Posthumanism in Practice 1350293806, 9781350293809

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Theory into praxis
Section I: Science and Technology
Chapter 1: Engineering the posthuman: Conceiving handedness and constructing disabled prostheses
Chapter 2: Posthuman(izing) biomedicine: The role of microbiota in Parkinson’s disease research
Chapter 3: Posthumanism and the limits of multispecies relationality
Chapter 4: Alien embodiment and nomadic subjectivity: A speculative report
Section II: Art and Curation
Chapter 5: Sympoietic art practice with plants: A case for posthumanist co-expression
Chapter 6: Kneading bodies
Chapter 7: Circus as practices of hope
Chapter 8: Posthumanism in play: Entangled subjects, agentic cutscenes, vibrant matter, and species hybridity
Chapter 9: Posthumanist interfaces: Developing new conceptual frameworks for museum practices in the context of a major museum technology collection
Chapter 10: Affirming future(s): Towards a posthumanist conservation in practice
Section III: Education
Chapter 11: Water, ice, and dead ‘tadpoles’: Discovering within undecided boundaries in early childhood education for sustainability research
Chapter 12: Reflections on a language teacher education praxis from a posthumanist viewpoint
Chapter 13: Unlearning to be human? The pedagogical implications of twenty-first-century post-anthropocentrism
Chapter 14: Posthumanism and postdisciplinarity: Breaking our old teaching and research habits
Index

Citation preview

Posthumanism in Practice

Posthumanism in Practice Series editors: Matt Hayler (University of Birmingham, UK), Danielle Sands (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) and Christine Daigle (Brock University, Canada) Ways of thinking allied with “posthumanism” have received increasing interest across a number of disciplines, predominantly in philosophy and the humanities, but also in biology, law and ethics, and art theory and creative practice. Indeed, we contend that the field’s potential implications extend to the majority of academic disciplines. Focusing on emerging trends, cutting-edge research and current debates, Posthumanism in Practice presents work in and across multiple disciplines that investigates how posthumanism can effect change. The questions that posthumanism raises, of what it means to be human, the nature of our relationship with the world, our relative importance, our obligations, entanglements, potentials and limitations, speak to every aspect of life. This series will address questions such as: What are the implications and entailed effects of the revelations of contemporary science and philosophy? Can our laws, societies, and egos hold up to our becoming less special? What can we do, and how might thinking differently enable us to act differently? Works in this series will pose these kinds of questions and offer practical answers, suggestions and provocations. The aim is to inspire work that isn’t occurring often or loudly enough, and to promote a wide variety of voices which are left outside of the arenas where they might be most usefully and importantly heard. Disciplinary conversations also often remain siloed, but posthumanism is inherently an interdisciplinary concern; the field questions (but doesn’t necessarily reject) the usefulness and stability of existing disciplinary boundaries. As such, this series will prioritize works which bring insights across those boundaries and which demonstrate the real-world potential and/or risks of posthumanist ideas.

Editorial Board: Megen de Bruin-Molé (University of Southampton, UK) Emily Jones (University of Essex, UK) Yoriko Otomo (Director of Global Research Network) Pedro Oliveira (Independent Researcher) Rick Dolphijn (Utrecht University, Netherlands) Isabel Galleymore (University of Birmingham, UK) Craig N. Cipolla (Tufts University, USA) Stefan Herbrechter (Heidelberg University, Germany) Simone Bignall (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia) Olga Cielemęcka (University of Turku, Finland) Dominique Chen (Waseda University, Japan) Mickey Vallee (Athabasca University Canada)

Posthumanism in Practice Edited by Christine Daigle and Matt Hayler

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Christine Daigle, Matt Hayler and Contributors, 2023 Christine Daigle and Matt Hayler have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design: Ben Anslow Cover image: Fairy, glowing mushroom (© janiecbros / iStock) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-9380-9 ePDF: 978-1-3502-9381-6 eBook: 978-1-3502-9382-3 Series: Posthumanism in Practice Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Theory into praxis  Christine Daigle and Matt Hayler

vii xi

1

Section I  Science and Technology 1 Engineering the posthuman: Conceiving handedness and constructing disabled prostheses  Stuart Murray 2 Posthuman(izing) biomedicine: The role of microbiota in Parkinson’s disease research  Aaron Bradshaw 3 Posthumanism and the limits of multispecies relationality  Bryan Lim 4 Alien embodiment and nomadic subjectivity: A speculative report  Steve Klee and Kirsten McKenzie

17 31 43 57

Section II  Art and Curation 5 Sympoietic art practice with plants: A case for posthumanist co-expression  Lin Charlston 6 Kneading bodies  Madaleine Trigg 7 Circus as practices of hope  Marie-Andrée Robitaille 8 Posthumanism in play: Entangled subjects, agentic cutscenes, vibrant matter, and species hybridity  Poppy Wilde 9 Posthumanist interfaces: Developing new conceptual frameworks for museum practices in the context of a major museum technology collection  Deborah Lawler-Dormer and Christopher John Müller 10 Affirming future(s): Towards a posthumanist conservation in practice  Hélia Marçal and Rebecca Gordon

79 95 114 133

147 165

Section III  Education 11 Water, ice, and dead ‘tadpoles’: Discovering within undecided boundaries in early childhood education for sustainability research  Debra Harwood 12 Reflections on a language teacher education praxis from a posthumanist viewpoint  Laryssa Paulino de Queiroz Sousa and Rosane Rocha Pessoa

181 198

vi

Contents

13 Unlearning to be human? The pedagogical implications of twenty-first-century post-anthropocentrism  Stefan Herbrechter 14 Posthumanism and postdisciplinarity: Breaking our old teaching and research habits  Christine Daigle Index

212 227 241

Contributors Aaron Bradshaw is a biological scientist whose PhD and postdoctoral research focused on the cell biology of neurodegenerative diseases. Since 2020 he has been working as an Independent Scholar with interests in the role of microorganisms in neurodegeneration and environmental issues. His forthcoming article in Environmental Humanities discusses how humans and microorganisms might form new relationships to collaborate on pressing environmental issues. Lin Charlston is an independent researcher and a practising artist whose conceptual artist-books are represented in over forty public collections including Tate Britain and the Environmental Library at Berkeley. Her PhD at Manchester School of Art, MMU (2019), developed a sympoietic art practice with plants informed by posthumanist ethics. For Charlston, the artist-book is part of a collective, adaptive work which manifests during the co-expressive process. The artist-book I buried my arm (2018) relives a performative gesture of connection with the underground plant world. Christine Daigle is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University. She has published extensively on existentialist thinkers such as Nietzsche, Sartre and Beauvoir, including her latest monograph, Nietzsche as Phenomenologist: Becoming What One Is (2021). She also co-edited the volume From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism (2022) and is completing a monograph on the theme of posthumanist vulnerability. Rebecca Gordon is a freelance researcher and writer in modern and contemporary art and has taught in the History of Art Departments at University College London and the University of Glasgow, as well as guest lecturing at the University of Amsterdam and New York University. Her current research focuses on care and emotional labour of social practice artists, a posthumanist ethics of care and the conservation of contemporary art as a counter-extinction activity. Debra Harwood is Professor of Early Childhood Education at Brock University, Canada. Her research is situated within a framework of challenging the social, political, cultural and historical forces that have shaped central ideas such as care, professionalism, child agency, place and intra-active pedagogy. Her most recent project involved a study of young children’s entanglements within a forest, specifically examining how relationships with the more-than-human world might foster educational practices that support a more sustainable planet.

viii

Contributors

Matt Hayler is Associate Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham, and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Cultures. His past work has looked at electronic reading via cognitive science, post-phenomenology, and the philosophy of technology (Challenging the Phenomena of Technology (2015); Ambient Literature (2022)). His current work looks at the implications of posthumanism for human enhancement projects, digital cultures, and moral responsibility (see e.g. ‘Posthumanism and the Bioethics of Moral Responsibility’ in Bioethics and the Posthumanities (2022)). Stefan Herbrechter is a writer, researcher and Privatdozent at Heidelberg University. He has published widely on English and comparative literature, critical and cultural theory, and cultural and media studies. His main publications related to his current research focus, posthumanism and its critique, include Autoimmunities (with Michelle Jamieson, 2018); Narrating Life (with Elisabeth Friis, 2016); European Posthumanism (with Manuela Rossini and Ivan Callus, 2016); Posthumanism – A Critical Analysis (2013); Posthumanist Subjectivities (with Ivan Callus, 2012); Posthumanist Shakespeares (with Ivan Callus, 2012); Posthumanismus – Eine kritische Einführung (2009); Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges (with Ivan Callus, 2009) and Discipline and Practice (with Ivan Callus, 2004). He is Director of the Critical Posthumanism Network (cri​tica​lpos​thumanism​​.net) and General Editor of its online ‘Genealogy of the Posthuman’ project (cri​tica​lpos​thumanism​.net​/gen​ealogy). Steve Klee is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln, and an artist and theorist who explores the philosophical relationship between aesthetics, politics and natural science. The through-line here is the question of human agency: how do biological and socio-historically constrained subjects act upon their world? What are their potentials and limitations? Exhibitions include a solo show Between a Rock and a Hard Place for Five Years gallery, London (2015), and involvement in Concrete Plastic, LAM Gallery, Los Angeles (2016), as well as Perpetual Liquidity at No.1 Smithery, Kent (2016). He has published on Jacques Rancière, and myriad contemporary artists, and is currently developing articles on the relation between science, new realist philosophy and aesthetics. Deborah Lawler-Dormer is a research manager at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Her work is transdisciplinary and often engages art, science and technology in collaboration with industry, tertiary and community partners. She is the lead curator for the exhibition Invisible Revealed (2022) developed in partnership with Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. She is also a visiting Research Fellow with the Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre at the University of New South Wales and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Recent publications include a chapter on ‘Critical posthumanist practices from within the Museum’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (2022). Bryan Lim completed his PhD on human–HIV relationalities at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is interested in probing the limits of current debates in social

 Contributors ix theory regarding the scope and extent of our relations with non-human others and more broadly, the pragmatics of radical pluralism, and how practices of thinking, knowing and living differently might be encouraged to flourish. Hélia Marçal is Lecturer in History of Art, Materials and Technology at the University College London. She was the fellow in Contemporary Art Conservation and Research of the research project ‘Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum’, at Tate, London (2018–20). She is the coordinator of the Working Group on Theory, History and Ethics of Conservation of the Committee for Conservation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-CC) since 2016. Kirsten McKenzie is Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of Lincoln. Her current research has two main themes; the multisensory processes underlying body representation and spatial awareness in healthy individuals, and the cognitive and perceptual processes leading to somatic misperception in people with medically unexplained symptoms and other clinical disorders, such as autistic spectrum disorder. She uses a variety of techniques including MIRAGE virtual/augmented reality, fMRI, EEG and other psychophysical measures, structured patient interviews, physiological assessment and eye-tracking. She is also Athena Swan Assessment Panel Member for the Equality Challenge Unit. Christopher John Müller is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Media at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work focuses on the intersection of technology, social constellations of power and the deceptive ‘immediacy’ of feeling. He is the author of Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and his articles, translations and reviews have appeared in Parallax, Thesis Eleven, CounterText, TrippleC, Textual Praxis and Modernism/modernity. Chris is part of the editorial team of The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (2022) and co-edits the Genealogy of the Posthuman, an open access, ISSN accredited online platform on www​.cri​tica​lpos​thumanism​.net. Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds in the UK, and Director of the University’s Centre for Medical Humanities. He has published widely on issues on cultural disability representation and his latest book is Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology and Cultural Futures (Liverpool UP, 2020). He is Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust-funded research project ‘Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures’, running between 2020 and 2025, and Joint Principal Investigator on ‘LivingBodiesObjects: Technology and the Spaces of Healthcare’, a Wellcome project that will run between 2022 and 2025. His next book is Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines, which will be published by Bloomsbury. Rosane Rocha Pessoa is Full Professor of English at the College of Letters (Faculdade de Letras) at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil. She is currently a voluntary professor at the same university, teaching courses in the areas of language and

x

Contributors

education in the graduate program, and supervising undergraduate, master and doctoral students. Her research interests are language education and language teacher education based on critical, decolonial and posthumanist praxiologies. Marie-Andrée Robitaille is a doctoral candidate in performative and mediated practice with a specialization in choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH). She studied human sciences while training as a dancer at École de Danse de Québec and as a circus artist at the National Circus School in Montréal, Canada. Since 1998, MarieAndrée has worked as a circus performer with Cirkus Cirkör, as a multidisciplinary artist and producer in various international projects, and as a talent scout for Cirque du Soleil. From 2009 to 2018, she was Assistant Professor and the head of the Bachelor programme in Circus at SKH. In her artistic research projects, she explores alternative modes of composition in circus as a method to rethink the world. Laryssa Paulino de Queiroz Sousa holds a PhD in Letters and Linguistics, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil. Her thesis is entitled A posthumanist perspective on an English course at a private language school (2022). Her interests primarily include language education and teacher education. Her research involves sociocultural, critical, decolonial, and mainly posthumanist perspectives. Madaleine Trigg is a doctoral candidate and visiting lecturer at the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand. A performance artist and photographer, Madaleine’s practice explores new intersections between bodies, materials and movement. Her doctoral research focuses upon contact improvisations with dough, yeast and wheat to problematize and reverse power relationships between human body and non-human matter, in order to better understand the possibilities and implications of new materialist discourses. Previous practice-based publications include REF: CN1183315 (2017), which explores material relations between disappearing ultrasound scans and mourning. (Ad)dressing the Body (2014) considers the transformation of garments within her performances. Poppy Wilde is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Birmingham City University and an active researcher in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR). Her work focuses on what it means and how it feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. She has conducted autoethnographic projects exploring the lived experience of MMORPG gaming with a particular focus on the avatar-gamer as an embodiment of posthuman subjectivity. In her current work, she is extending this to explore further insights in gaming, from tomboyism to moral ambiguity, as well as researching posthuman subjectivity in a variety of different contexts, from zombie studies to music artists.

Acknowledgements Christine would like to thank the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where she held a core fellowship during much of the time that work on this collection was done. The supportive friends and work environment were an energizing backdrop to see this project through. Matt would like to thank Holly for being the best thing about the last couple of years and for always being excited when I’m home. You still suck at walking nicely; we’ll get there. Oh, and mum, thanks mum. The editors would like to thank Brett Robinson for his incredibly helpful assistance in getting a number of these chapters into final shape during a really difficult time; Liza Thompson and Ben Doyle from Bloomsbury for getting this series up and running and generally being fantastic editors to work with; Danielle Sands, our wonderful partner in creating and editing this series; and our editorial board, who have already inspired where we’re headed next.

xii

Introduction Theory into praxis Christine Daigle and Matt Hayler

This chapter introduces the book you are about to read, but also the book series of the same name: Posthumanism in Practice.1 This is the start, for us, of asking what it can mean to put posthumanist thinking to work, of encouraging others to ask this question, and of sharing the results to an audience invested in speculating about how things – art, science, politics, responses to crises, daily life – might be otherwise. In this volume, and with the series, we are less interested in the question ‘what is posthumanism?’ Whilst we don’t take a fixed definition for granted, it has become time to acknowledge that there is an increasingly coherent contemporary discourse oriented around challenges to both anthropocentrism – thinking which is human-centred and/ or depends on human exceptionalism – and the obvious and subtle intellectual and societal (and discriminatory and destructive) legacies of the European Enlightenment, and particularly as they manifest in contemporary normative understandings of what it means to be, think, and act as a human being. There are a wide variety of names for this kind of critical work, and we use ‘posthumanism’ here in a broad sense, that is, as a term to connect critical responses to the overly simplistic or reductive conceptions of human life which emerge from this scientific, philosophical, and political tradition and the discourses that it has more or less directly inspired. Insights from the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences, from law, politics, economics, and theology, and from all manner of lived experiences, can be brought to, and improve upon, this kind of posthumanist thinking. These areas of life and research can also learn from established posthumanist approaches and bring them into action. In this capacity and variety, the borders and effects of posthumanist thought are hard to neatly draw, but by accepting that it exists as a useful and informed framework for interrogating aspects of the world, it can become better established and increasingly put to work, and not least by both inviting new perspectives in and better noting existing influences and similarities with other approaches. This book focuses on a range of applications of posthumanist ideas in art, science, education, and curation, clearly demonstrating how these potent ideas can challenge, destabilize, and renew practices in and across different fields, and open new avenues. Later volumes in this series, however, will also consider how posthumanism can further adapt and improve in response to the lessons learned from its sustained engagements with reality, and explore its indebtedness to other fields which have implicitly or explicitly challenged the legitimacy of the image of ‘Man’ which was meant to stand in for all of us.

2

Posthumanism in Practice

However, whilst we may not be focused on establishing a single history or canonical definition, we hope that there will be a number of readers new to the field engaging with this volume, as well as readers who have worked extensively with posthumanist ideas – both need to know where we’re coming from. So, for us, and for now at least: what is posthumanism?

Posthumanist aims Posthumanism and the posthumanities (Braidotti 2019) present themselves as critical apparatuses to dismantle the problematic features we have inherited from centuries of humanistic thinking emerging from, if not always directly, the European Enlightenment and the entwined projects of colonialism and the expansion of global capitalism. These legacies include conceptions such as human exceptionalism; ‘universal’ human rights; teleological progress; mind/body dualism; the clean division of nature and culture; autonomous human agency; and overriding faith in access to objectivity and rationality. Posthumanist approaches – variously rooted in the analyses put forward by theories of culture and language, of race and gender, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, disability studies, critical animal and plant studies, queer theory, and philosophies of immanence, embodiment, and agency – posit that ‘the Human’ of humanist thinking is an exclusionary subject that is far from universal. They challenge the accuracy, stability, and ethics of this envisioning of how we ‘should’ be, in which the Human, explicitly or implicitly, tends to be figured as a white, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied man, in control and reliant on no one, and, by virtue of continually being positioned at the top of the hierarchy of beings, typically seen as entitled to oppress and exploit environments and their inhabitants. This might seem, to some readers, like a crude caricature of humanism (see e.g. Gumbrecht 2020), or of the complexities of the European Enlightenment and the variety of ways in which humans have been conceived of and represented in its wake. Karin Kukkonen, for example, provides a fantastic critique of the tendency of posthumanist writers to oversimplify the sheer range of Enlightenment thought; many significant figures of the time questioned the limits of human rationality and explored ‘self-organization, [the] links and continuities between humans, animals, and matter, as well as the relational quality of subjectivity’ (33), all areas that posthumanism is now invested in, and that posthumanist thinkers have often positioned as their own radically new contributions to philosophy. Dialogue with radical Enlightenment thinkers, Kukkonen argues, has much to bring to contemporary posthumanist research, and charting the evolution of these ideas, rather than seeing posthumanism as a wholesale break with all that has been thought before, is vital. But, as Kukkonen also notes, the Enlightenment has a continued and significant effect as a ‘popular caricature’ (29), and a faith in the implied hegemonic subject described earlier is pervasive and enduring. Posthumanism cannot function as a broad critique of all European humanism and Enlightenment thinking, and we do not deny that there are scientific, philosophical, and cultural visions of the human which are far more sophisticated than the worst excesses that emerge from the period. But reductive, wrong, and pernicious ideas,

 Introduction 3 policies, practices, and disciplines really were formed and intensified, and their legacies do persist. We see them, for example, in attitudes towards disability and the presumed need to ‘fix’ ‘disordered’ or ‘wounded’ bodies and minds back to normalcy (Davis 1995; 2002); we see them in the ongoing wake of slavery and colonization, and the persistent effects of the histories of peoples who have been excluded from being seen as fully human (Sharpe 2016; Jackson 2020; Ellis 2018); we see them in the faith still granted to the autonomous, culpable subject in jurisprudence (Caruso 2021; Hayler 2022), the rational actor in economics (Ariely 2008), and the neutral observer in scientific research (Barad 2007; Pickering 1995). Posthumanism, as we conceive of it here, forcefully rejects these kinds of subject formations and their naturalized position as gospel, establishing their critique as essential and the first step towards constructive proposals that can rethink the human and the non-human, the biotic and the abiotic, in non-exclusionary, non-hierarchical terms and, most importantly, decentre the human as the locus of all discussion and plans for the future (anthropocentrism being the unquestionable inheritance of European thought, and with its effects surrounding us in increasingly visible ways). Posthumanism asks: what does it mean to think of beings, deeply and fundamentally, in terms of interrelations, dynamic processes, and manifold entanglements? And in this way, posthumanism is a post-anthropocentrism that aims at changing human relationships and mitigating the ongoing production of crises and oppressions. This way of thinking turns us to the core of what we are and how we know. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway quotes Marilyn Strathern, the anthropologist who taught her that ‘it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with)’ (2016: 12). Haraway builds on this insight, offering multiple variations on this theme of what matters: ‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (2016: 12). And why does it matter? Because our ways of framing phenomena, experiences, and identities shape our mode of being in the world and our relating to others, humans and non-humans. All praxis is shaped by the ideas, matters, stories, knots, thoughts, descriptions, and ties that we hold, are permeated by, or partake in. Critiquing a philosophical tradition enamoured with universal truths and transcendent ideas, Friedrich Nietzsche poetically noted that ‘[w]e see all things through the medium of the human head and cannot well cut off this head’ ([1878] 2013: 19). This Nietzschean perspectivism posits that we create the world we live in; we give it meaning: ‘we have been the colorists: the human intellect, upon the foundation of human needs, of human passions, has . . . injected its own erroneous fundamental conceptions into things’ (27). Transcendent truths only appear as such because we have created them, forgotten we did so, and started believing them. We make the world as we engage with it and, in the same process, make ourselves; there is no such thing as an objective scientific observer standing outside of the experiment or the ways in which it will be interpreted, and no practitioner guiding their practice with objective and universally valid knowledge and principles. As Karen Barad explains, ‘[k]nowing is not a matter of reflecting at a distance; rather it is an active and specific practice of engagement. To know is to become entangled; objectivity requires that

4

Posthumanism in Practice

one take responsibility for one’s entanglements’ (2007: 453n7). Barad also argues that ‘[t]heorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice’ (55) – both are intertwined activities that an always-already embedded and embodied being engages in, and, moreover, ‘Zoe- and geo-entities are partners in knowledge production. This implies that thinking and knowing are not the prerogative of humans alone’ (Braidotti 2019: 101). These reconceptualizations of the human and our ways of knowing, that are so far removed from the dominant Man of the Enlightenment legacy, demand that ‘[t]he posthuman[ist] subject needs to defamiliarize their mental habits’ (Braidotti 2019: 77) in order to more fully comprehend the manner, function, impacts, and limits of our thinking. With the foregoing in mind, we might better understand how posthumanist work seeks to dismantle the oversimplifications and misguided prioritizations of anthropocentric humanism; now, more than ever, we need new thoughts. And for these to be possible, we need to engage in thinking differently, to shake our old habits (even, or especially, when they seem ‘natural’), and to embrace new methodologies; we need new thoughts to think thoughts. And engaging in a process of defamiliarization must be an ongoing project in order to avoid one set of assumptions being replaced with another. Death to assumptions! The process of unlearning and relearning must remain as much in flux as the various entanglements in which we exist, but without losing knowledges and practices which have proved effective. This is not the time for ‘disruption’ for disruption's sake, but instead a time for holding up each idea, considering it with as fresh a set of eyes as possible, and exploring what we can make work, how, and to better understand why. As such, as a collection and as a series, Posthumanism in Practice entails explorative, alternative, and creative ventures that may currently be unconventional in an academic setting, but which are highly generative of both new and reflective thinking.

Subjects and philosophies If the previous section gives some sense of the aims of the posthumanist stance we’re advocating for, the word itself requires a little more explanation, not least with regard to the terms which surround it. For more on the history of how ‘posthumanism’ has been used, see for example Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? (2009) or Francesca Ferrando’s Philosophical Posthumanism (2019), but here we focus on the potentially distracting conflation that is often made between ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’, with posthumanism often being seen as simply synonymous with the latter, often more familiar term. This slippage is understandable for two reasons. First, transhumanism has permeated popular discourse with the rise in prominence of the use, representation, and discussion of prosthetic technologies, artificial intelligence, and the intersections of ‘NBIC’ artefacts and processes (i.e. nano-, bio-, information, and cognitive technologies). Transhumanism, at its heart, is a philosophy advocating for the continual improvement of human experience via ever-accelerating technological development. As Natasha Vita-More puts it in her ‘Transhumanist Manifesto’, ‘transhumanism challenges the issue of human aging and the finality of death by

 Introduction 5 advocating three conditions[:]. . . aging is a disease, augmentation and enhancement to the human body and brain are essential for survival, and that human life is not restricted to any one form or environment’ (2020). The bright futures envisioned through speculative technological achievements promise to fix or remedy our human flaws, from the limitations of our bodies to the damage wrought on our environments, or to escape them entirely, uploading our minds to computer networks or moving to live on other planets. Transhumanism also makes for good science fiction; even though high technology is often depicted as leading to disaster and dystopia, the imagery of gleaming cities and new embodied experiences have proved consistently alluring. Second, transhumanism’s techno-optimism, and its embrace of cyborgs, human-AI fusion, consciousness uploading, and genetic manipulation, can lead to, quite literally, a ‘posthuman’ position that aims at leaving the fallible and fragile human behind in favour of the creation of new beings. Disability studies’ well-established critique of the human body that needs to be ‘fixed’ into normalcy (mentioned earlier) can be extended to this transhumanist position – to see the human body as a site of continual lack, or even trauma, that must be overcome is to profoundly distort or diminish the role of the body in human experience and the diversity of embodiments that people occupy, thriving and without tragedy. In turn, this view, and its often-attendant dualism (we can somehow escape our bodies, going somewhere else, like we might escape Earth for Mars), can lead to a profound instrumentalization of the body as reduced to a mere tool (see e.g. Hauskeller 2014; 2016). Crucially, this is not the posthumanism we have in mind here, a doubling-down on human exceptionalism, human mastery, and sharp distinctions drawn between the human and the non-human, the human and nature. This kind of thinking, the slippage between posthumanism and transhumanism, has led to the rejection of posthumanism by a number of writers, including Haraway, who has stated that it ‘is much too easily appropriated by the blissed-out, ‘[l]et’s all be posthumanists and find our next teleological evolutionary stage in some kind of transhumanist technoenhancement’. Posthumanism is too easily appropriated to those kinds of projects for my taste’ (Gane 2006: 140). Though she also notes that ‘[l]ots of people doing posthumanist thinking . . . don’t do it that way’ (140), it’s clear that there is still work to be done to ensure that posthumanism retains a distinctive and critical path of its own. We can’t undo the confusion entirely here, but in the following we propose a more consistent terminology, one that is deployed more-or-less throughout this collection, separating out three subjects and three philosophies that are still precariously defined: humans, transhumans, and posthumans, humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism. We don’t expect these definitions to be final, but rather to capture their most useful current usage as separable categories. 1. Humans are all of Homo sapiens, in their full diversity of experiences and entanglements, past, present, and future. This might change: maybe there will be artificial/biological/technological productions of embodiments and cognitions that we will want to consider as being human in the future; maybe the boundaries of Homo sapiens’ origins will be redrawn to include more of our ancestors. ‘The human’, as we’ve noted earlier, has also always been a more

6

Posthumanism in Practice

restless category than might at first be assumed, and the long and cruel history of who has been excluded reveals the slippages in what should seem obvious (see Ferrando 2014). Judith Butler’s discussion of the ‘ungrievable’ lives produced by conflict and politics shows how too many humans remain barred from their full humanity with fatal and negating results: ‘Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death’ (2004: xiv–xv). Posthumanism, then, works with a more capacious understanding of who gets to be human, and for reasons of (entwined) accuracy and political agency. 2. Transhumans are humans that have substantially modified their bodies, minds, and/or experiences with technology – again, this might be something of a moving target and makes for this being perhaps the least useful term discussed here. Our ancestors modified life with technologies well before the origins of our species (see e.g. Taylor 2010; Clark 2003). Have we always been transhumans, then, and how might we rigorously draw the line between human and transhuman? 3. The adjective ‘posthuman’ has frequently been used, in both academe and popular discourse, to designate what comes after the species human becomes extinct (see e.g. Weisman 2007). If we are outlived by our AI offspring, or if we so change ourselves through NBIC technologies that we can no longer reasonably be considered the same species, then we meet the posthuman. The continued use of the adjective ‘posthuman’ by some thinkers to refer to the human subject as construed by posthumanism, however, contributes to maintaining an unhelpful confusion: we maintain, instead, that if the humanist vision of ‘the human’ is inaccurate and insufficient then the subject of posthumanism is better thought of as a posthumanist human, a posthumanist subject, not a posthuman one, that is, a subject which substantially differs from the humanist conception, but which is not a move beyond the human itself. 4. There have been a great many threads of thought that might be labelled humanism (see e.g. Davies 2008). But, as described earlier, there is also a coherent, recurring, and mutually reinforcing set of assumptions, typically extrapolated from logics formed or cemented in the European Enlightenment, that is taken as read when it comes to the autonomous, unified, rational, individual human subject, the idealized inheritor of liberal democracy, history, and the perfected/perfectible human body and mind. As such, there are many humanistic elements that posthumanism might critique and aim to move beyond, and not least the (ongoing) construction of ‘the human’ in colonial, racist, androcentric, homophobic, ableist, speciesist, nationalistic, and classist terms. Here, and throughout the series, rather than attacking a particular strand of humanism, or any particular thinker, we are far more invested in challenging the naturalized inaccuracies and oversimplifications of how and what humans are or should be and demonstrating the potentials of imagining human life differently. 5. We have discussed transhumanism earlier as a philosophy which tends to double down on a humanistic stance, but this needn’t be the case. By separating out these six terms, we could conceive of a humanist transhumanism and

 Introduction 7 a posthumanist transhumanism with quite different goals. A humanist transhumanism, for example, might deploy technological enhancements to reinforce the human as isolated individual, fostering competition and aiming at a homogenous teleology of progression. In the film Limitless (2011), for example, the protagonist takes a cognitive enhancement compound, NZT-48, that enables him to unlock the full potential of the human mind. He uses this newfound ability to manipulate the stock market, pick up women, and run for senator – he embodies a particular power fantasy at the intersection of enhancement, humanism, and neoliberalism. A posthumanist transhumanism, instead, might deploy technologies to enhance experience through greater communion with non-human others, or the expansion of the human sensorium. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, for example, ends on a work of speculative fiction which sees humans genetically modified to become chimera, fostering kinship with species on brink of extinction. 6. Posthumanism, in various iterations, has been and continues to be developed in academic circles. Scholars from various disciplines have been engaged in the critique of humanism and constructions of who gets to be human, and importantly including work which might not recognize itself as doing such, but which asks the same questions or fosters actions with aligned intent, including articulating visions for posthumanist futures. Posthumanist studies have also increasingly developed critiques of posthumanism itself, and of academia more broadly, with proposals for moving beyond the humanities, the ground out of which posthumanism grew, and embracing the posthumanities as ‘post-disciplinary discursive fronts . . . as off-shoots of the more marginal, interdisciplinary critical discourses that tend to call themselves Studies’ (Braidotti 2019: 100). This postdisciplinarity, along with the fundamental idea that the knowing subject is never autonomous, always embodied, embedded, and entangled, entails that methodological approaches will not let themselves be constrained by rigid disciplinary norms and expectations. Many works of the recent decade are exemplary of these postdisciplinary posthumanities pursuits, and they present innovative (and subversive) outcomes (see e.g. Tsing et al. 2017; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). These studies are advancing the field, and posthumanist thinking, in crucial and creative ways. However, there is also now a pressing need to really think theory as intertwined with practice. If posthumanism necessitates the development of the posthumanities, and of postdisciplinarity, then it also requires post-academicity, that is, escaping the confines of academic contemplation to explore how posthumanism can shape action, experience, and the development of viable futures through innovative ways to think and learn about ourselves and the world.

Posthumanism in practice Putting some of the ideas outlined earlier to work, the chapters in this volume are divided into three sections: science and technology, art and curation, and education. Each section features the work of several writers who consider the impact of posthumanism

8

Posthumanism in Practice

in their field, either analysing their own practice, exploring the work of others, or looking to the future of how things might be done differently with posthumanism in mind. Importantly, the divisions between the sections are thematic, rather than disciplinary; most of the writers here draw from a multitude of disciplines in order to make their case, further demonstrating posthumanism’s innate demand for insights drawn from a range of sites of knowledge production and practice. Importantly, many of the contributions here also make a case for questioning inherited practices in the fields they engage, and the possibilities (and responsibilities) of learning to do things differently. In the first section on science and technology, Stuart Murray (Chapter 1) begins by exploring a research project that saw the design and building of prosthetic hands ‘constructed specifically to be disabled’. This speculative work unites posthumanist inquiry with disability studies, examining how posthumanist approaches to embodiment might meet real-world engineering and design. By questioning how prostheses ‘should be’, that is, returning human users to ‘normal’ functioning, Murray argues that better prosthetics might be imagined and created by keeping a posthumanist perspective in mind. Prosthetics aren’t just tools; they capture a host of assumptions about embodiment, the divisions between the ‘real’ and ‘artificial’, and the ways in which we might interact with the world. Each of these areas can be challenged and developed, opening new possibilities, and not least in the act of simply undertaking speculation against, or in spite of, seemingly foundational beliefs. In the next chapter, Aaron Bradshaw (Chapter 2) turns to the role of microorganisms in Parkinson’s disease research. The growing appreciation of the role of non-human living matter in the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of human diseases has been an area of significant advance in recent years, but, as Bradshaw notes, this increase in knowledge also highlights ‘the limitations of certain traditional ways of delimiting and demarcating the body for understanding .  .  . illness’. Bradshaw also makes the important point, however, that biology and medicine don’t need explicitly posthumanist approaches in order to progress; even as they make insights that are hugely useful to posthumanist philosophers, and inspire artworks and other practical responses through their new information, their work doesn’t (inherently) rest on engagement with posthumanist thinking. And yet, posthumanism might have a significant role to play in speeding up the acceptance and deployment of more nuanced models of the human body and nature of disease, prompting an escape from assumptions about the sovereignty of human embodiment that are tied into deeply rooted humanist histories; in the future, a posthumanist foundation for medical research might lead to greater insights that are realized more quickly and accepted more widely. Bryan Lim’s chapter (Chapter 3) considers the challenges that stem from the new ways of conceiving the embodied relationships discussed by Bradshaw. For Lim, ‘the persistent presence of traditional narratives of microbes as scourge, crisis, and disaster’ limit the uptake and acceptance of a ‘post-Pasteurian microbiopolitics’. Particularly during the worst global pandemic in a century, this shunning of microbial life is understandable; some microorganisms can do us real harm, even if they represent only a tiny percentage of the teeming mass of minute life we constantly interact with. And so, Lim asks a difficult question for posthumanist approaches to entanglement: ‘what

 Introduction 9 might it mean to embrace an “unloved” and “unloving” pathogenic other if doing so also simultaneously threatens one’s very own existence?’ In the last chapter of this first section, Steve Klee and Kirsten McKenzie (Chapter 4) bridge the gap between art and science, discussing the cognitive neuroscientific study of body image and how it might be conjured with in a time of virtual reality and the increasing possibility of occupying a digital embodiment. Klee and McKenzie see the therapeutic potential for this work, devising alien embodiments which might help the humans that get to inhabit them to escape body image concerns that can profoundly restrict or diminish lived experiences. Importantly for this volume, their research builds out of, and responds to, Rosi Braidotti’s explicitly posthumanist conception of subjectivity, and they propose that their experiments should ‘be understood as a case of empirical science supporting philosophical enquiry[,] the framework [they] use giv[ing] (further) credence to Braidotti’s assertions, and [able to] be viewed as fleshing out their detail’. As with Murray’s descriptions of prosthetic design, we can see in this chapter (and throughout the next section) how posthumanist thinking can make a material change in the ways that practitioners undertake research and development, and the kinds of artefacts that they bring into being. In the first chapter of the section on art and curation, Lin Charlston (Chapter 5) outlines an art practice built around plants as co-creators, a practice explicitly affected by ‘the slow explosion of posthumanist ideas’. Charlston explores two art projects as case studies to focus on ‘the ethical relations, norms, and values’ that artists bring to their engagements with non-human others, exploring how humanist legacies figure into the kinds of relationships that unavoidably need to form during acts of creation, and the ways in which posthumanism might productively disrupt those assumptions. As Lim also notes, however, there can be a variety of significant challenges to doing so, and Charlston similarly doesn’t shy away from discussing the barriers to connection that can be found in seeking kinship and common ground. In what, at first, seems to be a very different context, Madaleine Trigg (Chapter 6) asks similar questions of entangled artistic production, influenced by posthumanist approaches to ethics and embodiment, but with the striking example of bread dough as her collaborator. Using the theatrical technique of ‘contact improvisations’ (typically involving sustained, responsive interactions with a human partner), Trigg asks ‘what it means to intersect with different bodies’. The chapter sees Trigg return to the microbiomic concerns seen in the first section, with dough alive with yeasts and bacteria that contribute to a blurring of the boundaries of the human and non-human; the dough, in Jane Bennett’s term, is seen as ‘vibrant matter’, full of its own agency and provocations to look at things anew. In the third chapter of this section, Marie-Andrée Robitaille (Chapter 7) positions ‘Circus as practices of hope’. With so many of us having had to spend a lot of time indoors, and away from crowds, the questions of what the circus is for, how it can be sustained, how it can be relevant, and how it can continue to look have been raised in nontrivial ways. Robitaille looks to circus arts as innately good at dealing with indeterminacy and precarious situations[;] . . . you can be injured and even die if you miss [your mark;] . . . you need to attune to the weather

10

Posthumanism in Practice [while touring]; we work collaboratively when it comes to safety while spotting and catching each other; we . . . locate bodies in space and control movement.

With this in mind, her chapter outlines a host of ways in which circus might contribute as an act of practical thinking-through, both a spur to imagination and speculation, and a putting of thought into action. But circus is also a practice haunted by its own humanist legacies of standardization, objectification, and elitism. As such, Robitaille outlines her own new kinds of circus acts that build on the art’s prior inherent potential and show what a bringing-in of posthumanist motivation can do when reimagining future circus performances. Poppy Wilde’s chapter (Chapter 8) looks at a specific work of art: the 2003 videogame Beyond Good and Evil. Wilde offers an autoethnography of her own engagement with the game, and shows how her specific gameplaying, and gameplaying in general, ‘demonstrates an embodiment of posthuman[ist]2 subjectivity’. For Wilde, the kinds of engagement that make up the activities of playing a game – for example, taking on new subject positions through embodying on-screen avatars – are a posthumanism in practice; the activity is best understood posthumanistically, and this gives us a richer insight into how gameplaying, and specific games, function. Deborah Lawler-Dormer and Christopher John Müller (Chapter 9) also look to specific digital artefacts, but do so by outlining how posthumanist frameworks might be applied to doing and understanding curation in museums. In particular, they focus on the ‘unique dilemmas computer-based technologies pose for museum practices, and on how they might also facilitate the generation of knowledge and stories about the unintentional, unanticipated, cumulative effects of technological objects on the planet’. The curation of digital artefacts, of hardware, has the potential to provoke museum visitors into developing a more sophisticated conception of the myriad roles that computing technology plays in their lives, and ‘the wide catalogue of approaches posthumanist ways of thinking makes available . . . can help inform museum practices that seek to acknowledge th[e] gap between the attitudes [that] technological objects provoke in us and the complex cognitive assemblages these objects emerge from and configure’. For Lawler-Dormer and Müller, posthumanism also offers the possibility of prompting ‘museums to acknowledge perspectives, constituents, and interests that are routinely marginalised in human-centric narratives of progress, narratives that also tend to universalise a set of Western ideas, values, and societal norms and structures’. Again, this is about a turn from a legacy that tends to be rendered as invisible even as its intertwined logics can be found everywhere as we encounter artefacts and practices that prompt reflection. In the final chapter of this section, Hélia Marçal and Rebecca Gordon (Chapter 10) outline a posthumanist approach to art conservation. With a particular focus on the ethics of conservation, Marçal and Gordon ask what role the conservator can and should play (and has, historically, played). Drawing on work in feminist new materialisms, they look at artworks as in a constant process of becoming in museum settings, and in particular at how conservation serves to continually shape artworks’ materiality and impacts whilst also playing a significant role, with the potential to be both supportive or critical, in the wider canon of art history and its litany of ‘inclusions and exclusions’.

 Introduction 11 The last section of this collection, oriented around education, begins with Debra Harwood’s (Chapter 11) investigation of teaching and learning with children. For Harwood, posthumanism ‘invites new ways to ‘think with’ research, children, and the planet[, and] with an openness and fluidity’ that she also sees in the artwork of Susan Quinn. Harwood ‘stumbled upon the work of posthumanist scholars’, but from then on, ‘the usual demarcations of the world, that is human/nonhuman, logic/sense, indoor/outdoor, learning/play, and so on, no longer made sense’. Harwood looks at the implications of taking posthumanist insights onboard, breaking down lived assumptions (a recurring theme in the chapters here) in educational settings where they might do the most harm by becoming entrenched from the outset of human lives. In the next chapter, Laryssa Paulino de Queiroz Sousa and Rosane Rocha Pessoa (Chapter 12) look at the practicalities of teacher training in English teacher education in Brazil. Rather than seeing specific posthumanist concepts directly put into action, Sousa and Pessoa instead write about a ‘posthumanist orientation’ they let ‘wash over [them] so that [it] can redirect [their] thoughts’. Student teachers and senior teaching staff are both configured, here, as ‘constituted by socio(discursive) material entanglements’; in the classroom, and before and after class, what changes when teachers and students, and the act of educating, are consistently seen as being created in the practices of doing and becoming? Stefan Herbrechter (Chapter 13) starts from a clear, and widely acknowledged, point: ‘education needs to change’. The why and the how of this, however, is particularly complex. For Herbrechter, a focus on rejecting technology in the classroom as the path to improvement has stalled a more nuanced discussion. Echoing our own concerns with terminology outlined earlier, he notes that ‘posthumanist education . . . is usually associated with a technoeuphoric approach, embracing technological possibilities and the promises of enhancement, networking, distributed cognition and participatory (media) culture .  .  . [But p]osthumanism, .  .  . [he] argue[s], lies entirely elsewhere’. Instead, a posthumanist approach can offer insights into ‘a changing world picture, away from centuries of humanist anthropocentrism and towards multispecies social justice’. Like many of the writers in this collection, Herbrechter poses further difficult questions that emerge directly from posthumanist perspectives, and demonstrates their relevance for the field that he focuses on: ‘Have we ever been human? Will we ever be? Should we be? How does one learn to be (a) human? Or should one rather unlearn to be just that?’ But these questions can’t just be used to turn on a dime, an important lesson that again recurs throughout the work seen here; education’s historically being bound up with humanism requires its own specific unlearning that is fraught with risk during the process of rebuilding its foundations on more solid, and less damaging, ground. In the final chapter of this collection, Christine Daigle (Chapter 14) examines how we ‘do’ philosophy, ‘i.e. when we teach it, when we learn it, when we work as scholars, and when we ourselves philosophize’. Similarly to the other chapters in this section, Daigle realizes that education, in many respects, needs to be overhauled, and she offers a series of case studies of what a teaching practice underpinned by ‘posthumanist material feminism’ might be able to achieve. She then turns to research and the ways in which posthumanism might encourage philosophy to ‘get out in the world more’;

12

Posthumanism in Practice

philosophy, underpinned by posthumanism, can deploy more practices of doing, of learning in the making and unfolding of action and creation. This, then, is the last encapsulation of the essence of this collection: posthumanism has to go and meet people, and get involved in real work, if it’s going to have any chance of making a positive impact.

Notes 1 This collection, and introduction, is co-edited and written by Christine and Matt; the series is co-edited by Christine, Matt, and Danielle Sands. 2 Wilde uses ‘posthuman’, here, in Rosi Braidotti’s sense of the experience of the contemporary human subject, a subject increasingly unavoidably understood as entangled with their environment, and clearly imbricated in complex webs of technology and biomedicine. In line with our discussion earlier, however, we would describe the experiences that Wilde outlines, instead, as ‘posthumanist’ and use that term here for consistency in this introduction.

References Ariely, D. (2008), Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, London: Harper. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Caruso, G. (2021), Rejecting Retributivism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, A. (2003), Natural Born Cyborgs, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, T. (2008), Humanism, Abingdon: Taylor and Francis. Davis, L. (1995), Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London: Verso. Davis, L. (2002), Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, New York: New York University Press. Dolphijn, R. and I. van der Tuin (2012), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Ellis, C. (2018), Antebellum Posthuman, New York: Fordham University Press. Ferrando, F. (2014), ‘The Body’, in R. Ranisch and S.L. Sorgner (eds), Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction, 213–26, Bern: Peter Lang. Ferrando, F. (2019), Philosophical Posthumanism, London: Bloomsbury. Gane, N. (2006), ‘When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway’, Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (7–8): 135–58. Gumbrecht, H.U. (2020), ‘Humanism’, in J. Wamberg and M. Rosendahl Thomsen (eds), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, 13–24, London: Bloomsbury. Harraway, D.J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press. Hauskeller, M. (2014), Sex and the Posthuman Condition, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hauskeller, M. (2016), Mythologies of Transhumanism, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

 Introduction 13 Hayler, M. (2022), ‘Posthumanism and the Bioethics of Moral Responsibility’, in D. Sands (ed.), Bioethics and the Posthumanities, 99–115. London: Routledge. Jackson, Z.I. (2020), Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, New York: New York University Press. Kukkonen, K. (2020), ‘The Self and Subjectivity: Why the Enlightenment is Relevant for Posthumanism’, in J. Wamberg and M. Rosendahl Thomsen (eds), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, 25–34, London: Bloomsbury. Limitless (2011), [Film] Dir. Neil Burger, USA: Lionsgate. Marx, K. ([1845] 2002), ‘Theses On Feuerbach’, trans. Cyril Smith, Marxists Internet Archive, n.d. Available online: https://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/marx​/works​/1845​/ theses​/index​.htm (accessed 10 December 2021). Nietzsche, F. ([1878] 2013), Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. A. Harvey, Auckland: The Floating Press. Pickering, A. (1985), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sharpe, C. (2016), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, T. (2010), The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Tsing, A.L., H.A. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt (eds) (2017), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. Vita-More, N. (2020), ‘Transhumanist Manifesto (version 4, 2020)’, Natasha Vita-More PhD, n.d. Available online: https://natashavita​-more​.com​/transhumanist​-manifesto (accessed 10 December 2021). Weisman, A. (2007), The World Without Us, London: Penguin. Wolfe, C. (2009), What is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

14

Section I

Science and Technology

16

1

Engineering the posthuman Conceiving handedness and constructing disabled prostheses Stuart Murray

In 2017–18 a research team at the University of Leeds developed an interdisciplinary project that designed, built, and then showcased two prosthetic hands that were constructed specifically to be disabled. The work was deliberately speculative, unconventional, and provocative, bringing Humanities and Engineering perspectives on disability together to ask new questions of the issues that surround posthumanist approaches to embodiment, especially how the mechanics of making a prosthetic hand combine with the cultural and aesthetic work performed by artificial limbs. In this essay I want to interweave a narrative around the process of building the hands, including choices about ‘designing’ the disability, and the subsequent public engagement that took place – an invited participation at the British Academy’s Summer Showcase in London in June 2018, a two-day event focused on innovative research projects attended by 1,700 people – with a series of observations on the modes and meanings of handedness and embodiment drawn from cultural and critical disability theory. My aim is to bring these perspectives together in order to see them as an example of posthumanism in practice, in which the making of new objects-of-knowledge exemplifies the complex encounters of theorizing posthumanist embodiment with the specifics of engineering design, the construction of prostheses, and public responses to the results. To do this is to argue for the relevance of posthumanism’s critical strategies as grounded and located mechanisms that can enable real-world change and benefits, a point that is especially significant for people with disabilities. The specific disability inflection of the project is central to the articulation of this grounded complexity: the demands that disability makes when it is placed centrally in critical arguments surrounding technology and embodiment not only reformat how we think of posthumanism and its conception of the body’s difference but also exemplify the possibility of positive interventions in disabled lives (Murray 2020). As this essay’s movements across arguments central to critical posthumanist and disability writing will show, the disciplines’ perspectives on embodiment, reconceived selfhood, and

18

Posthumanism in Practice

agency highlight a productive convergence in which shared suspicions of abled and coherent wholeness drive new conceptions of being and belonging.

Thinking posthuman prosthesis Much is made of the idea of the prosthetic in critical and cultural theory. Perceptions of its inherent flexibility have allowed the concept to spin out into a variety of contexts, where it becomes a vehicle to express a succession of connected relations between the imagined and embodied. Cassandra Crawford summarizes this in her study Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology, noting that ‘innovations in prosthetic science have also transformed the prosthetic imaginary’, pointing out that ‘bodies have been mediated by prosthetization’, a process that is ‘not simply or straightforwardly done to bodies [but] is always a relational process of technologization-in-the-making’ (Crawford 2014: 13; 6). Similarly, Margrit Shildrick observes, with a specific focus on prosthetics and disability, that ‘whereas traditional understandings have centred on their utility for a subject experiencing some form of lack or inability, more contemporary approaches stress that prostheses speak to the mode of supplementation’ (Shildrick 2015: 14). While in some scientific/technological discourses the prosthetic limb will remain centrally an object, albeit one of great complexity, in the critical realms of which Crawford and Shildrick write it is these stresses on transformation, relations, and supplementarity that dominate. As an animating concept, prosthesis has been applied to the renegotiation of public memory (as in Alison Landberg’s Prosthetic Memory, an examination of how narratives of American popular culture articulate remembrance); the study of fiction as ‘Artificial Life’ (Peter Boxall’s The Prosthetic Imagination, which analyses novels from the early modern to the contemporary period); or identity and the image (Celia Lury’s Prosthetic Culture, which explores relations between photography and bodies), just to name texts where the word appears in the title. Boxall argues that the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century saw the idea of the prosthetic undergo a critical transformation, a move from signalling ‘the coming together of theory and technicity’ to become a ‘mark of weightless information freed from its instantiation’, exemplified by Donna Haraway’s cyborg and William Gibson’s fictional cyberspace. In recent years, however, such weightlessness has been unsustainable, because of what Boxall terms the ‘connected return of a material ontology, a body that matters’ (Boxall 2020: 12–13). Within such an ontology, exemplified by the materialism of contemporary events such as Covid-19, climate change, or forced migration, the prosthetic-as-concept can no longer function either as a representation without substance or an uncomplicated mode of embodiment. Such a duality is not fit for purpose in an era when the division between artificial and real, the creation/illusion and the constructed/grounded, has fallen away. Within this frame, Vivian Sobchack has written eloquently about the specific problems of cultural iterations of prosthesis in the context of disability experience. Sobchack addresses what she terms the ‘seductive’ nature of prosthesis and augmentation when understood as metaphors or tropes, but notes: ‘The scandal of the metaphor is

 Engineering the Posthuman 19 that it has become a fetishized and “unfleshed-out” catchword that functions vaguely as the ungrounded and “floating signifier” for a broad and variegated cultural discourse on technoculture that includes little of these prosthetic realities’ (Sobchack 2006: 21). Sobchack is careful not to propose a dualism between concept and lived experience; her argument overall proposes an understanding of prosthetics in which they are both theorized and grounded, an approach that fits with the implications for practice central to the Leeds research. Her critique is a call for better thinking on the methods by which cultural formations of prosthesis can be grounded in material embodiment, a frame for an active posthumanism that engages in situated events. A specific focus on prosthesis as seen through a disability optic throws these tensions into sharp relief. It was this focus that lay behind the Leeds project and our desire to bring together the multiple resonances of ‘the prosthetic’ and complex embodiments of disability to explore synergies between Cultural Studies and Engineering approaches to the prostheticized body. The work was generated by the recognition that although Cultural Disability Studies has discussed ideas of prosthetics and augmentation for decades, little of this work involved dialogue with those responsible for the actual design and production of prosthetics for people with disabilities. Could the freefloating concept of cultural prostheses have any productive point of interaction with such engineering processes? What challenges might exist in bringing together two radically different disciplinary approaches to the one term? How might this be a possible example of a critical posthumanism operating as praxis, a grounded example of theory? The research team sought to situate the origins of the work in an apparently counterintuitive position, pushing back against the presumption that the value of a prosthetic limb lies in its capacity to return utility and functionality to a body in which these are (understood to be) absent. Rather we posed the – hopefully provocative – question of what becomes manifest when a limb is designed and made to express specifically non-utilitarian elements: can an artificial hand convey empathy, for example, or care, or embarrassment? If so, what would be the technical developments that might generate the engineering details through which such abstractions became realized? In addition to this, the team made a conscious decision to construct the limb itself as recognizably disabled, a process that opened another set of questions: can disabled difference be built into design? How much does a limb need to be visually recognizable in order to subsequently denote difference; how could it be normal to generate a built ‘abnormality’? What are the tangible/tactile elements that, within the obvious visual realm of ‘the artificial’, signal disability? If indeed these can be identified, how do you make them? These are, of course, issues of posthuman embodiment. In her 2019 study Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi Braidotti states that: ‘Recognizing the embodied and embedded, relational and affective positions of humans is a form of situated knowledge that enhances the singular and collective capacity for both ethical accountability and alternative ways of producing knowledge’, a process she sees as being central to what she calls ‘the posthuman convergence’ (Braidotti 2019: 12). In stressing the link between embodiment and knowledge production as constitutive of posthumanist theorizing, Braidotti is in effect here summarizing a critical tradition that runs through

20

Posthumanism in Practice

the writings of, among others, N Katherine Hayles, Jack Halberstam, Ira Livingston, Pramod Nayar and Manuela Rossini (to only name those who make such a connection through an explicitly posthumanist lens). When such critics write of the complex interactions between the human body and evolving technologies, they frequently stress broad conceptions of science, philosophy, agency, politics, and cultural production that are addressed in what Braidotti terms ‘the Posthuman condition’. But it is worth stressing that the specifics of these conditioned and embedded bodies can be found in the engineering and product design decisions required to construct an artificial limb, where the micro requirements of, say, kinematics, digit articulation, or choice of construction materials become a grounded location of the kinds of ‘convergence’ inherent in posthumanist theorizing.

Hands and handedness In choosing to focus on the construction of a hand, the research team wanted to acknowledge the sheer complexity of hands as both material and symbolic objects. As neurologist Frank Wilson notes in his study of the working and meaning of hands: The hand is so widely represented in the brain, the hand’s neurologic and biomechanical elements are so prone to spontaneous interaction and reorganization, and the motivation and efforts which give rise to individual use of the hand are so deeply and widely rooted, that we must admit we are trying to explain a basic imperative of human life. (Wilson 1999: 10)

For Wilson, this imperative includes a need to recognize both the relationship between the hand and the objective (as ‘a divider, a joiner, an enumerator, dissector, and an assembler’) as well as the more abstract (as in the intimacy of touch ‘secret to the power of healing’, or as – possibly – ‘the instigator of human language’). When Wilson stresses ‘the open-ended and overlapping worlds of sensorimotor and cognitive function and the endless combinations of speeds, strength, and dexterity in individual human skills and performance’, he articulates the extraordinary intricacy of hands, their incalculable expressions of gesture and function, but also their ordinariness, the sheer everyday occurrence of touch (Wilson 1999: 59; 9). Seeing this kind of complex bodily expression within the kinds of posthumanist critical modes exemplified by Braidotti allows it to be understood as a bio-technology of embodiment, a networked meeting point where the hand is a distributed but connected assemblage in which the body is both ‘motor’ and ‘secret’. The materiality of the human in the ordinary/everyday world of bodily activity is a technical space that embodies the abstract, a realm vital in understanding the relationship between prosthetics, augmentation and disability experience. Boxall also observes the proliferation of a hand’s complexity, calling it ‘the organ that gives us the closest haptic proximity to the world’, while noting that ‘it is also part of that world itself, an object which has its own material existence apart from mind’. In a phrase that echoes critical posthumanism’s critique of the humanism inherent in the

 Engineering the Posthuman 21 assumed centrality of the centred idea of Man, he continues that it is the ‘independence’ and ‘thingliness’ of hands that form ‘one of the great challenges to the bound integrity of the self ’ (Boxall 2020: 149). If Heidegger believed that ‘the hand is the ground of the essence of man’ (Heidegger 1999: 198), then the complex embodiment central to the disability-led posthumanism inherent in the project’s decision-making (e.g. exemplified in deliberately constructing a prosthetic as disabled) offers a revision of this view, situating the hand as an object conditioned within a dispersed assemblage of materiality and meaning. Thinking of such revisionism, it is worth remembering that hands are both compliant and rebellious. Psychoanalyst Darian Leader observes that while hands ‘cannot be easily withdrawn from ideas of ownership and autonomy’, a hand must be operative in some way to perform meaning, even if that does not involve movement. There are numerous instances of ‘alien hand syndrome’, in which ‘one hand may act at cross purposes to the other, failing to obey the conscious commands of the patient’ (Leader 2017: 9; 7). Here, the relationship between hand and brain produces effects where issues of utility and functionality are not only revised but also overturned. Within Disability Studies, it is the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson that outlines the place of hands within the meaning of the schema of the disabled body. In Staring: How We Look, her study of the visualization of disability, Garland-Thomson notes that ‘hands make us human, or so we are told’. ‘Hands do things’ she continues, observing that Aristotle ‘called hands “the instruments of instruments”’, and that ‘we look to the physiology of hands for meaning’, such as the various associations given to individual fingers: pointing with the index finger for example, or the middle finger’s connection to the display of obscenities (Garland-Thomson 2009: 119). But while hands ‘doing their jobs do not draw stares’ (presuming that this applies to non-disabled hands), Garland-Thomson argues that: ‘The expressive work of hands, in contrast, demands scrupulous watching.’ She goes on: We talk with our hands as much as with our mouths. Our faces may be the command centers of communication, but our hands speak a more common language. Hands are our harbingers, announcing us and our intentions to the eyes of others. Pointing is a visible grammar. Babies point before they speak. An open, extended hand is a congenial greeting, a clenched fist a hostile warning. Thumbs up or down signal assent or decline. A handshake seals agreement [. . .] Hands attract intense looking when they act as instruments of linguistic intercourse. The art of oratory extends the word from mouth to hand and bonds hand to eye. Our hand’s extended range of motion and malleable form enables subtle gestures requiring close reading, making hands the center of visual interest in gesturing. (Garland-Thomson 2009: 120–1)

Garland-Thomson is right to stress that the use of hands in these ways constitutes work, and this is not simply the work that hands may do themselves. The human brain receives and recognizes more signals connected to touch from the hands than any other part of the body; brains, it appears, need hands and the information they produce to orient a proprioceptive comprehension of the physical and spatial world. But, as Garland-Thomson’s examples make clear, people without hands (for whatever reason)

22

Posthumanism in Practice

offer a variation on such orientation, a rerouting of signalling that allows for a different conception of spatial relations. Engineering products that engage with and express this comprehension have a long history. Following the loss of his right hand in battle, Roman general Marcus Serguis fashioned an iron replacement that allowed him to hold his sword, a detail sometimes held to be the first evidence of the use of a prosthetic hand (Pliny 2004: 127). Such a relationship between prosthetics and warfare has been central to the subsequent history of artificial limb development. In the twentieth century, for example, a discourse of the ‘managed body’ sought to emphasize productivity and efficiency in adapting disabled US veterans to civilian environments following the two world wars (Serlin 2002: 47). Twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan produced substantial limb loss among serving military personnel, with prosthetic hands and arms now signalling enhanced utility because of not only advances in engineering and design but also service, sacrifice, and patriotism. In their examination of the Paralympic Military Program, a US Olympic Committee initiative launched in 2004 that oversaw the transformation of disabled veterans into what they term ‘tactical athletes’, Callie Batts and David Andrews note that the women and men involved became ‘saturated with political meaning and national representation’ (Batts and Andrews 2011: 563). These sociocultural meanings and others like them work to underscore the extent to which all encounters between bodies and prostheses are centrally ideological. Our present history is no different, and its stress on the role of technology in replacement, function, and utility as a ‘natural’ response to absence is a logic our research sought to overturn. Even when they stress the complex interactions of emerging technologies, modern histories of prosthetics often work in spaces very separate to the contested versions of bodily integrity central to critical posthumanist writing. Nayar’s description of embodied identity as ‘a consequence of the layered flows of information across multiple routes and channels [. . .] subject to social pressures and power relations’ (Nayar 2014: 64) finds expression more in the domain of design than engineering when considering the specifics of artificial limb production. Between 2016 and 2019, the Hands of X project expanded the design boundaries of prosthetics hands. Led by Graham Pullin, whose 2009 ground-breaking Design Meets Disability remains the most comprehensive study of the interrelationship between prosthetics and design principles, Hands of X challenged the assumptions that prosthetic hands came in only two forms: skincoloured silicone gloves or cyborg-like carbon-fibre. Through a series of wearer-led consultations, the project developed a range of design options and usable materials, incorporating multiple colours and textures in a series of bespoke hands – not to be worn – that stressed speculation and simplicity rather than function and utility. Hands of X contested the idea that success in the production of prosthetics equates to technological proficiency, focusing instead on issues of aesthetics. In doing so, it highlighted the shortcomings of the celebratory mode of transhumanism that stress what Russell Blackford has termed ‘self-transformation and self-overcoming’ in the interaction between the body and technology. Blackford articulates a common transhumanist position, that ‘technological intervention in the capacities of the human body and mind will lead to alternations so dramatic that it will make intuitive sense to call the people of the near and not-so-near future posthuman’ (Blackford 2013: 422,

 Engineering the Posthuman 23 italics in original). The ideas of ‘overcoming’ and ‘capacity’ suggested in such a view are common in the frequent giddy excitement in transhumanist visions of the future, but they are ignorant of the meaning of such words within a disability context. In disability terms, the words signal (respectively) a teleological narrative in which assertions of triumph resolve a perception of disability-as-deficit; and a conception of wholeness that, again, situates the disabled body through images and metaphors of absence and loss. A critique of these ableist perspectives is also central to the critical posthumanist position which stresses that trajectories of progress and embodied wholeness are humanist fictions. A disability-led investigation of the complexity of prostheses, Hands of X showcased the materiality of disability’s complex embodiment as well as the modes of design and production that might be used to respond to it.1

Design and production The Leeds team pushed this logic further, purposefully aiming to show an audience hands that explicitly signalled disability through the immediate visual encounter with them. Following a series of workshops that explored questions of colour, texture, movement, touch, and the status of hands as objects, the group made the decision to work through the development of an Ada Hand, a kit-based 3D printable product made by Open Bionics that can be assembled in under an hour. The choice was made because of a need for an achievable construction within a specific time frame, but also because the Ada Hand is a low-cost, open-source option in a market dominated by expensive proprietary models. Even though the hands were never to be used, the connection between cost and access is a vital element in the take-up of prosthetics by people with disabilities (where product prices are often prohibitive) and the decision fitted with the project’s desire to be disability-led and to avoid simplistic connections between prosthetic limbs and cyborg superability. The Ada Hand kit included motors, electronics, materials for printed circuit board assembly, control firmware and basic wires that serve as finger tendons. The parts added their own dimension to the project, limiting design and production because of the reduced range of optionality they offered. As a prosthesis, the hand was arguably as far from the transhumanist dream of futuristic technology as could be imagined. The team identified two prototype models. The first was a lunate hand that built on the latent presence of the crescent-shaped carpal bone at the base of the palm in primates and some other mammals, and extended it to become a fully formed sixth digit (Hu et al. 2017). The thinking here was to approximate a possible ‘natural’ evolutionary stage, imagining that the curved lunate ‘thumb’ (also present in humans) had developed and not been arrested.2 This imagination envisaged a second thumb in the human hand as a contested amalgam of evolution and an obvious visual (and therefore potentially disabled) difference. The second hand was designed around the actual hand of a project team member who had lost two digits in an explosion and subsequently had cosmetic reconstruction. Here the origins of the hand were not speculative, as with the lunate hand, but part of a personal history of disability. If the

24

Posthumanism in Practice

lunate hand was a creative projection of evolutionary biology, the three-digit hand was similarly artificial but modelled on a real disabled hand. Each hand in some way coordinated a social and cultural story. Each placed posthumanism, here as a mode placing an antihumanist emphasis on the inherent porosity and permeability of the body, in conversation with disability as those terms are concept-driven through philosophies of embodiment. But each also required specific technical decision-making before production was possible. The hands were at no point designed to be worn, but the overall conception of making them material had to be broken down into sub-projects that did allow for function, where this is understood as the working of the hand as object in itself, and not in terms of a wider disability utility. In order to approximate a second opposable thumb, for example, the articulation of the tendons in the lunate hand involved the reconfiguring of materials provided in the Ada Hand kit, while the placement of the digit itself likewise required a re-engineering of the palm from the standard form. In each case, the work undertaken was an example of both the engineering ‘inventive step’, the moment of creative imagination in which a design/production decision is made, as well as what Nayar has described as a posthumanist ‘reformatting’ of the conception of the body, an understanding of embodiment as morphological and positioned fluidly across social, cultural, and ideological sites (Nayar 2014: 55). Here, however, the additional twist is that the reformatted object is not a human body reconceived through networks and modulation but rather an artificial limb reworked to build in disability difference. The construction of the three-digit hand posed a similar specific challenge. Following the reconstructive surgery the team member experienced, the middle finger was moved away from the index to allow for greater functionality. Engineering the hand to mirror this required the pocket in which the linear actuator sits to be moved, with the result that the palm of the hand had to be redesigned. Making this adaptation involved enacting an engagement with the process disability critic Michael Davidson has termed ‘thinking through the body’. ‘Disability demands re-assigning meaning’, Davidson writes, a phrase especially relevant to the experience of making the hand, where ‘re-assignment’ was foremostly a technical issue. That the hand then looked different (not only in the sense of being disabled but also did not look like a five-digit prosthetic hand that simply did not have two digits inserted during construction) is also a question of disability aesthetics, a category that, as Davidson notes, ‘foregrounds the extent to which the body becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted, when the social meanings attached to sensory and cognitive values cannot be assumed’ (Davidson 2008: 225; 4). The aesthetics produced by both hands articulated complex processes of visualization: the material existence of an artificial limb signalling an immediate expression of disability ‘replacement’, but the secondary reformatting of each hand revising this through the recognizable change to the seeming normality of the ‘fake’ object. As the team worked through detailed production issues – questions of articulating the digits, actuating the joints, possible motorization or mounting on a supportive wrist, for example – the technical decisions were always instances of such disability aesthetics. All were the building blocks of a specific posthumanism in practice, the (literal) nuts and bolts of production inspired by posthumanism’s conception of the body as, to again cite Braidotti, ‘embodied and embedded, relational and affective’. They

 Engineering the Posthuman 25 were also driven by disability perspectives on embodiment as a fiction of ‘totality’, a perspective again clearly aligned with Braidotti’s. As we prepared to present our work to the public, the team felt that we had achieved one part of the project’s aims: the interwoven processes of cultural (posthumanist, disability) theory and engineering detail in our design and production that signalled and made the material a practical posthumanism. The project’s next stage lay in how this would be received.

Public touch Davidson’s stress on the ‘thinkable’ body and the ‘social meanings’ it produces is a central frame for reading the public responses to the exhibition of the hands that took place at the British Academy showcase. The event itself sought to highlight a range of innovative, socially relevant research funded by the Academy, using its central London location as a base. The research team set up an exhibit that put the two disabled hands (in white in Figure 1.1) in the context of a series of others, including toys, artworks, and examples that signalled cultural difference, and the display was accompanied by a short film depicting a variety of disabled and abled hands in use. The film begins, in silence, in British Sign Language, stressing hands as ‘tools of consciousness’ that are both functional and expressive. Emphasizing the location of both speech and gesture in Broca’s area in the brain, the signing continued: ‘We encounter the world through our hands in the same way that we make words into sentences.’ It then featured a montage of hands, including those of team members, set to the soundtrack of Steve Reich’s 1972 composition ‘Clapping Music’, a piece for two musicians performed entirely through clapping.3 Overall, the exhibit placed a range of hands together for public scrutiny and comment.​ The immediate reaction of people encountering and engaging with the exhibit was to be made self-conscious. Initial handling of the objects on display created the kinds of moments Kathleen Stewart has characterized as ‘ordinary affects’, spaces that are ‘a kind of contact zone where the overdetermination of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place [. . .] more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings’ (Stewart 2007: 3). The materiality of the hands, the ways they provoked a need for touch and the context of a public exhibition combined to make them non-symbolic in precisely this way, while an unpredictability came from the sudden invitation to contemplate the taken-for-granted status of handedness in acts of holding the hands as objects.4 That this took place through the use of hands only complicated the kind of contact zone (here one that was literal) that Stewart describes. Central to this contact was the quality – especially the materiality – of touch and its presumed meanings. Karen Barad begins her ground-breaking essay ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’ with a specific focus on hands. She observes: When two hands touch, there is a sensuality of the flesh, an exchange of warmth, a feeling of pressure, of presence, a proximity of otherness that brings the other

26

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 1.1 ‘Why Would You Deliberately Design a Disabled Hand?’ British Academy Summer Showcase, June 2018. The lunate and three-digit hands are bottom left. Courtesy Stuart Murray.

nearly as close as oneself. Perhaps closer. And if the two hands belong to one person, might this not enliven an uncanny sense of the otherness of the self, a literal holding oneself at a distance in the sensation of contact, the greeting of the stranger within? So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times – are aroused. When two hands touch, how close are they? What is the measure of closeness? [.  .  .] Many voices speak here in the interstices, a cacophony of always already reiteratively intra-acting stories. These are entangled tales. Each is diffractively threaded through and enfolded in the other. Is that not in the nature of touching? Is touching not by its very nature always already an involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger within? (Barad 2012: 206)

For Barad, the terms of this feeling and proximity – the strangeness of the uncanny or other held within an ‘entangled tale’ – enact wider processes of quantum physics we can recognize as posthumanist: part of ‘a radical deconstruction of identity and of the equation of matter with essence’ that forms a core tenet of posthumanism’s critique of the centred humanist self. Touching becomes a detail of this through the production of alterity: ‘All touching entails an infinite alterity, so that touching the other is touching all others, including the “self ”, and touching the “self ” entails touching the strangers within’ (Barad 2012: 208; 213). Following this, we might ask where such thinking

 Engineering the Posthuman 27 leaves an idea of disability-as-strangeness, particularly when part of the strangeness is not the touch between two biological hands that Barad discusses, but – as at the showcase – between an abled biological hand and a production-disabled prosthetic.5 María Puig de la Bellacasa echoes Barad’s stress on touch and alterity: ‘in its quasiinescapable evocation of close relationality’, she notes, ‘touching is [. . .] called upon as the experience par excellence in which boundaries between self and other are blurred’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2009: 298). In every encounter at the showcase, those members of the public touching the hands entered into these processes of relationality: indeed, this was a key response to all the exhibits on display, with many visitor questionnaire comments stressing the attractiveness of the ‘hands-on’ element of the event (Jenkins 2018: 15–16). As Puig de la Bellacasa goes on to observe: ‘To think with touch has a potential to inspire a sense of connectedness that can further problematize abstractions and disengagements of (epistemological) distances – between subjects and objects, knowledge and the world, affects and facts, politics and science’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2009: 298). It was precisely this connectedness and problematization that were in play as the hands were handled, examined and considered. ‘Thinking with touch’ is a perfect shorthand for the kind of practical application of posthumanist ideas that the project was aiming for here, where the relational complexities of affect, body, and technology as an assemblage became an everyday moment of handling and thinking. The pause that happened before a visitor commented or asked a question was the space in which such practice began its emergence. The research team encouraged an engagement with thinking through handedness, asking all non-disabled visitors to imagine what kind of prosthetic hand they would want should they need to have one, with no limit on the possibilities of what it could do or what form it might take. Most chose to stress utility, though the frequent answer that a new hand should do ‘nearly everything my hand can do now’ was unexpected, as if an expression of the latent belief that a replacement hand must somehow not be capable of the same functionality as a biological one. Very few expressed a desire for any kind of excess, a hand that could do more than those they currently have, while examples of a fully imaginative leap – ‘I’d want it to be green, and to glow’ one woman said – were rare. Common to many of the responses was the lack of articulation that came with the offer to contemplate and touch (all) the hands; people often spoke haltingly and were uncertain in their reply. Stewart’s stress on the ‘overdetermination’ of an encounter with the ordinary and familiar appeared here to short circuit the ability to express what hands meant. Through the exhibit, hands were made strange. Such strangeness was brought into focus when the visitors were asked to respond to the lunate and three-digit hands (this was done deliberately after conversations about the others on show, to set up a narrative of engagement across the objects). When informed that the hands had been designed and made specifically to be disabled, the public response was to contextualize this within the previous discussions about the other hands in the exhibit. Instead of what might have been expected – comments on the lack of logic of such production, or confusion surrounding assumptions of utility – the visitors drew attention to the complexity of the hands’ materiality and meaning. Comments ranged from a recognition that prosthetics need not only be thought of in terms of replacement to an appreciation of the ways in which the hands could be understood

28

Posthumanism in Practice

as political objects, indicative of an asserted agency (many connected the hands to the increased use of non-cosmetic prostheses, understood as statements of difference). In their own way, each response was an example of Davidson’s concept of ‘thinking through the body’ with a disability focus, a process that changed the terms of apprehension. As people held the hands at this point in their visit to the exhibit, it was clear that their experience of touch had changed. Through an experience of interaction, the strained self-consciousness of the initial encounter had transformed into an appreciation of complexity. This was, it should be stressed, more than an issue of touch alone: as Puig de la Bellacasa notes, ‘The worlds into which touch will attract us will not be given by the nature of its singular phenomenology or a singular rationale. They involve visions of touch’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2009: 306–7, italics in original). The visualization of the hands at the showcase recalls Garland-Thomson’s insights into staring and gesture and the clear manifestation of an embodiment of physical difference. The hands were visual as well as tactile, material as well as theorized, familiar yet uncanny; as more people encountered them, it was clear that nothing in the moment was singular.

