Bodies are mediated. They are mediated by words, in technology, through the way in which they are organised and used by the social and economic system in which we live, i.e. power. Bodies are also educated in a system that belies a philosophical perspective and history that certainly goes back to the Greek forefathers of philosophy. The critique of this system of belief, ideas and organisation of that ‘which constitutes knowledge’ about the body; involves the understanding of core systems of idealism in philosophy, and the construction of strategies about these systems that suggest escape routes from them, viz., post-structuralism. These escape routes are not attempts to belittle their importance, or efforts to rewrite history at the bequest of a different, solely feminist or post-structural perspective; they are part of an emergent sea-change, that necessitates the comprehension and construction of these escape routes in order to bring about the realisation of the conditions for post-modern society. This is a society where the electronic order is dominant; mediation of the body through the digital universe opens up digital knowledges about the body, it sets u digital levels of image about the body (where the body is in the process of becoming multiple), and it produces variant complex connections that the body is now cybernetically attuned to, whether prosthetic, commercial or educational. The task of this chapter on the electronically mediated body, is to set up an approach that avoids the mistakes of the male power elite, and uses the critique of their systems to make a mode of expression apparent about the body that keeps it as a pivotal theoretical educational construction. The central question as to why one would want to make such a move, is in part answered by the way in which the body has become objectified in terms of mainstream curriculum concerns. Scientific and philosophical rendition of the body, has tended to make its reality other than knowledge about it; the real body has been, in a sense, hidden. The task of this chapter is to make the reality of the body pertinent for inclusion in the digital curriculum.

Luce Irigaray set about to critique the hegemony of the patriarchy with the Speculum of the Other Woman, and, This Sex Which is not One. Michel Foucault investigated the hegemony of scientific thought with The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. The combination of these four works, and the resultant critique of hegemonic power, produces a hybrid methodology for the investigation of education, in that Irigaray is continually escaping the iron rule of the modes of reproduction of dominant male systems, and Foucault is continually examining the ways in which knowledge is represented and used by the scientists of technical and administrative society. Education, and in particular what constitutes the learning process, is caught between the two poles of the reproduction of patriarchy (authoritarianism) and the manipulation of knowledge in civil society (state and private education). Therefore, to rearrange the writing of Irigaray and Foucault in a combinational manner, is an approach to the rendering of bodies in a field where they have been written upon, organised and educated; and this approach ‘unhinges’ the body from the clutches of the patriarchy and the irreducible stare of science as defined by the inquiry of the Enlightenment, here we are concentrating on the social sciences. This is not to centre a different approach from the perspective of the human subject, but to look at the body awash with forces which distort, rearrange, transform and assimilate it; as can be clearly understood on the electronic plane. It is impossible to return to a primitive, innocent, sexually specific, role driven body. We are left with the rendering of it in an electronic circus, and the various powers which have been at play in its reorganisation, located and tracked:

This is an example of how Foucault has tracked the workings of power, from a local+ situation, to the formation of a whole social apparatus. The contemporary education system has the same elements at play within its structures. Talk of power, and the control of bodies, immediately brings out the elements of power formation as barriers against their analysis. This is what has been termed as ‘phallocentric logic’. Jane Gallop has indicated the process of this mechanism, in that the representation of female anatomy suffers from the dichotomy between ‘The Same’, or the ‘castrated hole’. One is obliged by the limiting parameter of ‘either-or’, in that one may choose either the male rendition of the female body, in recognition of his prescient position, or the rendition which destroys the power of the female, by internalising the efficacy of the rendering, and placing her as the ‘blind-spot’ in his theorising. Power tracking over/in/through the mediated electronic body, also gives one the immediate choice between a theoretical machine to regulate the various approaches to the mediated body, or a shadow-land where the body has been subjugated, dominated and controlled. Neither choices reveal or release the ‘substance’ of the body, or the movement on its own plane, the middle ground of which Elizabeth Grosz speaks. This is the highly charged, ‘political’ forum, which the body has come to occupy in feminist thought. It is the zone of contestation where theorists argue in order to understand the functioning of male dominated power in discourse. It is not that the body can be positioned in words in order to write the story of its renewal, or as a figure freed from the power constraints that have belittled it beneath the submergence of the mind; but that it may be posited as a mediated electronic matrix, or lattice, for the interconnection between theory and form, content and drama. This is the encaenia of feminist critique and post-structural theory, and it is also the point at which we may approach the viability for an underwriting of education through Irigaray and Foucault and the ‘real’ material body.

Irigaray uses the metaphor of the cave at the start of Book VII of the Republic by emphasising that "the bodies are chained up, they are at the back of the cave. They do not receive light. Inside this dark, twisted space, the men (not sexed), can only see the repetition of the same, the over-determination of the image; the perception of this ‘nature’, clearly not brought into sharp focus by the blinding light of the sun." Plato’s community is here mutated and disabled, they are the fathers of the theory of opposites and of form; it could be said that they are the slavish prisoners of the imperative to remember, and they represent the metaphorical beginnings of the circuits of truth. They infect language from this inauspicious start by illusion and with metaphors; they present copies of the same, the differences between their bodies are covered or ‘ordered’ by the unalterable formulation of ‘the permanent’, ‘the one’, and ‘Being’. Irigaray points out that Plato requires the dialectic to establish identity, to rid the mind of the formless monotony of these bodies that are chained up and mutated , he needs to make room for the superiority of the form of the mind, where the myths drawn out from the drama of the cave may reign in the establishment of ‘the good’, syntax, and the understanding of meaning. The Platonic metaphorical bodies are based on their similarities, which immediately takes us away from real bodies, and into the establishment of the realm of the mind through identity, where the real body is neglected. To educate the real body it is necessary to return to a state before this ‘circuit of becoming’ has been established. Irigaray is pointing out that the cave is more than just a metaphor, but represents actual repression of bodily knowledge, and before the dialectic impinges upon the body, we have ‘the arcane body’ or a body of differences.

Irigaray therefore posits the formation of the dialectic on ‘sameness’. This sameness takes into its fold the truth of all other voices and makes of them one. Sounds are caught in the complicated play of screens, echoes and metaphors; this process is the subjection of rhythm, number and harmony to a never ending mimetic of the idea, it is the attempt to ground all the screams from the cave in an original mechanism that replicates and reproduces them. The authority that we gain regarding the emergence from the cave, out of the shadows and into the light; is an accumulation of sound, which manipulates the diverse sounds as non-material fact, and produces what we call the dialectic voice. Foucault recognised the working of the same in the enunciative function. Here, the statement is constituted by a field of stabilisation, which makes possible the repetition of a formula, with all its differences of enunciation levelled by using identity. The field also defines a threshold, beyond which a new statement must be recognised. In so doing, the statement, whether it is a rhetorical configuration or informationally loaded scientific derivation, preserves its function in its field of use, and duplicates itself through constancy. The whole of the enunciation defines the placement of the statement, and its materiality defines the possibilities for reinscription and transcription. Foucault’s interest in his theorisation of the statement, lies in its principle of variation. This sets up the statement as diverse and modifiable, apart from its sentence structure, not as just an event or ideal form, but as a weighty repetition, evoked under strict conditions and given a status by the men who "produce, manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose, and possibly destroy them".

Irigaray challenges this process of reproduction, and she questions the authority of reproduction which permeates throughout the system of knowledge through the repression of mediated bodies. For the men in the polis as much as the men in the cave, ‘the feminine’ is frozen by representation dominated by truth, light, identity and resemblance. Therefore, the working of the same is not only through the construction of a field of stabilisation, but it also takes on the aspect of an Ideal, i.e. something that is frozen. Derrida transcribed Plato’s Ideal forms into the production of mimesis, which he saw as a type of physis, and the reproduction of the same responded to the genius and origination of language. Irigaray’s method is to locate the feminine elements which were taken out by Plato’s machinery, and then to put them back into the system as mediated body parts, exposing their functioning and the relations which may be formed around them. Foucault does not differentiate between the masculine and the feminine at this level, and therefore does not approach the complex of the same from a position of dislocation as Irigaray does. He identifies ‘missing’ bodies, but by keeping them as dislocated, he integrates them into the apparatus for analysis of the system in order to produce material difference.

