Some words about understanding, teaching, learning, words and embodiment

Understanding 'understanding' is always a problem. Any understanding of any understanding is always uncertain. Poststructuralism was clear on this much. Words beget words beget words, and simple unambiguous clear certainty (or final signified) is permanently deferred. Derrida's reading of Plato/Socrates in Dissemination (Derrida 1981) is an exemplary reading of the problem: If I want to teach you something, and to establish that you understand 'properly' (the way I want you to understand), I stand a far better chance of success if I can be locked in a room with you for as long as necessary and test you, examine you, cross examine you, until I feel confident that I can rely on the predictability of your responses. Rather this than merely being able to send you an email or letter or postcard about it. For Plato/Socrates, if a teacher can be locked in a room face to face with a student for long enough, then the teacher may come to feel sooner that they know that the student knows what teacher wants them to know, in the way they want them to know it. 

From this, Derrida lays out his arguments about the western metaphysical preference for face-to-face speech, rather than distant writing, and also sets out many of the key terms for the critique of pedagogical institutions that he would develop in subsequent years (Derrida 1983, 1992, 2002). Indeed it is doubtless my familiarity with Derrida's later critique of institutions-as-political that I have switched the Platonic/Socratic pedagogical scene from what Deleuze and Guattari called its initial 'arboreal' location (wherein teacher and student were imagined to be sitting in the shade of a tree, outside of the city, in the apparent freedom of the countryside). In my rendering of the situation, teacher and student are locked in a room. This is to emphasise the institutional character of every pedagogical relation: whether it takes place in a room or outside in the wilderness, both are still 'institutional' situations, argues Derrida, because an institution both is and isn't physical. On the one hand, an institution may have a physical instantiation (a building, and office, a room). But, on the other hand, an institution is first and foremost a structure of thinking (Derrida 1992).

However, even after the harrowing and hardening ordeal of face-to-face teaching and learning, the question of what has been taught and learnt can still remain in doubt – and even unverifiable. For instance, I once had a student who in response to my questions about deconstruction would repeat, almost word for word, whole sections of John Protevi's book Political Physics: Derrida, Deleuze and the Body Politic (Protevi 2001). And it was quite unsettling. For, in one sense, he clearly 'knew'… something. But did he really know (as in understand), or was he more like a parrot, or automaton, or replicant? To play around with the key terms of one of Jacques Rancière's famous discussions (Rancière 1999): this student of mine was clearly able to recognise logos, to select, and to 'understand' it, in one sense; but in another sense it remained unclear whether he was able to 'use' or 'command' logos, and hence to really or fully 'understand'.

In other words, although we might initially idealise perfect repetition as the absolute demonstration of high fidelity understanding, the almost perfect repetition actually comes to be self-subverting, introducing doubt: does ventriloquism prove comprehension? No. What seems required is an ability to use, to modify, to differ – but to do so properly; not just to learn the words, but to learn a rule or principle. Moreover, to use an observation of Wittgenstein's that Slavoj Žižek is perennially fond of repeating: in learning a rule, as well as learning an explicit rule, one also needs to learn another silent, unspoken rule, namely the rule about how to understand and how to follow the rule 'properly'.

Because 'propriety' is always and everywhere entirely contextual, this second, unspoken, unconscious rule might be thought of as a process of 'enculturation' or (cultural) competence. So one might say that this is the real lesson of any lesson: the object of any lesson is not the input of some positive content (say, the memorization of a book); but the modification or even transformation of the capacities of the subject, who learns not just the explicit but also the implicit rules. By 'implicit', I mean the 'proper' (contextual) 'implicit'; not some crazy, random, undisciplined 'implicit'. There is always a proper (legitimate) and an improper (illegitimate) 'implicit'. The lesson of Foucault is, after all, that the production of stable knowledge necessarily arises simultaneously with and through the reciprocal production of stable subjects (Mowitt 1992). Those who know are those who know how to read, think, interpret, and act according to proper contextual convention. Lyotard calls these 'savoirs' – sorts of 'know-how' that only come about through what we might call enculturation, subjectivization, interpellation, institutionalisation, or whatever.

But the problem is that there is always instability, excess, drift, conflicts, ambivalences, ambiguities, indiscipline, resistance, play, grey areas and, in short words begetting words begetting words in a sea of uncertainties. This is the lesson about lessons of poststructuralism. Perhaps.