Conclusion The showcase made a number of things clear. One was a predictable observation to which the project added complexity, namely that all prosthetic hands designed for functionality contain the kinds of excess that re-assesses the embodiment they suggest. Whether low-cost 3D printable units, like the Ada Hand, or high-end products that use osseo-neuromuscular implants to create a dexterous and sentient prosthetic experience, each articulates a complex and varied mode of the ‘artificial’. In terms of replacement, as with biological examples, there is no such thing as a ‘normal’ artificial hand, nothing that serves as a foundational model for any iteration of a functional experience.6 As outlined earlier, this recognition expands into what we might recognize as posthumanism in practice. The production of specifically disabled prosthetics created precisely the complex overdetermined and unpredictable processes and objectsas-knowledge described by Braidotti, Stewart, Barad and others. They triggered a re-conception of embodiment, whether understood in terms of designed technology, aesthetics, or public perception. In so doing, they opened connections to multiple spaces that might seem outside the realm of a prosthetic limb. For Braidotti, these are found in modes of immanence and relationality, necessarily limited but nevertheless powerful distributed subjectivities that include numerous moments of being-in-the-world (Braidotti 2019: 132). For Barad, questions of ‘responsibility and justice’ are raised by the recognition of ‘the existence of the inhuman as threaded through and lived through us, as enabling us, and every being/becoming, to reach out to the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never touch’ (Barad 2012: 216). Here, we should be careful not to be troubled by the ‘inhuman’ – as slur, as prejudice – in relation to disability, but rather understand the word in terms of the materiality of the constructed hands. In these perspectives as well as multiple others, critical posthumanism’s explicit relationship with disability provides the detail into which embodied technologies and technologies of embodiment can enter. It is precisely the overlap between posthumanism’s critique of the bounded and centred sense of self with disability’s reformatting of the abled,

 Engineering the Posthuman 29 presumed normal, body that signals such a becoming. That these are also moments of responsibility and justice grounds these methods, an aspect vital for full recognition of the value of disability experience and lived life. Barad’s ‘otherness that we might otherwise never touch’ is more than a frame, however. It is an apt description of the Leeds project, from the disability-led detail of the hands’ design to the specifics of the public encounters. These latter are grounded sites of practice, situated examples of engineering and exhibition, and their importance lies in that they show that critical posthumanist conceptions of the body can and should be built in the processes of design and production, and that better prosthetics would result if this were the case. In their materiality and abstraction, these sites are powerful actuators of posthumanism, enabling processes where we might see the tendons of philosophy pulled by disability technology, theory touched by a hand’s complex plasticity.

Acknowledgements Funding for the ‘Engineering the Imagination’ project was generously provided by an APEX award from the British Academy, Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering. Special thanks to Raymond Holt, Andy Mudd, and EatFish Design.

Notes 1 The Hands of X project culminated in two exhibitions: nine months at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design, New York, in 2017–18 and two months at the V&A Dundee in 2019. 2 The lunate or ‘false’ thumb is found most prominently in Giant and Red Pandas, where genomic sequencing has suggested that a mutation of shared genes could have led to its development. 3 The film was made by Crispian Neill and the BSL signing provided by Vivien Sabel. 4 Nearly all visitors to the exhibit were adults. The few children who encountered the hands immediately recognized those that were toys or played with others as if they were toys. 5 I do not have space here to consider the added complexity of hand transplants, in which the biological and idea of ‘replacement’ are even further intertwined. 6 It is also worth noting that even the most expensive prosthetic hands can leave users deeply frustrated, to the point where they stop using the product. Britt Young expresses this frustration in his response to obtaining the sophisticated Bebionic arm. Especially telling is Young’s observation that the rejection rate of new prostheses by upper-limb users is as high as 44 per cent. See Young (2021).

References Barad, K. (2012), ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, Differences, 23 (3): 206–23. Batts, C. and D. Andrews (2011), ‘‘‘Tactical Athletes”: The United States Paralympic Military Program and the Mobilization of the Disabled Soldier/Athlete’, Sport in Society, 14 (5): 553–68.

30

Posthumanism in Practice

Blackford, R. (2013), ‘The Great Transition: Ideas and Anxieties’, in M. More and N. VitaMore (eds), The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, 421–9, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Boxall, P. (2020), The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press. Crawford, C. (2014), Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology, New York and London: New York University Press. Davidson, M. (2008), Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (2009), Staring: How We Look, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. ([1942-43] 1999), ‘The Hand and the Typewriter’, reprinted in F. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hu, Y. et al. (2017), ‘Comparative Genomics Reveals Convergent Evolution Between the Bamboo-eating Giant and Red Pandas’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (5), 1081–6. Jenkins, S. (2018), British Academy Summer Showcase 2018: Evaluation Report, London: British Academy. Landsberg, A. (2004), Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Leader, D. (2017), Hands: What We Do With Them and Why, London: Penguin. Lury, C. (1998), Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity, London and New York: Routledge. Murray, S. (2020), Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology and Cultural Futures, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Nayar, P. (2014), Posthumanism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Pliny (2004), Natural History, trans. J.F. Healy, London: Penguin. Puig de la Belacasa, M. (2009), ‘Touching Technologies, Touching Visions: The Reclaiming of Sensorial Experience and the Politics of Speculative Thinking’, Subjectivity 28: 297–315. doi:10.1057/sub.2009.17 Pullin, G. (2009), Design Meets Disability, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Serlin, D. (2002), ‘Engineering Masculinity: Veterans and Prosthetics after World War Two’, in K. Ott, D. Serlin and S. Mihm (eds), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, 45–74, New York: New York University Press. Shildrick, M. (2015), ‘“Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?” Embodiment, Boundaries and Somatechnics’, Hypatia, 30 (1), 13–29. Sobchack, V. (2006), ‘A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor and Materiality’, in M. Smith and J. Morris (eds), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, 17–41, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stewart, K. (2007), Ordinary Affects, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wilson, F. (1999), The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, New York: Vintage. Young, B. (2021), ‘I Have One of the Most Advanced Prosthetic Arms in the World – and I Hate It’, Input, Available online: https://www​.inputmag​.com​/culture​/cyborg​-chic​-bionic​ -prosthetic​-arm​-sucks (accessed 28 April 2021).

2

Posthuman(izing) biomedicine The role of microbiota in Parkinson’s disease research Aaron Bradshaw

Imagine one day you wake up and notice that your left index finger is trembling. You dismiss it, putting it down to the beers you drank last night, or maybe nerves, or lack of sleep even. Over the next few months, however, the tremor doesn't resolve, but gets worse; you start dropping things and occasionally your left arm becomes rigid, stiff, and slow to move. Following numerous medical assessments, questionnaires, brain scans, and pharmacological interventions, you are diagnosed by a neurologist as suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease (PD), an illness caused by the death of a specific set of neurons deep in the brain. Your insidious physical difficulties have now been crystalized as a legible, identifiable nosological entity. The movement difficulties you are experiencing can be traced back to a demarcated anatomical locus with a well-described physiological function. What is going on then, when you are offered to take part in a trial of faecal transplant – intended to recolonize the gut with ‘healthy bacteria’ – for treatment of PD? What is the relation between the ‘death of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra’ (Armstrong and Okun 2020: 548–60), a very specific part of your brain, and the microbial communities living out their days in your gut? Currently, PD is diagnosed by neurologists, doctors who specialize in knowledge about the function and dysfunction of the brain and nervous systems. As a clinical discipline, neurology is an artefact of the Western model of medicine that, after rigidly separating the human body from its environment, sub-divides that body into a set of organ systems to which certain professionals are devoted. Recent advances in the understanding of PD, however, link the dysfunction of the nervous system characteristic of this illness to the outside world, to non-human actors, and to other organ systems in the body. PD is ‘more’ than a movement disorder. This changing knowledge opens up PD to investigation from other disciplinary formations as well as highlights the limitations of certain traditional ways of delimiting and demarcating the body for understanding the illness. These ways of segmenting and dividing up the body have themselves been inherited from a humanist paradigm that, roughly speaking, takes the ‘self ’ and ‘its’ body as a continuous, self-identical and bounded entity. Disease or illness, according to

32

Posthumanism in Practice

humanist medicine, can be located as specific lesions, disruptions, and mutations in a homeostatic system that, under normal working conditions, maintains internal consistency as well as discrete and clear borders between itself and ‘the rest of the world’ or the ‘environment’. Over time, this model has been imposed upon the messiness of the body and our worlds, and, notwithstanding its success in many areas, such as surgery,1 may also have limitations for how we understand our bodies, especially in their relation to the environment, and perhaps health and disease more generally. Posthumanism, as a theory and a set of practices, may offer a productive way out of these limitations. Although it is important to note that posthumanism itself is multiple, heterogenous, and internally differentiated, what the developing systems of thought which cluster around the term tend to share is a view of the world that decentres human agency in accounts and ontologies of the processes of material and social life.2 The ‘negative’ side of the posthumanist equation is one which deconstructs the humanist ideals of rationality and control exerted by a human subject who exists over and above – somehow ‘outside’ – the domain of the world. In other words, the posthumanism mobilized here is one in which the human cannot be understood as an entity pre-existing its material entanglements in the world, and is, instead, in an openended state of flux and becoming-with those entanglements. The aim of this chapter is to offer an account of changing concepts and theories of PD that emphasizes the posthumanist nature of both their form and content. As a central organizing framework for this analysis, I draw from philosopher of science Andrew Pickering’s account of scientific practice which he terms the ‘mangle’. In his account, Pickering distinguishes between (scientific3) ‘culture’ and ‘practice’ in which the former refers, in a broad sense, to the ‘“made things” of science . . . includ[ing] skills and social relations, machines and instruments, as well as scientific facts and theories’ (Pickering 1995: 3), whilst the latter is taken to mean ‘cultural extension’ – the transformation of this culture in time. In other words, ‘culture’ and ‘practice’ refer to the synchronic and diachronic aspects of science, respectively, and the mangle offers a theory of their interaction and emergence in time. I am interested, in this sense, in the ‘practice’ of PD research insofar as the field has gone through certain transformations in which the aetiology and ontology of the disease have been reconceptualized, and the ‘culture’ of contemporary models of PD which emphasize the open-ended becoming of the human organism and its entanglement with microbial others. Pickering’s account of science is at base a performative one. Instead of viewing science as a collection of facts which may correspond more or less to the way things really are,4 science is conceived of as a ‘field of powers, capacities, and performances’ (Pickering 1995: 5). These powers and capacities are distributed across human and non-human actors, and in this way his account of scientific activity is an explicitly posthumanist one that resonates with feminist epistemologies of science as elaborated by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.5 This way of theorizing scientific practice departs from the humanist sociology of scientific knowledge in that whilst those accounts tend to refer material agency back to human accounts of it – and scientific accounts themselves suppose the material world determines the final answer to a particular question (i.e. they are antihumanist) – Pickering’s performative idiom ‘subverts the black-and-white distinctions of humanism/antihumanism and moves

 Posthuman(izing) Biomedicine 33 into a posthumanist space, a space in which the human actors are still there but now inextricably entangled with the non-human, no longer at the centre of the action and calling the shots’.6 In the scientific process, then, human and non-human agencies are related to one another in a ‘dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ or a ‘dance of agency’, in which different agencies reciprocally alternate between activity and passivity. In this dance of scientific practice, the material agency is temporally emergent in the sense that it emerges in real time through its capture in ‘delicate material positioning or tuning [i.e. in machines]’ and its contours are never ‘decisively known in advance’ (Pickering 1995: 14). It is this dance of agency that Pickering refers to as ‘the mangle of practice’, where mangling is conceived of as precisely that dynamic between the human and non-human constituents of scientific culture in the processes of cultural extension. Following Pickering, a central part of my analysis here, therefore, is the relation between non-human and human agency in both the dynamic of scientific activity into PD, and in the ontology of the disease itself. In what follows, I use a posthumanist account of scientific cultural extension to analyse the practice and culture of PD research, which are then brought together through a reflection on the meaning of scientific translation, that is, the process of translating physiological findings from one organism to another, with the goal of treating human subjects.

Trajectory of modern PD research PD research has alternated between views of the disease as being driven primarily by self-contained ‘genetic’ changes, and understandings which view the illness as having important environmental causes and mediations.7 Moving in tandem with this shifting trajectory has been the questioning of the spatiotemporal borders of PD pathology, and the gradual implication of organ systems and non-human entities further and further removed from the central nervous system. Indeed, pathological changes once thought to be confined to the substantia nigra8 of the brainstem are now known to occur in the enteric nervous system and olfactory bulb potentially decades before the motor symptoms of the illness present.9 Importantly, both of these structures form boundaries that interface with the environment and interact with populations of commensal and symbiotic microbial species in complex dynamic relationships, and their activities, too, are now being implicated in the illness. This widening of the material agency of PD, coupled with the enrolment of non-human actors in its development strongly resonates with a posthuman understanding of material life in that it decentres human biology as the locus of disease – and therefore of treatment. More than this, the scientific process by which these forces and agencies have been implicated in PD is also well explained by a posthumanist account of scientific practice. The idea that PD could be an illness with an environmental cause was given a substantial evidential base in 1983 when a patient showed up at a clinic with unexplained motor symptoms identical in presentation to late-stage PD. Unlike the usual progression of the illness, however, these symptoms had not developed over the course of decades, but overnight. Five other such individuals were rapidly identified,

34

Posthumanism in Practice

and subsequent analysis linked their syndrome to the consumption of a drug that had been inadvertently synthesized during the production of meperidine (Langston et al. 1983: 979–80). Animal models were quickly developed and demonstrated that this agent, known as MPTP, reached the central nervous system and was converted into a toxic metabolite, MPP+, that was selectively concentrated inside dopamine neurons, including those in the substantia nigra. Once inside these neurons it inhibited the energy production of the cells, causing them to die (Przedborski et al. 2000: 135–42). With the discovery of MPTP, the idea that PD could have causes outside the body, and which viewed the human organism as embedded in a transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010: 11–25) space was given a solid evidential base, but simultaneously, so was the view of the illness as having a spatially restricted underlying pathology, confined to the substantia nigra pars compacta of the midbrain. These views of a spatially restricted underlying pathology have sedimented in the practical experimentation into PD in recent decades; the main techniques used to study PD in biomedical contexts have been cell culture and animal models in which the aim is to capture the material agency of PD precisely inasmuch as it is confined to neurons. Indeed, these systems are developed with the intention of precisely extracting this neuronal pathology from the rest of the body (and world), observing it in isolation and how it responds to pharmacological and genetic manipulation. Following the identification of the first monogenic cause of the disease in 1995, the conception of PD as a tractable and localizable process was further stabilized. Mutations in the gene coding for the protein alpha-synuclein lead to PD, and, importantly for researchers attempting to model the disease, dysfunction of the alphasynuclein protein is observed in all PD cases, not just those associated with mutations in this gene.10 This finding formed a tractable – and manipulable – molecular link between sporadic cases of PD and those with known, genetic, causes and spurred on a new wave of cell culture and animal work. Armed with the genetic knowledge of PD, the goal was now to model the dysfunction of alpha-synuclein and its links to neuronal cell death. PD was inherently being conceptualized as an illness with causes immanent to the body, and its genesis as somehow housed within the architecture of the cell. Pickering stresses that scientific practice occurs through the ‘formulation of specific goals and plans in the processes of modelling’ (Pickering 1995: 72), which is precisely what scientists were doing as they modelled PD in cultured neurons and animal models. These goals explicitly included the ability to observe dopamingergic neuronal cell death, the dysfunction of alpha-synuclein, and, in some cases, the role of MPTP in these processes. The resulting ‘dialectics of resistance and accommodation organised around [these] intended captures of material agency’ (Pickering 1995: 51), in which humans and their ‘objects’ of study – cell cultures, animal models, proteins in a test tube – reciprocally stood forward and backward, have given rise to a large corpus of knowledge on the molecular and cellular processes implicated in neuronal cell death (Chia, Tan and Chao 2020: 2464). But the formulation of these goals have themselves been conditioned by a particular orientation within medical and biomedical research. Specifically, a humanist ontology that separates the human body from its environment and seeks causes for the evolution of illness that conform to this binary; following this rigid separation disease is often

 Posthuman(izing) Biomedicine 35 thought of as either genetic or environmental. The identification of genetic causes of PD – and their phenotypic similarity to idiopathic cases, solidified the sense that human biology, self-sufficient and cut off from the material world, held the answer to slowing down and stopping the disease. A posthumanist approach, however, would have us pause to question how the human organism is irreducibly entangled with the non-human and material world and consequently, how health and disease emerge across these fields that are constitutively intertwined. A posthumanist model of scientific practice would moreover encourage us to question how these forces that extend beyond the human body register not only in health and disease but also how they sculpt and direct scientific practice, too, and therefore, come to be present in our material and theoretical engagement with the world. Indeed, these two facets of posthumanist thought to mingle and merge in the story of PD; the agency of the illness has itself forced a material resistance to the efforts of capturing it in the machinic plane of cell culture and animal model technology.11 Consequently, researchers have accommodated for these resistances by looking further from the neuronal ‘essence’ of the disease and following chains of association throughout the bodies’ organs, non-human residents, and into the wider environment. In one sense, posthumanist analysis gives an account of how researchers ended up following these chains, whilst in another, the very content of these chains in PD (see in the following) typifies a posthumanist ontology of health and illness.12 Tracing from the substantia nigra outwards, then, researchers have come, sequentially, to the enteric nervous system, the intestines, and their associated microbiota; clinically, PD is associated with a host of prodromal features, such as anosmia and constipation, referred to as the ‘non-motor’ symptoms, which predate the appearance of motor symptoms by many years, even decades. Contemporary views of PD locate the hallmark pathology of the disease13 as progressing from the periphery into the brain over a long period of time, giving rise to the sequential dysfunctions that result in its characteristic non-motor and motor symptoms. In fact, there is epidemiological evidence that cutting off the communication between the peripheral enteric nervous system and the central nervous system through the procedure of vagotomy reduces the incidence of PD (Svensson et al. 2015: 522–9). This image of the disease as encroaching from the periphery into the brain has been provocative in research and clinical circles, providing a captivating and elegant explanation for the alltoo-common symptomatic progression observed in these patients and offering hope that the disease can be tracked and, ultimately, halted in its course. Taking us even further from the substantia nigra, the ‘classical’ locus of the disease, recent hypotheses and experimental data now suggest that, in at least some cases, changes to the populations of commensal microbes inhabiting the gastrointestinal tract may be critically involved in the initiation and maintenance of PD.14 The addition of non-human actors to our understanding of the illness begins to draw an explicit link between the ontologies and causalities at play in this disease and a posthumanist conception of health and disease as distributed across the material agency of humans and non-humans. In this decentring of the human, it becomes clear that understanding and treating PD cannot retain an exclusive focus on studying and treating human physiologies – these theories begin to implicate a host of networked

36

Posthumanism in Practice

and relational variables that must similarly be taken into account; human physiology (and pathophysiology) itself becomes indelibly caught up in a web of non-human influences and forces. The next section elaborates some of these hypotheses and attempts to show how they may be consistent with relational ontologies of the body that are characteristic of posthuman thought.

Nondualist and posthumanist ontologies, and the matter of PD Whether implicitly or explicitly, popular accounts of neurodegenerative illness, and its associated research, have a tendency to reinforce the long-held separation of ‘body’ and ‘mind’. However, although neurodegenerative diseases are generally interpreted within this schema of the mind/body distinction, an insightful point that Elizabeth Wilson makes is that this is often ‘despite the data they are generating’ and ‘not because of them’ (Wilson 2007: 397). Indeed, as reviewed earlier, and as Wilson goes on to argue, ‘the viscera [such as the gut] aren’t mere transfer stations for agents [for instance, PD pathology] that will have their effects elsewhere’ (Wilson 2007: 397) but, rather, constitute an integral feature of health and disease in an organism that cannot be conveniently divided into ‘mind’ and ‘body’. Taken with the understandings discussed earlier, we are led to a conception of PD, and of illness in general, as more embodied and distributed. Such a view renders the appearance of pathology as localized to specific centres and peripheries as an artefact of particular, and humanist, ways of knowing and a contingent crossing-over point into a relational and situated onto-epistemology. Biomedical research’s view of the brain as residing in a ‘privileged environment’ separated from the rest of the body, however, is in fact founded in an empirical, as opposed to metaphysical, account of the world. This organ, though receptive to the outside world through the transducing and mediating activities of our sensory organs, is one step removed from direct contact with the matter of the world by the blood brain barrier (BBB), a complex anatomical arrangement of microvasculature, epithelial cells, and molecular pumps that selectively exclude or internalize chemicals and nutritional components into the brain. A functional link between the dysbiotic microbial communities observed in the guts of individuals with PD and the evolution of their illness is found at this boundary of separation; the altered metabolism of microbial communities living in the gut is hypothesized to participate in a series of processes that renders the blood brain barrier increasingly permeable and ‘leaky’ to chemicals ordinarily excluded from the brain.15 Likewise, the intestinal wall itself may be rendered ‘leaky’ by a persistent microbial dysbiosis, a ‘leakiness’ that is associated with chronic inflammation and changes in the neuronal cells of the enteric nervous system that might participate in central nervous dysfunction, too (Carabotti et al. 2015: 203–9). Given the above, we may ask how theories of the microbiota and its role in health and disease differ from the paradigm of infectious disease that also emphasizes interaction and proximity between humans and microbes. Although both stances acknowledge the porousness of the body to the outside world, the infectious disease paradigm conceptualizes the body as a fortress or bounded system that is vulnerable

 Posthuman(izing) Biomedicine 37 to invasion or attack by pathogenic agents, and must, therefore, be secured against such attack. Microbiome-informed understandings of the body, on the other hand, conceptualize the human as always already entangled with non-human others, as a fundamental and irreducible feature. Symbiotic, commensal, parasitic, and pathogenic connections with microbes are defined relationally and contextually, through both presence and absence (Lorimer 2017: 34–6). In this ontology, the notion of specific, individual isolatable organisms with pre-existent identities, of which pathogenicity may be an essential feature, becomes marginalized in favour of becoming-with microbes in ongoing interactions. This conceptual reconfiguration is tied up with new knowledge and philosophical reflection in the wider biological sciences, reflections that consider no organism as wholly separate, and which assign formative roles to cooperation between organisms, rather than competition, in the evolution and diversification of life on Earth.16 In his essay ‘New Ontologies’, published a decade after The Mangle of Practice, Pickering gives an analogy of the difference between the humanist representational idiom he seeks to subvert and the nondualist, posthumanist, and performative ontology he develops, by reference to the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Willem de Kooning, respectively. In reviewing the eternal forms and rigid divisions of his work, Pickering suggests that Mondrian’s vision is one of standing outside the world and representing it in an atemporal manner; ‘image[s] [that] one can hold clearly in one’s mind and unleash in the world whenever one is so disposed’ (Pickering 2007). De Kooning’s paintings, on the other hand, are created through a performative process which is not predetermined in advance and which emerges in time. Pickering’s argument is that whilst de Kooning’s paintings thematize the ontology from which they emerge – the dynamic interplay of human and non-human (e.g. paint, canvas, etc.) agencies, Mondrian’s paintings, through evoking a duality of human and non-human worlds ‘draw a veil over the basic ontological situation from which they themselves emerged’. I would suggest that this analogy can be applied to the views of PD that are outlined earlier. Similar to how Mondrian’s work is a stance within the ongoing flux and emergence of reality, the view of PD as being a spatially restricted pathological entity which can be manipulated and controlled ‘from a distance’ is a stance adopted within its flux of becoming. The view of PD as an emergent phenomenon, materialized in ongoing relation with a wider world of non-human elements and others, however, thematizes the very ontology from which it theoretically, empirically, and indeed, physiologically emerges.

Performance and translation The complication, however, comes at the point when the discourse and practice around microbiota manipulation in PD – which aims to precisely control intestinal microbial populations in the service of slowing the illness down – begins to obscure the ontological conditions from which this knowledge arose. If, as I have suggested, the scientific understanding of PD as emerging through the interplay of human physiology and non-human actors typifies a posthumanist ontology, then the attempt

38

Posthumanism in Practice

to manipulate the microbiota in specific directions – as controlled by a human subject standing ‘outside’ of the world – is humanist through-and-through. In other words, the aim to precisely manipulate microbial communities contradicts the very findings motivating these attempts and for the reason that any map or representation that would inform such manipulations necessarily lacks a critical dimension of the ontological reality which it attempts to grasp. If this is the case then it becomes very reasonable to ask what counts as a pragmatic approach to treating so-called ‘dysbiosis’ in PD. One angle through which this dilemma may be addressed is via the notion of biomedical ‘translation’ and its disruption through the implications of microbiomics. In the conceptual framework of translation, every form of biomedical research is considered to exist at some point along a ‘translational spectrum’, from ‘pure’ research on the one hand to clinical trials and ‘real world’ interventions on the other. ‘Translation’ is considered as the movement from one pole of this spectrum to the other, from ‘simple’ models and systems (read ‘non-human’) to more complex biological organisms ultimately culminating in treating human beings. Translational research posits a fundamental homology, or correspondence, between different organisms and model systems, and findings from one system can be appropriately modified and applied to the one next up the hierarchy. Biomedical translation is then, at its heart, a reconfiguration of the representational idiom that instead of getting caught up with the correspondence between our ‘knowledge of the world’ and the ‘world itself ’, concerns itself with the correspondence between one system, one organism or model, and another. As a biomedical theory and practice, translational research is deeply imbued with humanist ontology and values; in addition to constructing a hierarchy of simple to complex organisms, and electing humans to the apex of that hierarchy through the partial correspondences and resemblances of those ‘simpler’ organisms to the human, it also puts all nonhuman physiologies at the service of humanity. But more than this, the meta-theoretic position of biomedical translation relies on a general structural formula that installs a knowing human subject that observes, records, and ultimately organizes the world. But how does the revelation of microbial involvement in human health and disease undercut this orientation and highlight limitations in the humanist paradigm? Microbiology grew up as a discipline that aimed towards the isolation and identification of distinct species, that is, grounded in a humanist ontology of identity and continuity. In the last few decades, however, these views have been significantly reconfigured to see the microbial world as radically emergent and as going through constant transformations. This applies also to the intestinal microbiota, which, despite the growing deluge of data, seems to resist any definitive enumeration of its components and behaviour, not least because of its dynamic nature. Isabelle Stengers’ engagement with Ludwig Fleck’s research on the development of the Wasserman reaction for syphilis is illuminating in this regard. Stengers notes that ‘Fleck’s questions address [a] field [i.e. biomedicine] in which facts usually cannot be given to authorise a single interpretation because of the intrinsic and entangled variability of what is suggested in those fields’ (Stengers 2018: 94). Stengers’ remarks suggest a point that has been foregrounded throughout the last two sections of this chapter: that biological knowledge thematizes the very ontological conditions from which it arises. In particular, the dynamics of microbial ecology and evolution resist generalization, do not authorize ‘single’ interpretations, and tend

 Posthuman(izing) Biomedicine 39 towards representing the unpresentable. The point here is that the content of the findings of microbial ecology and microbiomics has the potential to re-address the biomedical model of translation, and, potentially, the humanism at the base of biomedicine itself. The fact that our representations of the world do not necessarily mirror that world is foregrounded by the complexity, messiness, and translocations of the microbial. But there is something more to it. It might be fair to say that the whole of biomedical research into PD thus far has the capacity, if analysed in detail, to highlight the limitations of the humanist paradigm, at least insofar as such research has not translated into an ability to reliably slow down the illness. But the microbial involvement shows something potentially specific about this limitation; although our knowledge does not accurately reflect a world out there in a one-to-one correspondence, representations are not arbitrary and ‘how the material world is leaks into and infects our representations of it in a nontrivial and consequential fashion’ (Pickering 1995: 182). The point is that in the case of microbial ecology, what ‘leaks into our representations’ of it isn’t just something about microbial ecology, but about the world in general; ontologically, its entangled nature and emergence through the interplay of human and non-human actors, and epistemologically in terms of representing how it is a fraught and necessarily incomplete task. In other words, if de Kooning’s paintings thematize posthumanist ontology, so does microbial ecology, which also, and to boot, thematizes the insufficiency of correspondence realism and humanism for understanding our being and relating in the world. It is here, I believe, where the rubber meets the road in terms of biomedical knowledge and its application in the world. Such research, casting a light unto itself, forwards an epistemology of translation and correspondence, whilst at the same time generating data attesting to the sheer unrepresentability of certain instances of microbiological life. In the case of microbiota restoration, ‘translation’ and its attendant humanist flavouring comes up hard and fast against a representational horizon: each instance of microbial ecology is, for all intents and purposes, radically singular and unique in its composition. From this perspective, restoration of the microbiome as a (potential) therapy17 for PD is in fact not a restoration, to a previous, knowable, and precisely representable point of balance and harmony, but an ongoing pragmatic collaboration with microbial life in its relationship with human physiology. Does this suggest that, to return to the opening vignette, when an individual’s symptoms of PD, the tremor, rigidity, and constipation are relieved by, say, a faecal microbiota transplant, that we have still failed to understand the truth of what is going on and how the illness has come to be abated? I would suggest this is a misguided question: truth is not a future consensus reached when we know what is really happening behind-the-scenes of illness and disease, but an ongoing manifestation of our pragmatic engagements with the world, in which both the world, ourselves, and our microbial others are constantly reconfigured.

Notes 1 One instance of the success of surgical interventions of relevance for the current chapter is deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease. In this treatment electrodes are implanted in the nuclei that degenerate in the disease, and activation of these

40

2

3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10

Posthumanism in Practice electrodes stimulates the neurons which are ordinarily stimulated by those that have been lost. The anatomical exactitude required for therapeutic effect of deep brain stimulation attests to the relative successes of neatly dividing up the body in treating specific diseases. There are various theoretical approaches that are either ‘posthuman’ or about posthumanism, including philosophical (Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Francesca Ferrando, Stefan Herbrechter, Rosi Braidotti), science and technology studies (Karen Barad, Donna Haraway) and social theory (Nigel Clark, Myra Hird) among others. Posthuman work is often focused on technological and ecological issues, and often engages with ‘hard’ science. One characteristic of posthuman thought, then, is its tendency to cross disciplinary boundaries. Pickering conceives of science itself in its broadest sense, to include science, technology and society. What Pickering refers to as the ‘representational idiom’, that is, the classical tradition of history/philosophy of science that concerns itself with the ‘objectivity’ of theories and their correspondence to a reality. Barad, for instance, has developed a model of scientific practice as intra-action, in which entities do not precede relating, and agency emerges through those relatings. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Haraway’s work in STS emphasizes the entanglements between nature and culture and human and non-humans. See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). Pickering, 25–6. This subversion is enacted through an insistence on the ‘constitutive intertwining and reciprocal interdefinition of human and material agency’. Pickering comments that ‘much of everyday life . . . has [the] characteristic of coping with material agency, agency that comes to us from outside the human realm and that cannot be reduced to anything within that realm’. This conception of science thus resists standard sociology of scientific knowledge approaches which reduce material agency to scientist’s accounts of that agency, and which, accordingly, tend towards arguing that the world is as it is constructed. Material agency ‘comes at us’ so to speak, exceeding our representation of the world and the task of science is to capture and domesticate this material agency, a process Pickering refers to as ‘tuning’. See, for instance D.G. Le Couteur, A.J. McLean, M.C. Taylor, B.L. Woodham and P.G. Board, ‘Pesticides and Parkinson’s Disease’, Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy 53 no. 3 (1999):122–30. See Zafar and Yaddanapudi (2020) for a standard textbook treatment. S. Zafar and S.S. Yaddanapudi, Parkinson’s Disease. In: StatPearls [Internet] (Treasure Island: StatPearls Publishing, 2021). Nolwen L. Rey, Daniel W. Wesson and Patrik Brundin, ‘The Olfactory Bulb as the Entry Site for Prion-Like Propagation in Neurodegenerative Diseases’, Neurobiology of Disease 109, no. Pt B (2018): 226–48; P. Derkinderen, T. Rouaud, T. Lebouvier, Varannes S. Bruley des, M. Neunlist and R. De Giorgio, ‘Parkinson’s Disease: The Enteric Nervous System Spills its Guts’, Neurology 77, no. 19 (2011): 1761–7. Aberrant forms of the alpha-synuclein protein being the major constituents of the pathological hallmark of the disease – Lewy Bodies – the dense intra-neuronal inclusions observed in the brains of individuals with PD. Biochemically they are composed of aggregations of alpha-synuclein, a protein whose normal function is related to neurotransmission.

 Posthuman(izing) Biomedicine 41 11 Highlighted primarily by the inability to effectively alter the course of PD and its underlying neurodegeneration in human individuals. 12 Certain paradigms of health and disease that pre-dated humanist models would also be likely to follow human illness into the wider environment and non-human forces (for instance see Maurizio Meloni, Impressionable Biologies (New York: Routledge, 2019). The case set out here outlines a liminal paradigm, or transition point, in which the tools of biomedical science and its humanist antecedents converge on an understanding of disease that resonates with posthumanist ontologies of the body and its environment. 13 That is, misfolded alpha-synuclein protein forming Lewy bodies. See earlier discussion on alpha-synuclein and its role in PD. 14 Filip Scheperjans et al., ‘Gut Microbiota Are related to Parkinson’s Disease and Clinical Phenotype’, Movement Disorders 30, no. 3 (2015): 350–8; Daniele Pietrucci et al. ‘Dysbiosis of gut microbiota in a Selected Population of Parkinson’s Patients’, Parkinsonism and Related Disorders 65 (2019): 124–30. 15 José Fidel Baizabal-Carvallo and Marlene Alonso-Juarez, ‘The Link between Gut Dysbiosis and Neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s Disease’, Neuroscience 432 (2020): 160–73; Madelyn C. Houser and Malú G. Tansey, ‘The Gut-Brain Axis: Is Intestinal Inflammation a Silent Driver of Parkinson’s Disease Pathogenesis?’ NPJ Parkinson’s Disease 3 no. 3 (2017). 16 Tobias Rees, Thomas Bosch and Angela E. Douglas, ‘How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self ’, PLoS Biology 16, no. 2 (2018); Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals’, Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 325–41. 17 Liu-Jun Xue et al., ‘Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease: A Preliminary Study’, Medicine (Baltimore) 99, no. 35 (2020): e22035; Hongli Huang et al., ‘Fecal Microbiota Transplantation to Treat Parkinson’s Disease with Constipation: A Case Report’, Medicine (Baltimore) 98, no. 26 (2019): e16163.

References Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Armstrong, M.J. and M.S. Okun (2020), ‘Diagnosis and Treatment of PD: A Review’, JAMA, 326 (6): 548–60. Baizabal-Carvallo, J.F. and M. Alonso-Juarez (2015), ‘The Link between Gut Dysbiosis and Neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s Disease’, Neuroscience, 432: 160–73. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway, Durham: Duke University Press. Carabotti, M., A. Scirocco, M.A. Maselli and C. Severi (2015), ‘The Gut-Brain Axis: Interactions between Enteric Microbiota, Central and Enteric Nervous Systems’, Annals of Gastroenterology, 28 (2): 203–9. Chia, S.J., E. Tan and Y. Chao (2020), ‘Historical Perspective: Models of Parkinson’s Disease’, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21 (7): 2464. Derkinderen P., T. Rouaud, T. Lebouvier, S. Bruley des Varannes, M. Neunlist and R. De Giorgio (2011), ‘Parkinson’s Disease: The Enteric Nervous System Spills its Guts’, Neurology, 77 (19): 1761–7. Gilbert, S.F., J. Sapp and A.I. Tauber (2012), ‘A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never been Individuals’, Quarterly Review of Biology, 87 (4): 325–41.

42

Posthumanism in Practice

Haraway, D. (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Houser, M.C. and M.G. Tansey (2017), ‘The Gut-Brain Axis: Is Intestinal Inflammation a Silent Driver of Parkinson’s Disease Pathogenesis?’, npj Parkinson’s Disease, 3 (3). Huang H., H. Xu, Q. Luo, J. He, M. Li, H. Chen, W. Tang, Y. Nie and Y. Zhou (2019), ‘Fecal Microbiota Transplantation to Treat Parkinson’s Disease with Constipation: A Case Report’, Medicine, 98 (26): e16163. Langston, J.W. (2017), ‘The MPTP Story’, Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, 7 (1): S11–S19. Langston J.W., P. Ballard, J.W. Tetrud and I. Irwin (1983), ‘Chronic Parkinsonism in Humans Due to a Product of Meperidine-analog Synthesis’, Science, 219 (4587): 979–80. Le Couteur D.G., A.J. McLean, M.C. Taylor, B.L. Woodham and P.G. Board (1999), ‘Pesticides and Parkinson’s Disease’, Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy, 53 (3): 122–30. Lorimer, J. (2017), ‘Probiotic Environmentalities: Rewilding with Wolves and Worms’, Theory, Culture and Society, 34 (4): 27–48. Meloni, M. (2019), Impressionable Biologies, New York: Routledge. Pickering, A. (1995), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pickering, A. (2007), ‘New Ontologies’, Philosophical Literary Journal Logos, 27. Pietrucci D., R. Cerroni, V. Unida, A. Farcomeni, M. Pierantozzi, N.B. Mercuri, S. Biocca, A. Stefani and A. Desideri (2019), ‘Dysbiosis of Gut Microbiota in a Selected Population of Parkinson’s Patients’, Parkinsonism and Related Disorders, 65: 124–30. Przedborski, S., V. Jackson-Lewis, R. Djaldetti, G. Liberatore, M. Vila, S. Vukosavic and G. Almer (2000), ‘The Parkinsonian Toxin MPTP: Action and Mechanism’, Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 16 (2): 135–42. Rees, T., T. Bosch and A.E. Douglas (2018), ‘How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self ’, PLoS Biology, 16 (2): e2005358. Rey, N.L., D.W. Wesson and P. Brundin (2018), ‘The Olfactory Bulb as the Entry Site for Prion-like Propagation in Neurodegenerative Diseases’, Neurobiology of Disease, 109 (Pt B): 226–48. Scheperjans, F., V. Aho, P.A.B. Pereira, K. Koskinen, L. Paulin, E. Pekkonen, E. Haapaniemi, S. Kaakkola, J. Eerola-Rautio, M. Pohja, E. Kinnunen, K. Murros and P. Auvinen (2015), ‘Gut Microbiota Are Related to Parkinson’s Disease and Clinical Phenotype’, Movement Disorders, 30 (3): 350–8. Stengers, I. (2018), Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. Svensson, E., E. Horváth-Puhó, R.W. Thomsen, J.C. Djurhuus, L. Pedersen, P. Borghammer and H.T. Sørensen (2015), ‘Vagotomy and Subsequent Risk of Parkinson’s Disease’, Annals of Neurology, 78 (4): 522–9. Wilson, E. (2007), ‘Organic Empathy: Feminism, Psychopharmaceuticals, and the Embodiment of Depression’, in S. Alaimo and S. Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms, 373–400, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Xue, L., X. Yang, Q. Tong, P. Shen, S. Ma, S. Wu, J. Zheng and H. Wang (2020), ‘Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease: A Preliminary Study’, Medicine, 99 (35): e22035. Zafar, S. and S. Yaddanapudi (2021), Parkinson’s Disease, StatPearls, January 2021. Available online: https://www​.ncbi​.nlm​.nih​.gov​/books​/NBK470193/ (accessed 1 August 2021).

3

Posthumanism and the limits of multispecies relationality Bryan Lim

Prevailing ideas around the autonomous self are being revised in the field of biology. No longer framed as the study of self-contained entities, biology increasingly appreciates ‘individual’ animals as organized multispecies consortia living in symbiotic communion. This ecological shift in the biological sciences is also paralleled by a similar turn to the ‘non-human’ in the social sciences and humanities and can be seen more specifically in the work of scholars affiliated with philosophical posthumanism and other related and cognate fields such as human–animal studies, political ecology, new materialisms, and multispecies ethnography. Focusing on human entanglements and dependencies with insects (Beisel, Kelly, and Tousignant 2013; Raffles 2010), dogs (Haraway 2008; Kohn 2007), meerkats (Candea 2010), forests (Kohn 2013), plants (Hustak and Myers 2012), H5N1 (Lowe 2010), highly pathogenic avian influenza (Porter 2012) and matsutake mushrooms (Tsing 2015), these scholars have interrogated anthropocentrism by illustrating the myriad ways in which the world we inhabit and what we are, only comes-into-being through multispecies engagements. The contemporary shift towards an ecological mode of doing science is shaping the way human–microbial relationalities are being practised. Anthropologist and multispecies scholar Stefan Helmreich (2014), for example, proposes that Homo sapiens be reconceptualized as Homo microbis, a fleshy assemblage co-produced with and through messy entanglements with our more-than-human microbial companions whom we share the world with. Owing to a newfound appreciation for the health benefits that certain microorganisms co-produce with their human hosts, a fundamental reappraisal of the prevalent negative associations of microbes is now underway. Our microbiopolitics are changing, a term which Heather Paxson explains as referring to ‘the creation of categories of microscopic biological agents; the anthropocentric evaluation of such agents; and the elaboration of appropriate human behaviours vis-à-vis microorganisms engaged in infection, inoculation, and digestion’ (2008: 17). Yet, even as we are adopting a more post-Pasteurian approach to human–microbial relationality, the persistent presence of traditional narratives of microbes as scourge, crisis, and disaster – seen for example, in responses to HIV/AIDS and the more recent Covid-19 pandemic – make clear that such post-Pasteurian microbiopolitics also run

44

Posthumanism in Practice

parallel to a more traditional immuno-microbiopolitics (Cohen 2009) which figures coexistence with microbial others in terms of defence/aggression. If there can be said to be a general problem of living with microbes – that is, the question of how we should coexist with microscopic others – it is no exaggeration to say that the problem has been and continues to be configured as an immunological problem of keeping organism and micro-organism apart. Situated at the point where these two different microbiopolitics meet, this chapter builds on posthumanist thinking, and probes the limits of current debates in social theory regarding multispecies relationality, by asking: what might it mean to embrace an ‘unloved’ and ‘unloving’ pathogenic other if doing so also simultaneously threatens one’s very own existence? This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first, I will outline some key concepts related to the body, disease, and infection that form the foundation of the aforementioned immunological mode of doing microbial relations. This immunomicrobiopolitics did not suddenly occur overnight and it certainly did not arrive out of nowhere. It will be important, therefore, to develop an understanding of how this immuno-microbiopolitics became so entrenched in modern life. Having done so, in the second part of this section, I will highlight how the way we do human–microbial relationality is becoming increasingly aligned with posthumanist ideas that emphasize inclusion, tolerance, and cooperative relations instead of strict separations between objects and subjects. Recent developments in microbiology and immunology will be considered alongside social science and humanities research associated with the turn to the ‘non-human’, in order to further move away from an exclusively immunological mode of practising microbial relations. The second section argues that for all the differences that obtain between a postPasteurian and immunological mode of practising human–microbial relations, both remain resolutely normatively anthropocentric (Mylius 2018) in the sense that the preservation of the human organism is always privileged. I suggest that this presents a curious problem for posthumanist thought and practice, which on the one hand aims to interrogate anthropocentrism through attunement to the significance of the morethan-human, and yet, on the other, continues to value the perdurance of anthropos above all. I suggest that even though the manner in which we are practising human– microbial relationality is moving in posthumanist ways, the ethics and pragmatics of our kinship with microbes continue to be rooted in a conceptualization of finitude that is tied too exclusively to human death. I subsequently suggest some possible directions towards which posthumanism might be reoriented, such that we may reckon with the kinds of biopolitical and microbiopolitical calculations needed to reassemble modern life with the full knowledge that multispecies worldmaking is never only benign.

Shifting microbiopolitics Conventionally speaking, the epidermal frontiers of our bodies mark the physical boundaries of what is human and non-human, self and non-self, and what is inside and outside. The human skin, as philosopher Arthur Bentley points out, ‘is the one

 Posthumanism and Multispecies Relationality 45 authentic criterion of the universe which philosophers recognise when they appraise knowledge’ and its importance is such that ‘if philosophers cease thus crudely to employ it, all their issues of epistemology will vanish’ (1941: 1). There is, of course, as Gayatri Spivak (1989) notes, no possible outline of the body as such – and here, Spivak is both alluding to and acknowledging that the body must be understood as both the product of and the producer of complex systematicities, an ecological view which I expand on in the next section – but regardless, we continue to conceptualize our bodies as a self-enclosed thing, separate and autonomous from the world around us. We thus inhabit our bodies in what Teresa Brennan (2004) has called affective selfcontainment, with all else beyond taken as foreign. We are owners of our own body, or property-in-ourselves. The epidermal frontiers of our bodies serve to mark out the domain within which we are free to exercise our agency – and the freedom to exercise this agency is crucial here for, without it, what is distinctive about ‘owning’ a property is subsequently lost. In other words, property ownership ‘constitutes a form of dominion and [this] dominion manifests a force or power that resists and repels all opposing forces or powers within its domain’ (Cohen 2008: 107). Hence, if ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson 1962) has it that we are embodied persons in possession of ourselves, then relatedly, it must also be the case that any challenges to the ‘boundedness’ of our bodies be repelled at all costs since the exclusivity of property ownership forecloses the possibility of coexistence with ‘others’. Stated more simply, what underpins a working notion of ‘possessive individualism’ is the assumption that a body can be marked out and that its bodily boundaries are defendable. Relatedly, defence in the context of the biological body is thought about immunologically; we expect our immune system to defend us against a hostile ‘outside’. The embodied resistive force described here – one that repels all opposing forces to ensure the maintenance of bodily integrity – thus manifests in what Cohen terms the ‘immunity-as-defence’ paradigm (2009). As Blackman summarizes, this paradigm ‘sees immunity as primarily a defensive process which allows bodies to maintain borders and boundaries between the inside and outside and the self and non-self through waging war on what are typically framed as invaders (whether bacteria, fungi, viruses, etc.)’ (2010: 2). The founding concepts of immunology are often traced to developments in bacteriology and more specifically, Louis Pasteur’s experiments on anthrax, rabies and fermentation which demonstrated not only the existence of microorganisms but also that these microorganisms had a role to play in infectious diseases (Golub and Green 1991; Silverstein 1989). His work established a conceptual and ontological distinction between host bodies and microbes and it is this infective relationship between these two discrete entities that undergirds the immuno-microbiopolitics which we are familiar with. Pasteur’s bacteriological insights were aided by the work of his contemporary, Robert Koch, who developed methods to isolate and grow microbes via cultures in the lab, leading to the creation of the Koch Postulates, four criteria used to determine a causative relationship between a microbe and a disease (Silverstein 1991). Propelled into both scientific and public awareness via the laboratories of Pasteur and Koch, the germ theory of disease subsequently became widely accepted. This theory advances a vision of the world as teeming with microorganisms that are directly responsible for disease and is often taken to be bacteriology’s most important contribution to science.

46

Posthumanism in Practice

By conceptualizing disease in terms of a causal relation between the presence of microbes and the experience of infection, harm or damage by the body, this etiological position presumes the prior existence of two separate bodies (human and non-human) which then enter into an infective relation with each other. Implicit in ‘the idea that the origin of many diseases lay in the pathogenic actions of certain micro-organisms when introduced into the body’ (Worboys 2000: 3), then, is also the assumption that relata have priority over relations. In other words, the biological identities of the host organism (as self, as healthy) and micro-organism (as non-self, as harmful) are both static and given from the outset. The infective relation and fixed biological identities of both human and microbe associated with this immuno-microbiopolitics is however, becoming increasingly untenable owing to recent developments in the biological sciences. Consider how the presence of ‘foreign’ entities is a vital part of human evolution and development; development is a multispecies affair, a matter of interspecies communication (Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 2012). Microbes play a crucial part in the co-development of the immune system and other tissues (Rhee et al. 2004), such as T-cells (Duan et al. 2010) and B-cells (Lanning, Rhee, and Knight 2005; Wesemann 2015). If the immune system has previously been thought of as a defensive system that protects self from non-self, then what new research makes apparent is that in an ironic inversion of events, an individual’s immune system is actually co-created with resident microbial ‘others’. In other words, the human ‘self ’ and microbial ‘non-self ’ intra-act to produce immune systems; rather than strict divisions as per the ‘immunity-as-defence’ paradigm, what is perhaps more appropriate is ‘immuno-cosmopolitanism’, where immunity is understood as not only ‘reliant on productive relations and amicable coexistence with the other’ (Davis et al. 2016: 135) but also framed as a ‘science and politics of creative, productive relations of self and other’ (Davis et al. 2016: 48). Hence, despite a common predilection for thinking of the immune self as a closed fortress (Wilson 1972), the evidence simply shows ‘that “the immune self ” cannot be defined as an entity’ (Tauber 2000: 242) and that the ‘neat boundaries of “self ” and “other” continue to be broken and replaced by a spectrum of functions based on a gradation of immune responses that do not neatly fit the self/non-self division’ (Tauber 2015: 53). Consider also how microbes are central to the maintenance of the human body (Turney 2015). Not only are they responsible for the continued functioning of our endocrine, metabolic, and immune systems (Gill et al. 2006; Relman 2015), but microbes may also have a hand in shaping our mood and mental health (Smith 2015). Changes in the composition of gut microbiota have also been found to influence normal physiology and be implicated in obesity, autism, and multiple sclerosis (Cryan and Dinan 2012), as well as the development of a pre-disease state in which one becomes more susceptible to chronic diseases (van de Guchte, Blottière, and Doré 2018). Social behaviour in mammals may have also potentially co-evolved with their microbiomes (Stilling et al. 2014). Thus, in addition to playing a vital role in the co-creation of the immune system and other tissues in the human body, as discussed earlier, microbes also actively participate in the construction of our lived experience and human life as we know it. Nothing stands alone (Molotch 2003), and, as Anna Tsing (2012) opines, human nature cannot be but an interspecies relationship (see also

 Posthumanism and Multispecies Relationality 47 Haraway 2008). Humans and microbes are irrevocably entangled and have co-evolved to live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria, six hundred species in our mouths that neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies, four hundred species in our intestines, without which we could not digest and absorb the food we ingest. Some synthesize vitamins, others produce polysaccharides or sugars our bodies need. . . . They replicate with their own DNA and RNA and not ours. Macrophages in our bloodstream hunt and devour trillions of bacteria and viruses entering our porous bodies continually: they are the agents that maintain our borders. (Lingis 2000: 27)

Symbiosis, now a core principle of contemporary biology, ‘is replacing an essentialist conception of “individuality” . . . lead[ing] us into directions that transcend the self/ non-self, subject/object dichotomies that have characterised Western thought’ (Gilbert et al. 2012: 326). Unsurprisingly, this emphasis on symbiotic coexistence has had a profound impact on the way biomedicine understands health and, relatedly, how we practise human–microbial relationality. A general ‘microbiomania’ (Helmreich 2015) has now gripped popular science and a wave of new microbiopolitical practices such as helminth (i.e. hookworms) therapy (Lorimer 2016; 2017; 2019), birth canal bacterial colonization for babies born by caesarean section (Houf 2017; Molloy 2015), and faecal matter transplants (Beck 2019; McLeod, Nerlich, and Jaspal 2019; Wolf-Meyer 2017) are now proliferating. These nascent practices ‘involve careful processes of “controlled decontrolling”’ where microorganisms are used ‘to reorganize ecologies to secure desired systemic properties’ (Lorimer 2016: 58). Deliberately aimed at entangling human and microorganisms to reengineer internal ecologies for therapeutic ends, these practices are underpinned by the aforementioned recognition that ‘biological organisms maintain themselves, not through a radical closure to everything that is not-self, but through constant dynamic exchanges of – and negotiations with – foreign substances and bodies that cross into it from the outside’ (Florencio 2019: 44). Relatedly, these practices are ‘driving a fundamental reappraisal of the prevalent negative associations of microbes’ (Lorimer 2019: 61). Our corporeal boundaries are indeed demarcated and guarded, but they must also always remain open to renegotiation if we are to survive and flourish in this world. From this perspective, no microbe is ‘intrinsically healthy or unhealthy; instead, they are contributors to the becoming or retraction of health’ (Andrews 2018: 5). And in this way, biomedicine now increasingly conceives of health as a post-Pasteurian achievement dependent on the careful curation of our encounters with microbes. As multispecies scholar Jamie Lorimer notes: In some parts of the world, the focus of health care is beginning to shift from wholesale microbial eradication toward differentiating microbial agencies and curating encounters with beneficial microbes. There is a probiotic turn underway here, which encompasses a growing interest in finding ways of managing human microbial composition and colonization by modulating life course infection pathways and intensities. (2019: 62)

48

Posthumanism in Practice

Lorimer rightly identifies a shift from a Pasteurian conception of health (i.e. one which revolves around keeping organism and micro-organism apart) towards a postPasteurian notion of health, and it is this shift, he argues, which drives microbiopolitical practices such as the helminth therapy he studies: the use of hookworms for therapeutic purposes illustrates precisely both the ‘communal and immunitarian characteristics of contemporary biomedicine’ (2016: 59). Post-Pasteurianism, as Paxson reminds us, ‘takes after Pasteurianism in taking hygiene seriously. It differs in being more discriminating’ (2014: 118). Biomedical health, in its post-Pasteurian form, can be linked to the popular ‘biome depletion’ hypothesis (Rook 2009) on health, which Lorimer explains as such: While agreeing that the developing human body can be threatened by microbial infection, it argues that the vast majority of the human microbiome is benign or beneficial. Graham Rook and others suggest that from birth the body and the immune system are also enabled and calibrated by encounters with microbes. In particular, they argue for the salutatory role played by a small number of microbial ‘old friends’. These are microbes with which humans originally co-evolved that can be differentiated from undesirable ‘crowd infections’ (like typhoid or cholera) that emerged after the agricultural revolution and subsequent urbanization. (2019: 66)

What the ‘biome depletion’ hypothesis makes clear is that even if these new practices of human–microbial relationality might be said to be inspired by the increasing recognition that bodily boundaries are porous, more specifically speaking, they are actually driven by a revised notion of biomedical health which acknowledges that microbial presence can be beneficial. We thus curate our encounters with microbes based on the health value they provide. It is precisely because these ‘missing microbes’ (Blaser 2014) are now understood to be related to ‘epidemics of absence’ (VelasquezManoff 2012) that the microbe, which was once feared as universally pathogenic, is now ascribed a central role ‘in the performance and maintenance of a healthy body’ (Lorimer 2016: 58).

Anthropocentrism The ways in which the emergence of a more posthumanist manner of doing human– microbial relations is tied to a post-Pasteurian notion of health raise interesting questions regarding the fate of those microbes (e.g. HIV) that do not necessarily become ‘good’ in this framework. Here, the crux of the issue relates to the manner in which the revision of our Manichaean view of microbes (i.e. we good, they evil) conducted thus far remains tethered (and thus limited) to how biomedicine understands microbes as being beneficial (or detrimental) to human health. Hence, even as these ‘new’ practices of human–microbial relationality bring into being some microbes as desirable, they continue to do so along biological axes and remain resolutely anthropocentric in that they are ‘firmly targeted at securing the human – with varying normative connotations – in the face of the vulnerabilities of microbial presence and absence’ (Lorimer 2016:

 Posthumanism and Multispecies Relationality 49 71–2). In this way, for all their differences, both immunological and ecological doings of human–microbial relations might be said to be similar insofar as they are both committed to the health (albeit differently understood) of the human subject. Health, now conceived by biomedicine in a post-Pasteurian manner, thus becomes the ultimate arbiter of whether a microbe may be microbiopolitically (re)enacted as more than just ‘bad’. Alice Beck makes a similar point, noting that even as the use of probiotics helps to challenge a binary understanding of ‘microbial life as either an “old friend” or an enemy’ (2019: 4), by developing this dichotomy such that some microbes are seen as ‘good’, this is still done within an immunity discourse and is dependent on probiotics ‘acting as an alternative form of “increasing” the body’s protection’ (Beck 2019: 10). The microbe may now become kin via our health-seeking post-Pasteurian practices, but this hinges on the microbe being able to offer some modicum of health to anthropos in the first place. The point I am making here is not only limited to microbes: a quick review of multispecies research (Candea 2010; Chao 2018; Despret and Meuret 2016; Hustak and Myers 2012; E. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Lorimer 2016; Tsing 2015) reveals that our understanding of making kin with more-than-human others tends to be restricted to commensal or at the very least, non-lethal others. From helminths to gut bacteria to palm trees and sheep, living with these more-than-human others may be problematic and inconvenient at times, but very rarely do they pose a direct threat to human life. Val Plumwood’s comment on anthropocentrism is instructive here and she writes: exceptionalized ‘as both species and individuals, we humans cannot be positioned in the food chain in the same way as other animals . . . Human Exceptionalism positions us as the eaters of others who are never themselves eaten’ (2008: 324). It is possible, according to Mylius, to distinguish between three different types of anthropocentrism (2018: 159): 1. Perceptual anthropocentrism (which characterizes paradigms informed by sensedata from human sensory organs); 2. Descriptive anthropocentrism (which characterizes paradigms that begin from, centre upon, or are ordered around Homo sapiens/‘the human’); 3. Normative anthropocentrism (which characterizes paradigms that constrain inquiry in a way that somehow privileges Homo sapiens/‘the human’ [passive normative anthropocentrism]; and which characterizes paradigms that make assumptions or assertions about the superiority of Homo sapiens, its capacities, the primacy of its values, its position in the universe, and/or make prescriptions based on these assertions and assumptions [active normative anthropocentrism]). Mylius’s distinction between descriptive and normative anthropocentrism is helpful here because it captures the gist of what I take to be a possible lacuna in current posthumanist discourse and practice: even as we recognize the significance of microbial others to human life as we know it, insofar as our practices are able to embrace microscopic others, this is only if and when it does not threaten/benefit our own existence. Certainly, this may not hinder humans from forming new relationalities

50

Posthumanism in Practice

with microbes that offer some sort of biological benefit to them, but the issue becomes particularly pronounced when dealing with pathogens that offer no therapeutic value even within this ‘new’ post-Pasteurian framework. For those microbes which remain solely pathogenic, taking seriously the idea that the microbe is indeed multiple (Mol 2002) will require a different response from us as posthumanist scholars: it requires that we focus not exclusively on health-seeking practices and also those which do not aim directly at the absence of disease or even the avoidance of death. Although seemingly banal, this is an important insight which warrants much consideration, since it makes clear not only the limit of our multispecies kinship-making practices but also how our posthumanist practices can continue to reinforce normative anthropocentrism even while eschewing descriptive anthropocentrism. What might it mean then, to embrace an ‘unloved’ and ‘unloving’ pathogenic other, if doing so also simultaneously threatens one’s very own existence? In posing the continued self-preservation of the human subject as a question, I am in no way advocating for the death of the human. Rather, the question should be approached as a lure through which we may begin to think about what posthumanist thinking needs to grapple with so as to better account for the undeniable fact that multispecies worlding is never only benign – which, against the backdrop of the recent Covid-19 pandemic only serves to emphasize the saliency of such a task. The importance of tending to the different kinds of human–microbial relationalities that are emerging as a result of a renewed biomedical understanding that some microbial life has the potential, in the right circumstances, to enhance health cannot be overstated. Yet, given that the ‘frequency and diversity of disease outbreaks are expected to grow steadily’ alongside continued developments in travel, trade, and connectivity (World Economic Forum 2019: 7), and the fact that inequitable access to healthcare continues to foster vulnerability to disease and poor health outcomes globally (Gray et al. 2020; Lee and Ahmed 2021), there is a certain urgency also for ushering posthumanist research in a direction that will allow us to better grapple with the fact that we are indeed living ‘in a somatic and semiotic environment that is becoming ever more toxic’ (Preciado 2013: 360–1) and where many individuals will never have the luxury of curating their encounters with microbes in solely therapeutic ways. Posthumanism has shown us that there is much more to learn about ourselves once we start to make the effort to ‘fully appreciate and extensively explore our multiple and complex interrelationships with other organisms through time and space’ (Singer 2014: 1283), and this holds true even if the more-than-human others we are entangled with, endanger our existence. A good starting point, I think, would be to consider how the privileging of the perdurance of the human organism is closely associated with what is commonly acknowledged to constitute a desirable life. In their thought-provoking paper on development, Srinivasan and Kasturirangan highlight, for example, that even the most basic of development indicators, such as life expectancy, is tellingly ‘predicated on the human capacity to circumvent the risks (and inconveniences) that are inherent to living as a part of the more-than-human world’ (2016: 126). The pursuit of human development is thus tied too closely to a singular vision of the ‘“good” human life as one that is freed from the vicissitudes . . . of living on the planet, of being a part of “nature”, of being animal’, so much so that human ‘ways of life that depart from the

 Posthumanism and Multispecies Relationality 51 norms of human exceptionalism set by certain societies are animalised and cast as in need of upliftment – of “development”’ (Srinivasan and Kasturirangan 2016: 126). The problem here, as I see it, is that despite advocating for the improvement of human life, developmentality also simultaneously downplays the significance of living a life because in proclaiming ‘the enhancement of individual life as the end of point of progress and mission of history’ it also legitimizes the treating of life as a means to an end – or as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, ‘no purpose could be said to reside in the episode stretching from the birth to the death of the individual’ (1992: 4). On my reading, what Srinivasan and Kasturirangan might be said to be implicitly alluding to then, is the predominant manner in which the ‘good’ life is too often narrowly associated with and focused on death-denial (Aries 1974; Gorer 1955). Here, I am reminded of what Freud wrote in his 1918 Reflections on War and Death, in which he remarks: Our attitude [towards death] had not been a sincere one. To listen to us we were, of course, prepared to maintain that death is the necessary termination of life, that everyone of us owes nature his death and must be prepared to pay his debt, in short, that death was natural, undeniable, and inevitable. In practice we were accustomed to act as if matters were quite different. We have shown an unmistakable tendency to put death aside, to eliminate it from life . . . We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality. (Freud 2014: 20)

Bauman too notes this insincerity in our attitudes regarding death, stating that ‘since the discovery of death . . . human societies have kept designing elaborate subterfuges, hoping that they would allow them to forget about the scandal; failing to forget, to afford not to think about it; failing that, to forbid speaking of it’ (1992: 1). The truth of whether each of us is truly convinced of our own immortality (and how or if this might relate to developmentality) notwithstanding, what these scholars make clear is that the way we approach death is intimately entwined with the kinds of knowledge and worlds that are rendered conceivable and made possible in the first instance. Put differently, our specific conception of our finitude in terms of human death becomes the conditioning space for our thought and practices as such. Our ability to become kin with pathogens in light of the full knowledge that they may very well hurt us thus hinges on our willingness to reconsider our relationship to death; after all, as Bataille (1962) wrote in Eroticism, because death is the limit of thought, death-as-limit also ‘contaminates and affects the very project of knowledge that seeks to address it’ (Romanillos 2011: 2534). Relatedly, in his brilliant paper, Romanillos argues for the importance of a critical exploration of the concept of finitude itself, noting that finitude in geographical research plays an important, though often veiled, role within a series of geographical concepts and debates: from understandings of spatiality, corporeality, and representation, to the ethics and politics that are made possible – or denied –

52

Posthumanism in Practice through the boundaries inscribed between the human and the animal, the organic and the inorganic. (Romanillos 2011: 2534)

If the way we do human–microbial relationality is grounded and striated by a kind of normative anthropocentricism that approaches finitude predominantly in terms of the death of the human, then ‘attempts to write the worlds and spaces both of human and of nonhuman beings need to become aware of how a distinctively anthropocentric notion of finitude “grounds” the epistemological and phenomenological basis of that writing’ (Romanillos 2011: 2549). The deconstruction of the anthropocentric basis of finitude thus transforms the posthumanist project of understanding human relations and dependence with/on more-than-human others into one that is also concerned with the difficult challenge of working out the value of human life not only for humans but also for life more generally. One possible way in which we might begin this deconstruction is, as Claire Colebrook writes, to ‘redefine life beyond its bounded forms, and beyond organic notions of self-maintenance’ (Colebrook 2014: 217). This requires a sensitivity and attention to how all bodies have the ‘capacity for facilitative responsivity, for nourishing an other, [and] for proliferating life in the plural’ (Chandler and Neimanis 2013: 62). We are all, as philosopher Astrida Neimanis argues, bodies of water, and as bodies of water we leak and seethe, our borders always vulnerable to rupture and renegotiation. As we know, our human bodies are at least two-thirds watery, but more importantly, these waters are in constant process of intake, transformation, and exchange. For humans, the flush of waters sustains our bodies, but also connects them to other bodies and other environments – drinking, urinating, sweating, transfusing, siphoning, sponging, weeping. Human bodies are thus very literally implicated in other animal, vegetable, and planetary bodies that materially flow through us, replenish us, and draw upon our own bodies as wells. (2018: 55)

The life-giving capabilities of water that Neimanis foregrounds here hint at the gestational potential that all bodies have. Subsequently, it is possible to discern a sort of ethics implicit in conceiving of our bodies as milieu-for-another, as directed towards the becoming of other bodies and ultimately, as ‘providing the conditions for an unpredictable plurality to flourish’ (Neimanis 2018: 55.). Granted, there is necessarily some ‘loss’ involved in offering one’s body as milieu-for-another, but it is also precisely this dissolution of the self that facilitates ‘new iterations and manifestations of watery life’ (Neimanis 2017: 54). What the notion of becoming-milieu does then is to reinsert the human into Plumwood’s food chain and to encourage us to avoid ‘a commitment to self-preservation at all costs’ (Chandler and Neimanis 2013: 78), such that we may be lured into becoming attuned to and actively participate in the bringing-intobeing of different forms of life and modes of living that emerge precisely through the dissolution, to varying degrees, of the perdurance of the human body. It is precisely this articulation of the facilitative modes of being and how we become embodied in others, as others, when we serve as watery milieu, that I argue for here.

 Posthumanism and Multispecies Relationality 53 Might it not be said then, that the posing of the continued perdurance of the human organism as a question can also serve as a strategic gambit for posthumanist scholars to initiate a ‘move away from a thanatoethics, where death is always imminent, to a more affirmative mode that concerns itself with the persistence – even the un-timeliness – of dynamic expansiveness’ (Shildrick 2019: 11)? To approach the human body gestationally is thus also to engage in the ethical project of elaborating ‘a hitherto unregarded network of relations that dispenses with the boundaries of singular location and time and reimagines the concept of living outside oneself ’ (Shildrick 2019: 20) – it is to rethink common notions of finitude that start and end, respectively, with the birth and death of the human. This sensitization to how the human self-externalizes its becoming is an initiation into the non-teleological time of its becoming and also an invitation to think ‘an atemporal bioethics of coexistence’ that is not based on the idea of its successive existence and the ever-present threat of facing its own finitude (ibid.). In this new ecology of finitude, where modern conceptions of human selfhood are transformed via the renegotiation of the conventional bookends of life and death, it may then be possible to precipitate a revaluation of the either/or values associated with the demise/preservation of the (human) organism by ‘making it perceptible that the choice is not one between salvation or damnation, life or death, but one between divergent modes of living and dying, of composing worlds, of inhabiting the Earth’ (Savransky 2021: 4). What remains then for future posthumanist research, is to elaborate, both empirically and theoretically, how a ‘more fluid and embodied concept of self and its boundaries’ can be employed in the service of a ‘complex narrative of continuities, in which the story goes on, although no longer mainly a story about human subjects’ (Plumwood 2008: 328). Practices that aim not at the avoidance of death – and perhaps even at death – are thus good fodder to think with and may subsequently allow for the facilitation of such forms of storytelling.

References Andrews, G. (2018), ‘Health Geographies II: The Posthuman Turn’, Progress in Human Geography, 43: 1–11. Aries, P. (1974), Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bataille, G. (1962), Eroticism, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Bauman, Z. (1992), ‘Survival as a Social Construct’, Theory, Culture and Society, 9: 1–36. Beck, A. (2019), ‘Microbiomes as Companion Species: An Exploration of Dis- and Re-entanglements with the Microbial Self ’, Social and Cultural Geography. Beisel, U., A.H. Kelly and N. Tousignant (2013), ‘Knowing Insects: Hosts, Vectors and Companions of Science’, Science as Culture, 22 (1): 1–15. Bentley, A. (1941), ‘The Human Skin: Philosophy’s Last Line of Defense’, Philosophy of Science, 8 (1): 1–19. Blackman, L. (2010), ‘Bodily Integrity’, Body and Society, 16 (3): 1–9. Blaser, M. (2014), Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, New York: Henry Holt and Company. Brennan, T. (2004), The Transmission of Affect, New York: Cornell University Press.

