Introduction: Take Your Pick! Posthuman Education, Human Posteducation or Posteducation Humanism

KEYWORDS:

• Posthumanism
• education
• enlightenment
• subjectivity
• individualism

Like the discipline of economics, the philosophy of education and educational studies are offshoots of moral philosophy. They investigate how best to realize the good as part of human existence. In economics, the purpose is to optimize the flows of exchange and the production of value for the cooperative functions of society which is a good because (and here pick your favourite) it produces autonomous individual agents; or maintains and supports personal individual liberty; or inculcates fellow feeling; or allows for more efficient production practices; or increases general welfare. Prior to doing economics, one needs to do the philosophical legwork of ethical justification. Similarly, with education; taking our pick from self-government, equality, liberty or political emancipation. Even Lyotard (1991, 3), the most postmodern of postmodernists and the most sceptical of unifying systems and structures, offers us an axiomatic starting point: ‘That children have to be educated is a circumstance which only proceeds from the fact that they are not completely led by nature, not programmed. The institutions which constitute culture supplement this native lack’. Education is quintessentially human, and its emancipatory goal is quintessentially characteristic of the Enlightenment. It is a behavioural transformation. Plants can be constrained. Animals can be trained. Computers can be programmed. Dependents can be indoctrinated. Only humans, complicit in the practices and ends of education, aware of its goals and consensual to its interventions, can learn. And that is why it is so curiously problematic for posthuman discussions: will the after-human need to learn given new technological immediacies and will the goal of that education still be understood in terms of the values that the posthuman discourse itself, at best, is wary of and, at worst, outright rejects? Surely, education is the human activity or pursuit par excellence – the very sort of thing we can do and no other things can do. After all, what are you doing now as you read this?

The easiest and most immediate way I assume the readers of this journal will envisage education is within the tertiary sector. But there is pre-school education, primary and secondary levels, vocational, training, prison education, popular nonfiction books, debate evenings in pubs, reading groups, book clubs, hobby classes, documentaries, museum visits and countless other instances. Education is ubiquitous. Let us make a baseless empirical remark and rather foolishly claim that when a society forms, one of the initial institutions formed is education. The training of labourers, producers, the teaching of who has power and who does not and why you should accept it, are fundamental to the running of any society. In this journal education is to be understood in this very broad sense of learning.

Education is also essential to modern self-understanding. The Enlightenment led to the characterisation of education as a form of objective freedom; education is rational, right, good insofar as it supports and maintains the individual in independent self-determination: it allows individual to make choices about what matters, what sort of life to live and to attain equal reciprocity with others. However, it has not always been that way. In the Ancient and Medieval world, education, through the transmission of myth and religion, was a basis for political legitimacy, its value was in obedience. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, education was valorised in labour and moral ownership. Now, its apparent purpose is the monetisation of institutions and practices (Rose 2021: 50—59). The modern world has played out the conflict between the positive normative effects of education (truth, ability to be rational, to learn a skill or a role, to become independent, substantiate equality of respect) against the negative ones (rhetoric, post-truth, to divide the social whole, to enforce social domination, to reproduce ways of thinking and value systems). This conflict is reflected in our self-understandings as participants in education. Positively, we understand ourselves as willing to learn, responsible for what we appropriate and the choices we make; yet, negatively we believe our entitlement to knowledge means we stand on the same footing as experts. We accept that we are a storehouse of knowledge that can be communicated, shared, exchanged and used by others with our consent; yet, we understand our relationships as in competition with our classmates and with our teachers. We understand ourselves as deserving our marks as a reflection of our talent skill, acquired knowledge and effort; yet demand that our opinion has the same status as those who know more and better than we do.

