One learns early on in life to identify and differentiate an āusā and a āthem.ā Indeed, there is evidence that this distinction occurs even before the onset of beliefs or mental propositions take shape (Gallagher, 2006). One might argue that the conceptualization of difference is shaped by a preconscious grasp of difference that lives within, on, and through embodied entanglements. And this is true for the most basic forms of difference as it is for more complex, sociocultural differences that are rooted in material inequalities and symbolic meanings requiring maintenance and adaptation. Many have written about the ideological and discursive constructions of sociocultural differences in educational institutions and cultural worlds beyond the classroom (see, e.g., Ahmed, 2012; Lareau, 2003; Laura, 2014; Michael, 2015; Pascoe, 2007; Stevenson, 2014; SuĆ”rez-Orozco, SuĆ”rez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). Yet there has been little discussion in the field of educational theory about how subjects experience difference phenomenologically, that is, the experience of being made different or āOtherā that is embedded within our preconscious habits, orientations, perceptions, and intuitive understandings of the world. We are interested in difference as it is lived and felt through preconceptual comportment with Others. How, we ask, do we make sense of our own difference and the differences of Others at the most palpable moments when difference carried with us through ways of seeing, hearing, moving, and gesturing suddenly appear and take us by surprise?
In the popular media, such moments are often described as flashpoints . Here are several examples:When Bree Newsome visited Ferguson to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown Jr. ās being killed, she was not going back to the source of her activism. It was actually the Trayvon Martin killing in 2012 that brought her into what is now a national movement. But in Ferguson she was visiting the place, she said, where people really began to fight back against a newly defined common enemy. āTrayvon Martin , that was when I got pulled in, that was when a lot of people got pulled in ā¦ But Ferguson was a flashpoint moment.ā 1Donald Trump took heat when he spoke about āanchor babiesā and seemed to relish the fallout from his latest provocation in the race for the GOP presidential nomination . Then Jeb Bush echoed the phrase and found himself on defenseāand increasingly exasperated ā¦ Whatever the issueās lasting value, āanchor babiesā is the latest buzz phrase, hashtag and flashpoint in the volatile debate over who should stay in the U.S. and who should leave. 2While in basic training, one is continually addressed as faggot or girl. These labels are usually screamed into the face from a distance of two or three inches by the drill instructor, a most awesome, intimidating figure ā¦ This process is used as a means to threaten the individualās sexual identity ā¦ Recruits were brutalized, frustrated, and cajoled to a flash point of high tension. Recruits were often stunned by the depths of violence erupting from within ā¦ After a day of continuous harassment, I bit a man on the face during hand-to-hand combat, gashing his eyebrow and cheek. I had lost control. For the first time the drill instructor didnāt physically strike me or call me a faggot. He put his arm around me and said that I was a lot more man than he had previously imagined. 3
Scientists describe flashpoints as physicochemical happenings. They are measurable moments when ambient conditions located just beyond a fluidās surface surround and bring forth volatility. 4 The flashpoint signals where, when, and how this previously stable entity meets, mixes, and erupts with some other entity. āAt the flash point the application of a naked flame gives a momentary flash rather than sustained combustion, for which the temperature is too lowā (Daintith, 2008, p. 227). Similarly, one could say that a flash is, in a more general sense, a heightened occasion, arising from the activation of power that disturbs a seemingly fixed relationship. We see important connections between the physicochemical description of flashpoints offered by scientists and the physicosocial moments of disruption articulated in the media. Raised to an intensity that is both real and felt in the body, a flash signals kinesis, change, violation, or creation. Often it is only when we take note of uneasy gnawing and nagging in the bodyās memory stores that we are able to locate, re-experience, and articulate the fiery sensations that mark the time and place of the flashpoint. Such sensations are critical to understanding how difference is accomplished and its implications for education.
In this book, the notion of pedagogical flashpoints is an invitation to examine specific instances in which bodies educate and are educated in sociocultural difference in various formal and informal contexts, including schools, universities, museums, communities, and so forth. 5 By sociocultural formations we are referring to the making of the self as an occasion through which socially and culturally situated bodies are construed and experienced within and against histories of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, speciesism, and class inequality. Thus, sociocultural differences are not neutral. They emerge from asymmetrical power relations (re)produced and maintained by historical, structural, and symbolic forces. These differences are durable indexical locations and intersections that demarcate groups of people and the hierarchical relations between them. It is inaccurate to reduce or atomize sociocultural differences as merely individual characteristics, feelings, or experiences. Oneās participation in the world, and thus oneās knowledge of the world, is always influenced by dynamic, overlapping, and adaptive systems of power that inhabit and inform the body and bodily senses in preconscious ways (Alcoff, 2006).