54

Posthumanism in Practice

Candea, M. (2010), ‘I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat: Engagement and Detachment in Human-Animal Relations’, American Ethnologist, 37 (2): 241–58. Chandler, M. and A. Neimanis (2013), ‘Water and Gestationality: What Flows Beneath Ethics’, in C. Chen, J. MacLeod and A. Neimanis (eds), Thinking with Water, 61–83, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Chao, S. (2018), ‘In the Shadow of the Palm: Dispersed Ontologies among Marind, West Papua’, Cultural Anthropology, 33: 621–49. Cohen, E. (2008), ‘A Body Worth Having? Or, A System of Natural Governance’, Theory, Culture and Society, 25 (3): 103–29. Cohen, E. (2009), A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body, Durham: Duke University Press. Colebrook, C. (2014), Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Cryan, J. and T. Dinan (2012), ‘Mind-altering Microorganisms: The Impact of the Gut Microbiota on Brain and Behaviour’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13: 701–12. Davis, M., P. Flowers, D. Lohm, E. Waller and N. Stephenson (2016), ‘Immunity, Biopolitics and Pandemics: Public and Individual Responses to the Threat to Life’, Body and Society, 22 (4): 130–54. Despret, V. and M. Meuret (2016), ‘Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’, Environmental Humanities, 8 (1): 24–36. Duan, J., H. Chung, E. Troy and D.L. Kasper (2010), ‘Microbial Colonization Drives Expansion of IL-1 Receptor 1-Expressing and IL-17-Producing γ/δ T Cells’, Cell Host and Microbe, 7 (2): 140–50. Florencio, J. (2019), ‘The Theatre of Posthuman Immunity’, in P. Eckersall and H. Grehan (eds), The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, 43–4, London: Routledge. Freud, S. (2014), Reflections on War and Death, Auckland: The Floating Press. Gilbert, S.F., J. Sapp and A.I. Tauber (2012), ‘A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals’, Quarterly Review of Biology, 87 (4): 325–41. Gill, S.R., M. Pop, R.T. DeBoy, P.B. Eckburg, P.J. Turnbaugh, B.S. Samuel and K.E. Nelson, (2006), ‘Metagenomic Analysis of the Human Distal Gut Microbiome’, Science, 312 (5778): 1355–9. Golub, E. and D. Green (1991), Immunology, A Synthesis, Sunderland: Sinauer Associates. Gorer, G. (1955), The Pornography of Death, Encounter, 5 (4): 49–52. Gray, D.M., A. Anyane-Yeboa, S. Balzora, R.B. Issaka and F.P. May (2020), ‘COVID-19 and the Other Pandemic: Populations Made Vulnerable by Systemic Inequity’, Nature Reviews Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 17 (9): 520–2. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Helmreich, S. (2014), ‘Homo Microbis: The Human Microbiome, Figural, Literal, Political, Thresholds, 42: 52–9. Helmreich, S. (2015), Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Houf, J.R. (2017), ‘The Microbial Mother Meets the Independent Organ: Cultural Discourses of Reproductive Microbiomes’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 40 (3): 1–17. Hustak, C. and N. Myers (2012), ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters’, Differences, 23 (3): 74–118. Kirksey, E. and S. Helmreich (2010), The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography, Cultural Anthropology, 25 (4): 545–76. Kohn, E. (2007), ‘How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement,’ American Ethnologist, 34 (1): 3–24.

 Posthumanism and Multispecies Relationality 55 Kohn, E. (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lanning, D.K., K.J. Rhee and K.L. Knight (2005), ‘Intestinal Bacteria and Development of the B-lymphocyte Repertoire’, Trends in Immunology, 26 (8): 419–25. Lee, I.J. and N.U. Ahmed (2021), ‘The Devastating Cost of Racial and Ethnic Health Inequity in the COVID-19 Pandemic’, Journal of the National Medical Association, 113 (1),: 114–17. Lingis, A. (2000), Dangerous Emotions, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lorimer, J. (2016), ‘Gut Buddies: Multispecies Studies and the Microbiome’, Environmental Humanities, 8 (1): 57–76. Lorimer, J. (2017), ‘Parasites, Ghosts and Mutualists: A Relational Geography of Microbes for Global Health’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (4): 544–58. Lorimer, J. (2019), ‘Hookworms Make Us Human: The Microbiome, Eco-immunology, and a Probiotic Turn in Western Health Care’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 33 (1): 60–79. Lowe, C. (2010), ‘VIRAL CLOUDS: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia’, Cultural Anthropology, 25 (4): 625–49. Macpherson, C.B. (1962), The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLeod, C., B. Nerlich and R. Jaspal (2019), ‘Fecal Microbiota Transplants: Emerging Social Representations in the English-language Print Media’, New Genetics and Society, 38 (3): 331–51. Molloy, A. (2015), ‘Mothers Facing C-Sections Look to Vaginal ‘Seeding’ to Boost Their Babies’ Health’, The Guardian. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/lifeandstyle​/2015​/aug​/17​/ vaginal​-seeding​-c​-section​-babies​-microbiome. Molotch, H. (2003), Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be As They Are, New York: Routledge. Mol, A. (2002), The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Mylius, B. (2018), ‘Three Types of Anthropocentrism’, Environmental Philosophy, 15 (2): 159–94. Neimanis, A. (2017), ‘Water and Knowledge’, in D. Christian and R. Wong (eds), Downstream: Reimagining Water, 51–68, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Neimanis, A. (2018), ‘Posthuman Phenomenologies for Planetary Bodies of Water’, in C. Åsberg and R. Braidotti (eds), A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, New York: Springer. Paxson, H. (2008), ‘Post-pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-milk Cheese in the United States’, Cultural Anthropology, 23 (1): 15–47. Paxson, H. (2014), ‘Microbiopolitics’, in S.E. Kirksey (ed.), The Multispecies Salon, 115–21, Durham: Duke University Press. Plumwood, V. (2008), ‘Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death’, Environmental Values, 17 (3): 323–30. Porter, N. (2012), ‘Risky Zoographies: The Limits of Place in Avian Flu Management’, Environmental Humanities, 1 (1): 103–21. Preciado, P. (2013), Testojunkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, New York: Feminist Press. Raffles, H. (2010), Insectopedia, New York: Pantheon. Relman, D.A. (2015), ‘The Human Microbiome and the Future Practice of Medicine’, JAMA – Journal of the American Medical Association, 314 (11): 1127–8.

56

Posthumanism in Practice

Rhee, K.J., P. Sethupathi, A. Driks, D.K. Lanning and K.L. Knight (2004), ‘Role of Commensal Bacteria in Development of Gut-Associated Lymphoid Tissues and Preimmune Antibody Repertoire’, The Journal of Immunology, 172 (2): 1118–24. Romanillos, J.L. (2011), ‘Geography, Death, and Finitude’, Environment and Planning A, 43: 2533–53. Rook, G. (2009), The Hygiene Hypothesis and Darwinian Medicine, Basel: Birkhauser. Savransky, M. (2021), ‘Counter-Apocalyptic Beginnings: Cosmoecology for the End of The World’, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 4 (1): 1–14. Shildrick, M. (2019), ‘(Micro)chimerism, Immunity and Temporality: Rethinking the Ecology of Life and Death’, Australian Feminist Studies, 34 (99): 10–24. Silverstein, A. (1989), A History of Immunology, San Diego: Academic Press. Silverstein, A. (1991), ‘The Pasteur Institute and the Birth of Immunology: The Great Immunological Debates’, in P.A. Cazenave (ed.), Immunology – Pasteur’s Heritage, 11–20, New Delhi: Wiley Eastern Limited. Singer, M. (2014), ‘Zoonotic Ecosyndemics and Multispecies Ethnography’, Anthropological Quarterly, 87 (4): 1279–310. Smith, P. (2015), ‘The Tantalizing Links between Gut Microbes and the Brain’, Nature, 526 (7573): 312–14. Spivak, G.C. (1989), ‘In a Word: Interview with Eileen Roney’, Differences, 1 (2): 124–56. Srinivasan, K. and R. Kasturirangan (2016), ‘Political Ecology, Development, and Human Exceptionalism’, Geoforum 75: 125–8. Stilling, R.M., S.R. Bordenstein, T.G. Dinan and J.F. Cryan (2014), ‘Friends with Social Benefits: Host-microbe Interactions as a Driver of Brain Evolution and Development?’, Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, 4 (147): 1–17. Tauber, A. (2000), ‘Moving Beyond the Immune Self?’, Seminars in Immunology, 12 (3): 241–8. Tauber, A. (2015), ‘Reconceiving Autoimmunity: An Overview’, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 375: 52–60. Tsing, A. (2012), ‘Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species, For Donna Haraway’, Environmental Humanities, 1 (1): 141–54. Tsing, A. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turney, J. (2015), I, Superorganism: Learning to Love Your Inner Ecosystem, London: Icon. van de Guchte, M., H. Blottière and J. Doré (2018), ‘Humans as Holobionts: Implications for Prevention and Therapy’, Microbiome, 6 (81): 1–6. Velasquez-Manoff, M. (2012), An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases, New York: Scribner. Wesemann, D. (2015), ‘Microbes and B Cell Development’, Advances in Immunology, 125: 155–78. Wilson, D. (1972), The Science of Self – A Report of the New Immunology, London: Longman. Wolf-Meyer, M.J. (2017), ‘Normal, Regular, and Standard: Scaling the Body through Fecal Microbial Transplants’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 31 (3): 297–314. Worboys, M. (2000), Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900, New York: Cambridge University Press. World Economic Forum (2019), Outbreak Readiness and Business Impact – Protecting Lives and Livelihoods across the Global Economy, Geneva.

4

Alien embodiment and nomadic subjectivity A speculative report Steve Klee and Kirsten McKenzie

Alien Bodies and How to Wear Them is an ongoing research project, which crossfertilizes knowledge and skills from contemporary art with cognitive neuroscientific understanding concerning embodiment and body image. The project began with the attempt to formulate an experiment that would shed light on the ways in which body image can restrict experience and offer a pathway to potential therapies for particular forms of body dissatisfaction.1 Body image, from a psychological perspective, is a complex multisensory representation that brain-bodies construct; one that provides the basis of the lived experience of being embodied. In more prosaic terminology, we could say that perceptual body image is the construct which allows us all to perceive the external appearance of our bodies and provides us with a sense of individual selfhood (Cash and Deagle 1997). Body image is also understood within the discipline to be dependent upon, and shaped by, intersubjective dynamics (see e.g. Slade 1994; Gallagher 2006: 1–24). Psychological research and theorizing are, therefore, attentive to ‘social forces’ such as beauty norms, and how these influence and shape affective body image: the way we feel about our own bodies. This provisional sketch will be fleshed out as follows, but we offer it to show that body image is a concept, or nexus of concepts, central to the investigation of psychological issues pertaining to the body, for instance, those that arise from feelings of dissatisfaction about how we (think we) look. Our initial experiment delved into the complex mechanisms that feed into body image. We were concerned with body dissatisfaction in terms of size and shape, of the kind that motivates diets, excessive exercise and plastic surgery, and is so prevalent within Westernized societies, and many other cultures, that it has come to be known as ‘normative discontent’ because dissatisfaction with physical appearance is now the norm rather than the exception (Rodin, Silberstein, and Striegel-Moore 1984; Tantleff-Dunn, Barnes, and Larose 2011). Specifically, we wanted to find out whether elevated concerns about a person’s own bodily appearance affected their ability to imagine the embodiment of a physical form vastly different from both their own, and the ideal body proscribed by Westernized beauty norms. Our investigation involved drawings of aliens; creatures designed to

58

Posthumanism in Practice

live on planets other than the Earth. Participants were asked to imagine living as these aliens, to ‘picture’ the alien bodies as their own. We will discuss this initial experiment in more detail later, but in many ways this chapter’s core focus pertains to the next stage of our project in which we aim to devise a second round of experiments that make use of so-called ‘body swap illusions’ (van der Hoort, Guterstam, and Ehrsson 2011). We plan to build 3D digital versions of our drawn aliens, which a participant will be able to embody. Participants will not simply choose avatars from a line-up on a screen but will experience and inhabit them from a first-person perspective via a virtual reality (VR) headset. We believe this next step may help facilitate therapies for those with elevated body image concern, as there is ample evidence to suggest that exposure to body swapping can have positive affective and perceptual consequences (Slater et al. 2009: 214–20; Maister et al. 2013: 170–8; Preston and Ehrsson 2014) and that these can last after the illusion has ended (Keizer et al. 2016: e0163921). Our chapter also aims to theoretically situate the project, particularly this second phase, within the field of critical posthumanism, specifically Rosi Braidotti’s elaboration of these ideas across multiple publications. With Braidotti, we understand ‘the human’ to be a category marked by violence, in that it tacitly refers only to ‘the dominant vision of the subject as white, male, heterosexual, urbanized, [and] ablebodied’, thereby excluding and devalorizing great swaths of people and entities, that is: ‘the sexualised others: women and LGBT’s; the racialised others: natives, postcolonials and non-Europeans; the naturalized or earth others: animals, insects, [and] plants’ (Braidotti 2020: 161–6). We might add further exclusions here in relation to body image: to be properly human is to look a certain way. The category of the human is, therefore, understood to be violent because it is narrow, reducing an array of possible ways of being to an idealized and highly focused spectrum. We also endorse Braidotti’s characterization of subjectivity as nomadic, that is, to be understood as a process, one suffused by difference, which, in principle, evades categorization in terms of the dominant notion of the human. In fact, one key claim of this chapter is that there is a deep affinity between what our cognitive neuropsychology framework designates as body image and Braidotti’s designation of subjectivity. Both models refer to a socially mediated, deeply bodied, and sometimes self-reflexive consciousness, which they both characterize as highly malleable and capable of shapeshifting adaptation. We propose that this affinity be understood as a case of empirical science supporting philosophical enquiry; the framework we use gives (further) credence to Braidotti’s assertions, and can be viewed as fleshing out their detail. Arguing this point brings us in line with the aim of this collection; by showing those ways that Braidotti’s theories are supported by scientific theory, underpinned by practical experiment, we bring posthumanism into contact with practice. Braidotti’s position is suffused with critical ethics, she believes the violence perpetrated by the ‘hegemonic human’ can be contested by contextually specific performances that emphasize the nomadic nature of subjectivity (Braidotti 2020: 164) including the reception of cultural artefacts. Braidotti has written in this vein about literature, film, and contemporary art,2 arguing that some instances of cultural reception generate an enhanced awareness of the nomadic nature of subjectivity,

 59 that is, that certain artefacts can catalyse a ‘reader’s’ understanding of themselves as a nomadic subject. With this in mind, the second aim of our chapter is to lay claim to this critical ethics. In other words, we will argue that the therapeutic potential of our proposed alien body-swap illusion is, at one and the same time, a contestation of the aforementioned narrow way of being, and thinking, the human. With this move, then, we are again aligning posthumanist ideas with practice: we are arguing that if and when our proposed therapies are employed, they will represent a practical instance of Braidotti’s critical position, a case of posthumanist ethics in action.

Initial experiment Our first-stage experiment featured hand-drawn depictions of aliens, and the environments in which these xeno-lifeforms might live. The creatures were developed as creative hybrids of terrestrial non-human animals, and each alien-set (one per planet) was composed of several figures on a continuum, starting with a recognizably (and idealized) female, male, or gender-ambiguous character and evolving to a more ‘fantastical’ one. The most fantastical, or creaturely, character within every set was designed to be the best adapted to their home world. It was possible to read each set of aliens as representing a timeline, one showing sequences along an extended ‘evolutionary’ journey in which humans (stripped of their technological capability) change so as to best fit a niche provided by a given planet.3 A total of eighty-five volunteers across a range of gender identities took part in this experiment, having been recruited online. During the experimental procedure, participants were provided with these figure and landscape drawings, as well as a short description of the simple ‘ecological relationships’ between each planet and its inhabitants. These descriptions outlined a world’s terrain, potential foodstuffs, and predator–prey factors, supplying sufficient information to enable judgement about which alien was best suited to surviving and thriving on any given planet (see Figures 4.1–4.6). Our participants were then asked two questions, in a counterbalanced order. Either: ‘Which body would be best to survive and thrive on this planet?’ where each participant was asked to make a decision about adaptation or ‘fitness’. Or: ‘Which body would you choose to live on this planet?’, which required participants to shift their perspective, thinking not only in terms of survival but also in relation to themselves, that is, which body would they prefer to inhabit, or to be, for a life lived on an alien world.4 When we analysed the data, we found that there was no relationship between selfreported body image concern and answers on the ‘survive task’ (‘which body would be best to thrive on this planet?’), but there was for the ‘self-choice task’ (‘which body would you choose to live on this planet?’). When responding to this ‘self-choice task’, those with increased body image concerns were less likely to take imaginative ownership of a more alien body, whereas those with higher bodily satisfaction tended to select more alien, and therefore more functional, bodies.5

60

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 4.1  High-gravity alien sequence (gender-ambiguous).

Figure 4.2  High-gravity planet. This planet has a rocky landscape dotted with pools, dwarf trees, and bulbous plants. The animals on this world are subject to a much higher gravity than on the Earth so they have evolved squat physiques to be able to move effectively and are equally at home in water or on land.

 61

Figure 4.3  Shallow ocean alien sequence (woman).

Figure 4.4  Shallow ocean planet. The surface of this world is covered by a shallow sea with a rocky floor, pockmarked with crevices and caves. Creatures able to reach into these caves in search of prey, and who can swim quickly to catch the fish-like animals that have also evolved here, are the dominant predators.

62

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 4.5  Low-gravity alien sequence (man).

Figure 4.6 Low-gravity planet. Gravity is low in this world, favouring tall plants and allowing unusual top-heavy rock formations to develop. The planet’s animals are very tall and slender herbivores who dine on the leaves taken from the lower branches of trees.

 63

Cognitive neuropsychological framework So why should this be the case? In order to explain, we need to further elaborate our cognitive neuropsychological understanding of body representation. The experience of having, and indeed being, a body, is in a state of constant flux. Continual and sometimes competing inputs across multiple sensory modalities must be synthesized and integrated into a cohesive whole in order to successfully represent the physical form as it is now, as it has been previously and as it will be in the future. According to Bayesian Predictive Processing theory, our brains weigh information from different sensory modalities depending on the amount of variance (noise) within those inputs.6 Consequently, perception is seen as an inferential process that combines prior beliefs with a predictive model to explain the causes of sensations (Friston 2010: 127–38). Body representation, therefore, is an (ongoing) predictive synthesis, but the singular, conscious experience of existing as an embodied being is, in fact, comprised of a number of separate, interacting forms of non-conscious bodily representation. Body schema refers to both the positional and configurational relationships of the body as a three-dimensional object in space and is engaged and updated during intentional movement. In contrast, body image – the way in which our body appears to ourselves – is a multidimensional construct that incorporates self-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about the appearance of one’s own body (Cash and Deagle 1997: 107–26) that has distinct attitudinal and perceptual factors (Quittkat et al. 2019: 864) which are shaped and moulded via a sociocultural lens. The notion of body image itself can be further finessed. Perceptual body image can be further broken down into specific visual frames of reference: egocentric representations are those that exist in a first-person point of view, whereas allocentric representations are those that are encompassed by an external, third-person point of view. So, while egocentric representations are the result of transient embodied experiences that are constantly updated, the allocentric perspective is built up in a more piecemeal fashion, using external views to construct a whole, for instance, by seeing oneself in a reflection, or photograph, and then storing this information away. But in addition to personal experiences, the allocentric frame of reference also incorporates our experiences of how others perceive and represent our physical bodies (Riva and Gaudio 2018: 57–9). Viewing oneself allocentrically incorporates the recognition that other people see your body in this way too (i.e. from ‘the outside’), and that these gazes are bound up with forms of social judgement, influencing affective body image. Around the world, and over time, there are a range of social judgements of bodily appearance that idealize specific proportions and that are aggressively disseminated. Women, particularly, are taught to judge themselves according to these ideals. In effect, they are required to see themselves as valuable, if not solely then largely, in relation to the appearance of their bodies, and to do so according to the similarity (or otherwise) of their bodily appearance with that of the socially sanctioned idealized form.7 What we refer to as ‘affective body image’, how an individual feels about their body shape and size, is, therefore, closely implicated with these body-beauty norms. If one’s body image matches the specific ideal of the culture in which you are located then it is

64

Posthumanism in Practice

assumed that body confidence must ensue, but if a miss-match is perceived, then body dissatisfaction, and under-confidence will result. While both egocentric and allocentric perspectives are necessary for being embodied, and ‘normally’ these allocentric and egocentric representations exist in complex mutual reciprocity, in more extreme forms of body dissatisfaction such as body image disturbance (in which perceptual body image is actually distorted), this reciprocity is upset. Egocentric simulations pertaining to ‘being the body’ or perceiving from a first-person perspective are less salient when incorporated into the combined percept; they are outweighed by the allocentric purview. This tendency to place greater reliance upon stored (and incorrect) allocentric representations is, in part, because they are more durable than egocentric ones, and hold a stronger negative emotional salience when incorporated into ‘the memory of the body’ (Irvine et al. 2019: 38–50; Riva and Gaudio 2018: 57–9). But, as the earlier description makes clear, this overemphasis is also socially sanctioned; women particularly are taught to judge and value their allocentric appearance, and the sociocultural evaluation of this external appearance, over and above their own first-person bodily experiences, and is clear that in relation to body dissatisfaction this overemphasis is particularly acute. Therefore, even ‘milder’ forms of body dissatisfaction, those described as ‘normative discontent’, are bound up with an overemphasis upon allocentric representations. In normative discontent, it is not that the perceptual body image is disturbed by way of overweighted and incorrect allocentric representations, but that a preoccupation with the allocentric perspective, including a preoccupation with how this ‘third-person’ body compares with body-beauty norms, results in feelings of discontent, that is, a disturbed affective body image. We suggest that our experimental results also demonstrate this emphasis of form over function. First, to restate, we found no relationship between body image concern and the survival task; how a participant felt about their body did not influence their ability to judge which alien body was the best fit for survival on a planet. However, when participants were asked to imagine themselves inhabiting a particular body (the self-choice task), the degree of body image concern did influence the alien chosen; individuals with higher self-reported body image concerns chose creatures that were closer to (human) beauty, or body-ideal norms. According to the framework just outlined, then, we might speculate that those with elevated body image concerns may have a more rigid idea of beauty, whereby overemphasis on appearance in selfworth leads them to select bodies that are more similar to social ideals and at the expense of the functionality of the body. Indeed, previous studies have reported similar findings, with higher flexibility in affective body image associated with decreased body image dissatisfaction (Sandoz et al. 2013: 39–48) and lower levels of eating disorder psychopathology (Bluett et al. 2016: 150–5; Pellizzer and Waller 2018: 368–72).

Virtual reality body swapping As already intimated, we hope to develop our project by introducing VR technology into future experimental set-ups. In this we follow recent work within psychology

 65 which uses VR to better understand body image, but also for therapeutic purposes (Serino et al. 2019: 313–22). Of particular interest to us is the paradigm of VR body swapping, wherein a participant can be induced to feel as if they ‘own’ another body, that is, they are sensing and perceiving from the bodily site of a digital avatar; this is called ‘embodiment’ (Serino et al. 2016: 127–33; Porras et al. 2019). To achieve the body swap, an avatar is created, and this digital body is connected to the anatomical body of the participant by way of a head-mounted display and/ or motion sensors. The participant’s sensory perspective within the VR environment is aligned with that of their avatar and modulated by the participant’s movements, with the digital environment updating to supply necessary detail in real time. A more immersive and convincing experience of ‘becoming’ or ‘embodying’ the avatar is generated by the introduction of synchronous visual and tactile stimuli. For instance, if the stomach of the participant is stroked at the same time as that of the avatar, by way of a ‘wand’ wired into the digital world, then a strong sense of fusing with the avatar (embodiment) can occur. According to our neuropsychological framework, this illusion occurs because the participant draws together the different channels of sensory input (visual, proprioceptive, somatic) so as to build an updated body representation, one that results in feelings of spatial reciprocity with, and ownership of, the avatar form, in addition to agency over the movements made. Importantly, the avatar can be vastly different to the anatomical body of the participant without impacting the success of the illusion. Bayesian Predictive Processing theory suggests that such a sensory misperception may be due to false inferences arising from incorrect priors; ‘optimal inference with suboptimal priors’ (Parr, Rees, and Friston 2018: 61). Whichever way the illusion is described, the feeling of embodiment is undoubtedly powerfully convincing, such that if a digital assailant were to suddenly appear within the VR environment and attack the avatar it would result in genuine (if momentary) fear and an expectation of pain.8 Cognitive neuroscientists are interested in body swapping for therapeutic purposes because these illusions can manipulate both perceptual and affective body image. The idea here has two components. First, there is a sense that embodying an avatar within a VR environment prompts direct engagement with that first-person, egocentric perspective necessary for spatial orientation, movement, and basic body ownership. In this way, attention is drawn away from the (potentially distorted) allocentric representations as a matter of course. Riva says as much here: Such effects, attributable to the reorganisational and reconstructive mechanisms necessary to adapt the subjects to the qualitatively distorted world of VR, could be a great help during the course of a therapy aimed at influencing the way the body is experienced because they lead to a greater awareness of the perceptual and sensory/motorial processes associated with them. (Riva and Melis 1997: 102)

We can, therefore, see that virtual embodiment could well play a role in helping a participant who experienced body image disturbance. In the VR experience, and perhaps beyond, an incorrect (stored) body representation is demonstrably incompatible with the current sensory inputs; the virtual experience of a vastly different body would cause

66

Posthumanism in Practice

a shift away from the ‘top–down’ prior knowledge of the allocentric appearance of the body and enable a greater up-weighting of current sensory inputs to effect embodiment. Furthermore, this information would not be overwritten by the high emotional salience of the incorrectly stored representation, as might happen when viewing one’s ‘own’ body. Second, this shift into a completely ‘other’ form would also disrupt the top–down effects of affective body image; the weight of knowledge from thoughts and feelings about the ‘body-as-self ’ would no longer apply to the current body. While deviation from social ideals can elicit negative feelings about the body, these alien bodies are sufficiently removed from the human form as to have no socially sanctioned ‘idealized’ comparator.

Exemplar therapy The demonstrated effects of body-swap illusions and virtual embodiment on perceptual and affective body image have also led to attempts to utilize this technique in a therapeutic setting. For instance, Serino, Polli, and Riva found that a participant with an eating disorder diagnosis was significantly helped by a cycle of body swapping treatment (Serino, Polli and Riva 2019: 313–22). The patient, who presented with significant distortions to their body image (for instance, estimating their hip-width to be nearly twice as wide as in actuality), underwent a multisensory embodiment into a ‘young and thin healthy-weight woman’ (Serino, Polli, and Riva 2019: 317). At the end of the three rounds of VR therapy, the patient was able to more accurately estimate the size of her anatomical body, suggesting that this approach was indeed beneficial, ‘inducing temporary but pervasive changes in the perceived body following the direction of the illusion’ (Serino, Polli, and Riva 2019: 320). Again, the repeated VR embodiment would appear to be interrupting the reliability of the stored allocentric representation, while up-weighting the embodied egocentric representation within the combined percept. No matter that the anatomical body of the patient was actually thinner than the avatar, the important point is that the avatar was thinner than her distorted perceptual body image, and the VR experience enabled her to perceive this difference. Manipulation of the patient’s perceptual body image enabled recognition that her internalized (stored) body representation was unreliable/irrelevant to the experience, which served to down-regulate, or overwrite, this information within the combined bodily percept.

Alien embodiment therapy Our approach to VR body-swap techniques is informed by, but different from, the existing methods outlined earlier. To be clear, we have not yet begun this stage of our project, therefore our alien therapies exist as proposals only. We are able, however, to employ our neuropsychological framework to offer informed speculation about how these therapies will function. First, we hypothesize that running our initial alien bodies experiment again, but this time incorporating VR body-swap techniques, will reproduce the findings already stated, that is, that those participants with raised

 67 body image concern will choose to avoid embodying significantly alien figures. The mechanism behind this decision being, we suggest, that overemphasis on appearance in self-worth leads to these individuals selecting bodies that are more similar to social ideals, at the expense of bodily functionality; their affective body image being so constrained by body-beauty ideals that contravening these ideals will be avoided. Second, we speculate that exposure to alien embodiment, as a therapeutic device, will activate egocentric body representations as the participant seeks to acclimatize perceptually to the new body, to grapple with the apparent ownership of a tentacle in place of an arm, for instance. This ‘grappling’ is to be understood as a reformatting of both the spatial, active body (body schema) and perceptual body image so as to best accommodate the new sensory information. In other words, we would expect the participants’ perceptual body image to take on an alien character, for instance, an octopoid one. We would also expect that the very process of activating, or up-weighting the egocentric representations – which VR embodiment seems to do so successfully – will help to reorient the relationship between ego- and allocentric coding, interrupting the bias towards the distorted body representations characteristic of body image disturbance. So, in contradistinction to the majority of existing therapeutic approaches, rather than aim to resize an existing objectified body image so that it conforms to an anatomical reality, we aim to move the participant’s body image in a more fantastical direction. Over time, with repeat controlled exposures, Bayesian inference theory would predict that these VR experiences would begin to erode at the authority of the stored body image, thereby increasing the reliance upon current perceptual inputs to effect a more accurate body representation. This should also serve to alter affective body image as well, as body satisfaction has previously been shown to be altered after embodiment of ‘other’ bodies (Preston and Ehrsson 2014; 2018). Embodiment of a novel alien form should also divert focus away from one’s ‘own’ affective body image, as this new avatar has no associated sociocultural demands, and no idealized archetype with which to compare. We have provided an overview of our project as it stands, and what we still need to achieve, and we now turn to contextualizing this account in relation to posthumanist ideas. As outlined in the introduction, the first claim on this front is that our neuropsychological account of body image significantly overlaps with Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity to the extent that it provides some empirically confirmed support for her largely theoretical assertions. In the next section, we map out these overlaps and consider some of their implications.

Nomadic body image Following her mentor Gilles Deleuze, Braidotti understands subjectivity to be nomadic, or in a constant state of ‘becoming’ (Braidotti 2002: 70). This means that any given subject is never at rest, but constantly on the move, or in process. Subjectivity is also nomadic, in this sense, because it is in an evolving entanglement with other ‘potential’ subjectivities. As she says: ‘For philosophical nomadism, the

68

Posthumanism in Practice

subject is fully immersed in and immanent with a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations’ (Braidotti 2002: 122). In sum, nomadic subjectivity is processual, not fixed, or finished, and this restless movement takes place in relation to other subjectivities (similarly processual), thereby making all subjectivity open to difference, to becoming different. Braidotti’s understanding of nomadic subjectivity fits within a broader system, a process ontology, inspired by the thought of Spinoza and Deleuze.9 These thinkers take reality to be composed of material processes, believing static, or state-based ontologies to be misguided: all apparently fixed phenomena are actually composed of processes operating at a more fundamental level. Another tenet of process ontology is the assertion that even ethereal seeming phenomena such as ‘concepts’, or ‘discourses’ are also to be understood as material flows.10 As should be becoming clear, the neuropsychological framework we deploy understands body image in an equivalent fashion: body image is processual and open to difference. According to Bayesian principles, body image’s restlessness is a consequence of the brain-body’s ceaseless predictive processing. In this way, and as we have seen, body representations are ‘best bets’ on, for instance, the location and appearance of one’s own body, bets that make use of Bayesian inference and include prior experience and beliefs. Also, and as we have seen, these body representations are not in lockstep with the anatomical parameters of any individual but can be altered by tinkering with the underlying predictive mechanism. In other words, body image is open to ‘becoming different’ and can transform in all manner of ways. This is what happens when embodiment with a VR avatar is successful; the simple fact that these illusions are possible demonstrates the differential fluidity of human body representations, particularly with regards to our proposed alien embodiments, which really stretch this potential. In fact, following Andy Clark, we believe that the Bayesian-informed neurop­ sychological framework we are working with (and its experimental confirmation) provide empirical evidence for the assertions of process ontologists. In his article ‘How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket’ Clark argues, in contradistinction to some interpretations (Jakob Hohwy), that the ‘free energy principle’ at the mathematical heart of the Predictive Processing framework motivates the adoption of a process ontology: Hohwy’s insightful probing has thus revealed something deeply important. It has forced us to recognize that the picture of biological agents as free-energyminimizing systems requires something closer to a process-based (rather than a static or state-based) ontology. (Clark 2017: 1–19)

In terms of our discussion, we would say that the neuropsychology of body image, which emphasizes ceaseless predictive modelling and re-modelling, substantiates Braidotti’s assertions about the nomadic pliability of subjectivity. This, then, is the first way we bring posthumanist ideas into contact with practice: by asserting that Braidotti’s theory is supported by a specific scientific hypothesis, underpinned by the practice of empirical experimentation.

 69 Arguing for the similarity of nomadic subjectivity and Bayesian body image also prepares the ground for the second way we intend to contextualize our project in relation to posthumanism. As stated in the introduction, we read our proposed therapies as capable of enacting the critical ethics embedded within Braidotti’s theory. Showing both frameworks (Braidotti’s and our own) to be essentially processual gives initial cause for thinking this ‘ethical translation’ to be a legitimate one, and it is to this ‘ethical dimension’ that we now turn. Our first step is to explain how Braidotti understands subjectivity to be constrained by power, and to show that the body dissatisfaction so prevalent in the Westernized world, and the target of our project, is a consequence of this constraint.

The hegemonic human Nomadic subjectivity is at odds with the way that subjects are conventionally understood in philosophy and science derived from European Enlightenment traditions; in fact, subjectivity’s nomadic nature is actively suppressed. As foreshadowed in our introduction, Braidotti’s master example is that subjectivity which is taken to be representative of the human. The human subject is not recognized, by convention, as fluidly relational and open to change; rather it is conceived as fixed and unitary (Braidotti 2019: 26–30). This subject-convention is achieved by the expulsion/ exclusion of other potentials so as to isolate a set of characteristics-of-the-human which specifically designate a particular community; this is an operation of power and is pursued in the service of existing elites. We can, therefore, thank this process for our inherited figure of the human subject, which is, according to Braidotti, coded as ‘white, male, heterosexual, urbanized, able-bodied, speaking a standard language, and taking charge of the women and children’ (Braidotti 2020: 161). The exclusions that underpin our category of the human take different physical-symbolic forms, for instance, in the action of material exploitation, or as Braidotti frames it, in the disposability of certain bodies and lives: ‘Just think of the oppression of woman and LGBT’s, of colonial domination, and the depletion of the earth[’s] resources’ (Braidotti 2020: 162). Here, then, physical domination is not ‘downstream’ from discursive processes, as with some theories of ideology (discourse analysis, for instance), but instead, as per the commitment to process ontology, physical domination is one mode of dealing with (i.e. suppressing) difference, a difference that interpenetrates both discursive and material realms, cutting across them as two instances of the same. The fact that Braidotti does not make a substantial distinction between ‘the mental’ and ‘the physical’ does not preclude her ability to analyse artworks or other symbolic artefacts in their specificity.11 So, for her, difference-suppression also happens within culture. For instance, in many of her books she spends time tackling Leonardo da Vinci’s, so-called, Vitruvian Man. At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’, formulated first by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’, later renewed in the Italian renaissance

70

Posthumanism in Practice as a universal model and represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. An ideal figure of bodily perfection which, in keeping with the classical dictum mens sana in corpore sano, doubles up as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values. Together they uphold a specific view of what is ‘human’ about humanity. (Braidotti 2019: 13)

For Braidotti, this image, occupying as it does a central place within Western culture, has been the bearer of much symbolic violence, defining a set of norms for physical appearance and cultural value that serve to ‘cast out’ those who do not fit Leonardo’s master template, either physically or culturally. In sum, Braidotti understands the nomadic nature of subjectivity to be restrained so as to match a fixed, narrow norm concerning what gets to ‘count’ as fully human. In many ways this human norm is a proxy for value per se, with entities that meet the norm recognized as valuable. As Braidotti makes clear, this norm works in the service of existing elites, excluding those (women, people of colour and indigenous peoples, disabled people, LGBTQIA+ people, as well as animal and vegetable others) that cannot be comfortably accommodated within the category of the human, and casting them as therefore of little or no value. From the perspective of our project, all humans, and what might be called ‘humanadjacent entities’ within Braidotti’s scheme-of-exclusion (i.e. the marginalized peoples listed earlier), are further subject to appearance norms. Even the cis, white male does not get to be entirely human if he is larger or ‘skinnier’ than social ideals, Vitruvian or otherwise. And it is clear that women, particularly, are pressured to constantly police their objectified allocentric body image, expected to match, for instance, the Westernized thin norm so as to retain their value. In sum, we think these sub-norms, ones associated with the human-body-beautiful, are part and parcel of the power wielded by and through the narrow definition of the human, and that these power effects manifest in feelings of body dissatisfaction and normative discontent across populations.12

Critical ethics Up until now, we have told one story about Braidotti’s theorizing, that of an ontological subjectivity conceived as processual and differential (nomadic), and those ways that this dynamic difference is suppressed by power. There is another story to tell, however, one that focuses on resistance. Braidotti proposes that the ontological flows that compose subjects can also, under certain conditions, be disruptive of power. In terms of our project, specifically its framing within posthumanist ideas, we believe that our proposed alien embodiment therapies are an instance of the power disruption that Braidotti describes. In order to understand this, we need to unpack her thinking a little more. As we have seen, the hegemonic vision of the human is won by battling off ‘other’ versions of what it is to be a human subject. This accounts for its violence, but also accords it

 71 a kind of frailty, something that Braidotti names as a ‘structural weakness’ (Braidotti 2020: 164). Because real entanglements underlie subjectivity, the hegemonic notion of the human can never exist on its own; try as it might, it can never entirely defeat its others, and ultimately, the death of difference would mean the death of all possible subjectivity. Therefore, Braidotti claims that this structural weakness, which is a form of dependency upon difference, renders the dominant human subject open to critique: Given the structural importance of these ‘others’ as props that confirm the ‘same’ in his dominant subject-position, their sheer existence is a source of perennial anxiety because it illuminates the complex and dis-symmetrical power-relations at work in the constitution of the dominant subject-position. Because this system of difference-as-pejoration fulfils a structural and constitutive function in subject formation processes, it also occupies a strategic position, as it has the power to challenge the very foundations of the self-other relationship. (Braidotti 2020: 161)

This critique can be actualized by subjects, those who embrace their nomadism, that is, by foregrounding their fluid differential nature and undergoing ‘journeys’ that commit to forms of hybrid existence. Such hybridizing is always an encounter with that which has been excluded (from being ‘properly’ human), so that nomadic subjects are always in a process of, what Braidotti calls, ‘becoming minoritarian’, often theorized as a movement away from a network’s centre to its periphery (Braidotti 2011: 36). This is why the path of becoming always leads from a subject considered ideally human (or human-ideal-adjacent) towards an excluded other, the animal, the vegetable, the virus and so on. Braidotti is clear that becoming minoritarian is not to replace one bounded subject as the representative of humanity with another, currently subordinate yet similarly bounded one; the aim is, instead, to dissolve all unitary identities in the journey of becoming. So, these becomings are critical, and they are so because they reveal (by performing) the fact that identities are always in a fluid relationship with difference/ others, always open to an outside and, therefore, these becomings demonstrate the bounded, unitary subject to be a lie. And in doing so the authority associated with unitary subjectivity, specifically as/in the human, begins to be dissolved (or so it is hoped). In terms of our own project, then, the support our neurological framework provides Braidotti’s ‘processual’ notion of subjectivity, as outlined earlier, begins to take on a critical edge. Under certain conditions, an awareness of the flexibility of body image might well be described as disruptive of power. Braidotti’s hybrid figures, however, are not only critical but also constructive in that they are attempts to forge different open-ended models for human life and attempts to perform the human in a manner that departs from unitary convention. Braidotti understands that this critical/productive articulation of nomadic subjectivity, or ‘double procedure’, can occur in myriad realms, from political activism to art and culture more generally. One example that she discusses in a particularly vivid fashion is a short story by Estonian writer Aino Kallas. The narrative, titled ‘The Wolf ’s Bride’, involves the metamorphosis of a village woman into a wolf. According to Braidotti:

72

Posthumanism in Practice [‘The Wolf ’s Bride’] describes in a moving manner the freedom and exhilaration as well as the voluptuousness, of giving up the human form. The process of physical transformation marks also the shifts of consciousness of the woman, who gradually discovers her commonality or sameness with the leading wolf, the leader of the pack. ‘And she melted away into the murmur of the forest spruce, was pressed in golden drops of resin from the red sides of the pines, and vanished into the green dampness of the marsh moss’. (Braidotti 2002: 129)

This story produces Braidotti’s ‘double procedure’; unitary identity, in this case ‘woman’ or ‘dutiful housewife’, is revealed as a sham by the character’s nomadic becoming. But, also, at one and the same time, the story offers possible speculative, alternative ways of being, or living; this is also represented by the ecstatic melting of boundaries, the melding of human, animal, and vegetal life as the wolf ’s bride runs with the pack and even seems to dissolve into the forest itself. Importantly, Kallas’ text, as conceived by Braidotti, is not only a story about nomadic subjectivity but also a catalyst for generating a nomadic readership. For its readers it is a kind of motor for transformation, enabling an imaginative first step on a journey of becoming. And, it is precisely this status, that of motor, or catalyst for critical transformation which we claim for our embodiment therapies. Now we have all the parts in place to flesh out our final claim: the affinity between our neuroscientific framework and Braidotti’s posthumanist one licences us to characterize our proposed VR alien embodiment therapy as a critico-ethical catalyst in the sense outlined earlier. To prove this affinity, we will describe our proposed VR alien embodiment therapies one last time, doing so by ‘crosscutting’ between Braidottian and cognitive neuroscientific vocabularies.

Critical therapy Like the reader of The Wolf ’s Bride, when our participants embody as alien creatures, our neuropsychological framework, coupled with extant work in the field, suggests that they will begin to recognize the nomadic nature of their own subjectivity. In other words, they will undergo a phenomenological journey wherein they encounter themselves as ‘unfinished’ and open to difference, capable of transformation, of becoming hybrid. In our proposed therapy, as for Braidotti, this hybridizing is to be understood as an encounter with ‘others’, those excluded from the human norm. Otherwise put, the participant will be, in transforming into an alien animal, undergoing a becoming minoritarian. Neuropsychologically speaking, this transformation occurs because the participant draws together different channels of sensory input (visual, proprioceptive, somatic), placing Bayesian bets upon them so as to build an updated body representation, one that results in deep feelings of spatial connection with, and agential ownership of, the alien avatar. Continuing with this vocabulary we can also apply Braidotti’s ‘double procedure’. First, in our VR therapy, human-body-beauty norms, as they manifest

 73 at the level of affective body image, will be critiqued, gradually eroded through the introduction of ‘noise’ into the experiential situation; in light of this noise, existing representations, either directly perceptual or of an affectively desired body, will be gradually reweighted and/or rendered less emotionally salient. This will represent an attack upon damaging appearance norms, showing them to be ‘inadequate’ to the actual potentials of the lived body. Second, at one and the same time, as we have shown earlier, such eroding will very likely produce therapeutic effects, and will make the participant feel better about their body. In Braidotti’s terms, the therapy can be seen as licencing the participant to live differently, for instance, to adopt a new relationship with their body, to enjoy its functionality, its ability to run, jump, flex, etc., and/or to appreciate its sensory capacities more fully. Also, perhaps, the participant’s minoritarian experience, whereby they recognize themselves as existing in a network with creaturely others, with whom it is possible to meld, will encourage the ecological or environmental outlook associated with Braidotti’s posthumanism, prompting ways of living that account for our non-human cousins as entities of worth, to be valued and respected. In sum, given the careful excavation of symmetries between nomadic subjectivity and body image, we are confident in asserting that our proposed VR alien embodiment therapies will act as catalysts for nomadic performances, or, in other words, as mechanisms for norm-busting, and for opening pathways to new unconstrained forms of living. As such they should be understood as (future) instances of putting posthumanism into practice. If our first reason for translating Braidotti’s posthumanist account of subjectivity into the language of body image, as neuropsychologically defined, was to bolster the empirical clout of her definition, the second rationale for such a translation has been to tease out the full social implications of our proposed therapies, to use her expansive, ambitious theorizing to reveal the posthumanist ethics of our project, which are impossible to explain in purely neuroscientific terms. Through this investigation we have arrived at an understanding of our own ethical position that conceives body-beauty norms and their resistance to be bound up with the posthumanist rejection of the human, narrowly defined.

Notes 1 This project emerged from research conversations at the University of Lincoln. These first took place between us (Kirsten and Steve), and then expanded to include Kai Speed, who was then a fine art undergraduate, and Heather Sunderland, a current PhD candidate within Psychology. Kai was included as part of an effort to involve students in academic research, and his contribution recognized with an award through the University’s UROS Scheme. For more details see: https://lalt​.lincoln​.ac​.uk​/project​-years​/2020/. Heather incorporated the project into her ongoing PhD research and was instrumental in helping to design and deliver the first round of experimentation described within the current chapter. Alien Bodies and How to Wear Them, then, is a collaborative endeavour with multiple offshoots and outputs; long may it prove generative for those involved. 2 See, for instance: Rosi Braidotti, ‘Metamorphic Others and Nomadic Subjects, in Dan Byrne-Smith (ed.), Science Fiction: Documents of Contemporary Art, 161–6, London:

74

3 4

5 6 7

8

9

10 11

12

Posthumanism in Practice Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.’ and Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). The alien-sets represent then a reversal of the famous The Road to Homo Sapiens illustration, and our ‘verso-versions’ were informed by the visionary and idiosyncratic work of Dougal Dixon, as well as Donna Haraway’s most recent foray into SF. Participants also answered a number of validated questionnaires pertaining to positive and negative aspects of body image, self-esteem, and eating behaviours, which were then used to calculate a positive- and negative-body image index score for each participant. All procedures were approved by the University of Lincoln Research Ethics Committee and were conducted in accordance with British Psychological Society guidelines. All participants provided full informed consent prior to participation, and were provided with details of support organizations prior to beginning and after completing the experiment. The experimental study is currently being written up for a scientific journal, the data will be available upon publication. For a compelling overview of this theory see: Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). This analysis of the sociocultural influence upon body image is almost entirely in line with a large and important body of feminist literature on the issue of ‘objectification’. The classic instance is provided by: Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. Embodiment, therefore, is an ‘extension’ of the well-known ‘rubber hand illusion’, which can also employ VR technology. See: Wijnand A. IJsselsteijn, Yvonne A. W de Kort, Antal Haans. ‘Is This My Hand I See Before Me? The Rubber Hand Illusion in Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 15, no. 4 (2006): 455–64. doi: https://doi​.org​/10​.1162​/pres​.15​ .4​.455. For a succinct account of the way in which Braidotti’s commitment to nomadism fits with other materialist/process philosophies, see: Rosi Braidotti, ‘Posthuman Critical Theory’, in Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) (339–42). For a relevant definition of process ontology see: James Williams, ‘Process Ontologies’, in Posthuman Glossary, 371. (371–3). In saying that Braidotti does not make a substance distinction between ‘the mental’ and ‘the physical’ I am making the same point as when I asserted that process ontologists, such as Braidotti, insist that concepts and discourses should be understood as material rather than ethereal. For an excellent overview of these issues see: Francesca Ferrando, ‘The Body’, in Postand Transhumanism: An Introduction, ed. Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG, 2014). (213–25).

References Bluett, E.J., E.B. Lee, M. Simone, G. Lockhart, M.P. Twohig, T. Lensegrav-Benson and B. Quakenbush-Roberts (2016), ‘The Role of Body Image Psychological Flexibility on the

Alien Embodiment and Nomadic Subjectivity

75

Treatment of Eating Disorders in a Residential Facility’, Eating Behaviour, 23: 150–5. doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2016.10.002. Braidotti, R. (2002), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2011), Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2018), ‘Posthuman Critical Theory’, in R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova (eds), Posthuman Glossary, 339–42, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Braidotti, R. (2019), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2020), ‘Metamorphic Others and Nomadic Subjects’, in Dan Byrne-Smith (ed.), Science Fiction: Documents of Contemporary Art, 161–6, London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Cash, T.F. and E.A. Deagle III (1997), ‘The Nature and Extent of Body‐image Disturbances in Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa: A Meta‐analysis’, International Journal of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Eating Disorders, 22: 107–26. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-108X(199709)22:23.0.CO;2-J. Clark, A. (2016), Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, A. (2017), ‘How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket: Resisting the Second Law with Metamorphic Minds’, in T. Metzinger and W. Wiese (eds), Philosophy and Predictive Processing, 3, Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, 17: 1–19. Francesca, F. (2014), ‘The Body’, in R. Ranisch and S. Lorenz Sorgner (eds), Post-and Transhumanism: An Introduction, 213–25, Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG. Friston, K.J. (2010), ‘The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11: 127–38. doi:10.1038/nrn2787. Gallagher, S. (2006), How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irvine, K., K. McCarty, K.J. McKenzie, V. Pollet, K.K. Cornelissen, M. Tovee and P.L. Cornelissen (2019), ‘Distorted Body Image Influences Body Schema in Individuals with Negative Bodily Attitudes’, Neuropsychologia, 122: 38–50. doi:10.1016/j. neuropsychologia.2018.11. Keizer, A., A. van Elburg, R. Helms, H.C. Dijkerman (2016), ‘A Virtual Reality Full Body Illusion Improves Body Image Disturbance in Anorexia Nervosa’, PLoS ONE, 11 (10): e0163921. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0163921. Maister, L. et al. (2013), ‘Experiencing Ownership over a Dark-Skinned Body Reduces Implicit Racial Bias’, Cognition, 2 (128): 170–8. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.04.002. Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (3): 6–18. Parr, T., G. Rees and K.J. Friston (2018), ‘Computational Neuropsychology and Bayesian Inference’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12: 61. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00061. Pellizzer, M. and G. Waller (2018), ‘Body Image Flexibility: A Predictor and Moderator of Outcome in Transdiagnostic Outpatient Eating Disorder Treatment’, International Journal of Eating Disorders, 51 (4): 368–72. doi:10.1002/eat.22842. Petkova, V.I. and H.H. Ehrsson (2008), ‘If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping’, PLoS ONE, 3: e3832. Porras Garcia, B., M. Ferrer Garcia, A. Olszewska, L. Yilmaz, C. González Ibañez, M. Gracia Blanes, et al. (2019), ‘Is This My Own Body?: Changing the Perceptual and Affective Body Image Experience Among College Students Using a New Virtual Reality Embodiment-based Technique’, Journal of Clinical Medicine, 8: 925. doi:10.3390/ jcm8070925.

76

Posthumanism in Practice

Preston, C. and H.H. Ehrsson (2014), ‘Illusory Changes in Body Size Modulate Body Satisfaction in a Way That is Related to Non-clinical Eating Disorder Psychopathology’, PLoS ONE, 9 (1): e85773. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0085773. Preston, C. and H.H. Ehrsson (2018), ‘Implicit and Explicit Changes in Body Satisfaction Evoked by Body Size Illusions: Implications for Eating Disorder Vulnerability in Women’, PLoS ONE, 13 (6): e0199426. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0199426. Quittkat, H., A. Hartmann, R. Duesing, U. Buhlmann and S. Vocks (2019), ‘Body Dissatisfaction, Importance of Appearance, and Body Appreciation in Men and Women over the Lifespan’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10: 864. doi:10.3389/ fpsyt.2019.00864. Riva, G. and S. Gaudio (2018), ‘Locked to a Wrong Body: Eating Disorders as the Outcome of a Primary Disturbance in Multisensory Body Integration’, Consciousness and Cognition, 59: 57–9. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2017.08.006. Riva, G. and L. Melis (1997), ‘Virtual Reality for the Treatment of Body Image Disturbances’, in G. Riva (ed.), Virtual Reality in Neuro-Psycho-Physiology, 95–111, Amsterdam: Ios Press. Rodin, J., L. Silberstein and R. Striegel-Moore (1984), ‘Women and Weight: A Normative Discontent’, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 32: 267–307. Sandoz, E., K. Wilson, R. Merwin and K. Kellum (2013), ‘Assessment of Body Image Flexibility: The Body Image-Acceptance and Action Questionnaire’, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 2: 39–48. doi:10.1016/j.jcbs.2013.03.002. Serino, S., E. Pedroli, A. Keizer, S. Triberti, A. Dakanalis, F. Pallavicini, et al. (2016), ‘Virtual Reality Body Swapping: A Tool for Modifying the Allocentric Memory of the Body’, Cyberpsychol. Behav. Soc. Network, 19: 127–33. doi:10.1089/cyber.2015.0229. Serino, S., N. Polli and G. Riva (2019), ‘From Avatars to Body Swapping: The Use of Virtual Reality for Assessing and Treating Body-size Distortion in Individuals with Anorexia’, J. Clin. Psychol, 75: 313–22. doi:10.1002/jclp.22724. Slade, P.D. (1994), ‘What is Body Image?’, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 32 (5): 497–502. Slater, M., D. Perez-Marcos, H.H. Ehrsson and M.V. Sanchez-Vives (2009), ‘Inducing Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Body’, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 3 (2): 214–20. Tantleff-Dunn, S., R.D. Barnes and J.G. Larose (2011), ‘It's Not Just a “Woman Thing”: The Current State of Normative Discontent’, Eating Disorders, 19 (5): 392–402. doi:10.1080/ 10640266.2011.609088. van der Hoort, B., A. Guterstam and H.H. Ehrsson (2011), ‘Being Barbie: The Size of One’s Own Body Determines the Perceived Size of the World’, PLoS ONE, 6 (5): e20195. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020195. Wijnand, A.I., Y. Jsselsteijn, A.W. de Kort and A. Haans (2006), ‘Is This My Hand I See Before Me?: The Rubber Hand Illusion in Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15 (4): 455–64. doi:10.1162/ pres.15.4.455. Williams, J. (2018), ‘Process Ontologies’, in R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova (eds), Posthuman Glossary, 371–3, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Section II

Art and Curation

78

5

Sympoietic art practice with plants A case for posthumanist co-expression Lin Charlston

Posthumanist calls for a conceptual break with Western hierarchical norms of human centrism become more and more compelling as the harmful effects of human dominance and progress materialize (Braidotti 2013; 2016; 2019; Haraway 2016; 2017; Alaimo 2016). We are urged to question historical humanist narratives of human exceptionalism in the face of the devastating anthropogenic global warming, pollution, extinctions, and depletions that these narratives have facilitated1 (Demos 2017). While political and technological action could avert some of the catastrophic consequences of life-threatening environmental practices, persistent hierarchical attitudes towards nature have a detrimental influence on policymaking (Uggla 2010) and individual environmental action (Klein 2014; Shiva 2013). Thus, the future of our shared ecosystem cries out for a reversal of deep-seated disconnections from nature and a concurrent repositioning of humans to live in equitable relations with other species. In this chapter, I show how specific aspects of the slow explosion of posthumanist ideas have inspired and changed my art practice. Taking Rosi Braidotti’s plea to ‘think harder about the status of human subjectivity and the ethical relations, norms and values that may be worthy of the complexity of our times’ (2016: 13), I question my subjectivity as an artist and the ethical relations, norms, and values I bring to my art practice with plants. I will draw on affirmative posthuman ethics (Braidotti 2017), plant ethics (Marder 2013),2 and Haraway’s ‘sympoiesis’, as well as new materialist understandings of agency (Barad 2003; 2007; Bennett 2010) to propose and explore a ‘sympoietic’ art practice with plants. My development of sympoietic art practice with plants was first detailed in my doctoral thesis (Charlston 2019) in which I follow the sympoietic process from its conception to its manifestations in extended artworks, co-creative growing, making, and walking with plants, through to audience participation and collective reverberations. In the present chapter, I pursue the specific role played by subjectivity when working with living plants as creative partners. I also discuss the concept of ‘plant de-coherence’, which has helped me to think creatively about the role of cultural interference in plant– artist relations. I will reflect on two exploratory activities which probe the ethical,

80

Posthumanism in Practice

relational, and processual changes necessary to work with plants as active co-creative partners: The first involves burying my arm in the soil in an empathetic gesture towards the plants in my garden, while the second is a poetic speculation about how the rose perceives me. These explorations bridge theory and practice by seeking to reduce the contrast between human powers and the perceived helplessness of plants.

Hierarchy-disrupting, trans-species art practice In an interplay of posthumanist philosophies, co-creative activities, and provocative questioning, sympoietic art practice drives transformative relational changes which re-align human-centric attitudes and shape a hierarchy-disrupting collective knowledge. The status of human subjectivity is particularly questioned in the proposed trans-species alliance because pre-existing patriarchal hierarchies prioritize selected aspects of human subjectivity (Merchant 2003: 68) in stark contrast with the low status imposed on plants. For example, the human subject is conventionally inflated by a human bias towards the inherent value of movement and language (Mancuso and Viola 2015: 149; Trewavas 2015: 67). The historical exploitation of plants as a passive, inferior life-form3 has not only de-valued their fundamental role in maintaining life-sustaining conditions on the planet but has also systematically precluded the possibility of plant subjectivity or active plant participation in creative processes. The sympoietic art practice I outline here seeks to transform the human domestication of trivial plant life to the active formation of cooperative alliances with significant non-human actors, thus contributing to a wider posthuman shift. Working artistically with plants, eco-printing, dyeing, designing, and representing plants, can be joyful and appreciative. However, I argue that making the radical leap to working sympoietically, that is, together with plants as active co-creative partners, necessitates a deeper engagement with the changing roles of human and plant subjectivity. Sympoietic entanglements with plants in acts of co-creation generate new ontologies free from humanist hierarchical worldviews and necessitate a re-evaluation of how we perceive plants and ourselves. As I will show, posthumanist transformations of complacent human subjectivity, ethical relations, and attitudes towards plants are prerequisites as well as outcomes of co-creative practice. The key term ‘sympoiesis’ describes the characteristics and behaviours in natural, collectively produced, adaptive systems which are organizationally ajar (Dempster 2000: 1). Dempster differentiates sympoietic systems from autopoietic systems which are organizationally closed and autonomous, with self-defined boundaries. While autopoiesis is held to be a characteristic of living matter (Maturana and Varela [1972] 1980), in the context of posthumanism, Braidotti describes the apparent opposition between autopoiesis (self-defined) and sympoiesis (collectively produced) as a ‘generative friction’ (2019: 27) rather than an oppositional dualism. Similarly, the pursuit of cooperative, collective worldings in sympoietic practice usefully rubs against the competitive world of autonomous art-making, generating the kinds of radical methodological and relational shifts discussed here.

 Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants 81 The idea of a sympoietic art practice with plants grew around Haraway’s sense of sympoiesis as ‘making-with’, ‘becoming-with’, and ‘worlding-with, in company’ (2016: 57, 71). I suggest that working sympoietically together with plants can transform human-centric stories of progress by nurturing liaisons, which loosen hierarchical dominance in preparation for the ‘multispecies flourishing’ envisaged by Haraway (2016: 40, 97). Openness to non-human others in sympoietic practice unsettles human privilege with respect to plants and drives a reframing of both the role of the plant and of the human in creative processes. It would be impossible to welcome plants as co-expressive partners and work with them as active artistic agents while maintaining cultural norms of human superiority and exclusive agential and artistic prowess. The acceptance of mutual agency in co-creative practice fundamentally changes humanist presuppositions that humans dominate the world through exceptional agency while animals and plants respond instinctively or helplessly (Nealon 2016: 42). Simply entertaining the possibility of plant agency acknowledges plants as co-habitants and active members of a collective ‘we’ (Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson 2014). This step towards inclusivity, opens the way for a more symbiotic future in which plant subjects participate in sympoietic practice. New materialist understandings of agency and vital matter provide a theoretical foundation for endorsing plants as agentially active partners in art practice by abandoning the prevailing view that intentional agency is a defining human capacity which separates humans from nature (Coole and Frost 2010: 10). Instead, distributive agency (Bennett 2010: 21, 28), in which multiple subjects are identified as the source of an effect, provides a paradigm for a combined agency in plant–artist relationality. In Barad’s agential realist account of posthumanist performativity, all matter is considered to be actively agential in the process of the world’s becoming, stressing that human life is not categorically distinct from other organisms (Barad 2013: 37). Agential realism, defined as mutual ‘intra-action’, mutual response, is thus a relational process, not a possession or a work of human intention (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 54; Barad 2003: 818, 820). These performative, and co-creative interpretations of agency effectively de-objectify plants, thus bringing them into the frame for an ethics of care for plants which is not based on human interests alone (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The ethical and moral rights of plants have been widely discussed (Hall 2011; ECNH 2008) and have been specifically linked with plant subjectivity (Marder 2013). In two lectures, Braidotti characterizes a broader affirmative posthumanist ethics situated firmly in the world, in which non-discriminatory relations extend the appreciation of the world in multiple directions beyond self and beyond individualism (2015; 2017). Critique and creativity feature strongly in modes of affirmation in which we try out what we are capable of becoming and knowing together. In co-creative practice, the move to a more affirmative position demands a sense of equity and a commitment to non-exploitation of plants. Accordingly, sympoietic practitioners necessarily see themselves as part of, not external to, the problem and grapple affirmatively with transspecies inequalities from within practical, collective situations. Thus, posthumanist ethical priorities of non-exploitative, egalitarian acceptance of plants, and ecologically situated practice are integral to sympoiesis.

82

Posthumanism in Practice

This commitment to equitable dealings with all co-habitants is at variance with a managed ‘ethic of domination’ ingrained in the Western belief in exceptional human agency (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018: 345; Marder 2013: 51). In addition to every contemporary artist’s obligation to reduce damage, waste, and polluting materials in artistic production, sympoietic practice compels non-exploitative, egalitarian dealings with plants which break with established thought patterns concerning their passivity. Indeed, sympoiesis goes beyond restoration, sustainability, and a nostalgic love of plants to examine underlying attitudes and relationships in preparation for the collective outcome of multispecies becoming urged by Haraway (2017: 35). Art practice is uniquely capable of setting up a creative cycle of caring, ethically accountable activities such as looking, listening, touching, drawing, and making poetry combined with thinking and questioning, without the pressure to form limiting closures. As an instrument of enquiry, art practice is thus capable of addressing provocative questions and generating multidimensional perspectives within a posthumanist frame. A sympoietic system, in which all creative participants (including plants) are fully recognized, defies the traditional approach in which the individual artist-genius faces a critical audience of art consumers. While sympoietic art practice claims autonomy in the form of independence from institutional and commercial pressures, the value of autonomous creativity is reduced. In co-creative processes, interdependence is strongly welcomed and fully acknowledged, so that the myth of individual creativity and artist ownership gives way to a more generous and ultimately more rewarding collective ownership of ideas and artwork. The immediate benefit for plants in this creative liaison is less obvious, given that plants adapt and blossom successfully without human collaboration. However, we are working with the damage already done; therefore, in the broader and longer term, a shift in human perception and attitudes towards plants can contribute to the future flourishing of the whole planet. To summarize: sympoietic art practice accepts plants as co-agential partners, necessitating and facilitating a re-working of the human exceptionalism which has engendered divisions between plants and people. Theoretically, sympoiesis with plants is supported by affirmative posthumanist ethical priorities and new materialist conceptions of agency. In practice, the performative re-negotiation of my presence with plants starts before artistic production, at that moment of appropriation when the urge to be creative impels interference with the plant’s nature by picking, arranging, using, representing, and showing. The next section switches from theory to practice where I slow down to appraise the complex motives, emotions, doubts, and powerful effects of a performative enactment with plants, raising questions about my taken-forgranted subjectivity. Am I about to dominate, exploit, or demean plants or disrupt the plants’ ecological situation?

De-stabilizing the dominant I of me In order to de-stabilize my dominant relationality with plants and de-centre my individualism as an artist, I wanted to work with living plants as co-constructors of my (self)understanding in a kind of worlding-with, in company. The attempt to make

 Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants 83 sense of the world, and ourselves, through open trans-species exchanges is not about individual self-discovery or ego expansion but rather a relational change to facilitate co-expression. In this spirit, and in an attempt to shift the axis of our relationship in favour of the plants themselves, I undertook to reach out to the plants in my garden, literally in their own ground, by burying my arm in the soil in a dramatic surrender of my dominance. The setting is a small suburban garden in October. I am standing under a pear tree with a spade. I am familiar with the plants around me, the ivy, couch grass, periwinkles, asters, nettles, and late flowering roses, but I am looking for increased empathy, perhaps even spiritual connectivity. I imagine my fingertips becoming sensitive root tips feeling down into the plants’ living place, connecting with mycorrhizal networks under the ground. However, cutting into the soil with a spade again and again, unearthing roots, twigs, and damp smells, I feel a sense of transgression, of inadvertent violation. It is too late to stop, I have already wantonly disrupted microhabitats and delicate soil infrastructure for my own purposes. I lie face-down in a submissive gesture to plunge my arm into the cavernous hole in the ground. I pack the soil tightly around my arm as if planting a shrub and press down firmly until I am trapped, my arm locked into the earth. I am small, intimidated by the pear tree’s power to crush me or to bury me in leaves; the power of moss and grass to overgrow me. My face is disturbingly close to writhing worms and slugs, rotting pears, beetles, grubs, snails, ants, decomposing leaves, millipedes, leather jackets, woodlice, and earwigs (Figure 5.1). My arm is icy cold.

Figure 5.1  My face is disturbingly close to writhing worms and slugs.

84

Posthumanism in Practice

During the seemingly endless minutes of capture, there was perhaps a fleeting sense of empathy with the surrounding plants as well as sensitivity and trust in the living network of roots. But emotions of a different kind prevailed. Below the surface of this small domestic garden, I encountered an unknown chthonic world which stirred a deep dread of incarceration, imprisonment, being helplessly sucked into quicksand or buried alive. While plants spring to life from the soil, humans die and decay. I recoiled in horror and wrenched my arm free when I felt a tentacular movement against the bare skin of my finger, deep in the ground. Subsequently, bringing together fragments of text and photographs captured on my iPhone stirred memories of the dreadful closeness of the soil and slugs. Thoughts that were barely present at the time took shape when I re-lived the visceral clawing at the earth by tearing holes in the pages of my artist-book, Planting My Arm (Figure 5.2). The process of committing thoughts, not only to words and images, but to the orchestration of an artist-book, created a narrative which organized, intensified, and changed my perception of what had happened. On reflection, it was clear that my reaction to the experience was influenced by enduring imagery from my casual reading of Poe, Lovecraft, and the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe. I had expected that planting my arm in the soil would diminish my importance, strengthening my empathy with plants and facilitating interconnectivity with the plants’ world. However, the artist-book told a different story in which plants played a marginal role. Despite my explicit intentions, the experience was centred on myself, my feelings, my heightened awareness and unexpected emotions, all of which interfered

Figure 5.2  I re-lived the visceral clawing on the earth by tearing holes in the pages of my artist-book Planting My Arm (Charlston 2018).

 Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants 85 with the vegetal presence around me. Rather than de-centring my human subjectivity and assisting a warm, unproblematic alliance with plants which might inspire art and poetry, my shock at my own shockability resulted in a violent cut in which I became the subject, and the plants, and alien creatures of the soil mere objects again. While the experience of planting my arm in the soil seemed to increase the distance between us, there is much to be learned from the challenges of putting posthumanism into practice as an artist. Although I was intimidated by the experience, arguably reducing my status as planned, the intention was not to punish me in order to bring about equality but to balance our relationship by reaching out creatively. The affirmative posthumanist stance is neither a dismissal of the human, nor an attempt simply to swap places in the hierarchy, but rather to build modes of relation which encourage mutual becoming beyond individualism (Braidotti 2017). In this sense, the tensions and discomforts of this performative sympoietic enactment delivered valuable insights by starkly revealing the limitations of my human senses, the exclusivity of human language and the intensity of my culturally embedded predispositions and expectations. Sympoietic processes are, by definition, flexible and always receptive to collective imagination and collectively generated knowledge. Each sympoietic experience is uniquely situated, affective, and exposed to the tensions and shocks inherent in adaptive intertwinings of nature and culture; consequently, sympoietic findings may seem complex, surprising, partial, contradictory, or hard to accept. The attendant unsettling of complacency provides an opportunity to release alternative, posthumanist ways of viewing plants and to energize collective co-creativity from which something exciting and novel can emerge. The concept of ‘plant de-coherence’, examined in the next section, is just such an emergent concept.

Plant de-coherence4: Cultural interference or naturalcultural enrichment? While working sympoietically together with plants I suspected that obvious disparities in our temporality and senses did not fully account for all the mysteries and paradoxes in our relationship. I wanted to climb down from my human pedestal to get closer to plants, but each artistic move seemed to add another layer of cultural significance which interfered with the plants’ vegetal nature. When I tried to express plant encounters, such as burying my arm in the soil, I found that the language surrounding plants was already engaged in cultural discourses and norms which coloured the intended posthumanist narrative. I began to speculate that, as well as my innate humanness and my personal objectives, I was also unconsciously bringing cultural baggage into our relationship which would inevitably influence our naturalcultural becoming in sympoietic practice. The concept of plant de-coherence took shape amidst these concerns. I was reading about the quantum activity inside the cells of green plants when, by chance, I stumbled upon a description of ‘quantum decoherence’. Quantum decoherence happens when our slow, normal world interferes with super-fast quantum processes (Al-Khalili and McFadden 2015). I was inspired by the idea that a ‘transitional interface’ could generate active interference effects. At that point, I began to speculate about

86

Posthumanism in Practice

the possibility of plant de-coherence in posthumanist art practice. I will discuss how plant de-coherence helped me to tease out the subtleties of complex naturalcultural interfaces, and to think creatively about the cultural effects which influence relational exchanges with plants. But first, bear with me as I attempt to bring the concept of plant de-coherence alive and explain the connections with quantum theory in more detail. Posthumanist thinkers, such as Karen Barad, have already fruitfully applied concepts from quantum physics to activate new materialist philosophies of dynamic matter which de-centralize the human subject and reinforce a feminist non-hierarchical stance. Concepts such as ‘entanglement’, ‘diffraction’, and ‘intra-action’ emphasize human involvement in ubiquitous exchanges of matter and energy (Barad 2003: 803; 2013: 37). While quantum behaviour is counterintuitive and tricky to think about,5 it is intellectually stimulating and can provoke creative speculation, artistic imagination, and playful metaphor.6 Similarly, exploring the possibility of de-coherence effects in the transition between plants and humans in art practice releases fresh ideas and vocabulary into posthumanist research. In quantum theory, the term ‘coherence’ is applied to the behaviour of an electron inside an atom when it matches complex mathematical modelling of the wavelike behaviour and energy states of sub-atomic particles. However, electron interactions with our slower, everyday world interfere with the regular wave patterns, causing ‘quantum decoherence’. All transitions from the ultra-small, ultra-fast quantum world to the everyday world create quantum decoherence (Schlosshauer 2010: 1–12). The effects of this quantum to classical transition can be imagined in the following analogy: a coherent wave pattern is clearly visible as perfect concentric ripples radiating outwards across the surface of a pool when a pebble lands on the smooth surface of the water. However, in turbulent water the potential wave pattern is disturbed and rendered decoherent – it is no longer distinguishable (Al-Khalili and Mcfadden 2015: 164). I propose a conceptual leap to imagine that plant de-coherence is created during transitions from living plants to the human perception of plants. It is as though the din and jostling of our human-paced world obscure the slower behaviour and subjectivity of plants. Similarly, the ‘semiotic maelstrom’ of cities (Hoffmeyer 1996: 143) could conceivably distort or interfere with coherent plant signals, causing plant de-coherence. Yet again, the slow responses of plants in terms of human expectations might be mis-recognized as a ‘crushing indifference’ towards humans (Nealon 2016: 74). I am suggesting that these examples of the mis-recognition of plants are the effects of plant de-coherence, an interference phenomenon which occurs in the transition between plant life and human perception. This concept of plant de-coherence can be compared with the existing theory of ‘plant blindness’ (Wandersee and Schussler 2001; Schussler 2017). Plant blindness refers to a widespread human failure to notice plants or appreciate their ecological importance.7 Theorists of plant blindness suggest that ignorance of plant science and lack of emotional connectivity can be addressed through education and positive experiences with plants, an idea taken up by researchers from a number of disciplines, prompting projects which bring attention to plants and their benefits.8 Even though appreciation of the ecological contribution of plants may enhance well-being and initiate more responsible actions towards plants, I argue that a

 Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants 87 profound conceptual shift is also required to mend established hierarchical divisions and ensure that these actions work beyond the utility-value of plants for us humans. These hierarchies often go unnoticed, like the invisible ripples in turbulent water, but they nevertheless preserve human exceptionalism, and associated behaviours, to the detriment of human–plant relations and resultant naturecultures. For example, deeprooted humanist values support a tendency to keep human beings separate from the world, and to grab human advantage from plants while de-valuing our co-dependence. The concept of plant de-coherence offers a lively strategy for playing up these undernoticed influences so that they are recognized as such rather than accepted as the norm. Far from presenting a problem for sympoietic practice, the concept of plant de-coherence provides an imaginative conceptual tool for recognizing and questioning the underlying cultural attitudes and hidden power structures which dominate and distort relational exchanges with plants. In this way, an understanding of plant de-coherence adds complexity for nuancing naturalcultural relationships with plants, both in co-creative practices and beyond; one could speculate, for example, that a form of de-coherence manifests in other transitions, such as those between highly contrasting cultures.9 Figure 5.3 offers a visual, photographic impression of de-coherence, where plant life is interrupted by cultural intrusion. The brambles can be seen, squeezed between human detritus and metal fencing which holds back plant growth. The orderly wire mesh interferes with the chaotic crossings of plant stems, bringing to mind neatly clipped lawns which tame nature to make it more appropriate for a civilized world.

