Posthumanism and the Digital University

Texts, Bodies and Materialities

Lesley Gourlay

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350038189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

It is a commonplace in educational policy and theory to claim that digital technology has 'transformed' the university, the nature of learning and even the essence of what it means to be a scholar or a student. However, these claims have not always been based on strong research evidence. What are students and scholars actually doing in the day-to-day life of the digital university? This book examines in detail how the world of the digital interacts with texts, artefacts, devices and humans, in the contemporary university setting. Weaving together perspectives from a range of thinkers and disciplinary sources, Lesley Gourlay draws on ideas from posthuman and new materialist theory in particular, to open up our understanding about how digital knowledge practices operate. She proposes that digital engagement in the university should not be regarded as 'virtual' or disembodied, but instead may be understood as a complex set of entanglements of the body, texts and material artefacts, making a case that agency and the ways in which knowledge emerges should be regarded as 'more than human'.

1

More than Human

The focus of this book is on how, in the context of digital technology, our understanding of student engagement, teaching in higher education (in class and online), and also on how our understanding of how students engage with knowledge practices might be enhanced by looking at the university in a different way, drawing on posthuman theory. Posthumanism is a complex web of ideas which are not easily defined, are often misunderstood, and may be (mis)identified as an esoteric and highly abstract notions, with little relevance to day-to-day life, and certainly at first glance, to higher education. In this first chapter I will attempt to summarize what I consider to be the most important and useful ideas from posthuman theory, and how they might help us reconceptualize higher education and digital practices.

Posthumanism and the University

The concept of ‘posthumanism’ is in many respects a puzzling one. This chapter will attempt to define the theoretical ‘ground’ on which the book is based, and will also attempt to do some clearing work – by setting out how I am using the term, and also what I would seek to exclude, or de-emphasize in my use of it. The apparent oddness of the term posthumanism has arguably contributed to the challenge of making it relevant to educational thought, and bringing it in from what may appear at first glance to be the ‘wild fringes’ of education theory. The term was first used by Hassan in 1977, the essay based on a keynote speech delivered at a symposium devoted to ‘postmodern performance’. In a dense theoretical piece, Hassan proposes posthumanism as a response to what he saw as the rapidly changing nature of the human form and its representations, referring to the development of human space exploration, and also to potential change brought about by artificial intelligence. He also refers to the origins of the universe, and the fact that humans are composed of the atoms created at that time. He goes on to reference contemporary poststructuralist challenges to the notion of the human ‘subject’ and Cartesian dualism, in addition to referring to future possibilities of human evolution (Hassan 1977). Since that paper, and that rather esoteric focus, the term has evolved and is used in a range of ways.

Bayne (2018) provides an excellent ‘navigation aid’ for educators seeking to understand the concept, in which she classifies the various strands of thought into three parts: critical posthumanism, technological posthumanism and ecological posthumanism. I find this helpful, and will follow Bayne’s framing here to introduce the idea. Bayne points out that the object of critique within early posthumanism was liberal humanism. She quotes Badmington, who characterizes humanism as holding the following central belief:

… that the figure of ‘Man’ (sic) naturally stands at the centre of things; is entirely distinct from animals, machines and other nonhuman entities; is absolutely known and knowable to ‘himself’; is the origin of meaning and history; and shares with all other human beings a universal essence.

Badmington 2004: 1345

Bayne offers her own definition:

To simplify, posthumanism involves us in making an ontological shift from understanding ‘the human’ as an individuated entity separate from and observant of the world and its (human and nonhuman) inhabitants, to one which is inextricably connected to the world and only conceivable as emergent with and through it.

Bayne 2018

The emphasis here is on the ending of a particular unitary and separate conception of the human, as opposed to an ending of the human race itself – this is a crucial distinction. The important idea here is the decentring of the human from our conception of the world, and how it operates. She highlights the dominance of the notion of the autonomous human subject in educational theory, quoting Usher and Edwards:

The very rationale of the educational process and the role of the educator is founded on the humanist idea of a certain kind of subject who has the inherent potential to become self-motivated and self-directing, a rational subject capable of exercising individual agency. The task of education has therefore been understood as one of ‘bringing out’, of helping to realise this potential, so that subjects become fully autonomous and capable of exercising their individual and intentional agency.

Usher & Edwards 1994: 24, in Bayne 2018

Bayne first examines what she calls ‘critical posthumanism’, pointing out the roots of posthumanism in 1960s poststructuralist critiques of the Enlightenment view of ‘man’ as autonomous and unique, a set of critiques which instead emphasized the discursive construction of human subjectivities, informing movements such as feminism and postcolonial studies. Following these insights, as Bayne puts it, ‘… it became difficult in critical thought to see the human subject as existing outside history or outside political, discursive and material practice’ (Bayne 2018). However, as Bayne argues, this set of insights do not necessarily lead us to a nihilistic perspective which implies an absence or irrelevance of the human, or human agency. She highlights the stance of Braidotti (2013), who proposes a move from ‘unitary to nomadic subjectivity’ (Braidotti 2013: 49), a subjectivity focused on interconnection between self and others. While some commentators have focused on posthumanism as a reaction to humanism (e.g. Davies 2008), others have claimed that there is nothing new in this state, but simply that it is now being recognized. As Wolfe points out, it was the case:

… before in the sense that it names the embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world … and after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentring of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.