Judith Butler went further in the analysis of Irigaray, in that she locates the representation of woman in the economy of the philosopher as the site of her erasure. The argument of Irigaray plays in a ‘double bind’. Irigaray wanted to argue that the feminine is precisely what is excluded from the binary mechanism of materiality and rational mastery, yet when matter is described within philosophical discourse, it is at once a substitution for and displacement of the feminine. The figures that philosophy provides for the feminine cannot be used directly, but the feminine acts as the citing of the unspeakable condition of the figuration; the exclusion is, as Butler terms it, "that propriety as its enabling condition". The feminine survives as the inscriptional space of phallogocentrism, being rendered unintelligible by its self-constituting claims, the "specular surface" receiving the marks of the masculine signifying act, reflecting them back, but making no contribution of its own. Irigaray works on the level of this play, and many of her more elusive formulations are as a direct result of this double bind, and the effective stalemate that it produces in discourse. Elizabeth Grosz indicated a way out, when she theorised the body as surface of inscription. The processes which have inscribed themselves on the body, produce an "inscriptive model of corporeal subjectivity". Grosz cites Nietzsche’s mnemotechniques, which were the effective inscription of memory on the body, and Foucault’s analysis of the normalisation of the body within regimes of punishment. Both give a reading of the body as a site through which social codes and practises have made themselves apparent, which, in contemporary education could be termed as the electronic body. In this chapter, the electronic body is ‘produced’ via the inscription of the processes through which the body is inscribed. Thus the feminine is not the only object of the analysis, but is one of many such processes through which the body is inscribed. The important point for this theorisation is that the knowledges which Irigaray derives are decisively not male knowledges, but extend a different methodology to investigate the emergence of male knowledges. To catch Irigaray in the double bind which she sets up, as Butler attempts to do; is to play the male game, and does not act as an effective method when setting up a different, feminine or electronic body position in education. As Grosz states, Irigaray shows that there are a plurality of possible techniques, procedures and methods within knowledges; the task is to enact these paths, and to make them effective in the realm of the body and power, with its complex latticework of electronic inscription, description and mutilation.

Perhaps the threshold of body knowledges is part of the post-modern turn in theoretical thought, where bodies are ‘free-flowing’ and mediated in electronic forms. Alice A. Jardine has examined this point in her analysis of American and French feminism. The theoretical conjunction of ethical concerns with process, is what Marguerite Duras has called the "last theoretical imbecile". Jardine looks forward to the time when the question of the woman and language will not be one of fashion, but will involve the profound rethinking of both the male and female speaking subjects, and their relationship to the "real, imaginary and symbolic, as well as of the status of metadiscourse itself". Irigaray perhaps takes us closest to this rethinking. Her theorisation of the feminine does not metaphorise it into a semeiosis, nor does it refuse the ‘woman ‘or the ‘feminine’ as a libidinal or cultural construct. In fact, she enacts the drama of inscription through the play of subjects and objects, and their philosophical journeys on the surface of the body are paralleled by her writing around the subject and the way in which it is subjugated to reproduction. This methodology is at its heart post-modern. Patti Lather, in her identification of post-feminism, states that we must not replace the modernist master narratives of Freud or Marx, with the new ones of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan et al, but we should refuse meta-narratives altogether in new movements of minor education. Irigaray’s method is in agreement with Lather in that her pedagogic influence restructures hierarchical power relations which might be positioned in the wake of the reproduction of the theory and its use by the forces in power. Her expression is intimately and closely tied to the discourse which it embraces. She does not teach us the metaphysical truth about Plato or Freud, but leads them into a dance, and the "performative movement of the body". Therefore, the meta-narratives are materialised and brought into the realm of the mediated body, where reproduction happens in a minor rather than meta sense. We still ‘learn’ about the repressive regimes that have given birth to so much power structuration in education and the oblivion of the body; but these regimes are spiralled into bodily knowledges, their processes are lateralised and dispersed.

Foucault states his aim in the analysis of the already-said, as being the rediscovery of the point of rupture (of the already-said), where the body knowledges break through. This rediscovery is his method of archaeological investigation, which works through the repetition of formulas and statements by uncovering the regularity of discursive practises. It does not establish a hierarchy of value, and makes no difference. Instead, to look at the regularity of discursive practise, is to designate a set of conditions for every verbal performance in which the enunciative function operates. Regularity for Foucault is therefore not a statistical mid-point in the range of possible statements, but specifies an effective field of appearance. The field of statements is an extremely active domain, not concerned with origination or creativity as such, but with enunciative homogeneity, which intersects with linguistic continuities and changes, and with logical identities and differences, not necessarily affecting one another or proceeding at the same pace (cf. chaos theory, or Baudrillard’s vorticity). Foucault mentions that it is possible to draw out trees of enuciative derivation, in which base statements extend rules of operation and formation, and by using this method it is possible to constitute the tree of derivation of a discourse (for example, that of Natural History). Yet these enuciative derivations do not constitute a principle of enunciative regularity or individual invention. Archaeological methodology does not totalise discourse into a period, but allows enuciative homogeneity to form its own structures, articulations, orders and hierarchies; thus excluding a "massive, amorphous synchrony".

This exclusion is part at least of what Irigaray wanted to include. The effective field of appearance is not only the specification of regularity, but it is also the site for the domination of Truth, and the dispersion into madness where the electronic body disintegrates. Irigaray questions the authority of pedagogy at this complex juncture, in that the certainties of the past are given up as the result of the choice between right and wrong. The teacher telling the men in the cave to listen to the voice of reason, is a break with the past, it is an instruction to forget the fantasies of childhood in order to remember what is truer. This requires a new discourse, it is necessary to speak again, and specifically to name, to distinguish, to index. Irigaray names this discourse as that of reason, it is solar and paternal. The father holds the monopoly on procreation, in that whatever has been defined within the domain of sameness as ‘more’: (i.e. the true, right, clear, reasonable, intelligible, paternal, masculine...), will progressively win over its ‘other’ or ‘different’, and its ‘less’: (i.e. the fantastic, harmful, obscure, mad, maternal, feminine...). This fissure will reign as the indivisible, ideal origin, and its primitive conjunction will be eliminated in the unity of concept or Foucault’s enuciative homogeneity. Irigaray’s method for rediscovering bodily knowledges at this point has taken a turn from that of Foucault. His method of archaeology, is very different from the incisive break between the father and the ‘other’ to be found in Irigaray, which designates the field of appearances as being a political arena in which schizophrenia is present. Yet it is perhaps too hasty to foist on Irigaray an ethic of sexual difference (betraying the unity of concept or essentialism), and on Foucault, the rule of the strange father.

