers and educationists that
appeared in the small towns as well as big cities of the nation and continue to do so in contempo-
rary times.
6
See Pinderhughes (2011) for a recent reconceptualisation of internal colonialism.
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 583

experience of learning that systems of education offer to its learners are foun-
dationally pinned upon the ways in which the immanent and the transcen-
dent converge in the existence of the learner, his/her/their body and minds.
The existence of the learner and education’s ethics of engagement with the
learner therefore must first be understood through various metaphysical per-
spectives that implicitly or explicitly have a role to play in how the body is
recognised within the learning environment. In the following section, I artic-
ulate various metaphysical perspectives on the relationship between the mind
and the body in order to make possible the ethical body of the learners in any
learning environment.

2 The Body and the Learning Environment:

Some Metaphysical Perspectives
One major point of distinction between the metaphysical frameworks from
South Asia and Europe is the relationship between the mind and the body.
The various ways in which the mind and the body are conceptualised within
different paradigms point towards the complex centrality of the body in the
discussion of learning. The mind is inherently entangled with the body, there-
fore learning is embodied. Furthermore, as some contemporary thinkers point
out, the mind-body problem appears to have been resolved to a considerable
extent with respect to its Cartesian bifurcation (Stoljar, 2017). Therefore, it is
not in the restitution of the body in discourses on education but in our under-
standing of the various imaginations of the embodied mind that we must
learn about learning processes as geared towards distinct experiences. This
complex of mind and body, henceforth addressed as the ‘body-mind’,7 then
becomes the foundation for us to imagine an ethical body as the human learn-
ing subject and offers a way towards understanding learning as an ethical
experience.
There are several stakes involved in scholarship on the body in its attempt
to bring the body into the discursive space. The stakes involved include gen-
der, race, caste, class, ‘dis’abilities and so on—all of them deeply contingent
on the physical body. Several feminist and socio-political theorists like Ásta
(2018), Das (2015), Blackman (2008), Westley (2008), Damasio (1999),

7
Here I refer to the body-mind as a distinct conceptual entity that attributes the mind’s capacities to the
body as much as it establishes the mind as experientially embodied. This is similar to the processual man-
ner in which Holdrege (1998, p. 347, p. 358) refers to the ‘body-mind complex’ in the context of tran-
scendence at work within soteriological philosophies but is distinctly different in the context of its usage,
which is very much immanent and bound by this world.
584 S. Kaikini

Synnott (1993) and Scarry (1985) have theorised the body and its sociality
with respect to race and gender as well as its afflictions and crises. In the
Indian context, there is a large amount of sociological literature on the role of
the body as a political provocateur. However, within Indian conceptualisa-
tion, the task becomes slightly complicated when it comes to philosophical
thinking on the body, given the complicated syncretic history of India,
whereby contemporary theories of the body consider it as a cultural concept
while pre-modern theories of the body are radically deterministic.
However, what does metaphysics have to do with the body, if at all? It is
necessary for this question to be understood as it is closely linked with the
possibility of change and transformation. In other words, would any concept
of change ever be possible without the presence of the body? Here I presup-
pose a radically empiricist idea of knowledge and experience as entangled,
whereby it would be impossible to talk in purely epistemological or ontologi-
cal terms. This lineage of the mind as an integral constitution of what one
calls the body takes up various trajectories in different pre-modern metaphysi-
cal systems in South Asia.8
Some philosophers of the Nyaya-Vaiśeṣika tradition, for instance, consider
the mind to be a material entity like an instrument that senses. Thus the pre-
supposition that it is only the body that senses and the mind that reasons is
already challenged through this conception. Similarly, the Upanishads con-
sidered the human being as a composite of psychological and physical ele-
ments, whereby there was an attempt to look at the “agent of normal
phenomenal experience” as distinct from “the transcendental” (Laine, 1998).
Holdrege (1998, p. 369) argues that the body as a concept within the philoso-
phies of the “Hindu” religion can be either seen as an ‘integral body’ taking
up forms of either “the divine body9, the cosmos body, the social body and the
human body”, or a “processual body” taking the form of “the ritual body, the
ascetic body, the purity (sic) body, the devotional body, the Tantric body and
so on”. Each of these taxonomies of bodies are intended to be ways in which
the body becomes the ontological location of creation of systems, order or
practices that have various purposes. For instance, the body in the Upanishadic
framework is ascetic and a teleological object of liberation (Holdrege, 1998,
pp. 357–363).
All these conceptualisations bring into the picture the necessary relation
between the concept of the self with the body-mind. The concept of the self