Figure 5.3  Brambles are squeezed between human detritus and metal fencing.

88

Posthumanism in Practice

When we encounter plants in art practice and in everyday life, the wire mesh and detritus may not be physically present, but, instead, tacit cultural influences mediate the experience, causing interference and plant de-coherence. The posthumanist move in sympoietic practice is neither to button down a coherent view of plants nor to deny or remove cultural influences, but to openly recognize and question them, to loosen their unnoticed grip and make way for co-creative relationships to flourish. Plants are continually affected and changed by multiple sources of de-coherence, some of which obstruct the acceptance of plants as creative partners. However, some de-coherence effects are useful for plants. For example, when plants blend to form a scenic background they may benefit from our blindness to them, because they are less exposed to being vandalized, eaten, dug up, or coveted. Indeed, plants have evolved strategies for drawing attention to themselves when they want it by bursting out in flamboyant colours to attract pollinators or secreting delicious fruit flavours to ensure seed dispersal. With this in mind, Michael Pollan dares to suggest that most of our interactions with plants are cleverly manipulated by the plants themselves: ‘Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it?’ (2003: xiii). The intriguing thought that plants influence human and non-human animal behaviour to their own advantage does not, however, alter the detrimental effects of objectification or exploitation which discredit their vegetal nature. While plants are well-adapted to provide food and shelter for animals, including humans, they suffer from deforestation, monoculture, and wanton herbicidal destruction by humans. Power structures founded on human centrism, such as exploitative colonialism, bioregionalism, assumptions of ownership, commodification, and market-driven aesthetics, create plant de-coherence effects which compromise equitable relations with plants. The appropriation of plants to symbolize love, death or celebration, and the perpetuation of gender mis-associations, which consistently portray flowers as feminine10 are also particularly relevant to artist–plant relations. Each source of plant de-coherence presents an avenue for analysis as well as the potential for naturalcultural co-creativity. Working together with plants in a co-agential interplay with cultural intricacies offers abundant opportunities for naturalcultural enrichment through the special combination of thinking and doing found in exploratory art practice. The question remains: how can artists use this generative interface to create new forms of connectivity in co-creative practice? Bearing in mind that sympoiesis is a relational process rather than a product, I am thinking of collective art-making, ecologically situated practice, walking with plants, growing with plants, and audience participation in extended artworks and discussion. With an awareness of de-coherence effects, artists can consciously begin to re-pair divisive dualisms through their practice. We are better equipped to strengthen beneficial networks and co-create patterns of connection in which equitable co-habitation and life-dependent symbiotic entanglements are recognized. My appreciation of the plants around me when burying my arm in the soil was marred by culturally prompted fears mingled with my expectations that plants contribute to human well-being (Brook 2010). While the well-being afforded by plants is real and valuable, hunger for gratifying experiences is a weak basis for ethical

 Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants 89 collaboration and falls short of a posthumanist appreciation of plant qualities. Other familiar strategies for empathizing with plants also centre around the human subject. Anthropomorphism, likening plants to human features, gestures, and shapes, at first appears to welcome them into a closer kinship, and it may be a desirable step towards recognizing ourselves in plants (Bennett 2010: 99). However, anthropomorphisms which portray plants as figures of fun or as an aggressive threat,11 or which suggest that plants talk to each other, eavesdrop, or call for help,12 are falsely grounded and misconstrue the complexities of plant life. Such comparisons are unlikely to establish bonds which are beneficial to the plant and could instead engender intolerance to plant–human differences, ultimately feeding the dominant, human-centric subject. The co-creative partnership sought in sympoietic art practice necessitates a posthumanist commitment to equitable sharing which acknowledges differences between species rather than looking for human attributes as a normalizing feature (Wolfe 2010; Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018: 346). It is clear that, while empathizing with plants, likening plants to humans, and seeking feelings of well-being with plants can be effective ways of reaching out to them, these strategies do not necessitate a posthumanist shift away from subjective individualism. I have argued that this posthumanist de-centring shift is vital in the re-negotiation of human presence with plants in sympoietic practice, and up to this point, I have discussed how my subjective response to plants might influence our relationship. But sympoiesis is a multi-directional process. The next and final section takes an unusual turn when I envisage the plant’s point of view in a second sympoietic enactment.

To this rose I am a warm cloud Recent scientific research into plant intelligence reveals an array of super-human senses in plants, including senses for gravity, magnetic fields, humidity, and chemical gradients13 (Trewavas 2015; Mancuso 2018). These findings contribute a new incentive to include plants in the ongoing discourse about other-than-human subjectivity.14 Although it is impossible for a human to know what a magnetic field feels like, a magnetic sense arguably forms part of a plant’s subjective experience. This unimaginable subjective world view of plants can provoke artistic speculations about how plants might experience human presence in their world. As such, in a situated sympoietic enactment, I tried to imagine in what form, if at all, I might be detectable to a rose. I sat with a rose bush, silently slowing down, resisting acceleration, resisting judgements about the rose. I looked, listened, and breathed in the aroma. I touched the fragile petals and the hard waxy leaves and felt the prick of rose thorns. Who do I think I am, touching the rose? What am I to the rose? I could not expect the plant to recognize me in the same way that I know myself. To the plant, I might be concentrated into one spot or dispersed as a vague presence. Perhaps I radiate thoughts which are more perceptible to a plant than my physical self. Am I to the plant another intelligence? A magnetic shape? Perhaps there are no words – I might be an indescribable colour, an

90

Posthumanism in Practice

impossible delight, or an unimaginable threat. The plant’s world and my presence in it might be entirely beyond description. To this rose I am a warm cloud a flush of light or a glow of warmth an exciting tingle an indescribable sensation to this rose I am a magnetic blue blob a mist, a shudder a sharp pain a blur, a breeze a murmur a menacing shadow a vibrational shape an aroma or an aura to this rose am I nothing at all?

This flight of imagination into the strange subjective world of the plant offers a proliferation of creative guises for the artist, but it remains alien to the artist as human, whose identity becomes less distinct, more mobile, and unpredictable. If I do not exist in a recognizable form to plants (arguably Earth’s dominant life-form),15 the status of my human-centric self is greatly diminished in our relationship. All my human hopes, fears, political convictions, achievements, social standing, and so on, are irrelevant to this trans-species alliance. By encouraging these familiar attributes to fall away, I am ready to accomplish a temporary ‘suspension of ontologies and epistemologies, holding them lightly, in favour of a more venturesome, experimental natural history’ (Haraway 2017: 45). During this de-linking process, the status of human subjectivity shifts into unknown posthumanist territory where there is less confidence of superiority. The astounding realization that the person I recognize as ‘me’ is not a person to the rose, and the plant I recognize as ‘rose’ is no such thing to the rose itself, changes everything. That the rose and I, plants and humans, see each other differently from how we see ourselves emphasizes that we are mutually (if asymmetrically) subject to de-coherence effects. In this state of dynamic de-coherence, we can perhaps, at last, begin to fulfil one another through experimental sympoietic worlding-with, in collective, ecologically situated experiences, performative exchanges, and ephemeral, non-invasive sympoiesis. Sympoietically produced artefacts such as artist-books and extended artworks arise naturally from these generative posthumanist co-expression processes. In this way, holding back from artistic production to establish co-agential artist–plant relationality ultimately manifests in tangible outcomes and unexpected forms of artwork.

Conclusion While an entirely sympoietic art practice with plants remains hypothetical, the desire and attempt to achieve it is itself generative of thinking and creating beyond the

 Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants 91 anthropocentric tradition. The journey towards the inclusion of plants as co-creative partners incentivizes changes in process and artistic production, which activate radical changes in attitude and ethical relations, and which, in turn, influence the wider world. Situated enactments of sympoietic processes with plants alongside critical thinking through the lens of the emergent concept of plant de-coherence and posthumanist theories reveal the rich complexity of plant–artist relationality. In this way, the personal story of my shifting human-centric subject contributes a thread to the fabric of collective posthumanist knowledge. As I write, humans are being humbled and tyrannized by the infinitesimal, barely living virus (SARS-CoV-2) which has caused the Covid-19 pandemic; a new sense of isolation and vulnerability adds to the urgency for change in human relationships with the world, and the limitation on human participation releases intriguing opportunities for trans-species sympoiesis to flourish. Art-inspired growing, making, and walking with plants, placing artist-books, drawings, and poems in public spaces, and activist interventions such as guerrilla seeding can continue the non-exploitative, ecologically sensitive remit of sympoietic art practice. By reaching out to an unseen, opportunistic audience, sympoietic art practice with plants has the potential to reverberate in unpredictable ways which initiate diversity-affirming posthumanist discussions and a multiplicity of naturalcultural possibilities.

Notes 1 Anthropogenic increase in CO2 is causing dangerous global warming, while soil nitrogen, nuclear fallout, pesticides, plastics and other non-biodegradable human-made substances will persist in rocks for thousands of years. The most recent scientific assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that anthropogenic global warming is ‘widespread, rapid and intensifying’: https://www​.ipcc​.ch​/report​/ sixth​-assessment​-report​-cycle/ (accessed 12 August 2021). Environmental pressure movements such as Extinction Rebellion keep the public informed and politically engaged: https://extinctionrebellion​.uk​/the​-truth/ (accessed 17 June 2021). This era of humanity’s global impact has been termed the ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). However, the concept of the Anthropocene is questioned in the posthumanities because it emphases the importance of ‘man’ (Alaimo 2016; Haraway 2016). 2 Marder’s Plant-Thinking (2013) is cited as a seminal text in critical plant studies (Stark 2015: 180). 3 A discussion of historical views about plants from Aristotle to Heidegger and Derrida can be found in Marder (2013) and Nealon (2016). For an ecofeminist account of the parallel denigration of women and nature, including the influence of the mechanistic world model, divisive dualisms, and capitalism, see Gaard and Gruen (1993) and Merchant (1989, 2003). 4 The phenomenon of quantum decoherence is an inspiration for plant de-coherence but not the same concept. To underscore this difference, I have introduced a hyphen in plant ‘de-coherence’. 5 For example, particle entanglement effects which operate across vast distances, quantum superposition, and wave-particle duality are not intuitive.

92

Posthumanism in Practice

6 Such appropriation of ‘scientific knowledge’ is sometimes discouraged by accusations that intellectuals abuse science when they refer to scientific theories loosely or inaccurately (Sokal and Bricmont 1998). I suggest that the creative value of lively trans-disciplinary exchange outweighs any danger that transferring and re-applying concepts might be damaging to science. 7 A BBC article by Christine Ro (2019) links plant blindness with ‘nature deficit disorder’. Available at: http://www​.bbc​.com​/future​/story​/20190425​-plant​-blindness​ -what​-we​-lose​-with​-nature​-deficit​-disorder (accessed 20 April 2021). 8 A collaborative artists’ project, coordinated by Dawn Sanders, was presented at the Symposium Beyond Plant Blindness: Where can a single plant take you? at the University of Gothenburg (November 2018). Available at: https://sna​ebjo​rnsd​otti​ rwilson​.com​/category​/projects​/beyond​-plant​-blindness/ (accessed 16 June 2021). 9 For example, Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ (1978) identifies a phenomenon in which ostensibly positive attitudes towards foreignness and the exotic may conceal unconscious assumptions of colonial superiority. 10 Many flowers incorporate both sex organs, having male, pollen-bearing stamens as well as a female carpel in the same bloom. Some have separate male flowers and female flowers on the same plant (e.g. squash) while others have separate male and female plants (e.g. holly). 11 The science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham 1951) plays on our deep fear that plants could become mobile and aggressive. 12 For example, see the Guardian article by Hannah Devlin: https://www​.theguardian​ .com​/science​/2018​/may​/02​/plants​-talk​-to​-each​-other​-through​-their​-roots (accessed 02 August 2021). 13 Wild spinach plants have been engineered to alert researchers (by smartphone!) to the presence of toxic contaminants in groundwater, such as the nitroaromatic compounds dinitrotoluene and dinitrobenzene (Wong et al. 2017). 14 Biologist and semiotician Jakob von Uexküll expanded the meaning of ‘Umwelt’ (literally the objective environment) to explore the self-centred subjective surroundings of different creatures in the same environment. He speculated how a ‘blooming meadow flower’ might be perceived in the Umwelt of a young girl, an ant, a cicada-larva, and a cow from their differing sense perspectives (1982: 29). While Uexküll extended subjectivity beyond humans, plants remained as objects. Posthumanists, however, envisage more inclusive, collective ‘trans-subjectivities’ (Braidotti 2019: 90) and a ‘hyposubjectivity’ of the excluded and oppressed (Morton and Boyer 2021). 15 Although human-made mass exceeds all biomass (Elhachem et al. 2020), plants constitute 80 per cent of the earth’s biomass (Thompson 2018).

References Al-khalili, J. and J. Mcfadden (2015), Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology, London: Black Swan. Alaimo, S. (2016), Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barad, K. (2003), ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3): 801–31.

 Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants 93 Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2012), ‘On Touching: The Inhuman that Therefore I Am’, Differences, 23 (3): 206–23. Available at: https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​/10407391​-1892943. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2015), ‘Nomadic Affirmative Ethics’, lecture presented at the conference Deleuze and Guattari and Africa: Southern Responses, Cape Town. Available at: https:// rosibraidotti​.com​/2018​/06​/29​/nomadic​-affirmative​-ethics/. Braidotti, R. (2016), ‘Posthuman Critical Theory’, in D. Banerji and M.R. Paranjape (eds), Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, Chapter 2: 13–32, New Delhi: Springer. Braidotti, R. (2017), ‘On Affirmative Ethics’, lecture presented at Dutch Philosophy Olympiad, Leusden. Available at: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=aCvZAR7Pulk. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge Polity Press. Braidotti, R. and M. Hlavajova (eds) (2018), Posthuman Glossary, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Brook, I. (2010), ‘The Importance of Nature, Green Spaces, and Gardens in Human WellBeing’, Ethics, Policy and Environment, 13: 295–312. Charlston, L. (2019), ‘Towards a Sympoietic Art Practice with Plants,’ Doctoral Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, Available online: http://e​-space​.mmu​.ac​.uk​ /626447/ Coole, D. and S. Frost (eds) (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Demos, T.J. (2017), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and the Environment Today, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Dempster, B. (2000), ‘Sympoietic and Autopoietic Systems: A New Distinction for SelfOrganising Systems’, in J.K. Allen and J. Wilby (eds), Proceedings of the World Congress of the Systems Sciences and ISSS 2000 [Presented at the International Society for Systems Studies Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, July 2000]. Available at: https:// citeseerx​.ist​.psu​.edu​/viewdoc​/download​?doi​=10​.1​.1​.621​.9187​&rep​=rep1​&type​=pdf. Dolphijn, R. and I. van der Tuin (eds) (2012), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, London: Open Humanities Press. Ecnh. (2008), ‘The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants’, The Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology, Available online: https://www​.ekah​.admin​.ch​/inhalte​ /ekah​-dateien​/dokumentation​/publikationen​/e​-Broschure​-Wurde​-Pflanze​-2008​.pdf (Accessed 23 August 2021). Elhachem, E., L. Ben-Uri and J. Grozovski (2020), ‘Global Human-Made Mass Exceeds all Living Biomass’, Nature, 588: 442–4. Gaard, G. and L. Gruen (1993), ‘Ecofeminism: Towards Global Justice and Planetary Health’, Society and Nature, 2 (1): 1–35. Hall, M. (2011), Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany, New York: SUNY Press. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2017), ‘Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble’, in A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hoffmeyer, J. (1996), Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

94

Posthumanism in Practice

Klein, N. (2014), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, London: Allen Lane. Mancuso, S. (2018), The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence, New York: Atria Books. Mancuso, S. and A. Viola (2015), Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, Washington, Covelo, London: Island Press. Marder, M. (2013), Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, New York: Columbia University Press. Maturana, H.R. and F.J. Varela (eds) ([1972] 1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Dordrecht, Boston, London: D Reidel Publishing Company. Merchant, C. (1989), The Death of Nature, New York: HarperOne. Merchant, C. (2003), Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Morton, T. and D. Boyer (2021), Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human, London: Open Humanities Press. Nealon, J.T. (2016), Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pollan, M. (2003), The Botany of Desire, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Puig De La Bellacasa, M. (2017), Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, E.W. (1978), Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books. Schlosshauer, M. (2010), Decoherence and the Quantum-to-Classical Transition, Berlin: Springer. Schussler, E. (2017), ‘Seventeen Years of Plant Blindness: Is Our Vision Improving?’, Available online: https://www​.pla​ntco​nser​vati​onal​liance​.org​/resources (Accessed 03 August 2021). Shiva, V. (2013), Making Peace with the Earth, Canada: Fernwood Publishing Snæbjörnsdóttir, B. and M. Wilson (2014), ‘The We of ‘We’: Rethinking Back to the Garden’, Available online: https://sna​ebjo​rnsd​otti​rwilson​.com​/publications​/writings​-by​ -the​-artists/ (Accessed 14 July 2021). Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont (1998), Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York: Picador. Stark, H. (2015), ‘Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies’, in J. Roffe and H. Stark (eds), Deleuze and the Non/Human, 180–96. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, A. (2018), ‘Taking Stock of Life’, Scientific American, 319 (2): 16. doi: 10.1038/ scientificamerican0818-16. Trewavas, A. (2015), Plant Behaviour and Intelligence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uggla, Y. (2010), ‘What is This Thing Called Natural: The Nature-Culture Divide in Climate Change and Biodiversity Policy’, Journal of Political Ecology, 17: 79–91. Von Uexküll, J. (1982), ‘The Theory of Meaning’, Semiotica, 42: 25–82. Wandersee, J. and E. Schussler (2001), ‘Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness’, Plant Science Bulletin, 47 (1): 2–9. Wolfe, C. (2010), What is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wong, M., J. Giraldo, et al. (2017), Nitroaromatic Detection and Infrared Communication from Wild-type Plants Using Plant Nanobionics’, Nature Materials, 16: 264–72.

6

Kneading bodies Madaleine Trigg

Fifteen bags of flour. The fine white flour filters and floats through the air as it is poured into a mound on the ground. A soft dust settling on my skin. Pushing my fingers into the powdery peak, cracks form and the flour falls. Water rushes in, escaping over the sides, pooling until the liquid is suddenly soaked in. My hands are startled by the cold, congealing mass as they slowly submerge themselves. Folding the flour and water, this mixture sticks to fingers, creeping into the creases and crevices of skins. Fumbling our way through folds, the dough caresses the circulating hands. Bringing these materials together through our moving bodies, we work steadily to bind ourselves to each other. Knuckles slapping skins, pushing away from itself (or is it inside itself?) before being pulled back into the mix. Again. Spreading, folding, kneading. Gathering strength, these bodies resist each other, pushing back against the persistent prodding to regain their former position. Resting for a moment, they begin to rise. ​ is chapter follows a series of contact improvisations with dough to consider what it Th means to intersect with different bodies; how do we move with and affect one another? Kneading these materials actively reveals the agencies of non-human bodies, bringing the biological blurring of boundaries between these lifeforms into conceptual focus. Folding fungi, female bakers, performance, philosophy, and dough together, these materials ferment to embody new materialist and posthumanist discourses and the ‘response-abilities’ (Haraway 2016: 34) that arise through the agitation and negotiation of these bodies – ‘cultivating response-ability; that is also collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices’ (Haraway 2016: 34). Conventionally, contact improvisations are a movement practice between human bodies. Expanding these principles to focus on the interactions between human and non-human bodies is a gesture that recognizes the ‘vibrancy of matter’ (Bennett 2010) and is deeply curious about our entanglements with others. Considering non-human bodies as creative partners in performance moves away from an anthropocentric tendency to shape and possess materials. Instead, these contact improvisations concentrate on the interactions between human and non-human bodies to create a posthuman performance practice that is responsive to, and takes responsibility for, the microbial bodies that live on, around, and within us.

96

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 6.1  Photograph from Knead, 2018. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg and Simon Donger.

I offer here three ‘bodies of work’ that dwell in dough and reflect how posthuman and posthumanist principles are embedded and reveal themselves within these performances. Collaborating with non-human bodies, rather than controlling them, this practice proposes an embodied, open, and generative approach to understanding how human and non-human bodies are intertwined with and affect each other. Scholars liberally season this work, reflecting the multiplicity of voices that have shaped this practice-led research, offering rich perspectives that permeate and expand our understandings of interspecies relations with dough. Through kneading, seemingly individual ingredients and identities are bound together, forming complex ecologies that sustain multiple species.​

Moving with material bodies My performance arts practice focuses on movement-led, body-based work that is interdisciplinary, improvised, and often site-responsive. My fascination with materials has led to a series of performances where the physical transformations of garments were central to the work; this manifested in dresses that dissolved1 and clothing that was felted onto my body through the audiences’ touch.2 These performances revealed a sensitivity to the unique qualities of materials and an interest in exploring how materials can physically and emotionally affect human bodies. Wearing materials on my body was an intimate act that revealed ambiguities between skins and surfaces. The contact improvisations with dough described here extended these discoveries by directly engaging with non-human bodies.

 Kneading Bodies 97

Figure 6.2  Film still from Knead, 2018. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg and Simon Donger.

Dough is a rich material to work with, from its function as food to its many cultural significations and relations with the (female) body, domesticity, and labour. Dough is lively matter. Swelling and expanding, dough develops over time. Moving of its own accord, dough has a body that is extensive and elastic. This material also has multiple microbial bodies within it and these yeasts and bacteria are companion species (Haraway 2006: 97–114; Haraway 2003) that allow us to rethink distinctions between human and non-human bodies. Recognizing the liveliness of dough offers the possibility to reconsider the vitality of all materials. Human bodies, too, share these microbial ‘messmates’ (Haraway 2008: 4) and as such, the boundaries between human and non-human bodies become physically blurred. Performance is an apt medium as the duration allows us to experience the interactions and transformations that emerge as human and non-human bodies move together. However, this project also recognizes the challenges of communicating with non-human bodies. How can I attune myself to encountering and reacting with non-human bodies that have different temporalities, materialities, and modes of communication? What methods allow us to move with and be moved by non-human bodies? What results from this reversal of an anthropocentric relationship to the world? Improvisation is central to my practice as it allows me to generate performance material without knowing what will emerge. This open, risky, yet disciplined approach requires the performer to be fully absorbed in the encounter, while neither knowing where it is going nor where it will end. Usually, the movements generated from the improvisations would be shaped into a performance, but in this series the contact improvisations are the core work. Contact improvisations3 consider the ‘partner’s body as a medium for one’s own movement’ (Yohalem 2018: 48); the movement emerges from the contact between two or more bodies. Contact improvisations, then, are ‘neither leading nor following’, but rather a ‘moving with’ or a ‘being moved by’ (Foster 2003: 7). As co-founder of the practice, Steve Paxton, observed:

98

Posthumanism in Practice Here is a movement form in which, in the essence of contact, touch, and the exchange of weight, in the conversation between the masses, a very lively communicative interaction occurs, causing both people to improvise simultaneously to keep up with the other one as in conversation. (Rainer and Paxton 1997: 19)

If it is possible to have this communication between human bodies through touch, what unfolds when you contact improvise with non-human bodies? Extending the practice of contact improvisations to non-human bodies allows us to explore how we encounter and are entangled with others. Can our anthropocentric attitude towards manipulating non-human others be inverted within this practice? If so, what kind of world can be envisaged through this inversion? Contact improvisation offers a methodology that is open-ended, responsive, sensual, practical, and which confounds pre-established patterns of behaviour. Re-orientating contact improvisation towards non-human bodies offers the potential to further decentre the significance of the human within encounters. Interacting with non-human bodies rather than imposing on them, establishes why contact improvisations are a useful framework to practically explore posthumanist principles. It’s heavy. I struggle to move the dough as it escapes my grasp, falling to the ground. I try again. Cradling the dough, holding it to my belly, I move quickly to the plastic sheet. Dumping the dough on the ground, I gather a long cardboard tube. Leaning over, I press it into this pile, giving my whole weight to the mass. Pushing down and forward, I start to roll. Rolling. Rolling over, rolling on, rolling through. Lots of rolls. Leaving wrinkles in this flattened flesh. The thick sheets of dough are draped over my shoulders, wrapped around my neck like a scarf. The dough feels cool as it touches my skin, powdery against my pores. The weight presses into me.​

Figure 6.3  Film still from Knead, 2018. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg and Simon Donger.

 Kneading Bodies 99 Shifting our understanding of skin from its being a membrane that protects the body’s integrity to instead being a conduit for multispecies contact opens up how we can move together. If we consider that ‘the world is already inside one’s body, then the separation between internal and external – self and other – is much less distinct. The skin is no longer the boundary between the world and myself, but rather the sensing organ that brings the world into my awareness’ (Cooper Albright 2013: 240). Contact improvisation training focuses on honing the response-ability of the skin, essentially re-awakening the body’s sensitivity to others. The ability to listen to another body is crucial as this practice focuses on the movement that emerges through bodies’ contact and weight, rather than relying on language. My reflections, here, on contact improvisations with dough are shaped through engaging with the choreographer and scholar Ann Cooper Albright. Albright invites her performers to ‘imagine opening the pores of their skin so that the world can enter the space of their bodies’ (Cooper Albright 2013: 225). More than just a visualization, Albright elaborates on the vital importance of this exercise: This image of one’s body as part of the whole landscape, rather than the vehicle which moves through and arranges that landscape, has clear physical results in the released muscular tone of the body. But there is also a profound psychic reorganization here as well. . . . By shifting our somatic imagination, we can reorder our cultural notions of selfhood. (Cooper Albright 2013: 225).

It is this reordering of notions of selfhood which is pivotal. Contact improvisation, as a training, works towards losing the body’s individual sense of identity and preestablished direction in favour of moving with others in a spontaneous collaboration. Responding to situations with curiosity rather than determination, ‘[c]ontact improvisation trains one to react without ever being reactionary’ (Cooper Albright 2013: 224). Extending these principles to interactions between human and nonhuman bodies offers an alternative model for an embodied understanding of relations with others. Not only do I move with these materials, I am open to the possibility of being transformed through these encounters. Considering my body as integral to the landscape, rather than separate from it, deeply troubles anthropocentric perspectives. Taking this sense of self seriously dilutes and distributes the importance of the human body. Instead, relations with non-human bodies are re-configured in the recognition of the impact that these have on human bodies. The anthropocentric illusion of the sovereignty and sanctity of human embodiment is deeply unsettled through this practice. For Albright, contact improvisation ‘requires a desire to dance in a state of disorientation’ (Cooper Albright 2013: 224). Embracing this disorientation has been a deliberate approach to destabilize my habits and assumptions about non-human relations; however, it is a complex and confusing process. Can we relinquish our desire to control situations? What happens if I lose myself within this encounter, and what will we find? This openness to indeterminacy and ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) embodies a posthumanist perspective, recognizing that the human body is not central to the action but one of multiple bodies (re)acting upon each other.

100

Posthumanism in Practice

I’m on all fours. Under me is a large layer of dough. Carefully my body dips onto the dough, leaning into it. It latches onto me. Lastly, I lay my head on to the dough and close my eyes. And breathe. The dough starts to seep into my nose. I move my head; it is in my mouth now. I move again. My breathing has quickened. It’s suffocating. I realize I am scared. It seems so silly, but I am not laughing. I am stuck. I cannot control myself. I am held. Gripped. My movements are not my own. I have merged into the material. I struggle to strip myself away, but the dough is too strong. I give up and go to the ground. I try to rise again; the dough clings to me. I relent and release back into the material. Putting my weight onto my hands, I try again. Pressing, pushing, pulling. Trying to peel away. I am persistent, and this pays off.​​ During these contact improvisations, the agency of dough was remarkable and defied my assumptions. In Knead, the weight of the material clearly moved me by forcing me to the floor. My feet also became stuck in the dough, making my movements more precarious and laborious. Rising from the ground normally takes seconds, but in the encounter described earlier, the movement took ten minutes. Despite lying on top of the dough, a dominating position, the dough unexpectedly reversed this relationship by resisting my body’s movements. The act of standing has been significant in evolutionary terms to distinguish humans and animals but here the dough’s characteristics undermined this distinction by stalling my progress. I had anticipated capturing an imprint of my body in the dough, but instead it clung to my skin, further blurring the boundaries between our bodies. The dough defiantly demonstrated its agency with the strength of the material making my movements more arduous. I had not expected that this encounter would be so physically and emotionally draining; afterwards, it took over an hour to clean the dough from my body, although chunks congealed in my hair, needing to be cut out. Bruises blemished my skin for days afterwards.

Figure 6.4  Film still from Rising, 2019. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg and Simon Donger.

 Kneading Bodies 101

 

Figure 6.5 (Top) Figure 6.6 (Bottom)  Film stills from Rising, 2019. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg and Simon Donger.

I was held to the ground by the ‘muscle’ of the material, the gluten. Gluten is created when water hydrates flour. Two proteins, gliadin and glutenin, are formed from the flour which combine to create networks, threads of gluten; gliadin contributes to the extensibility of the dough, whereas glutenin provides the elasticity. ‘As in the fibers of muscles, these qualities exist in productive tension’ (Pollan 2013: 223), allowing the dough to be shaped, stretched and returned to its original form.4 Gluten doesn’t exist naturally, but instead forms through the contact and interactions between flour and water. Without the combination of these materials that create ‘the extensible and elastic gluten to trap the carbon dioxide, bread would never rise’ (Pollan 2013: 224).

102

Posthumanism in Practice

Contact improvisations and intra-actions Kneading dough is an embodied example of how humans live and think; this dynamic image of dough echoes the complex web of relations that contemporary posthumanist scholars, such as Karen Barad, propose. Barad’s agential realism and intra-actions5 (Barad 2018: 233) build upon the work of quantum physics’ founder, Niels Bohr, and his profound contributions that disturb the dualisms of subject/object and knower/ known. For Bohr, ‘things’ do not inherently have defined boundaries, and theoretical concepts, such as ‘momentum’, are ‘not ideational in character but rather are specific physical arrangements’ (Barad 2018: 232). Essentially, matter is not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency’(Barad 2018: 232). Dressing my body in dough envelops it in an elastic, second skin. The texture and tone of this body echoes my folds of flesh. I can’t tell where I begin and the dough ends. Slowly I start to move around, feeling the weight of the dough displace me. I’m unstable. Circling is such a simple movement, but this load makes me falter, fumble, and fold in on myself. Wearing me down. I try to resist but it is futile. I’m forced to the ground, crumbling as my body is completely covered. Barad suggests that ‘the primary semantic units are not “words”, but, materialdiscursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfiguring of the world’ (Barad 2018: 232). Importantly these ongoing flows of agency are not established a priori, but are constantly in flux, so they do ‘not take place in space and time but in the making of spacetime itself ’ (Barad 2018: 231).

Kneading/needing new philosophies Kneading is one of the oldest movements in our shared cultural histories. Beyond doughs’ practical role in personal and communal lives, it has permeated philosophical discourses, providing rich metaphors for understanding relations between bodies. For French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, the workings of oils, creams, and doughs were derivatives of an ideal primary paste. Proposing that the hand ‘thinks only in squeezing, in kneading, in being active’,6 Bachelard offers a ‘cogito of kneading’ (‘un cogito pétrisseur’)7; valuing the primacy of the experiential encounter between bodies and materials was an important proposition, philosophically. Bachelard’s un cogito pétrisseur clearly challenges René Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, which positioned the intellect as essential in the formation of identity and epistemology. Emphasizing our material experiences with earth/clay (mixing and moulding) and dough (through kneading), Bachelard’s philosophy instead focused on what arises from these embodied encounters between materials and bodies. Philosopher Michel Serres also drew upon dough, and the theory of ‘baker’s logic’, to enrich his account of the complexity of relations between bodies, time, and space.

 Kneading Bodies 103 Steven Connor summarizes Serres’s view that kneading dough functions as ‘an image of the complex overlayering of time in history, an image not of time moving on and dissipating, but of endlessly regathering itself ’ (Connor 2021). This material structure favours connections and accumulations rather than a linear pattern of ‘progress’. Significantly, Serres concentrates on the important contribution that women make to philosophy through their embodied knowledge; he chides his contemporaries for being ‘simple blind people’ who ‘have not imagined implication, inclusion, fold; . . . never noticed or listened to women’ (Serres 1991: 82). Feminist scholar Maria Assad notes the significance of Serres’s distinction. The female baker, ‘folds and refolds and comes up with, not a regular product but a multitude of different things. The woman baker quietly and privately works a system that harbours deterministic chaos’ (Assad 2005: 216). This image of dough and the female baker, kneading together to create a ‘deterministic chaos’ (Assad 2005: 216), echoes the disorientating dance that unfolded through my contact improvisations with dough. These encounters between human and non-human bodies were not pre-established, but rather ever-evolving accumulations of time, body, and space that folded, unfolded and refolded within multiple bodies. Yve Lomax also elaborates on what we can learn from the female baker who, ‘caresses rather than grips. The art of folding, of implication, lies in a non-grasping of the dough. .  .  . Practicing the baker’s logic leads elsewhere than towards the things we possess’ (Lomax 1995: 55). Caressing rather than possessing non-human bodies profoundly disturbs anthropocentric tendencies. This reconsideration of how we can touch others, responsibly, has the potential to lead to a more ethical engagement with non-human bodies, an idea that is fundamental to the research presented here. In The Book of Skin, Connor proposes that [t]he action of kneading makes the material alive because it invests it with energy. One literally puts work into kneading, inserting kinetic potential into the previously dead substance. When one kneads dough or clay, it is as if one were winding a spring. A lump of worked dough is a negentropic niche in things. Time has been folded into it along with work and air, and so, having undergone a transition from an in-itself to a for-itself, it has a future. (Connor 2004: 225)

However, dough is not dead. Kneading doesn’t invest dough with life, as it is already alive. Mixing dough by hand aids and quickens the biochemical processes within the materials. However, without human interventions, the activities between the flour, water, and yeasts would still occur, albeit more slowly (sourdough starters and no-kneaded bread are proof of this). Left to its own devices, ‘a complex drama unfolds during bulk fermentation’ (Pollan 2013: 223) in dough. The yeasts are hungry. Consuming the sugars from the flour, they burp out carbon dioxide which gets caught up like a balloon in the gluten networks, ‘a three-dimensional lacework of air’ (Pollan 2013: 223). When these yeasts have run out of oxygen, they astutely switch to fermentation to feed themselves. This ability to create new cultures that breathe life into bread explains why leavening has been considered both sacred and suspicious. This is a miraculous material, not only lively but also able to generate new life through fermentation, which is essentially a process of decomposition. The alchemical acts

104

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 6.7  Film still from Knead, 2018. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg and Simon Donger.

within these bodies are astonishing. Yeasts’ activities are also, of course, not limited to dough. They have an intimate connection to our bodies, and to air and environments; they are needed ‘messmates’ (Haraway 2008: 4). Yeasts surround us and are in us. These tiny bodies touch us deeply. As we have evolved together, yeasts are intimately connected to our cultures and histories. They are familiar to us since they are family.​

From handmade to hand-taste: Although Saccharomyces cerevisiae a​ re commercially cultivated as baker’s yeasts, they are natural phenomena. These yeasts live in the respiratory and digestive systems of the human body (Dynowska and Góralska 2006: 140). They also inhabit the environment. When flour and water are mixed and left for several days, the yeasts from the air mingle with the mixture. A hive of activity, these yeasts ferment to create a ‘mother’ or sourdough starter, a community of yeasts and bacteria which help the bread to rise. The complexities of these cultures were illuminated by Rob Dunn and Anne Madden’s sourdough study. In 2017 identical sourdough starter kits were mailed across the world to fifteen bakers. Gathering at the Puratos Center for Bread Flavour in Saint Vith (Belgium), these bakers excitedly broke bread together to sample the unique taste of each loaf. The bakers’ hands and their sourdough starters were also swabbed. The researchers found that most of the bacteria and yeasts8 in the ‘mothers’ were from the flour (ranging from the microbes inside the grain seeds, to soil microbes from where the grain was grown), but none appeared to be from the water.9 Different microbes were also present in different regions; for example, one fungus was confined nearly exclusively to Australia, which could mean that Australian breads have a unique taste (Dunn 2018: 249). Studying the bakers’ hands was also

 Kneading Bodies 105 enlightening. L ​ actobacillus10 is relatively rare on hands: approximately 2 per cent of microbes on men and 6 per cent on women.11 Lactobacillus tends, instead, to live in the gut and healthy vaginal flora. However, in Dunn and Madden’s study, on average 25 per cent, and up to 80 per cent, of all the bacteria on the hands of the bakers were Lactobacillus and related species. Similarly, all of the fungi on the bakers’ hands were yeasts found in sourdough starters, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Surprised by the results, Dunn’s ‘suspicion is that because the bakers spend so much time with their hands in flour (and starters), their hands become colonized by the bacteria and fungi they work around’ (Dunn 2018: 251). Speculating further, Dunn suggests that the acid and alcohol produced by the Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces cerevisiae on bakers’ hands could create an ecology which protects the baker from getting sick. Dunn also wonders ‘whether all people who work with food develop unusual hand microbes?’ (Dunn 2018: 251). The sourdough study evolved from research on kimchi that Dunn had been conducting. In The Flavor of Biodiversity, Dunn draws upon the Korean concept of sson mhat to reveal how other cultures have understood the relationship between our bodies and food. Sson mhat (Sson, ‘hand’; mhat, ‘taste’) ‘refers not to the food itself but instead to the flavor given to food by the person who makes it – literally by their hands, but figuratively by everything about who they are and how they touch, walk around and work with food’ (Dunn 2018: 233–4). ‘Hand-taste’ acknowledges that you can be given the same ingredients, but the finished food will always taste slightly different depending on who prepared it. The food is flavoured by the mixing of microbes, and how the bacterial bodies on the hands infuse and collaborate with each other. Each body adds their unique ingredients to the mix, and the environment is also part of this recipe. Likewise, kneading dough is an assemblage of multispecies players, and understanding the complex ecologies that occur throughout the process further establishes why it is such a fertile material to interact with. My own research further complicates the interactions between human and nonhuman bodies that emerged during my contact improvisations with dough, the boundaries between bodies blurring biologically as well as visually through these encounters. As the dough stuck onto me, microbial bodies were colonializing my body. During these performances with non-human bodies, does my human body become even more diluted? Moving with dough, do I become more Saccharomyces cerevisiae than Homo sapiens? If the borders between bodies are more porous than previously imagined, what occurs when bodily fluids are brought into the mix?

Microbial messmates12 Recipe: Spit into a large, glass bowl to produce enough fluid. Mix your saliva into the flour, using the sweat from your hands as salt. Using your fingers, carefully extract yeast from your vagina. Add to the dough and knead.13​

106

Posthumanism in Practice

 

Figure 6.8 (Top) Figure 6.9 (Bottom)  Film stills from Body-Made-Bread, 2019. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg.

In April 2019 I decided to make bread from my bodily fluids. I wondered whether the yeasts from my body would make the dough rise. Settling on saliva and other secretions from my body, I started to make this bread. It took over half an hour to make enough fluid for the flour. Body-Made-Bread was a durational performance to camera but also a thought experiment. Based on an apocalyptic scenario where all our water sources were contaminated, would we still find ways to survive? Could we bake bread made from our bodies?14 Bio-artist Tarsh Bates’s practice and research shares a similar affection for yeasts and has been germinal in reconfiguring my understanding of bodies towards posthuman

 Kneading Bodies 107

 

Figure 6.10 (Top) Figure 6.11 (Bottom)  Film stills from Body-Made-Bread, 2019. Courtesy of Madaleine Trigg.

and trans*ecological perspectives (Bates 2017: 151). In The Unsettling Eros of Contact, Bates makes bread from Candida albicans (the yeasts commonly known as ‘thrush’) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeasts). Serving these multispecies baguettes with brie and hummus to the audience, Bates’s work draws upon that of Donna Haraway and acts as a ‘provocation to “stay with trouble”, to break bread with our microbial messmates’ (Bates 2015: 28). This artwork activates a multifaceted understanding of the biological interactions between non-human bodies within the human body. Bates reminds us that the human body ‘seethes and pulses with hundreds of other species, fashioned and transfigured by tiny lives and deaths, host to a thriving ecology’ (Bates

108

Posthumanism in Practice

2017: 151). It is challenging to estimate how many different bodies reside in the human body, however recent research suggests ‘that the number of bacteria in the body is . . . of the same order as the number of human cells’.15 It is clear that classifications as to what constitutes human and non-human bodies become very cloudy indeed. These tiny bodies deeply trouble the notion that humans are separate from other species. As human bodies have evolved from and are co-dependent on these bacteria and yeasts to survive, we are intimately entangled in each other’s bodies and lives. In Me, My Self, and the Multitude: Microbiopolitics of the Human Microbiome, Penelope Ironstone proposes that microbes are better understood to themselves be actors in the complex dramas that unfold in history and evolution, within and outside of the bodies of animals or plants, and with or without human capacities to understand and govern their movements, interrelations, or activities. (Ironstone 2019: 329–30)

In fact, the functions that these fungi fulfil are often those that humans haven’t yet developed, such as digesting food. Human bodies need other bodies inside them to live. We are host and home to these yeasts and bacterial bodies; they feed on us even as we devour them. In Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake suggests that for our microbes, the human ‘body is a planet’ (2020: 18) and emphasizes that there are ‘more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy’ (2020: 18), revealing the impressive scale of these microorganisms. The Milky Way contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars; in comparison, it is estimated that every human contains 100 trillion microbes (Yong 2016: 269). In emphasizing the biological co-dependency of species, Bates, biologists, and posthumanists trouble traditional conceptions of the individuality and autonomy of human bodies. This biological blurring of boundaries between the human and non-human eats away at any sense of a unified human body. Although we have been questioning how biologically human our bodies are as a whole, even within human bodies there is diversity. Discussing the different species of microbes that can be found on human skin, Ed Young relates that a human’s ‘right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.16 The variations that exist between body parts dwarf those that exist between people. Put simply, the bacteria on your forearm are more similar to those on my forearm than to those in your mouth’ (Yong 2016: 17). The interconnections between microbes and their hosts also extend to other parts of bodies. Studies have shown that bacteria in the gut change if animals eat different food (Yong 2016: 36). This ‘microbiotica-gut-brain-axis’ (Robinson and Cameron 2020: 2) suggests that bacteria work ‘via their hosts’ (Yong 2016: 54). For example, the behaviour of Drosophila melangaster (fruit flies) indicates that bacteria manipulated and modulated their hosts’ behaviour by olfactory pathways, attracting them to compounds of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Lactobacillus plantarum17. If microbes can change animals’ behaviour, how do they affect how the human body moves? These examples question even the role of human agency within encounters, shattering any pretension that the human body is separate, superior, and self-determining.

 Kneading Bodies 109 Although my posthumanist practice embraces these multiple shifts and reconfigurations between the human and non-human, I recognize this work is not to everyone’s tastes. When I exhibited the Body-Made-Bread video, I witnessed some audience members’ wretch; I’m not sure whether anyone would eat my Body-MadeBread either. The Candida albicans in Tarsh Bates’s bread certainly disgusted her audience. Most people refused to eat the baguettes, despite being informed that all the microorganisms used to leaven the bread were killed in the baking process. Even if these microorganisms were not destroyed, Candida albicans are already present in or on most of us. What is so distasteful about bread made from the microbes in our body? Why are we fine to eat flour that is bleached or white bread that contains over thirty ingredients, many of these synthetic and potentially poisonous chemicals?18 Indeed, most commercial doughs contain L-cysteine, which, until recently, was made from dissolving human hair (Gupta 2014). Bates suggests that perhaps ‘[o]ur suspension of disbelief that we ingest fungi, bacteria, moulds etc, and that we are in turn consumed by such creatures, our messmates, fails in this moment, and thus all bread, possibly all food becomes “unacceptable”’ (Bates 2015: 25). Our bodies are always contaminated by others, and though microbes are feared for spreading diseases, [t]here are fewer than 100 species of bacteria that cause infectious diseases in humans;19 by contrast, the thousands of species in our guts are mostly harmless. At worst, they are passengers or hitchhikers. At best, they are invaluable parts of our bodies: not takers of life but its guardians. (Yong 2016: 11)

This commensurate co-habitation actually allows the human body to develop antibodies and immunities to infections. It is a shame that this suspension of disbelief about the existence of these bacterial bodies is necessary to be able to live with other bodies, and perhaps actively addressing this cognitive dissonance could help in improving interspecies relationships. Diversity rather than homogeneity is core to the successful evolution and proliferation of beings, and humans are deeply responsible for the health and welfare of these single-celled organisms. My research into our relationships with microbial organisms emerged at precisely the moment that our world was being turned upside down thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. The impact of these microbial bodies on human bodies’ lives (and deaths) have become more palpable to communities around the globe, and shifted our understandings of the significance of non-human bodies. The strands of gluten gradually give up and I gather momentum in moving. My torso is nearly free. Pulling myself up I leave the dough, although some strands stubbornly stick to the skin. Like umbilical cords. Still holding on. I’m exhausted and unsettled. Through my practice with dough, I explored ‘kneading/being-kneaded’. These contact improvisations with non-human others offered an embodied understanding of the complexity of interactions that occurs. Rather than working through the anthropocentric expectation of centering my body in every performed action, my kneading of dough refers to a dialogic process of mutual affection that is constantly reconfiguring agencies. ‘Being-kneaded’, seeking to be moved and affected by non-

110

Posthumanism in Practice

human matter, helped me to experience and articulate both posthumanist and posthuman ideas in practice. These contact improvisations are planting the seeds20 for a different understanding of a way of living with and through non-human others. Human and non-human bodies in this practice have a more balanced relationship to each other, and the struggles and surprises of moving with dough may also start rendering the wider challenges and advantages of these posthumanist relations applied beyond artistic practice.

Acknowledgements A special thank-you to my dear friend and collaborator Simon Donger for shaping this work. Julieanna Preston, Martin Patrick, Sarah Gilligan, and Alex Stone have been cherished companions on this journey. I’m grateful to Collin Bjork and Craig Cherrie for their support. Thank you to Maria O’Toole for sharing Steven Connor’s work on kneading with me. This creative practice-led research was generously supported through a Massey University Doctoral Scholarship.

Notes 1 Created in collaboration with costume designers Francisca Rios and Cristina Valls, the solo performance Sutre first premiered in 2009 at the SPILL Festival National Platform at the National Theatre Studios, London. Sutre was transformed into a hologram through a collaboration with Musion, represented the UK at the Extreme Costume Exhibition (2011 Prague Quaddrennial) and was longlisted for the 2013 Aesthetica art prize. 2 In Felt Me I am covered in two kilos of white wool and invite the audience to feel me and felt a dress on my body. Originally created during a residency at Schafhof Europäisches Künstlerhaus Oberbayern (Freising, 2013), Felt Me has also been presented at The Performance Arcade (Wellington, 2019) and Ensemble Festival (London, 2019). 3 Contact improvisation is a term coined by Steve Paxton. However, the principles of these movement practices, improvisation and an exploration of pedestrian movements and process, originate more widely among avant-garde dancers. 4 Early edible grasses such as Einkorn did not contain sufficient quantities of these proteins to produce gluten. It was only through centuries of seeds cross breeding that this grain mutated into the wheat we now eat. 5 For Barad, ‘Intra-actions are causally constraining nondeterministic enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is sedimented out and enfolded in further materializations’. (Barad, 2018: 233). 6 Bachelard Gaston, La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris 1948), 117. In Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 223. 7 Bachelard Gaston, La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris 1948), 79. In Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 223. ‘A cogito of kneading’ is Steven Connor’s translation for Gaston Bachelard’s ‘un cogito pétrisseur’.

 Kneading Bodies 111 8 Although the starters weren’t as bacterially diverse when compared to soil, homes and human skin, they were still more diverse than previously imagined. 9 Instead the starters were dominated by species that were able to live on the sugars of the grain and flour and Lactobacillus bacteria. 10 A.A. Ross, K. Muller, J.S. Weese and J. Neufeld, ‘Comprehensive Skin Microbiome Analysis Reveals the Uniqueness of Human Associated Microbial Communities among the Class Mammalia’, bioRxiv (2017). These studies found that the common microbial communities on hands include S​ taphylococus, Corynebacterium and Propionibacterium. 11 N. Fierer, M. Hamady, C.L. Lauber and R. Knight, ‘The influence of Sex, Handedness, and Washing in the Diversity of Hand Surface Bacteria’, Proceedings of The National Academy Of Sciences 105, no. 46 (2008): 17994–9 in Dunn, Never Home Alone, 250. 12 A term from Haraway’s When Species Meet (4). 13 Performance score/recipe for Body-Made-Bread. 14 In 2015 British blogger Zoe Stavri also made a sourdough starter from her vaginal yeasts and ‘crumpets with her crumpet’ (2016). 15 Ron Sender et al., ‘Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body’, PLoS Biology 14, no. 8 (2016): e1002533. This estimate updates the widely cited claim that 90 per cent of cells within the human body are bacterial rather than human. 16 N. Fierer, M. Hamady, C.L. Lauber and R Knight, ‘The Influence of Sex, Handedness, and Washing in the Diversity of Hand Surface Bacteria’ (2008) In Yong, I Contain Multitudes, 17 and 270. 17 Robinson and Cameron, ‘The Holobiont Blindspot’, 3. Robinson and Cameron reference studies by Qiao et al. (2019). 18 Centre for Science and Environment. What’s in Our Bread? Accessed 4 April 2021. https://www​.cseindia​.org /whats-in-our-bread-6408. The bread industry has been known to use potassium bromate, which is classified as a category 2B carcinogen. Although other countries have banned the use of these chemicals, these were still being used in bread in India in 2016. 19 M. McFall-Ngai (2007), ‘Adaptive Immunity: Care for the Community’, Nature 445, 153 in Yong, I Contain Multitudes, 11. 20 Within the Wheatfield. https://windowgallery​.co​.nz​/exhibitions​/within​-the​-wheatfield.

References Assad, M. (2005), ‘“Being Free to Write For A Woman”: The Question of Gender in the Work of Michel Serres’, in N.B. Abbas (ed.), Mapping Michel Serres, 210–25, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bachelard, G. (1948), La Terre et les Rêveries de la Volonté, Paris: Librairie José Corti. Barad, K. (2018), ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, in C. Åsberg and R. Braidotti (eds), A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, 223–40, Cham: Springer. Bates, T. (2015), ‘We Have Never Been Homo sapiens: CandidaHomo Naturecultures’, Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, 6 (2): 16–32. Bates, T. (2017), ‘Queer Affordances: The Human as Trans*Ecology’, ANGELAKI: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 22 (2): 151–4.

112

Posthumanism in Practice

Bennet, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Centre for Science and Environment (2021), ‘What’s in our Bread?’, Available online: https://www​.cseindia​.org​/whats​-in​-our​-bread​-6408 9 (Accessed 4 April 2021). Connor, S. (2004), The Book of Skin, London: Reaktion Books. Connor, S. (2021), ‘Michel Serres’s Milieux’, Stevenconnor​.com​, Available online: http:// www​.stevenconnor​.com​/milieux/ (Accessed 31 March 2021). Cooper Albright, A. (2013), Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Cryan, J.F., K.J. O’Riordan, C.S. Cowan, K.V. Sandhu, T.F. Bastiaanssen, M. Boehme et al. (2019), ‘The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis’, Physiological Reviews, 99: 1877–2013. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00018.2018. Dynowska, M. and K. Góralska (2006), ‘Saccharomyces Cerevisiae in the Respiratory System, Digestive System, and On the Skin in Humans’, Acta Mycologica, doi:10.5586/ am.2006.017. Dunn, R. (2018), Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live, New York: Basic Books. Fierer, N., M. Hamady, C.L. Lauber and R. Knight (2008), ‘The Influence of Sex, Handedness, and Washing in the Diversity of Hand Surface Bacteria’, Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 105 (46): 17994–9. Foster, S.L. (2003), ‘Improvisation in Dance and Mind’, in A. Cooper Albright and D. Gere (eds), Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, 3–12, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Gupta, A. (2014), ‘Human Hair ‘Waste’ and Its Utilization: Gaps and Possibilities’, Journal of Waste Management, Article ID 498018, Available online: doi:10.1155/2014/498018. Haraway, D. (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2006), ‘Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists’, Configurations, 14 (1): 97–114. doi:10.1353/con.0.0002. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, London: University of Minneapolis Press. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Ironstone, P. (2019), ‘Me, My Self, and The Multitude: Microbiopolitics of the Human Microbiome’, European Journal of Social Theory, 22 (3): 325–41. Lomax, Y. (1995), ‘Folds in the Photograph’, Third Text, 9 (32): 43–58. doi: 10.1080/09528829508576563. Pollan, M. (2013), Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, New York: The Penguin Press. Qiao, H., I.W. Keesey, B.S. Hansson and M. Knaden (2019). ‘Gut Microbiota Affects Development and Olfactory Behavior in Drosophila Melanogaster’, The Journal of Experimental Biology, 222: jeb192500. doi: 10.1242/jeb.192500 Rainer, Y and S. Paxton (1997), ‘Conversation Between Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton’ in A. Benoit (ed.,) On the Edge: Dialogues on Dance Improvisation in Performance, 15–42, Brussels: Contredanse. Robinson, J.M. and R. Cameron (2020), ‘The Holobiont Blindspot: Relating HostMicrobiome Interactions to Cognitive Biases and the Concept of the “Umwelt”’, Frontiers in Psychology, 11: 591071. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.591071. Ross, A., K. Muller, J.S. Weese and J. Neufeld (2017), ‘Comprehensive Skin Microbiome Analysis Reveals the Uniqueness of Human Associated Microbial Communities among the Class Mammalia’, bioRxiv, 201434.

 Kneading Bodies 113 Sender, R. et al. (2016), ‘Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body’, PLoS Biology, 14 (8): e1002533. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533. Serres, M. (1991), Rome: The Book of Foundations (Rome: Le Livre des Fondations), California: Stanford University Press. Sheldrake, M. (2020), Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, London: The Bodley Head. Stavri, Z. (2016), ‘Great Pussy Bake Off: The Results.’ Available online: https:// anotherangrywoman​.com​/2016​/09​/05​/great​-pussy​-bake​-off​-the​-results/ (Accessed 16 March 2019). Yohalem, H. (2018), ‘Displacing Vision: Contact Improvisation, Anarchy, and Empathy’, Dance Research Journal, 50 (2): 45–61. Yong, E. (2016), I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, New York: HarperCollins.

7

Circus as practices of hope Marie-Andrée Robitaille

Amidst the fourth industrial revolution, the sixth mass extinction, global warming, and a world pandemic, humans face an increasing amount of complex and challenging crises on planet Earth. Since March 2020, the performing arts sector has been paralysed for more than a year. As of September 2022, we are still experiencing unforeseen effects; thus, our creation, production, and dissemination modes have been disrupted. On a larger eco-socio-political scale, during the pandemic, the impacts of human activities on Earth seem to have been made more distinctively visible, inviting us to ask: what does it mean to be human today? More specifically, however, the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing circus artists, in particular, to revise how we work and think about circus arts. What does it mean to be a circus artist today? How can circus remain relevant? And what connections might circus arts have with the wider question of human involvement in the world? Circus artists are good at dealing with indeterminacy and precarious situations: on the teeterboard, you have to land on a small part of the apparatus; you can be injured and even die if you miss. When touring with, and performing in the circus tent, you need to attune to the weather; we work collaboratively when it comes to safety while spotting and catching each other; we work with proprioception and other senses to locate bodies in space and control movement, thus enabling us to perform complex body trajectories. Circus is an embodied practice manifesting in real time and in-person; hence, circus requires adaptation, presence, and the assessment of risks. Circus also requires creativity; we do things differently than in ‘habitual’ day-to-day life, generating alternative ways of encountering the world and thinking about human ability. Circus arts help us to imagine and experiment in ways that push the boundaries of what is considered to be normally possible. Based on these circus specificities, the art form offers an excellent discipline for opening fields of possibilities. However, circus often manifests the opposite of its subversive potential in the standardization of circus acts; objectification of bodies; representations and narratives which reinforce Western binaries; an emphasis on self-sense expressions; the predominance of monological forms; and authoritarian processes. Circus can be exclusionary and elitist. Circus performances often reinforce a humanist narrative of autonomous, independent, and dominating agents through superheroic protagonists able to control and master the environment for their own glorification. The search for these familiar

 Circus as Practices of Hope 115 manifestations of virtuosity creates tricks and illusions that are mainly perpetrated for the sake of risk and triumphs. It is this perspective that I challenge throughout my project and research; I am asking: is there another, as of yet unidentified virtuosity that meets the challenges of our times? What can be learned about our modes of presence and engagement in the world when vulnerability is recognized and integrated into circus performance rather than aimed at being transcended? In my doctoral project, ‘Circus as a Practice of Hope’, I am looking at the parallel between my role as a circus artist and the larger perspective of my role as a human in the current ecological and societal challenges we are facing. I engage posthumanism as both ‘a navigation tool’ (Braidotti 2019) and an ethical compass to establish a feminist new materialist approach to my circus practices. As discussed by Francesca Ferrando: Posthumanism . . . provides a suitable way of departure to think in relational and multi-layered ways, expanding the focus to the non-human realm in post-dualistic, post-hierarchical modes, thus allowing one to envision post-human futures which will radically stretch the boundaries of human imagination. (Ferrando 2013)

Besides entertaining for pleasure, thrills and delight, circus arts also function as a divertissement, as in, they possess the ability to divert, and it is this circus agency that I am preoccupied with here. In troubled times, circus arts may serve as a diversion tool, not in the sense of taking away attention from the challenges that we are facing, but rather bringing our attention to these challenges so that we can engage by working with and through them. Through poetics, which calls for imagination, creativity, and alternative modes of being, circus arts and circus artists may evoke and support the development of our ability to divert. In adopting a critical posthumanist approach to my circus praxis, I aim to revise the dominating posture of the circus artist, exploring how to transform it and examining what insights can be gained for transiting towards a more ‘humble circus’1 and becoming a more responsible human subject. The exercises described in this chapter are motivated by the aspiration to explore how my circus practice is transformed when it is influenced by posthumanist ideas. I want to understand, how I can, in practice, challenge the concept of the subject and the object as ontologically separated, which I understand as a dichotomy that leads to both anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. An overarching entry point to the processes and thoughts conveyed in this chapter is the attempt to shift from anthropocentric circus-making to practices that take significant consideration of the other-than-human forces in circus composition. This approach involves defamiliarization of standardized and normalized modes of composing and performing in order to look for the ways in which ‘otherness can prompt, mobilise, and allow for flows of affirmation of values and forces which are not yet sustained by the current conditions’ (Braidotti 2013). By doing so, I aim to develop circus practices of hope, practices that affirm the possibility of other possibilities. Otherness, here, infers the remediation of a dominating centralized fixed posture of the circus artist to revive the poetic potential of the circus arts and re-affirm them as ‘nomadic’ (Braidotti 2011), a gesture of hope for ‘future habitable and flourishing worlds’ (Harraway 2016). The exercises are anchored in the material world and are interested in the bodies’ vulnerable

116

Posthumanism in Practice

limits as an important modality as I revise my circus praxis from less dominating postures. This chapter conveys the strategies and thoughts which have emerged from this exploratory process so far.

Circle as methodology2 In my project, I am working on the articulation of a methodology that pertains to the circle as a form and as a motion, metaphorically and literally. Johann Le Guillerm3 defines circus ‘as a minority practice for which the circle is its natural architecture’ (Quentin 1999). Expanding from this definition, I approach circus as engaging the world in a circular manner; in my research, circus is understood as the act of going around, spiralling, spinning, swinging, twisting, encircling, turning, and returning in and out in cyclical, circular flows. As opposed to a Western-based linear world vision, I aim to share, with that of the Amerindian, a circular world vision.4 I propose ‘Circle as methodology’ which involves the act of ‘circumposing’. Circumposing, in this context, is practising circling, and accounting for how the circle is formed, and who and what are included or excluded. Circumposing involves intra-positioning movements such as spacing, pacing, oscillating, and phasing, thus countering the idea of fixed positions; this evolving methodology insists on attention to the peripheral, to the unheard, the hidden, the avoided, the unknown. It recognizes all entities as ‘entangled, intra-relating’ (Barad 2007) and ‘trans-corporeal’ (Alaimo 2010), and wants to encourage a ‘pluriversal world of many worlds’ (Escobar 2018). ‘Circle as methodology’ is an effort to counter a vision of the world as linear which appears to often reinforce fixity, hierarchy, and duality. By, instead, engaging in the world's re-circularization (Sioui 1999), I wish to revive a system of value based on a plurality of viewpoints, nondualism, and relational ontology. Here, the circle is conceptualized from ‘nomadic ethical considerations’ (Braidotti 2011) which echo nomadic circus perspectives that involve a figure neither fixed nor closed: the circus ring is always moving from place to place and always including an opening that allows for moving in and out of it, consequently involving movement as a process of change.

From mastering to mattering ​ hen the World Health Organization (WHO)5 declared the novel coronavirus a global W pandemic in March 2020, I found myself in a studio with no other people. The physical distance recommended by the health authority encouraged me to return to the role of a solo circus performer after a fifteen-year hiatus, during which I worked as a pedagogue, choreographer, and director. Fifteen years ago, I was a dancer acrobat; climbing poles, swinging on ropes, defying gravity, and performing displays of extreme physical ability. However, in that instant, alone in the studio, my circus discipline changed and became what is called in circus arts ‘object manipulation’. In this chapter, rather than using

 Circus as Practices of Hope 117

Figure 7.1  Photo series Safe in the City, Stockholm, Sweden, March 2020. Credit Einar Kling Odencrants. Courtesy Marie-Andrée Robitaille.

the word ‘object’, I will refer to the objects as ‘bodies’ in an effort to move beyond the object/subject dichotomy. The bodies I ended up working within the studio were not random, it had been a long time coming, a growing attraction for these ‘things’. The bodies I predominantly worked with were ‘bubbles’ (handcrafted circles made of flexible fibreglass rods bowed into rings and woven into a dodecahedron),6 ‘foil’ (pieces of metallic sheets originally manufactured as safety blankets) and mooring fenders (inflatable protective bodies that prevents scratches and other damage to the hull of a boat). Other bodies included: three juggling balls, six inertial sensors, one computer, cables, ropes, rigging gears, one two-metre-long wooden stick, one phone, and a few white disposable coverall protective suits.

Studio Work with Foil 15 April 2020 I play with one piece of foil, focusing on its lightweight quality. My brain is looking for different entries to control the motion. I stand with the foil in a zone where I try not to lead but rather follow where the material is leading me. The will to create effects is predominant. I want to break this compositional reflex and spend more time in ‘the zone’ where I ‘move with’. This deceivably simple exercise appears to be more complicated than I thought. I need to spend time developing the ability to attend to the material, and not to the ideas of how the material should serve. Easy in theory, hard in practice. It will take time and now I must go home to feed the baby.7​

118

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 7.2  Photo series STUDIO 16 – COVID-19, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2020. Credit Einar Kling Odencrants. Courtesy Marie-Andrée Robitaille.

Studio Work with Bubbles 29 June 2020 I am more and more at ease in the studio, I mean ease in the way that I feel brave and accepting to be disoriented; ease at being uneased. Not to lead and not to achieve any pre-decided effects is counter intuitive but with practice, I start to feel that the dynamic has changed. I experience an increased ability to sense what is happening rather than to think about it. It feels as if time goes by slower, like being between time. It is no longer of my body, of objects, or of the space but rather my body, other bodies and space working together. Moving with bubbles and not moving the bubbles is actually not as simple as it sounds. I must engage in a ‘deep corporeal listening’ (Oliveros 2005), increase proprioception and opening of the senses.8

Early in the process of working with foil and bubbles, control appeared as a central notion. I turned to the tensions emerging between the differences it makes to my gestures when I am gaining control or losing control. The assessment of my success and failure moved from an ability to control to an ability to let go of control. As my work progressed in the studio, I wondered less about losing control and gaining control, but rather about the potential of displacing control. Displacing control disrupted the notion of virtuosity. The virtuosic gesture moved away from the spectacularism of my human ability to master and manipulate the bodies, and transformed into the ability of phasing with my environment. Therefore, ‘object manipulation’ as the appellation of my circus discipline no longer makes sense. Instead of ‘object manipulation’, I propose

 Circus as Practices of Hope 119 a ‘body re-orienting’ practice that suggests the idea of distributed agency, an ‘agency of assemblages’ (Bennett 2010).

Dislocating bodies Summer 2020. In Sweden, we experienced a lull in the virus spread and we were far from the silent deserted streets of the spring’s lockdown. The murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter9 movement brought people together in the streets to protest and raise awareness of police brutality and systemic racism. That summer, the second wave of #metoo denunciations propagated through social media and Greta Thunberg was gathering large crowds to call for stronger actions on climate change, emphasizing that ‘we can no longer look away from what our society has been ignoring for so long, whether it is equality, justice, or sustainability’.10 At the time, I was invited by Gävle Konstcentrum,11 an art centre in Sweden, to explore the potential of a meeting between circus arts and visual arts. A series of pictures and three circus installations were displayed in the exhibition hall, which included non-circus objects that are associated with crisis and human vulnerability. In the next section, I describe the installations with foil and with mooring fenders.

Foil Foil is a participant in the human ambition to explore and conquer. First developed by NASA in 1964, metalized polyethylene terephthalate (MPET) reflects up to 97 per cent of radiated heat. Sheets of MPET are commonly called space blankets as they are used to protect Earth-made crafts from the harsher environment of space. Manufactured as safety blankets, foil has been used to warm marathon runners who experience a rapid cool-down after the finish line; mountaineers and campers have them in their survival kits; hospitals use them in the chilled environments of operating theatres. Foil is used after natural disasters such as earthquakes and after terrorist attacks. In the European migrant crisis, foil has been life-saving, especially for people who crossed the sea in winter. In Berlin, 2018, the golden refugee space blankets were brandished as flags and became a symbol against the rise of right-wing groups across Germany. A few artists have also been working with foil. From his art installation ‘Flag for No Nation’, artist James Bridle12 said: A single technology – the vacuum-deposition of metal vapour onto a thin film substrate – makes its consecutive and multiple appearances at times of stress. . . . These are moments of hope as well as failure; moments when, properly utilised, technological progress enables us to achieve something which was beyond our capabilities before. And yet: we are still pulling bodies from the water wrapped in material which was meant to send us into space.13

​ y foil installation is a floating piece of foil attached at the four corners by ropes which M circulate through pulleys systems attached to four corners in the ceiling of the room.

120

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 7.3  Photo series STUDIO 16 – COVID-19, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2020. Credit Einar Kling Odencrants. Courtesy Marie-Andrée Robitaille.

Through my fingers, I held the four strings and spent hours engaging in slow, meditative, and sensuous choreography of movements, forms, and sonic textures. Foil, ropes, floor, roof, pulleys, and I became one body, an assemblage in which none of its constitutive parts could be subtracted without changing the nature and potential of that body. In the exhibition hall, foil attracts the eyes. The visitors were often timid and did not touch the ropes. However, once permitted beyond the conventional art gallery’s boundaries and behaviours, the visitors began to grab and pull. With just a small pull, the foil deployed, generating a surprising amount of movement and sound while other visitors were trying to pass under the foil without being touched by it. Sometimes the foil was still, floating, and visitors would pass by without paying much attention to it; then, with some delay, the piece would shiver, a phantom in the room, reminding us of its presence.

Mooring fenders I​ n boating, a mooring fender is a bumper used to absorb a boat or vessel's kinetic energy. If a crash occurs, the mooring fenders prevent damage. As in boating, the circus artist will often use protections to ease the impact of a bad landing after a somersault. In these pandemic times, physical distance appeared as its own invisible protection. The coronavirus not only increased our awareness of the physical distance between people but also the socio-economic disparity between them. The installation with mooring fenders sparked from the combination of these observations.

 Circus as Practices of Hope 121

Figure 7.4  Circus Meets Visual Arts, Gävle Konstcentrum, Sweden, September 2020. Credit Marie-Andrée Robitaille. Courtesy Marie-Andrée Robitaille.

