Pedagogy Without Bodies

Educational theory today seems to be premised on a distributive thought; either on students’ bodies perceived as unified entities, as self-maintaining and ongoing forms that can be recognized and represented, or as with some post-humanist and new materialist accounts, as just this one entity, emerging and interconnected among a myriad of others in a world, understood as one organic and reproductive whole. This raises certain problems and certain questions, the solution of which presents us with specific tasks of thinking about curriculum planning, as well as ethics and politics in education. What is pursued is either a universal subject and his human right to be educated and skilled well enough to live well and to be a good and productive citizen (thus there ought to be generalizable and standardized elements of curriculum); or, there is a notion that we can only know subjects in their individuated and socially determined expressions, and thus curriculum is integrated as much as possible (bestowing individual differences in ability and access according to diverse social contexts), as is evident by the upsurge in individuated and differentiated learning plans tailored to each individual student. I argue that a different ethics is needed for the future of education and pedagogy if we are to think multiplicities beyond the world of man. By understanding life as virtual, it is possible to conceive of a pedagogy without bodies. Pedagogy without bodies as a concept (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) would be an orientation for educational thought where we would no longer begin with the image of a living, active, corporeal body, but would, following Claire Colebrook (2011), consider intensive forces that unfold life differently from that of the productive human. Pedagogy without bodies as a concept alludes to the incorporeal and material composition of sense which, I believe, is an important orientation for thinking philosophy of education, and curriculum in terms of dispersed, intensive and inhuman forces and processes intricate to any singular pedagogical event and its readability.