Irigaray’s examination of Plato’s hegemony, by differentiating between the dominating forces in the cave, and the forces which are subjected to their rule, is playing with the establishment of dialectic; this works in relation to the text and the reader, reader to readers, or the reader to the text. She does not wish to replace it, or to offer an alternative dialectic to rival its efficacy, but she weaves in between the elements of rational dialectic, a possible escape route from it, an Ariadne’s thread of the electronic body. Foucault’s weaving is equally subtle, and is placed full-face in the processes of scientific discourse which wrap and trap the mediated body in power structures of knowledge and understanding. To relieve the body of the power structures which dominate and subjugate it, is not solely a picking apart of the mutilated sections of a disregarded and dismissed object, which is the body that was expelled from philosophy; but it is a lateral extension into the very processes of formation of reproduction of what constitutes body knowledges and therefore, how to get through the field of appearances. Feminist theorists have addressed this point in terms of body-politics. Trinh T. Minha-ha (1989), Toril Moi (1985), and bell hooks (1984), for example, have all looked at the political efficacy of feminism in a post-structural or post-modern theoretical climate. The feminine, or woman, or the female, is impossible to render as a stable category in a situation which must allow the diversity of sexual orientation, this is emphasised by Judith Butler in her Gender Trouble; and it must take into account the mixture of cultural heritage which goes to make up our society, (Spivak’s work is important in this field). The charge which is made against Irigaray is one of essentialism. It is said that the post-modern feminist subject cannot be regulated by one perspective, which is the ‘other’ of patriarchy, as Irigaray would seem to be doing. By determining the feminine in Plato’s cave, it could be argued that Irigaray is making an overly determined figure the subject of feminist analysis, and as such it is essentialist, limited, and liable to be unable to challenge the patriarch which it seeks to undermine due to an unwieldy stability. Yet the reading of Irigaray which I am presenting, is one of feminist post-structuralism, in which the body and power are analysed simultaneously, and are placed into a lateral field. Essentialism is avoided through the writing of Foucault, which casts doubt upon the representation of any one category in terms of stable discourse around which a power formation may gather and attempt to reproduce enuciative functions, and the domination of the same when even grammar is effected. Irigaray’s essentialism holds efficacy if we allow biological determination to diminish the philosophical work which we are doing in order to educate a dispersed, chaotic, global body; biological determination of the feminine category would mean a reversion to the dualism of the mind and body replaced by the biological male and the female.

In education, as elsewhere, power requires strategies, the body process. As Foucault argued in his later collection of writings and interviews, the formation of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analysed in terms of tactics and strategies of power. Tactics and strategies are deployed through implantations, distributions and demarcations, the control of territories and the organisation of domains; this goes to make up, as Foucault terms it, the unstable category of ‘geopolitics’. The tracking of the forms of implantation, delimitation and demarcation of objects, and the organisation of domains, realises the throwing into relief of process, their related effects of power, and the multi-dimensional movement of the spatialised electronic body. This is why Irigaray cannot be read as forming a stable category of the woman or feminine, but needs to be seen to be looking/feeling/dancing with the process of the feminine. Thus, power structures which manifest around the process of the feminine may be delegitimised, organised around themselves in such a way as to undermine their formation (the already-said), and the processes of bodily formation are hereafter brought to bear on the tactics which have been employed to increase their territorial advantage; that is to say, this is a type of negative feedback or immanent critique of the educational discourses and sociological movements which have subjugated the body.

Pasi Falk’s, The Consuming Body, concerns the garrulous sociological debate which has arisen around the body. In effect, the debate started with Merleau-Ponty’s seminal theorisation of the ‘modes of being’ of the body, and the phenomenology of the twentieth century; this discourse centres its perspective on the collapse of Cartesian dualism, and the various ways in which the body has effectively disappeared, yet remains an important postulate for the social scientist to use in the analysis of societal functions. Falk sediments his theoretical and historical apparatus in consumer society; the body in this society is situated at a cross-roads for desire, exacting the consumerist dreams of production and accumulation seen here in terms of the electronic body. The neo-Marxian critique of the use of the capitalist body at the centre of social interaction, specifies that there are theoretical regimes for the material passages of desire, and assumes that the body is continuous in the processes of social change, which is similar to the construction of abstract capital. Falk’s engagement with Bataille, and the moral and aesthetic complex which society has built around images of the body (taboo), makes it clear that to centralise the body in this manner is to posit its theoretical importance as dominated by social concerns: or, in particular, the emergence from the unsocial to the social, paralleled by the emergence of civil society. In this theorisation of pedagogy, the body acts as process for the power structures transmitting knowledge and understanding. This is not a centralised, social body or a body emerging from singularity to the multiple; but it is a body receiving and distributing educational parameters, in discourse with and through and perhaps despite its being educated with knowledge and rights; in fact it was multiple from the start, and rarely gains singularity, even in a transcendental sense. The attempt to centralise the body in a social (or talked about environment), is a remnant of modernist thinking; which uses the enuciative function of ‘body-image’ to repeat the way in which the body is represented and discussed in a moral or aesthetic sense. The representation of a highly unstable, distributed electronic body, is not a critique of the bourgeois body-image (and fashion), but it is a tracking of post-modern force and its processes.

Before the consumer society which Falk outlines for the construction of a social body, the configuration of the body was impinged upon by Christian formulations, and the figure of the soul. Plato’s thinking of the soul owes its heritage to the Orphic and Pythagorean sects, who organised the immortal soul’s residence in the body as exile; and it also owed some debt to the moral and aesthetic attitude of Plato’s compatriots, who ranked the soul’s control over the body as a virtue, and who also celebrated the grace engendered by the union of the two. Plato took two positions with regard to the body, that of reforming it, and that of subjecting it to asceticism. Yet both positions are tied to the soul taking charge of the body, and allowing reason to work through the right education. In the Christian East, and specifically with Plotinus, a man’s body is a diminished and absorbent reflection of his soul; it is also the starting point of the reconversion which leads the soul to turn away from its sensible image. In the Christian West, and above all for Augustine, the body is the irreducible symptom of man’s original fall, it is also the ultimate quest for his salvation. Western Catholicism aims at man’s resurrection inside a spotless and glorious body. All these processes of the body form a system of power around them and make the body susceptible to the degeneration of morality.

The Christian father’s pedagogic approach to the subjection and appreciation of the body is perhaps a more prohibitive system to tackle than the placement of the body as the ‘centre’ of post-modern social interaction. Yet both structures suffer from the preponderance of male thought. This is, that the figure of the body does not deal with its own reproduction. The production of bodies in both these systems is always subservient to effects (whether religious, pedagogic or social judgement), and this subverts the efficacy of the body. The discourse which arises is therefore channelled into the placement of hierarchies, and away from the chaotic field of immanent appearances; these processes of hierarchy and stasis lead us away from actual physical energy as they need to be described in detail and in so doing drain the body of its life through interaction with various powerless forces (morality, social interaction and pedagogy). Mary O’Brien has theorised a feminist outline of a discourse which does address the reproduction of its own body; however, she veers away from the minor narrative side of the argument, by naming her collection of essays, Reproducing the World, and taking the Marxist theory of production as her basis for reproduction. For O’Brien, childbirth immediately establishes a dialectic (with production), which from the perspective of post-structuralism, is already the enforcement of the processes of sameness. Irigaray’s theory is less inhibited by its predecessors, and less likely to be caught by the immolation of hierarchial discussion and valuation. The body parts which appear in her discourse overlay, displace, and reconfigure their male counterparts. Perhaps the cave always was a womb, the tunnel a vagina; and the prospective escape, that was metaphorised and turned into a visual game by the patriarchs, was in fact childbirth. In this sense, the force of writing is the direct understanding and expression of a post-structuralised electronic body.