8
See Michaels and Wulf (2013) for an account of perspectives on the role of sense across South Asian
philosophical traditions.
9
See Colas (2007) for more on the imagination of the divine body in Sanskritic logical traditions.
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 585

as entwined within the body and the mind is conceptualised differently in

Buddhist metaphysics. In Buddhist metaphysics, for instance, the idea of the
self is conventional but not essential as encompassed in the concept of the
anātman (which loosely can be translated the theory of no-self 10), and there-
fore, the nature of experience is understood as a causal complex of mental and
physical events playing out in relation to each other. Thus, the dualism that
we see in these schools of thought is not the Cartesian duality of mind as
distinct from the body but the dualism in the kinds of experiences that are
registered by the body-mind as a complex (Baindur, 2015b; Gupta, 2009;
Flood, 2006; Holdrege, 1998; Griffiths, 1986).
The monistic metaphysical schools imagine the body-mind complex with a
particular teleological commitment towards a unification of the mind and
body wherein the subject-object distinction collapses. The Sānkhya-Yoga and
the Advaita schools imagine the body as kind of ‘technology’ committed to
the well-being of the body-mind through the discourses on practices of Yoga
and its associated systems of healing like Āyurveda (Brennen, 2002). Within
this framework, the mind and the body are not dichotomous, but co-
constitutive (Larson & Bhattacharya, 1987).11
For instance, in the Āyurvedic metaphysical system the onus of under-
standing the body in relation to the world comes from a particular way of
looking at the body, whereby the presupposition is that each body is uniquely
constituted and thereby it is the body’s constitution that is understood in
order to determine the nature of ‘dis’-ease caused to the body. The threefold
categorisation of the human body into ‘vāta’, ‘pitta’, ‘kapha’ bodies largely
reflects an intention of imagining the body through certain universal proper-
ties. Essential to these systems of categorisation is the understanding that the
human living body is defined by its capacity to sense, think and act. The sys-
tematic extrapolation of these categories into the ways in which they respond
to the environment and conditions around the body points to very different
ways in which the concept of disease, for instance, is looked at in comparison
to modern medicine. Disease is not looked at as an objective state of discom-
fort symptomatic to the generic body but a specific case of imbalance between
the relation between the body and its environment (Baindur, 2015a; Brennen,
2002; Zimmerman, 1987). In this framework, it is not the state of disease
that is targeted for cure but the general condition of the body—thereby put-
ting the onus of well-being on the sensing, thinking, acting body.

10
This no-self theory does not imply the absence of self but is a theory that is not committed to a perma-
nent unchanging concept of a singular self.
11
I am grateful to Meera Baindur for her scholarly inputs on this subject.
586 S. Kaikini