Phenomenologically speaking, flashpoints are lived phenomena. To experience a flash is to experience a moment of interruption or suspension in normal behavior, perception, and everyday experiential flow. The flash erupts, temporarily sending an affective surge throughout oneās extended sensorium. Such affective surplus might be experienced in terms of uncanny weirdness, shock, cold sweat, a lump in the throat, existential disorientation, perceptual blurriness, and so on. These abrupt and intrusive moments are, as the term indicates, states of emergence where our plans suddenly donāt work, we cannot find our way, or preconscious intuitions are suddenly confirmed. A flashpoint is like a flare in the night sky. It indicates a change in a material, embodied state, and calls for some kind of special attention and focus. These flashpoints thus disorient us from going about our business and reorient us toward that which is suddenly urgent and pressing (even if we donāt fully understand or appreciate what that thing is or its immediate relevance). And like a flare, the flashpoint suspends the flow of time, taking us out of time (or slowing time down), so that the world feels oddly frozen. The flare captures us, holds us hostage, leaving an imprint not unlike an afterimage burned onto the back of the retina. The flashpoint is therefore assaulting, and when it washes over us, it abruptly halts the usual passage of time, rendering inoperative our plans.
For us, the surge of the flashpoint is not merely disabling. Rather it indicates a breakdown in everyday coping in ways that might reveal the otherwise taken-for-granted sociocultural background of lived experience. As Heidegger argued (2008), breakdowns in our most basic forms of everyday attunement are educational opportunities, un-concealing certain facets of experience that are otherwise invisible or peripheral. Breakdowns are also breakthroughs that flare up in our perceptual field, shifting the withdrawn background into the foreground of conscious experience. Through phenomenologically attuned descriptions of flashpoints, we can craft language capable of articulating forms of sociocultural understanding that are tacit, prelinguistic, prethematic, and prereflective. These are ways of knowing that we intuitively understand yet rarely, if ever, fully articulate to ourselves (let alone others). Such understanding is so familiar, so embedded in our basic forms of everyday comportment that it is invisible until it breaks through the veil of transparency to become an unavoidable facet of experience.
The aim of this collection is to focus on describing concrete circumstances, events, singular moments, or sensations so that phenomena of sociocultural difference (s) suddenly well up as uncanny yet salient, palpable, and constituting dimensions of educational experience. Our gambit is that such descriptions offer unique entry points for reconsidering how sociocultural differences are written on and through the body. Each flashpoint attempts to get at what sociocultural difference feels like in order to reveal a perceptual structure and/or the essential meaning underlying the phenomenon. While not denying the relevancy of structural critique of institutions or the narrative richness of ethnographic studies, here we want to focus on the embodied structures of sociocultural differences as they are lived in and through limbs, perceptual structures, sensations, orientations, and affective surges as they happen in particular moments that interrupt experiential flow.
Flashpoints as Fleshpoints
Because flashpoints are embodied surges that disorient us and reorient us toward that which would otherwise be unthematized in our everyday experience, they are always already fleshpoints. Bodies are central to the descriptions of flashpoint, but bodies are only one locus/node of the more diffuse webbing often referred to in phenomenological literature as the flesh. As our three examples above indicateāFerguson, the āanchor babyā phenomenon, and the aggressive sexual bullying in basic trainingāflashpoints involve power over and through bodies but also exist in the charged atmosphere between bodies. For Merleau-Ponty (1968) āthe flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substanceā (p. 139). In this sense, flesh subtends the particularities of a given body and any image/thought we might have of the body in our mind. The flesh is neither inside us as an idea nor outside us as an object, thus pointing to the ways in which bodies and worlds are interdependent and co-constituting. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, the flesh is the basis for āintercorporeityā (p. 141) which āmakes the organs of my body communicate and founds transitivity from one body to anotherā (p. 143). The intercorporeity of the flesh does not fuse the self and the other so much as set the stage for how they relate to one another, communicate with one another through gesture, speech, and desire. The most basic experience of this intercorporeity is the phenomenon of touch. When one touches something, one is simultaneously touched by it. Thus, the active subject (who is doing the touching) becomes the passive object (who receives the touch). This fundamental sensation of reversibility (wherein subject becomes object and activity becomes passivity) means that the flesh is always already relational, folding the outside into the inside. In this sense, the flesh is not āmineā or āyoursā the way bodies are. Rather it speaks to a more fundamental level of intertwining wherein self and Other pass through one another not unlike passing through a permeable membrane. As such, there is not a gap or void between two bodies so much as an invisible connective tissue of flesh that compels and repels bodies toward one another. It is precisely because of the fleshiness of bodies that Otherness is never truly outside or over there. Because Otherness is always already woven into the flesh, individual bodies are never fully immunized against difference, bodies are never self-same or self-identical. While this might undermine the notion of an autonomous self, Merleau-Ponty points out that without the chiasmic structure of flesh, bodies would not be able to differentiate or communicate with one another. Thus for Merleau-Ponty , the Otherness within is a purely enabling feature of āourā phenomenological experiences of the world.
Although Merleau-Ponty ās notion of the flesh as the most basic form of intercorporeity between the embodied self and world is provocative and phenomenologically apt, he can be faulted for situating his analysis of the flesh as below/subtending sociocultural differences. Whereas Merleau-Ponty emphasizes how the flesh provides the connective tissue necessary to achieve a kind of experiential flow or environmental equilibrium, we would like to suggest that this is not the exper...