Through the force of writing, we may embark on the escape from the cave. This is a passage to full daylight. Yet the man, or unnamed male gender, will not be extracted without feeling pained or irritated. The womb was already reproduced, reproducible and reproductive by means of projections, thus making the extraction difficult and complicated. The pain of childbirth is consequently a most primal fear and the basic trauma. Extraction is subject to systematic complication, away from what actually happens during childbirth, and into any number of similar examples and analogies. This system of metaphor held in place, and was meant to express, a sense of being, which was subject to the laws of symmetry and analogy in the form of a grotto. The farthest wall of the den served as a horizon-limit and as a backcloth for projection. Thus, the prisoners were held in place without being aware of their subjection. The cave was constructed ‘as if’ it were a womb, the child and the ‘obstetrician’, or anonymous assistant, were both oblivious to the twisted, reversed, and inverted character of this prison. The trap is so powerful that escape is only effected by jumping to an ‘other’ life. This other life necessitates an other birth, an other origin (an endless mediation of the body). All ideals and all simulations ride on proportions and arithmetic; they are mimetic and hysterically replayed as endless mediations of a lost body. The ejection from the cave is a magical effectiveness, it belies the philosophical fascination with tricks and relations, and the errors of the stage director, or the way in which the electronic body is manipulated. The prisoners will escape by force, but it is not from the cave. They escape from a third place, by using an ‘other’ way out, the force of the ejection eliminating difference, the male gender pushed along by other males and the subjection of the one by many bodies; in contrast, the mother is represented as thorny, she is pregnant with danger.

Irigaray uses the confusion of the metaphorical game of learning, to establish the dissolution of the electronic body under the dominance of the male form. The need to escape the womb, and the elaborate staging of this process, is a guide to the separation and distinction which is being directed at the form of the body by Plato. The electronic body is sublimated and confused by this analogical, dizzy, and tiring charade. It becomes impossible to orientate oneself in and through the levels of illusion that are being piled upon what is really going on. The fake exit is a ploy to cast childbirth into the subjection of the rule of the educator and to the dominance of Truth. The vacuum that results from the complex subjugation of bodily representations, opens up the ground for the Platonic system of education (idealism). Once the man is out of the womb, it is said that everything will become clearer, it is only a matter of time, or as Irigaray puts it; "out of the senses into the intellect, out of the passions into the harmonious love of truth, out of doxa into epistëmë". Judith Butler takes up the dissolution of the electronic body, and the intricate discursive game which is being played, in terms of the distinction between morphe and eidos.

Judith Butler argues that the figuration of masculine reason as "disembodied body" is one whose imaginary morphology is crafted through the exclusion of other possible bodies. According to this figuration, the feminine has no morphe, no morphology and no contour; the feminine is that which contributes to the contouring of things, but is itself undifferentiated and without boundary. Reason dematerialises the bodies that do not properly stand for reason or its replicas; thus, as Butler describes it, reason is a figure "in crisis", as it requires that women and slaves, children and animals are the body, and that they perform the bodily functions that it will not perform. This organisational power, whilst not recognising sexual difference, instigates the electronic body as its site for inscription. Matter, or nature as such, also remains outside binaries, as is everything excluded from reason, which fundamentally stands on this exclusion. Allowing other elements into the electronic body, as Donna J. Haraway has done in her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, where the technologically advanced cyborg is the site for the communicative game being played out by society, and is one process of bodily inscription, which has been excluded by male reason. Butler has characterised the exclusivity of elitist reason, which has tried to organise everything from above, and in so doing has made exclusive categories where reason has required the real action to happen; in this case away from the hybrid mix of flesh and machine. Certainly this characterisation brings about the understanding of the reasonable (male) body as absurd and divisive. In contrast to Butler, Irigaray, whilst emphasising that the feminine has been dissolved by the sameness of reason, sets up a discourse without the characterisation of its opposition as absurd (reductio ad absurdum). It is a discourse where the electronic body does not reform, fresh from its inscription by philosophical males, but spins its dislocated parts out into the processes of inscription as markers and guides to material reality (the electronically educated body). Butler plays the male rhetorical game, and is to an extent herself limited and snared by its Strange Education.

It could, be argued that post-structuralism is lacking in apositive perspective, in that it is a counter to the claims of progression, directed change and the transformation of educational practises; it is in this sense fatalistic, or determined by outside forces such as technological and economic change rather than rational analysis making insightful and critical suggestions. Foucault takes up this issue when discussing his method of archaeology, and the analysis of the rules of formation of a group of statements. Archaeology analyses the degree and form of permeability of a discourse; in so doing it provides the principle of its articulation over a chain of successive events; it also defines the operators by which the events are transcribed into statements. That is, archaeology does not engage at the level of the empirical ‘facts’, but works on the conditions of correlation, and the mobility of discourse; which is often pulsating to the rhythm of events, and yet, as Foucault puts it, the analysis is at the level of "evential engagement". This engagement, far from being indifferent to succession, maps temporal vectors of derivation, which differentiates between temporal directions in the rules of formation, some of which may be temporally neutral, others intersecting in necessary succession, others not. To constitute an archaeological history of discourse, it is necessary to remove two models that have previously imposed their image and dominated thought; firstly, the linear model of speech and partly in writing, in which events succeed one another, without any effect of coincidence and superposition; and, secondly, the model of the stream of consciousness whose presence always eludes itself in its openness to the future and its retention of the past. Foucault has, by identifying these two models, taken an important movement away from the structural analysis of thought; in that discourse is no longer a consciousness that embodies its project in the external form of language, nor is it a language plus a subject to speak it. The electronic body exists in time, but it is a chaotic, eventful time, a time of inherent complexity.

By opening up differences and making them work in education; the methodology which establishes discontinuities as process in the electronic body, throws light on the entanglement of discourse. It does not establish a system of differences or distinctions, and refuses to reduce them into the ideal limit, or the non-difference of a perfect continuity. The question of difference itself has developed into a post-structural discourse. Jacques Derrida’s différance or the trace, entails a notion of constitutive inscriptio. According to Derrida, before the word and the thing, before the distinction between space and its ‘contents’, texts and their ‘ideas’; is an originary and impossible trace or difference, which always infects the purity of the container with the impurity of its contents and vice versa (contagion). By contrast, Gilles Deleuze thinks difference primarily as force, as affirmation, as action and effectivity. The Derridean project is to question the self-sameness of logos, (deconstruction), and takes us into understanding the interconnectivity of logical and textual thought. Deleuze posits thought as positive desire, as the making of difference (pragmatics), it is, "the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or passion to think". This is in the fold of the method of archaeology, which separates lines, points, concepts, events from structures and constraints which bind them to the same, the one, and the self-identical and it is in contrast to deconstruction which necessitates textual continuity or the edifice of logos. For Deleuze, the regimes of subjectification, signification and representation continually bind thought to unity and to the One. The forces of knowledge and power do not accept difference, but suppress it into structures; they make it absorbable, assimilable and digestible without disturbance or perturbation. The active method of difference, which I am using throughout this analysis and is in contrast to Derrida, is to produce thought which acts on its own different strata, and avoids the pressing action of power by inventing consequences, events and encounters; this is the escape into the dispersed electronic body. This avoids the tendency of major educational narrative structures that would look to unify and surround discourse metaphysically, theoretically, and in terms of power.

Events occur in discourse and these events are layered. Foucault states that the substitution of one discursive formation for another, that which Kuhn would call a paradigm shift, happens rarely. In the discourse of power, for example, the educational discourse, or the word of the teacher, there is no absolute control over other discourses in the classroom, and there is not a simultaneous rupturing effect at other levels of discourse by the dominant discourse. To analyse such events, an investigation of transformation is required. Transformations that constitute change entail a system of conditions; they are not undifferentiated, but always contain a discontinuity specified by distinct transformations between two positivities. The object of the analysis is therefore the dispersion of discontinuity. Ruptures themselves are not the limit of this methodology, without being able to either determine it or to give it specificity; ruptures are transformations that bear on the general rules of one or several discursive formations. The electronic bodies in education are spoken about in archives that are constituted by the ‘mapping’ of these ruptures. Events in discourse mean that bodily knowledge finds its way up through the sedimentation of moral and social coding into everyday talk. The matrix of the electronic body acts as a type of ‘super-fissure’ through which this process is accelerated, and the regimes of the body become ever more apparent. The educational implications that belie such an understanding, mean that the discursive functions of the body shall be exponentially increased from the restrictive terminology of the scientific and the biological, to include a plethora of new and inventive bodily discourses (positive electronic body-slang). The arts, this would suggest, play a major role in this process, as a post-structural collection of minor literatures, dance and music; opens up the ways in which the creative interpretation of the electronic body in education may be expanded to allow for the break-up of the rational or binding (male and scientific) subject.

