Posthumanism and Higher Education , livre ebook

Editors
Carol A. Taylor and Annouchka Bayley
Posthumanism and Higher Education Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research

Editors

Carol A. Taylor

Department of Education, University of Bath, Bath, UK
Annouchka Bayley

Royal College of Art, London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-14671-9 e-ISBN 978-3-030-14672-6
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14672-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932954
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Forward-ing

Doing
Thinking together
Undoing and rethinking collectively MOVING-ING and LOOK-ING forward
with an unlimited number of questions
MAYBE-ing
FUTURE-ing
RELATE-ing
It is possible that a posthuman Forward to a posthuman book—rather than a Foreword—could be nothing but a human. Maybe a Forward of this kind functions as a human-initiated move promoting textual interchanges and shifting related matter while at the same time inviting, acknowledging, and relating to the plants, animals, viruses, and machines surrounding us. After all, it is not that posthumanism rejects the role of human but for many it questions certain independent and autonomous conceptions of the human and humanity.
Forward-ing the posthuman could also draw attention to the complex and relational subjects shaped by the life beyond the self. Braidotti (2013: 66) proposed that posthuman theory ‘strikes an alliance with the productive and immanent force of zoe , or life in its non-human aspects.’ The authors in this book take on the challenging task to engage with life’s human and non-human forms and to rethink the status of human while being inspired by the complexity of human and non-human relations, creativity, and imagination. What kind of movement might happen when book, text, dialogue and subject intra-act and relate? What directions might forward-ing take? How might the relations in this book contribute to and stimulate radical transformations, some of which might be multidimensional and moving fast others, while others might be stuttering in their collective mattering and slow singularities. However this happens, these (textual) directions are never independent from other texts, relations, and matter. Maybe some of these transformations and directions take the form of inquiries, prompted by a variety of productive and generative questions including those about the future subjects and becomings of posthuman relations in higher education pedagogy, practice or policy. Such directions may provoke questions of possibility, anticipation, visioning, meeting, becoming, belonging, or perhaps fear, doubt, or worry, and more.
According to Braidotti (2013) critical posthumanist subjects function within eco-philosophies, multiplicities, and differentiation. Inter-connectedness between self and other transposes hybridity. The politics of life itself call for collaborative morality. Human and posthuman practices have co-existed alongside each other as long as humans have populated the earth and now at the time of this newly yet historical posthuman moment scholars need to caution against inhuman(e) ethics which could jeopardize productive inter-connectedness. While human-centered education has dominated the majority of educational discourses and practices one might also argue that relational learning and adaptation across species have existed far before the human cognition, awareness, and knowledges centered by Enlightenment and colonizing educational discourses and technologies. This predominant focus on scholarly and educational practices of the human has been a convenient yet rather selfish choice since humans have always lived in complex ecosystems and relational universes. So, like Braidotti (2013), one might ask how do we know this (and that) humanness in us, how have we come to recognize ourselves as human and who/how is human after all?


Many of us have come to know posthumanism as a rather complex and differentiating scholarly and theoretical orientation, which often cuts across disciplines and phenomena. Connectedness of all kinds, including ecological events, subject-objects, onto-epistemologies, matter-minds, ani-humans, offer alternative ways to think about the presence and/or role of human, human knower, and human activities within complex conditions of humanity at large (see Braidotti and Hjavalova 2018; Braidotti 2013). Connected lives, shifting and eventful worlds, call for different kinds of techniques of practice and inquiry. Singularity and privilege of human experience, experiential logic, and limited systems perspectives can be replaced with inter-species multiplicity, situationality, and continuous (becoming) variation and generative difference. A becoming perspective of inter-relatedness disrupts the dominance, independence, agency, and privilege of ‘human’ as the only point of significance and mattering in the world.
In this book the authors have taken on the (im)possible task of de/re/unworking humanism in higher education. They use a variety of techniques to undo deeply internalized practices of human-centered learning and education. By doing so the authors illustrate how posthumanism could be lived and assembled within contradictory, paradoxical, damaging and even absurd educational spaces. Minor gestures, affects, senses, and unexpected material connections emerge within different chapters of this book. However, this emergence of minor gestures and particularities call for careful noticing. Tsing (2015) referred to the art of noticing—noticing assemblages, synched and un-synched rhythms, polyphony, and various world-making processes around us (both human and non-human). In this book, the authors are actively noticing and world-making posthumanism and posthuman practices across unpredictable higher education contexts, becomings and uncertain time-spaces. According to Tsing (2015: 20) precarity makes life possible and it ‘is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves … we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others … everything is in flux, including our ability to survive’. Making worlds collectively sometimes helps humans to look around rather than ahead. Making worlds happens beyond the humans and within the ecological systems where every organism has potential to operate as a change agent—‘patterns of unintentional coordination develop in assemblages. To notice such patterns means watching the interplay of temporal rhythms and scale in the divergent lifeways they gather’ (Tsing 2015: 23).
Furthermore, the chapters in this book address and work through various troubles. Haraway’s (2016) call to stay with the trouble offers intriguing and ecologically oriented positioning: ‘Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, and meanings’ (Haraway 2016: 1). The ubiquitous figure of SF (science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures and more) functions as a process and practice for Haraway to speak simultaneously to the ongoingness of staying on with the trouble and exercising response-ability. For Haraway (2016: 39), ‘it matters what thoughts think thoughts; it matters what stories tell stories’. Narrated partiality connects and unites thoughts, practices, and theories. Moreover, tentacular thinking challenges linearity as it patterns and utilizes attachments and detachments, cuts and knots, and weaved paths. SF, she says, ‘is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times’ (Haraway 2016: 31). Posthuman response-ability cannot avoid risks when compos(t)ing possible common worlds since it aims to trouble visual clarity as the only sense and affect of thinking.
How could SF be put to work to trace the demise of human centered thinking? According to Braidotti (2013) posthuman theory can be a productive tool to re-think human as a unit of reference. She says: ‘The human in Humanism is neither an ideal nor an objective statistical average or middle ground. It rather spells out a systematized standard of recognizability—of Sameness—by which all others can be assessed, regulated and allotted to a designated social location’ (Braidotti 2013: 26). Furthermore, the concept and practice of human are normative conventions. For Braidott