Gough asks an important question about posthuman pedagogy and  gives an example of Mayakovsky’s Cyberantics as narrative and textual strategy which might help us in the rhizomantically becoming-cyborg configuration. The chosen audience for the story were kids because of their ‘sense of wonder and curiosity’ which transcends limitations posed by too often dichotomous academic structures.

At the same time, I came across Dave Cormier’s blog with a series of posts tagged ‘Rhizome’. Dave has been pondering on rhizomatic learning for some time now. In one of his posts, he writes a compelling letter to his 5-year-old son, explaining what rhizomatic learning is. Through a moving story involving a bunch of theropods and other ancient creatures, Dave points out how the learning can be stifled if the lines of flights are cut off before they form. If there is no black and white (Angus et al, 2001), why ask questions about ‘right’ and ‘false’ dinosaurs? Instead, following Dave’s advice, it would be better to ask ‘How would I feel if a piece of silicon was naturally part of me? What if my best friend was a robot? How would my life differ?’ Such questions propel the conversation and as Dave says ‘the stories will never end’.

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Weeks later, reading about cyborgs and posthumans, I was reminded of Dziga Vertov, an innovative Russian cinematographer who already in the 20’s pronounced himself ‘a mechanical eye, a machine’, who ‘freed from the boundaries of time and space, coordinate[s] any and all points of the universe, wherever [he] want[s] them to be. [His] way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus [he] explain[s] in a new way the world unknown to you’.

His Man with a Movie Camera, which shows a day in the life, is innovative for various reasons one of them being the idea of a film within the film; the film itself becomes the subject (the relevant sequences showing Vertov in most impossible positions from the point of view of human anatomy and physical accessibility!).

Reading around Vertov, I found two contemporary projects echoing his ideas:

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – one of the most creative uses of the Internet according to Google. Users contribute their own interpretations of Vertov’s sequences which are then streamed alongside, thus adding a twist to the original version. A day of encountering significant objects back in the 20 together with their equivalents in the contemporary times, filtered and processed by the contributor’s and final viewer’s imaginations. A dialogue reaching beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. Could that be another example of posthuman pedagogy?

dearphotograph.com, explored in detail by Ian Bogost, allows us to see what a photograph looks like in a photograph. It’s not only about sentimentalised human experiences but the object itself as the photograph becomes a salient entity encountered by the viewer. Bogost refers to it as object-oriented ontology which basically asks us to see the world of things as things in a world, rather than our world, with things in it. Another boundary blurred, another domination democraticised. Through visual turn …

Is it possible to create a space where these two species of knowledge can meet and mingle? (Pedersen, 2010: 241).

I found this question to be crucial when considering educability of the posthuman. What Pedersen meant in her article was the boundary work between animal and education studies but it could be extended to whole disciplines in the way Pickering (2005) did in his essay where he suggested that natural and social sciences transcend each other by forming assemblages with ‘inner unity’ and around ‘evolving dialectic’. I think that a similar project can be undertaken in regard to different subjectivities, namely writers/editors and readers, as exemplified by the Liquid Reader Project from the University of London, my nomination for a posthuman(-esque) pedagogy task. Even though it does not lead explicitly to human/machinic hybridisation, the project, inspired by  Gary Hall’s and Clare Birchall’s Liquid Book Project aspires to explore liquidity, promote boundary work, foster open access and technological innovation and so questions the human project understood as ‘one-way, closed form of knowledge transfer in university education that is encompassed by the static, photocopiable ‘course reading pack’ – typically designed by course leaders and handed out to students’ (from the project description).

The blurb from the dedicated website spells out exactly the origin and the rationale of the project.

[This project] engages media students in a dynamic process of devising instead a fluid, open-access, online ‘reader’, whose content and form are being negotiated, updated and altered by students themselves, under the guidance of the course leader. Using the freely available media platforms (online archives, educational wikis, YouTube, Blogger), students are able to both link to the already available textual and audio-visual material (essays, books, video clips) and upload their own documents and designs. They are thus actively involved in producing a ‘liquid reader’ – a customisable learning tool which involves them in curriculum design. Via an involvement with the Open Humanities Press, and its Culture Machine Liquid Books Series, the project promotes the socially significant ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open learning’ under the open access agenda.

According to the project description, the aim is to decentre the author by making everybody an editor/author, which can be seen as an attempt to liquidise the boundaries between the two subjectivities, thus enabling them to meet and mingle, producing various entanglements.

There is a wealth of additional questions and issues raised alongside, for example in regard to the process of remixing, repurposing,  limitability of the ‘book’ , attribution, citation and intellectual property.

There are two accompanying tasks here.