Is ‘the posthuman’ educable? On the convergence of educational philosophy, animal studies, and posthumanist theory

Abstract

Formal education in Western society is firmly rooted in humanist ideals. ‘Becoming human’ by cultivating certain cognitive, social, and moral abilities has even symbolised the idea of education as such in Enlightenment philosophical traditions. These ideas are increasingly coming under scrutiny by posthumanist theorists, who are addressing fundamental ontological and epistemological questions about defining an essential ‘human nature’, as well as the elastic boundary work between the human and nonhuman subject. This paper responds to the ongoing discussions on the diverse articulations of posthumanism in education theory and animal studies by investigating possibilities of a shared conceptual framework that allows for a productive dialogue between them. By analysing some of the meanings attached to the notion of posthumanism in education theory and animal studies, the paper begins to identify some instabilities of humanist traditions/ideals of education and explores posthumanist challenges to research on the institutionalised production, mediation, and development of knowledge.

Keywords:

• posthumanism
• critical education theory
• human–animal relationships
• intersubjectivity
• species performativity

Acknowledgements

I thank the internal seminar participants at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, for valuable feedback. I am particularly indebted to Eva Hayward. I also thank Mikael Pedersen for helpful comments on an early draft of this paper, as well as the Discourse reviewers. Finally, I am very grateful to the GenNa programme at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University for funding and hosting my research fellowship.

Notes

1. Adopted from the notion of 'compulsory heterosexuality’ as articulated by Adrienne Rich and Judith Butler, McKay frames 'compulsory humanity’ as follows: ‘It is compulsory that we “become” human, and this very becoming is a function of our renunciation of the animal’ (2005, p. 218).

2. Humane education, an approach to teach children care and compassion toward animals through formal and non-formal education, originated around 145 years ago as part of the organised animal protection movement (Unti & DeRosa, 2003).

3. For instance, the Swedish National Curriculum (Lpo 94/Lpf 94) defines values that the school should ‘represent and impart’ in accordance with ‘the ethics borne by Christian tradition and Western humanism’ (National Agency for Education, 2006, p. 3).

4. Some educational situations manifest approaches to blur this human–animal divide. However, the expression of human–animal continuities in the classroom (and elsewhere) may, paradoxically, appear as an even more authoritative emphasis of the reinscription of species boundaries (Pedersen, 2010).

5. By ‘species performativity’ I mean discursive practices and processes that produce and reproduce nonhuman otherness in specific contexts of human–animal interaction. The term is developed from Birke, Bryld, and Lykke's (2004) application of Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity to human–animal relationships. (For a further account of species performativity, see Pedersen, 2010.)

6. I thank Måns Andersson for alerting me to the point that biologists might be sceptical to this idea, on the grounds that selection of complex genetic characteristics would be extremely complicated in humans.

7. I am not sure whether Pickering would consider himself to be an animal studies scholar, but I nonetheless regard his article to which I am referring as an interesting contribution to the field of animal studies.

8. That is, a community in which we are all in a sense strangers to each other and which asks us to respond to what is unfamiliar (see Biesta, 2006, pp. 55–71; Lingis, 1994).

9. The question of whether it is in animals’ interests to morph discursively or phenomenologically into human/animal/technoscientific cyborg relationships or assemblages is, to my experience, rarely raised in posthumanist scholarship. (For an example from critical animal studies see Weisberg, 2009)