Elizabeth Grosz in her Volatile Bodies has written a body whihc may be used to more fully understand the electronic body that I wish to write into education. This body is fully open to the dispersion of discontinuity, and to the distinct transformations which happen at the level of discourse. It is a figure which is a discontinuous, nontotalizable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations; it is outside the binary oppositions imposed on the body such as [mind-body], [nature-culture], [subject-object] and [interior-exterior]. The electronic body is understood in terms of what it can do, the things which it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations and becomings it undergoes, the machinic connections it forms with other bodies, what it links with, how it proliferates and its capacities; it is a rare, affirmative understanding of the body, parallel in kind to the communicative cyborg of Haraway, yet inscribed by education in terms of power and gender. In this sense, things, material or psychical, can no longer be seen in terms of rigid boundaries, or clear demarcations; nor can they be seen as united, singular or holistic. This messy, moving picture of the body opens up the theoretical space for the body as the space into which heterogeneous elements rush around/through/in/on/out... of it. Grosz charts various strategies including those of Merleau-Ponty, Alphonso Lingis, Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan; whose theories of the body, can also seen to be working on the plane of an electronic body without a fixed order. This body does not establish hierarchies away from a fixed position. It is not sexually neutral, as Rosi Braidotti argues, nor is it the fantasmatic projection of woman’s sexuality turned psychotic, as Irigaray as stated. Questions of sexuality are turned multiple, into fields of becoming or the molar and molecular to utilise Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, where the sexual "norms" are not directly approached. As Grosz puts it, this is a manoeuvre that "desexualizes and obfuscates one of the major features of phallocentric thought; its subsumption of two sexual symmetries under a single norm." This chaotic sexuality is far from passive, it defies determination, yet actively follows powers of formation and the scattering of discourse; it afterwards finds a nomadic home in the electronic universe.

Foucault’s History of Sexuality looks at the body in terms of the censors which have impinged upon it. The various discourses and legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied, sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined, and all the possible deviations were carefully described. Pedagogic controls and medical treatments were organised around the slightest fantasies, as Foucault terms it, they, "brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination." As the powers of control advanced, and multiplied its relays and its effects, its target also expanded, subdivided and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace. In appearance, we are dealing with a barrier system; but in fact, all around the child, indefinite lines of penetration were disposed. Educational thinkers are caught in this matrix of lines and dispersive functioning when theorising the development of the child. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux call for a critical psychology, which points to the way in which "un-freedom" reproduces itself in the human psyche. Their hope is that this analysis will reveal how dominant ideologies have prevented the many faceted needs of the oppressed from being realised, or, how hegemonic ideologies function to exclude oppressed groups from creating needs that extend beyond the instrumental logic of the market. The call to arms around the needs of the oppressed has perhaps been galvanised by Paul Freire’s, pedagogy of the oppressed. In this work, theories of resistance are taken to a new height, the oppressed minorities are theorised with the aim of releasing their capacities into the mainstream educational debate. Yet isn’t this exactly what constitutes mainstream educational debate? And doesn’t this enforce the binary systems which one is attempting to avoid? The figure of the electronic body is crucial in the assessment of a perspective which will ‘make a difference’. By theorising this body in terms of oppression, emancipation, freedom, resistance, struggle; one sets up a locus of becoming which vibrates between the two poles of positive and negative enaction of the particular quality which is being theorised (this is what I am arguing against). By theorising the electronic body, as has been proposed, without fixed boundaries and qualities to describe it; we have a perspective which avoids the oscillation between the rights of the weak and the manipulation of the strong. The plane of this electronically educated body interacts with discourse through ruptures and bifurcation, strange attractors and cybernetic impulse. There is no one ‘true’ line out of or beyond it which makes things better for this mediated body (democratic utopianism). It exists in the flux of pixels and rides on waves of interference, it experiences a tempestuous and multi-dimensional journey in and out of education, avoiding the teleology of economic progression that we find in Freire from the poor to the rich.

One of the most useful challenges to the hegemony of the scientific discourses that weld power over the body, lies in Foucault’s, The Order of Things. Foucault has identified the nineteenth century as being the period in which man’s mode of being in modern thought appeared at the foundation of all positivities, and it is present in a way which cannot even be termed as privileged; it is (in) the element of empirical things. This fact, acts as an historical a priori, in the status of the human sciences, and in the body of knowledge which takes as its object man as empirical entity. These sciences appeared when man constituted (him)self as both that which must be conceived of, and that which must be known. Foucault describes this an "an event in the order of knowledge". The human sciences have progressively tangled themselves in the disappearance of mediaeval representation, and in the redistribution of epistëmë. This entanglement Foucault situates in three dimensions; the first being that of the mathematical and physical sciences, for which order is always a deductive and linear, it is a linking together of evident or verified propositions. The second is that of the sciences; such as those of language, life, and the production and distribution of wealth, that proceed by relating discontinuous but analogous elements in such a way that they are able to establish causal relations and structural constants between them. These dimensions define a common plane, which can appear as a field of application of mathematics to the empirical sciences, or as the domain of the mathematizable in linguistics, biology, and economics. The third dimension, is that of philosophical reflection. This forms a common plane with the dimensions of linguistics, biology and economics, and it is here that we find regional ontologies which attempt to define life, labour, and language in their own being. There is also, Foucault adds, the common plane of the philosophical and mathematical dimensions which combine to produce the formalisation of thought. The human sciences are excluded from this space, yet they are located at the interstices of these branches of knowledge, or in the volume defined by the three dimensions. In this way the human sciences are related to all forms of knowledge, yet are also deferred from them. They are precarious and dangerous to the other forms of knowledge, as any detachment from their pre-defined spaces will send them plunging into ‘ogisms’, e.g. ‘psychologism’, ‘sociologism’, ‘anthropologism’. The human sciences find themselves on such shaky grounds because of the complex epistemological configuration on which they sit, and their uncomfortable relationship with the other three dimensions.

The human sciences have a form of positivity, which is fixed in the vicinity, and on the immediate frontiers, along the whole length of the sciences which deal with life, labour, and language. They are not an analysis of what man is by nature; but rather an analysis that extends from what man is in his positivity, i.e. living, speaking, labouring, being, to what enables this same being to know, or seek to know what life is, in what the essence of labour and its law consist, and in what way he is able to speak. These sciences thus occupy the distance that separates, though not without connecting them, biology, economics, and philology from that which gives them possibility in the very being of man. They are not an extension, interiorized within the human species, and they do not envelop economics or linguistics. They lead the sciences of life, labour and language back to the analytic of finitude, which shows how man, in his being, can be concerned with the things he knows, and know the things that, in positivity, determine his mode of being. The human sciences are in a "ana-or-hypo(without the pejorative connotations)-epistemological" position of duplication, and that duplication can serve a fortiori for themselves. This, as Foucault expresses it, explains how "the invincible impression of haziness, inexactitude, and imprecision left by all the human sciences is merely a surface effect of what makes it possible to define them in their positivity".