The installation consisted of seven white mooring fenders, attached with strings in suspension from the ceiling. The mooring fenders moved as pendulums when pushed or pulled. Under each mooring fender was placed one ultrasonic sensor. An ultrasonic sensor is an electronic device that measures distance by emitting ultrasonic sound waves (such ‘no-contact’ distance measuring is used in automation, robotics, and instrumentation). The visitors were invited to walk through the space and swing the mooring fenders which, in turn, created visual patterns and sonic responses. One of the key realizations with these installations is that, while the environmental specificities changed between the different places the installation was mounted, the positions of the bodies and the space in-between the bodies did too. While the spatial intervals between the parts of the installation changed, the physical degrees of freedom changed too, impacting how the foil and the mooring fenders moved and how the installation sounded, thus transforming how people experienced the entanglement of bodies forming the installation. This type of realization may seem elementary at first, but when analysing the results from a circus perspective, it invites us to rethink the professional practice of ‘fixing’ a circus act, as it prevents us from enacting other possibilities. Rather than ‘fixing’ the circus act and controlling/transforming the environment to enable the pre-decided trajectories, the process here is reversed, enabling the environment to define how bodies can move, relate, and organize. Physical and social distance between us has been made more distinctively visible during the pandemic. While the physical distance between bodies became increasingly important, we accepted a decrease in freedom of movement and an increase of distance

122

Posthumanism in Practice

between bodies as a way to care for one another; our relation to freedom and control of movement shifted. We might think of this in terms of the Japanese principle of Ma, that is, interval, or pause, as it applies to both space and time. The innovative modernist Japanese architect Isozaki Arata wrote: In Japanese architectural space, Ma is expressed in a conception of indefinite space in which, for example, the permeation of light or lines of vision is determined by a layer of flat boards so thin as to be almost transparent. What appears from the space is a flickering of shadows – a momentary shift between the reality and a world of unrealities. Ma is an empty moment of waiting for this change. (Rodger 2020)

The space in-between or Ma can be understood as a void holding the possibility of possibilities – the void in-between bodies; ‘the void as a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming’ (Barad 2012). The importance of the in-betweenness as understood through the making of the installation is not that something may happen in-between bodies; the events happen where the bodies are. Instead, the in-betweenness is necessary because the intervals of time and the distance or the void in-between bodies define who, what, and how one can move, be seen, and be heard. The installations described earlier are an example of the potential of posthumanism in practice. Engaging circus practice through a critical posthumanist perspective opened up ecosophical dimensions of the composition and performance, emphasizing the inter-meshed parts of the circus installation as a whole which can ultimately be autonomously experienced without the need of the circus artist as the central mediator. The installations made me aware of the habits we have in circus to ‘fix’ the circus piece and ‘control’ the environment in order to maximize human virtuosity. They also concretely demonstrated the potential of diverting from these habits. By considering the other-than-human forces at play as central, different virtuosic events were enabled; other possibilities were released through small shifts in the spatial, temporal, and material thinking and the making of these circus installations. Other types of expressions and virtuosities emerged, which decentred the circus artist’s involvement in inviting other-than-artist participants to experience the non-human forces at play. One afternoon, I passed by the gallery, unannounced. A child was playing relentlessly within and between installations; the bodies’ liveliness exceeded their primary functions and capabilities. The child was kicking, avoiding, listening, watching, sensing, in short co-constituting the installations. Another day, I was alone in the gallery, with no other human; the circus sonic installation was standing still, as time stood still. The foil, bubbles, and mooring fenders were in, what appeared to be, a state of inertia. I stood, aware. The foil would suddenly move for no evident reason, reminding me that simply breathing can impact our surroundings. In this quasiimmobility of things, I paid attention to the sonic drone produced by the installation, a reminder of the almost invisible oscillation of the mooring fenders. A reminder that nothing is ever really still.

 Circus as Practices of Hope 123

Fabulating the present Pictures seem still. The still image is the capture of a moment, a remembrance of the past or a ‘present fabulated’. ‘Fabulation is fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet which returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way’ (Scholes R. 1975). In my project, I am interested in ‘fabulation’ as a philosophical concept (Deleuze 1989), a literary genre (Scholes R. 1975), a feminist approach (Harraway 2016), and a circus act. As I have described in the earlier sections of this chapter, my research engages in exercises of dislocating time, space, and bodies while paying attention to the differences these combinations create. Transposing this method to my writing, I wrote a series of poems based on ‘Safe in the City’, a collection of pictures with me and the foil in the empty streets of Stockholm, Sweden, just when the spread of the ‘(novel) coronavirus’ was declared as a global pandemic. The following text emerged from ‘fabulating’ the picture:​ ‘Nathanaëlle Ravelling the Multiverse’ I is human. I is in the Now. There were many of Us in the Then, but I is alone of I in the Now. I is alone aside of Them in which I parts partly. Them wants to morph I. I is attracted to Them. I is not sure I is ready. I have no Us to play and dreams with. I is falling into feelings. I likes to dream of Then and After. But it’s risky. I is unshaped and Them can move I when I dreams. Sometimes, I hides in inertia. In Inertia, I can’t be sensed by Them. Sometimes I wants to give into Them. Them is circulating through I. Them want I. I resists the movement of Them. I is afraid to

Figure 7.5  Photo series Safe in the City, Stockholm, Sweden, March 2020. Credit Einar Kling Odencrants. Courtesy Marie-Andrée Robitaille.

124

Posthumanism in Practice

mutate. I is afraid to forget. I is dreaming in the Then. I is fixed in the Now. Them passes I. Them covers I. Them is a land moving. If I moves with Them, Now will be After without Us. Into After, I will be Them.14

This poem is an example of fabulation as an artistic practice for fostering possibilities. The picture does not only hold a fixed past but also holds exceeding potential and possibilities. As Karen Barad points out, ‘possibilities and potential are not about what might yet be, so much as what is already active, in motion, in this Thick Now’ (Barad and Gandorfer 2021). With this in mind, I came to think of circus as fabulation. The poetic circus gestures evoke other possibilities while simultaneously demonstrating their feasibilities in real time and in the flesh. Rather than speculating the future (showing what could be possible by maximizing the virtuosity and navigating the risk), the circus artist ‘evoke[s] and invoke[s] latent potentialities, possibilities, and abilities, the artist is a seer, a becomer’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996). The bare bones of the circus acts are beyond representation and are anchored in the present time. At any given circus moment, there are bodies that commit embodied actions; presence and immediacy are two crucial factors. In circus, ‘rather than speculate on alternative possibilities as a mental exercise, the speculation takes place by repeatedly creating the conditions for alternatives to appear, or not to appear, in and through the practice’ (Arlander 2017). ‘In this sense, a posthumanist circus has a “fabulatory function”, thus detaching from the spectacle’s dynamics to instead give insight into spectrality; into the “Thick Now”’.

Sensing bodies, ‘technopoetics’ and hidden possibilities Music has traditionally been an important component in circus performance: Since the creation of the modern circus in England by Philip Astley in 1770, music . . . [has] follow[ed] the action on stage and stir[red] up the audience during the show. Music is used for setting the mood of the audience, indicating the tempo of the acts, highlighting specific tricks, accentuating the suspense of the anticipation, and marking . . . success . . . Overall, music is there to enhance the performance by emulating its dramaturgical development. (Elblaus et al. 2014)

I became increasingly involved in exploring sonic modes of composition to break from circus’ traditionally binary relationship to music. First, based on listening to the sound of the human bodies on the apparatus, came a series of works involving the use of motion capture technologies to explore different relationships between sound and motion. In collaboration with researchers from the sound and musiccomputing group at the Royal Institute of Technology,15 we investigated different modes of sonic interaction: accompanying,16 amplifying17 and interacting.18 The work with sound became another precious tool to break with habits that came with years of

 Circus as Practices of Hope 125 micromanaging circus tricks. Suddenly, we, the performers, were listening to what we were doing, and the habits started to fade. Early in my doctoral project I conducted a series of experiments with Guillaume Karpowicz,19 a diabolo specialist, and Hara Alonso,20 a sound designer. The diabolist holds two sticks which are joined by a rope. With this apparatus the diabolist throws and catches an object (a body) named ‘diabolo’. On each forearm of the diabolist, we place a ‘Myo armband’, a device which reads the electrical activity of the muscles and the motion of the arm. We explored the coupling of the motion and muscular activity with sound.21 One of the interesting revelations of this particular experiment is that one would lose track of who/what was leading who/what. Was it the juggler responding to the sound, or the sound responding to the movement of the juggler? We discovered that who led no longer mattered; the intra-acting parts generated new sequences of movements in a material dialogue. There was no longer separation between subject and objects, but rather a becoming-with in a type of ‘intra-space, a space where the human and non-human bodies’ experiences are aesthetically reformulated and theoretically challenged in their spatial, temporal, and transversally entangled spheres.22 In my choreographic studies, over the course of the last decade, the motion capture technologies we deployed were mostly placed on the human body. More recently in the studio, the sensors have been placed on other-than-human bodies, namely bubbles, balls, and sticks. The practice of listening comes as an important step in my attempts to shift away from anthropocentric circus-making. Instead of looking at the bubbles, I would listen to their motions; by relating to other bodies, through other modes of perception, ‘the registers and practices of sensing are shifting from an assumed humancentered set of perceiving and decoding practices, to extended entities, technologies, and environments of senses’ (Gabrys and Pritchard 2018). Feedback received from the public exposed to my sonic works with the bubbles was interesting: by placing the sensors on the bubbles, I was giving them agency, or giving a voice to the bubbles. This line of thinking adheres to the posture of the human as the manipulator of the object. However, in my research, bubbles already had agency; by sonifying them, I was not giving the bubbles agency, but rather un-taming them, unleashing their possibilities. While the human intentions, decisions, and cognitive processes remained central, their orientations changed, and hidden possibilities appeared through these intermedial and technopoetic23 sonic essays.

Composting in Multiverse Multiverse is an experimental circus performance named after Francesca Ferrando’s thought experiment: ‘The Posthuman Multiverse’, from her book Philosophical Posthumanism (2019). In the context of my research, Multiverse is a live fabulated universe that forms out of the exceeding possibilities of matter(s). Multiverse is an accumulation of multiple remnants of re-cycle-able bodies/material from the exercises

126

Posthumanism in Practice

described earlier. ‘By ‘material’ I mean matter, energy, and information, not only matter in the narrow sense’ (Hayles 2017). Multiverse is a circus act understood as a monstration. Monstration is an Old French word that refers to both monstre (monster) and démonstration (showing). In Multiverse, the exercise is to problematize who and what is being shown, and how. This is done by actualizing the art of bear-taming, montreur d’ours in French, as an un-taming practice. A bear-tamer was formerly a man who led a bear cross-country. Tamed bears were used in the blood sport of bear baiting and in circus acts. In Multiverse, the role of the bear, enacted by other bodies, bubbles, and foils, is reversed with that of the artist. Instead of showing how the bodies obeyed the artist, the artist let herself be impacted by the other bodies; rather than trying to tame the bodies and control the environment the artist engages in dialogical relation with their unleashed possibilities. The performative approach of Multiverse is one that appropriates the act of ‘monstering’. Monstering here is understood ‘as a tool to generate qualitatively new encounters . . . It challenges normative protocols and existing practices by embodying the unknown’ (Armstrong R. et al. 2020). The choreographic approach to Multiverse is the exercise of circumambulation (to walk around). I was inspired by the methods developed by the walkinglab, an international queer-feminist art collective based in Canada.24 The Queer walking tours they offer are a form of place-based research that draws on Indigenous, anti-racist, feminist, and queer frameworks to open up different conversations around the notion of place. ‘As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material’ (Springgay and Truman 2018). The performative site of Multiverse is conceptualized as an integrating circular place, in which the artist (the walker) walks in a circular motion. This circumambulation involves an attentiveness to the interconnected parts of the circle, the site in which the circle forms, and care for the manner in which one accesses, crosses, and occupies the circle in each step. In the circular site of Multiverse, the walker encounters foils, bubbles, and sticks. The walker observes, carrying, orienting, and being re-oriented while moving and walking in circular flows. Circular Flowing Integrative Honouring Interconnectedness of All Balancing Mental Spiritual Emotional Physical Dimensions How do I get from here to there?

(Graveline 2010)

​ e walker holds a two-metre-long sonified walking stick. The walking stick draws Th parallels with the Indigenous traditions of the Talking Stick. The Talking Stick,

 Circus as Practices of Hope 127

Figure 7.6 Multiverse, circus performance/lecture SLOW CIRCUS, Alliances and Commonalities Conference on Artistic Research, Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden, October 2020. Credit: Eduardo Cardozo Hidalgo. Courtesy Marie-Andrée Robitaille.

used in many Indigenous cultures, is used as a communication tool and democratic instrument.25 The stick, sometimes a feather, is passed around a group of people and it gives the opportunity to all members of the group to participate, be heard, and for their words to be accounted for. Similarly, in the context of the performance ‘Multiverse’, the sonified walking stick is a reminder of the ‘response ability’ of the circus performer and the importance of listening. The walker, walking in ‘ruins’ (Tsing 2015; Stengers 2020), is wearing a disposable white protective suit. This was an aesthetic choice to emphasize the human ability to build, construct, deconstruct, extract, conquer, plant, destroy, rebuild, shape, transform and so on. Hence, the white costume of the builders, the painters, the forensics on a crime scene, the scientists in their lab, the explorers, or the astronauts. While alone in the studio, as well as when performing for an audience, I wear the white suit as a ritual inviting me to leave my own self-expression at the door and enter a state of being which allows me to observe how I situate, position, and act in relation to others. Through the triangulation of these emerging methods: Circumambulation, monstering, and un-taming, the performance site filled with images of planetary constellations, minerals, elemental-biological-ecological beauty and devastation, life and extinction; a universe folding and unfolding in and out of itself in which I am not the master but instead a responsible part of the whole. ‘Multiverse’ is neither an

128

Posthumanism in Practice

achieved or achievable fixed circus act, but rather a ‘material-semiotic experiment’, a mutable live fable that is composting and re-composing.26

Vulnerability as virtuosity ​ e exercises described in this chapter were motivated by the aspiration to explore Th how my circus practice is transformed when it is influenced by posthumanist ideas. The common aims of these processes were to challenge the human–non-human dichotomy and to destabilize the idea of human exceptionalism in my circus practices. The intent was to explore the opportunities of, and develop strategies and methods for, a posthumanist circus in practice. The decrease of speed has been an essential aspect in each of the exercises described in this chapter. In the studio working with foils and bubbles, and in the performance of ‘Multiverse’, I moved at an insistent slow pace. To create the attuning conditions for listening and slowing down I have developed and used pacing, spacing, oscillating, and phasing techniques. With the emerging methods of circumambulation, monstering, un-taming, sensing, and dislocating, and the evolving ‘Circle as Methodology’, I investigated the potential of shifting spatial and temporal dynamics for revising my circus practices from less dominating postures. These tactics helped me defamiliarize from the usual, normative and standardized modes of production and creation of my circus practices; opening up the field of possibilities for alternative reality forming. Slowing down means becoming capable of learning again, becoming acquainted with things again, reweaving the bounds of interdependency. It means thinking and imagining, and in the process creating relationships with others that are not those of capture. (Stengers 2018)

When the circus gestures are being captured as commodities, circus art’s subversive potential gets neutralized. The circus act gets normalized and standardized; a product

Figure 7.7  Photo series STUDIO 16 – COVID-19, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2020. Credit Einar Kling Odencrants. Courtesy Marie-Andrée Robitaille.

 Circus as Practices of Hope 129 consumed rather than a poetic, diverting, provoking, and useful tool. In this sense the exercise of approaching circus from posthumanist and new materialist perspectives enabled me to re-engage circus gestures as a poetic act of resistance. To anchor my relations with the other-than-human bodies in the material world helped me to consider the body's sensibilities, boundaries, limits, and vulnerabilities. Through all the processes, vulnerability appeared as an important concept. By letting my body and other bodies re-orient, my circus mastery transformed from an ability to dominate over the environment into a virtuosic poetics of care and vulner-able/ affect-able (Daigle 2018) relations to the environment. As other types of virtuosities manifested I, as a circus performer, embarked on a transition from spectacularity to spectrality. The current crises we face force us to revise what it means to be human. But how is circus relevant in this necessary revision? If one can equate circus to divertissement (as in the ability to divert), perhaps the circus can be a constructive diversion to focus on the hidden, unheard, unseen, and misunderstood. By diverting us from the illusion of control over our environment, we may bring attention to vulnerability as a tool to nurture other types of virtuosity. It is in understanding the importance of vulnerability that we can better appreciate humans’ delicate relationships with all living and nonliving beings. And in engaging circus, a seemingly invulnerable art, as the embodiment of a humble posthumanist thinking, there is the attempt to nurture our ability to respond sensitively to the challenges of our time as well as to revive poetics as a force for changing the world. It is a circus practice of hope.

Notes 1 In his master thesis, Vincent Focquet reflects on the concept of a ‘humble circus’. He analyses tactics for implementing ‘careful dramaturgy’ and developing a discourse grounded in politics of care (Focquet 2019). 2 The title ‘Circle as methodology’ is inspired by Jean Fyre Graveline’s article ‘Circle as methodology: Enacting an Aboriginal paradigm’ a poetic narrative, a Trickster tale and a descriptive of an Aboriginal method in use. (Graveline 2000). 3 http://www​.johannleguillerm​.com​/en/ 4 I am aware and respectful of the circle as a figure and practice present in many cultures. In this project, while I am not engaging in the study of the circle’s numerous symbolic traditions and meanings, I am nevertheless honouring the traditions of Circles that some of the First Nations’ peoples use and have used for millennia. I am a non-native, born in the immediate periphery of Wendake, home of the HuronWendat nation located in Québec, Canada, and I recognize that I am deeply indebted to those who have carried the Indigenous Circles traditions into our times. For more about Circle traditions see Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle (Sioui 1999). 5 https://www​.who​.int 6 The Bubbles are designed by Rachel Wingfield – http://loop​.ph​/rachel​-wingfield/ 7 Artist personal archives, studio diary, April 2020. 8 Artist personal archives, studio diary, April 2020. 9 https://blacklivesmatter​.com

130

Posthumanism in Practice

10 Greta Thunberg: Climate change 'as urgent' as coronavirus, by Justin Rowlatt, 20 June 2020 www​.bbc​.com​/news​/science​-environment​-53100800 11 www​.gavlekonstcentrum​.se​/19​-09​-20​-cirkusperspektiv/ 12 https://jamesbridle​.com 13 http://booktwo​.org​/notebook​/a​-flag​-for​-no​-nations/ 14 Written by the author as part of the artist’s doctoral project ‘Circus as Practices of Hope’. 15 www​.kth​.se​/hct​/mid​/research​/smc​/sound​-and​-music​-computing​-1​.780604 16 Gynoïdes Project_Bêta Test V_Contortion-distortion – https://vimeo​.com​ /89224891 17 Gynoïdes project_Circus female Intelligentsia Acoustic Acrobatics https://vimeo​.com​ /240357172 18 Gynoïdes project_EggSystem_BêtaTestVIII_2015 https://vimeo​.com​/305464479 Gynoïdes Project_ Bêta Test VI_CyborgAcrobat https://vimeo​.com​/88395101 Gynoïdes project_Sonified Wheel https://vimeo​.com​/87856666 19 https://www​.diabolofocus​.com​/service​-page​/diabolo​-act​-guillaume​-karpowicz 20 https://haraalonso​.com 21 https://vimeo​.com​/233954455 22 The term and description for ‘intra-space’ is borrowed from the research INTRASPACE, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2017. www​.icinema​.unsw​.edu​.au​/projects​/ intra​-space/ 23 I propose the term ‘technopoetics’ in my project, after the philosophic use of the term ‘technoscience’ as introduced by Gaston Bachelard (Bachelard 1953), to specify my relation to technology in these processes which advocate for the power of poetics for changing the world. 24 www​.walkinglab​.org 25 In relation to the traditions of the talking sticks, it is important to note that each First Nation is unique in their culture, traditions and history, so each nation have their own protocols. 26 The artist is inspired by Donna Harraway’s ‘The Camille Stories; Children of Compost’ (Haraway 2016).

References Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Arlander, A. (2017), ‘Artistic Research as Speculative Practice’, jar​-online​.net​. doi:10.22501/ jarnet.0001. Armstrong, R., R. Hughes and S. Ferracina (2020), Monstering: A Transdisciplinary Method for an Unstable World, London: Palgrave. Bachelard, G. (1953), Le Matérialisme Rationnel, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting with the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2012), ‘What is the Measure of Nothingness?: Infinity, Virtuality, Justice’, in 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts Documenta Series 099, Hatje Cantz Publishers. Barad, K. and D. Gandorfer (2021), ‘Political Desirings: Yearnings for Mattering (,) Differently’, Theory and Event, 24 (1): 14–66.

 Circus as Practices of Hope 131 Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Bogue, R. (2010), Fabulation: Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti, R. (2011), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd edn, New York: Colombia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013), ‘Nomadic Ethics’, Deleuze Studies, 7 (3): 342–59. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press. Daigle, C. (2018), ‘Vulner-abilité Posthumaine’, Con Texte Notes and Inquiries: An Interdisciplinary Journal About Text, Special Issue on ‘Posthumanism: Current State and Future Research’, 2 (2): 9–13. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hug Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1996), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Colombia University Press. Elblaus, L., M.Goina, M.A. Robitaille and R. Bresin (2014), ‘Modes of Sonic Interaction in Circus: Three Proofs of Concept’, Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing Conference, 1698–706. Escobar, A. (2018), Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Durham: Duke University Press. Ferrando, F. (2013), ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations’, Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts, 8 (2): 26–32. Ferrando, F. (2019), Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Focquet, V. (2019), Withdrawal to a Humble Circus: Three Careful Dramaturgical Tactics, A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University. Gabrys, J. and H. Pritchard (2018), ‘Sensing Practices’, in R. Braidotti and M. Hjavajova (eds), Posthuman Glossary, 394–6, London: Bloomsbury Academics. Graveline, F.J. (2000), ‘Circle as Methodology: Enacting an Aboriginal Paradigm’, Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi). Harraway, J.D. (2016), Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin, in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press. Hayles, N.K. (2017), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oliveros, P. (2005), Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, Troy: Deep Listening Publications. Quentin, A. (1999), Johann Le Guillerm : Mémoire du Cirque d’aujourd’hui, Paris: Magellan and Cie. Rodgers, K. (2020), ‘Ma-a Measure of Infinity’, Kyoto Journal Insights from Asia, 98 (5): 5–6. Scholes, R. (1975), Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Sioui, G.F. (1999), Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle, trans. J. Brierley, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Springgay, S. and S.E. Truman (2018), Walking Methodologies in a More-thanHuman World: WalkingLab, Routledge Advances in Research Methods, New York: Routledge.

132

Posthumanism in Practice

Stengers, I. (2020), Réactiver le Sens Commun, Lecture de Whitehead en Temps de Débâcle, Les Empêcheurs de Tourner en Rond, Paris: Découverte. Stengers, I. (2018), Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, Cambridge: Polity Press. Tsing, L.A. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

8

Posthumanism in play Entangled subjects, agentic cutscenes, vibrant matter, and species hybridity Poppy Wilde

This chapter analyses the 2003 Ubisoft videogame Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) through posthuman autoethnography, acknowledging the complex factors at play in the experience of gameplay (Wilde 2020). In my previous work I have argued that the avatar-gamer in videogames demonstrates an embodiment of posthuman subjectivity (Wilde 2018; Wilde and Evans 2019). Rejecting anthropocentric, hierarchical views that would suggest the gamer is in control of the avatar, I instead maintain the avatar ‘controls’ the gamer just as much,1 therefore suggesting a more rhizomatic (i.e. nonhierarchical) understanding of this relationship. By using the avatar-gamer as an example of posthuman subjectivity it is possible to see how these entities intra-act (see Barad 2007) and agency emerges from their entanglement to make a series of actions and affects possible. This is similar to the ‘idea of subjectivity as an assemblage that includes non-human agents’ (Braidotti 2013: 82). I argue that posthuman subjectivity is a condition of emergence, through intra-action with other entities. In many ways, this means that posthuman subjectivity is the embodiment of the philosophical theory of posthumanism – posthuman subjectivity is ‘posthumanism in practice’ in embodied, networked, materialist, vitalist, and, crucially, multiple ways. This could also be considered as posthuman(ist) becoming. It is important to note that this ‘practice’ is occurring even in unacknowledged ways – we are posthuman subjects even if we do not account for or ‘believe’ in it. To suggest otherwise would be to reinforce humanist ideals of self-control, self-knowledge, and self-actualization. However, there are specific aspects of our embodied posthumanism that allow further critical insights into how posthumanism can be applied to other practices. Exploring the avatar-gamer emergence allows us to interrogate certain practices that might have previously been considered humanistic (through supposed focus on self, autonomy, individuality, anthropocentrism, etc.) and to ‘posthumanize’ them by breaking down their individualistic principles and reconceiving them in post-anthropocentric ways. For example, in this chapter notions of ‘control’ are swiftly dismantled and reconceived through gaming, as are issues around interaction vs. intra-action, and player ‘agency’.

134

Posthumanism in Practice

Furthermore, BGE is ripe for exploring posthuman themes as, throughout the game, the protagonist’s ‘individuality’ is disrupted through her reliance on ‘others’, be they human or non-human. In this action-adventure, third-person perspective game we play as the protagonist, Jade, on her homeland of Hillys. In this world, set hundreds of years in the future, humans mix and live alongside anthropomorphized animal beings and have spacecrafts and hoverboats, although most of the action takes place on foot. Crucially, at the heart of our story, the inhabitants of Hillys (Hillyans) are currently under attack from the ‘DomZ’, a parasitic alien species who kidnap Hillyans to suck their life source from them. Jade is a photojournalist, and because of this, she is recruited by a rebel organization, the IRIS Network, who reveal to Jade that the DomZ have infiltrated the supposed protective mercenary group, Alpha Sections. The IRIS Network needs Jade’s help to expose this infiltration. Much of the game therefore centres on photography missions; however, it is only thanks to Jade’s fighting skills (and her prowess with a Daï-jo combat stick) that she manages to defend herself, her friends, and ultimately fight off the skeletal DomZ aliens. As Barad argues, ‘entanglements are not isolated binary coproductions’ (Barad 2007: x), and there are multiple elements in the posthuman entanglement of BGE beyond avatar and gamer. In this chapter, I explore the story and cutscenes within the game to demonstrate how they bring further elements to the subjectivity that emerges from the videogame as posthumanism in practice. Furthermore, I draw on the themes and materials within BGE to demonstrate how this posthuman subjectivity is able to embody further lessons in postdualistic thinking. Within the game, the protagonist Jade draws on a variety of ‘tools’ that allow different subject positions to emerge, and I suggest that the intra-action with these ‘tools’ demonstrates a rhizomatic entanglement between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ that characterizes a new materialist perspective even within a digital gamespace. Further postdualisms are explored as I consider species hybridity within the game, both through the species-instability of Jade, and the anthropomorphized animal-subjects, demonstrating how this game disrupts the sanctity of humanity.

Avatar-gamer as posthuman Many aspects of humanism that critical posthumanism seeks to redress relate to dichotomous binary thinking, including human/machine, self/other, and subject/ object. Those humanist binaries would suggest that the human, self, or subject is entirely separate from the machine, avatar-other, or object. Due to humanism’s anthropocentric nature, in such a dichotomy the human-self-subject would be seen to be autonomous, self-sufficient, and self-contained and, crucially, in a position of mastery over machine, avatar-other, and object. However, contrary to such claims, I argue that the avatar-gamer can be considered as a posthuman subjectivity, wherein the avatar and gamer are entangled, intra-active entities through which agency is emergent. Such an argument aligns with critical posthumanism’s aims of dismantling binaries and breaking down anthropocentric worldviews. As Zalloua explains, this

 Posthumanism in Play 135 draws on a ‘flat ontology’ which broadens ‘our understanding of subjects, of who or what can act and ultimately speak. This means that animals, plants, and machines all are reconceived as sharing the same ontological playing field as humans’ (Zalloua 2021: 18). Accordingly, ‘the ontological turn urges a renewed attachment to the external world’ (Zalloua 2021: 16) and thus, per Braidotti: The posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems. (Braidotti 2013: 89)

Elsewhere she expands on this position, arguing that ‘[p]osthuman subjectivity is an ensemble composed by zoe-logical, geological and technological organisms – it is a zoe/geo/techno assemblage’ (Braidotti 2019: 47). From this perspective, rather than considering an avatar as ‘other’ than the human player, I instead argue that it is through gameplay that the avatar-gamer is embodied across human–machine such that the supposed lines that divide them are evidently blurred to such an extent that to talk of either one without the other fails to make sense of the gaming experience. This is apparent across a series of entangled aspects: embodiment is distributed between avatar and gamer, with an empathetic line of networked affect as the gamer body responds to both bodily and environmental aspects that affect the avatar, while similarly, the avatar body responds to the bodily movements of the gamer (hands-on keyboard/controller). Furthermore, the goals of avatar and gamer must be aligned; when infiltrating the Alpha Sections, we (Jade and player) must be aligned in our actions of crouching to creep past enemy guards, for example. If I, as the player, decide not to press the button that Jade responds to with a crouch, then we will get caught. If Jade, through the game, or a glitch, does not align with this, then we will also get caught. The role or notion of ‘character’ within this hybrid identity is an intriguing one. Some aspects of character and character building might be considered to come from the avatar, such as visual gender identifiers, racial identifiers, and physical features. The bodily qualities of the avatar body also speak to specific characterization through how the avatar body is built, for example in terms of size and physique, the actions that this allows, and how it moves. From running, walking, crouching, and sneaking to the way that Jade fights in the game, her character, and our sense of it, builds. Yet this is still not a ‘her’ that is removed from ‘me’ – the player – as these aspects of the avatar are interpreted, embodied, experienced, and understood in ways specific to the avatargamer subjectivity at play. Playing BGE forms a different entanglement with me now, as I first played the game with my mother over a decade ago. Jade and BGE are therefore already intrinsically entangled with me through another context of entanglement and intra-action with another – my first perceptions of Jade are also shaped through my mother’s eyes, and vice-versa. With Jade’s cropped hair, green lipstick and headscarf, baggy trousers and attractive features, we would often remark on how ‘cool’ Jade was. Through our entanglement, we explored the fictional world of Hillys and built affective and affectionate relationships with Pey’j (Jade’s anthropomorphized boar of an ‘uncle’)

136

Posthumanism in Practice

and Double H (a fellow member of the IRIS Network, whose catchphrase (‘respect the home team!’) when you accidentally hit him is something we still regularly bark at one another outside of any game context). With Jade, we uncovered plots, photographed new species, fought enemies, and saved the world. It is in these sorts of ways that avatar ‘characteristics’ are read, understood, and enacted, and they are all dependent on the qualities that the gamer themselves brings, inscribes, and embodies through them. This, in turn, is dependent on the sociocultural context that the gamer is in, and their own beliefs, values, histories and environments. This aligns with the ways in which posthumanism operates as a rejection of individuality, autonomy, and independence from others that liberal humanism suggests. In some games this characterization is also extended into the poses that avatars make and adopt when they are not in motion (‘idle animations’), for example shifting, looking around, moving slightly and so on. In previous work, I have explained the posthuman reading of these idle animations of the avatar with and through the gamer. Drawing on Barad’s concept of mutually entangled material-discursive practices, the avatar could be said to provide the ‘material’ movement that is ‘discursively’ read by the gamer. This ultimately means that neither operates individually, and that it is this entangled context that provides this embodied expression and affect (Wilde 2018). In BGE, Jade’s stance when ‘at rest’ (e.g. not moving either through player-pushing or cutscene animation) is loose, relaxed, with a hand in her pocket and looking around. If more time passes, she stretches, arching with her hands at the small of her back. These poses perform specific embodiments that, through our posthuman subjectivity, are read as her being casual, careful, active, eager, and ready for action. This is an entangled reading – it is through multiple connections, entanglements, and intraactions that these movements hold such meanings. Neither the avatar nor gamer is operating independently, yet the subject position is informed by both, and so this is not a humanist, self-contained understanding; it emerges through and with the machinic avatar. Beyond body language, it is important to consider the role of the avatar voice – and therefore the voice actor – in the posthuman assemblage. This voice is neither human nor non-human – initially spoken by a voice actor, but given new meanings through the visual cues from the avatar; amplification, distortion, and other manipulations through technology; the social and cultural understandings of those sounds and the effects on the gamer from (and through) the voice they encounter. Those affects might be of frustration (see Wilde 2018) – when the avatar voice does not vocalize what or how the gamer might feel, for instance – but might also be of connection, admiration, affection, empathy, and oneness. As the avatar-voice-actor embodies the vocalizations that the gamer experiences, there is a difficulty in differentiating between which came first, the vocalization or the feeling. For example, in a moment of fear or shock it is hard to distinguish between whether the affective feeling is felt prior to hearing the avatar vocalize such an affect, or whether the affect in the gamer is framed through the affect on the avatar as vocalized by the actor.2 The emergence of this particular subjectivity occurs in a way that also incorporates the voice actor as a part of the assemblage of component parts. Jade, for example, vocalizes in specific ways that perform aggression, strength, care, concern, jest, and more. Voices indicate specific qualities to us, and

 Posthumanism in Play 137 I experience Jade as a badass character – to imagine her with a different voice is as odd as to imagine any human I know with a different voice. Her voice is entangled as a part of her performative expression and subjectivity. This is not meant to suggest some form of aural or vocal exceptionalism. For d/Deaf players this specific angle to the entanglement may not be present, but, even for hearing or Hard of Hearing players for whom it is, voice should not be considered separately from the story, gameworld, avatar expression, or gamer perception as all are entangled to highlight specific, yet endlessly multiple, subjectivity, agency, and embodiment. This is, perhaps most evident throughout the cutscenes of the game.

Avatar-gamer-story-cutscene As previously mentioned, conversations about agency in videogames often lead from a humanistic perspective wherein the gamer is seen to ‘control’ the avatar as well as to be ‘in control of their actions and the outcomes of these actions in the game’ (Muriel and Crawford 2020: 140). This perspective privileges the human in an anthropocentric way that fails to account for the complexity of how we function, grow, develop, and emerge through intra-actions. Yet, as games scholars Muriel and Crawford point out, although agency is often referred to ingame studies it has been under-defined in the field (Muriel and Crawford 2020: 139). They provide a less ontologically distinct version of agency, wherein this is not an attribute solely related to the human. Drawing on actor-network theory, they suggest that the three characteristics that define agency are ‘first, that agency produces differences and transformations; second, that the characteristics of agency are multiple and do not reside in any one prototypical actor; and third, that agency is distributed and dislocated’ (Muriel and Crawford 2020: 140). They continue, drawing on Latour, that ‘Agency exists because, in some way, it transforms reality. Agency, therefore, does not have to do with the intention, desire, or the will of an actor, but rather with the transformations that occur’ (Muriel and Crawford 2020: 141). Further, they note that videogame hardware and connections are therefore also seen as ‘actors’ in this view. It is surprising, however, that Muriel and Crawford do not take this work further, drawing on the posthumanism of, for example, Barad who similarly argues that agency is not a trait to be owned, but is, instead, the ongoing material configurations of the world (Barad 2007: 141). This extension, as I explore as follows, allows us to consider the emergence of agency as a constant negotiation, in which the human element is only part. Elsewhere, Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum define agency differently: ‘when play and story intersect, agency is better understood as a commitment to meaning instead of a desire to act freely’ (Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum 2010: 12). This notion of commitment allows a perspective wherein ‘designers and performers are in a type of conversation with each other’ (Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum 2010: 14), and it is interesting to view this as emergent intra-action that allows for a potential ‘configuration of the world’ as per Barad (2007: 185). Yet, I would argue, Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum’s notion of agency as commitment has an implied hierarchical humanism to it – suggesting autonomy of that commitment, and placing a perspective on what ‘meaningful’ commitment

138

Posthumanism in Practice

means. This suggests that there are ways of playing that are more important, correct, or desirable – and also that all of those things are within the gamer’s control. I argue that this is an unhelpful framework that loses the nuance and appreciation for the multiple different factors that affect gameplay and game experience. Cutscenes within videogames offer an interesting addition to the storyworld, and often spark debates about player agency. Cutscenes are a scene of animated footage within the videogame that interrupts ‘normal’ gameplay; during these scenes, the gamer is usually removed from the position of being able to affect gameplay through button-pushing, and therefore their keyboard/controller actions do not affect the avatar behaviour. Instead, these pre-scripted and pre-animated scenes play out regardless of the gamer’s intention. Applying an agentic analysis to cutscenes, Cheng (2007) discusses the tensions that cutscenes provide in terms of narrative vs ludic modes of interaction with videogames, where ‘radical ludology’ (Klevjer 2002) focuses purely on the ‘interactive’ (button-pushing) aspects of gameplay, facilitated by game mechanics, and sees narrative interventions (that force the gamer into the role of observer rather than participant) as problematic to the field of game studies. Klevjer’s piece concludes that ‘There is a balancing, and a struggle, between the agency of the story-game and the agency of the player’ (Klevjer 2002: 201). However, incorporating the posthuman perspective offered by Barad allows us to consider the ways in which these ‘agencies’ are not individually ‘owned’, but instead agency arises through intra-action. In BGE then, the intra-action between the player and the cutscenes is not merely about the gamer’s button-pushing, it is about the ways in which the story becomes woven and entangled with the gamer. Upon starting the game, the first ten to fifteen minutes are extremely cutscene-heavy. These visuals immediately demonstrate Jade as a caring character, helping children who have been orphaned by the DomZ invasion and living in a lighthouse home which is now under attack from the DomZ. We are then quickly ejected from the ‘objective’ cutscene into our first fight. While Cheng (2007: 17) writes about the need to engage in cutscenes in case of quickfire single-button responses to onscreen cues, BGE instead surprises the player with quick flits between different modes of action. After this first fight, for example, the game transitions quickly into another cutscene and out again, demonstrating Jade’s travel between areas and her ongoing (player-pushed) battle to the (cutscene) arrival of the (supposed) heroes of the Alpha Section and the biased media team who report the Alpha Section’s role in saving the day (and the orphanage). Shortly following this, Jade collapses and awakens (still in a cutscene) surrounded by Pey’j and the orphans discussing the DomZ attack, which affected them so badly because they could not afford enough credits to activate the shield around the lighthouse. At this point, Secundo, Jade’s AI pack inventory system, anthropomorphized as a European man, appears in the room as a hologram with a photography job for Jade that will allow her to earn money. This first entry into the gameworld is therefore littered with information about Jade, her companions, the world they are in, the worldwide problems (DomZ invasion, orphans) and personal problems (lack of finances) that plague Jade. Far from this being the ‘agency of the story-game’, as Klevjer (2002: 201) would suggest, I argue that these cutscenes contain integral information that becomes entangled with the avatar-

 Posthumanism in Play 139 gamer’s approach to the game, thus demonstrating the ways in which this posthuman subjectivity emerges through all aspects of the game mechanics. The cutscene adds to the agentic capacity of the assemblage (Bennett 2010: 34). To clarify; if we view agency as emergent material reconfigurations of the world, then the constant intra-action between story-game and avatar-gamer allows a specific posthuman subjectivity to emerge, which is formed of game mechanics, narrative elements, visual properties, character developments, audio settings, environmental considerations, spatiotemporal attributes, and networks – social, cultural, and technological. Here, to make a finite distinction between ludology and narratology in terms of agency enacts not only a binary between supposed inaction and interaction (which occludes intra-action altogether) but also becomes a distinction unworthy of recognition in comparison to the major elements being taken into consideration. The cutscenes, like the button-pushing parts, provide fresh new information from non-human elements of the game, all of which affect player (and avatar) knowledge, possibilities for action and inaction, and which therefore are much more constitutive of intra-action. As Lyttleton-Smith articulates, ‘to explore “intraactions”, rather than “interactions”, means to consider all bodies around a phenomenon as (potentially) equally agential and engaged in production’ (Lyttleton-Smith 2019: 659). To view cutscenes as either non-agentic or non-interactive suggests an entirely limited, and anthropocentric, view of agency and interaction that refuses cutscenes’ alwaysalready existing agentic capacity (which operates regardless of our acknowledgement, as per my introduction). Returning to Muriel and Crawford, the cutscene does ‘[produce] changes and transformations in reality’ (Muriel and Crawford 2020: 144). With this view of agency in mind, if we look again at Cheng’s useful analysis of literature on interaction, he states: As suggested by the use of Aarseth’s term ‘ergodic’, interactivity here is defined in terms wherein ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’. [. . .] In other words, ‘interactivity’ is defined in terms of the users’ direct influence in navigating through the digital text. (Cheng 2007: 16)

Yet this nontrivial effort, physical response, and ‘direct influence’ does not bear in mind the important aspects of gameplay that produce (posthumanly) subjective responses to information, narrative, characters and avatars that precisely shape the emergent reconfigurations in the game based on specific entangled experience and affective response. By denying the agency of non-human elements we simultaneously stifle the opportunity to explore the benefits and opportunities of intra-action in more depth, while also berating ourselves for actions beyond our control. Recognizing these entanglements, conversely, gives us a practical opportunity to engage in more empathetic practices that embrace the ways we are continuously shaped by ‘others’ (including media) around us.

Vibrant matter – ‘tools’ and ‘objects’3 Jade’s ‘tools’ are another part of her (and therefore our) subject formation, and the affordances granted to her in the game, thus further complicating the subject/object

140

Posthumanism in Practice

binary. Her skills are therefore not simply an implied mastery on her own part, but a confluence of the ‘tools’ that she uses, and, as I argue elsewhere, Jade’s efficiency ‘is brought into being in part through the player’s proficiency at the game itself, again demonstrating the intra-dependence of avatar and gamer’ (Wilde 2022: 202). In BGE, Jade’s ‘objects’ enable us to operate in different subject positions, and allow us different abilities within the game. Again, this is an example of posthuman subjectivity – for example, Jade is not able to operate as a photojournalist without her camera, and therefore both camera and Jade are equally important to the formation of this subjectivity. Bennett has written extensively about the vibrancy of matter, where she argues for depicting ‘things’ (including tools and artefacts) ‘as actants rather than as objects’ (Bennett 2010: 10). Describing what she calls thing-power, she draws on vital materialists (such as Kafka, De Landa, and Vernadsky) who argue that ‘there is no necessity to describe these differences [between humans and materials] in a way that places humans at the ontological center or hierarchical apex’ (Bennett 2010: 11). The hierarchy of subject/object is a dualism that posthumanism seeks to break down, as is the anthropocentric hierarchy of humanism. New materialism and posthumanism are therefore closely aligned, since ‘[i]f matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated’ (Bennett 2010: 13). In this way, rather than Jade possessing the agency to become a photojournalist, it is precisely through her intra-action with the camera that this subjectivity is possible. On replaying the game for this research, the materiality established between me-Jade-camera was made even more apparent. I recently bought a new gaming laptop but misplaced my old mouse. Using the trackpad on the laptop still enabled me to explore the gameworld as and with Jade, however, and also to operate the camera. Our first photography assignment of capturing photos of different species from the world of Hillys rewards us with another ‘thing’ – a zoom lens for the camera. However, despite acquiring this game-object, it was impossible to grasp how to use the zoom effectively on this second playthrough. This didn’t overly trouble me initially, as I instead simply moved Jade closer to the subjects that I/we wished to photograph to compensate. However, unsurprisingly, this workaround did not work for long. Following a new instruction for a job on capturing a particular species on film, I, as Jade, navigated a network of tunnels with Pey’j accompanying and assisting, including fighting off various beasts within the network. The network was confusing and involved acquiring a special set of pliers which we then had to pass to Pey’j for him to cut through some metal gates preventing us from accessing the areas we needed to reach to find the species. Upon reaching the end goal of this task, it became apparent that the zoom was integral, the species was too far away – separated by a drop and behind a rock – for us to get close enough to photograph any other way. I pressed every button on my keyboard, fiddled around with the trackpad, all to no avail. Turning to Google for help (another clear aspect of the posthuman entanglement of subjectivity through the virtual ‘outsourcing’ of information through ‘other’ (machinic) entities that affect positionality within the game) the only instruction I could find for zoom was right there: the scroller wheel on a mouse. It was therefore only once my new mouse arrived

 Posthumanism in Play 141 that I was able to complete this quest and therefore continue in the game. I was unable to find any trackpad equivalent scroll, nor reassign the game controls through my PC, to circumvent this issue. Without the right ‘matter’, my gameplay was hindered, thus surely highlighting the thing-power of the mouse, and the rhizomatic relationship between human and machine. As Giddings argues: video game players are acted on as much as they act, that they must work out what the machine wants them to do (or what it will allow them to do) as well as engage with it imaginatively. [. . .] Neither agency nor behavior can be restricted to the human participants here. Moreover, we are not looking at clear distinctions between human subjects and nonhuman objects, but the game event as one constituted by the playful translation of agency, the eccentric circuits of effect and affect, between human and nonhuman components. (Giddings 2009: 144–57)

Thus, Jade no more controls the camera’s actions than the camera controls her actions, the player no more controls Jade’s actions than Jade controls the player’s actions, and the human no more controls the machine’s actions than the machine controls the human’s (Wilde and Evans 2019). This is also true of the Daï-jo stick, Jade’s main weapon, as it is through the Daï-jo stick that Jade is not only able to fight the DomZ, but we are also able to intra-act differently with our accomplices Double H or Pey’j in order for new forms of attack to emerge. By combining a ‘super-attack’ with one of these other characters, different attack formations are possible. Again this moves away from interaction, viewing these entities as separate, to intra-action, viewing their coming together as specifically generative of new processes. Further to her camera and Daï-jo stick, Jade is ‘augmented’ through her ‘S.A.C’., or Synthetic-Atomic-Compressor (which operates as an inventory in-game), with the aforementioned Secundo, a humanoid artificial intelligence, built-in. Jade’s reliance on her S.A.C. and Secundo again demonstrates a disruption of self and other, subject and object. It is through Secundo that Jade learns about the items that she collects, as Secundo ‘is able to scan and “digitalize” small items that Jade gathers up around Hillys. He provides useful descriptions of these items as well as directions on how to use them’ (Beyond Good and Evil Wiki, ‘Secundo’). In the same ways that the player-as-Jade embodies the figure of the posthuman by disrupting stable and static categories of self/ other through the relation between avatar-gamer (Wilde and Evans 2019; Wilde 2018), Jade’s own ‘individuality’ is disrupted through her intradependence on ‘others’. Her ‘tools’ are part of her subject formation and the affordances granted to her in the game, thus further complicating the subject/object binary. Where videogames could have the power to circumvent ‘stuff ’, they instead draw on our pre-existing understandings of materiality. On the one hand, the constant grinding required to earn currency to acquire ‘stuff ’ in videogames could be read as reaffirming a capitalist society whereby material gain is considering as part of a consumerist worldview, especially as this acquisition is often followed by more grinding, for more upgrades, in a constant cycle of consumption. On the other hand, perhaps this focus on ‘stuff ’ enables consideration of new materialism and ‘thing-power’ (Bennett 2010: xvi). Bennett argues

142

Posthumanism in Practice

that ‘We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern non-human vitality, to become perceptually open to it’ (Bennett 2010: 14). Throughout BGE there is clear non-human vitality present through the vitality of the game/mechanics/avatar/ world. More than that though, there is a clear theme throughout the game of being ‘perceptually open’ to ‘nonhuman vitality’ through the reliance on matter – whether camera, Daï-jo, S.A.C., or any other of the materials incorporated within gameplay. While BGE is not unique among videogames in this reliance on matter, the different properties associated with each ‘tool’ have allowed for an in-depth critical consideration of their values to game/avatar/gamer.

Posthumanizing Jade – species disruption Jade’s own species-instability, through her embodiment of the alien forces, introduces another posthuman intersection wherein Jade is also beyond the human/alien binary. At a certain point within the game, we discover Pey’j dead, having been captured and tortured by the DomZ forces. Through another cutscene we see what I would define as a stoic response from Jade – though clearly upset, with eyes downcast and a slight waver in her voice, she does not shed a tear, and avoids an exaggerated emotional outburst. Crouching by his dead body and holding his hand, she promises, ‘I’ll come back for you. I’ll take you home’. This sentiment, and loss of an entertaining sidekick and key character of the game, is accentuated when Pey’j does not immediately ‘come back to life’, leaving us to believe he is really gone, and eliciting sadness in the avatargamer. Yet shortly after this, Pey’j reappears, alive (hooray!), and in a cutscene tells us/ Jade, ‘You’re the one that brought me back to life’, showing a flashback to her hands glowing faintly and holding his; he states, ‘There has always been a prodigious energy hidden deep inside you. .  .  . Now it’s coming to the surface, and you’re starting to understand it.’ Following this, the conclusion to the game reveals that Jade is actually linked to the DomZ forces. As she/we fight the DomZ High Priest, the final ‘boss’ of the game, the Priest reveals: You are not who you think you are. The pig has hidden your origins from you . . . You are the source of my powers. The instrument of my strength. They took you away in the hope of destroying me [. . .] They made you human, but you are not like them. You are mine, Shauni [Jade’s codename], and I am going to kill the human part of you.

Jade is therefore a figure that disrupts a number of humanist binaries, yet in doing so she manages to remain the hero of the game. Rather than her alien hybridity being used to encapsulate the idea of a monstrous ‘Other’, to be repelled, avoided, and cast out, Jade’s ‘monstrosity’ literally saves the day. While the monster often functions ‘as both Other to the normalised self, and a third state or hybrid entity that disrupts subject constitution understood in terms of hierarchical binary dualisms’ (Toffoletti 2007: 84)

 Posthumanism in Play 143 this can amount to the monstrous other being ostracized and feared (Zalloua 2021: 10). Yet Jade’s ‘monstrosity’ is instead utilized. Toffoletti argues that monsters are typified by ambiguity, and ‘[t]he posthuman shares with the monster a confusion of boundaries that challenges what it means to be human’ (Toffoletti 2007: 84). If we consider the posthuman not only as a monster or cyborg but also as an embodied (new materialist) condition, this allows us a different perspective on how we as posthuman (subject) can confuse those boundaries in our own practice. In BGE, this confusion of boundaries is not seen as a threat, but a (posthumanist) possibility, and rather than falling victim to the stereotypical responses to non-humanness we see in many sci-fi media products (panic, repulsion, horror), Jade utilizes the alien power within her to overcome the DomZ High Priest, and free the captured Hillyans. Jade (and we through her) is therefore unafraid of her hybridity, or ambiguity, but perhaps this is facilitated through the world she inhabits: other BGE characters extend this instability of human-ness, through Pey’j and other characters disrupting the human/animal binary. Considering what is to be achieved through accepting hybridity, not as a loss of humanist ‘self ’ but as an embracing of what we as posthuman subjects can achieve through our entanglements, allows us to explore the gains inherent in posthumanism through our own practice. Such gains include non-hierarchical relationships, accountability for multiplicity, posthuman ethics of care, and the ‘humbling experience of not-Oneness’ (Braidotti 2013: 100). As mentioned, Pey’j is a pig/boar-like creature, yet anthropomorphized: he speaks, stands on two legs, and wears clothing. When Jade is tasked with documenting all of the species on Hillys, if we photograph Pey’j, his species information is shown as ‘Sus sapiens (Swine humanoid)’. His animal-ness is not seen as a hindrance: he is credited with having adopted Jade when her parents were unable to keep her with them; he is a mechanic and designer and it is later revealed that he is also the leader of the IRIS Network. However, neither is his un-humanness ignored – there are frequent references to his species, including statements from himself, such as ‘Maybe this old pig can’t fly. . . . But he’s still got a bounce in his step’ and ‘Without you, I’d be smoked ham by now’. On the one hand, it could be argued that having alternative species in positions of power and demonstrating their capabilities aligns with a post-anthropocentric worldview, wherein non-human others are granted equal status. Yet, despite these species’ intra-actions, the depictions within BGE could be considered to be problematic from a posthuman perspective as although they include animal/alien hybridity, these are articulated in anthropomorphized ways, thus reducing the status of the ‘other’ through its equation with human ‘norms’; that is, we are only able to appreciate Pey’j through his more human-like qualities, rather than appreciating his piggishness! Nevertheless, the game demonstrates a complexity towards binary positions that places it more within the posthumanist, than the humanist understanding of ‘self ’hood. Whether the species hybridity that runs concurrently to Jade’s embodiment of the posthuman signifies that a post-dualist world is only as attainable to us as a world full of talking pigs, or whether it depicts a posthuman future where the sanctity of the human collapses, remains to be seen, but as Jade’s year of birth is apparently 2415 (Beyond Good and Evil Wiki, ‘Jade’), it remains for my descendants to comment.

144

Posthumanism in Practice

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated a variety of ways in which video gaming can be considered as posthumanism in practice, and has explored how video gaming allows multiple opportunities for addressing humanist thought and critiquing anthropocentric worldviews. BGE has been explored as an example where themes of agency, tool use, and species disruption strongly align with a feminist, new materialist, posthumanism. The prevalence of these themes makes an emergent posthuman subjectivity, and thus a practised posthumanism, more explicit, and therefore more apt for analysis. However, regardless of game themes, the embodied posthumanism that is characterized through gameplay (though not only that) is indicative of the ways in which human relations and theorizations can benefit from the incorporation of entangled worldviews. Initially exploring the avatar-gamer as an entangled and rhizomatic intra-action between multiple different entities, I extended this argument through the consideration of historic and social entanglements of playing the game BGE with my mother over a decade ago, and the ways in which the subjectivity formed through and with the video game continues to draw on past experiences, perspectives, and instances. This has demonstrated some of the ways in which supposedly subjective viewpoints are in themselves intra-subjective, and the entanglements and intra-actions across video game spaces include both material properties and sociocultural ones. The production of posthuman subjectivity that arises through the practice of video gaming, then, includes not only properties from within the game and game environment and machinery, but also human and non-human relationships, cultural dynamics, and historical experiences. By using video gaming as a framework to explore posthumanism, we can see how boundaries and binaries are broken down through this work, where self–other, subject–object, and human–machine are no longer viewed in dualistic ways. This is an important and ethically forward-looking philosophy for a world in which humans are humbled; less destructive, more ethical, and compassionate in their advocacy and acknowledgement of the intra-active forces that we are a part of in the world in which we live. While the form of posthumanism that I draw upon here is feminist and new materialist, the technological developments I describe also doubtless emphasize the importance of getting these negotiations right as technology, and our relationship with it, continues to evolve alongside our ethical responsibilities to the environments that are affected by its expansion. From this rhizomatic argument, I have gone on to argue that the cutscene, which has previously been explored through questions of agency and interactivity, can more meaningfully be analysed through intra-action and theories of posthuman agency that consider agency as emergent. This view enables a further breakdown of binaries between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ agents, arguing that there is no meaningful separation. This presents a challenge to theories of games based around ludology vs. narratology that seek to separate ‘play’ from story. By considering cutscenes as part of an intraaction, rather than the humanistic model that merely sees them as inactive, or passive, a holistic and rhizomatic engagement can be found.

 Posthumanism in Play 145 By exploring some of the specific themes of the game narrative, both in terms of the objects that are drawn on and the species (and alien hybrids) evident within the game, I have demonstrated how BGE offers new ways to consider posthuman theorizations. While it would be possible for an avatar to be ‘pre-packaged’ with powers or abilities, or for the avatar to attain those powers or abilities in ways that are not ‘held’ through an object, the majority of video games make use of our inherent understanding that ‘stuff ’ has value – and, of course, this acquisition is what creates a ‘quest’, thus exemplifying our own joy at finding these materials too. In many ways this shows how video games embody new materialist values. As Bennett argues: Vital materiality better captures an ‘alien’ quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman. [.  .  .] My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. (Bennett 2010: 112)

This argument is therefore particularly salient when aligned with the ‘alienness’ of Jade, who has the DomZ alien species within her. Bennett continues, We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the time, if we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways? (Bennett 2010: 112–13)

While I am not, sadly, arguing that playing BGE immediately achieves this goal of making us more attentive to the ‘indispensable foreignness that we are’, I do nevertheless believe that reflexively engaging in specific activities as posthuman and post-anthropocentric allows us to broaden our critical field of understanding the ontological entanglement of ‘self ’ and ‘other’. The arguments presented in this chapter have therefore offered an original demonstration of some of the ways in which practising posthumanism through this specific entanglement enables that practice to speak back and inflect posthuman theorizing in alternative/additional ways.

Notes 1 For example, dictating the way in which the gamer body has to behave in order to engage with the game. 2 This relates to questions in affect theory that confront the privileging of discourse over affect, but equally argues that we must not fall into the opposite of this in terms of affect over discourse. See, for example, Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion (London: Sage, 2012). 3 I place ‘tools’ and ‘objects’ in quotation marks here to acknowledge that in using these terms I am engaging in a discursive form of meaning-making that shapes the power that these ‘things’ are embedded with.

146

Posthumanism in Practice

References Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway, London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter, London: Duke University Press. Beyond Good and Evil (2003), [Video Game] Dir. Michel Ancel, Milan: Ubisoft. Beyond Good and Evil Wiki, ‘Jade’, Available online: https://beyondgoodandevil​.fandom​ .com​/wiki​/Jade. Beyond Good and Evil Wiki, ‘Secundo’, Available online: https://beyondgoodandevil​ .fandom​.com​/wiki​/Secundo. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cheng, P. (2007), ‘Waiting for Something to Happen: Narratives, Interactivity and Agency and the Video Game Cut-scene’, Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference. Available online: http://www​.digra​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/digital​ -library​/07311​.24415​.pdf. Giddings, S. (2009), ‘Events and Collusions: A Glossary for the Microethnography of Videogame Play’, Games and Culture, 4 (2): 144–57. Klevjer, R. (2002), ‘In Defense of Cutscenes’, in Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, Tampere: Tampere University Press. Available online: http://www​ .digra​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/digital​-library​/05164​.50328​.pdf. Lyttleton-Smith, J. (2019), ‘Objects of Conflict: (Re) Configuring Early Childhood Experiences of Gender in the Preschool Classroom’, Gender and Education, 31 (6): 655–72. doi:10.1080/09540253.2017.1332343. Muriel, D. and G. Crawford (2020), ‘Video Games and Agency in Contemporary Society’, Games and Culture, 15 (2): 138–57. Available online: doi:10.1177/1555412017750448. Tanenbaum, K. and J. Tanenbaum (2010), ‘Agency as Commitment to Meaning: Communicative Competence in Games’, Digital Creativity, 21 (1): 11–17. doi:10.1080/14626261003654509. Toffoletti, K. (2007), Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, London: I.B. Taurus. Wetherell, M. (2012), Affect and Emotion. London: Sage. Wilde, P. (2018), ‘Avatar Affectivity and Affection’, Transformations, Special Issue, ‘Technoaffect’, 31: 25–43. http://www​.tra​nsfo​rmat​ions​journal​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​ /2018​/06​/Trans31​_02​_wilde​.pdf. Wilde, P. (2020), ‘I, Posthuman: A Deliberately Provocative Title’, International Review of Qualitative Research, Special Issue, ‘Cyber Autoethnography, Cyber Culture, and Cyber Identities’, 13 (3): 365–80. doi:10.1177/1940844720939853. Wilde, P. (2022), ‘Beyond Good and Evil . . . and Gender and Humanism?: Exploring Jade as a Posthuman Protagonist’, in E.J. Dymond, J. Harrison and H. Wells (eds), Reclaiming the Tomboy: The Body, Representation, and Identity, 187–208, Lanham: Lexington Books. Wilde, P. and A. Evans (2019), ‘Empathy at Play: Embodying Posthuman Subjectivities in Gaming’, Convergence, 25 (5–6): 791–806. doi:10.1177/1354856517709987. Zalloua, Z. (2021), Being Posthuman, London: Bloomsbury.

9

Posthumanist interfaces Developing new conceptual frameworks for museum practices in the context of a major museum technology collection Deborah Lawler-Dormer and Christopher John Müller

Objects in museums excite curiosity because they hold multiple stories and forms of knowledge while offering ‘tangible evidence to support immaterial words’ (Foti 2019: 21). Take for instance the Apple iMac G3 ‘Bondi Blue’ personal desktop computer (1998), exhibited in a transparent Perspex case in Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.​ The iMac is part of the highly popular Interface exhibition, which introduces ‘the visionaries who started some of the great consumer product companies of the 20th century’.1 Inclusion in this visually stunning exhibition showcasing ‘how design has been applied to information technology products’ makes the iMac speak of a revolution in design, of Australia’s embrace of the iMac and its financial rescue of what is today a ‘Big Five’ tech company. The presence of the ‘Bondi blue: iMac’ in a major state-funded museum perhaps also subtly charms the public by conveying the injection of cool Australian colour into the beige world of computers. Since the turn of the millennium, Interface: People, Machines, Design (opened in 2014) is the fourth major technology exhibition at the Powerhouse, following on from Universal Machine / Cyberworlds: Computers and Connections (1999–2018), and Out of Hand (2017).2 Together these exhibitions have been viewed by over 2.5 million visitors. The popularity of these exhibitions shows how museum technology collections can provide a unique avenue to stimulate informed public debate about the increasingly obvious ways in which technology is an agent of change, both on the planetary scale and on the intimately mundane level of the everyday. Yet the narrative used to communicate the Interface exhibition also discloses that human-centred stories of genius, innovation, and progress are central to the way this collection is conceptualized at the Museum of Applied Arts and Science (MAAS), which the Powerhouse belongs to. It is these visions, and the boundaries between the human and technology they draw, that posthumanist modes of thought have complicated in multiple (often divergent) ways, and as such they promise to open fresh perspectives onto these

148

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 9.1  Apple iMac G3 ‘Bondi Blue’ computer designed by Sir Jonathan Ive. Powerhouse Collections. Gift of John Deane, Australian Computer Museum Society, 2013. Photographer Marinco Kojdanovski. Copyright Powerhouse Museum.

collections. In acknowledgement of this potential, this chapter provides an account of an ongoing research collaboration, which seeks to bring posthumanist frameworks of thinking to the MAAS technology collection. Our focus here will lie on the ‘unique dilemmas’ computer-based technologies pose for museum practices, and on how they might also facilitate the generation of knowledge and stories about the unintentional, unanticipated, cumulative effects of technological objects on the planet and the ways it is inhabited. Our interest in the unintentional and unanticipated effects of technological objects lies in the access points they can provide to a more nuanced understanding of technology, for they alert us to the ever more paradoxical relationship to the future that technological change entails. On the one hand, the growing power and presence of technological objects in our lives signals that the future is, in a very concrete sense, something ‘we’ humans are collectively ‘making’ through the development and use of new technologies (see Anders [1956] 2018: 313); on the other hand, the unintended and cumulative effects of human worldmaking reveal that these objects and the hyper-complex networks of relations they form are also propelling us towards a future that is happening to us in ways that we struggle to comprehend, understand, imagine, regulate, and counteract. Despite (and also because of) our growing technological mastery, the world seems to be running dangerously out of control.