Two overarching presuppositions can be extracted from such an attempt at

determining the body and its relation to its environment within the frame-
work of Yoga—first, that the body is deeply dictated by the metaphysical
constructs governing its conceptualisation; and second, that the body and the
mind are necessarily connected as a complex system. Given these two presup-
positions, we see how the question of education must necessarily take into
account metaphysical predeterminations often implicitly influencing the
body-minds in any learning environment.
The conditions for learning as outlined in the previous section, requiring
the presence of others and an intention to learn, present before us the sensitive
task of understanding what makes for a good education. In the Indian con-
text, recent work on pedagogical methods reflects an active interest in under-
standing how this metaphysical presupposition of the body-mind as a complex
influences the kinds of learning traditions that evolved in the South Asian
region. These include not just the Sanskritic and the Buddhist, Jaina, Āyurveda
traditions as mentioned above but also music, theatre, subaltern performative
traditions, tribal education cultures, as well as contemporary education think-
ers including Gandhi, Ambedkar, Vivekananda, Tagore, Sri Aurobindo,
J. Krishnamurti, Phule and many more who left behind legacies of educa-
tional institutions (Sarukkai & Akshara, 2020).
Baindur (2020) highlights how learning in the Vedic traditions took two-
fold forms where the learner was expected to learn through repetition of what-
ever the teacher taught ‘him’, and secondly the learner was expected to
understand the meaning of the teaching. Dialogue played an important role
in the process of learning. Similarly, residential schooling was the norm, with
the student expected to imbibe education not merely as accumulated knowl-
edge but through internalised lived everyday experience. Vedic educational
systems were thus implicitly informed by the Vedic metaphysics. This included
a particular conception of society as being one comprised of immutable caste
hierarchies. The redundant elements of Vedic rituals were challenged by
Buddhists by negating the notion of an essential self, logically discarding caste
as a concept and thereby proposing a conception of a society that is made up
of ‘conventional’ social bodies that are relational in nature. The Buddhist
‘sangha’ became the site of collective learning just like the ‘gurukul’ was the
site of experiential learning in the Sanskritic traditions. Historically, the major
work that Buddhist metaphysics did in its response to Vedic metaphysics was
to dismantle the conceptual basis of caste,12 thereby influencing the learning
environment very differently.

12
See Guru and Sarukkai (2019) for a compelling argument on the bearing of metaphysics on caste.
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 587

While these concerns belonged to the pre-modern social in India, the rea-
son I am invoking these here is to point out how the metaphysics percolates
over time and implicitly dictates the foundational social fabric of modern-day
learning environments in India. For instance, the significance of metaphysics
in self-recognition is reflected by Ambedkar when he called for all Dalits to
adopt Buddhism in an attempt to annihilate their Vedic inheritance of caste
as a concept. In other words, the learning body, when seen in the contempo-
rary Indian context, ridden by such binding presuppositions and ontological
determinations, is deeply conflicted. Its heritage dictates the access and expe-
rience of education far beyond the ideals of a promised ethical experience of
education, further complicated by colonial inheritances.
The body of the learner in contemporary India is far from being an enabled
body-mind. With the general decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres, 2011) tak-
ing sway across the globe, the coloniality power matrix of exploitation of
people by applying ideas like that of center and periphery and the related
body-politics shall be overcome, this is the aim of decolonial education. Then,
the need for an account of the ways in which the body-mind is troubled by its
metaphysical inheritances is necessary in order to understand the obligation
of education to the body in the Indian context. Thus, instead of considering
embodiment as some form of distinct educational practice, I want to focus
my attention on the need to reclaim the place of the body-mind and bring it
back into the learning space by outlining the following three ways in which
the body has been displaced from the learning space through contextual
forces. I am not concerned here with the training of the body in performative
and body-centric education but with mainstream learning environments
where the role of the body is often subordinated to the potentials of the mind
as well as subject to implicit violations, thereby making the experience of
secular contemporary education very disembodied and fragmented and often
a futile experience.

3 The Body in Trouble: The Suffering Body,

The Labouring Body,
The Discriminated Body
The idea of education has been at the heart of several modern and contempo-
rary philosophers in India, especially through India’s independence and
renaissance. They were not just educationists, but also social reformers, poets,
philosophers and political leaders. The emphasis of their philosophies of
588 S. Kaikini

