Schooling Bodies to Read and Write: A Technosomatic Perspective

In this article Joris Vlieghe defends the view that technologies of reading and writing are more than merely instruments that support education, arguing that these technologies themselves decide what education is all about and that they form subjectivity in substantial ways. Expanding on insights taken from media theory, Vlieghe uses the work of Bernard Stiegler in order to develop a “technosomatic” account of literacy initiation, that is, a perspective that zooms in on the physical dimensions of how to operate writing and reading technologies. He argues that that the bodily gestures and disciplines that constitute (elementary) literacy give rise to a particular space of experience, which comes down to a heavily embodied, first‐hand sense of what it means to be able to produce script. Vlieghe contends that the advent of digital writing and reading technologies implies a fundamental shift in this sense of ability, and that in order to understand digital literacy we need to take into account the technosomatic aspects of learning to read and write with digital media (a dimension that is absent from the way in which the New Literacies movement approaches the phenomenon of digitization).