Schooling the Postmodern Body: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Enfleshment

While educators the United States are witnessing a reactionary and ultimately fatuous rearguard defense of the alleged transcendent virtues of Western civilization, a neo-corporatist assault on the New Deal welfare state, and what Jim Merod calls the guiltless counterrevolutionary violence of state power (1987, p. 191), they are also experiencing a new vitality the realm of educational theory. The cultural/moral hegemony of mainstream approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and epistemology is being fissured and some cases torn asunder by new deconstructive postmodern strategies. Largely imported from literary theory and influenced by continental poststructuralism, postmodern strategies (e.g., Derridean grammatology and Foucauldian discourse analysis) have systematically problematized, if not dismantled, the epistemological certainty and transcendent claims to truth that characterize dominant strands of modernist discourse.1 Suffice it to say that there exists a crisis of representation and a steady and sometimes vehement erosion of confidence prevailing conceptualizations of what constitutes knowledge and truth and their pedagogical means of attainment. Keeping mind the conceptual inflation of the term postmodernity and its unwieldy semantic overloadwhich has come to designate a vast array of artistic, architectural, and theoretical practices I want to make clear that I am using it a severely delimited sense. While postmodernism crisscrosses numerous regions of inquiry, I am using it to refer to the material and semiotic organization of society, primarily with respect to what Stanley Aronowitz calls culture and the homogenization of culture (1981, 1983). That is, I am referring to the current tendency toward desubstantialized meaning or literalness of the visual which students seem unable to penetrate beyond the media-bloated surface of things, thereby dismissing concepts such as society? capitalism, and history which are not immediately present to the senses (Aronowitz, 1983). According to Aronowitz, in the last half of the twen-