Pedagogies of incorporation : touch and the technology of writing

Metaphors of tactility are often used to describe the considerable ease that skilled individuals display in the performance of certain actions; a pianist who has a deft ‘touch’ or a footballer with a ‘feel’ for the game. While such terms denote skill, they tend to mask the process the process of its acquisition, suggesting an intuitive ability rather than a technique perfected over time through practice. This is similarly the case with phenomenologies of the body that emphasise an almost seamless meshing of subject and object in the acquisition of skill. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, in discussing a typist’s touch, describes this as ‘knowledge in the hands’ but doesn’t fully explain how it gets there. While he considers this a ‘knowledge bred of familiarity’ and attests to the power of habit in the body ‘appropriating fresh instruments’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1999: 143-144), this implies a pedagogy whereby acquiring a skill is simply learnt as a matter of course. Such physical capacities, however, are not just learnt, they are also often taught. In the context of children learning to write and their production of text through the use of a pencil, this is an important distinction. Children do not simply acquire the capacity to write, they are taught to do so and the pedagogies that affect this process are instrumental to their embodied and sensuous competence.