education addressed different concerns and pushed towards different urgen-

cies and crises in education including the crises of the body and its presence
in the learning environment.13 The concept of the body-mind in its threefold
articulation as a sensing, thinking and acting entity as idealised in the concep-
tualisation of the pre-modern metaphysical systems mentioned above, fails to
translate into the modern social. Instead, the contemporary socials have suc-
ceeded more in deteriorating and diminishing the body-mind of the learner,
turning it into a suffering, labouring and discriminated body. In other words,
the irony of the learning environments is that they do little to address the
violence of certain living conditions.
J. Krishnamurti’s philosophy of alternative schooling conceptualises the
learner as a sensing, feeling body that needs an education not to conform to
societal constructs but to set the “mind” free. He gives precedence to processes
of perception, observation and paying attention to the world as central to
ways of educating oneself (Krishnamurti, 1974, p. 10). Education, according
to Krishnamurti, is to “learn never to accept anything which you yourself do
not see clearly, never to repeat what another has said” (Krishnamurti, 1974,
p. 11). According to Krishnamurti, an education of the mind is geared towards
freedom from the known, which comes about through the process of under-
standing the known (Krishnamurti, 1975). Krishnamurti’s keenness on an
aesthetically motivated education reflects the presupposition of the learning
body-mind as a sensing body.
The attempt to actively encourage this sensing body despite its pre-given
social determination also reflects his understanding of how the body, when it
enters the learning environment, is already suffering—a condition which the
self might not recognise until it learns about it. In a conversation with the
physicist David Bohm on the question of psychological conflict, Krishnamurti
wonders whether the root of such suffering stems from the recognition that
while the brain can grasp physical time, the mind has a very unpredictable
relationship with time: “the mind not being of time, and the brain being of
time—is that the origin of conflict?” (Krishnamurti & Bohm, 2014, p. 21).
Such a view reflects a dualist understanding of the experiences of the body-
mind where the self senses the world physically through embodied cognition,
while also being guided by free imagination through a mental grasp of experi-
ence. Thus, the suffering body is, in its unlearning, unmediated and meta-
physically pre-determined state, unable to recognise, perceive or even
13
In the fields of scientific and socio-scientific education, systematic efforts in addressing innovative
methods of teaching and ‘epistemic practices’ only highlight the large gaps and incongruences that need
to be addressed between lived experience of education as compared to education as knowledge-transaction.
For more see Kelly and Licona (2018).
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 589

understand that it is in fact suffering. It is the task of education, as seen by

Krishnamurti, to re-instate this suffering, i.e. the unmindful body so that it
can recognise its condition and come to understand that it is in fact suffering
in order to reclaim its body-mindfulness.
Gandhi’s philosophy of education, on the other hand, is influenced by
Thoreau, Rousseau and Tolstoy and their tenets of naturalist education
(Kaikini, 2019). Gandhi’s educational commitment is towards practical utili-
tarianism, laying emphasis on vocation-based learning, or learning by doing,
aimed towards self-sustenance that can ultimately enable or empower self-
rule (in Hindi ‘swaraj’). However, Kaikini (2019, p. 329) observes certain
shortcomings in this utilitarian system which placed emphasis on job-ori-
ented learning by pointing out that this experiment was a failure given that
schools risked turning into production units, a view acknowledged by Zakir
Hussain of the Wardha Education Plan. In addition, Gandhi’s ‘Nai Tālim’
philosophy of education is highly pragmatic where the only way out of colo-
nial dependence was by finding ways to generate one’s own revenue and mak-
ing primary education self-reliant. This came with its own risks, namely
possible exploitation of the students by the teacher and becoming an oppor-
tunity for vested interests by economic groups in the profits generated by the
school. Thus, while Gandhi’s philosophy of education is veered overall
towards economy, of time and resources, being pragmatic in approach and
aimed at “character building and discipline”, it turned out to be a failure in
practice, as it also harboured the risk of deepening the already pre-determined
labouring body’s crises by making it harder to emancipate from labour
(Kaikini, 2019, p. 335).
This privilege that betrayed Gandhi’s philosophy of education was coun-
tered by Ambedkar’s philosophy of education that has as an educational ideal
a promising balance of modernity and progress as well as ‘presence’ in the
form of embodiment, thus making education accessible to the caste-oppressed
labouring body who could then hope to emancipate themselves from the life-
long yoke of a caste-dictated life of labour as well as imagine learning as a
collective social process where one educates oneself not just for one’s own bet-
terment but for the betterment of others (Valeskar, 2012). Thus the labouring
body is the second degree diminished form of the reasoning body, one that
cannot even hope to sense, let alone think. This desensitised, unreasoning
body becomes the discriminated body that continues to bear the brunt of
restricting socials.
The crisis of the thinking body is when it becomes pre-determined into the
kinds of work it is ‘allowed’ to do, a case in point being that of the inheritance
of the caste social. The caste social categorises bodies in a manner that
590 S. Kaikini