Foucault’s analyses have raised many objections and debates in themselves. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak charts some of these oscillations in her chapter entitled power/knowledge. David Hoy points out a "pragmatic nominalism" in Foucault’s work, where power is intentionality without a subject. Edward W. Said and Sheldon Wohlin, criticise Foucault exactly on these grounds, as the subject is virtually eliminated from the discourse in Foucault. Derrida’s stinging attack cuts at the foundations for Foucault’s analysis by arguing that there are none, whilst Richard Rorty declares that his sense of power is vacuous and that he fails to separate the public from the private spheres. Spivak begins to develop a theory of paleonymy, in which the moving base of the force relations are followed and tracked like the remains of the dinosaurs, yet she becomes embroiled in their social and economic institutional realities. To move too quickly into the field of ethics, and not to complete the theorisation, is to contemplate the difference between theory and practice without looking at the complex meshwork which locks both into an archive of differential, relative, and positivistic relations. Foucault offers a methodology for exploring this archive, his nominal subject is irrelevant when looking at questions of power, discourse and the electronic body. The point at issue is the hierarchical relations which form around the electronic body or the positivistic subject of human science, and the tendencies within those relations for universalisation, generalisation, distinction, absorption and assimilation. Derrida’s deconstruction of the grounds for humanism and logocentrism, does not offer the methodology of Foucault in that he does not present a way in which to escape from the phenomena that are being analysed, these define the ways in which the mediated body is subjugated; Derrida’s discourse spirals in its own reproduction, it is one which presses to the universal, and is at times precariously conformist.

Philosophy of education has also taken up the Foucauldian debate in terms of the applicability or otherwise of his analyses to the educational forum. This produces a space for the discussion of educational power, yet it is a provisional and tentative start to the process of using Foucault’s insights, which is often caught in the process of interpretation, i.e. trying to understand just what Foucault meant rather than applying his ideas in a broad framework. The post-structural project to release difference involves the understanding of discourse and the processes of discursive evolution that makes clear the ‘ways out’ of closure and the entrapment of thought, or the snaring of the mediated body. Debates which focus on the controversy of the issues that Foucault raises without using them to further the study of a subject such as education, tend not to release difference, but make its effects liable to nullifying emotive contingency, or to the convoluted and comparative processes of interpretation. Kal Alston takes up the slogan of difference in her essay, ‘The Difference We Make: Philosophy of Education and the Tower of Babel’. She points out that ‘multiculturalism’ is the rearticulation of the strategies of cultural containment. The articulation of difference, whether cultural, sexual, economic, in the academic strata often makes little difference to other strata: i.e. it may become contained in its own sphere of over definition. Alston’s solution is to propose that multicultural education’s epistemic foundations should not rest on the ability of rationality to kill or cure disputes and difference, but rather should rest on an expansive notion of how various forms of knowledge can come into play and how they infect the power relations and ethical understandings of their proponents and participants; that is idea-contagion involving the infection and contamination of education. This is in part the educational intent behind this reading of Irigaray and Foucault; it is to open up the entry routes into the dispersal of the electronic body, and to unpick the foundations of structured thought (power) that have been woven around/in/over/through it.

The interactive game between discourse and the body has been played with great intensity, especially since the intervention of psychoanalysis. Foucault speaks of capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement between educators and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts. These are the attractions and evasions, the circular incitements which have been traced around bodies and sexes; they have not produced restricted boundaries, but spirals of power and pleasure. Thus are located sites of intensity in which complex regimes of discourse structure themselves. The discourses themselves are pleasurable. The pleasure of tying up a body in educational parameters, of structuring its emergence with goals, targets, standards, mimetic loops, channels of knowledge, freedom or the truth; locates and constructs the institutions within which they are played out. The large populations of educational or psychiatric institutions, with their hierarchies, spatial arrangements, surveillance systems; have constituted alongside the family, other ways of distributing the interplay of power and pleasure. They also delineate areas of extreme saturation, with their privileged spaces and rituals (secular value); for example, the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, the consultation.

Irigaray takes up the pleasure analysis with an analysis of Freud and Lacan. Freud, perhaps working with concepts drawn from Goethe, set up the nature of the feminine as a riddle, as the ineffable. Sexual difference is posited in terms of that which is the object of investigation, yet it is mired in the infallible discrimination of the the feminine. Irigaray questions this infallible discrimination, this process of production and reproduction, this expectation of a discovery of an unknown which arrests and obstructs the objectivity of scientific or at least anatomical discourse, as far as sexual difference is concerned. Freud worked to establish psychoanalysis as a scientific study which investigated the dynamics of sexual difference, laying hold of the unknown characteristic of the feminine. Irigaray characterises this as a type of "zoology", always looking for a counter example of behaviour which would dissuade one of a former opinion; for example, a spider eating her mate, male lions rearing the young, the females hunting. The scientists are confused in their search for criteria of sexual difference. Yet they continue regardless, ignoring the rupture in their thinking, they substitute the pleasure of discourse for the pleasure of the unconscious. With all this sexual differentiation going on in nature, the only recourse for the scientists is to some micro-process which could salvage the project in terms of credible scientific investigation. Sexuality is thereafter aligned to the reproductive function. As a result of this alignment, the power of the patriarchal hegemony, with all its deferrals and footnotes, and its ‘other’ suggestions that define scientific validity; takes hold of the discourse, and by degrees, the reproductive function.

The economy of sexual reproduction creates mimes and stages plays around itself. This aids the so called ‘phallic order’ in its production of the same. The smoke screen of its reasoning defines the nexus of a bisexual pleasure centre, notable for its masculine masochism; the following of the arguments of sexual differentiation is a perverse pleasure parameter, a constitution of power exactly on that which it tries to explain (heterosexuality). Strategies to avoid this heterosexual play of illusion, include Judith Butler’s "subversive bodily acts". She uses the writing of Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Monique Wittig, in order to displace the heterosexual matrix that dominates variations in sexual orientation. The tactics employed by them include the blurring and confusion of any sense of the term identity; this is in order to articulate the convergence of multiple sexual discourses on the site of ‘identity’, and thus to render it permanently problematic. This, following on from the work of Lacan, where just about any category is thrown into the realm of an almost inexplicable complication, is eminently achievable; yet with respect to the drives of Freud, perhaps does not serve as an adequate methodology for avoiding its reproductive and productive power relations, which assume the multiple variation of sexual identity from the start. The hierarchies which need to be avoided are those which would reinstitute sexual difference in another order, and in so doing retain the same mechanisms for institutionalisation. Elizabeth Grosz offers a more potent critique in her theorisation of the body, and the understanding of Freudian drives which take the processes of the electronic body, as constituting an active plane of inscription.

Grosz argues that Freud effects a series of displacements of the biological, modifying the ways in which biology is generally conceived, showing its susceptibility to the psychological rather than assuming a rift between them, as occurs in Cartesian notions of mind and body. The surface of the electronic body, (the screen), provides a ground for the articulation of orifices, erotogenic rims, cuts on the body’s surface, loci of exchange between the inside and the outside, points of conversion from the outside into the electronic body, and from the inside and outside of the electronic body. These are not sites not only for the reception and transmission of information, but also for bodily secretion, ongoing processes of sensory stimulation which require some form of signification and sociocultural and psychical representation that is the auto-eroticism of the mediated body. These cuts on the electronic body’s surface create a type of ‘landscape’ of that surface, which provides it with regions, zones, an uneven distribution of intensities, and of erotic investments in the electronic body, i.e. the tendency towards body-art and markings in cybernetic culture. Freud’s ego is an internal screen onto which the illuminated and projected images of the electronic body’s outer surface are directed. It is the site for the gathering together and the unification of otherwise disparate and scattered sensations provided by the various sense organs, in all their different spaces and registers. It is also a mapping of the electronic body’s inner surface, the surface of sensations, intensities, and affects, the ‘subjective experience’ of bodily sensations. The ego derives from these two kinds of surfaces, the inner surface of psychical agencies; and the outer surface of the projection or representation of the electronic body’s surface. Both surfaces are perceptual, and in the establishment of the ego, perceptual processes are sexualised and libidinally invested. The notion of the electronic body as a whole is dependent on the recognition of the totality and autonomy of the electronic body to ‘the other’; but not in a limited or singular sense as in the cave. This significatory, cultural dimension implies that electronic bodies, egos, subjectivities, are not simply reflections of their cultural context and associated values, but are constituted as such by them, marking electronic bodies with ‘biological’ configuration with sociosexual inscriptions; this is, in fact happening in social education through the media.

