Posthuman Pedagogies in Practice

Arts based Approaches for Developing Participatory Futures

Annouchka Bayley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319709789
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book investigates transdisciplinary, arts-based approaches to developing innovative and pertinent higher education pedagogy. Introducing timely critical thinking strategies, the author addresses some of the key issues facing educators today in an increasingly complex digital, technological and ecological world. The author combines emerging ideas in the New Materialism and Posthumanism schools of thought with arts-based teaching and learning, including Practice-as-Research, for Social Science contexts, thus exploring how this approach can be used to productively create new pedagogical strategies. Drawing on a rich repertoire of real-life examples, the volume suggests transferrable routes into practice that are suitable for lecturers, researchers and students. This practical and innovative volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in Posthuman and New Materialist theories, and how these can be applied to the educational landscape in future.

© The Author(s) 2018

Annouchka BayleyPosthuman Pedagogies in Practicehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70978-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Annouchka Bayley¹

(1)

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

End Abstract

Landscapes, Territories & Porous Boundaries: Enter the Posthuman!

All such attempts are about learning and teaching at its most primal level: it is about investigating how humans build their competency to know and act in a ‘more than human’ world while being already in (and part of) that world. (Bennett 2010, p. 73)

What does it mean to be human today in a digital , interconnected and global political, cultural and economic order? (Belfiore 2013, p. 12)

Electronic Ink: Tattoos, Manifestos, and Posthumanisms

It’s a warm, spring morning in 2017. I am working from home, absent from the crush and squash of the rush hour commute. Accustomed to perusing a morning newspaper on the bus –The Metro – a free paper, widely available across the UK on buses and trains, I decide that working from home should not prevent me from the everyday ritual of flicking through its pages to marvel at some popular story that oftentimes acts more as entertainment than ‘news’. Without the materiality of the paper, the bus, the squash of other commuters, I go online. I access The Metro’s site, choosing not to miss out on the perks of casual reading that the journey usually brings. Inadvertently, I end up clicking ‘back in time’ as it were, extending my reach to previous days’ stories in an attempt to find some editorial that might capture my interest or amusement. The headline I fall on was published a few days prior to my accessing it, and provokes a gasp: Electronic Tattoos Will Turn Skin Blemishes into Smartphone Controls. (http://​metro.​co.​uk/​2017/​03/​19/​electronic-tattoos-will-turn-skin-blemishes-into-smartphone-controls-6520672/​. Accessed 3 April 2017.)

Upon further investigation I discover that researchers at Saarland University and Google have indeed been collaboratively developing these “SkinMarks” – temporary tattoos that can trigger smartphone commands by, for example, rolling a finger over a knuckle that has the electronic tattoo emblazoned on it – to some success. More clicking and scrolling reveals that this is just one development in a long line of such experiments. I even see a photograph of one of the tattoos. It is a little blue rabbit that lights up and glows on the skin. Straightaway, a number of things strike me. Firstly, comes the question uppermost in many of the more popular kind of posthuman debates I hear in university corridors, on podcasts and in cultural discussions on ‘A.I’ (artificial intelligence) in my daily stream of current affairs, social media discussions, radio and television: have we already become part-cyborg? This question, once the exclusive purvey of science fiction magazines, has become part of our daily digest. For me, the answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes’, as advances in medical sciences have seen new and seemingly miraculous developments in eye surgery, hip replacements and prosthetic limbs – all of which use artificial and digital technologies to assist in patient treatment. However, a second, more critically relevant thought strikes me in this instance: this technology is designed to be used to cover up blemishes. Why? What is interesting or significant about coupling this technology specifically with the cosmetic cover-up of skin blemishes? Why is this tugging at something deep in my mind? How does this matter?

In her essay Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and the Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-humanist Landscape (1992), Donna Haraway explores “what counts as humanity” (2004, p. 60), suggesting the ideal type that matters in the discourse of what it is to be human is male and white – an echo, perhaps of the Vitruvian Man – whilst women are positioned on a scale that moves further and further away from this inclusive position of being human, depending on their whiteness, sexuality and geopolitical location. Haraway suggests, that, “[h]umanity is a modernist figure; and this humanity has a generic face, a universal shape. Humanity’s face has been the face of a man.” (ibid., p. 49) Figured as outsiders, as different and differencing subjects/objects, women have been rewritten as suffering bodies, whose suffering acts as a reminder to keep the dominant positionality of Vitruvian Man in place/check.

Here, in the flash of a moment of reading about SkinMarks through the looking glass provided by Haraway, I see another moment of the eradication of difference – of marks on bodies, to invoke posthumanist scholar Karen Barad (2007) – that is conscripted to the cause of a new corporate, digital , cosmetic, cyborgian initiative. Here, the blemish, the imperfect, the differencing mark is covered over with electronic ink. Contrary to Haraway’s Ecce Homo, it is not in this instance made ‘white’. Rather, it is made into a glowing, blue, bunny rabbit, linking the wearer/bearer to Google’s infinite digital space via the flesh itself. I imagine myself with a SkinMark. In this imagining, ‘I’ am not entirely woman, nor man, not white, nor ‘mixed’, I am a hybrid Other with a host of individual preferences, and yet the focus of the differencing lens has shifted: I am made corporate, I am made cyborg, I am part-branded and I am always-already connected to Google. In this hybridised reality, my most human of ‘defects’ – the blemish – connects me to cyberspace courtesy of a corporate giant. My difference has been conscripted, absorbed and entangled with the company at the very level of flesh itself. My blemish has been covered over with digital ink.

