The posthumanist challenge to teaching or teaching’s challenge to posthumanism: a neohumanist proposal of nearness in education

ABSTRACT

Pedagogical approaches emanating from posthumanist and neomaterialist theoretical frameworks can potentially redefine what learning and teaching are. In this paper, I argue, however, that these discussions are marked by a distinct absence, having to do with the role of teachers and the nature of teaching itself. Attempting to make up for this lack, I discuss here posthumanism’s and neomaterialism’s critique of humanism – indeed, in connection to certain reconfigurations of agency as relationality existing between human and non-human species and of learning as encounter between species. I then deliberate on an alternative kind of agency that reconfigures existence, as posthumanism and neomaterialsm do, but also salvages some useful aspects of human agency, which are necessary for discussing teaching and learning. In this way, I am finally able to describe a type of neohumanism illuminated by the state of being a child (childness) and by a certain reconceptualization of teaching and learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Posthumanism
• neohumanism
• assemblage
• Heidegger
• hermeneutics
• nearness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It should be pointed out here that Deleuze and Guattari’s and Barad’s concepts should not be conflated, as they have very different metaphysics, whilst many have written of their incommensurability (e.g., Hein, 2016).

2 There are of course many types of humanisms and as many antihumanisms. Here, I refer to western secular and anthropocentric humanism.

3 Barad’s notion of intra-action denotes a radical form of relationality. Whereas interaction refers to the synergies effected between independent beings, intra-action describes the transformational exchanges between interdepended beings that do not pre-exist these exchanges.

4 By pre-individuality of knowledge, Stiegler (quoted in Kouppanou, 2016b) refers to the possibility for the student to learn anew and give new individuated form to knowledge.

5 Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism is a response to Sartre’s (2007) text ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’. Both thinkers agree that existence comes before essence in the case of the human being, but for Heidegger this is not enough. Humanism needs to be concerned with the human being’s relationship to Being. Of course, in his later thought, Heidegger puts Being under erasure.

6 See also Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2019).