The Visceral Imagination: A Fertile Space for Nontextual Knowing

• In Event: Sensual Curriculum: Making Educational Sense Through the Senses

Abstract

In this panel discussion of sense/nonsense understandings of curriculum through multiple art forms, we will consider “visceral” variables, particularly in the live/d space when our art is speaking with the interstices in and intertwining of our curriculum theorizing. Considering these visceral variables disrupts the comprehensible, creating space to re-imagine culturally bound knowledge processes.

While we will foreground our sensual understanding, we recognize the irony of pursuing of more definitive understanding of nonsense. Rather than conflict, we will address the irony as a potential fidelity (den Heyer, 2010), and in a line of thinking something akin to Badiou’s notion of an “encounter” we will discuss with our audience how one might thus arrive in this or that moment with sense, in sensuality, and partly incensed to deeply, politically, and personally investigate a fertile space for understanding non-textual understanding. In Lacanian terms, the non-textual endeavour is one of getting beyond the imaginary.

Gallop (1985) rightly notes the implied dualistic pitfalls that arise in expending effort to get beyond the imaginary to the symbolic. The non text/text dyad if treated conceptually as the traditional axis of X and Y leaves one in a curricular quagmire. Gallop (1985) writes: “[T]o accede to the symbolic and vigilantly to resist the imaginary is mired in the imaginary” (p. 60). We propose that getting beyond the imaginary (Gallop, 1985, p. 59), when it comes to pushing the conceptual boundaries of how curriculum can be felt deeply with the senses, is not so much a pragmatic, or even a critical imperative, but a willed energy to live differently, to live in ways that exceed present limitations.

How often, however, is this energy expended within limitations that appear so fundamental to the educational process? So much so, for example, that even the good intention exposing those limitations (early work in critical pedagogy comes to mind), further subjects our being-deeply-human in our senses to a straight jacket of controlled experience. De Lissovoy (2010) explains that the current educational emphasis on critique oversimplifies “the central route to liberation” (p. 208) and makes human beings subject to further power by defining them within “particular forms of reason” (p. 208). De Lissovoy (2010) argues that “to create a human situation—and discover a moment of human being—is to challenge the essence of power” (p. 208). Feeling the import of Badiou, Gallop, and De Lissovoy, we will discuss with our audience the ways and means by which sensuality and an awareness of it might be the mode of our sense-making.

Foregrounding sensuality is inquiring into rhythms in the landscapes; it is the returning to places and people and moments because of how we remember and are drawn to smell; it is the way we learn to know through touch, all of our senses inherently together, our exploration of what it means to know through and with the body as our sensory relations and interactions come to form a rich and sensuous fabric of experience.

Authors

• Sean P. Wiebe, University of Prince Edward Island

• Celeste N. Snowber, Simon Fraser University