The Transhumanist Creep: Posthumanism, Pedagogy, and the Praxeological Mangle

Roman Bartosch

doi:10.16995/olh.4688

Abstract

This contribution takes one of posthumanism’s most powerful conceptual distinctions – between posthumanist thought and its ill-famed doppelgänger, transhumanism – as the starting point for a critique of posthumanist thinking in education. Pointing to moments in which both post- and transhumanism become harder to distinguish in educational theory and practice, it utilises the notion of the ‘creep phenomenon’ to describe how these seemingly opposite concepts and ways of thinking can become unfavourably ‘mangled’ in everyday practices of teaching and of marketing posthumanism. It thus makes a case for the need for empirical thick descriptions of practices at the unsought intersection and overlap between post- and transhumanist thought. Drawing on work on the cognitive and affective impact of literature, it suggests that literature pedagogy is one of the places where such convergences are explicitly reflected and that literature pedagogy as a form of applied literary and cultural studies provides helpful insight into such practices of creeping overlap. Literature pedagogy, from this vantage, can be seen as an aid in formulating praxeological critiques of a prevalent practice-blindness in the field.

Highlights

Ian McEwan’s delightfully clever novel, Machines Like Me, ends with a number of ethical conundrums
The ‘mangle,’ Pickering writes, ‘conjures up the image of the unpredictable transformations worked upon whatever gets fed into’ it and ‘draws attention to the emergently intertwined delineation and reconfiguration of machinic captures and human intentions, practices, and so on’ (1995: 23). Such a concern with ‘emergently intertwined’ reconfigurations is what I am after as I probe the idea that a thick description of the educational practices revolving around posthumanism and fiction can provide empirical and praxeological leeway for a critique of posthumanist theory and practice
Digitisation and its neoliberal background noise may drown out the whispered promises of a truly transformative education through the mechanistic din of educational solutionism and optimising fervour. This is why a dedicated look at pedagogical endeavours situated within the posthumanist discursive arena helps us understand in how far debates in posthumanism and, I would like to argue here, its potential if uneasy links with transhumanism, need to question what Timothy Clark calls ‘hyper-humanism’ whose key fallacy is to assume that technology is only a tool, the servant of certain presupposed human features and faculties that are somehow always unchanged – reason, progress, a certain egalitarianism and progressivism, self-improvement and so on