Cyborg Yeast

The main issue lay with PostHuman.  Things that helped were changing the meanings I’d previously given to the name.  I stopped thinking of it as post = after in the sense of a linear development and saw it more as post = after as in “we’re finished with that”.  Edwards’ article on Lifelong Learning was crucial reading in helping me put the pieces together.

Not so much post as plus - a little bit extra

As others on the course have noted, the human element of posthuman is still the same in terms of the motivators and drivers of human endeavour.  But the notions that Edwards postulates of matters of concern, gathering and the avoidance of separation of meaning from matter started to make sense (on the 3rd and subsequent reading).  “Entanglement of human and non-human in the enactment of the world” (Edwards, 2010) suggested a more pragmatic approach to knowing and hence learning especially when put into context with Freud’s “education is an impossible profession” statement.

So I went looking online for examples that I could make sense of.  It wasn’t as easy as finding my Cyborgs.  Then I spotted the argument now raging between Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson in the London Review of Books over Mishra’s review of Ferguson’s latest work; Civilisation: the West and the Rest.  Without going into the details, the issue lies over a concept or rather a number of concepts: imperialism, colonialism, racism being chief.  Ferguson is known for his stance that all empires were not bad all of the time.  Mishra is an eminent author and critic from India and rejects that notion.

So is this a gathering?  What do these concepts represent?  What is the difference between colonialism, imperialism, globalism, nationalism and so on?  Can the meaning be separated from the matter?  As Edwards puts forward, central to the PostHuman condition are conditionality, fallibility, experimentation and responsibility.  Adding richness and depth is his reference to Biesta’s work on Emancipatory Ignorance: trust without ground, transcendental violence, responsibility without knowledge.  There seemed to be enough of this happening in the Mishra/Ferguson tussle to justify some element of posthumanism.  Without a doubt, neither side is infallible and both are experimenting with knowing as they push against historical tides.  Both are risk takers as evidenced by their contentious work (Mishra on Kashmir, for example, or Ferguson on the British Empire) and this recent clash denotes transcendental violence on a massive scale with challenge, confrontation, the role of difference (accusations of racism, counter allegations of academic sloppiness) and otherness.

Niall Ferguson

What hooked me into this as a posthuman gathering was the idea that these writers (as educators) had unlimited responsibility for the “emergence of the world”.  In other words, as they become entangled with both the matter and the meaning of their knowing subject, through a technical forum, the ripples from their gathering will inform and engage others.  This is not the representation of fact but a grappling, an engaging with matters of concern and their high voltage entanglement has arisen from experimentation.  (Not so long ago, no historian would have dared suggest that the European Empires were anything but bad, for example).  What remains to be seen is if it qualifies as “responsible”.

Matters of Concern