Wolfe 2010: xv, in Bayne 2018

In this book, I also adopt this position, and regard posthumanism as a theoretical framing which provides insights into the nature of human/nonhuman life and practices across historical epochs, as opposed to viewing it as a state of affairs which is new, or unique to our contemporary political and historical moment or predicament. With that in mind, I apply it as a framing throughout, including in consideration of past practices and technologies in the history of the university. Bayne goes on to discuss what she terms ‘technological posthumanism’, drawing on Hayles (1999, 2006). Her form of posthumanism is focused on:

… transforming untrammelled free will into a recognition that agency is always relational and distributed, and correcting an over-emphasis on consciousness to a more accurate view of cognition as embodied throughout human flesh and extended into the social and technological environment.

Hayles 2006: 160–161 in Bayne 2018

As she points out, in a humanist framing, knowledge is seen as ‘representing accurately those objects over which we have dominance as autonomous observers’ (Bayne 2018). This division of subject and object of knowledge is broken down in a posthuman framing, instead the two elements can be seen as intertwined and co-constitutive. This book focuses particularly on this point, I will argue that this has always been the case throughout the history of the university, but that the advent of digital technology adds further complex dimensions to this set of relationships. Bayne also identifies a third strand, which she characterizes as ‘ecological posthumanism’. This work focuses more on human relationships with the natural world, and is associated with writers working in ‘new materialism’, such as Barad (2007), Coole and Frost (2010) and Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012). These theorists are influenced by the philosophical writings of Spinoza, Bergsen and Deleuze, focusing on the concept of ‘new vitalism’ (e.g. Fraser et al. 2005) or ‘vital materialism’ (Bennett 2010), a perspective which is founded on a ‘radical relationality’, as Bayne puts it, that ‘… the world is composed only and always through the enfolding and mutual constitution of matter and meaning’ (Bayne 2018). Bayne points out that much of this work has focused on animal studies and ‘critical animal pedagogy’ (e.g. Dinker & Pedersen 2016) and post-anthropocentric work focused questioning human dominance over the environment. This theme relating to the natural environment is beyond the scope of my project with this book, but undeniably opens up searching new questions and perspectives on the university and its place in the world.

However, there are some objections which may be raised to the notion of posthumanism, and whether it offers anything of value of educational research. The first is that, given the enormous socioeconomic challenges facing the planet in terms of equality and access to basic resources, freedoms and rights, it may seem counter-intuitive to be apparently moving away from the notion of a shared common humanity when discussing education. The project of humanistic education is generally regarded to be a benign and ‘person-centred’ one, focused on inclusion and sensitivity to human needs, emotions and diversity. In contrast, posthumanism, with a name reminiscent of science fiction, literal cyborgs – even robot overlords – is suggestive of a daunting and unknown future, and may seem to represent the opposite of the values of humanistic education.

Additionally, the notion of posthumanism may appear to negate, or elide, the struggles of those who are regarded as ‘less human’ than others – in a context of extreme power imbalances worldwide, where the ‘prototypical’ human may be seen as a white, heterosexual, middle-class man. Women, people of colour, LGBTQ people, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged, may be regarded implicitly as ‘less human’, and therefore not entitled to the full set of rights accorded to those at the pinnacle of privilege. For marginalized and oppressed groups in society, there has been a long and ongoing struggle to be granted full human rights and to be afforded equal status. Viewed from the standpoint of intersectionality, and the contexts of these ongoing liberatory struggles, it may seem unhelpful to apparently move away from the category of human, where the majority of the world’s population are still denied that status. For these reasons, for scholars, students and activists working in struggles such as feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ rights, a move to posthumanism may feel alienating. However, as I hope to clarify, posthumanism offers a way of understanding the world which allows us to see more clearly operations of power, ideology and privilege, by questioning implicit notions of the prototypical ‘ideal’ human subject placed at the centre of society, or in this case higher education.

One feature of the term ‘posthumanism’ is that it tends to be associated with notions of a ‘robot age’, a world dominated by machines and digital technology, in which the human race has been rendered obsolete, or has in some sense been replaced – or even defeated – by dominant technologies. This book is concerned with the relationship between digital technologies, the university and what I broadly term epistemic practices. However, my central thesis is not that the university – or indeed society as a whole – is being ‘taken over’ or supplanted by digital technology, or that it should be. Instead, my work is rooted in a desire to examine the existing and emergent relationships between the digital, the material, the textual and the human in the university. I seek to do this in such a way as to refocus attention on the embodied nature of human subjects, on the various forms and actions of texts and devices which make up the university, and the materiality of how epistemic practices – digital and analogue – emerge. In doing this, I situate my work under a fairly loose canopy of posthumanism, defined broadly to include work which might also be categorized as part of new materialism. The emphasis in this work is not on a replacement of the human, but more of a questioning of the central role that has been granted to the human in educational thought, seeking to focus instead on how the human and nonhuman entities entangle, to create knowledge in the university. The bedrock of posthumanism is a questioning of supposed taken-for-granted binaries, such as the division between nature and culture, human and animal, subject and object, or between human and nonhuman. My interest in this book is on the digital, but similarly I do not regard this as existing in a separate and clear binary with the analogue, or nondigital, therefore I also focus on how these technologi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 More Than Human
• 2 Matter
• 3 Body
• 4 Presence
• 5 Interfaces
• 6 Wayfaring
• 7 Quantum
• 8 Document
• 9 Conclusions, or So What?
• References
• Index
• Copyright