This act – becoming-cyborg via the covering over of a blemish that marks difference – arguably re-inscribes a new outsider-ness into the fabric of both society and flesh. Is it possible to “figure a collective humanity without constructing cosmic closure of the unmarked category” (ibid., p. 54), or are ‘we’ simply reconstructing the notion of ‘insider’ to mean those who have access (or permit access) to the digital literally living in their skin. In this Huxley-style daydream/nightmare, the blemish is homogenised, ironically, into a bespoke, glowing avatar that erases my human difference in the same moment as it connects me to the digi-verse. Is this the figure of a new, ‘Everyman’ in techno-development – an always-connected hybrid, part cyborg ? How can I come to critically evaluate whether these developments that seemingly celebrate complexity, multiple voices, multiple differences in the 3.0 and 4.0 digital world, are doing just that or are actually erasing my hard-fought-for difference by marking my flesh anew. Indeed, to invoke Haraway again,

Body, names, and speech – their forms, contents, and articulations – may be read to hold promise for a never-settled universal, a common language that makes compelling claims on each of us collectively and personally, precisely through their radical specificity, in other words, through the displacements and resistances to unmarked identity precisely as the means to claiming the status of “the human”. The essential (Sojourner) Truth would not settle down; that was her specificity. S/he was not everyman; she was in/appropriate/d. (ibid., p. 54)

Perhaps I am making too much of something that is essentially ‘skin-deep’. But in this moment the rise of new, differencing modes of being, thinking and practicing a post-Enlightenment humanity are already being conscripted in service of creating new consumptions, new identities, new knowledge -making/knowledge -accessing hybridities that are inadvertently reinforcing rather than critically questioning a politics of same-ness. In this example, are these powerful posthuman technologies that apparently applaud and encourage me to state and celebrate my difference via the concept of declaring and setting my ‘preferences’, that are capable of tailoring information to my specific interests (based on my user histories), able to recognise my friends (based on the ‘tagging’ of photos) and predicting and delivering to my consumption patterns (based on pre-set algorithms), already being stemmed towards reproducing the kind of powerful discourses and practices that feminist and postcolonial work on difference has previously tried to overturn? Are our blemishes, our differences, becoming an entry-point for our transformation into ‘perfect’ digital -consumer-avatars? Are they reproducing discourses of being unblemished and homogenised? Are our differences in this posthuman, digital age of tracking and tagging becoming a wormhole through which, in a sleight-of-hand, we are becoming more and more predictably the same?

If, to invoke and in some ways betray de Beauvoir: one is not born human but is made human; then what kind of values do we¹ wish to drive our posthuman pursuits by? How can thinking about our present/future technological advances develop and value difference in our everyday, increasingly cyborgian life? Is to think in posthuman ways to become part of a narrative in which we race to turn our blemishes into branded, digital portals, into access points for: information selected for us; consumption patterns identified and made for us; cyborgian realities delivered to us? Is this just another, more technologically advanced step into a Zizek-style nightmare of interpassivity?

This is not a declaration that is in resistance of cyborgs , of techno-digital hybrids and entangled others of all kinds. To the contrary, this work is in service of waking up to our response-ability (Barad 2007) to direct our advancements in ways that celebrate, include and rescript our notions of what it is to be an Other , to be different and always differencing, to be continually towards-human, always-already entangled with new hybridities, to eliminate the stranglehold of the Vitruvian Man in all his old and new guises – be they corporate, digital or made-flesh, to be aware of how ‘we’ can choose to develop and script our posthuman age.

As the march of a not-too-distant time travels in the spaces of our everyday lives, how are we preparing ourselves to create and to participate in this posthuman present/future with our eyes open? I believe this is the single most important question for the development of 21st century education. It is not just vital for ourselves, but for those we are educating, to travel down new critical highways towards different and participatory futures.

The idea of 21st century education is a complex one and perhaps would benefit from a thorough engagement with the heritage of humanisms passed down from one schooling generation to another (in a quasi-teleological approach to teaching humans how to be and function in a world designed for the betterment of [certain] humans), as it would from apprehending new technologies. As Nathan Snaza suggests, “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 that use that identification to control the entirety of my system of ethics’” (Snaza 2015, p. 18).

These kinds of questions start to move critically towards an understanding of ‘the human’ as something in flux, unfixed, moveable and never static, and perhaps never an ontological state that is entirely achieved. Such a view flies somewhat in the face of classical humanism and deterritorialises the Vitruvian Man from his central position as a master of the universe (or at least the ‘Natural’ world he finds himself in, rather than as part of an integral ecology of). Such deterritorialisations are central to the arguments presented in this book. Rather than solely aim to broaden the category of who gets to be admitted closer to the powerful category of ‘the human’, in terms of having more social, cultural and political purchase on account of race, gender, class and other ‘distinguishing marks’, inquiring into the fibrous separations made from human/nonhuman binaries starts to move pedagogy into a mode that is perhaps more relevant for the kinds of complexities of the 21st century in all its blurred boundaries. This kind of act unravels how these tropes come into being, rather than simply recreates them in new images. It is a critique, with view to creating new kinds of participation. Not passive, or remaining in the heady clouds of the conceptual alone, it addresses how humanist exclusions matter in and through education. Indeed,

Critiquing dehumanization by asserting that some people excluded from the category of ‘the human’ are really huma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Entangling Concepts with Practices
• Part II
• Back Matter