The ego, rather than representing the division between the feminine and the masculine in this schema, becomes the location for the contestation with the patriarchal formulation of the electronic body. The reconstitution of the electronic body depends upon the throwing into relief of the processes which transcribe it. Freud’s drives and instincts, which manifest an immense sexuality across every function of the body, cannot be diverted by the realignment of one or many of their distinctions, conjunctions, enactments or mergers. Irigaray recognised this, and looked at the discourse of psychoanalysis in terms of the ruptures and discontinuities which imply bodily process (the events in discourse), and the connection between these processes and their reproduction. For example, she questioned the tying of anatomical references to the development of sexuality and the issue of reproduction. She asked, "what would happen when the sexual function is separated from the reproductive function?" Grosz looked for the rewriting of the female body (and by degrees the mediated body in education) in two ways: 1) reorganising and reframing the terms by which the body has been socially represented, and, 2) challenging the discourses which claim to analyse and explain the body and subject scientifically, i.e. biology, psychology and sociology.

Svi Shapiro, in response to Alston’s paper on multiculturalism, has positioned rationality as being no match for the raging, existentially hungry, desirous being of the electronic body. This author looked forward to an educational discourse which embraces the desire of the electronic body, and which sets up a space in which sensual language may live in education. Irigaray’s language, still dancing in the psychoanalytic spectrum, alights on the skin of the electronic body where fantasies abound, and where we find the locus of ‘contiguity’. According to Irigaray, the main theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis, have taken no account of woman’s desire, not even of ‘her’ castrations; this defines the locus of becoming of the electronic body). The ways of psychoanalysis are derived from the history and the historization of male sexuality. Without knowing it, the woman is the place for the inscription of representations; she provides a basis for such fantasies as the amputation of her sex organ, and in a perverse ‘deal’ the anatomy of her body is put up as the security for reality. The images of her sex and organs, and her generalised body (in the media), are despoiled from the start by the male dominated scientific discourse; the castration of the woman is taken back into the processes of the body undergoing psychoanalysis by the castration of the father of psychoanalysis (Freud). This censorship extends to all areas of sexual activity, masturbation coming in for particular attention, signification and sublimation. Through this process the education of the electronic body is a male representation of the image of the female body. The electronic body includes a reinforced spectacular representation of this male education, and the media is dominated by the censorship of the real body.

The ‘fact of castration’, as Freud termed it, has to be understood as a definitive prohibition against establishing one’s own economy for the desire of origin. Hence the hole, the lack, the fault, or the ‘castration’ that greets the little girl as she enters as a subject into representative systems. This is the assumption governing her appearance upon the scene of ‘presence’, where neither her libido, nor her sex and organs have any right to any ‘truth’, except the truth that casts her as a ‘less than’, or the other side of the equation, the ‘backside’ of the representation thereby perpetrated by the psychoanalytic fathers and the grounding for the mediated body in this type of discourse. The desire for re-presentation, and for representing oneself in desire, is taken away by the primary metaphorization of the desire as a woman. Being caught up in the phallic metaphors of the same devours the desire for femininity, the origin of the woman in woman, produces a schizophrenia of desire; they demonstrate the needs of the electronic body doubling back on themselves. The prohibition of the Oedipus complex, the rule of the authority of the father or the parents, the construction of the super-ego, are all justified in the same way; the securing from the return of the libidinal cathexis through identification. The phallic same, the little boy’s penis, is protected by his narcissistic interest, which would be endangered by the discovery of the woman’s castration. Thus the penis is armed with laws and ideals, it is reassured by the identification with the all-powerful, law-giving father, it is supplied with a severe super-ego, before it risks going back into the body of a woman; and the mediation of the global super-body, that is portrayed through a representational media and educational discourse as being the self-same. Judith Butler offers the ‘Lesbian Phallus’, as a critical response to the narcissistic Freudian theory, and the self same re-presentation of the electronic body in media and through the practises of education.

Freud founds the ego with the externalised idea one has of one’s own body, and pain. Lacan read Freud in a similar way, in that "the libidinal drive is centred on the function of the imaginary". Knowledge of one’s own body becomes possible through an imaginary investiture; the Freudian ‘prototype’ for this investiture was designated as the male genitals, other erotogenic zones may act as substitutes for the genitals and behave analogously to them, yet the male genitals are, as Butler expresses it, "an originating idealisation, as the symbolically encoded phallus". The metonymic trajectory of Freud’s text, has at its core an ambivalence to the construction of the phallus, which is fundamentally erotogenically transferable, and belongs to no one body part; thus transcribing a multi-directional, fluidic, hyper-mediated plane. The phallus rhetorically enacts the process of narcissistic investment and idealisation that Freud seeks to document, overcoming ambivalence through the conjecturing of an ideal. Lacan rewrote Freud’s theory of narcissism through the dynamics of projection and misrecognition. He established the morphology of the electronic body as a psychically invested projection, an idealisation or ‘fiction’ of the mediated body as a totality and locus of control. He suggests that this narcissistic and idealising projection, that establishes morphology, constitutes the condition for the generation of objects and the cognition of other examples of the mediated body, it is the reserve of morphe from which the contours of objects are produced.

Judith Butler’s lesbian phallus acts as an unexpected intervention and consequence of the Lacanian scheme, an apparently contradictory signifier which, through a critical mimesis, calls into question the ostensibly originating and controlling power of the Lacanian phallus; indeed, it is installed as the privileged signifier of the symbolic order. The move that is emblematized by the lesbian phallus, contests the relationship between the logic of non-contradiction, and the legislation of compulsory heterosexuality at the level of the symbolic and bodily morphogenesis: throughout this thesis this contestation exists in electronically mediated education discourses and their purposes. Consequently, the lesbian phallus seeks to open up a discursive site for reconsidering the tacit political relations that constitute and persist in the divisions between electronic body parts and wholes, anatomy and the imaginary, corporeality and the psyche. Butler envisages that this imaginary phallus will tackle questions of femininity, desire and lesbian identification in a way which will not be caught in the legislative trap of controlling libidinal cathexis through repeated displacement, repression and symbolisation; and so escape into and through the realm of the electronic body. If the phallus is lesbian, it will not tend towards the masculine figures of power; its signification will be split, it therefore opens up a site of "proliferative resignifications". Another way out of the Freudian specular game, is through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and their novel and inventive understanding of the mediated body.