The very modern self-understanding produces conflicts with both transhumanist and posthumanist thinking. Transhumanism assumes that the human being is not the end of evolution or development. And it is here that education as an institution and a practice so clearly entwines with the discipline of posthuman and transhuman thought:

‘Trans-human’ emphasizes the way transhumanism goes well beyond humanism in both means and ends. Humanism tends to rely exclusively on educational and cultural refinement to improve human nature whereas transhumanists want to apply technology to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage. Transhumanists regard human nature not as an end in itself, not as perfect, and not as having any claim on our allegiance. Rather, it is just one point along an evolutionary pathway and we can learn to reshape our own nature in ways we deem desirable and valuable. By thoughtfully, carefully, and yet boldly applying technology to ourselves, we can become something no longer accurately described as human – we can become posthuman. (More 2013, 4)

There are those who see the thinking of the beyond of the human as the evolution of the human being (Huxley 1959) and those who see it as the discontinuous rupture with the human being (Kurzweil 2005). There are those who see the technologies of the present and the future as a danger to human status (Fukuyama 2002; Habermas 2003), and those who see them as a liberating force (Braidotti 2013; Ferrando 2013). It is necessary, then, to offer an initial understanding of the term posthuman in use here. Porter opens this collection with a discussion of the distinction. He offers us definitions which mostly align posthuman thought with continental traditions and transhuman thought with analytic thinkers (Cf. Rose 2020: 11—42). All these positions, be they analytic or continental, share the rejection of the notion of exceptional human agency, the ghost in the machine, that requires special explanation. And so, the posthuman is the transition of intelligence which, for a while, had exclusively resided on the site of the human body. The boundaries of thought, its possibility (animal, computer, climate, human), are significant to posthumanism because each occupies a role in the cognitive system previously thought to be exclusively human and such an acknowledgement of other agents or agencies forces us to put into question our very notion, derived from humanism, of agency.

We understand ourselves as unique amongst things because we are responsible for our actions, and take ourselves to be individuals who are the originators of epistemic claims, intentions to act and existing in and through the self-contained physical body. The critique of the human subject and its supposed exceptional status in the order of things is well known, whether it be in the early anti-Cartesians in seventeenth century England (Hobbes) and eighteenth-century Italy (Vico), the young Hegelians and Marx, the schools of pscyhoanalysis and Freud, or the post-structuralism of the nineteen-sixties. Nietzsche, a thinker seemingly intimately bound with the discipline of posthuman studies (as reflected in Lipowicz and Balthasar’s contributions), managed to summarise all the past and future attacks on the primacy of the subject and the self-understanding of humans (Nietzsche 2001: section 354). Humans may well understand themselves as individuals, but such an understanding is an error derived from a number of factors: the seduction of language and grammatical arbitrariness; the identification of consciousness and the will with nothing but the strongest desire which no more belongs to an inner world of an entity than the outer world of physical causes; and social pressures and relations which require and contextualise the type of agency for the social web and its meanings, grounded in the modern commitment to egalitarianism and responsibility. What is at stake, at base, is the modern belief that individual subjects are in control of and best identified by a storehouse of internal desires and intentions that are properly their own and, in ideal situations, most immediately present to the subject himself, herself or themselves; that the deeds, actions and products of effort emanate from something we identify as a self, a personality, an individual identity. Nietzsche manages to capture all the questions which prise open this self-understanding and to raise the problem of alienation: one’s intentions are not properly one’s own, they are the product of social relations and class or social identities. What you believe is in your interest or your preference is actually that of the other acting through you, whether that other be an unconscious of which you are unaware and which you repress (Hobbes, Freud, psychoanalysis), the relations of power and system of social production in your culture (Vico, Marx, Foucault), or the structures, expectations and demands of language and grammar (Heidegger, Derrida, post-structuralism). The priority of the subject in modern philosophy is an ideological construct, an error, a distortion, an exercise of power, a production of power.

