Abstract
This paper explores how touch is key to understanding education—not as an achievement or an instrument of acquisition, but as a process through which one becomes a subject capable of both living and leading a life that matters for ourselves and others. As a process, it is concerned with how we encounter things and others in the world and not solely with what we encounter. In particular, it argues that the dynamics of touch-as both a touching and being touched by-are central for understanding educational encounters as sensory landscapes of contact. This paper turns first to Aristotle’s understanding of touch as central to life itself in order to contemplate how it is not merely one of the senses but signifies as the primary mode of all bodily contact with the world. This vital aspect will then be examined in relation to the specific ways bodies experience contact, through their membranes, morphological make up and their movements. Here, I draw on a number of philosophers and theorists, such as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Juhani Pallasmaa and Erin Manning, and a recent art installation The Boarding School by Sisters Hope to demonstrate how bodies matter to the very practices of education. I conclude with some thoughts on what morphologies, membranes and movements can specifically offer to a sensuous understanding of education.
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Notes
My formulation of education here draws on a combination of Gert Biesta’s (2014) notion of the subjectification function of education as a process through which students come to lead their own life projects and Tim Ingold’s (2017) understanding of education as having as its aim students’ ability to lead lives with others. I choose, however, to include also ‘living’ a life to signal that our sensory relationships with our environment are central to ‘leading’ a life and are integral to the very educational practices we engage in.
For a description of the two main projects falling under the Sisters Academy umbrella, The Boarding School and The Takeover, see http://sistersacademy.dk
For a more detailed discussion of these issues, please see chapter 6 in my forthcoming book, The Touch of the Present: Educational Encounters and the Politics of the Senses (SUNY Press).
In addition to the usual five senses, ‘mind’ is a sixth sense within some eastern traditions, while Mark Paterson (2007) outlines some of the additional ones from psychology and neuroscience as including proprioception, kinaesthesia, and the vestibular sense.
I use the phrase ‘other elements in the environment’ in order to highlight that each of us is indeed a singular element in any given environment, which is composed of things as well as living matter.
Indeed, one might claim the aim of such an education is to help fashion, select or channel some of these sensations into new forms of subjectivity. I discuss this in the conclusion.
Buddhist philosophy articulates a similar trajectory: sensations arise to which we then attribute, for example, the feeling of ‘anger’, to which we then, in turn, attribute as belonging to ‘me’. The sensation becomes ‘my anger’ instead of being something we experience as something that both arises and passes away. In an educational context see the discussion in Todd (2015).
At times, there is an insistence in Sheets-Johnstone’s work on ‘boundaries’ in order to establish that not everything is possible for a given organism and that we are somehow bound to (and not only by) the surfaces of our skin. While skin might indeed be a necessary limit, it is important not to reify or equate the “subject” or “self” with the boundaries of the skin—for the reason that such reification can also operate as a slippery descent into racist and colonial forms of identification of skin with subjectivity. For an in-depth discussion of these latter issues, see Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (2000).
This idea has come about in discussion with Elisabet Langmann and Lovisa Bergdahl. See also Løvlie (2007).
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Todd, S. Education, Contact and the Vitality of Touch: Membranes, Morphologies, Movements. Stud Philos Educ 40, 249–260 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09765-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09765-w