Deleuze and Guattari took as their starting point, the definition of ‘partial’ objects. Lacan faulted Karl Abraham for introducing the notion of the partial object, and was strongly opposed to Melanie Klein’s theory of introjected body parts, and with Ernest Jones’s influential acceptance of the position. Lacan associated the normalisation of the phallus as partial object with the degradation of psychoanalysis. Deleuze defined partial objects as having two senses; one of the state of introjected objects and the corresponding state of the drives attached to these objects, and the second as being the elective body zones and the state of the drives which find in them a ‘source’ (of the zones). It is in this sense that zones are facts of the surface, their organisation implies the constitution, the discovery, and the investment of a third dimension which is no longer either depth or height. One could say that the object of the zone is ‘projected’, but projection no longer signifies a mechanism of depth, it indicates a surface operation. Deleuze spreads this surface so that the libidinal drives may work on it. Action still happens in the depths, but the drives may free themselves from the constraint of the destructive drives by the production of new surfaces, and the involvement in relation with new objects. The twice liberated libido is a veritable superficial energy, the object of the surface, projected over a zone, in accordance with an entirely different mechanism; i.e. that of image and electronic body. The phallus does not play the role of an organ, but of a partial object, projected on the zone, it is often the privileged genital zone, as an image and the electronic body. It traces a line at the surface, interfacing with all the erogenous zones, bringing together partial surfaces on the body of the child. Yet the Oedipal game is not so easily won, the real test of the ego lies in the ‘auto-eroticism’ of partial surfaces, the phallic co-ordination, where the super ego invests the libido as superficial energy in a "secondary narcissism". The line that the phallus has traced at the surface, across every partial surface, is now the trace of castration, where the phallus and the penis are dissipated. This ‘Oedipal tragedy’, is the site for action, which Deleuze calls a metaphysical or transcendental surface and also an event in discourse. The castration of the mother and the death of the father, preserves or liquefies the Oedipus complex, and organises a definitive sexuality on its own surface; it is also the origin of what Freud called ‘desexualized energy’, where energy reinvests the destructive drives on its new metaphysical surface, or surface of pure thought. This second process corresponds to sublimation and symbolisation, and the Freudian idea that the death instinct is an affair of speculation; this corresponds to and augments the representation of the electronic body as repeated media event.

Melanie Klein remarked that symbolism is the foundation of every phantasm, and that the development of the phantasmatic life is hindered by the persistence of the schizoid and depressive positions. The phantasm finds its origins in the secondary narcissism, and is inseparable not only from grammatical transformations, but also from the ideational material of these transformations. Deleuze took these transformations further in Anti-Oedipus. Here, the evolution of the drives is questioned; there is no direction for them to progress as an integrated whole, neither is there an original totality from which they are derived. Partial objects have a sufficient charge to demolish the Oedipal triangle, when they connect with desiring-production and group fantasy they establish nonfamilial relations, i.e. "the unconscious as orphan". The Oedipal triangulation fails to see the nature of desiring-production, buts acts as a recording process for power and education; trapping the child, the neurotic, the psychopath, sexuality, and the schizophrenic in its dissipated net. Deleuze and Guattari wondered if it wouldn’t be better to schizophrenize the domain of the unconscious, as well as the sociohistorical domain, to shatter the iron collar of Oedipus and to rediscover everywhere the force of desiring-production. Psychoanalysis crushes desiring-production in representation, the productive unconscious is hereafter expressed in dream, myth and tragedy. Deleuze and Guattari express the notion that desire can not be defined in terms of lack. It needs its own reproduction, otherwise the teacher or the colonel or the instructor, are reduced to mommy/daddy; they are figures of familial reproduction, whereby desire is plugged into the system, the child finds daddy in the teacher, is dependent on recognition, loses its own desiring-production and does not partake of the electronic body.

To implement desiring-production of the electronic body, Deleuze and Guattari propose three syntheses. Connective synthesis which involves the libido, it is the joining of territories in a flux, and could be said to be an analogue form of production. Disjunctive synthesis is digital in that it involves code, the production which expresses surplus, recording processes and the transmission of messages. Conjunctive synthesis is intensive, revolving around types of consumption and consummation, it tends to individualise and to sexualise. 1) In connective synthesis, partial objects can join with anything, which confronts the recording processes of the Oedipal as they figure the pairing of people in familial reproduction. In and through this process, instead of a connective appropriation, partial objects become the possessions of a person, and when required, they become the property of another and they are therefore caught in the discourse that defines this locus of becoming as property. The nonpersonal flows of connective synthesis do not designate persons as abstract quantities, but rather they figure the global and specific uses of transversal forms of sedimentation or strata. 2) Disjunctive synthesis has two uses, one immanent, the other transcendental. Psychoanalysis uses the transcendental to impose exclusions and restrictions, making the unconscious swing over into Oedipus. The immanent use of disjunctive synthesis is one which remains disjunctive, it is no longer exclusive or restrictive, but it is fully affirmative, non-restrictive and inclusive. It is not that it resolves paradoxes or contradictions, but that it does not closet itself in its own terms. 3) In conjunctive synthesis, a great intermingling takes place of intense becomings, passages, migrations, that drift in flows of time; countries, races, families, geographical and historical designations, even miscellaneous news items partake in this immense passage. It is a matter of relationships of intensities through which the subject passes on the body without organs; also known as the synthetic or partial body, or the electronic body in time. This is a process which engages the subject in rises and falls, displacements and journeys. The races and cultures designate regions on this electronic body, they are zones of intensity, where the phenomena of individualisation and sexualization are produced. Here the schizophrenic delirium is set free. All the names in history (Nietzsche), are gathered together, and they participate in their settings, becomings, stories....It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the desiring-machine. This is the point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice. Freudian psychoanalysis made intensive use of the family, yet it distorted the nature of the intensive quantities in the unconscious. The familial reproduced itself through the institutions of Lacanian analysis, by stressing the imaginary and intensive qualities of their origination. The unconscious is to this extent immensely powerful; conjunctive syntheses have the potential to raise every type of national, racial or religious sentiment. Questions about groups, individuals, societies or origins, all have their communicative apparatus wrapped in the establishment of their processes in the unconscious; this may be clarified and surmounted as the emergence of the electronic body.

Deleuze and Guattari produced these three syntheses so that they may be used as machinery for the analysis of desire and the construction of an electronic body in discourse, or the electronic educational debate. This immanent mechanism takes us towards the understanding of children without social power structures using the discourses of psychoanalysis as state science and a static apparatus; rather it sets the debate adrift into the folds of the electronic body. It is meant to act as a non-containment strategy for desire in education, or as Foucault expresses it: "when Desire reigns in the wild state, as if the rigour of its rule had levelled all opposition". Such a pragmatics of education is a definite step to making discourse work, and also, perhaps, a transgression on the ground of educational freedom where we may experience the full electronic body, or body without organs as partial object set up and designatory in discourse through time and the comprehension of objectivity. Put another way, as Irigaray has stated:

Writing on Electronic Bodies does not mean mediated bodies which have been written on, or groups or organisations of units of writing in cyberspace. It locates the processes of writing about our bodies in and through the discourse of education and that which constitutes writing. In other words, it could be explained as taking as a given that which is being proved. This ‘taking as a given’ is a process of locating and identifying the power structures which have played upon the body, and setting them into a lateral or planar direction so that further presentation, representation and designation does not set up an order of bodily categorisation or system of exclusion. Such a process is being produced through the generalised forum of post-modern educational discourse, where such theorists as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard or Patti Lather have indexed sites for lateral thinking about the many and varied types of desiring-production that are proliferating in the electronic global educational climate.

This ‘spread-sheet’ for cultural investigation, cannot be played out without an amorphous assembly rearranging its conditions, translating its codes or reversing its tendencies: this is the reading of the writing on electronic bodies. The leading edge of educational practises, opens up difference, and combines the types of synthesis involved with the processes of the mediated body immanently. That is, the distinctions, concepts or ideas do not constitute intensive fields which act as centralising modes of production. Contrastingly, they act through multiple linkages, heterogeneous separations and virtual becomings; Deleuze and Guattari have elsewhere termed this process as being, "rhizomatics". This scattering of discourse is a tactical post-modern manoeuvre. Such a becoming will not serve as authoritative, ‘knowledge’, ‘method’, or as the ‘truth’ as change in the field of education is immanent; but it marks channels and the ‘flow’ of experience, or the supermediation which we find in areas such as the internet or the proliferation of global media. The inter-disciplinary discursive strategies of feminist and post-structuralism, work by producing the conditions where writing on electronic bodies in education happens. These conditions represent the method of objectivity for this thesis. The next chapter uses this perspective on electronic bodies to develop a critique of the type of learning environment in which pupils are being taught through computers. I have called this critique cyberpunk.

Go back to writing