relegates the labouring body to the lowest of social orders and thereby farthest
from any access to an egalitarian experience of education, if at all (Guru &
Sarukkai, 2012). This powerful metaphysical predetermination of the learn-
ing body that decides who is eligible to be educated at all and who is not,
foregrounds a crater in the social fabric of modern-day India. The champions
of a reformist vision that strived to address the caste-ridden cause in education
like Ambedkar, therefore, had a distinct vision of educating in order to agitate
and bring about social change.
This discrimination has been deeply ingrained in a manner that cannot be
directly addressed through certain standardised teaching methods. Instead,
there is a need for a complex persistent process of education that is geared
towards re-instatement of the completely perceptive body that has rid itself of
its discriminatory violence. This violence and discrimination has been carried
by Dalit, women, queer communities over generations, resulting in a pinning
down of the discriminated self to the sensual body, that is often reduced to the
unthinking, unreasoning, grossly explicit body, pushing the mind component
of these into oblivion. This reduced body directly affects the ability to be open
to and imbibe experiences of learning that help the re-instatement of the
body-mind.
Several nineteenth-century social reformers such as Rammohan Roy,
Dayanand Saraswati, Pandita Ramabai, Narayan Guru, Iqbal, Periyar and
many other leaders, activists and political thinkers of the freedom movement
drew inspiration from canonical as well as indigenous philosophical traditions
(Baniwal & Sharma, 2020). It is also significant to note that several women
reformers played an active role in education reforms towards equality of access
and enabling the presence of e.g. the female learner in the classroom space.
Basu (2005, p. 184) observes that surveys of indigenous education in
Governments of Bombay, Madras and Bengal presidencies in 1820s and
1830s showed a total absence of girl students from the village schools and
schools of higher education. These figures, mostly for the lack of adequate
records or documentation, are slowly coming to the fore with active archival
and documentation work.14
Amongst these nineteenth-century reformers were Savitribai Phule and her
husband Jyotirao Phule who extensively championed the cause of such gross
violence done to the discriminated body in education. The Phules instituted
dedicated schools for female students, and for the lower caste community,
namely the Mahars and the Mangs, in response to the lack of ‘indigenous
schools’ in and around Poona in West India (Deshpande, 2016, p. 102). An

14
See Ray (2005).
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 591

avid advocate for equal rights for the oppressed, Phule’s philosophy of educa-
tion was actively geared towards bringing about radical change in the system
by engaging in dialogue with the Government as well as creating schools in
order to address the gross inadequacies of the existing educational mandate in
colonial India.
In a memorial addressed to the Education Commission dated 19 October
1882, Phule argues that the Government’s education was merely patronising
a “virtual high class education” that was meant to cater only to the upper
classes and which resulted in a “monopoly of all the higher offices under them
by Brahmins” (Deshpande, 2016, p. 104). He further criticises the lack of
attention paid to adequate primary education for the masses, urging that
there be

schools for the Shudras in every village; but away with all the Brahmin school-
masters! The Shudras are the life and the sinews of the country, and it is to them
alone and not to the Brahmins, that Government must ever look to tide over
their difficulties, financial as well as political. (Deshpande, 2016, p. 105)

In another conversation, Phule draws out a critique of the Vedic monopoly

over education from within the system as follows:

If God had created the Vedic scriptures for the liberation of entire mankind, the
‘bhat’ brahmans would not have prohibited the ‘shudras’ and the ‘atishudras’
from studying the Vedas. The ‘bhat’ brahmans have thus violated God’s com-
mandment and are not the ‘shudras’ and the ‘atishudras’ suffering for that?
(Deshpande, 2016, p. 188)

Phule poignantly traces the suffering of the discriminated body of the ‘shu-
dra’ to the basic lack of education in his prologue to Shetkaryacha Asuud
(1883) (Cultivator’s Whipcord):