 Posthumanist Interfaces 149 It is these two counter-indicated tendencies that museum technology collections are uniquely suited to contemplate and explore. As repositories of past technologies, they also collect past visions of the future and thus expose ‘the gap’ that separates what we imagine and believe we are creating from what we are actually creating.3 And this gap and lagging comprehension doesn’t only create large-scale planetary and societal challenges (e.g. climate change, environmental destruction and mass extinction, skills gaps in labour forces, and toxic online hate), but it also affects the human self-image and very comprehension and experience of togetherness that we have been gesturing towards by using the pronoun ‘we’. For even though it signals a material and less tangible sense of connection facilitated by computer-based technologies many of us have come to directly or indirectly rely on in some form, the word remains an empty signifier that is shaped by highly stratified and deeply historical relations of power, ownership and access. ‘We’, the figurative 99 per cent of the population who are not directly involved in developing or administrating these technologies, encounter them as simply ‘there’; as objects on display in shops, as objects that are coveted, enjoyed, used, or unobtainable (see Anders [1956] 2018: 42). In short, we encounter them primarily as objects that others make and as objects that provide access to services others provide. They can also act as barriers to these very services and create digital divides and help normalize relations of power that give rise to technological infrastructures. And as public institutions, museums are ideally suited to act as spaces in which the often hyperbolic, dystopian and utopian imaginaries surrounding technological change can be put into perspective, complicated and debated through the entry-points museum technology collections provide. And the wide catalogue of approaches posthumanist ways of thinking makes available, can help inform museum practices that seek to acknowledge this gap between the ‘attitudes’ technological objects provoke in us and the complex ‘cognitive assemblages’ these objects emerge from and configure.4 In doing so, they promise to facilitate further ways for museums to acknowledge perspectives, constituents, and interests that are routinely marginalized in human-centric narratives of progress, narratives that also tend to universalize a set of Western ideas, values, and societal norms and structures. Before we turn to the MAAS technology collection and a past vision of the future it provides access to, we would like to offer some thoughts on the paradoxes and challenges that a posthumanist practice itself entails. And as such, this chapter does not intend to provide a critique or solutions, but will instead present a constellation of ideas to reflect on posthumanist perspectives that are facilitating a collaborative ‘experiment’5 around a museum collection, and more broadly within the institutional settings we both move in. The visual metaphor of the constellation, deployed here in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, has proven useful when navigating a constantly evolving collection comprised of over 500,000 items. In astronomy, a constellation is a somewhat contingent pattern of stars that depends on a point of view. Once seen, it is hard to unsee and can become blindingly obvious, but it can also remain unrecognizable or indistinct among the myriad connections that could be drawn. Yet the ideas we are presenting here, do not just emerge from our situated perspectives, they also jar with this allusion to a visible universe, as they seek to interrogate the very equations of sight with knowledge and visibility with status that are influential in university and museum

150

Posthumanism in Practice

culture. So, rather than turning to posthumanist paradigms as anchors for new or even superior kinds of knowledge, we turn to them to reimagine these equations. One of the ways we understand posthumanism, therefore, is as a collaborative and ‘situated practice’ that is guided by what escapes, shapes, and complicates self-certainty and vision. The concrete implications of this are spelled out in a seminal text by Donna Haraway, which introduces a range of open-ended questions that trouble the clarity and confidence that words like ‘knowledge’ and ‘expertise’ are often deemed to point towards: How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinkered? Who wears blinkers? Who interprets the visual field? What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate? (Haraway 1991: 194)

In the context of our research, Haraway’s questions relate to the objects assembled in the MAAS technology collection as much as to our inevitably limited situational ‘self-awareness’ as collaborators who are part of complex, hierarchical and structurally exclusive institutional spaces with colonial legacies. We hope that in the context of MAAS and the wider Australian university sector, posthumanist practices can contribute to the production of spaces in which various forms of expertise can meet and be affirmed. Larger collaborative projects, however, also need to be conducted within the pre-defined parameters of funding bodies, organizational structures and processes, and need to be narrated in line with their metrics. In our experience, under these conditions, the academic nature and scholarly complexity of the various objectoriented paradigms that posthumanist engagements with technology make available can become a two-edged sword. Whereas they provide productive registers with which to think how objects have a dynamic of their own that exceeds human attention and understanding, they are also steeped in abstract jargons and intellectual debates. Posthumanist paradigms can easily turn into intimidating (or at least impressive) projections of status that perpetuate hierarchical notions of expertise and knowledge, and as such, they can also impede collaborative practices in the everyday. Posthumanist projects, therefore, are not automatically immune from replicating individualistic, territorial and combative narratives that claim, for example, the generation of ‘worldleading’, and ‘field-defining’ knowledge. Indeed, the very act of seeking fresh ways to navigate the institutional spaces we move in can end up tacitly projecting the very notion of vision and innovation that posthumanist practices surrounding technology collections have the potential to reframe. This double bind is a challenge that can require awkward positioning – but it is precisely in these continual adjustments that we also see transformative potential: for it is these feelings of exposure and frustration themselves that also open ways to approach the wider field of technology and the way technological objects are involved in shaping our bodily sense of self. This technologically mediated configuration of a sense of self is absorbingly obvious in the now ubiquitous Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) which mediate our relationship to computer-based technologies. GUIs, in

 Posthumanist Interfaces 151 the words of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, are ‘widely assumed to have transformed the computer from a command-based instrument of torture to a user-friendly medium of empowerment’ (Chun 2011: 60). As such, the dynamic contradiction the interface embodies by shielding its user from its own complexity, has provided one of the access points to think through the intersection of the collection and posthumanist perspectives on technology. To navigate this wide field of questions, we will gradually arrive at a discussion of a collection item, listed in the collection catalogue as ‘Virtual Reality game station (1992-94)’ (a W-Industries VR-2000). Like the museum itself, the VR-2000 is a powerfully immersive technology of vision, and as such, it lends itself to thinking through the trickeries and user-illusions with which computer-based technologies (and institutions!) can create highly contradictory and fascinatingly absorbing feelings of empowerment. This trickery, however, necessarily also entails the enshrining of the fundamental absent-mindedness, absent-heartedness, and ignorance which we hope to bring into sight. To start, we briefly turn to Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum (1995), because a broader discussion of the ‘exhibitionary logic’ (see Bennett 1995) that makes museums ‘icons of modern humanism and cartesian rationality’ (see Cameron 2015: 16) can help situate the dilemmas technology collections create. As museal practices and museum studies have evolved significantly since 1995 (often in a productive critical dialogue with Bennett’s ideas), we add the following caveat: ‘Museums’, to cite Chris Gosden and Frances Larson, ‘emerge from thousands of relationships’ that encompass a wide range of only ever partially traceable human and non-human interactions and networks, meaning that ‘no one person or group of people can control the identity of a museum’.6 This has perhaps provided one of the most notable developments to Bennett’s framework, which, as Bennett himself concedes, ‘privileges the agency of curators / directors, education officers, architects, and the public’ (see Bennett 1995: 12) over the varied forms of agency that lead to the build-up of collections. And the complex relationships that give rise to museums, as Gosden and Larson note, ultimately take shape around the objects that museum collections assemble. While the scope of this chapter cannot fully account for this complexity, Bennett’s discussion of the exhibitionary complex is highly productive in the context of computerbased technology collections, for both the challenges and possibilities they present are linked to the way the logic of exhibition intersects with the properties of the objects they collect. Bennett suggests that museal space emerged from ideologies of collection, classification, and exhibition that establish an equation of sight with knowledge and mastery, ideologies rooted in the colonial reality of the nineteenth century and its surveying and subjectivizing gaze. Building on Foucault, Bennett argues that museums allowed state power to reinvent itself through the creation of a new kind of national public. Rather than exhibiting its raw power to its domestic populations through its ability to punish and inflict pain, the state can now display its power indirectly through ‘its ability to organize and co-ordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the people in relation to that order’ (1995: 67). In the nineteenth century, the emergence and promotion of the story of the human (i.e., of ‘Man’) as a master discourse was (and at times still is) central to this museal ‘mode of representation’ by constructing

152

Posthumanism in Practice

‘for the visitor a position of achieved humanity, situated at the end of evolutionary development’ (Bennett 1995: 7). Bennett’s use of the term ‘Man’ signals how universal narratives of the human and human culture reproduced (and often still reproduce) colonial violence and Eurocentric narratives of progress, while also naturalizing intersectional relations of power through a distinct mode of representation. For the defining aspect of the museum space is its ability to render discourse experientially real. Thus, the emergence of public museums saw the formation of architecturally impressive, highly immersive (and thus often intuitively persuasive) discursive spaces that were (and necessarily remain) ‘shaped by gendered, racial, class or other social patterns of its exclusions and biases’ (Bennett 1995: 91). Over the last few decades, much work has been done to counter the exclusions and biases that Bennett presents as a structural component of the museal space of representation. These transformations underline that the ‘principle of general human universality’ museums were built to project is ‘inherently volatile’. The principle opens museums up ‘to a constant discourse of reform as hitherto excluded constituencies seek inclusion – and inclusion on equal terms’ (Bennett 1995: 97). It is here that these colonial cultural technologies also have capacity to act as powerful vehicles of reflection, enabling them to ‘function as a site for the enunciation of plural and differentiated statements’ and ‘an instrument for public debate’ (Bennett 1995: 104). Today, the pursuit of this potential is transforming the museal space of representation itself, with increasing emphasis placed on performative interactions and modes of experience that depart from traditional exhibits that are purely focused on subject– object relationships.7 Yet alongside these transformations, the collection itself has remained a constant, precisely for the exchange between the visible and the invisible that the inclusion of objects in a museal space can set in motion. Although no longer exclusively centred on representation, the exhibit, and the viewer, museum space is often still conceptualized as offering ‘access to a realm of significance which cannot itself be seen’ (Foti 2019: 35). Foti’s suggestion that museum objects provide ‘tangible evidence’ (Foti 2019: 21) in support of otherwise unsubstantiated words is here contextualized. Besides asking what exactly museum collections could potentially enable researchers and audiences ‘to see’ (to recall Haraway from earlier), posthumanist perspectives can also help conceptualize the very tricks and techniques of immediacy, presence, and vision upon which both museums and interfaces depend. They can, in other words, also make the peculiar invisibility of technology visible that cannot simply be revealed or understood, for technology’s capacity to become an intuitive part of the self and slip from the mind of the user generates the very sense of control, insight, and empowerment that we seek to question. It is this complex idea, and how it can help draw new connections within the collection, that we will now gradually unpack. To help with this, the unique challenges that computer-based objects represent for museum practice need to be discussed. Museums can themselves be seen to act as ‘interfaces’ that organize exchanges between what is past and present, visible and invisible, included and excluded. And the very nature of the objects technology collections assemble makes these exchanges especially charged and fraught with dilemmas. Unlike other cultural or mechanical artefacts, computer-based technologies comprise hardware

 Posthumanist Interfaces 153 and software: ‘Two examples of the same computer-based technology might look identical’, Foti notes, ‘but have entirely different software, making them two distinctly different objects’ (2019: 35). This poses the question of what museums ought to exhibit and collect. This multiplicity opens onto a compounding set of challenges we can only gesture towards. Computers and their ‘black-boxed’ interiors make poor exhibits: they have no moving parts to expose, and cannot be continuously operated or even interacted with (hence the prevalence of stylish, ‘iconic’ and aesthetically stimulating objects) (see Blyth 2016: 2). Plastic and electronic components of obsolescent technologies are hard to preserve and even harder to keep in working order.8 When stepping into the museum, we, as visitors, create further complications. We are accompanied by powerful cultural imaginaries and myths linking technology to progress, and even bring along smartphones that have often become an intuitive part of our lives and of our very sense of self. Faced with bulky exhibits, these devices can make us feel progressive, and automatically seem to place us ‘at the end of evolutionary development’, to recall Bennet from earlier. Yet, despite our intimate connection to technologies that exhibitions seek to reframe, we often enter the museum space ill-informed. Contemporary machine users simply don’t need to know how computation works. This ignorance makes early machines and computational processes doubly hard to exhibit as their function cannot easily be explained. The increasingly intuitive, user-friendly interfaces that the evolution of computer technology brought forth, not only shield us from needing to understand the computational processes, material science, technological infrastructures, datafication of user action, and global supply chains and labour conditions that underpin machine interaction today but they also trick us into an increasingly personalized sense of empowerment and joy. Chun, discussing the contradictory way in which interfaces link ‘rationality with mysticism, knowability with what is unknown’, notes that interfaces act as a ‘powerful fetish’: they offer ‘programmers and users alike a sense of empowerment, of sovereign subjectivity, that covers over – barely – a sense of profound ignorance’ (Chun 2011: 18). The complexities and practical challenges the properties of computer-based technologies create in museum space can help explain why museum practices surrounding technology collections have long favoured the ‘knowledge’ and ‘empowerment’ side of the equation, rather than exploring the ‘profound ignorance’ Chun gestures towards. ‘Traditional museum galleries and exhibitions’ as Tilly Blyth notes, have tended to legitimize ‘ideas of technological progress’ and ‘capitalist narratives’ of ‘efficiency and productivity’ (Blyth 2016: 24). Blyth offers this assessment in her account of the curatorial process that led to the Information Age gallery at the Science Museum, London, which seeks to actively reinscribe these narratives with alternatives. This highlights how the very fact that these scarcely studied collections have been so susceptible to ideas of progress, human genius, and modernity also means they are able to bring fresh perspectives into the museum space. At MAAS, the disciplinary area ‘Technologies’ is defined as follows in the 2018 MAAS Collection Development Policy: Technology refers to the practical application of knowledge to better and more effectively accomplish tasks across the spectrum of human activity. It refers to

154

Posthumanism in Practice

individual machines and tools as well as systems. [. . .] Collecting in this discipline includes information, communications, media and imaging technologies, robotics, small scale digital manufacturing, transport and space technologies, biotechnologies, military innovation with implications for the broader community, nanotechnologies and other emerging technologies, especially digital technologies which explore the intersection between the arts and sciences. (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences 2018: 9)9

It is apparent that this conceptualization replicates, and thus also legitimizes, the narratives of ‘efficiency’ and linear progress Blyth brings into sight. It adopts what Arthur Bradley calls the ‘instrumental definition’ (see Bradley 2011: 5) of technology: words such as ‘task’, ‘tool’, and the emphasis on human ‘activity’ and ‘use’ are part of a classificatory apparatus that places the human amidst a universe of ingeniously fabricated and improving things. This definition of technology is often traced to Aristotle’s Physics, which introduces a distinction between nature and artifice that still shapes Western ways of thinking about technological innovation today. For Aristotle, nature (phusis) makes itself. If conditions are right, seeds will grow into trees and mountains will erode into distinctive shapes without any human intervention. Artificial things, in contrast, are said to owe their existence to techne – the skill of making. Things like beds (to use Aristotle’s example) do not occur naturally: an offshoot from the wood a bed is made of would grow into a tree, not a bed. This way of thinking presents humans as the origin of artificial things – things human makers are deemed to be ahead of, distinct from, and free to use to their own ends. It is this influential, human-centred view of technology that museum collections are also uniquely placed to question. Far from being of merely abstract, theoretical significance, the way technology is conceptualized has very concrete consequences. The fact, for instance, that we habitually need to agree to ‘terms of use’ online, hints towards how legislative frameworks surrounding technological objects often focus on defining conditions for and limits to use (rather than regulating or democratically debating the existence and development of particular technologies). The opposition of the natural and technological also spurs utopian imaginaries transfixed on augmenting and overcoming human limitations or staving off natural threats and decline, and this dualism also informs a wide range of antagonistic reactions to technology, which are glossed as follows by Matt Hayler: ‘[in these views,] technology is unnatural, it separates us from the world, and technology corrupts, it does something to our minds’ (Hayler 2015: 8). It is this polarized imaginary, transfixed on the dyads of nature and artifice, thing and use, Utopia and Dystopia, that posthumanist perspectives can offer alternatives to, alternatives that can be activated in museum contexts to facilitate wider public reflection and curiosity. In A Cyborg Manifesto, to name perhaps the foundational text in the formation of concepts around technological posthumanism, Donna Haraway calls for ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries’ and for ‘responsibility in their construction’ (and not just their use!). To help create the territory for addressing a co-constitutive and co-evolutionary dynamic, Haraway coined the term ‘natureculture’, which attempts to merge the areas of nature and culture in order to examine the ways both condition each

 Posthumanist Interfaces 155 other in the formation of materialities of bodies and ecologies. Even this short glimpse at Haraway’s broad conceptualization of the relationship between ‘the human’ and ‘technology’ suggests that it can provide ways to navigate the technology collection and wider conceptual frameworks that define a disciplinary area of museum praxis at MAAS. To date, our collaboration has primarily focused on four broad paradigms – Affect Theory, Media Archaeology, New Materialism, and Originary Technicity – which can each connect to distinct types of knowledge, aesthetic qualities and layers of meaning that run through museum objects and the documentation that accompanies them. Yet working with the collection is complicating these paradigms in unanticipated ways, while also rendering them empirically observable and pragmatically demonstrable. To lead into our discussion of the VR-2000, we will briefly gloss the idea of ‘originary technicity’, which approaches the question of technology through the lens of evolution, a perspective on ‘natureculture’ that has proven especially useful in the MAAS context. Rather than placing a human subject amidst a set of detachable, external, and attained instruments, this view focuses on the co-evolution of life and technological skill and mediation. Building on the work of the paleoanthropologist André LeroiGourhan, thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and David Wills have each, in their own ways, sought to question the seemingly clear-cut distinction between the natural and artificial we have just introduced.10 The earliest known tools, to relay Leroi-Gourhan’s account of the ‘originary’ entanglement of technology and life, are over 3 million years old, created by early hominis of the genus Australopithecus (see Leroi-Gourhan 1993). As these hominids evolved, they began to manifest an increasingly upright stance and straight backbone, ever further freeing their hands for the use of implements. Roughly 200,000 years ago, the large brain from which the genus Homo sapiens derives its name appeared. The human, to sum up this view, did not first evolve an intelligence that allowed it to make use of tools; it was tool use that gradually made humans ‘smart’. To put it more provocatively: our supposedly natural intelligence is ‘artificial’ from the start, for it is the product of a reciprocal and generative relationship to technological skill, and the objects, artefacts and meanings this can create, a process that dates back millions of years. Viewed from this perspective, technology, quite literally (and anatomically) names a blind spot in our back11 – a blind spot which connects the technological future we so struggle to predict to the distant evolutionary past. The W-Industries VR-2000 game station, which is part of the MAAS collection can help us think through this complex idea, and the perspectives it can open onto the MAAS technology collection and the exhibitionary logic that configures museum space. We both came across this collection item independently, but in ways that equally sparked curiosity: through MAAS lore (DLD) and through a conspicuous absence (CJM): ‘Virtuality Reality game station (1992-94)’ is one of the few entries in the online collection catalogue without images.12 The description of the item makes this absence more notable. It suggestively invokes a machine hyped as ‘electronic LSD’ in the early 1990s, when ‘virtual sex, indistinguishable from the real thing’ was apparently deemed to be imminent. The hype the machine generated is corroborated by a 1991 news report, which also spells out how it embodies the perhaps ultimate human-centric narrative13 and promise: ‘imagine a space and you can step right into

156

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 9.2  Virtual Reality exhibition views – people in headsets, July 1992. Powerhouse Collections. Photographer Sue Stafford. Copyright Powerhouse Museum.

it’.14 Looking back at our fascination with this object through the exhibitionary logic glossed earlier, the missing image on the website seems newly significant. A trip to a MAAS collection warehouse revealed that the words ‘game station’ refer to two huge, 350-kilogram, cubicle-size apparatuses. To play, the devices evidently needed to be stepped into and the platform itself is enclosed by a sturdy plastic ring that surrounds players at waist height.​ As if in defiance of this size, the sales brochure in the museum documentation reassures potential buyers in the arcades industry that the bulky apparatus and cumbersome operating gear will not interfere with the gaming experience, for ‘the player soon forgets it’s a world of fantasy’.15 Today, roughly thirty years after their production, such forgetting is hard to believe. The grey plastic of the game stations has aged badly, the machines cannot be operated and have proven difficult to even capture on camera. In short, they are evidently poor display items. Every aspect of them seems to make a mockery of the brochure promise that: ‘equipment purchased today never becomes obsolete’ because it is ‘easily programmed to feature new games’.16 Yet this absence from MAAS’s (virtual) ‘exhibition space’ is only half the story, and MAAS lore now enters the frame since these objects, donated to the collection in 2007, were previously displayed at the Powerhouse. In July 1992, two machines of this make acted as the central attraction of the Powerhouse Virtual Reality exhibition. They were not simply on display: two visitors were able to enter the linked pods at a time to lose themselves to the two-player shooter game Dactyl Nightmare. The show was even

 Posthumanist Interfaces 157

Figure 9.3  Flyer, promoting ‘Virtual Reality’ dance party. Powerhouse Collections. Gift of David Travis, 2016. Photographer Belinda Christie. Copyright Powerhouse Museum.

accompanied by a dance party which promised transcendence ‘Into a Techno-Logic Utopia’.17​ The dilemmas and opportunities computer-based technologies represent for museums come into sight again here: the prospect of being able to actually use these machines, and simultaneously journey into the prehistoric past and a much-hyped technological future, caused a public sensation. Upon opening, long queues formed, the show needed to be extended, a raffling system was required, and the curator report notes how ‘representatives from the armed forces came to see the technology because they believed that VR was going to be important to training and remote fighting’.18 In one of the many media articles, Matthew Connell, who curated the show, put the arcade experience into perspective by noting MAAS’s ‘tradition of presenting new technologies to the Australian public’, adding that the games were vehicles ‘to draw attention to the enormous potential of the technology: for example, the lesssensationalist possibilities in science, education, design’ (Farmer 1992: 49). And this potential was indeed widely heralded in the early 1990s. To cite a 1995 book on VR in the MAAS research library: ‘the availability of home VR consoles, which will provide virtual shopping, adventure games, competitive sports, education and so on, is now only a few years away’.19 Viewed in isolation, then, the Virtual Reality exhibition’s celebratory feel certainly seems to match Blyth’s assessment that museum technology shows have tended to legitimize ‘ideas of technological progress’. Their often future-oriented stance, to cite Bennett, normalizes certain (ideologically charged) visions of the future by providing

158

Posthumanism in Practice

visitors with a space in which to ‘engage in an anticipatory futuring of the self ’ (1995: 217). Bennett is not just speaking of technology exhibitions here but also of the (already then) deep investment of museums in ‘futuristic’ technologies (such as VR) employed to make exchanges between the visible and invisible more immersive and engaging. Rather than simply producing a ‘place’ for the visitor vis-a-vis or amidst an order of things, Bennett suggests that such instantiations of the future contribute to the production of a consumerist public ‘modernized and tutored in the techniques of hi-tech shopping to embrace these future technologies in their own lives’ (Bennett 1995: 227). It is this somewhat hyperbolic image of the museum as a training ground for the future that we wish to hold onto, here and in our ongoing research, although we will take it in a very different direction. Blyth’s suggestion that museum technology collections have an important role to play in making the often ‘secretive’ world of technology infrastructures (e.g. server farms) visible, opens onto a dimension of technology that cannot simply be revealed. In demonstrating how museums are ideally placed to generate public awareness of technological processes and realities routinely kept out of public sight, Blyth presents the step back into the history and evolution of technology that museums can enable as being a possible pathway to generating a more informed and critically alert public, as museum collections can be used to contextualize and reinscribe the myths of progress, genius, and efficiency that routinely frame our technological present. Posthumanist frameworks can add an additional layer of meaning to this gesture, for they can help conceptualize not only what is actively kept out of sight, overlooked, or otherwise invisible but they can also complicate the very presumption that the formative power of technology is something that can be actively seen (see Blyth 2016: 16–17). And as we look at the VR-2000 today, it can help us to become attentive to the peculiarly blinkered sight and multidimensional lack of awareness towards technological mediation that we wish to activate. This lack of awareness not only affects those interacting with the machine itself but also shapes the way this machine was exhibited with the help of a hyped vision of the future, and it even extends to the way that this style of exhibition was critiqued. The first, obvious way the collection can alert us to limited awareness of technology, relates to past projections of the future. Even though the smartphones we bring into museums today perhaps underscore how well versed we have become in ‘techniques of hi-tech shopping’, it is also clear that the future projected in the 1990s did not become reality. Although VR technology is highly developed today, and widely deployed in science, design, and education, it is still mostly absent from our homes. VR technology has not created the world of virtual malls that was imagined in 1995; today we go shopping on devices that still bear the archaic name ‘phones’. If posthumanist perspectives can help us explore such skewed visions of technology and the future worlds, then the inevitably blinkered past visions of the future surrounding some collection items provide surprisingly empirical access points to the collection. If there is a grand human narrative to be found in the collection, it is a story of ‘trial and error’, dead-ends, misjudgements and chance, a story of trying to ingeniously catch up with, exploit (and even trying to recognize) the possibilities that the material existence of new things brought into the world, possibilities that might now be actualized.20 One

 Posthumanist Interfaces 159 of the ironies we encountered in this respect is that Polhemus, one of the companies that developed and supplied the sensors required to turn the VR-2000 into ‘electronic LSD’, is today a leader in ‘automated drug screening measuring involuntary eye reflex reaction to light’. And rather than creating virtual malls, this ‘VisionTrack’ technology can today be deployed in actual malls to measure the impact of product displays and ‘advertising effectiveness’.21 What is highlighted here isn’t the genius of human creative vision, knowledge, and foresight, but the way that technology appears to co-evolve alongside economic and social determinants and visions of control that emerge from the possibilities of what technology could do, thereby shaping it while also being shaped into unanticipated and new trajectories of development. This blinkered sight towards the future can be further put into perspective if we turn to an example of the software the VR-2000 could run: the game Dactyl Nightmare, which people queued up to play in the early 1990s. This game brings a much more fundamental lack of awareness into sight, one that left a visible mark on the actual game station. We are speaking of the mysterious ring that surrounds the playing platform, for it is a safety measure that needed to be installed because players could get so absorbed in the interface strapped to their face that they could forget the illusion and try to walk around. Virtual Systems, the 1995 book cited earlier, discusses various approaches to programming such computational ‘tricks’ (Vince 1995: 65) on the organism and warns developers to be attentive to bodily impulses if the illusion is to be maintained: ‘there is a natural inquisitive temptation to reach out and touch virtual objects. Obviously, this is impossible, as there is nothing to touch’ (Vince 1995: 7). Here, the machine tricks the body into mistaking a virtual image for reality, even though on some level it must be obvious to every player that they are interacting with an illusion. The brochures and players emphasize the feeling of freedom, control and realism, how players experience themselves as shooting and moving, although all movements are programmed and thus pre-defined. In fact, to aid immersion, gravity needed to be programmed to twice the actual force to create an exaggerated ballistic arc for the projectile of the gun, and arc players needed to intuit and embody if they were to hit their mark. It is this very adjustment that generates the joyful sensation of mastery and achievement, even though the program prescribes what the player can do, even though there is no gun and ‘nothing to touch’. Our point here is not that the VR equipment dupes a body that is not usually duped, nor that they create fake virtual worlds where there is otherwise just reality, but rather that they amplify a trickery and user-illusion that is always already at work. The userillusion that perhaps helped you imagine ‘a dactyl nightmare’ with the help of suggestive words (even without the experience of the gameplay). Yet, the VR-2000 makes a joyful and often highly empowering bodily ‘forgetting’ of technological processes observable. As a computational technology, it can be regarded as an ‘exaggerated’ version of the GUI that entered the mass market in the 1980s. These interfaces tap into the very trickery that VR and technology more generally create, for they are programmed to create a ‘user-illusion’ such as the one also created by the iconic operating system of the Apple iMac Bondi Blue: rather than requiring us to understand the working of a machine, these interfaces project familiar spaces – a desktop in an office, with folders, files, a trashcan, or even a virtual sheet of paper that can somehow ‘leave’

160

Posthumanism in Practice

the computer and be printed on paper. Like in the VR game, reassuring sounds and programmed resistances locate us in a virtual space that is designed to make us feel in control, a feeling of control that is a trick of a machine system that successfully trains and ‘produces’ its user by prescribing movements, limiting what is possible, yet still creating ‘users who believe they are the “source” of the computer’s action’ (Chun 2011: 68). Such technologies operate on the basis of a cognitive misattribution that allows for the continued reinforcement of the myth of human mastery. It is here that the players stepping into the VR machine, contorting and continually adjusting themselves on a platform while navigating a highly mediated sense of immediacy, can perhaps help us visualize – and make visible – how such adjustments to technology are always at work. Viewed in this way, VR technology points to an evolved ability to let ourselves be absorbed by the possibilities and capabilities technological mediation opens up. Born naked, we each acquire these possibilities – knives, clothes, wheels, languages, smartphones – through the adoption of technologies that shape our sense of self, what we can do, feel, and think. These additions pre-exist us or enter our lives, but once they are taken up and become intuitive and effective, they are habitually experienced as ‘ours’ and slip from our attention. For this to happen, however, technology has to play its tricks on our conscious self; we need to forget ourselves to it, intuitively mistake the abilities it unlocks for our own, and understand ourselves as the source of the actions it allows. Being attentive to this misattribution and what it elides can fundamentally complicate notions of ownership, use, innovation, and separation. Our patterns of speech exemplify our susceptibility to this trickery that misrepresents our abilities to ourselves. We might say, ‘I am going to call you later’, but it is in fact the phone, itself an assemblage of many technologies, each with their own history, and an equally complex distributed infrastructure not controlled or understood by callers, that establishes such calls on their behalf.22 When the phone battery runs out, or when a slow internet connection makes us frustrated, unable to work, or even leaves us under the impression that, to cite N. Katherine Hayles, ‘our hands have been amputated’, (Hayles 2012) we experience the effect of the VR player colliding with the plastic ring: we are jolted into a realization that the world opened up by these technologies is mediated by a forgetting of our own, highly generative lack of power and borrowed agency, status, and skill. The feelings of vulnerability, exposedness, frustration, powerlessness, and nakedness that emerge when we catch a glimpse of our own limited power can provide intuitive access points to the dynamic of ‘natureculture’ discussed earlier. They draw attention to something we cannot positively see or unravel, but that we can somehow sense nevertheless: the trickery of machines at the heart of our very sense of self (see Müller 2016: 3ff). Viewed in this way, technology does not name identifiable objects, that is, tools that can be put down, used, not used, or confidently located outside of the body and the material processes shaping evolution. It names an evolved, complex, multilayered space of possibility that is intimately intertwined with our identities and the forms of power and knowledge we claim. Technologies make these identities possible, but they do so precisely by covering their own tracks, by obscuring the new worlds and futures that they appear to open up; the power that user-friendly interfaces have to make us feel empowered, is thus power rooted in a radically blinkered sight.

 Posthumanist Interfaces 161 We saw earlier how the human-centred narratives of past museum exhibits and their celebration of technological progress have been critiqued as providing a ‘training ground’ for the production of future consumerist publics. And against the backdrop of this problem, we turn to posthumanist frameworks of thinking to ask how museums can invite forms of ‘futuring the self ’ that can work to reveal and facilitate ways to experience and contemplate the limited awareness that mediates our use of these technologies. Museums have the opportunity to open up the black box of technology, and to peel back the sociocultural and economic layers and material realities that give rise to technological systems, objects, and their multifaceted uses. It is here that posthumanist paradigms can be usefully activated to help ensure that such exposition of the invisible world of machines also exposes the limits of sight, and the biases, fallacies, economies of scales, and inalienable otherness of machine processes. We hope that this chapter has also conveyed a sense that this has the potential to lead to a more technologically literate public, one that can understand the question of technology as an intensely intimate affair, for rather than merely speaking about things, conversations about technology are also conversations about ourselves and the hyper-complex legislative, technological, material, and economic processes that give shape to our experiences of consciousness and subjectivity. Such encounters with technology, we suggest, have the potential to complicate the polarized imaginary and heavily mythologized narratives that frame images of future tech. As museums regularly develop new technological interfaces as part of their wider mission, the questions raised in this chapter do not only simply apply to the exhibition of technological objects but also to the institutional realities of working with rapidly evolving technologies and public expectations. As such, the contemporary museum can itself be understood as a series of ongoing technological experiments that are undertaken as they digitize their collections, seek to enable new forms of access and experience, and create a more porous space for multiple constituencies. By bringing posthumanist frameworks of thinking into the museum space, our collaboration hopes, therefore, that this experiment remains open and evolving rather than leading back to the old vision of social control that gave rise to the museum in the nineteenth century. For museums provide unique spaces in which to confront the paradoxes by which human beings are created out of the very technologies that they appear to create.

Notes 1 See ‘Interface: People, Machine, Design’, http://maas​-interface​-exhibition​.s3​-website​ -ap​-southeast​-2​.amazonaws​.com (accessed 23 May 2021). 2 Interface: People, Machines, Design, is curated by Campbell Bickerstaff; Universal Machine became Cyberworlds in 2000 and was curated by Matthew Connell and Kevin Sumption; Out of Hand was curated by Matthew Connell. 3 We are here influenced by Günther Anders’s concept of the ‘Promethean Gap’ which seeks to capture a growing rift between our technologically mediated ability to collectively influence the world and our individual capacity to feel, apprehend, and

162

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

Posthumanism in Practice

to take responsibility for our own part in these cumulative processes. See Anders, die Antiquiertheit, 17. We are here glossing perspectives opened by Gilbert Simondon and N. Katherine Hayles, who, in distinct ways, present technological innovation as a process of actualization that is shaped by multiple, co-implicated factors (cultural, material, biological, and computational). Hayles’s term ‘cognitive assemblage’ is especially useful here as it presents the cognitive processes we often experience as originating within our minds as a product of assemblages that easily slip from our perspective. To cite Hayles: ‘To be human in a cognitive assemblage means to participate in the deep symbiotic relation between biological and technical cognizers. This may be done with or without conscious awareness that such is the case; for example, most people in developed countries do not think much about their participation in the electric grid, which is completely dependent upon computational controllers, connectors, and transmitters, until something goes wrong and a blackout disrupts our normal routines. Then it becomes apparent how much of contemporary life is utterly dependent on our computational symbionts’ (see Louise Amoore and Volha Piothukh, ‘Interview with N. Katherine Hayles’, Theory, Culture, Society 36, no. 2 (2019): 145–55, 148; see also Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017 [1958]). The term ‘experiment’, in our understanding, means being open to change and risk, finding new forms, observations, encountering dead-ends, and engaging in complex and inventive generative processes that collaboration enables. See Deborah LawlerDormer, ‘Making Bad, Making Good’, in Success and Failure, ed. Lawler-Dormer, Lyons, Champion (Sydney: MAAS Media, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 2020), 12–23, 14. As cited in Tony Bennett, ‘Thinking (with) Museums: From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage’, in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, ed. Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message (New York: Wiley, 2015), 3–21, 12. For a discussion of representation and performative modes of experience that draw on technology as a cultural mode of reflection, see Deborah Lawler-Dormer, ‘Self-Styling an Emotionally Intelligent Avatar’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 16, no. 1 (2018): 33–42. For more on this see Tilly Blyth, Head of Collections and Principal Curator for the Science Museum (London), as interviewed in Foti, Exhibiting Computer-Based Technology, 38ff. The cited wording is part of the MAAS Collection Policy Document that was approved on the 4 December 2018 and valid at the time of writing. It can be accessed on https://www​.maas​.museum​/app​/uploads​/2018​/12​/MAAS​-Collection​-Development​ -Policy​.pdf (accessed 3 August 2022). On the 23rd of September 2021, it was replaced by a more recent policy document that can accessed on https://d55epuxr7x6s9​ .cloudfront​.net​/maas​.museum​/uploads​/2021​/10​/MAAS​-Collection​-Development​ -Policy​-23​-Sept​-2021​_updated​.pdf (accessed 3 August 2022). These poststructuralist approaches have an often-overlooked precedent in the field of philosophical anthropology, especially in the thought of Helmut Plessner, Max Scheler and Günther Anders, which each open perspectives on how the ‘natural artificiality’ of (‘human’) life fundamentally complicates ideas of natural evolution and a generalizable human nature. See, for instance, Helmut Plessner, Levels of Organic Life and the Human [1928], trans. M. Hyatt (New York: Fordham, 2019), 287ff.

 Posthumanist Interfaces 163 11 See David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008), 7–8: ‘A technology of the human itself, a technology that defines and so produces the human, cannot be part of the human self-image; it comes at the human from behind, is already at its back. Or indeed, in its back. [. . .] The figure or pose of our fundamental technological articulation and actualization – the point at which that emerges into visibility – is the upright stance’. 12 https://collection​.maas​.museum​/object​/364729 (accessed 23 May 2021). 13 For an excellent discussion of this wider problematic, see Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Virtual Reality: The Last Human Narrative? (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Our thanks go to Manuela Rossini for alerting us to this text. 14 See the ‘Virtual Reality’ segment of ABC Primetime Live, broadcast on 19 September 1991, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=rVn3H93Ysag (accessed 17 August 2021). 15 Virtuality VR – 2000 Series, sales brochure (n.p.), included in the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Object Statement file (Ref Number: 2007/94/1:3). 16 Virtuality VR – 2000 Series. 17 The Flyer for this party is now part of the MAAS collection, https://collection​.maas​ .museum​/object​/540418 18 MAAS Collection Development Policy (2018-2020) https://d55epuxr7x6s9​.cloudfront​ .net​/maas​.museum​/uploads​/2018​/12​/MAAS​-Collection​-Development​-Policy​.pdf (accessed 18 August 2021). 19 Charles Grimsdale, ‘Preface’, in Virtual Reality Systems, ed. John Vince (London: Pearson Education, 1995). 20 See Lawler-Dormer, Lyons, Champion (eds) Success and Failure. 21 See https://polhemus​.com​/eye​-tracking​/applications/ (accessed 23 May 2021). 22 This paragraph develops a set of formulations published in Christopher John Müller, ‘From Radioactivity to Data Mining: Günther Anders in the Anthropocene’, Thesis Eleven 153, no. 1 (2019): 9–23.

References Anders, G. ([1956] 2018), Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der Zweiten Industriellen Revolution, Munich: C.H. Beck. Bennett, T. (1995), The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge. Blyth, T. (2016), ‘Exhibiting Information: Developing the ‘Information Age’ Gallery at the Science Museum’, Information and Culture, 51 (1): 1–28. Bradley, A. (2011), Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Cameron, F. (2015), ‘Ecologizing Experimentations: A Method and Manifesto for Composing a Post-humanist Museum Cameron’, in F. Cameron and B. Neilson (eds), Climate Change and Museum Futures, 16–33, New York: Routledge. Chun, W.H.K. (2011), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Farmer, M. (1992), ‘Experiences That are Quite Unreal’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June. Foti, P. (2019), Collecting and Exhibiting Computer-Based Technology: Expert Curation at The Museums of the Smithsonian Institution, New York: Routledge.

164

Posthumanism in Practice

Haraway, D. (1991), ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183–201, New York: Routledge. Hayler, M. (2015), Challenging the Phenomena of Technology: Embodiment, Expertise, and Evolved Knowledge, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hayles, N.K. (2012), How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993), Gesture and Speech, trans. A. Bostock Berger, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney (2018), MAAS Collection Development Policy. https://www​.maas​.museum​/app​/uploads​/2018​/12​/MAAS​-Collection​ -Development​-Policy​.pdf (accessed on 3 August 2022). Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney (2021), MAAS Collection Development Policy. https://d55epuxr7x6s9​.cloudfront​.net​/maas​.museum​/uploads​/2021​/10​/MAAS​ -Collection​-Development​-Policy​-23​-Sept​-2021​_updated​.pdf (accessed 3 August 2022). Müller, C.J. (2016), Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Vince, J. (1995), Virtual Reality Systems, London: Pearson Education.

10

Affirming future(s) Towards a posthumanist conservation in practice Hélia Marçal and Rebecca Gordon1

This chapter discusses the ethics of conservation in the contemporary museum. Drawing on feminist new materialisms, and specifically on the notion of affirmative ethics (Braidotti 2019), we reflect on the affordances of the performative in rethinking the ethical positioning of conservation. In addressing the ways in which conservation participates in the relational becoming of museum objects (in the broad sense of the term), this chapter will interrogate not only the positioning of conservation as a practice in the museum ecosystem, but also how that practice co-constitutes – or, crucially, can counteract – the art historical canon, its inclusions and exclusions.2 Art conservation is a practice that cares for cultural manifestations – both tangible and intangible – with the goal of transmitting them to future generations. The encounter between conservators and artworks is often characterized by moments of intimacy – a connection that is formed in knowing the physicality of an artwork like few people do, that of recognizing the gesture of the artist in a brushstroke or a set of instructions, or even that of being pushed back in time, when instrumental techniques allow us to unveil something about an artwork for the very first time. And yet, most of conservation’s day-to-day actions – at least those of conservators working in museums – do not consist of those moments. Instead, a considerable amount of time is spent producing documentation; describing, categorizing, and defining aspects of artworks and other cultural manifestations; negotiating parameters for the conservation of these objects; procuring materials and equipment; monitoring environmental conditions and establishing strategies to prevent damage (also called preventive conservation); evaluating the condition of artworks; assessing their material history (or how they became what they are interpreted to be at that given moment);3 in some cases working on installation design and registration; establishing partnerships with communities outside of the museum; collaborating with other members of staff and, in the case of contemporary art (and where possible) with artists. The scalpel and cotton swab moment (or what we can call the ‘direct intervention’ in an artwork) is also one of conservation’s activities, but, as we can see from this list, it is far from being the only or most central one. As we argue in this chapter, all of these activities – from the

166

Posthumanism in Practice

most glamorous to the most mundane – participate in the becoming of artworks and, crucially, to the praxis of conservation itself. With the acknowledgement of the impact of conservation actions on the becoming of artworks (and vice-versa) comes the response-ability to recognize not only the ways in which conservation tailors the futures of artworks,4 but also for whom conservation is creating those futures. Statements of regulatory agencies such as ICON (Institute of Conservation, in the UK) or AIC (American Institute of Conservation, in the United States), as well as ICOM-CC (International Council of Museums – Committee for Conservation), set the aims of conservation as the transmission of cultural manifestations for access by present and future generations. In selecting certain futures instead of others, conservators are including certain narratives at the risk of excluding others. To facilitate access beyond the present moment, inevitable and exclusionary decisions tend to be made: preferencing one physical manifestation of an artwork over another; privileging one aesthetic scheme above multiple possibilities; questioning how to represent the artwork in documentation that will accompany and potentially steer the work’s ongoing material and conceptual trajectory. Which futures tend to be selected, and which are we more prone to exclude or resist bringing into being? An awareness of conservation's response-abilities both to the artwork and to its future audiences is yet to be explored fully and is vital to the ethical continuation of the practice. To do this, we propose a posthumanist framework by which to rethink and enact conservation praxis that moves beyond the essentialist practices to which conservators tend to default, namely to measure, score, and contain. In this chapter, we argue that a posthuman conservation practice amplifies the possible futures of works, rendering those objects and their histories more diverse, inclusive, and, necessarily, relational. Though posthumanism is a framework that can take on various routes, as one can see throughout the various chapters of this book, the term suggests a revisiting of the status, positioning, ontology, and relationality of human beings, not only rejecting anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism but also rethinking normative understandings of humanness and the human as category (see, e.g., Braidotti 2013). A posthumanist approach allows us to interrogate the exclusivity of humans as knowledge creators, prompting questions around the agency of the non-human (from nature to objects, infrastructures, or technology) and human fallibility, ethics, and vulnerability. Posthumanism, moreover, challenges traditional categories and hierarchies such as culture/nature, mind/body, or human/non-human, which we believe are vital to the ethical progression of conservation practice. The approaches to posthumanism we are using here are mostly connected to the writings of Braidotti and Barad, and broadly to what has been understood as feminist posthumanism, which offers a particular lens into the limits of current conceptions of humanness in processes, structures, and infrastructures. In this chapter, we will specifically address the ways in which conservation as a practice participates in the making of artworks in the contemporary museum, arguing for a posthumanist approach that promotes diversity in the material futures of museum objects and their uses. In proposing a relational ontology of what the world is and how it is understood, these feminisms are inherently intersectional (Crenshaw 1989: 139–67). Similarly, in relating the way things are to the ways that

 Affirming Future(s) 167 they are known, feminist posthumanisms add an ethical layer to every act of being and knowing, what Barad calls ‘ethico-onto-epistemo-logy’.5 This chapter is structured in three sections. In the first section, we discuss the pitfalls of a humanistic conservation practice, focusing specifically on how it impacts the conservator’s positioning in the museum. Taking on the example of collecting and conserving contemporary art, the second section will explore the ways in which the modernist conception of museum processes impacts the collecting of cultural manifestations that are expressed through forms of becoming. In the third and last section, we position the debate in relation to ideas of returning, undoing, or unlearning in the museum, arguing for a posthumanist turn in conservation practice. The chapter ends with a call for an active engagement with practices of affirmative ethics and diffraction in the museum,6 concluding with a proposal for an ethical reorientation of collecting and conservation practices using collections as a prismatic lens from the museum to the world. A relational ontology of conservation is discussed alongside the ethical response-ability of museum workers towards fairer practices of inclusion and becoming posthuman.

Challenging a humanistic museum Although the practice of care and maintenance goes back to time immemorial, when humans first began making cultural artefacts, the professionalization of conservationrestoration in the Global North is a relatively modern construct. Hand-in-hand with the Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress, the development of new technologies such as radiography (established as an autonomous medical department in Glasgow Royal Infirmary in January 1896) alongside a growing interest in the detection of forgeries in private and public collections in post–Second World War Europe, scientific methodologies became synonymous with conservation as a ‘revealer of truth’. Its recognition as a professional field was cemented in the 1950s with the establishment of the extant International Institution for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC) in London, which formulated its own code of ethics, initiated training and international conferences, and established international peer-reviewed publications. The entwined roots of conservation, technological innovation, and Enlightenment values are what continue to anchor conservation and collections care today. Accordingly, the figure of the conservator became that of a lab-coat-clad scientist who was more comfortable with chemistry than aesthetic subjectivity, worked at a museum, and mostly on paintings. That straw figure – naturally a white male (although curiously this maintenance labour is predominantly recognized as ‘women’s work’)7 – has been raised as a totem, a dispassionate resource of invisible labour. Conservator Miriam Clavir notes that conservation’s emphasis continues to remain on ‘rigorous, logical, and systematic methods of observation, experimentation, validation, and prediction’ (Clavir 2002: 10). In recent years, conservation literature has drawn attention to the problems raised by this humanist approach (see, e.g. Marçal 2021) particularly with contemporary artworks that challenge traditional modes of creation through material variability, physical transience, or in-built obsolescence. Even those frameworks that

168

Posthumanism in Practice

have been praised for providing some practical solutions to such variable artworks, such as ‘scoring’ time-based media artworks (Phillips 2015: 168–79) or mapping an artwork’s ‘work-defining properties’ (Laurenson 2008: 150–64) follow the default desire to contain, maintain, and codify. Are there other paths to be forged that better serve the care of these artworks and the individuals and communities enmeshed in their production and becoming? The focus on manual expertise has come to distinguish the role of the conservator from that of the curator who, in recent decades, has become known as something of a ‘tastemaker’ and ‘interpreter’.8 The backstory of the unfolding role of the curator – from the carer of the museum collection (coming from the Latin word curare) to its hermeneutic keeper – is certainly not linear or straightforward. Yet these pithy observations of the designation of various labours within the museum are not insignificant to the positionality of the practice of conservation and the role of the conservator within the institution. Museal structures tend to mirror this bifurcation. Conservation studios and offices are often separated from the main thoroughfare; conservators often are not consulted before the acquisition of new works to a collection is initiated; there are still salary discrepancies between conservators (and overall collection care professions), and those of curators, even when the same level of education is required;9 conservators and other collection care professionals are still rarely part of research projects on the care, conservation, and decolonization of museum structures, and, when they are, very rarely do they lead the project or one of the work packages or associated research streams. There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as MoMA in New York, where conservators and curators sometimes share the same spaces (Laurenson 2013) or the Andrew W. Mellon-funded project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum at Tate, which was led by the conservator Pip Laurenson and had a pluridisciplinary team researching the structures of the museum.10 In being positioned in what has been called ‘the backstage’ of the museum,11 conservators are refused access to the place from which one speaks and is heard. It is also a position from which it is difficult to hear. The ones who own the social capital to speak and be heard are also the ones whose speech is ‘authorised as “theory”’ (Ahmed 1998: 18) and, fundamentally, the ones who hold the power to define how other knowledges are valued.12 The separation of departments within the museum, perceived hierarchies of knowledge and quasi-Cartesian epistemic separations, the necessary yielding of authority and (with few exceptions) the absence of conservation from the public eye,13 is symptomatic of the essentialism that characterizes institutions of the West and of the humanist ontologies that underpin the making of artworks and their narratives in the museum. Here, with posthumanism in mind, we instead recognize that knowledge is relational, networked, and embodied; that labour simultaneously can be intellectual and physical (and many things in between and beyond); and that these intersections are vital for a more effective and affirming future of the museum, the objects in its care, and the people who care about and for those objects. This perspective necessarily impacts the understanding of conservation as a practice sustained and confined to the museum. A relational approach to the care of artworks and practices is one that recognizes all involved as having a particular, and yet not individualized, lived

 Affirming Future(s) 169 experience that impacts what we make of cultural manifestations. In the field of conservation, the recognition of these dynamics has been leading to the development of collaborations with communities outside of the museum ecosystem, with varying degrees of success (see, e.g. Marçal and Fekrsanati 2022). The response-ability of conservators to the other social aspects of the practice – particularly the ones that demand an inward reflection on the power structures in the museum – is less evident. Conservators (and other collection care professions) are still not part of debates that respond to the museum as a relational, entangled, epistemic site, with human and nonhuman agents operating together. More often than not, conservation is seen as the care for objects and not as an activity that can cause harm to others. Is conservation ethical if the resources to make it happen come from patrons that harm human and non-human others? Can conservation’s ethical ambitions ignore its (unwilling) participation in economies of exploitation?

Challenging a humanist conservation practice The structure of the museum, which was created for the acquisition and care of selfcontained objects of the fine arts,14 fails to properly cater to the expanded ontology of contemporary artwork. Much has been written about the contingent object of contemporary art and the complexities of its preservation,15 and there are numerous conservation research projects and networks that are seeking to answer contemporary art’s call for more diverse modes of continuation.16 Yet conservation remains rooted to the bedrock of six principles: durability, authenticity, original condition, original intent, reversibility, and minimal intervention. Some of these are written into the various codes of ethics, while others are ‘fundamental assumptions’, that is, those principles that are taken for granted and that ‘form a chain of reasoning’ (Eastop 2009: 151). That reasoning orientates towards fixity and prolonging the unchanging physical presence of the object. Contemporary art, however, has challenged such assumptions, often inciting mutation and reimagination, opening the door for lateral thinking about the practice and processes of conservation and collections care. Therefore, it is in relation to contemporary art that conservation’s positivistic essentialism is often challenged. Yet we argue that a rethinking of conservation as a posthumanist practice extends beyond the contemporary to the museum object-at-large. It acknowledges that every object/artwork in a museum is part of a meshwork of values, practices, cultures, human and non-human, that cannot be reduced to material and aesthetic concerns alone.17 To do so is to perpetuate the violence of lacunae initiated by collecting practices over centuries. A posthumanist conservation practice seeks to advocate for those voices (human and non-human) that do not have space to be aired in the current structures of the modernist museum. Epistemic cultures in museums, as networks of being and becoming in permanent intra-action (Barad 2007) impact not only how conservators operate in these structures, but also how artworks can exist and continue to become. The understanding that knowing is ultimately performative leads to an ongoing construction of what we are able to know. This necessarily implies that neither artworks nor conservation practices

170

Posthumanism in Practice

have a fixed or true ‘nature’, but are constantly constructed in every act of observation, in every practice of knowing; ways of knowing are then acts of excluding possibilities, and the creation of a given existence against all others therefore entails a sense of both accountability and responsibility. Choosing one possibility over others, or observing an artwork through a given frame, can be considered an ethical stance. Moreover, if we consider the process of conservation as making-with or worlding-with others, as proposed earlier, the realm of material possibilities for objects also determines that of the possibilities for all human and non-human agents connected with it. The sympoiesis of these systems makes them inevitably inseparable.18 Arguing for a given materiality – and putting forward a reasoning for including some aspects of the artwork and excluding many others – is a way of expressing a conservator’s responseability. Considering accountability as something that brings us together reframes it to refer to our responsibility to another, whether people, artworks, spaces, technology, or nature. In what follows, we ask what response-ability the conservator has to collaborate with other voices in the decision-making around an artwork’s becoming? In what ways can the conservator work towards a more ethical and relational decision-making practice that informs the care of the human and non-human agents involved in the making of art? Here we turn to Karla Black’s Contact Isn’t Lost (2008) to unpack these questions. Acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2009, it instantly raised questions of the Galleries’ cataloguing systems and conservation decision-making. A significant proportion of its material presence is a carpet of white plaster powder filling the gallery space, leaving the viewer only a narrow walkway around its perimeter, deliberately opening itself up to the vulnerabilities of a viewer’s ill-fated step. This spatial precariousness and its expansive positioning might lead one to ask whether this work should be catalogued as an ‘installation’; which it was until Black contacted the gallery to have its ‘object type’ changed to ‘sculpture’.19 The taxonomy of the modernist museum remains, in most cases, to follow classification by material type, again a hangover from Enlightenment collecting practices, which is problematic for artworks that defy neat categorization. Conservators’ job descriptions follow suit, with roles predominantly advertised as ‘paper conservator’, ‘sculpture conservator’, ‘time-based media conservator’, etc. In practice, this means a ‘sculpture’ conservator could be working simultaneously on a plaster cast of a Greek figurative sculpture, a large outdoor Louise Bourgeois Spider, and a complex multi-room Mike Nelson installation like Coral Reef (2000). Difficulties arise with the latter, being created from a multitude of different materials and objects, as the various elements may need to be stored in different conditions and locations. Such expansive and materially complex works may require input from outside experts and a whole network of supply and facilitation to present the work again. As with Black’s work – although hers operates according to relatively traditional taxonomies and materials in comparison (plaster powder, chalk, pigment) – contemporary artworks prompt questions of museal and conservation praxis. For artworks, such as No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2002), initiated by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, the schism between artistic and museum practices is augmented. A multi-authored work with thirteen further artists and collaborating

 Affirming Future(s) 171 partnerships, and with multiple iterations, Parreno and Huyghe purchased the cartoon character AnnLee from a Japanese manga company, which then became the basis of a succession of works by the collaborators including a number of films, a poster, and a neon portrait. A riff on the title from the Japanese cyberpunk animation Ghost in the Shell (1989), in which a female cyborg questions her existence as parthuman part-programme, No Ghost Just a Shell references AnnLee’s cybernetic form that is waiting to be imbued with the ghost of consciousness. Unlike traditional art production where ‘the idea is legitimated by the definition of a form, then protected by a system of copyright’, as curator Hans Ulrich Obrist explains, in No Ghost Just a Shell the idea is unfolding through its polymorphic becoming, then the copyright is returned to the sign itself.20 In tracing the process of making and becoming of No Ghost Just a Shell, Vivian van Saaze explored its many instances, appearances, and disappearances (van Saaze 2009: 20–32). Contrary to what usually happens when artworks are acquired, with No Ghost Just a Shell, museums and other collecting institutions participated in some of the ways in which the artwork disappeared. While Museum Collection Management Systems (CMSs) might struggle to catalogue the complexity of a multimodal installation, for No Ghost Just a Shell the CMS was unable to identify its various instances as part of the same artwork, providing them instead with separate inventory numbers (a problem that was later resolved). The museum similarly struggled to define the boundaries of an object that was ever expanding and the process of becoming of which was visible across all areas of intervention, including conservation. When facing non-conforming forms of artistic practice, museums typically end up adjusting the material conditions of the work itself instead of revising their own. With Contact Isn’t Lost – Black’s first work to be acquired by a national collection – the process of acquisition itself contributed to the material becoming of the work. At the far end of the paster powder carpet is a swathe of polythene sheeting, crumpled in a form like a model mountain range of translucent blue and pink peaks and valleys. With the knowledge that this work would enter a public collection, Black took it upon herself to try to ‘fix’ the work; to resist future reinterpretations and define the continuation of the work in a particular material configuration. The fine balance between material fragility and stasis is a constant theme throughout Black’s work: it needs to look like it could be blown away, trampled over (which sometimes it is!), while asserting a strong will to prevail. It was in this spirit that Black decided to cast some plastic bottles in plaster as anchor points for the polythene sheet. According to this logic, the plaster powder could be swept up for disposal and the sculptural form of the polythene and plaster-cast bottles would remain a constant in the work. While the intention to acclimatize the work to the structures and expectations of a national collection was understandable, it has prompted further questions and conservation issues around the becoming of this work in practice. The desire to provide something tangible to be stored in perpetuity has in fact caused more problems than it has solved. The lifespan of the polythene sheet was given as five to ten years in the initial conservation documentation.21 The artist’s directive to preserve this element of the work means that to replace it, even in consultation with the artist’s estate, is problematic. In trying to operate according to museal conventions of authenticity, as well as an understandable

172

Posthumanism in Practice

desire to remain connected to the materiality of the work, Black may have inadvertently sentenced Contact Isn’t Lost to its own partial demise.

Affirming a posthumanist conservation practice Both the expanded ontologies of contemporary artworks and their positionality in the world require a radical shift in awareness of disparate contributing factors to an artwork’s becoming as well as ethical relationality and duties of care surrounding the meshwork in which the artwork exists (Ingold 2011). That is the case, for example, of the supply chain in access to art materials. In an interview in 2009, Black pondered her use of chalk from the Early Learning Centre (now no longer trading): ‘I suppose if someone was dying from making it .  .  . if it was little children with their fingers bleeding in China. . . . Maybe it is, I don’t know, I haven’t looked into that. . . . That would be quite bad.’22 Do artists, as much as conservators and museum professionals, have a responsibility to a harm avoidance principle, in which moral agents have a ‘moral duty to avoid inflicting serious harm . . . on another human being or human beings . . . at least if she can avoid doing so without suffering comparable harm herself ’? (Cripps 2013: 11). Harm to others, namely non-human others, is also seen with issues of disposability, which are yet to be addressed in museums. If Contact Isn’t Lost’s polythene sheet begins to look less than ‘fresh’, how can it be disposed of in an ecologically sensitive manner? Its disposal would imply the need to source replacement polythene sheeting. Will there come a time when this type of non-recyclable material becomes obsolete? Conversely, if its production continues, who and what is negatively impacted by the manufacture of such material? Produced from ethylene, which is obtained mainly from petroleum, this has ethical implications for the environment and human alike: fossil fuel extraction is cited as one of the major causes of climate change and why, in accordance with the Paris Agreement goals, its use is to be ended within a generation (Muttitt and Kartha 2020: 1024–42). Assuming that climate change is also an issue of decision-making (Brown, Adger, and Cinner 2019: 61–3) and in line with the harm avoidance principle, how are conservation practitioners to navigate the culture of single-use materials, replacement, disposal of exhibition copies (in keeping with copyright restrictions), or ethically questionable material sourcing as outlined earlier? Is the allure of the authentic so powerful that it surpasses warranted concerns about the loan of objects, arguably one of the most polluting museum activities? Is it appropriate for artworks to be preserved and stored for future generations at all costs? While Black cites a recycling ethic behind her work, where everyday detritus such as cardboard and polythene sheets are made precious, the very act of ‘making precious’ has conversely cemented potentially damaging materials and practices as sacrosanct within the museum. If we were to consider the possibility of radical relationality afforded by posthumanism, the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human in the construction of worlds would mean that harming others would inevitably ultimately harm the object itself.

 Affirming Future(s) 173 As mentioned in the introduction, conservators are accountable for their exclusions; they are responsible for understanding how they mis- or under-represent other existences, or how they are harming non-human others, namely through the maintenance of practices that contribute towards our climate catastrophe. Barad’s proposal of an ‘ethics of entanglement’ precisely targets an individual’s accountability across space, time, and different ways of seeing and being in the world. She posits that an ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future. . . . Our debt to those who are already dead and those who are not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are. What if we were to recognize that differentiating is a material act that is not about radical separation, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments? (Barad 2011: 150)

Accepting the ethical responsibility that comes every time we perform exclusions, or misrecognize others, is, for Barad, essential for creating a just world. In the framework of posthumanist thought, this can be done by recognizing and connecting differences, while also approaching our activities as being inherently relational. Barad and other posthumanist scholars (such as Geerts and van der Tuin, or Haraway)23 propose processes of highlighting previously excluded possibilities and connecting them to ongoing phenomena as a way of bringing new perspectives to the fore (Barad 2007). As they argue, this is a process of diffraction related to the physical phenomenon of the same name, where a single beam of light produces an ever-widening wave that extends beyond that initial point of encounter. In this metaphor for diffractive thinking, the posthumanist conservation prism has the potential for positive impact not only within the confines of conservation practice itself but also beyond its edges towards wider museal values and, potentially, even bending around obstacles such as museum structures. In practice, this could mean, for example, the development of new categories of knowledge for artworks – or even the staying with the troubles of ambiguity and resisting categorization altogether (Haraway 2016). This could also mean to resist the allure of fixity and to allow artworks to be manipulated, changed, or, potentially, remade (or destroyed!) by their users – that being so-called ‘source communities’, artists, or visitors. This could be refusing to use any conservation materials that are not part of a circular economy or, otherwise, that do not have clean and fair-trade principles. Or this could even mean to accept that the museum is not the place to care for these objects and artworks as holdings, but can be a steward of these artistic manifestations, where the care for the artworks is as distributed as it is their ownership. Rather than shoe-horning the ‘polymorphic’ No Ghost Just a Shell into preconceived boundaries based on out-moded modernist taxonomies, or the use and replacement of ethylene, an awareness and understanding of the sympoiesis of this meshwork of making, becoming, and caring is vital. This needs to be reflected in the rewriting of the various codes of ethics for conservation (many of which haven’t been updated for decades),24 as well as educating conservators in their response-abilities during their training.

174

Posthumanism in Practice

This approach to ethical accountability links to a relational approach to conservation. A possible strategy to bring together apparently competing approaches to care can come through an awareness of these exclusions. The response-ability of conservators would be realized by considering the multiple possibilities for the artwork and the interactions that make it what it could be.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how current conservation practice upholds humanistic notions when caring for objects in the contemporary museum. Conservation practices tend to recognize the existence of a singular and exceptional authenticity in artworks, promote traditional categories of knowledge, and, in some cases (like what happened with Black’s Contact Isn’t Lost) change the characteristics of the work for it to better fit the expectations of a museum collection. Some of those practices are developed by museum staff, while others are championed by human and non-human others, such as artists, storage systems, communities, collection management apparatus, visitors, the artworks’ composite materials. Our contribution has proposed an alternative practice: a posthumanist conservation approach. A posthumanist conservation approach resists essentialism in favour of facilitating difference and embracing expanded notions of authenticity in the museum. A posthumanist conservation practice fosters collective engagement through collective caring, acknowledging the meshwork of creative practice and its care and seeking expert knowledges from individuals and communities at various turns of the artwork’s becoming, from acquisition of source material, communities involved in its ongoing, and its reception. A posthumanist conservation methodology sees the pain of unlearning the structures of the museum as a form of becoming, and affirms difference and distinctiveness. To use Braidotti’s words on affirmative ethics, a posthumanist, affirmative, relational, subjective, and, ultimately, ethical conservation approach ‘consists not in denying negativity, but in reworking it outside the dialectical oppositions; . . . it is not about the avoidance of pain, but rather a different way of reworking it. . . . Ethics is not just the application of moral protocols, norms and values, but rather the force that contributes to conditions of affirmative becoming’ (see Braidotti 2019). In the case of a posthumanist conservation practice, we argue that the first step on the path towards this ideal is to consider conservation from all-to-all. This relational conservation would encompass parity of participation in conservation decision-making, and recognize the shared ownership of cultural heritage. A posthumanist ethics of care is one that cares for objects alongside people, knowledge, and nature. A posthumanist conservation approach is one in which the object works as a prism that diffracts conservation practice as an ethical commitment to the world. Similarly, it is one that recognizes the object and all the material assemblages that co-constitute it through its lineage. This implies shifting the focus from harm to objects, to the harm of humans and non-humans that allowed the object to get to us at that precise moment in time and space. All this while caring for the people who created them, and the workers who produced the materials needed for their creation and ongoing care. A posthumanist conservation

 Affirming Future(s) 175 practice is caring for the planet that provided the resources for their production and continuous becoming, for all the humans and non-humans that are connected and entangled with their various ontologies. Caring for all, through conservation.

Notes 1 The authors have contributed equally to this chapter and should both be considered as first authors. 2 The present approach to Barad’s agential realism was first explored in Marçal’s PhD – From intangibility to materiality and back again: preserving Portuguese performance artworks from the 1970s (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2018) – and subsequent publications, the most relevant being ‘Towards a relational ontology of conservation,’ in Transcending Boundaries: Integrated Approaches to Conservation. ICOM-CC 19th Triennial Conference Preprints, Beijing, 17–21 May 2021, ed. J. Bridgland (Paris: International Council of Museums, 2021): n.p.n. 3 For more on material histories see Hélia Marçal, ‘Documentation Tool: Material History’, in Documentation and Conservation of Performance (March 2016–March 2021), a Time-based Media Conservation project at Tate, https://www​.tate​.org​.uk​ /about​-us​/projects​/documentation​-conservation​-performance​/material​-history (accessed 10 August 2021). 4 According to Karen Barad, Response-Ability is one’s ability to respond to the Other in their own situatedness in time and space. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 5 By ‘ethico-onto-epistemo-logy’, Barad means that the being and becoming of human and non-humans is intrinsically related to the ways of knowing them, and that, as all knowledge-making processes are situated, such onto-epistemology always has an ethical dimension. Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31. doi:10.1086/345321 and Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 6 For more on affirmative ethics see Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, and for diffraction see, for example, Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 7 See for example: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ithaka S+R. (2019). Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018, Report. https://mellon​.org​/media​/filer​ _public​/e5​/a3​/e5a373f3​-697e​-41e3​-8f17​-051587468755​/sr​-mellon​-report​-art​-museum​ -staff​-demographic​-survey​-01282019​.pdf (accessed 22 April 2021). 8 Henri Neuendorf, ‘Art Demystified: What Do Curators Actually Do?’, Artnet, 10 November 2016, https://news​.artnet​.com​/art​-world​/art​-demystified​-curators​ -741806 (accessed 10 August 2021). 9 The May 2011 statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, in the United States) place the conservators’ average income at $42,450 per year, while curator’s average income in the same report reaches $53,540. Do note that BLS pairs conservators with museum technicians, which might impact the statistics. The same salary discrepancy, however, can be seen between archivists and curators. For more on this see Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Occupational Employment and Wages (May 2011), https://www​.bls​.gov​/opub​/ted​/2012​/ted​ _20120329​.htm (accessed 10 August 2021).

176

Posthumanism in Practice

10 See Tate, ‘Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum’, https:// www​.tate​.org​.uk​/research​/reshaping​-the​-collectible (accessed 10 August 2021). 11 For an analysis on the pitfalls of this view of conservation as being the in backstage, or ‘behind-the-scenes’, see Rebecca Fifield, ‘No More “Behind the Scenes”: How Word Choice Matters in Presenting Collection Stewardship’, Conservation: Reactive and Proactive, AIC 48th Annual Meeting (2020). 12 The expression ‘knowledges’ derives from Donna Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. doi:10.2307/3178066. 13 An exception, for example, would be the Dallas Museum of Art where the Paintings Conservation Studio is located within the gallery and has a retractable windowed wall so that visitors can interact with conservators if there is a project underway of particular interest. Of particular note is the restoration and documentation project Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece, a highly collaborative initiative supported by The Getty Foundation, whereby the technical analysis, high resolution documentation, and project reports are openly accessible on the project website: http://legacy​.closertovaneyck​.be/​#home​/sub​=teaser (accessed 10 August 2021). 14 See, for example, Fernando Dominguez Rubio, Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 15 See for example: Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003); Pip Laurenson, ‘Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations’, Tate Papers 6 (2006), http://www​.tate​.org​.uk​/download​/file​/fid​/7401; Tatja Scholte and Glenn Wharton, Inside Installations: Theory and Practice in the Care of Complex Artworks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Vivian Van Saaze, Installation Art and the Museum: Presentation and Conservation of Changing Artworks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013); Hanna Hölling, ‘Transitional media: Duration, recursion, and the paradigm of conservation’, Studies in Conservation 61 (2016): 79–83. 16 See for example the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA) https://www​.incca​.org/; The Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (Dutch abbreviation: SBMK); The Network for Conservation of Contemporary Art Research (NeCCAR), a three-year international research network (2012–14) funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) which sought to develop joint research projects and a training curriculum on the theory, methodology, and ethics of the conservation of contemporary art. The latter led to the research and training programme New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network, with fifteen funded doctoral research projects: http://nacca​.eu​/about/ (accessed 10 August 2021). 17 Ingold uses meshwork as a metaphor to describe the entanglements of individuals and knowledges that are created through encounters with others. Tim Ingold, Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011). 18 Sympoiesis is a term coined by Haraway, which pertains to the complexity of processes of making-with within systems of being and knowing. In Haraway’s words, ‘[n]othing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. . . . Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively

 Affirming Future(s) 177

19 20

21 22 23 24

unfurls and extends it’. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 58. See correspondence in Contact Isn’t Lost accession file between Karla Black and Shona Cameron, National Galleries’ Online Curator. Artspace Editors, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist on the Historic Import of AnnLee, Pierre Huyghe and Philipe Parreno's Self-Aware Manga Creation’, Artspace, 27 August 2015, https://www​.artspace​.com​/magazine​/art​_101​/book​_report​/no​-ghost​-just​-a​-shell​ -phaidon​-53070 (accessed 10 August 2021). Noted by Senior Conservator Lorraine Maule in the work’s condition report when acquired in 2009. Karla Black interview with Rebecca Gordon, digital video and audio recording, Glasgow, 16 February 2009: 00:56:55. See, for example, Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin, ‘Diffraction and reading diffractively’, in New Materialism: How Matter Comes to Matter. Almanac, http:// newmaterialism​.eu​/almanac​/d​/diffraction (accessed 26 May 2021). E.g. the most up-to-date version of the American Institute of Conservation (AIC) Code of Ethics was revised in 1994.

References Ahmed, S. (1998), Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barad, K. (2003), ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3): 801–31. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2011), ‘Nature's Queer Performativity’, Qui Parle, 19 (2): 121–58. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, K., W.N. Adger and J.E. Cinner (2019), ‘Moving Climate Change Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons’, Global Environmental Change: Human and Policy Dimensions, 54: 61–3. Clavir, M. (2002), Preserving What is Valued: Museums, Conservation and First Nations, Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press. Crenshaw, K. (1989), ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1 (8): 139–67. Cripps, E. (2013), Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eastop, D. (2009), ‘The Cultural Dynamics of Conservation Principles in Reported Practice’, in A. Richmond and A. Bracker (eds), Conservation Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths, 150–62, Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Fekrsanati, F. and H. Marçal (2022), ‘Affirming Change in Participatory Practice of Cultural Conservation’, in C. Rausch, R. Benschop, E. Sitzia, and V. van Saaze (eds), Participatory Practices in Art and Cultural Heritage – Learning Through and from Collaboration, 127–42. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

178

Posthumanism in Practice

Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press. Ingold, T. (2011), Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, New York: Routledge. Laurenson, P. (2008), ‘Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-based Media Installations’, in J. Schachter and S. Brockmann (eds), (Im)permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time, 150–64, Pittsburgh: Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University. Laurenson, P. (2013), ‘Emerging Institutional Models and Notions of Expertise for the Conservation of Time-based Media Works of Art’, Techne, 37: 36–42. Marçal, H. (2021), ‘Becoming Difference: On the Ethics of Conserving the In-Between’, Studies in Conservation, doi:10.1080/00393630.2021.1947074. Muttitt, G. and S. Kartha (2020), ‘Equity, Climate Justice and Fossil Fuel Extraction: Principles for a Managed Phase Out’, Climate Policy, 20 (8): 1024–42. Phillips, J. (2015), ‘Reporting Iterations: A Documentation Model for Time-based Media Art’, Revista de História Da Arte, 168–79, Available online: http://revistaharte​.fcsh​.unl​ .pt​/rhaw4​/RHAw4​.pdf. van Saaze, V. (2009), ‘Doing Artworks: An Ethnographic Account of the Acquisition and Conservation of No Ghost Just a Shell’, Krisis, 1: 20–32.

Section III

Education

180

11

Water, ice, and dead ‘tadpoles’ Discovering within undecided boundaries in early childhood education for sustainability research Debra Harwood

From my researcher (sometimes educator) perspective, I revisit stories of practice from a three-year ‘unintentional’ post-qualitative study of young children’s intra-actions in a Canadian forest using a posthumanist reframing. Throughout this chapter, and inspired by visual artist Susan Quinn (2016) (Figure 11.1), who described depictions of bodies as porous, I (re)imagine children and my own intra-actions1 with human and non-human matter as ‘multiplicities of undecided boundaries’; matter on the move, free-flowing, influencing, and modifying2 entities encountering and entangling with one another. Posthumanism invites new ways to ‘think with’ research, children, and the planet with an openness and fluidity that Quinn’s art also inspires. Equally, I draw inspiration from children’s ways within the world, their thinking, feeling, sensing, and entangled embodiments with the real and imagined, the spaces and places they inhabit, and the living and non-living matter they encounter (Hackett 2015). Yet, I was trained as both an early childhood educator and qualitative researcher and now wonder: was I ‘ruined from the start’ (St. Pierre 2014: 3)? Certainly, I framed the original intent of the inquiry with a focus on children’s experiences in the woods, what they thought and how their playful engagements in the outdoors might provoke learning opportunities. (Un)fortunately, in the midst of the study and faced with the frustration of trying to find a suitable way to discuss method and analysis, I stumbled upon the work of posthumanist scholars. These scholars facilitated a freeing of my constructivist thinking and the constraints of searching for the ‘regime of truth’, one that often privileges language and human centrism within research processes (St. Pierre 2014). Moreover, the usual demarcation of the world, that is human/non-human, logic/sense, indoor/outdoor, learning/play, and so on, no longer made sense in the entangled woods (McLure 2013). The research processes, like the teaching practices and children’s intra-actions, evolved enabling a type of experience that was ‘on the move’ (Mcphie and Clarke 2020; Reinersten 2014).

182

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 11.1  Porous Bodies (2016). Reprinted with permission by Susan Quinn.

Researching and teaching within multiplicities of undecided boundaries Early childhood education (ECE), particularly teaching for sustainability, is fraught with binaries and hierarchies, for example: child-centred/teacher-directed, real/imagined, logic/sense, indoor/outdoor, learning/play and so on. Engaging young children with environmental and sustainability learning opportunities in early childhood education (increasingly referred to as early childhood education for sustainability or ECEfS) has historically been shaped by humanist traditions. Children are perceived as the future saviours of the damaged planet, whereby their affinity for nature and sense of responsibility to act towards saving the planet is achieved by immersing them in nature (Elliott 2017). These humanist traditions are critiqued for ‘placing humans strictly outside the natural world of which they are a part and may thereby inadvertently perpetuate the very alienation it seeks to overcome’ (Anderson, Comay, and Chiarotto 2017: 109). However, if we adopt Braidotti’s (2019) invitation to shed constraints of such dichotomized notions, human–non-human thinking can afford new opportunities to embrace ‘multi-dimensional complexity’ (10), where humans are recognized as ‘materially embedded and embodied, differential, affective and relational’ (16). But what does this recognition mean, and how might educators, children, and researchers ‘treat non-humans as knowledge collaborators’ (Braidotti 2019: 60)? Without these shifts, ECEfS is in danger of replicating the status quo, an approach that is flawed by

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 183 its ‘anthropocentric bias and [overemphasis of] the importance of children’s agency’ (Weldermariam 2020b: 7). Braidotti (2019) proposes the need for a kind of transversal non-human alliance – the embodied, embedded and transversal selves that we are, bonded by ontological relationality. Embodied and embedded because we are deeply steeped in the material world. Transversal because we connect but also differ from each other. And yet we are structurally related to one another, to the human and nonhuman world that we live in. We are after all variations on a common matter. In other words, we differ from each other all the more as we co-define ourselves within the same living matter – environmentally, socially and relationally. (38)

By recognizing the ‘embodied, embedded, relational, and affective positions of the child as a form of situated knowledge’ (Braidotti 2019: 16), educators and researchers can problematize the notion of the agentic child and embrace a view of the entangled child, provoking much-needed shifts in ECEfS. Braidotti (2019) highlights that this transference from a traditional focus on the bios (life of humans in organized society) to zoe (life of all living things) is urgent: it is only by understanding ourselves as members of a species (in relation with other species and entities) will humans be able to take accountability for the ‘disastrous planetary consequences of our species supremacy’ (14). Haraway (2015), a self-declared ‘compost-ist’ (versus a ‘posthuman-ist’)3 echoes this call by proposing philosophically and materially that all humans are compost. Humans, like all more-than-human counterparts, ‘become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthy worlding and unworlding’ (Haraway 2016: 97). Thus, we are merely part of the common world4 ‘natureculture’ collective and ‘staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We becomewith each other or not at all’ (Haraway 2016: 4). Making kin with oddkin is a liberating notion, a reimagining of sorts, and a way of moving away from human exceptionalism, individualization, and romanticism incumbent of ECEfS (Duhn and Quinones 2018). This shift affords new ways of thinking, expanding possibilities for the multiple and diverse encounters that can happen within teaching and learning. Thus, as Duhn and Quinones (2018), explain it is this ‘eye-to-eye with otherness’ within ‘encountering events across time and places’ (87) of the common world, such as those described later in the chapter between tadpoles, ice, and children that can ‘breathe life into the exhausted forms and habits of thinking and being with the world that we inhabit most of the time in our everyday life’ (88). This common world reconceptualization advocates for a ‘more-than-human relational ontology, and common world pedagogies reposition childhood and learning within inextricably entangled life-worlds’ (Taylor 2017: 1448). Thus, within this framing, every ‘thing–matter–child’ encounter (Tesar and Arndt 2016) invites new possibilities to ‘become-with’, opportunities to embrace and experiment with the unfamiliar, to change with and alongside human and more-than-human others. And

184

Posthumanism in Practice

like the hot compost pile which composts at an exponential rate (resultant from the enmeshment of specific materials and human actions), recognition within ECEfS of our human/more-than-human mutual entanglements/becomings and reliance on one another is on the cusp of greater appreciation (Weldemariam 2020b). Elsewhere, I have begun this exploration of what Braidotti (2019) describes as transversal non-human alliance by revisiting the intra-actions among children and matter that matters to them in a Canadian forest (Harwood and Collier 2019; Harwood 2019). I too have posited that it is within these moments of intra-actions of entanglements that learning happens and new knowledge emerges (Harwood, Barratt, and Collier 2019). For the child, these non-human actors are essential and a powerful part of the self, experience, and learning journey. Evidently, no one is arguing that the child becomes the stick (i.e. matter) or even thinks of themselves as a stick. Rather, new learning and teaching possibilities are apparent when we (re)consider the stick as an ‘agentic force acting relationally with children’s play and stories’ (Harwood and Collier 2017: 336). Perhaps young children already embrace Braidotti’s (2019) notion of ‘nonhumans as knowledge collaborators’ (60) much more readily than the adult researcher or educator. Young children seem less constrained by the polarizing mental habits of adults and readily embrace the real/imagined, living/non-living, thinking/feeling as having equal status. Braidotti (2019) proposed a need for a ‘defamiliarization of mental habits . . . granting equal status to natural and post-natural organisms is an explicitly post-anthropocentric move that illustrates the far-reaching implications of thinking in a posthuman frame’ (61). In the discussion as follows, I further experiment with this defamiliarization process of my own mental habits as a researcher/educator by embracing a posthumanist frame to re-examine the intra-play of children/researcher and some of the non-human inhabitants of the forest (e.g. water, ice, and dead ‘tadpoles’5). How might ECEfS utilize the notion of free-flowing children/researcher intra-acting with the non-human world, influencing and modifying capabilities of one another and learning to affect and be affected by others in the construction of meaning? By doing so, might we be better positioned to challenge the historical approaches to ECEfS that are rooted in ‘essentialist ontological assumptions that separate the child from non-human nature’ (Weldemariam 2020: 935). Braidotti (2019) offers ‘thinking in posthuman times is about increasing the capacity to take in the intensity of the world and take on its objectionable aspects. Thinking is about increasing our relational capacity, so as to enhance our power (potential) for freedom and resistance’ (62). Embracing this intensity and potential within my own thinking as a researcher/educator first requires a shedding of the constraints.

