Beyond cyborg subjectivities: Becoming-posthumanist educational researchers

Abstract

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to (re)interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research.

Keywords:

• Collective biography
• cyborg subjectivity
• environmental education
• posthumanist educational inquiry

Notes

1. Braidotti (2000, p. 170) argues that ‘the notion of “figurations” – in contrast to the representational function of “metaphors” – emerges as crucial to Deleuze’s notion of a conceptually charged use of the imagination’. Similarly, Haraway (1997, p. 11) asserts that ‘figurations are performative images that can be inhabited … condensed maps of contestable worlds … [and] bumps that make us swerve from literal-mindedness’.

2. The concept of lines of flight is one among several created by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, pp. 3–25) – others include ‘assemblage’, ‘territorialisation/deterritorialisation’ and ‘rhizome’ – for analysing thinking as flows or movements across space.

3. We use the ~ (tilde) to signal a conjoining of co-implicated notions in what we think of as complicity i.e. thinking that is complicit with talking and simultaneously vice versa.

4. Haraway (1991, p. 149) writes: ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction … The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century’.

5. Haraway (1989, p. 5) explains that SF designates ‘a complex emerging narrative field in which the boundaries between science fiction (conventionally, sf) and fantasy became highly permeable in confusing ways, commercially and linguistically’; SF also signifies ‘an increasingly heterodox array of writing, reading, and marketing practices indicated by a proliferation of “sf” phrases: speculative fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative futures, speculative fabulation’.

6. Following Haraway (1994, p. 63) I find diffraction a more generative optical metaphor than reflection: ‘My favourite optical metaphor is diffraction – the noninnocent, complexly erotic practice of making a difference in the world, rather than displacing the same elsewhere’.

7. My narrative experiments are essays, understood both as a verb – to attempt, to try, to test – and as a noun. In theoretical inquiry an essay serves similar purposes to an experiment in empirical research – a methodical way of investigating a question or problem. Both ‘essay’ and the related term ‘assay’ come to English through the French essayer from the Latin exigere, to weigh. I write essays to test ideas, to ‘weigh’ them up, to give me (and I hope others) a sense of their worth.

8. The sense in which Deleuze (1994) uses ‘science fiction’ here converges with Richardson’s (2001) notion of writing ‘to find something out’. Deleuze (1994, p. xxi) elaborates: ‘We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other’.

9. Malins’ article focusses specifically on the implications of this conception of the body for understanding and responding to drug users. Ian Buchanan (1997) and Nick Fox (2012) provide further elabora(tions ‘.of this theoretical position. Potts (2002, 2004) provides detailed demonstrations of the value of a Deleuzian approach to the socio-cultural impact of the medicalization of sexuality and the use of pharmaceuticals for the treatment of so-called ‘sexual dysfunctions’.

10. I should acknowledge that my long engagement with Katherine Hayles’ work owes much to my appreciation of her enthusiasm for incorporating SF texts into her scholarly research on posthumanism and other subject matters at the intersections of literature and science (see, e.g. N. Katherine Hayles, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2003).