Posthumanism and Educational Research

Nathan Snaza, John Weaver, Nathan Snaza, John Weaver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317668619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Focusing on the interdependence between human, animal, and machine, posthumanism redefines the meaning of the human being previously assumed in knowledge production. This movement challenges some of the most foundational concepts in educational theory and has implications within educational research, curriculum design and pedagogical interactions. In this volume, a group of international contributors use posthumanist theory to present new modes of institutional collaboration and pedagogical practice. They position posthumanism as a comprehensive theoretical project with connections to philosophy, animal studies, environmentalism, feminism, biology, queer theory and cognition. Researchers and scholars in curriculum studies and philosophy of education will benefit from the new research agendas presented by posthumanism.

Part I Humanism, Posthumanism, and Educational Research

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769165-2

1 Toward a Genealogy of Educational Humanism

Nathan Snaza

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769165-3

The question as to what it means to be human is also, and perhaps even first of all, an educational question. (Biesta 2006, 2)

Progressive and radical educators would do well to engage posthumanist philosophies in order to extend the political projects of feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, queer, and Marxist pedagogies. This is especially important because often these politicized educational praxes are staged around a notion of humanization that ends up reinscribing the same structural mechanism of dehumanization they purportedly critique, one that is firmly lodged within humanism, broadly understood. Thus, I would like to begin this book by asking what “humanism” is, which in turn raises the question of what is “human.” I will trace familiar answers to the question “What is humanism?”—answers associated with historical moments or events with (disputed but largely utilized) proper names: Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernity.¹ While the general sense of the answers is probably familiar to some readers, what interests me here are a) the ways we have come to think about the continuities and discontinuities that make up this seemingly progressive historical development and b) bringing the familiar history into relation with ideologically disavowed material relations.

Genealogy and Humanism

What we should attend to in this evolution of “humanism” and its attendant morphemes (the human, the humanities, humanity, humane) is the fact that every stage of it was beset with anxieties, uncertainties, hegemonic struggles, and a quality of contingency. The transformations “humanism” has undergone in the West should not be understood as the progressive unfolding of history, but as the outcome of a continuous and overlapping series of intensities: moments or nodes where power relations become overdeter-mined and the outcome or output is unpredictable. What follows is therefore a sketch not of a “history” but a “genealogy” in the Nietzschean sense. As Foucault reads Nietzsche, “The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin […] He must be able to recognize the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats” (1984, 80). The issue is not some search for the “origin” of humanism nor its teleological development, but the patient tracing of its fraught ascension to the common sense horizon of globalized political philosophy.²

Additionally, this project—which can only be schematic in the extreme at this moment—is a direct continuation of the genealogy Nietzsche offers in On the Genealogy of Morals (1967), which traces the domestication of “herd” humanity. Nietzsche posits “bad consciousness,” “self animal torture,” and “the ascetic ideal” as forces that turned the human against its animal self in order to produce the sickness called “humanity.” Rather than something that simply exists, Man for Nietzsche is an illness, one that makes civilization as we know it possible (85).³ Nietzsche’s writings not only diagnose the sickness that is humanity; they also proleptically imagine forms of becoming-with that would follow upon getting over this illness (Snaza 2013).

As an experiment in “the critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault 1984), this genealogy must account both for how we come to think about ourselves as “humans” (a problem of interpolation by and identification with an abstract category of identity) and for how this “human” has come to be thought of and put to work across its career. The first of these problems concerns one’s education via curriculum and instruction and any answer cannot ignore the myriad sites of nonschool education that transmit ideas about being human. The second is a question of history, one that should be asked with the long view in mind.⁴ A critical ontology of ourselves asks both “How do our schools teach us how to be human?” and “What sorts of struggles, compromises, and inventions produced a situation in which I can identify myself with the category of ‘the human’ and then use that identification to control the entirety of my system of ethics?”

The human with which we are coerced into identification is nothing simple, bounded, or stable. For Dominic Pettman (2011, 30), “the human [i]s a trope that functions across all sorts of conceptual platforms.” To redefine the human as a trope, the result of particular “software” that turns an ontological entity about which we know very little into the “human” as a recognizable, commonsense “being,” is to cast the human as, precisely, an “error.” Or, more specifically, errors: “our species’ systematic deployment of and within technology creates the human as an emergent property inside the overlap of the Venn diagram between animal and machine” (99). As it has come to be thought within posthumanist discourse broadly, the human is the construction of particular relational distanciations taking place among the terms in the cybernetic triangle of human/animal/machine. Agamben (2003) has called this production “the anthropological machine.” In order to produce “the human” as a being, these other terms must also be produced, since their definitions are mutually constitutive and exclusive. Thus, a genealogy of educational humanism must account not just for how “the human” was conceptualized and constructed in particular historical instances and the operations of particular institutions, but also—and as an inescapably linked set of problems—for how it is related to its various constitutive outsides: the animal, the machine, the savage, the slave, nature, the thing.

This posthumanist reconceptualization of “the human” requires a rethinking of “humanism” as a problematic that is considerably wider in scope than prevailing understandings of this term within educational histories such as Herbert Kliebard’s The Struggle for the American Curriculum (1995), which posits “humanists” as one among several competing interest groups in the ongoing debates about the social function of schooling and, consequently, the problem of curricular design in the United States. As he puts it, referring to Charles Eliot (arguably the most important “humanist” voice in education at the beginning of the twentieth century), “The right selection of subjects along with the right way of teaching them could develop citizens of all classes endowed in accordance with the humanist ideal—with the power to reason, sensitivity to beauty, and high moral character” (10). That is, humanists in this (limited) sense, seek to produce ideal “human” citizens through “the study of ancient Greek and Latin, and of the literature, history, and culture of the peoples who spoke them” (Davies 1997, 9–10). Humanists are those scholars and educators who insist on the study of what have come to be called “The Classics” of Western culture. The aim, for humanists, is to produce responsible, rational citizens according to a model that structures ancient Greek and later Roman philosophy, politics, and aesthetics (we cannot forget that this set of languages, texts, and cultures has come to be canonized thus in particular imperialist engagements with non-Western cultures, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems that exceed the merely vital).