Shedding the constraints of human exceptionalism Posthumanism helps shift the humanistic focus of ECEfS research to a ‘common world’ orientation (Haraway 2008; Braidotti 2013), meaning we must ‘reconsider the ways in which children are both constituted by, and learn within, this more-than-human world’ (Taylor, Blaise, and Giugni 2013: 49). Similarly, new materialism, whether considered

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 185 a branch of posthumanism as some scholars’ advocate (e.g. Braidotti 2013; Lenz-Lenz Taguchi 2014; Taylor and Hughes 2016) or a distinct field (DeLanda 2006; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012) also challenges human centrism and privilege. New materialist feminists and ecofeminists in particular (e.g. Braidotti, Barad, Bennett, and Haraway) reconceptualize matter as vibrant and agentic actants entangled and embedded within the human-more-than-human networks. Canagarajah writes, ‘a material orientation encourages us to consider activity as embedded in physical life, with all its messy fluidity and complex unpredictability’ (2018: 271). Theoretically, both posthumanism and new materialism stress the importance of a relational ontology, an intra-active process of becoming that disrupts human exceptionalism. This type of recognition of the distributed agency among human and the more-than-human is what some consider a ‘flat’ ontology (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005) of ‘egalitarian connectivity’ (Springett 2015: 630), an important consideration if we are to shed the typical constraints of conducting research or consider new ways of teaching/learning. Perhaps, ‘flat’ is an inadequate metaphor to describe the type of disruption of hierarchal epistemes that is necessary. Braidotti’s argument for an ‘ontology of materially embedded, differential system of composing living matter’ (2018: 180) affirms a view of distributed agency among humans and more-than-humans, a mutuality within meaning-making6 processes that accounts for the reciprocal influencers and entanglements that occur within the world (Canagarajah 2018). I return here to the image of porous and apply this to my thinking of ontologies, whereby meaning and knowledge can be recognized as evolving from the mutual interactions, the things that emerge in-between (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010). This should not discount the human within this idea of interconnected life. In fact, as Lenz Taguchi argues ‘we seem unable to escape that anthropocentrism that comes as an effect of our own capacity to language and be creative as thinking and writing beings, artists, and scientists in the world’ (2017: 702). Perhaps, this polarizing of ontologies and types of knowledge productions is unnecessary (Olkowski 2016) and simply telling the stories from being ‘of the world’ (Barad 2007: 185) can occur. The grounding of posthumanist research in lived experiences ‘of the world’ seems paramount, particularly within education. This intensity with ‘of the world’ in-betweenness is only imaginable by being, feeling, sensing, imagining, experimenting, and humbling oneself as a researcher, remaining fully cognizant that one’s role is most likely the least important (Somerville 2017). Lenz Taguchi suggests we act against ‘normalizing forms of research practices’ (2017: 700), what St. Pierre refers to as ‘conventional humanist methodology’ (2016a: 111). Lenz Taguchi and St. Pierre invite others to be experimental and unbounded within inquiries, to resist positivist categories and ways of thinking constrained by processes such as problem statement, research design, data collection, and so on, structures that often constrain or limit the possibilities (St. Pierre 2014). Admittedly, in my own work, this posthumanist lens has come after the fact, and the original intent of the research described in this chapter was rooted in social constructivism and an interpretative paradigm of children’s experiences and nature/forest pedagogies. I aspire, here, to actively experiment with the unknown potentialities of posthumanist thinking and engage in a process of becoming unstuck as a researcher.

186

Posthumanism in Practice

Each week for three years, I, and at times various members of the research team, trudged along with a group of children, educators, and a wagon full of materials out to the forest on a University campus. The forest area, adjacent to the well-manicured grounds, can be considered a somewhat ‘wild’ space where the trees and fauna are left relatively undisturbed. There was a system of hiking and mountain bike trails that cut through the forest with the occasional fallen tree across those roughly groomed pathways being removed by a volunteer group of caretakers. The trails are used by both the public and University members (as well as being home to many diverse species of flora and fauna). The children’s programme in the forest includes adventures beyond the human demarcations into places in the woods that are relatively untouched and undisturbed by people. Although, given the human history of the land itself is approximately 10,000 years and the geological history is estimated as 430 to 450 million years, I use the term ‘wild’ loosely. Simply put, the spaces the children and educators occupied offered abundant opportunities for encounters with the more-than-human world. The small group of eight, 3–5-year-old children in the forest programme varied each year, as graduates would move off to nearby kindergarten classrooms within the formal public education system each September. The research team cobbled together a myriad of tools to get close to the free-flowing action in the forest, using photos, videos, side-by-side interviewing, observational notetaking, and the children taking turns wearing a GoPro camera. Additionally, the educators and researchers kept diaries of their own experiences and we also surveyed parents and administrators every year. Throughout the research process I struggled with naming the ‘methodology’, at times referring vaguely to the process or simply discussing how various methodological tools helped slow the process (Harwood and Collier 2017; 2019) and supported the notion that ‘reality is composed not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but things-in-phenomena’ (Barad 2007: 140). It was this very process of trying to capture ‘things-in-phenomena’ that kept the team trialling tools, experimenting with methods, and re-immersing ourselves with intensity. We likened our journey to the messiness of being in the woods itself; sounds, sights, smells, bodies, matter, animals, insects, and so on, constantly in motion and entangled with both vibrancy and intensity. I recall the moment when I realized the limitations of the methodological traditions I had so relied upon in the past. Seeing myself captured within children’s videos and photos was a decentring experience, one that disrupted my ‘habitual anthropocentric style of seeing’ highlighting the need for what Hultman and Lenz Taguchi refer to as a ‘diffractive seeing and nomadic thinking’ (2010: 527). Hultman and Lenz Taguchi borrow from the theory of diffraction in physics that has also influenced the work of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, among others. In physics, diffraction occurs with sound, light, and small particles (e.g. atoms) and basically refers to the process of spreading waves around obstacles (Ball 2013). What occurs in the diffraction process is a type of transformation from the ‘interference’ that is always present, thus allowing something new to emerge. Like Barad’s (2007) example of an ocean wave navigating around rocks, I think of diffraction in terms of the child’s water painting, the drops of paint hitting the page, spreading, bending, then overlapping, and finally coming

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 187

Figure 11.2 Child’s outdoor watercolour painting of a pond (2017). Courtesy Debra Harwood.

together again, transforming not only the paint but also the paper and child holding the paper (Figure 11.2). The concept of nomadic thinking is another profound notion that helps disrupt or reorient ideas about methodological traditions. Nomadic thinking, influenced by philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and Braidotti (2002) helps shift ideas of individual subjectivity to one of relationality or what Hultman and Lenz Taguchi argued is ‘another kind of knowing, knowing of what emerges in-between’ (2010: 538); the middle ground of what is possible between objects and subjects, human and the more-than-human. Although, I have been a long proponent of conducting research with and alongside children, resultant of the rights discourse7 that has historically influenced the methodological approaches in ECE, an ‘enlightenment ontology of an autonomous rational human in control of his or her world’ (Somerville 2017: 399) counters this idea of entanglement. Thus, we (myself and fellow researchers) must reject this notion that the child is the sole purveyor of agency and that their social world consists of only humans with no other forces at play (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010). Like the other humans and matter in the forest, as a researcher, I too was part of the intraaction, what was emerging from the entanglements. The mud-caked boots outside my office door at the university were a testament to the immersive entanglements of the researcher within the processes unfolding in the woods. Barad (2007) reminds us that ‘to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another as in the joining of two

188

Posthumanism in Practice

separate entities, but to lack an independent self-contained existence’ (Barad 2007: x). This ontoepistemological way of thinking mutually implicates knowing and being as inseparable, and to be entangled as a researcher does require different and more experimental ways of inquiring. How might researchers and educators pay attention to these things that emerge in-between? How do we take up invitations to ‘shake off old habits’ (Änggård 2016) or ‘stay with the trouble’ as Haraway suggests (2016)? St. Pierre (2011) uses the term mash-up to advocate for the fluidity and openness needed within this post-era. She challenges each researcher to curate their own ‘remix, mash-up, assemblage, a becoming of inquiry that is not a priori, inevitable, necessary, stable, or repeatable but is, rather, created spontaneously in the middle of the task at hand’ (St. Pierre 2011: 620). Relatedly, Powell and Somerville (2020) describe their methodology as a ‘deep hanging out’ with young children, a process where the researcher remains open and curious without preconceived notions, willing to embrace the surprises that emerge. I extend this notion of deep hanging out to include the immersion of oneself alongside the freeflowing children and matter in the woods and taking part in this form of posthuman convergence that is ‘productive, dynamic, and inter-relational’ (Braidotti 2019: 39). Engaging in this deep hanging out means being open to ‘matter on the move’, embracing both nomadic thinking and troubling processes. St. Pierre (2016b; 2021) rejects the very idea of methodology, and she opts for a post-qualitative inquiry as a starting point. Evidently, these connotations of a ‘mash-up’ or ‘deep hanging out’ resonate with me as a researcher given the powerful imagery evoked by Quinn’s (2016) Porous Bodies that I used at the start of the chapter. Perhaps, only when we embrace this type of fluid (nomadic) thinking/processes and refuse to start with a preexisting methodology will researchers remain sensitive to new ways of understanding our world and be able to actualize the shifts needed in early childhood curricula and teaching (and ECEfS).

Hanging out with water, ice, and the dead ‘tadpoles’ on the move As part of this ‘deep hanging out’ process, I begin this section by first describing more globally how humans and more-than-humans in the woods were free-flowing, influencing, and modifying entities encountering and entangling with one another. Subsequently, I offer a diffractive reading of a specific entanglement with dead ‘tadpoles’ as a way of illustrating and provoking much-needed shifts in decentring the human in ECEfS research. Water seemed to invite and attract attention. There were several spaces within the forest where water was found, and intra-action with water was both constant and variable. At times, the water appeared to invite more passive observation, for example, children monitoring changes in water levels of one of the two unnatural lakes used as a reservoir for hydroelectric power generation.8 The rising and lowering water levels throughout the year and how this contributed to energy generation peaked children’s

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 189 curiosities and predictions. ‘Let’s check the water levels’ was a common request among the children. The nearby unnatural lake also offered a treasure trove of ecological features that captured children’s imaginations and attention including unique fauna such as the swamp rose-mallow that grew in among the cattails near the swampier areas. The lake was also a sanctuary for several bird species with two large white swans a favourite among the forest group, often appearing when the children were lakeside (in the spring with several cygnets in tow). Additionally, an eel was a frequent visitor with several of the lake’s many species of fish also spotted in the water near the shoreline. Low water levels that revealed human waste at the shoreline (e.g. chairs, tyres, disposable bottles), incensed children and motivated them into action (i.e. collecting and disposing of the waste) as they appeared keenly aware of the habitat’s ecological interdependence from their multiple encounters with the many species that relied on the lake. The water-nature-power muddle also fuelled ethical dilemmas given most of the children lived nearby in the town that drew power from this locale. Water also invited exploration and response depending on its form especially when children’s senses encountered, manipulated, or immersed their bodies in water, ice, or muddy water. Water invited deep thought and conversations and an ever-changing presence influencing the children’s play. Water was storied within play, negotiated or bartered for when access to particular bodies of water/ice/mud were esteemed as more valuable. The ebbs and flows of water were explored as children traced or predicted water’s movement from one locale to another. Water had ‘rights’ within the play explorations of children and protecting and preserving the water was paramount. For example, water found within a tree was carefully returned (to protect the tree) and signs were posted, and letters narrated by the children (and written by the educator) were sent to the hydroelectric company when nearby saplings were damaged in the process of gaining greater access to the waterpower station. Children also advocated within their own families for greater use of power-saving techniques. Water was fully embodied by the children in relations that are best described as ‘complex, entangled, mutually affecting and co-shaping’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. 2016: 150) (Figure 11.3).

Diffracted reading of the pond and dead ‘tadpoles’ The pond that we frequented throughout the year was intricately linked to two non-natural lakes that I referenced earlier; reservoir lakes that serve as part of the hydroelectric system. Although somewhat artificial with many anthropocentric influences, all the bodies of water are part of larger water ecosystems and entangled with many human and non-human systems, challenging any idea of finite boundaries for the water. The animals, birds, insects, fauna and aquatic organisms that are part of the overall ecosystem are very present near the small pond that was experienced in the woods (Figure 11.4). On one of the colder days in the winter season, the pond water responded accordingly and froze firmly, offering up a relatively smooth surface that invited navigating, sliding, exploring, and querying of the changes (Figure 11.5). The weather and temperatures in this part of Canada tend to be very erratic with quick sudden changes from quite tepid

190

Posthumanism in Practice

Figure 11.3  Children’s embodiment of water (2017). Courtesy Debra Harwood.

Figure 11.4  Discovery of the pond (2018). Courtesy Debra Harwood.

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 191

Figure 11.5  Encounters with pond/ice/tadpoles/children (2018). Courtesy Debra Harwood.

to freezing. And although these fluctuations in temperatures were commonplace, the change in the pond felt unexpected, the frozen surface making all of us query, ‘what world had we entered’? Perhaps, the icy pond had narrated its own dissatisfaction with our presence as sounds of cracking and dull creaking were audible. Regardless, the icy pond offered countless possibilities for encounters and the children were immediately enthralled and fascinated. Conversely, the icy pond was approached with some apprehension from the educators, who first assessed the risks and felt compelled to warn ‘children to be careful’. Akin to my own thought development, these educators were also engaging in a process of learning to be affected (Latour 2004), pedagogically shifting to afford opportunities for visceral experiences of response-ability (Haraway 2008) with the non-human world for both themselves and children. Monumental paradigm shifts are required of the early childhood educator in flowing from child-centredness to ‘common worlds’ perspectives; a daunting task that requires time and space for everyone’s vulnerabilities. An awkward encounter with the ‘tadpoles’ occurred soon after the foray onto the ice as one child noted that the tadpoles that were alive in the pond during the last visit were now ‘dead and bleeding’. More children edged closer with mixed affect to view and comment on the tadpoles. On the GoPro recording, the children’s questions are heard as they shuffle and flail their bodies across the ice. Were the specks on the ice blood? Had the ‘tadpoles’ been pecked by birds, or had they fallen and died while skating on the ice? Were ambulances needed? The entire ice surface was examined for more dead tadpoles, tracing and guessing where the small creatures might have

192

Posthumanism in Practice

entered or exited the pond. Ice-encrusted dead tadpoles were poked with sticks and sometimes fingers. Soon after, the children returned to gliding across the ice and their other play activities. What the children have labelled as ‘tadpoles’ were more likely small minnows, perhaps Northern Pike or some other perch species common within the lake habitat (NPCA 2012). The pond itself appears and disappears at times dependent on the control of water levels for the demands of the hydroelectric system. The anthropocentric impacts are evident, and a large flush of water causes spillage into the nearby forest (i.e. the pond), washing with it many biological organisms like fish, algae and macroinvertebrates. Notwithstanding, all these topics, queries, and issues offer multiple invitations or provocations for learning, particularly relevant for children of the Anthropocene; informally recognized as the new epoch when ‘natural forces and human forces became intertwined’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010: 2231). And throughout the year in the woods, the educators did capitalize upon many of these inquiries as learning opportunities (e.g. habitats, animal tracks, conservation). Yet, I propose that educators and researchers alike avoid starting off with the more cognitive aspects of living and learning (e.g. correctly labelling the ‘tadpole’ as a minnow). What if we take up St. Pierre’s research invitation to do ‘something different from the beginning’ (2021: 7), to be curious, playful and inventive with ‘new forms of inquiry that might create a new world and a people yet to come’ (2021: 7). Seemingly, it is through these entanglements, the awkward relations of staying with the trouble (Haraway 2008) with other living and non-living species (and matter) that offer new ways of knowing. The ice encounter afforded a close-up meeting with the ‘tadpoles’, the child’s body feeling and hearing the ice crack beneath them, seeing and sensing the small dead minnows just below the surface, enabling and provoking knowledge of the fragility of the ecosystem that they shared in common. As Somerville contends ‘being, knowing, and doing as inseparable’ (2017: 399). Perhaps, children came to understand the certainty and precarity of the ice, tadpoles, the pond, not by standing outside the world but through their developing ‘understanding of themselves as enmeshed within those phenomena’ (Weldermariam 2020a: 14). Certainly, subsequent child encounters with ice and others (e.g. deer) in the woods that year were tempered with the new collaborative knowledge from the ice/tadpole/child entanglement.

Mutually response-able common worlds ECEfS has traditionally focused on the child and finding ways to shift educational practices and research to be considerate of the ‘flattened co-constitutive relationship’ of equally important humans and more than-humans will be challenging (Pedersen 2014 as cited in Lenz Taguchi 2017: 701). How can we possibly begin to think with the more-than-human ‘other’ if we continue to perceive the human as uniquely agentic and separate from the world (Pedersen 2014)? In the forest, the common world included the agentic child and agentically more-than-human other, forces that were immanently entangled, mutually sensitive of one another in the way that Haraway (2008) describes as ethical and relational ‘response-ability’. Response-ability is less

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 193 about being responsible and more about learning how to respond, and cultivating the capacity to respond (Haraway 2018). This means thinking-with and learning-with all others of the posthuman world given both the relationality and interdependence of humans and more-than-humans. For educators, I have suggested a type of resistance to the familiar territorialization of teachable moments, instead pedagogically learning to be ‘differently attuned’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. 2016: 154). In ECEfS research, this also means a shift from being solely attuned to the child to paying attention to the collective human-morethan-human web of entanglements. Researchers will need to be curious and embrace practices that are unsettling and also imaginative, inventive, and more attuned with the common world.

Lingering thoughts Embracing new posthumanist ontologies means being open to shifts in thinking, exploring the spaces in-between the entanglements of humans and more-than-humans, and challenging the typical demarcation of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ (Lenz Taguchi 2017; Pedersen 2014) that has constrained teaching and learning for sustainability in ECE. As a free-flowing researcher inter/intra-acting with the human and non-human world, I am committed to the journey of (re)learning to/from affect and be affected by the influencing and modifying capabilities of all, becoming ‘more worldly’ (Haraway 2010) in the process.

Notes 1 Intra-action is a concept coined by Karen Barad in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). Barad’s notion of all phenomena intermingling and materially redefining one another through this ‘process of becoming meaningful’ (139) is particularly important in re-examining early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS). Here, I advocate for utilizing what ‘emerges in-between different bodies involved in mutual engagements and relations’ (Hultman and Taguchi 2010: 530) as provocations for teaching and learning. ‘Bodies’ refers to both human and more-than-human matter. 2 Symbolically, I adopted a varied style of font to demarcate a shift in my own thinking and academic writing style, the point where I began to embrace the invitation of playfulness, openness, and fluidity that Susan Quinn’s (2016) work inspired. 3 Notably, Haraway demonstrates what it is possible when we think of humans from an ecological lens. Haraway’s use of the compost-ist metaphor ‘enhances the notion of multi-species living as a dynamic mess of diverse bodies . . . The thickness and weight of Haraway's language counteracts the airiness of those who would construct a gap between human and non-human life’ (Kortekallio 2019: 230). 4 Borrowed from Latour (2005), ‘common worlds’ is the notion that the world encompasses humans and non-humans. 5 What the children label as ‘tadpoles’ are more likely small minnow fish typical of the water ecosystem where the inquires take place. I have intentionally opted to use tadpole throughout the chapter as one small act of defamiliarization and openness to something ‘new’.

194

Posthumanism in Practice

6 Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of meaning-making is applied where ‘meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility’ (149). 7 This Rights Discourse helped shape and influence methodological approaches where the power dynamics between child and researcher are somehow equalized or minimized (Christensen and James 2008; Malone 2013). 8 Information about the water system can be found: https://www​.guidetags​.com​/ mindmaps​/explore​/local​-landscape​-reports​-niagara​/3802​-goodson​-madeleine​-local​ -landscape​-report​-decew​-reservoirs​-lakes​-moodie​-and​-gibson

References Anderson, D., J. Comay and L. Chiarotto (2017), Natural Curiosity: The Importance of Indigenous Perspectives in Children’s Environmental Inquiry, Toronto: University of Toronto. Änggård, E. (2016), ‘How Matter Comes to Matter in Children’s Nature Play: Posthumanist Approaches and Children’s Geographies’, Children’s Geographies, 14 (1): 77–90. Ball, C.J. (2013), An Introduction to the Theory of Diffraction, London: Pergamon Press. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014), ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart’, Parallax, 20 (3): 168–87. Braidotti, R. (2002), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2018), ‘Affirmative Ethics, Posthuman Subjectivity, and Intimate Scholarship: A Conversation with Rosi Braidotti’, Advances in Research on Teaching, 31: 179–88. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press. Canagarajah, S. (2018), ‘Materializing ‘Competence’: Perspectives from International STEM Scholars’, The Modern Language Journal, 102 (2): 268–91. Christensen, P. and A. James (2008), Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices, New York: Routledge. DeLanda, M. (2006), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duhn I. and G. Quinones (2018), ‘Eye-to-Eye with Otherness: A Childhoodnature Figuration’, in A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone and E. Barratt Hacking (eds), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 1–16, Switzerland: Springer. Elliott, S. (2017), ‘An Australian Perspective: Seeking Sustainability in Early Childhood Outdoor Play Spaces’, in T. Waller, E. Arlemalm-Hagser, E.B.H. Sandseter, L. LeeHammond, K. Lekies and S. Wyver (eds), The Sage Handbook of Outdoor Play and Learning, 295–316, London: Sage. Hackett, A. (2015), ‘Children’s Embodied Entanglement and Production of Space in a Museum’, in J. Seymour, A. Hackett and L. Procter (eds), Children’s Spatialities, 75–91, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 195 Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2010), ‘When Species Meet: Staying with the Trouble’, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 28 (1): 53–5. https://doi​.org​/10​.1068​/d2706wsh Haraway, D. (2015), ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6: 159–65. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2018), ‘Staying with the Trouble for Multispecies Environmental Justice’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 8 (1): 102–5. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /2043820617739208. Harwood, D. (2019), ‘The Blue Car in the Forest-Exploring Sustainable Pedagogies in a Canadian Nature School’, NorDiNa, 15 (4): 403–17. Harwood, D., J. Barratt and D. Collier (2019), ‘Entanglements in the Forest: Children’s Embodiment of the Orange GoPro Camera’, International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education – Special Issue- Living within Precarious Times: Posthumanist Possibilities for Early Childhood Environmental Education, 7 (1): 57–72. Harwood, D. and D. Collier (2017), ‘The Matter of the Stick: Storying/Re-storying Children’s Literacies in the Forest’, JECL Special Issue: Early Literacy and the Posthuman: Pedagogies and Methodologies, 17 (3): 336–52. Harwood, D. and D. Collier (2019), ‘Talk into my GoPro, I’m Making a Movie!: Using Digital Ethnographic Methods to Explore Children’s Sociomaterial Experiences in the Woods’, in N. Kucirkova, J. Rowsell and G. Fallon (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood, 49–61, London: Routledge. Hultman, K. and H. Lenz Taguchi (2010), ‘Challenging Anthropocentric Analysis of Visual Data: A Relational Materialist Methodological Approach to Educational Research’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23 (5), 525–42. Kortekallio, K. (2019), ‘Book Review: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 26 (2), 229–31. Latour, B. (2004), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010), Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy, New York: Routledge. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2014), ‘New Materialisms and Play’, in L. Brooker, M. Blaise and S. Edwards (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Play and Learning in Early Childhood, 79–90, London: SAGE Publications. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2017), ‘This Is Not a Photograph of a Fetus’: A Feminist Reconfiguration of the Concept of Posthumanism as the Ultrasoundfetusimage’, Qualitative Inquiry, 23 (9): 699–710. MacLure, M. (2013), ‘Researching without Representation?: Language and Materiality in Post-Qualitative Methodology’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26 (6): 658–67. Malone, K. (2013), ‘The Future Lies in Our Hands’: Children as Researchers and Environmental Change Agents in Designing a Child-Friendly Neighbourhood’, Local Environment, 18 (3): 372–95. Marston, S.A., J.P. Jones and K. Woodward ([1965] 2005), ‘Human Geography Without Scale’, Transactions – Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4): 416–32. Mcphie, J. and D. Clark (2020), ‘Post-qualitative Inquiry in Outdoor Studies-A Radical (Non)methodology’, in B. Humberstone and H. Prince (eds), Research Methods in Outdoor Studies, 186–95, London: Routledge.

196

Posthumanism in Practice

Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority (2012), ‘Twelve Mile Creek 2012 Watershed Report Card’, Available online: https://npca​.ca​/images​/uploads​/common​/NPCA​-2012​ -Wa . . . (Accessed 1 March 2021). Olkowski, D. (2016), ‘Neo-Materialism and the Future of Feminist Phenomenology’, Peta Hinton and Karen Silberg (eds), Rizomes, Special Edition on Karen Barad, Issue 30. http://www​.rhizomes​.net​/issue30/ Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., A. Taylor and M. Blaise (2016), ‘Decentring the Human in Multispecies Ethnographies’, in C.A. Taylor and C. Hughes (eds), Posthuman Research Practices in Education, 149–67, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pedersen, H. (2014), ‘Posthumanistisk Pedagogisk Forskning: Några Ingångar’ [English Translation Guest Editor Introduction] Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige, 19 (2–3): 83–9. Powell, S. and M. Somerville (2020), ‘Drumming in Excess and Chaos: Music, Literacy, and Sustainability in Early Years Learning’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20 (4): 839–61. Quinn, S. (2016), ‘Porous Bodies’, in The Little Gallery Project Space, Devonport, TAS. Available online: https://tasmanianartsguide​.com​.au​/whats​-on​/exhibitions​/porous​ -bodies/ (Accessed 1 Sept 2021). Reinertsen, A.B. (2014), ‘Outdoor Becoming Thinking with Data Dewey Derrida Deleuze: Assessment for Health and Happiness’, Qualitative Inquiry, 20 (8): 1022–32. Somerville, M. (2017), ‘Thinking Critically with Children of the Anthropocene (Un) Learning the Subject in Qualitative and Postqualitative Inquiry’, International Review of Qualitative Research, 10 (4): 395–410. Springett, S. (2015), ‘Going Deeper or Flatter: Connecting Deep Mapping, Flat Ontologies and the Democratizing of Knowledge’, Humanities, 4 (4): 623–36. St. Pierre, E.A. (2011), ‘Post Qualitative Research: The Critique and the Coming After’, in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 611–26, London: Sage. St. Pierre, E.A. (2014), ‘A Brief and Personal History of Post Qualitative Research Toward Post Inquiry’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30 (3): 2–19. St. Pierre, E.A. (2016a), ‘The Empirical and the New Empiricisms’, Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 16 (2): 111–24. St. Pierre E.A. (2016b), ‘Rethinking the Empirical in the Posthuman’, in C.A. Taylor and C. Hughes (eds), Posthuman Research Practices in Education, 25–36, London: Palgrave Macmillan. St. Pierre, E.A. (2021), ‘Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New’, Qualitative Inquiry, 27 (1): 3–9. Taylor, A. (2013), Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood, London: Routledge. Taylor, A. (2017), ‘Beyond Stewardship: Common World Pedagogies for the Anthropocene’, Environmental Education Research, 23 (10): 1448–61. Taylor, A., M. Blaise and M. Giugni (2013), ‘Haraway’s “Bag Lady Story-Telling’: Relocating Childhood and Learning Within a ‘Post-Human Landscape”’, Discourse, 34 (1): 48–62. Taylor, C.A. and C. Hughes (2016), Posthuman Research Practices in Education, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Tesar, M. and S. Arndt (2016), ‘Vibrancy of Childhood Things’, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, 16 (2): 193–200. Weldemariam, K. (2020a), ‘Learning with Vital Materialities: Weather Assemblage Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education’, Environmental Education Research, 26 (7): 935–49.

 Water, Ice, and Dead ‘Tadpoles’ 197 Weldemariam, K. (2020b), Reconfiguring Environmental Sustainability in Early Childhood Education, Doctoral thesis, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. Zalasiewicz, J., M. Williams, W. Steffen and P. Crutzen (2010), ‘The New World of the Anthropocene’, Environmental Science and Technology, 44 (7): 2228–31.

12

Reflections on a language teacher education praxis from a posthumanist viewpoint Laryssa Paulino de Queiroz Sousa and Rosane Rocha Pessoa

The reflections presented in this chapter are grounded in posthumanist praxiologies (a term we use to think of theory and practice as intertwined and inseparable). We see posthumanism ‘as a project that questions what it means to be human, as it engages with ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad 2003; 2007) challenges that arise in contemporary times’, inasmuch as ‘there is a constant attempt to consider and address human and nonhuman entities [as co-constitutive elements]’ (Sousa and Pessoa 2019: 521). In relation to language teacher education, we perceive it not only as a nomadic and rhizomatic endeavour (Deleuze and Guattari 2005) but also as an impossible but necessary project (Lopes and Borges 2015) in the sense that we do not have control over the educated subject and the educational process, which means the experiences and events will always be different from what was planned beforehand. With this in mind, the second author of this article (professor henceforward) taught a course of Prática Oral 2 de Inglês (English Oral Practice 2) in an English teacher education undergraduate programme at a federal university in the Central West of Brazil. Although she had general aims for the course, the curriculum was developed with the student teachers according to what they brought to class in terms of language, knowledge, bodies, and according to the relations created and the entanglements generated in the group. Our objective is to discuss some of these elements and their correlations in the construction of the course, which resulted from unpredictable situations, local demands, conflicts, and micro- and macroforces, and required constant negotiation of diverse aspects and actions with the student teachers, including the dismantlement of boundaries concerning the students’ and the professor’s subjectivities (i.e. a disruption in the widely held perception of what they encompassed and where they began and ended, especially if we consider impermanence as the norm). It is important to emphasize that the posthumanist orientation we propose here does not refer to applying concepts but letting them wash over us so that they can redirect our thoughts. In this regard, this discussion represents an attempt to destabilize and possibly disrupt conceptual and tangible boundaries traditionally set in our educational context in order to promote other possibilities for conceiving and acting upon and with the human and non-human entities in it, or as Barad (2003;

 Reflections on a Language Teacher Education Praxis 199 2007) puts it, for intra-acting with them (once we consider their mutual constitution). To this end, the professor and the student teachers are perceived as transjective beings (Daigle 2017; 2018), that is, as embedded in and constituted by socio(discursive) material entanglements.

The study, the context, and the participants First, we should stress that this inquiry takes the shape of a cut (Barad 2003), and it is thus delineated by pragmatic boundaries (Canagarajah 2018b). This argument is important because although we are aware that these are artificial divides, since we are entangled in and with countless assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 2005), we need to set them so as to make the reflections presented intelligible.1 The context of this study pertains to the experience of a group of student teachers and their professor. In the second semester of 2019, she taught the course English Oral Practice 2, which is part of a four-year English teacher education undergraduate programme at a Brazilian federal university. The professor’s praxis was grounded in critical and decolonial perspectives on language education (Block 2017; hooks 1994; Pennycook 2001; Pessoa 2012; 2018; Walsh 2007, among others), and thus it concentrated on questions of power and inequities. Although she knew the lessons would be cut across by these standpoints, that she would encourage reflection on issues concerning language education and teacher education, and that the students would read and discuss different kinds of texts and teach microlessons, she had not devised a syllabus beforehand. Further, she had the intention of prioritizing negotiation of knowledge about social life in class – addressing language as social practice – in lieu of contents focused on standard language, especially its grammar and pronunciation (products of the coloniality of language)2. Hence, the course was developed from the intra-actions among the students, the professor, time, space, and the materialities of the classroom context. According to Barad (2007: 348, emphasis added), ‘In contrast to the usual interaction, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede but rather emerge through their intra-action’. For Pessoa (2018), critical language teacher education should be built upon identity practices and school practices. In her words, ‘These practices are rebuilt through the articulation among theories that underlie them and those that become necessary to deal with the various demands that arise from the practices’3 (Pessoa 2018: 192). Regarding this specific context, Pessoa and Pinho (forthcoming) discuss the praxiological and identity alignments and misalignments formed in those classes by reflecting on how the learners’ identities as students and teachers were performed in response to the praxiologies problematized in the classroom. For this inquiry, we draw on four sources of empirical material: an initial questionnaire, a lesson plan (prepared by two students), microlessons and lessons (taught by the student teachers), and a final interview – or intraview, as Kuntz and Presnall (2012) would put it. Nine student teachers participated in this study: Ane,

200

Posthumanism in Practice

Catarina, Izabelly, Maria, Melyssa, Morgana, Rogmana, Felipe, and Juca (seven women, one man, and one non-binary person, respectively).4 In relation to their previous English language learning, in the questionnaire, five of them mentioned that they had attended language schools, and four of them said they had learnt what they knew by themselves, by reading books, watching videos, movies, and TV series, playing video games, etc., but also by having lessons during their primary and secondary education. The information about their trajectories is important because it is fundamentally related to their identities as English speakers, their conceptions of language, and their teaching praxes. In this chapter, our aim is to address aspects pertaining to language teacher education as a nomadic and rhizomatic endeavour (Deleuze and Guattari 2005), highlighting its contingent constitution, and related to the subjectivities of those involved in the process. Language teacher education necessarily involves unpredictability in terms of content, procedures, expectations, people’s subjectivities, and so on. In this respect, we must add that what we mean by subjectivity does not refer specifically to an individual but to a subject who is constituted by countless kinds of relations and entanglements. Therefore, this discussion is justified by the need to understand language teacher education in more flexible terms as well as subjectivity from a more decentralized standpoint. In posthumanist terms, such a stance entails a different ontoepistemological perspective, according to which the constitution of human beings depends on their relations and intra-actions with other human and non-human entities. We argue that this understanding can help offer new possibilities for engaging with and in language education. With this in mind, we then discuss the experience of the group in question through the lenses of the perspective mentioned.

Language teacher education: A nomadic and rhizomatic endeavour Lopes and Borges explain that, to a great extent, teacher education has been ‘governed by a priori principles that are made possible by means of fixed identity models of society and the individual subject’ (2015: 493). In our context of language teacher education, it is not unusual for teachers and professors to prepare curricula, syllabuses, teach specific contents and/or use certain teaching materials and so on, that is, decide everything beforehand, without even knowing who their students are going to be. Therefore, given that external elements that do not relate to their realities recurrently take centre stage, learners’ knowledges, stories, experiences, interests, needs, and so on are often neglected, especially in language education classes. For Lopes and Borges (2015), hegemonic forces and relations of power that pervade society at large, and hence reproduce and reinforce specific discourses, are clearly present in the educational context, and they not only influence but also often determine the decisions made and positions adopted by teacher educators. However, as Pennycook asserts, once we understand how structure may limit and/or produce (rather than absolutely determine) our actions, we can work towards ‘a more multilayered model

 Reflections on a Language Teacher Education Praxis 201 in which the issue is [. . .] a poststructuration of [the] constant recycling of different forms of power through our everyday words and actions’ (2001: 120). In light of this argument, we stress that entanglements of structures and agencies are always produced contingently in language teacher education. Moreover, following Butler we argue that we should ‘interrogate what the [.  .  .] move that establishes foundations authorizes, and what precisely it excludes or forecloses’ (1992: 7, emphasis in original). In line with Canagarajah’s arguments, the professor sought to distance her praxis from ‘the structuralist paradigm’ – closely aligned with humanism – which ‘has been treated as foundational in modern linguistics’ (2018b: 31).5 In view of this, it is important to stress that here we explicitly acknowledge the subjectivities, knowledges, bodies, language repertoires, and expectations that the professor and the students brought with them to the course. In addition, it is worth observing that most students had wide linguistic repertoires in English, were diligent and had already started teaching while they were doing the course. However, not all of them were attending the undergraduate programme Letras: Inglês6 because they wanted to become English teachers. In the final intraview, when they were asked why they wanted to study it, Ane, Catarina, Morgana, and Melyssa answered they had enrolled on this programme because they wanted to study English and/or literature, and Juca said he wanted to be a translator. Morgana even added emphatically: ‘The only thing I know for sure is that I didn’t choose Letras to be a teacher. Even though you have always said that our programme is totally focused on this area [teacher education], I still hope to be able to do other things.’ Only four students – Catarina, Felipe, Maria, and Rogmana – stated they wanted to become teachers. Catarina, who was already working as a teacher at a private language school, wanted to ‘give better lessons’, and Felipe gave up a BA in Law, a prestigious degree at the same university, to study Letras: Inglês, because his wish was to become a professor someday. Before the course started, the professor had been reflecting upon the structure of the undergraduate programme. She aimed to negotiate knowledge about language and language teaching, since Letras: Inglês is a language teacher education programme, although its name (i.e. Letters) leaves room for ambiguity concerning its main objective. The professor believes all the courses of the four-year undergraduate programme should be engaged in teaching, but what happens is that there are theoretical and pedagogical courses, and there is a divide between them. The former, which include literature and linguistics and are taught during the first two years of the programme, are traditionally more prestigious in the area of research; the latter, which include educational courses and teaching practicum and are taught during the last two years of the programme, are invisibilized and seen as practical. The entanglement of experiences, positionings, and dispositions, mentioned previously, show a fraction of the contextual/local and contingent dynamics of the group concerning the syllabus – the professor found it crucial to focus on English teaching, but the students seemed to be more interested in developing their language skills, as it was a course of oral practice. Besides, the educator started the course with critical discussions around both English and language teaching. She knew that language education should not claim ‘the impossibility of any ground, but the impossibility of a final ground’ (Marchart 2007: 155, emphasis in original), and that she should think

202

Posthumanism in Practice

in terms of moving foundations in order to take into account the specificities of the context and those involved in it. In the second class, she asked the students to attend a lecture by Bernardete Gatti7 (2019), who talked about teacher education in Brazil and focused on the need to reformulate the curricula of teacher education programmes at universities (called licenciaturas), but they did not seem to concern themselves with it. Only two students took notes and participated actively in the class discussion. That may have happened either because they were not interested in teaching or because they did not relate to the broader and political perspective on teacher education approached by the lecturer in that big auditorium. In fact, what Gatti (2019) discussed had nothing to do with English teaching in private language schools, the context where some of them were teaching or starting to teach. This is a privileged language teaching context in Brazil, and one that university language students strongly favour, because it offers better teaching conditions and infrastructure than public schools and hires teachers who do not have a university degree. This was the case for seven out of the nine students: four were teachers and one was an assistant teacher in private language schools, and two were teachers in private regular schools. In these contexts, language is usually seen ‘as a self-defining and autonomous grammatical system internalized in the human mind’ (Canagarajah 2018a: 269). According to Canagarajah, in Saussure’s foundational version, ‘the abstract grammatical features constitute the primary meaning-carrying system, divorced from space, time, social, and material contingencies’ (Canagarajah 2018a: 269). He uses an arboreal metaphor, showing grammar as the root of language acquisition and competence to capture traditional understandings of second language acquisition and English language teaching. He adds that the root works with the trunk, constituting surface structural features such as phonology or morphology, to build advanced skills in written genres, specialized registers, disciplinary discourses, or pragmatic rules for variable situations. [.  .  .] Resources such as body, emotions, setting, or objects are considered part of environmental contexts that are extraneous or secondary to competence. (Canagarajah 2018a: 269)

In this arboreal model, language is acquired only after we have ‘mastered’ the grammar, phonology, and morphology of this language. It is this model the professor wanted to problematize when she presented a workshop on critical language teaching, emphasizing, based on Pennycook (2001), that the term critical means always being involved in and with issues of power and inequality, and that critical applied linguistics should find ways to relate aspects of applied linguistics (classroom statements, textual genres, media texts etc.) to broader social, cultural, and political domains (concepts of society, global capitalism, colonialism, education, gender, racism, social class etc.). She also challenged the representational view of language by contrasting it to the performative character of discursive practices, which means that language is shaped through the activities and practices entangled with material resources in meaningmaking (Barad 2007).

 Reflections on a Language Teacher Education Praxis 203 At the same time the professor questioned notions of language by using a PowerPoint presentation on academic praxiologies, she performed this problematization by giving a critical microlesson on the theme clothes, as she projected images of men dressed in skirts and the like (tunics, kilts, dhotis), at different historical moments, and by questioning the oddity of men in skirts in countries like Brazil nowadays. The aim was to show that, at any level, it is necessary not only to develop language repertoires but also to use language to challenge naturalized ideas present in society, or, as hooks (1994) underscores, to educate without strengthening systems of domination. She also acted critically throughout the course by posing questions such as: ‘If the world we live in is cruel, don’t we have to do something about it in our English lessons?’, ‘Is English an international language?’; ‘Is it really necessary to teach grammar and pronunciation in our lessons?’, ‘Is it true that there are contents which are basic and others which are complex in language teaching?’, and ‘Should language classes be playful and trivial?’. As they replied and reflected on such questions, they did not only use grammar and communicated, but, most importantly, they also enacted their roles as language teachers. The professor’s approach accentuates the fact that, as beings in a process of ongoing becoming, we find ourselves in nomadic, intermediate states (Deleuze and Guattari 2005), something which often causes discomfort, because as there is no fixity, we might often feel destabilized. Her aim was to disrupt foundational boundaries so as to expand the students’ views on language and teaching and start a movement towards in-betweenness that undermines the margins and well-established structures, thus opening up new possibilities for thinking and acting otherwise. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome can be useful here – according to them, a rhizome is ‘open and connectable in all of its dimensions; [.  .  .] detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’ (2005: 12). Such a notion supports an understanding of teacher education as a process that always entails new becomings, since it will depend on the entities present and the relations created by them as well as on the limitations and potentialities of each context. At least three aspects approached in the course were seen as disruptive by the students: (1) the focus on teacher education in a course of oral practice: ‘I think it was in the first class that I left early because I had an anxiety attack – I had to leave. [. . .] The thought of having to teach makes me anxious’ (Morgana Final Intraview); (2) the critical approach to language, which deviated from a focus on grammar and pronunciation of standard language: ‘Adapting to those notions of language, English, teaching English was difficult because they confronted lots of notions I had, as I was used to a very grammatical teaching methodology’ (Felipe Final Intraview); and (3) the pedagogy of inquiry (Nelson 1999), aimed at dismantling the traditional space of the classroom by having students and professor intra-acting in it and with it: ‘It was like emotions running high, and all the time it was a new challenge – I have to speak and I cannot speak, and I have to give my opinion’ (Ane Final Intraview). The student teachers went through disquieting moments in terms of destabilizing and even changing the way they thought, but, as Butler (1992) contends, problematizing our epistemological certainty is paramount. Their subjectivities were being created in and through entanglements, which reminds us of Daigle’s understanding of humans

204

Posthumanism in Practice

as transjective beings: ‘both transsubjective and transobjective, entangled in their subjective experiences and in their materiality’ (2018: 9). The disruptions mentioned resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s (2005) concept of affect – the ‘ability to affect and be affected’ (Massumi 2005: xvi) – which involves the mutual intradependence of entities. In this regard, as transjective beings, inasmuch as we rely on human and nonhuman others to exist the way we do, Daigle proposes (2018) the notion of affectability, which takes into account such an ability to affect. For the author, this involves ‘a new kind of ethical responsibility’ (Daigle 2018: 10). The relevance of the forces and flows of energy and their dynamic relations can be seen in some of the elements from Ane’s reflection in the final intraview: ‘I always want to have this contact with people [. . .], and not something superficial or cold, as the relationship we establish when we adopt a textbook.’ Her words reflect how affect permeates our work, how we understand it, the relations created with it, the relationships developed with others and so on. Not only were the students’ language teaching conceptions being affected but also the teaching praxes adopted at the schools where they taught – for example, their positioning as ‘masters of the language structure’ (grammar, phonology, and morphology) standing in front of the classroom (the ‘place of knowledge’), ‘teaching the students obediently’ while they were sitting and facing the teacher (the ‘place of ignorance’), was challenged. This relates closely to the idea of ‘spatial practices’ and ‘other nondiscursive entities’ as ‘seen to be productive of reality as well’ (Kamberelis, Dimitriadis, and Welker 2018: 1206). As we can see, space is not something we simply occupy (Massey 1994) but rather a key element that co-constitutes power and politics together with other entities. The usual seating arrangement in the classroom was the semicircle, which allowed everyone to look at one another, move easily (e.g. to change pairs), and build discussions on different topics. Some of the constitutive material elements of their semiotic productions, which also made up this learning environment, were the people’s bodies and their use of body language, the whiteboard and PowerPoint presentations (regularly used to provide explanations and examples), and smartphones (utilized to do activities like watching videos and sending messages). Therefore, meaning-making was constructed in a materially and socially situated learning environment full of semiotic resources that not only became part of their praxes but also (trans)formed them (Canagarajah 2018a). This process was imbued with the pedagogy of inquiry (Nelson 1999), which laid a basis for the professor and the students to build knowledge in class, especially by asking questions and proposing problematizations. Instead of grammatical and/or trivial microlessons (i.e. based on the notion of neutrality of language and the disregard of relations of power), following the discussion on critical language teaching, the professor told the students to teach critical microlessons, of fifteen minutes each, on the following topics chosen by them: routine, household chores, sports, Brazil, and family. They were supposed to address these topics by focusing on dynamics of power and inequality present in our society. The following is Juca and Morgana’s lesson plan on household chores: ●

We open the lesson with the question ‘What are chores?’, which will open the discussion, in pairs, about this subject.

 Reflections on a Language Teacher Education Praxis 205 ●

Task: Look at the images of different people doing chores and compare them to the chores in your house. Answer the question in pairs: ‘What do you have to do in your home?’. Then, open the discussion.

As we are unable to reproduce the images used by the students, which were downloaded from the internet, here we present just a brief description of them: Figure 1 – a white young adult male is vacuuming a fancy living room, while an elderly white man is sitting in his armchair and reading a newspaper; Figure 2 – a Black male child is washing clothes in a big bowl of water outdoors, and around him there are a few buckets and a plastic laundry basket filled with clothes. Figure 3 was created by the students and is displayed in Figure 12.1 with permission.​ ●

Present types of families that are ‘unusual’ and discuss with students how they think they’re different and how they think these families divide the household chores:

Figure 12.1 From Juca and Morgana’s Lesson Plan (Pessoa and Pinho, forthcoming). Permission has been granted by Felipe Pinho to use this illustration.

The students’ engagement with their microlessons significantly influenced the professor’s choices for the following classes. Some of the themes discussed after the microlessons were: language teaching from a decolonial perspective; colonialism; teaching to transgress; alternative schools; critical pedagogy; neoliberalism in textbooks; Adolf Hitler’s life from 1933 to 1945; Berlin’s historical monuments; the Book Burning Memorial; and development and presentation of an artistic creation of a memorial representing critically national or local historical events in Brazil. During these classes, some students expressed their interest in giving a lesson of their choice, which was followed by the decision each lesson would be given individually and last fifty minutes. These were the topics chosen: gender, cultural identity, Epictetus/Stoicism,

206

Posthumanism in Practice

Brazilian folk tales, dystopia, conspiracy theories, canonical literature, feminism, and anxiety/stress. The professor asked them to prepare an interactive/dialogic lesson and send her their lesson plans in advance. Contrary to the microlessons, which were supposed to be critical, these lessons were prepared by them according to their interests and knowledge about language teaching. In their third teaching experience (besides the microlesson, they had also presented historical monuments they had created), the positions changed, as they were then the ones teaching, standing in front of the classroom for fifty minutes. It is relevant to mention that the professor and the students often switched places during the course, as twenty-four out of the total of sixty-four hours were taken over by the student teachers. Catarina, the most experienced teacher – who had been teaching for four years at a private language school – gave the lesson on Brazilian folk tales. She started it with an interesting discussion on the fairy tales they had heard when they were children (which were mostly foreign) and Brazilian folk tales; then, she presented ten Brazilian folk tales and held a critical discussion on them with questions such as, ‘Why don’t we study and value our tales more?’. After that, she asked the students to tell tales which might have been unknown to their classmates. Finally, she proposed a competition, in which two teams had to answer questions on Brazilian folk tales and foreign fairy tales. In this competition, the students were all standing, cheering for their teams, and it seemed to have significantly affected them as students (they had fun) and as teachersto-be (they were negotiating their identity construction as teachers). After five lessons had been given by the students, this became one of the main topics of a reflective session they had, and the discussion was directed towards the group relationship. This session was held because the two students who gave the first lessons complained about a tense atmosphere in the group. They recognized they had not been very receptive to the previous lessons, affirmed the competition brought them together, and contrasted it with all the serious work that had been done in the course. However, the professor stressed that she found it difficult to align playful activities with critical work insofar as social inequities cannot be approached in an amusing way. From our viewpoint, marginalization, oppression, violence, and so on, which are actual outcomes from social discriminations, injustices, and inequities, are not concerns that should be taken lightly. The professor problematized, based on Pennycook (1990), that the combination of functional activities and games, which generally characterizes communicative language teaching, is responsible for the trivialization of learning, and that it thereby depoliticizes language teaching in an exemplary way.8 However, her argument was not taken into consideration, as the last four lessons included playful activities. As Butler (1992: 9) underscores, one’s actions ‘can no longer be understood as unilinear in direction or predictable in their outcomes’ (Butler 1992: 10); and thus ‘the effects of the [.  .  .] action[s] always have the power to proliferate beyond the subject’s control, indeed, to challenge the [.  .  .] transparency of that subject’s intentionality’ (Butler 1992: 10). We can see how this was the case of what happened in the last fifty-minute lessons taught by the students. There was a misalignment between the professor’s and the students’ desires. Desire is a key element in language teacher education. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already

 Reflections on a Language Teacher Education Praxis 207 shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions’ (2005: 215). Desire permeates all the exchanges we have with each other, reinforcing and deconstructing our subjectivities in the educational process. Further, once we consider the positions taken by subjects as temporary, insofar as they depend on spatiotemporal particularities, situations, relation(ship)s created among those involved – that is, ‘our relationality [as] essential to our becoming’ (Daigle 2018: 9) – we can better understand the professor’s expectations, the students’ resistance and wants, their positions shifting according to the events, etc. We agree with Daigle that, ‘Nomadic subjects are in transit because they are constantly becoming and necessarily permeated by their experiences’ (2017: 186). The student teachers’ attitudes and actions are unfoldings of their trajectories and entanglements with private language schools, as they tended to choose more playful rather than critical activities for the lessons they taught. In general, such institutions have underlying neoliberal ideas that guide their teaching and pedagogical choices. Above all, their aim is ‘to keep the clientele pleased’, and in order to do that, based on the notion of language as a neutral means of communication, they foster the creation of an acritical and apolitical atmosphere for students ‘to have fun’, thus contributing to the maintenance of the status quo. In Brazil, more often than not, language schools are merely seen as a business rather than educational institutions. In the intraview at the end of the semester, only Juca referred to these playful activities. He explained he had chosen to focus on a lighter theme because he had noticed that in the lighter lessons people were more willing to talk about themselves. Two students attributed the changes made in class to the conversation they had had about the group relationship: Catarina affirmed, ‘In the beginning it was a very disconnected group, but after the discussions we had, I think our relationship improved a great deal not only in class but also in college’; and Izabelly stated the conversation about the group relationship ‘made us [them] closer on the WhatsApp group and in the classroom – as we started supporting our classmates when they were teaching, we became closer, and we even planned a surprise party for the professor’. These student teachers’ assertions elucidate how the positions, movements, and events in class were reconfigured according to contingent dynamics. When they were asked what they had learnt in the final intraview, most of them mentioned critical teaching in their utterances: I learnt about being human, dealing emotionally with differences [.  .  .] and, certainly, a lot of things I will take to my practice. (Ane) I started seeing the English class as [. . .] a moment of questioning, not only at the university, and I learnt a lot about relating English teaching to social, political, and ideological dimensions. (Felipe) I learnt that any effort you make to present a different perspective [. . .] makes a difference; that being critical is not like getting there and questioning everything, all at once. Sometimes you present a different example, or ask a question like,

208

Posthumanism in Practice

‘Why is that so?’ or ‘Why do we do it that way?’, or ‘But why does it have to be that way and not another way?’. That already makes a difference and can expand possibilities for teaching. (Juca) I think critical teaching was the main thing [. . .] that really stuck with me – how to talk about topics in a different way, encourage students to think, to have an opinion about some things, and not just focusing on that book thing, textbooks, even because I’ve been through this here, at CL [the university language centre], and the classes were very boring. [. . .] Before planning the monument activity, I had never thought about the invasion of Brazil and the massacre of the Indians [. . .], since I had always heard about the discovery of Brazil as a beautiful thing. (Morgana)

As we can see, they were making sense of critical English teaching in different ways, highlighting reflections on who they were, what an English lesson is, how a teacher can be critical, and how to approach social issues in a critical way. Therefore, some alignments and misalignments concerning language teaching took place, especially because the students assumed the teacher’s role and had to plan the lessons, the materials, the PowerPoint presentations (elements that also contributed to their (trans) formation throughout the semester); they had to be in front of the classroom and, at the same time, promote interaction, make students participate, and so on. Finally, it is important to underline that we should be careful when we think in terms of what someone/something is, in relation to subjectivity, because that implies fixity, which in turn creates an illusion, given the impermanence of our ontological constitution. Rather, another possibility is focusing on the relations created with others, instead of their individuality. Some posthumanist problematizations can be useful to help us reflect on our place in language teacher education: What might come out of such relations were we more open to the idea of becoming(-with)? What could emerge from not only perceiving things differently but also engaging with our becomings? What if we were more attentive and willing to engage with our entanglements? What if teacher education courses and programmes could foster such an attitude?

Final words Lopes and Borges state that, ‘although we work with fixed positions, this fixity dissolves in the air due to countless articulations made’ (2015: 503). Rather than perceiving people as discrete individuals, it is more fruitful to regard them as entangled and constituted in and through their relations with others – ‘as fundamentally relational beings’ (Daigle 2017: 195), so that a multiplicity of elements and entities can be considered together. Such an understanding can steer us towards a posthumanist ethics, grounded in notions of affect, relationality, and accountability, which can help us think otherwise so that we can deal with contemporary challenges of (language) education in the glocalized world. Addressing the process of ongoing becoming, and hence the constant rearrangement of entanglements, entails a vehement opposition to the idea of unity, completeness, and

 Reflections on a Language Teacher Education Praxis 209 fixity, insofar as the subjectivity of beings is not seen as something well-delineated, finished, which is separate from assemblages and that belongs to individuals. In Daigle’s words, ‘We are not self-contained beings who interact with each other. All interaction is a transit, an entanglement, a constitution, and a destruction of the “self ”’ (2018: 11). Therefore, to sum up, we can claim that, in the course, the professor and the student teachers were enacting their roles as people, students, teachers, citizens, and that both alignments and misalignments were being made, as topics, subjectivities, classroom postures, lesson plans, lessons, classroom objects, teaching approaches, teaching materials, language repertoires, and conflictual debates intra-acted throughout the term. We can see examples of these unfoldings in some of the students’ remarks in the final intraviews, which we present here as ‘lines of flight’, defined by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘lines of n dimensions and broken directions’ (2005: 11): Felipe’s class on gender made me question: ‘Is it really this gender that I acknowledge, that I identify with?’ But then I say yes; then sometimes I’m even afraid to get into this subject because it means discovering things that I’m not ready to know, you know? And Melyssa’s class on cultural identity, we don’t know our history, indigenous cultures, African cultures. . . . We’re not proud of who we are. [. . .] Wow, you change the way you teach, you change the way you see life, you change the way you see yourself [. . .]. I want to read Judith Butler, I want to read Simone de Beauvoir. I’m Catholic, so I was trying to protect myself from these topics in a way [. . .], but, no, it’s important for us to think, to see life as it is, see ourselves, you know? It’s important. (Ane) The course was very difficult for me, the content, the level of English [. . .]. I thought about my process of learning English, and I realised that, in class, we used to be very passive. Neoliberal values are always being defended and we think, ‘Wow, I want this for my life’, and that’s a consumerist life, and the planet can’t take it if everyone wants to have an American standard of life, right? [. . .] It is a process of giving up things that we don’t need. (Ane) I identified myself a lot with critical teaching [. . .]. I was able to really see myself as a teacher, although I thought it would never happen, even though I was taking the course. And I could see I can teach all topics critically. It doesn’t have to be the most controversial subject; it may be something simple, [. . .] a simple topic a 10-year-old will like and understand, and do critical work on that, you know? (Rogmana)

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Matt Hayler and Christine Daigle, as well as Alan Andrade, Gabriela Grande, Iury Silva, Marco Túlio Urzêda-Freitas, Ricardo Almeida, and Victor Hugo Magalhães for their critical comments and insightful suggestions, which provided further improvement to this chapter. They would also like to thank

210

Posthumanism in Practice

the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Coordenação de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – CAPES) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – CNPq) for their financial aid.

Notes 1 As Barad (2007: 348) states, ‘What the agential cut does provide is a contingent resolution of the ontological inseparability within the phenomenon’. We mainly draw on her work as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s (2005) since both have been important references to the development of new materialist and posthumanist scholarship in the field of applied linguistics. 2 For further information on this discussion, see Makoni and Pennycook (2007). 3 All quotes originally in Portuguese and French were translated into English by the authors. 4 These were the names chosen by them, four of which are fictitious. All the students have granted us permission to use both their anonymized and nonanonymized responses. Consent was obtained following IRB approval. CAAE: 67165517.5.0000.5083. Scientific Review: 3.533.069. 5 See Sousa and Pessoa (2019) for a detailed discussion on how structuralism and humanism have worked hand-in-hand in the field of (applied) linguistics, fostering a particular perspective of human being, based on universalizing, totalizing, and essentializing assumptions. 6 Its literal translation is Letters: English, but it corresponds to the degree of BA in English teaching. 7 A nationally renowned researcher in the field of education. 8 It can be argued that games could be used to problematize relevant social issues, but what usually happens – and that generally characterizes communicative language teaching – is a focus on linguistic aspects in concert with an approach to trivial contents (normally based on neoliberal ideas) addressed by means of playful activities.

References Barad, K. (2003), ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3): 801–31. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Block, D. (2017), ‘Neoliberalism, the Neoliberal Citizen and English Language Teaching Materials: A Critical Analysis/Neoliberalismo, el Ciudadano Neoliberal y los Materiales para la Enseñanza de la Lenagua Inglesa: un Análisis Crítco’, Ruta Maestra, 21: 4–15. Butler, J. (1992), ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism”’, in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, 3–21, New York: Routledge.

 Reflections on a Language Teacher Education Praxis 211 Canagarajah, S. (2018a), ‘Materializing ‘Competence’: Perspectives from International STEM Scholars’, The Modern Language Journal, 102 (2): 268–91. Canagarajah, S. (2018b), ‘Translingual Practice as Spatial Repertoires: Expanding the Paradigm Beyond Structuralist Orientations’, Applied Linguistics, 39 (1): 31–54. Daigle, C. (2017), ‘Trans-subjectivity/Trans-objectivity’, in H. Fielding and D. Olkowski (eds), Feminist Phenomenology Futures, 183–200, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Daigle, C. (2018), ‘Vulner-abilité Posthumaine’, Con Texte, 2 (1): 9–13. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, (2005), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gatti, B.A. (2019), Formação Inicial de Professores para a Educação Básica: Cenários e Seus Desafios, Goiânia: Encontro de Licenciaturas e Educação Básica da UFG. hooks, b. (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom, New York: Routledge. Kamberelis, G., G. Dimitriadis and A. Welker, (2018), Focus Group Research and/in Figured Worlds, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 1202–39, Los Angeles: Sage. Kuntz, A. and M. Presnall, (2012), ‘Wandering the Tactical: From Interview to Intraview’, Qualitative Inquiry, 18 (9): 732–44. Lopes, A. and V. Borges, (2015), ‘Formação Docente, um Projeto Impossível’, Cadernos de Pesquisa, 45 (157): 486–507. Makoni, S. and A. Pennycook (eds), (2007), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Marchart, O. (2007), Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edimburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massey, D. (1994), Space, Place, and Gender, Hoboken: John Wiley. Massumi, B. (2005), ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (eds), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, xvi–xix, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nelson, C. (1999), ‘Sexual Identities in ESL: Queer Theory and Classroom Inquiry’, TESOL Quarterly, 33 (3): 371–91. Pennycook, A. (1990), Towards a Critical Applied Linguistics for the 1990′, Issues in Applied Linguistics, 1 (1): 9–29. Pennycook, A. (2001), Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction, Mahwah: Erlbaum. Pessoa, R. (2012), ‘Critical Teacher Education: An Interview with Rosane Rocha Pessoa’, APLIEMT Newsletter, XII (17): 3–4. Pessoa, R. (2018), ‘Movimentos Críticos de uma Prática Docente’, in R. Pessoa, V. Silvestre and W. Monte-Mór (eds), Perspectivas Críticas de Educação Linguística no Brasil: Trajetórias e Práticas de Professoras/es Universitárias/os de Inglês, 185–98, São Paulo: Pá de Palavra. Pessoa, R. and F. Pinho, (forthcoming), ‘De Aproximações e Afastamentos Praxiológicos e Identitários em Aulas de Língua de um Curso de Letras: Inglês’, in K.A. Silva and N. Takaki (eds), Educação Crítica de Professores/as de Linguagens: Olhares, Agências e Vivências, São Paulo: Mercado de Letras. Sousa, L. and R. Pessoa, (2019), ‘Humans, Nonhuman Others, Matter and Language: A Discussion from Posthumanist and Decolonial Perspectives’, Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 58 (1): 520–43. Walsh, C. (2007), ‘Interculturalidad, Colonialidad y Educación’, Revista Educación y Pedagogía, XIX (48): 25–35.

13

Unlearning to be human? The pedagogical implications of twenty-first-century post-anthropocentrism Stefan Herbrechter

Education needs to change, of that almost everybody is certain. Daniel Cottom’s assessment of the situation in 2003 rings even more true today: It is astonishing how stupid education can make people. . . . To most people the very idea of education connotes a bettering of the self distinct from any possible acquisition of skills. . . . It is no wonder that people should think in this way, for they have been taught to do so by sappy movies, college catalogues, and devoted teachers and parents, not to mention centuries of humanist propaganda. (Cottom 2003: 2; 18)

Under the impact of a global pandemic, politicians, policy makers, educationalists, parents and children are realizing that educational systems were ill-prepared for such adverse conditions. However, the discussion quickly got side-tracked into a blame game about lacking investment and inadequate teacher training, bad technical equipment, and obsolete humanist values and standards. If anyone mounted a half-hearted critique of and resistance to calls for more digitalization, blended learning, flipped classrooms, Zoom teaching, and so on, it was mainly stubborn liberal humanists with an ingrained technophobia. Basically, the current war about ‘Bildung’ is being waged mainly over form, or technical media, and much less over content, one might say. Is distance learning able to replace analogue human-to-human and face-to-face interaction in a classroom? Should robots replace teachers (Selwyn 2019)? How much technology is good for pedagogy? These are the questions currently exercising invested citizens and governments. Posthumanist education, in this context, is usually associated with a techno-euphoric approach, embracing technological possibilities and promises of enhancement, networking, distributed cognition and participatory (media) culture. Henry Jenkins’s report on digital media and learning was an early case in point, even though it did not specifically engage with posthumanism at the time (Jenkins 2009). It was strongly emphasizing the opportunities of participatory (media) culture afforded by digital and

 Unlearning to Be Human? 213 social media and thus equipping students with the necessary media literacies, cultural competencies and social skills ‘for full involvement’ (Jenkins 2009: xiii). The potential benefits of this shift included ‘opportunities for peer-to-peer learning’ (sometimes also referred to as ‘peeragogy’), ‘a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship’ (Jenkins 2009: xii). The emphasis was on an ‘ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support’ (Jenkins 2009: 7) that would enable participants to understand themselves as ‘produsers’ rather than media consumers. Games and simulations, sampling and remixing, multitasking, using distributed intelligence, and awareness of the affordances of technical media and media platforms – would all require ‘multimodality’ (Jenkins 2009: 88) and ‘transmedia navigation’ awareness, so much so that one might speak of a general shift or ‘disruption’ (Van Mourik Broekman et al. 2015). Even though this is just one, if prominent, example, digitalization by and large works well with a utilitarian technological drive towards adapting students’ abilities to changed media-technological needs. It usually involves an extension or revision of the arch-humanist notion of ‘literacy’ to new domains opened up by technological change and economic requirements – a revised adaptation process of the future workforce to new socio-economic conditions based on new technological ‘possibilities’. In that sense, this kind of digital agenda forms a continuation of modern educational policy based on a renewed alliance between the liberal subject now future-proofed for a transhumanist future. Posthumanism, as I would argue, lies entirely elsewhere. Technology, in the discussion about how humanist education should be, is a red herring. It is not, at least not predominantly, about cyborgs (1990s), data and algorithms (2000s), digital, social and open media (2010s), or artificial intelligence (2020s). These media-technological developments are without doubt important. And they rarely fail to captivate – money, attention, headlines. Posthumanism, at least in its ‘critical’ variety, however, is about the place of the human on this planet, human responsibility, and the relation to nonhuman others. It is about ecology, ethics and politics. It is about constructions of the future and genealogies of the past. It is about a changing world picture, away from centuries of humanist anthropocentrism and towards multispecies social justice (Haraway 2008). It is about new answers to an old question: what does it mean to be human? Have we ever been human? Will we ever be? Should we be? How does one learn to be (a) human? Or should one rather unlearn to be just that? Education has always been key to humanism and thus it is no surprise that it should continue to be so for posthumanism, understood as the contemporary critique of humanism. Humanism, as Michael Bonnett writes, is ‘that broad perspective that assigns to human beings a special place in the greater scheme of things, setting their nature and interests at the centre of study and policy’ (Bonnett 2003: 707). It is based on Enlightenment values, following Kant, that connects humanness with a process of progressive liberation from self-incurred tutelage through reason with the aim of producing an elevation above nature through cultural and scientific achievements. This same system of values expresses itself in modern, rational and colonial

214

Posthumanism in Practice

domination, conquest, exploitation and extraction of natural resources, including indigenous populations and non-human others. Humanism, thus understood, is from its beginning a pedagogical process positing, and addressed to, a very specific form of ‘liberal humanist subjectivity’. It is a subjectivity in tune with the self-perception of an individual who learns to embody certain (gendered, racial, national, social .  .  . ) identities that modern societies ‘construct’ and privilege or set as normative and thus as worth aspiring to. The ‘decentring’ of this liberal humanist subject was begun in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century by theoretical and philosophical formations like poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction. This decentring continues today due to the emergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism under radically new technological, ecological, and social conditions and due to new global challenges like climate change, depletion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and extinction threats. These developments are all signs that humanism ‘as a guide to human being’ and as a ‘basis for education’ is no longer adequate as an explanation of how we (humans) ‘should be in the world’ (Bonnett 2003: 707). One could say that humanism fails humans (and non-humans) in the classroom by establishing hierarchies and exclusions: it claims to teach humans to become (more) human by embodying a universalist ideal which it claims is shared by all humans and which differentiates them, or makes them unique and exceptional to other (non-human) animals and machines. This universal norm which it also sees as human ‘nature’ or its ‘essence’ (and which is thus at its core timeless and self-evidently ‘true’) is nevertheless clearly historically locatable and culturally specific – it is a ‘Western’, more specifically ‘European’, ideal based on a canon of philosophical, literary and artistic works, Enlightenment values, modern science and rationalism, and liberal bourgeois capitalism extended through colonialism, imperialism and globalization. Minorities, including women and non-white and indigenous populations, have only recently gained some ‘access’ to this ‘timeless’ community of planetary ‘humanity’. The most problematic humanist feature, however, is that it is based on the necessary exclusion of non-human others, especially non-human animals, which should be treated ‘humanely’ but are nevertheless radically different and inferior in value, which always leaves open the possibility for ‘animalizing’ certain humans and treating them as ‘lesser’ or ‘deficient’ and legitimating either their ‘education’ and ‘cultivation’ (i.e. colonialism) or repression (i.e. racism, slavery, genocide). Ultimately, humanism is based on an appropriative notion of ‘nature’ in contradistinction to ‘culture’, which is supposed to keep it in check and which legitimates its exploitation by humans. In this sense, posthumanist education must begin with a questioning of, and a challenge to, the quasi-monopoly humanism has been exercising over education. And from that vantage point, it is therefore often, wrongly in my view, equated with ‘posteducation’, or with an attack on education as such. William Spanos’s The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (1993) must be one of the first texts to acknowledge this tendency. Spanos describes the ‘shattering’ of the humanist curriculum by the protest movement of the 1960s and the ‘complicity of truth and power, of knowledge production and the dominant sociopolitical order’ exposed by the Vietnam War and the subsequent calling into question of the ‘discourse of disinterestedness’ by theoretical discourses that have come to be called ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructuralist’, but which he

 Unlearning to Be Human? 215 prefers to call ‘posthumanist’ (Spanos 1993: xiv). Spanos returned to his argument in a long article in 2015 pointing towards the ‘dehumanizing work’ of the ‘global free market’ and the neoliberalization of the university together with the threats this poses to the survival of the humanities (Spanos 2015: 37). The same threat of ‘dehumanization’ also exercised John Knight in his intervention to a volume entitled After Postmodernism (1995). However, Knight argues that ‘to equate mass schooling with a humanistic education is almost certainly to commit an oxymoron’ (Knight 1995: 24). Knight, like many at the time, and in fact ever since, laments that (humanistic) education ‘is replaced by the (re)production of flexible human units of production/consumption’ – a ‘disappearance of the (humaneducational) referent’ that he names ‘posthuman’ (Knight 1995: 24). While traditional humanism and (postmodern or poststructuralist) anti-humanism still depend on a previous knowledge of humanism, what Knight understands as ‘posthumanism’ is a (Baudrillardian) ‘simulacra’, or ‘posteducation’ (1995: 27) that fully embraces the ‘(post)ethos of the universal market and its (de)valuing of the individual to the status of commodity’ without any place for ‘human emancipation’ and ‘very little place for the human’ (Knight 1995: 31). It is probably true to say that Knight’s perception has become the central tenet of the critique of posthumanism as a theoretical discourse colluding in the neoliberalization and globalization of education. And to a certain extent I would agree that this is in fact so, if posthumanism is understood, as it very often is, as ‘technocentric’. As Knight explains: ‘The availability of technologies (the metaphor itself is significant) for transforming schooling intersects with the need for flexible and multiskilled workers for a (presumed – this is an item of faith) post-Fordist situation in industry and with presses for economies in the public services’ (1995: 32). The ‘posthuman world’ envisaged by ‘emergent corporatist forms of posteducation’ (Knight 1995: 33) that Knight foresaw has indeed led to a certain ‘dehumanization’ but not necessarily in the ‘apocalyptic’ way Knight and many others believed. What has in fact disappeared in the process is the ideal addressee of a ‘humanistic’ education, as well as the consensus about the universal reach of humanism as a discourse and political and ethical value system. And this is not an entirely bad thing at all. Around the same time, other voices, like that of Gert Biesta, saw the legacy of poststructuralist anti-humanism much more favourably, namely as an opportunity for a ‘pedagogy without humanism’ (Biesta 1998). The focus was on the social interaction or ‘transaction’ at work in pedagogical settings and the critique of the ‘asymmetry’ this usually presupposed, that is, between the subject-supposed-to-know and the subject to knowledge. Largely following Foucault, Biesta saw the intersubjective transaction and the subject formation through interpellation or ‘positioning’, and thus the ‘production’ of the individual, as the result of ‘power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces’ (Biesta 1998: 7). Biesta’s search for a pedagogy ‘without humanism’, like Foucault’s earlier critique of humanism, is not so much an attack on subjectivation as such but is rather aimed at the ideological obfuscation that seeks to disguise pedagogical transaction through a metaphysical world picture and its values which are standing in the way of ‘true’ emancipation and freedom. It is precisely in confusing education with humanization, for example, that one prevents a questioning of what it actually means to be ‘human’ and a challenging of anthropocentrism, or

216

Posthumanism in Practice

as Biesta provocatively asks: ‘Who designs the entrance exam for humanity?’ (Biesta 1998: 11). There is no fixed ‘norm of what it is to be human’ and thus pedagogy can and should not offer any ‘anthropological comfort’ (Biesta 1998: 32). At the same time, however, the focus on the ‘singularity’ of every subject formation, which then translates into (human) identity as task rather than as normative given, also implies a critique of the ‘instrumentalization and dehumanization’ of (post)education that Knight perceived as the main threat arising out of the vacuum left behind, once the consensus about humanism in education has disappeared. This is where a critical posthumanism has its role to play in reforming contemporary educational, still predominatly humanist, theory, policy and practice. It represents a posthumanism that is mindful of the contemporary and accelerated postanthropocentric drift, but one that at the same time is also critical of its technological determinism with its emphasis on artificial intelligence and its focus on technological solutions, as well as the instrumentalization of education as such. In an educationalist setting, posthumanism arrived surprisingly late and there are still relatively few attempts at thinking through its pedagogical and curricular implications (cf. e.g. Weaver 2010; Pedersen 2010; Herbrechter 2014, 2018; Knox 2016; Petitfils 2015a). In the manifesto, ‘Toward a Posthumanist Education’ (Snaza et al. 2014), a number of educators and educational researchers identify three ways in which posthumanism can transform educational thought, practice and research: First, it forces us to reckon with how resolutely humanist almost all educational philosophy and research is. Second, it allows us to reframe education to focus on how we are always already related to animals, machines, and things within life in schools at the K-12 and university levels. Third, building on and incorporating these first two insights, it enables us to begin exploring new, posthumanist directions in research, curriculum design, and pedagogical practice. (Snaza et al. 2014: 40)

The aim of posthumanist education is thus to break up the anthropocentric foundations of virtually all education that tacitly or openly presupposes that ‘the world’ or all ‘things’ exist ‘in relation to’ or ‘for’ humans, in the sense that the world is ‘ours’ to explore and exists only insofar as it exists for humans (Snaza et al. 2014: 46). Consequently, Snaza and his colleagues call upon ‘everyone – and everything! – implicated in the “anthropological machine” (Agamben 2004) of education to begin experimenting with forms of thinking, teaching, learning, and interacting that seek to create distance between us and humanism’ (51). The manifesto was followed by a volume edited by Snaza and J. A. Weaver, Posthumanism and Educational Research (2015), that stakes out the major areas in which posthumanism has been making inroads into (humanist) education and which have led to reconfigurations of it. Snaza and Weaver ask: ‘What would a world be that did not insist on human superiority or dominance and that did not disavow the human’s ecological entanglements?’ (2015: 3). The greatest challenge, they suggest, apart from escaping the predetermination of ‘learning outcomes’ that close off ‘wonder in the face of the world’ (Snaza and Weaver 2015: 7) and thus radical change, as well

 Unlearning to Be Human? 217 as the compartmentalization of knowledge into ‘disciplines’, is to acknowledge the agency of knowing in non-human subjects (Snaza and Weaver 2015: 5). The key in stopping, jamming, maybe even disassembling the ‘anthropological machine’ of (humanist) education, continues to lie in a focus on ‘subjectivity’ and on thinking ‘about how meaning is generated among subjects (although this word will have become untrustworthy)’ (Snaza et al. 2014: 51–2). Extending subjectivity beyond the traditional humanist and anthropocentric human exclusivity to non-human others (animals, machines, things, plants, environments, the planet etc.) is not just a new and more inclusive learning process, or a generalized animism (although this may be a good start); it is first and foremost an unlearning process. In other words, the decentring of the human(ist) subject does not ‘automatically’ lead to a pluralization of ‘other’ voices and agencies, it must be accompanied and motivated by an active process of deconstruction, of undoing, or of unlearning. This can of course be achieved by changes to curriculum content, but it should also involve new practices of learning that are no longer aimed at an individual human subject, taught, assessed and ‘produced’ according to a combination of institutional and economic requirements.