Without knowledge, intelligence was lost, without intelligence morality was lost
and without morality was lost all dynamism! Without dynamism money was
lost and without money the ‘shudras’ sank. All this misery was caused by the
lack of knowledge. (Deshpande, 2016, p. 117)

Phule’s sharp thrust is towards a philosophy of education that empowers

and enables the learner to be an active citizen of the State, who is able to par-
take of all his/her rights and to be able to live a life of dignity as an equal.
592 S. Kaikini

The philosophies of education discussed above either challenge the pre-

given metaphysics marking the body or re-enforce a different kind of meta-
physics binding it. Given this deeper relationship between metaphysics and
the body and the recognition of the various ways in which we have seen the
body in crisis in the context of Indian education, as a suffering, labouring and
discriminated body, the foundation of a just education is imaginable only
when we make possible an ethical recognition of the body-mind in the learn-
ing environment.

4 Education’s Obligation to the Body

Having thus far seen how various metaphysical systems a direct bearing upon
the perception and constitution of the body-mind within the learning envi-
ronment have, it is clear that the task for contemporary education is to under-
stand its obligation towards the body and more specifically towards restoring
and re-enforcing the body-mind of the learning subjects, in a way that instils
and fosters their abilities to sense, think and act in the world.
Speaking about the social context of intellectual hierarchies, Guru and
Sarukkai (2012, p. 14) observe that the capacity of knowledge making and
reflection—a privilege historically denied to the Dalit community—can be
cultivated only in the right material condition motivated by the possibility of
innovation and imagination. The Dalit self, historically, was denied the pos-
sibility of becoming a body-mind and instead consistently relegated to becom-
ing a mere labouring body that had no freedom to think. Therefore, they
argue that a certain kind of freedom from context was essential, particularly
for the labouring body, in order to become a thinking body-mind. This was
also recognised by Ambedkar who himself took time and detached himself
from his constraining working-class context to learn abroad. Moving away
from the empirical to the theoretical, according to Guru and Sarukkai (2012,
p. 24), is a ‘social necessity’, as it reverses “the orientalism that treats Dalits,
tribals, and the OBCs as the inferior empirical self ” in a move towards resist-
ing ‘museumising’ the Dalit and tribal communities as mere exotic bodies.
Thus, a mediated reflective space and time offered to the labouring body, in
the form of resources to simply be in order to resuscitate the body-mind, is an
essential obligation of education to restore the labouring body into a thinking
body-mind.
Similarly, the woman’s body in the India has a longstanding history of always
being subject to this spectrum of oppression—from being museumised into a
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 593

deity figure (e.g. imagining the Indian nation as a mother—‘bharatmāta’15) to

being denigrated as a suffering body confined to the space of the household,
thereby becoming a provocation to several women saints, philosophers and
wandering ‘Bhakti’ poets16 be it Akkamahadevi, Lal Ded or Avaiyyar who
broke this mould in order to reclaim their sensing and thinking body-mind.
Thus, in the absence of a formal learning environment that could enable this
restoration, forms of art, singing, dancing, writing or simply indulging in lei-
sure became radical learning environments for the suffering body to resuscitate
itself into a sensing body-mind.
The complex history of caste as a pervasive kind of social particular to India
makes the discriminated body the most prevalent kind of troubled body that
desires to be restored through education. This discrimination occurs at the
fundamental level of the self and its conceptualisation. The self or the indi-
vidual in the Indian social, as argued by Guru and Sarukkai (2019), is a ‘we-
self ’ or a collective self—one which sociological and philosophical theories
concerning the individual from Euro-American contexts fail to address in the
Indian context. This discriminated self, informed by the metaphysical given-
ness of caste through certain ‘authorless agencies’, suffers from a loss of com-
munity and identity as well as from a loss of basic social recognition. The
discriminated self in formal learning environments often gets marked by
social signs like caste-specific surnames, archetyping the body based on colour,
odour, dialect and so on (Guru & Sarukkai, 2019, p. 117). These metaphysi-
cally sanctioned violations create a deep sense of internalised humiliation in
the learner, who, having internalised the discrimination, then assimilates the
experience of education as a mere fossilising of his or her violated self as a
discriminated body.17 An example of this can be found in the violations faced
by a young Ambedkar in his school where he faced blatant discrimination as
an untouchable (Ambedkar, 1993). This discriminated body, in a learning
environment, is marked by a lack of recognition and acknowledgement, a
forced absence of the body that is further ensured by the overpowering learn-
ing environment.
Presence, therefore, becomes very significant for the discriminated body
that aspires to a sense of restoration to being, acting and experiencing in a
shared learning space with other body-minds. In other words, the obligation
of education towards the discriminated body is to ensure and enable its pres-
ence and actively resist its erasure through subconscious or internalised social