While this limited understanding of humanism proves enormously helpful in tracing how this ideal “human” is articulated in ancient Greek and Roman texts and then reconfigured in fraught, uneven, and even disjunctive ways in the intervening centuries, it also obscures some of the most salient features of humanism as I seek to conceptualize it here. As Akeel Bilgrami’s “Foreword” to Humanism and Democratic Criticism makes clear, Edward Said’s definition is more open (Said 2004, x). It has two poles. On the one side, humanism means to be committed to distinguishing the human from its Others in some manner or other, attempting to ontologize this difference under the pretense that the human simply exists. And, on the other, it means to embrace and “show regard for” anything and everything that comes from or is associated with that previously discerned human. The first pole points toward ontology, but often through relations of dialectical negations (the human is this because it is not that). It would determine who or what is (or counts as) human. The second pole points toward education and a narrative course. One has to learn to “yearn […] to show regard for all that is human” (x). For Said, the political import of the humanities is that it enables such regard, treating cultures contrapuntally and not as antagonistic, mutually alienated formations (a notion he borrows from Gramsci).

This definition has the virtue of making something else very plain: the human is a political category. To be a humanist is to be a partisan. It is to define a group or category and then demonstrate (political) commitment to its members. Schematically, we can say that humanism is then the belief that there exists such a thing as a “human” coupled with the belief that this human should be the center of one’s concerns, a belief we may also call “anthropocentrism.” This widened definition of humanism includes not only those educators who are partisans of a classical education in the manner of a Charles Eliot, but also virtually every educator and educational thinker within the Western tradition (including, obviously, Said). A genealogy of educational humanism, therefore, will therefore have to account for how humanism has come to structure the entirety of Western education, its institutions, its concepts, its practices.

Humanizing Education's Structural Doubling of the Human

Reframing humanism by removing it from a progressive, teleological nar-rativization calls into question humanism’s own self-understanding and its particular educational modes—its institutions, divisions of intellectual work, pedagogical and curricular practices. This is because humanism has always already presupposed a particular view of education, one that is structurally unthinkable without the progressive, teleological narrative. Put most simply, humanizing takes “the human” to be two related, but structurally different things. It refers to a particular being said to merely “exist” (Anthropos, the rational animal, the talking animal, homo sapiens sapiens), and to a being who cannot come into being except through an educational regimen of “humanization.” That is, one is not “fully” human until one has been educated: It is not something one is, but something one becomes. The human is both the protagonist of a story and the result of that story’s unfolding, a being who could only come into being by running the course of the narrative (something the Bildungsroman makes apparent).

This structural doubling of “the human” makes it so that the teacher (always in relation to a school and its infrastructure, its hierarchies of authority, its “culture”) has to address the students as both presently human beings—which they discern through dialectical negation—and as beings who are not yet human. They both are and are not human. We have tended to believe that education would do what it is meant to do if all humans “we” recognize as humans were given access and they all come out being “fully human,” something guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and called for in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000).

The importance of this structural doubling in the anthropological machine of educational humanism is perhaps most clear in relation to practices of what we have come to call “dehumanization,” practices many educators have theorized in relation to Freire’s writings. Schematically, this refers to when someone or some institution (broadly understood) treats a person who is really human “as if” s/he were an animal, a machine, a cog in the assembly line or the social wheel, and so on. Innumerable critics of life within industrial and postindustrial capitalism have pointed out how cities, modern modes of bureaucracy, capitalist modes of production and distribution, and even statistical demography (and/or sociology, or social psychology, etc.) “dehumanize” everyone (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Yet it is crucial for educators to connect this to the dehumanizations of women, slaves, and the colonized: dehumanizations that were so integral to the emergence of modernity that no modern project, including the modern school, is untouched by them.⁵ As Chela Sandoval (2000) reminds us, the experience of the marginalized with the most violent, oppressive, and damaging aspects of modernity often precedes the experience of the less marginalized with similar phenomena...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Education and the Posthumanist Turn
• Part I: Humanism, Posthumanism, and Educational Research
• 1 Toward a Genealogy of Educational Humanism
• 2 Researching the Posthuman Paradigm: The “Subject” as Curricular Lens
• 3 Posthuman Education and Animal Interiority
• 4 Education Policy Making for Social Change: A Posthumanist Intervention
• 5 “Approximate-Rigorous Abstractions”: Propositions of Activation for Posthumanist Research
• Part II: Attuning to the More-Than-Human Complexities of the Classroom
• 6 Ecologies of Praxis: Teaching and Learning against the Obvious
• 7 Losing Animals: Ethics and Care in a Pedagogy of Recovery
• Part III: Ecological Aesthetics
• 8 Affirmations and Limitations of Rancière’s Aesthetics: Questions for Art and Its Education in the Anthropocene
• 9 Dark Posthumanism, Unthinking Education, and Ecology at the End of the Anthropocene
• Part IV: What Posthumanist Education Will Have Been
• 10 Undoing Anthropocentrism in Educational Inquiry: A Phildickian Space Odyssey?
• 11 Resisting Becoming a Glomus Within Posthuman Theorizing: Mondialisation and Embodied Agency in Educational Research
• 12 To What Future Do the Posthuman and Posthumanism (Re)Turn Us; Meanwhile How Do I Tame the Lingering Effects of Humanism?
• Contributors
• Index