All of which surely fanned the flames of the historical backlash against poststructuralism. On the one hand, poststructuralism was too wordy. Derrida and deconstruction are obsessed with words – even as they seem to denounce logocentricity. Words upon words upon words about and against 'logocentricity' were always likely to come seem both excessive and not enough. And anyway, surely there is more than language? Surely there is an outside of language? Just because deconstructive poststructuralism seemed constitutively incapable of 'seeing', thinking or even imagining non-linguistic traces surely doesn't mean that there is nothing outside the text. It just means that the interpretive paradigm of deconstruction can't handle such alterity. This need not be a criticism, of course. Deconstruction was organised by the aim of targeting problematic thinking, argumentation, reasoning, the judgements made on the basis of skewed and skewing metaphysics, and the institutions founded thereon. To the extent that the human world is made up of and by and exists as writing (in the form of laws, policies, jurisdictions, arguments, etc.), then logocentric deconstruction will always have great critical potential.

Nevertheless, part of the backlash against poststructuralism involved a theoretical problematization of its investment in language. For there must be an outside to language, an 'other' of language. It is insanity to suggest otherwise. Just look around you. Don't think. Feel. Of course: one thing that is outside language is that which doesn't think, that which feels; that for which metaphors and vocabularies of thinking and speaking and signifying must be regarded as misconceptions or mistranslations; that which might be called the body. Isn't this different to and not tied down by words? How do bodies learn? Surely bodily learning is different to learning an argument or facts and figures?

Unfortunately, the idea of an opposition or clean distinction between bodies and words had already been long deconstructed in poststructuralism – and words had won. Words were already the bedrock of the world in Freudian psychoanalysis, but Lacan had amplified this to argue that from the outset and through all of the formative stages our bodies are entirely constituted by and within and captured by the symbolic order. Thus, if you ask a small child whereabouts in their torso the pain is, they will always say 'in my tummy'. Of course, we know that really there is more to the torso than the tummy. So if we ask an older child or an adult where the pain is, they can say 'at the bottom of my neck' or 'in my groin'. However, ask anyone of us to describe the pain – 'what sort of pain is it?' – and we all know that the words are inadequate to the true reality of the physical situation. I don't believe I have ever adequately conveyed to anyone else what the intermittent attack of pain in my once-broken left ankle feels like. Even myself. There are no words to grasp or convey the reality of it. And so, because we all have our own private versions of such evidence, in this sense, we know that there are realms and fields of knowledge outside and irreducible to language.

Moreover, we know that bodily learning takes place, often without our conscious knowledge, and often without our being taught. Marcel Mauss marvelled at the sheer range of culturally specific and contextually determined 'techniques of the body' (Mauss 1992), and Pierre Bourdieu theorised what he called 'habitus', namely the complex interactions of bodies with spaces and places and social and material relations. Lacan called all of the things we just know but don't know how we know and couldn't articulate or possibly even teach 'knowledge in the real'. And of course Foucault devoted enormous theoretical, analytical and archival effort to grasping the technologies and logics involved in the production of embodied, disciplined subjects (Foucault 1977, 1978).

Foucault's work is interesting because, if one proposes the most simplistic and hyperbolical reading of it – in which we regard everyone as being essentially disciplined bodyminds simply because we have all gone through disciplinary institutions like schools and colleges – then one question can come to seem inevitable or even necessary: how do we stop being disciplined 'docile' bodies? Can we unlearn an embodied knowledge if and when we decide critically and intellectually that we should? 

Across contemporary cultural theory, questions about the learning and unlearning of embodied knowledges have normally centred on 'cultural political' matters – such as how to unlearn or undo aspects of embodied gender (Butler 1999) or race or ethnicity (Chow 2002). These are significant ethical and political problematics, of course, and they are related to the body. But they do not stay 'bodily' for very long. Rather, they immediately open out onto and press home the relentless presence and influence of micro and macro dimensions of social forces and relations on identities. Feminist theorists, for instance, speak of the enduring society-wide forces of patriarchy, heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and so on. Similarly, Rey Chow theorises the many sources and forces of what she calls 'coercive mimeticism', forces that work constantly to 'police' ethnic identities into conventional places, roles, hierarchies and behaviours. Indeed, cultural studies in general has always been characterised by these sorts of studies.

However, what such examples show us is that unlearning gender or ethnicity or class is never going to boil down to an individual, or even a primarily bodily matter. The forming, teaching, positioning, arranging and coordinating of bodies is an irreducibly social matter, and is accordingly very far removed from the agency or control of any one individual. I'll say more about this next time.