But then, how is posthumanist theory different from postmodern critiques of the subject? It is in the emphasis on the impact of technology. Human-modifying technology has a distinct effect on modern social and economic arrangements and the self-understanding of the subject. I understand myself as autonomous, an individual, the author of this article, to be judged on its quality, yet perhaps that has been, is or will be an illusion. In education we can see how the use of genetic and medical enhancements on one’s offspring or citizens, the distribution of cognition through a system, access to smart drugs, to artificially intelligent language models for research and composition and to privatised databases of information will have an impact on memory and cognitive capacity, alertness, productive capacities and speed to process information. All these technologies will alter the self-understanding of individuals and the relationships between groups and classes. The self-understanding of the human, the learner (teacher and student) and the aims and goals of each of these manifestations of education is different and, in most cases, it is the emergence of a new technology that acts as the agent of change: mathematics, writing, the printing press, plastics, computerisation. Word processors superseded the pen, but I assume we do still have a pen in our bag. It is just its use, primacy, value and purpose have all transformed. The pen just sits there, a little confused about how it lost its ascendancy in the world of things, how other things can do what it did better and how it should now understand itself. At least, it would, if it had a self-understanding. So too with the human and the advent of the new posthuman. And think, just for a moment, how the pen is now reified, to be used on special documents, to sign legal documents, to express grace and elegance, and intimacy in handwritten notes. Posthumanism is not necessarily a negative development or the harbinger of obsolescence. But, unless we are careful, some of us may find ourselves in Montblanc boxes and some of us may find ourselves left-behind in old multibuy packs of biros.

Much of our disconcert with the new emerging educational practices and technologies comes from a very modern commitment to the individual as sovereign, as in control of himself, herself or themselves and the equality that demands. One can imagine the classroom of the future with humans sitting alongside enhanced humans, AIs, robots, upscaled animals, but these images from a Gibson or Banks novel do tend to distract from the main issues. It is worthwhile to bear in mind Habermas’s 2003, 15) pertinent warning not to be intoxicated by images of science fiction and thus leave these issues to fictional writers and natural scientists. The marking of an essay which has been, in part composed, by a ChatGPT algorithm, or how to reward or scale students using implants or pharmaceutical enhancements, or even artificial genetic endowments, when currently most societies are committed to widening participation to rectify the worst abuses of the social lottery. Such thinkers want to reduce the transhumanist agenda down to a subset of bioethical concerns, framing themselves in expected and familiar arguments of natural law, religious objections and rejection of the different and the new. The transhumanist will see education and human modification as an ethical matter which is novel due to the technology but to be resolved in the old tropes and principles of ethical theory, the values we have already established. The normative agenda for the bioliberal is familiar to us. The state interferes only to prevent harm to others, not to regulate the choices of the individual. Yet, this rests on the putative acceptance of liberal accounts of individualism, as well as an unproblematically appropriated host of contested concepts and understandings of the subject, the good and the right. All these positions, bio-ludditism, neoliberalism and bio-libertarianism, are one-sided in hanging on to an outdated model of subjectivity which corrupts their normative recommendations. They underestimate the radical change coming; the social rupture which is brought about by emergent factors.

The present special issue is mostly concerned with posthuman approaches which take seriously this rupture. Transhumanists and bio-luddites are most concerned with the social implications of technological transformations. Posthumanists share these interests but do not see the solutions in established ethical theories. Take education: I educate myself for greater welfare, freedom, power, sovereignty – my education is about me, the liberal subject pre-exists and grounds the discourse. Posthumanism differs from transhumanism in that it is the discourse of the humanities that recognises the actualisation of the postmodern critiques of the exceptionalism of the human subject. Posthuman education is then the transmission, resistance to, institutionalisation or the simple critique of these technologies on the sphere of learning. It is, therefore, about change: change in our self-understanding as individuals, classes, groups, species and changes in our practices and aims. And posthuman education? It is here that the technology actualises a very different social reality. Here, education will change in the context of distributed cognition, smart drugs, globalisation and genetic interventions. A context where the human is still what interests us, but a human relegated from its lofty and unentitled pedestal of the central, individual reasoning and thinking node. And that will affect change elsewhere. The belief that there is a natural order to power or to distribution is challenged as soon as one is being educated. No changes were as grand as the distribution of reading material so we could all equally access information and that brought about the enlightenment subject. The aim of the articles in this journal is to question what happens when the liberal subject, subject of and subject to modernising education, is humbled, enfeebled and put in question. The following articles offer us some visions of the new, enfeebled educational subjectivity. Only when we have some idea of the new subject can we ask the simpler questions about when and how much attention generating memory drugs one can take.

