This week the lifestream reflects my conscious attempt to grapple with some of the academic and philosophical themes in the block reading. I’ve been trying on a posthumanist hat. It fits a lot better than it did on Monday.
I’ve used the lifestream this week to draw together definitions and, since then, to test my nascent understanding of these definitions. I found some of the secondary readings particularly impenetrable in places, and I think that is reflected in the speculative tone I’ve been adopting all week. A main theme is binaries: my interpretation of Bayne (2015) concluded with an assessment of her opposition to the abbreviation of complex assemblages. I picked up binaries again in a longer post about some of the secondary readings, a sort of meandering through some of the key ideas I’ve been encountering, and a brief sojourn in what this may mean for educational philosophy and pedagogy.
Another recurring theme in what I’ve written and produced this week has been the postness of posthumanism and its necessary relativity to the dominant ideas that preceded it and caused it. There’s an innate sense of the disruptiveness, the fracturing and splintering of ideas and identities, even the combativeness with which posthumanism takes on its humanistic, anthropocentric predecessors. This sits in contrast with the view expressed in a Desert Island Discs interview with the choreographer, Wayne McGregor. He argues in favour of a continuum between technology and the body, approbative rather than antagonistic.
So it’s been quite a theoretical week, in many ways, and as we enter Week 3, I’m hoping to switch my attention to concrete examples of the implications of cybercultures for educational practice.
This is a really fantastic weekly summary Helen!
Great to see you reflecting on your specific lifestream items, and drawing this together into themes.
Binaries, dualisms, and oppositions seem to found everywhere don’t they? Perhaps they are ways of ordering the world that we find useful, or even comforting. They rarely seem to account for the nuance and complexity of the world around us, I’d argue.
Interesting ideas here around the combativeness of posthumanism too. Braidotti’s The Posthuman (http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745641584), if you can get hold of it, might be a good read here, given that she describes critical posthumanism as the end of the opposition between humanism and anti-humanism. Nevertheless, I do see your point here, and the critical here may tend towards the confrontational. I wonder, though, if some of that is warranted, given the discrimination with which a ‘Eurocentric humanism’ has exported and privileged a particular model of human being, to the detriment of all others.
Looking forward to reading more of your blog.