15
See Cheema, Zainab (2012) for a critique of the anthropomorphising of the Indian nation.
16
See Prentiss (1999) for an account of embodiment in Bhakti traditions.
17
See Guru (2009).
594 S. Kaikini

behaviour that pervades learning environments. This shared presencing,

therefore, in the spirit of what Guru and Sarukkai (2019) call as ‘maitri’ makes
it possible to recognise the subjects as acting, experiencing body-mind selves
that, through sensing, thinking and acting in relation to each other, learn
from each other and for each other, making the experience of education first
and foremost an ethical experience.

5 Towards an Ethical Experience of Education

In this chapter, I have first articulated the conceptualisation of the body
within various metaphysical traditions in India. I then looked at the various
complications that, within any learning environment, make these ontologies
of the body troubled, be it suffering, labouring or discriminated. The obliga-
tion of learning environments is then to work on the process of addressing
these differences in a way that restores the learner’s embodied constitution as
a sensing, thinking and also acting body-mind. Various educationists who
have thought about education in the Indian context have asserted the neces-
sity of embodied experience in education while also addressing various prob-
lems with the kind of misplaced idealism pervading the education system that
was transplanted to India during colonisation. This does not imply that the
education system that preceded the period of colonisation which included
residential and collective learning systems like the ‘gurukul’ or the ‘sangha’ did
not have their own problems in terms of caste- or gender-based ‘un’recognition
of certain bodies.
The models of education proposed by the educational reformists such as
Krishnamurti, Ambedkar, Gandhi and Phule strived to generate new syn-
cretic models that addressed the problems, at both systemic social levels and
individual levels. While they all had various motivations and commitments in
their educational philosophies, what is evident is that the double diminution
of the body-mind—firstly into a mere disembodied mind, and second into a
mere suffering, labouring or discriminated body—makes the very foundation
of the process of education morally dispensable. If education has to be indis-
pensable to human life, then it implies that it cannot be party to prolonging
such reductions of the body.
Further, the conceptualisation of the self in relation to the body-mind as a
relational complex, thinking, sensing and acting in this world, in the South
Asian context, does not necessarily correspond to the singular concept of the
self within the Cartesian context.18 Therefore, the self as an ethical relational
18
For more on the notion of the ‘we-self ’, see Sarukkai and Guru (2019).
 The Body and the Possibility of an Ethical Experience of Education… 595

complex must necessarily be addressed as an embodied sensing, thinking and

acting body-mind. There is need to articulate and imagine the notion of the
self and its relation to embodiment, which I have not addressed in this chap-
ter but merits attention. In this chapter, I have focused only the question of
the mind and its relation to embodiment and the place of the body-mind in
learning environments. The question that remains to be taken up for further
research from this argument is around the relationship between the self, the
mind and the body and how learning environments impact the self. The first
step in this regard is the articulation of the body and the mind in such envi-
ronments. It is only when the presuppositions of the body-mind are com-
pletely acknowledged, theorised, realised and cared for as a matter of principle
within philosophies of education that education can strive to become an ethi-
cal experience.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Christoph Wulf, Meera Baindur, Sundar

Sarukkai, Jayant Kaikini, Vivek Radhakrishnan, Ritwik Kaikini and Rakshi Rath for
their valuable insights and discussions that enriched the process of writing this
chapter.

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