An editor is like a music producer. One aims to select the running order to construct a narrative out of fragments. For example, Iron Maiden had a tendency to put the epic always as the last track of side 2; and Dio a penchant for putting the most meaningful and thematic of their songs on side 1, track 2. The analogy is not frivolous. Just as only those older than forty understand reference to a ‘side’ when talking about music, the posthuman age and its transformation into the digital stream has made music fragmented, tracks alienated from their narratives, asynchronous and hyperreal in an oddly literal Baudrillardian sense. Technology transforms practices and the technologies of learning are transforming education and with it the very certainties of individualism which underpin our values. With a journal, we tend to read the fragment we want, to ignore the running order. Let us see whether order can be reimposed. The collection before you, if it does little else, should allow us a framework to begin to think through these issues and demonstrate the pertinence of posthuman studies to the discussion.

It opens with a piece that sets the stage. Allen Porter surveys positions with respect to educational debates and offers a possible, speculative account of pedagogy which defines the formal condition for some of the substantive accounts which follow. Ashley Woodward concentrates on the condition of knowledge in posthuman societies, understanding the subject of education through the transformation of knowledge into information. Again, what a posthuman pedagogy might be is left at a speculative level. Instead, Woodward concentrates on the subject of education, the one who is educated, and the transformations that occur due to the explicitly specific technological changes and characteristics of the post-information age. It follows on from Porter because we see theory and the thinking of technology brought to bear on the subject of education but taken together, the two articles offer a framework of posthuman (as opposed to transhuman) thinking on education.

Other thinkers seek to situate the posthuman debate in the Nietzschean anti-liberalism tradition. Markus Lipowicz offers a critical addendum on the reliance of one interpretation of Nietzsche prevalent in posthuman thinking. The reason to establish Nietzsche as a posthumanist is to ground a normative judgement about why bringing about the overman’s existence is desirable in terms of personal autonomy (More 1990, 2013; Sorgner 2009, 2015). Within this debate, Lipowicz is right to shine a light on an interpretation of Nietzsche that does not shy away from its antihumanism. A theme that is developed in Pierre Balthasar’s reading. Responding to Woodward’s observation of the divorce of the content of education from its participants, Balthasar shares Lipowicz’s rejection of the simple, non-nuanced appropriation of Nietzsche to the transhuman banner, but uses a literary engagement to propose posthumanism as a practical philosophy, a philosophy of self-overcoming and hence educational. Turning posthumanism into an existentialism, Balthasar offers a different Nietzschean response to the worship of technology already criticized by Lipowitz in the earlier article. Lipowicz and Balthasar taken together offer an almost cautionary parable for those who use Nietzsche to determine the direction of human development.

The final two essays deal with the actual pedagogy of such a theoretical intervention in educational practices. Dominic Garcia’s article is an account of an experimental use of computers to undermine and deconstruct linear and individualistic ways of thinking and reasoning. Garcia describes an application of simple software to show a cybernetic system aiding self-understanding, offering a simple educational tool for the emancipation of new subjectivities from discursive oppressions. Finally, Francesca Ferrando details a speculative experimental approach. Recalling once more the speculations of Porter and Woodward, as well as the creativity norm of Lipowicz and Balthasar, Ferrando casts posthumanism as a theory of individual self-discovery, a speculative imagining of new practico-curricular approach fashioned around three concepts derived from posthumanist theory: selves-care, flex(st)ability and commUnity.

All in all, the collected articles offer the reader a way to think through the changes and transformations with respect to the subjectivities of student, teacher and learner. As new technologies begin to write and mark for us, as new systems begin to think and produce for us, and as new drugs begin to attend and remember for us, it is worthwhile to think through where we shall be in all this: Montblanc or biro? New creatives or left-behinds?

Acknowledgments

My most sincere gratitude goes to the supportive editors of the IJPS, especially Lisa Foran, as well as those who helped on the ground, as it were, Jake Parkins, Jacob Parkin, Holden Rasmussen, and Stephen Overy.

Disclosure Statement

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