Unlearning Snaza himself opens up the avenue of ‘unlearning’ when he says that ‘if posthumanism has taught us that we have become “human”, it also asks us to un-learn to be human’ (Snaza 2015a: 105). For education to cease to be a form of humanization (in the sense of humanism’s anthropological machine) however, it is not enough to reimagine the world ‘without humans’ although this can undoubtedly serve as an initial ‘eye-opener’ in the classroom or elsewhere. It is necessary to understand how learning to be a human works in the first place and then, through a patient and thorough working-through and rewriting process, to ‘un-learn’ it. The ‘un’ in ‘unlearning’ does not function as a simple negation, instead it signals its deconstruction. Like the ‘un’ in Freud’s ‘unheimlich’ (Dunne 2016: 20), which makes it both strange and familiar; it is a sign of the return of the repressed and a symptom of repetition-compulsion. ‘Unlearning the hidden curriculum’ is thus a ‘crucial component of the learning experience’, as Alan Wald already suggested in ‘A Pedagogy of Unlearning’ (1997: 127). Wald was writing in the context of the institutional racism in the humanities curriculum of the 1990s while following in the footsteps of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed ([1979] 1993) and bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress (1994), but his argument in my view also applies to the ‘hidden speciesism’ of all ‘humanist’ education when he says that ‘[i]f a pedagogy is to lead to empowerment, in the sense of a student’s gaining control over the forces shaping his or her life, one must develop courses that allow students who choose to do so to reassess the superficial and misleading paradigms brought into the classroom as a consequence of “the hidden curriculum”’ (1997: 133– 4). In a similar vein, in the context of queer studies, Jack Halberstam, commenting on his The Queer Art of Failure (2011), writes that ‘unlearning is an inevitable part of new knowledge paradigms if only because you cannot solve a problem using the same methods that created it in the first place’ (2012: 10). Halberstam, too, evokes the

218

Posthumanism in Practice

notion of wonder, namely ‘the curiosity, the sheer wonder, of not knowing on the path of transformation’ that daring to unlearn promises (2012: 16). For Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo, it is ‘thinking decolonially’ that implies such a Learning to Unlearn (2012), while Éamonn Dunne invokes Jacques Rancière’s ‘ignorant school master’ (Rancière 1987) and Barbara Johnson’s paradoxical ‘teaching of ignorance’ to the same effect, as the hardest pedagogical task of ‘unteaching something to your students’ and to ‘suspend knowledge’ (Dunne 2013: 625–6). Unlearning, in the sense of creating or at least accepting working with an ‘enabling ignorance’, despite its undeniable risks, is the only way of keeping the horizon of knowledge and futurity open, as opposed to masterful ‘explication’ which, perversely, always risks placing and keeping the student in a relationship of dependence and acceptance. This is the ‘lesson’ Rancière attributes to Joseph Jacotot, the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’, who ‘taught’ his Dutch students to ‘self-teach’ themselves French without him speaking any Dutch himself, and thus without being able to ‘explain’ the task. ‘Explaining’ as Rancière explains – which attests to the difficulty of ‘unteaching’ as a practice – is the blindness at the centre of teaching (Rancière 1987: 11–12), because it creates a dependence based on an infinite and unbridgeable regress of a distance (of an advance in knowledge) between the teacher and her students. In fact, and this may be almost too obvious a claim, it is the problem of subjectivity in education as such, in that a student needs to be addressed or positioned (as a subject to knowledge and learning) by a subjectsupposed-to-know in order to start the learning process in the first place. Rancière’s reading of Jacotot’s practice characterized it as a prime example of unlearning of ‘apprendre à désapprendre’. Learning – as opposed to ‘learnification’ – is in fact inherently unpredictable as Dunne explains: Learning begins when knowledge gets suspended. Good teachers are teachers who suspend knowledge, who open up the abyss. They’re the ones that know that counselling Enlightenment values of self-reliance and autonomy initiate an inescapable double bind. ‘Listen to me but don’t listen to me’. ‘Listen to me: Think for yourself!’ Sapere aude. Some instruction! (Dunne 2016: 20)

Subjectification through interpellation, or addressing, is about power, not about equality. The subject interpellated by the representative of the knowledge institution is everything but free, even when it, ironically, or even cynically, is interpellated as a ‘free individual’ – it is for your best, in your own interest, that you should learn to learn. As Rancière explains, it is not a question of forgetting this ‘scene of teaching’ but of ‘unexplaining’ it: Un-explaining in general means undoing the opinion of inequality. Undoing it means undoing the links that it has tightened everywhere between the perceptible and the thinkable. On the one hand, the un-explanatory method unties the stitches of the veil that the explanatory system has spread on everything; it restores the things that this system has caught in its nets to their singularity and makes them available to the perception and the intelligence of anybody. On the other hand,

 Unlearning to Be Human? 219 it returns their opacity, their lack of evidence, to the modes of presentation and argumentation which were supposed to cast light on them. (Rancière 2016: 35)

It is hard not to hear in this passage the echoes of Althusser, Rancière’s own teacher, and his characterization of education as an ‘ideological state apparatus’ with its central power mechanism of subjectification through interpellation in this comment (Althusser 1971). A posthumanist education worthy of its name and time will have to primarily unlearn this aspect, this mechanism, of the anthropological machine, bearing in mind however that there is no simple escape to subjectification, neither through decentring the subject, nor through its repositioning nor through the proliferation of subjectivities. However, it would certainly be a good start to problematize the idea of a subject and its positioning as well as speculate on and actually ‘perform’ alternative notions of subjectivity and thus extend them to non-traditional forms of agency like objects, animals, environments, networks and so on.

Addressing the posthumanist subject In a move similar to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous expression that one is not born a woman but becomes or is ‘shown’ how to behave as one, one could argue that one is not born human (at least not in the humanist sense) but is strongly ‘encouraged’ to behave as one, or to embody this ‘identity’. It is a learning process that involves developing subjectivity to be able to connect with others through language, culture, media, and technologies. Posthumanism implies that technological and ecological change poses challenges to humanism’s anthropocentric model of subjectification; ‘posthumanizing’ developments like digitalization, cyborgization, artificial intelligence as well as anthropogenic climate change, or bioengineering require new conceptualizations of subjectivity and new narratives out of which subjects can construct identities, and which are different from traditional (liberal) humanist understandings of what makes a ‘me’, human. One could thus say that posthumanism involves an unlearning and relearning process as far as human identity is concerned. Un- and relearning to be human differently passes through undoing traditional and constructing new subject positions. It is therefore important to look closely at the actual subject positions posthumanism or post-anthropocentrism can provide or ‘afford’. In fact, there is no reason why Althusser’s basic conception of the subject should not also apply under posthumanist conditions, provided one takes into account Althusser’s antihumanist ‘blindspot’. While Althusser seems to have had a quite specific ‘ideal’ addressee in mind in his description of the ‘little ideological theatre’ of hailing it (undoubtedly involves a human, French-speaking, probably white, male being interpellated by police), alternative, less ethno- and anthropocentric scenes of interpellation under posthumanist conditions are not only imaginable but have always been available (cf. Althusser 1971; Gearhart 2004). The interpellation mechanism as such is by no means suspended under new techno-, or eco-cultural and new, digital and social media conditions. Humans (and non-humans) can be interpellated by a whole variety of social actors: machines, animals, things, etc. Furthermore, subjectivity is, to

220

Posthumanism in Practice

extend Catherine Belsey’s argument, not only linguistically and discursively but also technically, environmentally, maybe even epigenetically constructed (Belsey 1980: 61). If machines, animals, things, environments, and media can each function as interpellators of humans as well as non-humans, then, in turn, they are also constantly being addressed by humans and, provided they can all be attributed with some subjectivity, which means that when machines address machines, animals, things, or when animals address machines or things, aspects of subjectivity are always potentially involved. So, far from any end to subjectivity, posthumanist conditions rather imply a proliferation of subjectivity, ideology, address or forms and instances of interpellation and ‘agency’. Although the posthumanist critique of humanism often focuses on scientific and technological challenges, there are aspects that apply even ‘without’ technology. A postor non-anthropocentric world view according to which we no longer see ‘ourselves’ as the central meaningful entity and form of autonomous agency in the universe challenges ‘our’ ingrained habit to anthropomorphize everything that comes into human view. This may have become visible and seemingly inevitable thanks to twentieth- and early twenty-first-century technological development, however, ‘critical posthumanism’ in particular has been proceeding genealogically, that is, has been un- or recovering previous or parallel connection points with non-anthropocentric knowledges, beliefs and subjectivities. Donna Haraway’s work on companion species, for example, provides such a theoretical framework for non-anthropocentric posthumanist forms of address and subjectivities. In her When Species Meet, she explains that: ‘human beings are not uniquely obligated to and gifted with responsibility; . . . animals in all their worlds, are response-able in the same sense as people are’ (Haraway 2008: 71). Haraway’s notion of ‘response-ability’, which she, in this particular context, restricts to the interaction between companion species and the proliferation of subjectivities this implies, poses a number of political and ethical challenges. Haraway’s suggested framework for dealing with these challenges is a ‘multi-species flourishing’: ‘Now, how to address that response-ability (which is always experienced in the company of significant others, in this case, the animals)? . . . multi-species flourishing requires a robust nonanthropomorphic sensibility that is accountable to irreducible differences’ (2010: 89, 90). Haraway’s answer to this challenge lies in a new (posthumanist, postanthropocentric) ecology: ‘We are face-to-face, in the company of significant others, companion species to each other. That is not romantic or idealist, but mundane and consequential in the little things that make lives’ (Haraway 2010: 93). One could argue that from a posthumanist point of view, Haraway’s ecology should probably be extended to all kinds of social actors (human, animal, machine, collectivities, and networks) in the way advocated by Bruno Latour (2005) and actor-network-theory, or object-oriented-ontology, as well as new feminist materialism more generally (cf. Ringrose, Warfield, and Zarabadi 2019). For posthumanist education – unlearning and relearning to be human – the proliferation of subjectivities and their connection through post-anthropocentric stories or narratives in a ‘posthuman landscape’ repositions childhood [or becoming-human more generally] within a world that is much bigger than us (humans) and about more than our (human) concerns.

 Unlearning to Be Human? 221 It allows us to reconsider the ways in which children [or humans] are both constituted by, and learn within, this more-than-human world. (Taylor, Blaise, and Giugni 2013: 49)

The realization of this involves a ‘decentering’ (or an unlearning) of humanist subjectivity or self-understanding, but also a ‘recentering’, according to Brad Petitfils, since, ‘especially in an age of exponential innovation, how are young people supposed to understand their “decentred” selves if they cannot first have a reasonable understanding of themselves in relation to the posthumanist world in which they live?’ (Petitfils 2015b: 33). In a concrete educational context one might thus, according to Petitfils, ‘help students decenter themselves and understand the implications of their digital and virtual lives’ (2015b: 35), and help them ‘recenter’ by helping them see ‘their own primordial essence as these formative years of posthumanity emerge’ (36). The recentering, however, even though it may be triggered by media-technological change and directed against its dehumanizing (postbiological, or transhumanist) possibilities, is first of all a relearning of human animality, or ‘humanimality’, or indeed a resistance to human ‘deanimalization’. It is illusory and harmful to both human and non-human animals to believe that humanity might be able (through technology) to escape its own animality. The ‘anthropologcial machine’, far from guaranteeing an exclusion of animality by creating a radical difference between humans and animals, constantly reinscribes the very continuity it seeks to deny. Instead of the (humanist or transhumanist) desire of postbiological ‘deanimalization’ it is important to stress the ‘animal side’ of the unlearning and relearning process of becoming-human, especially in these current techno-centred and techno-euphoric times with their fantasies of disembodiment. In practice, this involves an emphasis on human and non-human biological entanglement and the evolutionary and ecological continuity between human and non-human animals and their changing environments.

Animals in school – zoomimesis and rewilding One of the most basic questions posthumanism asks of (humanist) education is ‘must an educated being be a human being?’ (Heslep 2009). Since posthumanism extends ‘being’ to all kinds of non-human entities, it also produces all kinds of ontologies. Even though technology is seen by many posthumanists as ‘originary’ to human (and arguably non-human animal, even plant) ontologies, there is at least an equally good and arguably even more urgent case of (re)acknowledging the ‘originary’ character of animality in anthropogenesis. Rather than seeing animality as a primordial state of humans and their bodies that education as a main ‘anthropotechnics’ must seek to overcome, being (with) animals can and should be seen as a necessary condition for (re)learning to be human, thus acknowledging ‘human-animal co-constitution and mutual reconfiguration [as] being inextricably bound together in vanishing ecosystems’, as Helena Pedersen writes (Pedersen 2010c: 246; see also Pedersen’s

222

Posthumanism in Practice

Animals in Schools 2010a). Animals are thus not only good to ‘think’ with, they are also essential for ‘learning’, as Pedersen explains: Nonhuman animals enter systems of knowledge production in multiple ways, and on several levels. They may interrupt and disrupt ‘our’ familiar formations of knowledge and alert us to knowledge forms for which we (as yet) have no name. They may challenge preconceived boundaries between subjectivity/objectivity, inside/outside, and center/periphery in knowledge production, and they may, literally and figuratively, eat away at the artifacts that are simultaneously products and signifiers of knowledge. (Pedersen 2010b: 686)

In other words, ‘our commonality with all (other) animals is cause for wonder’ (Snaza 2013b: 27). Animals may help us ‘unlearn’ to be humans in a humanist sense and ‘relearn’ to be human differently, post-anthropocentrically, posthumanistically, in exploding ‘the anthropocentric conceit that the world or cosmos is as it is for us only’ (Carstens 2018: 63). If unlearning to be human involves ‘jamming’ the anthropological machine (cf. Calarco 2007), especially in the sense of rethinking the relationship between human and non-human animals through the construction of alternative, posthumanist and post-anthropocentric subjectivities, then one might also speak of a need for ‘rewilding’ education. Humanism traditionally sees education as a refinement, or a purification process of ‘deanimalization’, or, in short a ‘de-’ or ‘unwilding’ of the ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncultivated’ human. By the same token, negligence, a slip in standards, a decline in humanism’s central apparatus, that is, ‘literacy’, usually means giving in to a ‘natural’ process of Verwilderung (going feral, returning to some original state of ‘savageness’ or barbarization; cf. Sloterdijk 1999). Current ecological thinking, on the other hand, is strongly advocating ‘degrowth’ and ‘rewilding’ both as a ‘pathway to compassion and coexistence’ (Bekoff 2014). The ‘unwilding’ that modern education has caused, according to Bekoff, has produced an ‘animal deficit disorder’, which leads to a lack of connection with nature more generally (2014: 122–6). Even though nothing may or should replace the first-hand experience of ‘nature, nonhuman animals, and our shared home’ (Bekoff 2014: 130), and as loaded and problematic as the word and concept of ‘nature’ may be, pedagogical practice informed by posthumanist theory can and should contribute to a more general ecological awareness of education as ‘bewildering’, as Nathan Snaza puts it (2013a: 40). In sum, the main paradox of any humanistic education lies in the fact that it both presupposes the human – education is only possible or available for humans – and promises to ‘produce’ the human and to guarantee (its) ‘humanity’. As Snaza explains: In conceiving of the human as both an ontological given (a being) and the result of a particular process of education, education structurally introduces the necessity of intermediate concepts: the less human, the less than fully human. In order to justify the pursuit of humanization, educators must approach their pupils as not yet or not fully human (otherwise there would be no need for education). This structural gap between the not yet fully human animal and the human that is

 Unlearning to Be Human? 223 education’s telos allows for dehumanization to become a fundamental political fact of modernity. (Snaza 2013a: 41)

This is therefore education’s participation in the workings of the anthropological machine – a machine that reproduces what it seeks to overcome by repression. And this is precisely what needs to be ‘unlearned’. The actual encounter with the (non-human) animal, the ‘wonder’ and strange empathy this may cause in the best circumstances, should produce an ‘attention away from issues of cultivating human-centred knowledge, skills, and aptitudes’ (Lewis 2018: 122). In doing so, it actually returns us, according to Roberto Marchesini, to our evolutionary ‘zooanthropological’ condition (based on the fundamental evolutionary continuity between human and other animals), in the sense that we learned (we had to learn) to be human, by observation and imitation of (other) animals (Marchesini 2016). What Marchesini calls ‘zoomimesis’ – human imitation of animals and its influence on human (techno-)culture – is a dialogic learning process guided by interaction with nonhuman animals and the world more generally. In and through mimesis, Marchesini argues, ‘the subject discovers a new existential dimension, capable of undergoing an irreversible conversion in itself ’ (2016: 188), it involves a ‘dialogue with an alterity’ (2016: 189). This encounter with the non-human animal ‘is a slow and painful metamorphosis, one that excites us but also exposes us to vertigo, broadening our horizon but also increasing our vulnerability since it moves us away from our speciesspecific gravitational centre’ (Marchesini 2017: 100). Suspending anthropocentrism in this encounter means unlearning ‘centuries of humanist propaganda’, as the first epigraph by Daniel Cottom claims (2003: 18). In such an encounter there is always a risk and a chance of ‘dehumanization’ – a pedagogical moment par excellence, in its radical and non-instrumentalizable ‘uselessness’, as Cottom says – before the postanthopocentric ‘relearning’ process can begin and posthumanist subjectivities may arise. PS: Even though the earlier argument does make frequent reference to ‘practice’, I am aware that it will leave the ‘practitioner’ with a desire for examples of ‘applied’ posthumanist or post-anthropocentric ‘unlearning’. In other words, and in terms of educational praxis, is any of this ‘doable’ in or ‘relevant’ for school – leaving aside the fact that most of the academic discourse produced on education tacitly assumes the ‘university’ as the ideal teaching situation and institution; and thus equally leaving aside that this discourse, even if understood as and based on ‘educational research’, is usually produced by people who are working quite far removed from the daily teaching practice in primary and secondary schools, where nevertheless most of the post-anthropocentric ‘unlearning’ process would have to occur to really make a difference. There is the possible connection point of teacher training, of course, where future teachers could be taught how to teach ‘posthumanistically’ – in fact, a lot of the initiatives aimed at ‘digital learning’ seem to be aimed at just that, even though they tend to, ultimately, work towards an ideal of a ‘posthuman’ rather than a posthumanist teaching scene, that is, teaching ‘without’ humans, instead of humans teaching other humans about how to overcome their anthropocentric bias. This is not an argument against digital learning platforms or against the need for schools to prepare their students to become critical

224

Posthumanism in Practice

(digital, social or new) media ‘produsers’, but the question really is to what extent the current set-up of educational institutions will allow you to go with the idea of a postanthropocentric ‘unlearning’. Many educational policymakers would probably argue that school curricula have already been eroded too much by the imperative to digitally transform them. How to avoid a backlash under these circumstances, that is, back to good old humanist values of ‘Bildung’ in the face of existential threats? Apart from the institutional dimension of (and resistance to) taking posthumanism seriously, that is, as unlearning ‘our’ anthropocentrism, which would be one way of understanding ‘posthumanism and practice’, there remains thus the very practical question of what is ‘doable’ in the classroom ‘right now’. This will inevitably have to rely on the initiative and approach of the individual teacher (working against national curricular restraints). For what it is worth, as one such humble and individual effort, I can point to a blog-based teaching unit I taught to, or rather with, a year ten class (15–16-year-olds) at a secondary school in Germany a few years ago. The subject was ‘English’ (i.e. EFL) and the topic, ‘what makes us human?’ The teacher input to the blog is available at: https://whatmakesushuman​.edublogs​.org/. The students’ interactions of course remained their own and, for legal reasons, had to remain behind a protective ‘educational’ wall – which, to a great extent, of course, goes against the very idea of interacting ‘postanthropocentrically’ with the world and oneself. If anything, this experiment shows to what extent the ‘typical teaching situation’ occurs under serious institutional, technological and material constraints. I tried to capture some of this in the article I wrote about this teaching episode, and which appeared in a volume entitled Teaching the Posthuman, addressed to academics, naturally (cf. Herbrechter 2019).

References Agamben, G. (2004), The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, L. (1971), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster, 121–73, London: Monthly Review Press. Bekoff, M. (2014), Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence, Novato: New World Library. Belsey, C. (1980), Critical Practice, London: Methuen. Biesta, G. (1998), ‘Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education’, Interchange, 29 (1): 1–16. Bonnett, M. (2003), ‘Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist Age’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37 (4): 551–730. Calarco, M. (2007), ‘Jamming the Anthropological Machine’, in M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli (eds), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, 163–79, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Carstens, D. (2018), ‘The Politics of Animality and Posthuman Pedagogy’, in V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, T. Shefer and M. Zenbylas (eds), Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education, 63–78, London: Bloomsbury.

 Unlearning to Be Human? 225 Cottom, D. (2003), Why Education Is Useless, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dunne, É. (2013), ‘Love Foolosophy: Pedagogy, Parable, Perversion’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45 (6): 625–36. Dunne, É. (2016), ‘Learning to Unlearn’, in A. Seery and É. Dunne (eds), The Pedagogics of Unlearning, 13–24, London: Punctum. Freire, P. ([1970] 1993), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin. Gearhart, S. (2004), ‘Interpellations: From Althusser to Balibar’, in S. Herbrechter and I. Callus (eds), Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)Resitibility of Theory, 178–204, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Halberstam, J. (2011), The Queer Art of Failure, Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2012), ‘Unlearning’, Profession, 9–16, https://www​.jstor​.org​/journal​/ profession. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herbrechter, S. (2014), ‘Posthumanistische Bildung?’, Jahrbuch für Pädagogik, 267–82. Herbrechter, S. (2018), ‘Posthumanist Education?’, in P. Smeyers (ed.), International Handbook of Education, Vol. 1, 727–45, Cham: Springer. Herbrechter, S. (2019), ‘What Makes Us Human?: Teaching Posthumanism in Secondary School’, in R. Bartosch and J. Hoydis (eds), Teaching the Posthuman, 75–100, Heidelberg: Winter. Heslep, R.D. (2009), ‘Must an Educated Being Be a Human Being?’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28: 329–49. Jenkins, H. (2009), Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Knight, J. (1995), ‘Fading Poststructuralisms: Post-Ford, Posthuman, Posteducation?’, in R. Smith and P. Wexler (eds), After Postmodernism: Education, Politics and Identity, 23–35, London: Falmer Press. Knox, J. (2016), Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Global Education, New York: Routledge. Lewis, T.E. (2018), ‘The Pedagogical Power of Things: Toward a Post-Intentional Phenomenology of Unlearning’, Cultural Critique, 98: 122–44. Marchesini, R. (2016) ‘Zoomimesis’, trans. J. Bussolini, Angelaki, 21 (1): 175–97. Marchesini, R. (2017) Over the Human: Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany, trans. S. de Sanctis, Cham: Springer. Pedersen, H. (2010a), Animals in Schools: Processes and Strategies in Human-Animal Education, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Pedersen, H. (2010b), ‘Education Policymaking for Social Change: A Post-Humanist Intervention’, Policy Futures in Education, 8 (6): 683–96. Pedersen, H. (2010c), ‘Is ‘the Posthuman’ Educable?: On the Convergence of Educational Philosophy, Animal Studies, and Posthumanist Theory’, Discourse, 31 (2): 237–50. Petitfils, B. (2015a), Parallels and Responses to Curricular Innovation: The Possibilities of Posthumanistic Education, New York: Routledge. Petitfils, B. (2015b), ‘Researching the Posthuman Paradigm: The ‘Subject’ as Curricular Lens’, in N. Snaza and J.A. Weaver (eds), Posthumanism and Educational Research, 30–42, London: Routledge. Rancière, J. (1987), Le Maître Ignorant, Paris: Fayard. Rancière, J. (2016), ‘Un-What?’, in A. Seery and É. Dunne (eds), The Pedagogics of Unlearning, 25–46, London: Punctum.

226

Posthumanism in Practice

Ringrose, J., K. Warfield and S. Zarabadi, eds, (2019), Feminist Posthumanisms, New Materialisms and Education, London: Routledge. Selwyn, N. (2019), Should Robots Replace Teachers?: AI and the Future of Education, Cambridge: Polity Press. Sloterdijk, P. (1999), ‘Rule for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism’, Environment and Planning D, 27: 12–28. Snaza, N. (2013a), ‘Bewildering Education’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10 (1): 38–54. Snaza, N. (2013b), ‘Reductionism Redux: The Continuity Between Humans and Other Animals’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10 (1): 26–8. Snaza, N. (2015a), ‘Departments of Language’, Symploke, 23 (1–2): 91–110. Snaza, N. (2015b), ‘Toward a Genealogy of Educational Humanism’, in N. Snaza and J.A. Weaver (eds), Posthumanism and Educational Research, 17–29, London: Routledge. Snaza, N. et al. (2014), ‘Toward a Posthumanist Education’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30 (2): 39–55. Snaza, N. and J.A. Weaver, eds, (2015), Posthumanism and Educational Research, London: Routledge. Spanos, W.V. (1993), The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spanos, W.V. (2015), ‘Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking the End of Edcuation’, Symploke, 23 (1–2): 15–39. Taylor, A., M. Blaise and M. Giugni (2013), ‘Haraway’s “Bag Lady Story-Telling”: Relocating Childhood and Learning within a “Post-Human Landscape”’, Discourse, 34 (1): 48–62. Tlostanova, M.V. and W.D. Mignolo, eds, (2012), Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Van Mourik Broekman, P., G. Hall, T. Byfield, S. Hides and S. Worthington (2015), Open Education: A Study in Disruption, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Wald, A. (1997), ‘A Pedagogy of Unlearning: Teaching the Specificity of U.S. Marxism’, in A. Kumar (ed.), Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, 125–47, New York: New York University Press. Weaver, J.A. (2010), Educating the Posthuman: Biosciences, Fiction, and Curriculum Studies, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

14

Posthumanism and postdisciplinarity Breaking our old teaching and research habits Christine Daigle

Critical posthumanism and material feminism have developed into a significant field of philosophical inquiry in the last two decades. With major proponents such as, among others, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Stacy Alaimo, posthumanist material feminism has sought to engage critically with the humanist modes of thinking that are dominant in many parts of the world. This critical endeavour has examined the foundations of our ontologies, ethics, and epistemologies, unearthing the dualistic thinking operative in each – a dualism that fuels the hierarchical thinking that justifies all modes of oppression and discrimination that plague our existences. Posthumanist material feminists argue that the human exceptionalism at the heart of humanism also allows for the exploitation of humans considered as lesser on the count of their sex, gender expression, able-bodiedness, race, ethnicity, etc. The subject produced by the humanist worldview stands in need of reconceptualization just as much as the subject of knowledge – the teacher, the learner, the researcher – which is based on it. Further, posthumanist material feminism reconceptualizes the human as a dynamic, fluctuating subject that is perpetually done and undone through its various entanglements but never entirely done away with. This amounts to a rejection of the humanist subject who is the sole autonomous agent and posits, instead, that the human subject is an entangled being that is subject to other agencies and agentic capacities1 – indeed an assemblage of such – as much as it is the subject as the author of its own actions. This is not a rejection of the subject or agency but a radical reconceptualization. In this chapter, I am interested in what a critical posthumanist material feminist perspective can bring to how we ‘do’ philosophy, that is, when we teach it, when we learn it, when we work as scholars, and when we ourselves philosophize.2 In embracing the reconceptualization of the human offered by posthumanist material feminism, I believe that we must overhaul our teaching methods and transform our practices. While my own experience has been in the field of philosophy, I believe this also applies to other disciplines. In the following, I discuss some pedagogical experiments I have conducted while teaching philosophy that serve as examples of what this approach might generate. I then examine the impact posthumanist material feminist concepts

228

Posthumanism in Practice

can have on how we do research. This discussion revolves around my own experiments in transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research projects, focusing on an ongoing partnered research project with a theatre company. I aim to show that philosophy as a practice – be it a teaching or research practice – stands to gain from shaking its old habits and ‘getting out in the world more’.

New methods for teaching As philosophy scholars and teachers, we engage with the discipline in various traditional ways. We are trained to teach and research using certain proven and recognized methods. University professors rarely receive pedagogical training and reproduce the teaching methods that were used on them when they first were students; through trial and error, they refine their teaching skills. Operating within institutions and departments that impose their own sets of constraints in the form of learning objectives, learning outcomes, teaching evaluations, and other curriculum measuring sticks, instructors develop courses and methods that can unfold within these constraints. The buildings in which we teach, the windowless concrete classrooms in which we meet our students, the enrolment sizes dictated by budget concerns, and other very mundane and material factors all impact how we design our teaching methods. The power of matter and its agentic capacity, in that regard, is quite important.3 And yet, the current educational practice of teaching philosophy, or any other discipline for that matter, is human-centric.4 It revolves around a human being teaching a discipline and its content to human students conceived as rational individuals; minds as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge and becoming well-formed as critical thinkers. What happens if we shake this up? What if we adopt a posthumanist material feminist stance according to which all beings are radically entangled in a web of agentic capacities exercised equally by human and non-human beings? In the fall 2019 term, I was teaching a third-year undergraduate course on environmental philosophy. I had taught this course a few times before, but this time I wanted to try something new: I wanted to take the course outside. The university where I teach is located in an interesting natural setting. It sits on top of the Niagara escarpment in St Catharines, southwestern Ontario, which was designated, in 1990, as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.5 The campus is surrounded by trails and vegetation. While this may qualify it as a green campus, most of the buildings are the typical mix of cinder blocks, concrete, crammed seats, some wood, and few windows. The classroom that was assigned to my course was a fancy new one in a new building addition featuring bar stool type seating, the now ubiquitous smart classroom apparatus in the front where I would teach, and a tiny window in the upper left corner of the back wall. My students and I were gleeful that it was in the new building addition for our business school; I quipped in the first class that philosophy would take over the world of business. But for all its fancy looks and tools, it remained a pretty traditional classroom setting. To teach environmental philosophy in such a setting is interesting, to say the least. I teach that course by focusing on how the relations between the human being and nature – between human and non-human

 Posthumanism and Postdisciplinarity 229 animals, humans and plants, humans and the earth – have been conceived in the philosophical corpus. In previous iterations of the course, I would devote a few classes at the beginning of term to a historical overview and then dedicate the rest of the term to an examination of more contemporary views by way of a textbook. This was the traditional teaching format that I had learned and successfully applied. But the fall 2019 iteration changed format. I did retain the historical segment so we could understand how the way we have historically conceived of ourselves in relation to nature has shaped the world we are in. But I also added an important new feature: Nature Encounter – A Field Journal. I wanted to take my students outside. Ecology and biology students often do wander around campus with their notebooks in hand, stopping at some spots to measure and observe things. But philosophy students? In the first class, I explained the exercise to my students: the next week, they were to come to class with as little stuff as possible (we could not leave bags and computers in the room and lock it), proper shoes for an approximately two-hour walk around campus,6 and a coat and/or umbrella as the weather would require it. They would be provided with a booklet in which they were to write their observations, so they really only needed to bring a pen. This met with some moaning and expressions of scepticism (and perhaps even an eye-roll or two). Students, just like instructors, are used to certain methods. They are trained to come to class, sit, listen, take notes, and, depending on the type of classes, perhaps participate in small group discussion sessions (either during the scheduled class time or separate from the lecture at another scheduled time and with teaching assistants). Students often sit in the same spots and use the same devices to assist them (notebook and pen, tablet or laptop). They are used to and comfortable with – perhaps because they are used to it – a certain mode of content delivery. They expect their professors to use slides, lecture, explain ideas and concepts, and be in the front of the class, sitting on a stool or chair at the desk, or pacing left to right, right to left, in front of the room. They are used to their classrooms being the bleak kind of concrete settings I have described earlier. The idea of stepping outside the classroom for a nature encounter, even in a course on human–nature relations, appeared destabilizing. And it was. This was part of the purpose. It was also to make them realize what kind of connection they personally had to nature and also to realize the tension inherent in learning about the environment and nature in a classroom. I was away at a conference and two of my research assistants led that class. They each led a group of ten students through campus, visiting five different spots where some form of nature – from manicured to wild – could be encountered. The booklets handed out to students had the following instructions on the cover page: You are going to take a walk across campus and visit specific locations at which you will take a pause and inquire. Do not use cell phones, tablets, or laptops for the duration of this exercise. As you wander, observe, and reflect, ask yourself the following questions: ●

●

Who/what else – besides my classmates – is present in this location and shares this experience? What is my relation to these other beings?

230 ●

● ●

●

Posthumanism in Practice

How do I perceive them? Do they make noise? Do they move? Do they touch me? Do I touch them? Smell them? Look at them? Do they look at me? Do other beings present notice my presence? How do they react? Do I feel comfortable in this environment? Do I feel welcome? Do I feel that this belongs to me? What thoughts emerge as I observe and open myself to the location and diverse beings in it?

My research assistants reported some grumbling and students making fun of this silly exercise as they left the classroom. They took them to the five locations and, at each location, gave them ten to fifteen minutes to immerse themselves in their surroundings. What I read in the booklets collected at the end of class was highly interesting. Students were surprised at how little they had paid attention to the natural elements on campus before doing that exercise. A community garden by the parking lot had never drawn their attention. A pond with running water and lush trees was merely part of a blurry décor as they rushed by it going from one class to the next. They had never visited a trail right next to campus even if they had heard of it. In the first class, we had discussed statistics showing how little direct contact and experience with nature most individuals have and how our knowledge of nature is mediated. Sending them on these encounters with nature made them realize that even when they thought they had some experience with and knowledge of nature, they in fact were very little aware of their natural surroundings. The knowing subject, as conceptualized by posthumanist material feminism, is a zoe-/geo-/techno-framed subject – a radically entangled being that is embedded and embodied, a being which cannot be thought of apart from its manifold relations, an assemblage of assemblages itself existing within assemblages. In this context, and as Haraway points out throughout her Staying with the Trouble, ‘it matters what thoughts think thoughts’, ‘[i]t matters what matters we use to think other matters with’.7 Indeed, as Karen Barad notes, ‘knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world’ (Barad 2007: 49). In this sense, it matters in what settings and in relation to what beings we place ourselves when we engage in teaching/learning.8 Taking philosophy outside, as I did with this class, brought to light the material interconnections in which we exist, teach, and learn and the fact that we often are oblivious to these interconnections, preferring to conceive of ourselves as exceptional, separate, and in charge. That realization was completed through the in-class discussion that we had the following week based on what I had read in the journals; reporting to them what they had reported to me (while maintaining confidentiality and anonymity) was of great interest to all. Putting posthumanist material feminist principles into practice was generative of a better acknowledgement of our relations and new ways of thinking about them. While this experience was limited to one class out of twelve, it set a certain tone to the whole course: we were going to be creative with our philosophizing about the environment. This also entailed reading material from other disciplines and cultural perspectives: the goal was to philosophize individually and collectively based upon reading the work of geologists, ecologists, biologists, sociologists, economists,

 Posthumanism and Postdisciplinarity 231 historians, and philosophers. To philosophize about the environment required that we do so in a postdisciplinary fashion, taking in many different disciplinary perspectives and reflecting on how it shapes our thinking about nature and ourselves as natural beings. Ideally, this course would be taught almost entirely outdoors.9 I say ‘almost’ because I believe that if we are zoe-/geo-/techno-assemblages that are entangled in manifold ways, as Rosi Braidotti argues,10 something might be lost with cutting ourselves off from surroundings that we are also entangled with, be they as artificial as classroom settings.11 Another experiment with alternative methods took place in the winter 2020 term when I taught a small fourth-year philosophy seminar on posthumanism. The readings selected crossed disciplines and I was determined to use a variety of methods to explore the ideas to divert from the usual seminar format where the professor probes the students on their understanding of the texts and the students bring questions to be discussed. This traditional approach was retained minimally and supplemented by various alternative strategies. One of them was the Florilegium,12 an exercise that is very interactive and works well in a smaller class. Each student and the professor write on the board a short excerpt – a ‘sparklet’ – from the reading that was assigned for the class. The group then discusses these in isolation and in relation; shaping, testing, and refining our thoughts about the reading and what connections we see between the sparklets. Depending on the selection on the board, this exercise can take a significant portion of class time as all participants are actively thinking on their feet, building interpretations and understandings of the theory dealt with. As an instructor, one needs to be willing to relinquish the control one feels one has when leading a seminar discussion, normally having chosen excerpts or questions in preparation for the course. As a student – and also as a professor – one needs to be willing to open oneself to one’s preferences, insights, or lack thereof, and be willing to philosophize out loud, even if it means expressing less than polished ideas and claims and making oneself more vulnerable to the judgement of others.13 This exercise was conducted a few times over the course of the term, and always without forewarning. As the students and I grew more comfortable with the technique, it led to very insightful analyses of the material and, as reported by students, the feeling of a better grasp of the theory as they had to really think it through individually and as a collective. The collective effort to understand the theory was also illustrative of how the learning subject’s thinking and experience are intertwined with that of others: an assemblage in the making. In the last face-to-face class we had before the Covid-19 pandemic forced everyone into physical distancing and online teaching,14 I said very little on the readings, which were chapters from Braidotti’s Posthuman Knowledge in which she discusses higher education and argues for postdisciplinarity. Instead, I set them out on a team exercise: based on the reading and on the concepts discussed in the course about the human ‘subject’, they had to prepare a proposal for the launch of the first Posthumanist University. The scenario was this: I had been appointed Minister of Education and given an unlimited budget (in thought experiments such as this one, the sky can be the limit) to revamp the higher education system. The students were my team in the ministry to help with the design of this new institution. They were asked to consider issues of the curriculum such as: What courses and what disciplines or post-/inter-/

232

Posthumanism in Practice

trans-disciplines will be taught at this university? Will there be discipline-based teaching and, if so, what and why? What teaching methods, learning modes, and activities will be pursued? What learning outcomes will be sought? What skills will students acquire? They were asked to include considerations on infrastructure, such as: How will the university be built? What kind of physical settings will be set for teaching/ learning/research? Where will the university be located and why? To do the exercise, they were given one and a half hours and were allowed to leave the classroom and plan in whichever way they preferred (walking across campus, settling at the café, etc.). We then all met back in the classroom where they would pitch me their proposals. The creative thinking allowed by this exercise was amazing, and the ideas they came up with were truly interesting and well thought through. This design activity was a way for them to experience how their new philosophical knowledge had some real-world applicability: they were putting posthumanism into practice, albeit a potential one. If only we truly had the funding! There are many ways in which philosophy can ‘get real’ via teaching. A colleague at another university took her eight graduate students out of the seminar room to plant garlic in one of the university’s plots as part of a course on posthumanist philosophy. Getting their hands in the soil and looking after the plants were ways to apply the philosophy in real life. While one may be tempted to argue that the philosophy my colleague and I were teaching – posthumanism and environmental philosophy – was a better fit for such alternative methods than more traditional studies, I would disagree; there is no reason why ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, or ethics cannot be taught by exploring our entanglements via alternative teaching formats. If there is a need to change the way we exist in the world, as I have argued elsewhere (see Daigle 2021; Cielemęcka and Daigle 2019) then there is a need to change how we conceptualize it and therefore a need to change how we teach and think about it so we can arrive at new thinking. If it indeed matters what ideas we use to think other ideas, it is essential that we use creative ways to teach these ideas and to shape new ones.

New methods for research The philosophy researcher – like many humanities scholars – is most often imagined alone, surrounded by books, and deep in thought. I used to quip that my methodology section for grant applications ought to be a model for conciseness: I read, I think, I write. Collaborative work is rare, as are cross-sectoral endeavours, with the notable exception of ethics which finds its way into many non-academic sectors. The research model that is typically pursued is that of producing conference papers, articles, and monographs. Individual researchers pursue that model as the one that is valued in the profession, be it by immediate peers; deans and other administrators who may grant tenure and promotion, or not; grant adjudication committees; or peers in the field more broadly. To say that my own discipline, philosophy, tends to be conservative in this regard may be close to an understatement.

 Posthumanism and Postdisciplinarity 233 Gatekeeping is not a phenomenon restricted to philosophy and certainly occurs in a variety of disciplines. However, gatekeeping curtails research innovation. It is aggravated in the humanities and in philosophy when we are faced with a publication model that also slows the development of research. Journal articles can take anywhere between a year and a few years to see the light of day; rarely are articles accepted as submitted, and revisions and resubmissions delay dissemination of research. This is all for the better because it ensures that quality work is published; I am not arguing against the peer review process and its necessity. But I am pleading for a publication process that is both more efficient and expedient than what we currently have,15 and I am also arguing for alternative modes of dissemination and our collective valuing of them as valid and worthwhile. We need different means of dissemination such as mini books, longer than a journal article but not quite a 200-page monograph. We need journals to publish shorter interventions such as critical essays that are shorter in length (2,500–3,000 words, as opposed to the standard 8,000–12,000 words) and yet explore key themes and contribute to disseminating fundamental ideas that serve to advance research on those themes. We need to engage in, and give value to, alternate forms of dissemination that make research widely available to researchers and the general population internationally. We need to make better use of social media platforms and tools like podcasts, live streaming, blogs, and others so that ideas can circulate. By generating models for dissemination that can make insights more readily available – through open-access and accelerated publication processes, for example – we will also allow the humanities, and philosophy specifically, to keep up with the sciences and technology16 and we can engage in the postdisciplinary and cross-sectoral inquiries that posthumanist material feminism calls for. A non-negligible outcome is the potential for increased production of innovative and challenging ideas by making discourses and debates available globally. It is, unfortunately, the case that socioeconomic disparities and inequities, suffered particularly vividly in the global South, lead to underfunding of institutions and research, and prevent access and participation in cutting-edge discourse. Changing our practices in the ways I suggest earlier can lead to a more equitable and innovative knowledge creation landscape as we engage with more diversified interlocutors. To create new thinking, we need new methods. In their introduction to the volume Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds, Bastian et al. point out that ‘methods don’t just describe worlds, but make worlds [.  .  .] questioning the methods by which knowledge is created, and science is “done”, is key to shifting away from paradigms of human exceptionalism’ (Bastian et al. 2017: 2). While they make this claim in the context of doing research with non-humans, the necessity to question extant methodologies and to adopt alternative ones applies to the human as reconceived through the posthumanist material feminist lens: the human as zoe-/ geo-/techno-framed subject is always already more-than-human. How do we build an ontology, an epistemology, an ethics for such a being? How do we think through the various entanglements and their implications? My research contributes to the case that collaborative, postdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research projects are the most likely to yield the new ideas we need. I have recently worked with a theatre company on a funded partnership.17 The theatre company wanted to prepare a play in which the human being is reimagined

234

Posthumanism in Practice

as posthuman, exploring ontological questions as to the nature of this being and how it relates to others, both human and non-human. The project combines traditional research activities undertaken by research assistants – such as producing summaries and reading notes – and faculty researchers – such as taking part in workshops, making scholarly type presentations, and writing articles; the current chapter being one such endeavour. The plan was for the playwright and stage designer from the theatre company to lead the creative portions of workshops, in which academics take part, and for them to author the play based on the ideas and concepts elaborated in the more traditional academic activities as well as in the creative portions of the project. There were also plans to have a workshop in which the general public would have been invited to collaborate and to offer insights on the questions we investigate. Unfortunately, the onset of the pandemic threw off some of these plans and we had to adapt them to the new reality (though we were still able to hold one workshop together). One workshop took place in February 2020. In preparation for it, all participants were reading excerpts from Braidotti’s Posthuman Knowledge and Ferrando’s Philosophical Posthumanism. The morning was devoted to five short presentations, starting with a presentation from the playwright explaining her interest in posthu­ manism and transhumanism, which had been the topic of a previous play. During presentations, the audience was asked to note keywords of interest on post-it paper. This gave academics some familiar ground upon which to navigate the day. During lunch time, the playwright and stage designer posted the keywords on the wall of the room, clustering them by themes; these were to be used later. After lunch, the creative portion of the workshop unfolded. It started off with some warm-up exercises regularly used by actors and creators; these are designed to provide actors with the experience of: (1) warming up the body, (2) connecting with experiences of stimulus and impulse, (3) engaging the actor’s imagination, and (4) warming up the connection between participants.18 After that, all participants were asked to form teams of three, preferably with individuals whom they did not know well, so as to be confronted with different ideas. They were tasked with drawing a life-size posthuman using paper from a roll and after outlining the silhouette of a team member on it. They were to think of which features to retain and which to enhance and why, drawing those features on paper. This life-size portrait was to be presented to the whole group, catwalk style to a song chosen by the team, followed by a brief explanation of the rationale for that posthuman. The five posthumans that were created had interesting overlapping and diverging features: a few teams shared the desire to retain rationality while enhancing it with enhanced empathy, while individual teams were also interested in specific features such as x-ray eyes or growing wings to be able to fly. The second creative exercise of the afternoon involved the same teams working on a short scene to be staged in which they would explore a non-dystopian posthuman future; they were to create a storyline for up to three characters, rehearse it, and then perform it to the group. Interestingly, and as remarked by the playwright after all teams performed, all imagined scenes still contained dystopic elements, revealing various degrees of anxiety as to what a posthuman might be and how they might exist. The research conducted that day represented forays into ontology, epistemology, and ethics as we sought to reconceive the human from a posthumanist material

 Posthumanism and Postdisciplinarity 235 feminist perspective. Shaking up the methods, engaging in creative exercises atypical of philosophical research endeavours, opened our minds – individually and collectively – and allowed us to formulate ideas in a way that a traditional setting may not have been favourable to. Some activities, like the morning presentations, were more familiar and traditional, but the materiality of our surroundings impacted and inflected the unfolding of this activity: we were in a theatre practice studio, not wearing shoes, some sitting on the floor and others moving around the room freely. As mentioned earlier, ‘[i]t matters what matters we use to think other matters with’.19 Taking this into consideration to conduct the work of the day entailed productive destabilization thanks to the application of posthumanist principles. The workshop was generative, as per the participants’ self-reporting and my own experience as a full participant and not merely an observer, and in ways that a traditional workshop or conference could not have been. Other postdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research projects in which I am engaged are similarly comprised of a combination of conventional and non-conventional research activities so as to find ways to ‘think outside the box’. The current worldwide pandemic and various modes of quarantine have also pushed researchers to disseminate their work and ideas in alternative ways. There has been a significant rise in the publication of blog entries and vlogs, for example, as well as the use of videoconferencing to allow for exchanges to take place. In one blog entry on the pandemic, pondering whether philosophy can offer any help, Marie-Claude Sawerschel described the times we live in as a ‘boiling pot’ in which we are faced with an onslaught of information and opinions on the situation which constitute a ‘state of cacophony’ (Sawerschel 2020). A colleague launched a small interdisciplinary discussion group, which they named the Pandemic Theory Response Group, in which we are invited to share our thoughts on the crisis and what we come across in our daily readings about it. This allowed me to acknowledge and focus on the existing academic ‘cacophony’ that challenges the humanist model of the lonely scholar relegated to their study with their books and deep in their thoughts. The urgency with which thinkers are disseminating their sometimes less than polished ideas so that a conversation and the creation of ideas can occur is fascinating. As I see it, it points to the limiting and constraining nature of the ‘lonely scholar in their study’ model. Collaborative thinking, such as that which can occur when we meet and discuss our ideas – be it at a workshop, in a classroom, at a meeting, in co-authoring settings, creating an artwork, or experimenting with methods – enhances thought generation processes. One is a better philosopher when one can engage in collaborative thinking; deprived of real-life encounters and their generative possibilities, thinkers seek replacements via the academic cacophony we are experiencing. This is all a good thing and another way for philosophy to shake its old habits and perhaps to realize more widely, and formally, the benefits of breaking with its cherished humanist model. We live in unprecedented times that require unprecedented thinking. This statement was true before the Covid-19 crisis and is even truer now. The multiple crises we face – such as environmental collapse, climate change, the ongoing oppression of humans and non-humans through capitalist regimes and regimes of war – have their roots in humanist modes of thinking that posit the human as exceptional and justify various types of oppression. The critique brought forward by posthumanism and material

236

Posthumanism in Practice

feminism allows for the demonstration of this origin point, and also offers alternatives that arise from conceiving of ourselves as the entangled beings we are. To develop and adopt these alternative modes of thinking, we need to think new thoughts, which means we need to teach and research differently. Never losing sight of the manifold entanglement of beings, and thereby moving away from human-centric perspectives, requires that we adopt alternative methods in any and all fields. As a philosophy educator and researcher, I stand to benefit greatly from engaging in challenging, nonconventional activities that are fuelled by a posthumanist perspective, such as the ones that I have explored and experimented with and delineated earlier. But I believe that challenging our teaching and researching practices by adopting a posthumanist perspective is beneficial to all disciplines; doing so will force all of us to think differently, breaking our old habits and creating new ways of conceiving the world. This is much needed at this time.

Notes 1 The distinction is important and serves to recognize the power that non-human agents have, even if they are not necessarily exercising a wilful intention: their action impacts other beings and sometimes even more forcefully than the course of action decided upon by a human. For example, a forest fire’s agentic capacity is more powerful and destructive than the unfolding of my agency as I set out to write this chapter. 2 Like Nietzsche, I do see a fundamental difference between the activity of interpreting and commenting on the works and ideas of the philosophers – being a scholar – and the activity of offering explanations and interpretations on the world and its inhabitants’ existence and relations – being a philosopher. 3 Verlie makes this point forcefully in her article co-authored with CCR 15 – this co-author is none other than the classroom in which she was teaching and experimenting. See Verlie and CCR 15 (2018). 4 While I focus here on teaching at the university level and on teaching a specific discipline, it is interesting to consider how a posthumanist material feminist perspective entails reconceptualizing teaching at all levels and in all fields. Interesting work is being done in this regard by Taylor (2013), Taylor and Ivinson (2013), Pedersen (2010), Murris (2016; 2018), Bayley (2018), Quinn (2013), Snaza and Weaver (2015), Strom et al. (2018), Lenz Taguchi (2010), and Verlie and CCR 15 (2018). See also Daigle, Blaikie, and Vasseur (2020). 5 The university occupies only a small portion of the Niagara escarpment which stretches over 725 kilometres. See http://www​.unesco​.org​/new​/en​/natural​-sciences​/ environment​/ecological​-sciences​/biosphere​-reserves​/europe​-north​-america​/canada​/ niagara​-escarpment for information on this beautiful area. 6 The itinerary was planned so that students would be able to use paths. This was in case any student had mobility issues. Walking can itself be construed as a methodology for teaching and research. On this, see Murray and Järviluoma 2020; as they put it, ‘walking is not simply a movement from one place to another but a practice of engagement with the environment’ (233). Taking inspiration from Michel de Certeau, they claim that walking is an embodied, fundamental, and productive experience: it

 Posthumanism and Postdisciplinarity 237

7 8

9 10

11

12

creates ‘readings’ of one’s surroundings. This is what I was seeking to apply through the exercise. Throughout her book, Haraway offers various modulations of this quote from Marilyn Strathern from her book Reproducing the Future: ‘It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas’ (quoted in Haraway 2016, 34). Following Barad, one might say that the objects, bodies, and spaces in which we engage in education – as teacher or learner – all do things: they exercise an agentic capacity that inflects the teaching and learning. Taylor (2013) makes a strong case for the performative work accomplished by these materialities. In a piece co-authored with Ivinson, Taylor also explains that ‘[t]he forces and powers at work in classrooms operate through the bodies and things of the classroom, its space and its many materialities. The classroom as material assemblage, bodies as matter to be managed, and the materialities which impact on knowing, affect how learning takes place’ (Taylor and Ivinson 2013: 668). Teaching strategies can be attentive to these settings and attempt to create new ways of thinking by disrupting traditional settings. Verlie explains that ‘[a] diffractive [posthumanist] pedagogy therefore cultivates creativity, reconfigures bodies and subjectivities, is dynamic, non-linear, transdisciplinary, multi-modal, disruptive, unchartered, transcorporeal, interwoven, and one that troubles established categories (Hickey-Moody, Palmer, and Sayers 2016; Postma 2012; Spector 2015; Lenz Taguchi 2010)’ (Verlie and CCR 15 2018: 7–8). There are some school programmes that take their students outdoors; some even running year-round, all-weather programming. See her Posthuman Knowledge (2019) where this new phrase is put forward as the latest iteration of the nomadic subject. Throughout her career, and from a feminist political point of view, Braidotti has been concerned with rethinking the subject and retaining a subject position that is a constellation of affective encounters (in the Spinozist sense), something always in the making. We therefore move from the nomadic subject to the posthuman, to the zoe/geo/techno-framed subject, which is entangled with every instance of life, is embodied and embedded in an eco- and geo-system, and is always connected to the various technologies we use. I discuss in detail this new conceptualization and its implications in Covid-19 pandemic times in Daigle (2022). The way the exercise was construed may give the appearance of reinforcing a human/ nature split that posthumanist material feminism contests. The idea that a human would need to go outside to encounter nature seems to imply that the human is not part of it. But the exercise was precisely meant to demonstrate that this fundamental interconnection has always been there, and yet is obfuscated by the ways in which we structure our existences and, in an educational setting, our classrooms and campuses. It is true that the line dividing ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ is blurry at best and possibly impossible to draw. For a full description see: https://static1​.squarespace​.com​/static​/571​a6e3​9b6a​ a608​067028725​/t​/5ba​92a4​fe79​c70e​28cdf00f3​/1537813072166​/Florilegium​.pdf. I want to thank Mitch Goldsmith for introducing me to this technique in the context of a graduate course he was taking with me in the winter 2019 term in an interdisciplinary humanities programme. It is very clear to me that, in addition to my research in the field of posthumanism, my involvement in this graduate programme as director and instructor has helped open my horizons and modify my teaching in philosophy. I have taught the mandatory interdisciplinary methods course twice and this has allowed me to see the benefit that different practices could

238

13 14

15

16

17

18

Posthumanism in Practice

bring to my philosophy classrooms. In some ways, the Florilegium is a method for exercising the kind of deterritorializing rhizomatic reading that Lenz Taguchi favours in order to produce non-traditional researcher subjectivities (see Lenz Taguchi 2013). An in-depth discussion of the necessity of collegial, respectful engagement at the beginning of term is crucial for this to work well. That was on 9 March 2020. We held one more class via Life-size videoconferencing on 16 March. This was the perfect occasion to talk about the agentivity of life and reflect on how a virus was having such impact, forcing us to experience our interconnectedness via technologically advanced devices. In some ways, and as the last class we had, it was the perfect way to wrap up a course in which the main focus had been the various modes in which we exist as entangled beings, as zoe/geo/techno assemblages. Co-authoring with a biologist last year, I was simply shocked at how expedient the peer review process was at the very well-established science journal to which we submitted and were published by. This was a source of amusement for my colleague for whom tight turn-around times were the norm. I have never received reviewers’ reports, three of them, and an editorial decision within fifteen days of submitting a paper. I have also never been given only ten days to revise and resubmit a philosophy paper. I am willing to venture that the review process is that expedient and efficient in the natural sciences because of the collective valuing of the importance of getting research results out so that other researchers can build their ideas upon them such that the whole research enterprise can flourish. Because of that, researchers are willing to be expedient and efficient in assessing and reviewing papers and in doing the revisions that are requested. This co-authored venture in the natural sciences was an eye-opening process for me; it also explained to me why, after an initial promising meeting, a planned co-authored paper with a geologist to be published in a humanities journal did not happen: they were shocked at how long the humanities publication process was when I explained it and abandoned the project. Regional specifities may also apply as they relate to workload and the actual capacity of folks to engage in onerous reviewing work. You may have seen the meme ‘Science can tell you how to clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex; the Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea’. However, if the humanities and philosophy constantly lag behind because of a cumbersome and slow publication processes, the dinosaur might very well be cloned before we get the occasion to warn the scientists. The Montreal theatre company TRS-80 had presented the play Post Humains in 2019 in which they explored various questions related to cyborgs and the transhumanist movement (http://posthumains​.ca​/post​-humains​-le​-spectacle/). Following this, I partnered with them to conduct the research that would inform their next production, this time taking an interest in critical posthumanist theory and Haraway’s views. Since then, the theatre company renamed itself Post Humains and the theatre production I/O, one outcome of our collaboration was staged in Montreal in November and December 2021 (http://posthumains​.ca​/i​-o/). I want to thank my colleague David Fancy for his explanation of the purpose of such exercises in theatre. Needless to say, these are not exercises that academics are familiar with. With the exception of the playwright and stage designer, all participants were academics (faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students). I would

 Posthumanism and Postdisciplinarity 239 add another purpose to the exercises for that specific group: it served to indicate that they were going to engage in thinking in a significantly different way. 19 See Note 7.

References Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press. Bastian, M., O. Jones, N. Moore and E. Roe (2017), ‘Introduction – More-than-Human Participatory Research: Contexts, Challenges, Possibilities’, in M. Bastian, O. Jones, N. Moore and E. Roe (eds), Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds, 1–15, New York: Routledge. Bayley, A. (2018), Posthuman Pedagogies in Practice: Arts Based Approaches for Developing Participatory Futures, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Braidotti, R. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cielemęcka, O. and C. Daigle (2019), ‘Posthuman Sustainability: An Anti-anthropocentric Ethos for Our Anthropocenic Future’, Theory, Culture and Society, 36 (7–8): 67–87. Daigle, C. (2022), ‘The (Post)human and the (Post)pandemic: Rediscovering Our Selves’, in T. Topuzovski and S. Newman (eds), The Posthuman Pandemic, 27–42, London: Bloomsbury. Daigle, C. (2021), ‘Moving Beyond Humanism in a Constructive Manner: The Case for Posthumanist Material Feminism’, Rivista Per la Filosofia: Filosofia e insegnamento, Special Issue on ‘Postumano’, A.M. Pezzella and A. Calcagno (eds), XXXVIII/113, 81–95. Daigle, C., F. Blaikie and L. Vasseur (2020), ‘New Pathways for Teaching and Learning: The Posthumanist Approach’, in Canadian Commission for UNESCO, Ottawa. Available online: https://en​.ccunesco​.ca/-​/media​/Files​/Unesco​/Resources​/2020​/12​/Pos​thum​anis​ mAnd​Education​.pdf. Ferrando, F. (2019), Philosophical Posthumanism, London: Bloomsbury. Haraway, D.J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtuhlucene, Durham: Duke University Press. Hickey-Moody, A., H. Palmer and E. Sayers (2016), ‘Diffractive Pedagogies: Dancing across New Materialist Imaginaries’, Gender and Education, 28 (2): 213–29. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010), Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-active Pedagogy, Milton Park: Routledge. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013), ‘Images of Thinking in Feminist Materialisms: Ontological Divergences and the Production of Researcher Subjectivities’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26 (6): 706–16. Murray, L. and H. Järviluoma (2020), ‘Walking as Transgenerational Methodology’, Qualitative Research, 20 (2): 229–38. Murris, K. (2016), The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy and Picturebooks, London and New York: Routledge. Murris, K. (2018), ‘Posthuman Child and the Diffractive Teacher: Decolonizing the Nature/Culture Binary’, in A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, K. Malone and E. Barratt (eds), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 1–25, Hacking: Springer. Pedersen, H. (2010), ‘Is “The Posthuman” Educable?: On the Convergence of Educational Philosophy, Animal Studies, and Posthumanist Theory’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31 (2): 237–50.

240

Posthumanism in Practice

Postma, D. (2012), ‘Education as Sociomaterial Critique’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20 (1): 137–56. Quinn, J. (2013), ‘Theorising Learning and Nature: Post-Human Possibilities and Problems’, Gender and Education, 25 (6): 738–53. Sawerschel, M.C. (2020), ‘I Wonder How Philosophy Could Help in a Situation Like This’, Medium, Available online: https://medium​.com/​@sawer​/i​-wonder​-how​-philosophy​ -could​-help​-in​-a​-situation​-like​-this​-7119b1e62eb3 (accessed 27 April 2020). Snaza, N. and J.A. Weaver (2015), ‘Introduction: Education and the Posthumanist Turn’, in N. Snaza and J.A. Weaver (eds), Posthumanism and Educational Research, 1–14, New York and London: Routledge. Spector, K. (2015), ‘Meeting Pedagogical Encounters Halfway’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58 (6): 447–50. Strom, K., E. Haas, A. Danzig, E. Martinez and K. McConnell (2018), ‘Preparing Educational Leaders to Think Differently in Polarized, Post-Truth Times’, The Educational Forum, 82 (3): 259–77. Taylor, C.A. (2013), ‘Objects, Bodies and Space: Gender and Embodied Practices of Mattering in the Classroom’, Gender and Education, 25 (6): 688–703. Taylor, C.A. and G. Ivinson (2013), ‘Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education’, Gender and Education, 25 (6): 665–70. Verlie, B. and CCR 15 (2018), ‘From Action to Intra-Action?: Agency, Identity and “Goals” in a Relational Approach to Climate Change Education’, Environmental Education Research, 1–15. doi:10.1080/13504622.2018.1497147.

Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Ada Hand kit  23, 24, 28 affect  204 affective self-containment  45 affirmative ethics  165, 174 agency  102 as commitment  137 dance of agency  33 new materialist understandings of  81 non-traditional forms of  219 agential realism  81, 102 Albright, Ann Cooper  99 Alien Bodies and How to Wear Them  57, 73 n.1 alien hand syndrome  21 aliens 3D digital versions of  58 body-swap illusions  58, 59 critical ethics  70–2 critical therapy  72–3 embodiment therapy  66–7 hand-drawn depictions of  59 hegemonic human  59 high-gravity alien sequence  60 high-gravity planet  60 low-gravity alien sequence  62 low-gravity planet  62 nomadic body image  67–9 perceptual body image  57 self-choice task  59 shallow ocean alien sequence  61 shallow ocean planet  61 allocentric representations  63 Alonso, Hara  125 Alpha Section  134, 135, 138 alpha-synuclein protein  40 n.10, 41 n.13 Althusser, L.  219 Andrews, David  22 animal deficit disorder  222 animal models  34

AnnLee (character)  171 anthropocentric humanism  4 anthropocentrism  48–53 anthropologcial machine  221 anthropomorphism  89 anthropotechnics  221 antihumanist ‘blindspot’  219 Apple iMac G3 ‘Bondi Blue’ computer  147, 148 iconic operating system of  159 ‘apprendre à désapprendre’  218 arboreal model  202 Aristotle’s Physics  154 art conservation  165 ‘Artificial Life’  18 artificial limb production  17, 22 art practice  82 avatar-gamer  133 as posthuman  134–7 story-cutscene  137–9 avatar-voice-actor  136 Bachelard, Gaston  102, 130 n.23 bacteriological insights  45 baker’s logic theory  102 Barad, Karen  3, 4, 25–9, 32, 40 n.5, 86, 102, 124, 134, 166, 186, 187, 193 n.1, 198, 210 n.1 agential realism  81, 102 ethics of entanglement  173 intra-actions  102 material-discursive practices  136 meaning-making  194 n.6 response-ability  175 n.4 Bataille, G.  51 Bates, Tarsh  106, 107 Candida albicans in  109 Batts, Callie  22 Bauman, Zygmunt  51 Bayesian inference theory  67

242 Bayesian Predictive Processing theory  63, 65 Beauvoir, Simone de  219 Beck, Alice  49 becoming-milieu  52 ‘being-kneaded’  109 Bekoff, M.  222 Belsey, Catherine  220 Benjamin, Walter  149 Bennett, Jane  9, 140, 145 Bennett, Tony  151, 152, 158 Bentley, Arthur  44 Beyond Good and Evil (BGE)  133, 134, 136, 144 Biesta, Gert  215, 216 ‘Big Five’ tech company  147 Bildung  212, 224 ‘biome depletion’ hypothesis  48 biomedical health  48 bio-technology of embodiment  20 The Birth of the Museum (Bennett)  151 Black, Karla  170, 172 Blackford, Russell  22 Black Lives Matter movement  119 Blackman, L.  45 blood brain barrier (BBB)  36 Blyth, Tilly  153 museum technology  157, 158 body image  57 affective body image  63, 64 nomadic body image  67–9 notion of  63 perceptual body image  63 Body-Made-Bread  106, 109 film stills  106, 107 body re-orienting practice  119 body representation  63, 65 body schema  63 Bohr, Niels  102 ‘boiling pot’  235 Bonnett, Michael  213 The Book of Skin (Connor)  103 Borges, V.  200, 208 Bourgeois, Louise  170 Boxall, Peter  18, 20 Bradley, Arthur  154 Braidotti, Rosi  12 n.2, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 79, 80, 166, 182, 231, 237 n.10 characterization of subjectivity  58

Index double procedure  71, 72 nomadic subjectivity  67, 68 ‘processual’ notion of subjectivity  71 scheme-of-exclusion  70 transversal non-human alliance  183, 184 brambles  87 Brennan, Teresa  45 Bridle, James  119 British Academy’s Summer Showcase, London  17 British Sign Language  25 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)  175 n.9 Butler, Judith  6, 201, 203, 206 Canagarajah, S.  185, 201, 202 Candida albicans  107 in Tarsh Bates’s bread  109 Cheng, P.  138 literature on interaction, analysis of  139 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong  150, 153 ‘Circle as methodology’  116, 129 n.2 circumambulation  126 circumposing  116 circus  114. See also circus artists defined  116 object manipulation  116 performances  114–15 circus artists  114 dislocating bodies  119 fabulatory function  123–4 foil  119–20 from mastering to mattering  116–17 mooring fenders  120–2 Multiverse, composting in  125–8 sonic modes of composition  124 technopoetics sonic essays  124–5 vulnerability as virtuosity  128–9 ‘Clapping Music’ (Reich, 1972)  25 Clark, Andy  68 Clavir, M.  167 co-creative practice  81 inter-dependence  82 cogito ergo sum  102 ‘cogito of kneading’  102, 111 n.8 cognitive assemblage  162 n.4 cognitive neuropsychological framework  63–4

 Index 243 Cohen, E.  45 coherence  86 Colebrook, Claire  52 collaborative work  232 Collection Management Systems (CMSs)  171 committing thoughts, process of  84 computer-based technologies  149, 151, 153 Connell, Matthew  157 Connor, Steven  103 contact improvisations  9, 95, 97–9, 110 n.3 and intra-actions  102 Contact Isn’t Lost (Black, 2008)  170–2 contemporary art  169 contemporary events, materialism of  18 contemporary machine  153 contemporary museum  161, 166 Cottom, Daniel  212, 223 Crawford, Cassandra  18 Crawford, G.  137, 139 Cultural Disability Studies  19 cyborg  18 A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway)  154 Dactyl Nightmare game  156, 159 Daigle, Christine  203, 204, 206, 209 Daï-jo stick  141 Dallas Museum of Art  176 n.13 Davidson, Michael  24, 25, 28 dead ‘tadpoles’  188, 193 n.5 deep hanging out process  188–9 children’s embodiment of water  189, 190 dehumanization  215, 223 de Kooning, Willem  37 paintings  39 Deleuze, Gilles  67, 68, 187, 203, 204, 209 Derrida, Jacques  155 Descartes, René  102 descriptive anthropocentrism  49 diabolo  125 diffraction process  173 digital artefacts  10 disability-as-strangeness  27 disability-led posthumanism  21 DomZ  134, 138, 142 Double H  136

Drosophila melangaster (fruit flies)  108 Duhn, I  194 Dunn, Rob  104, 105 Dunne, Éamonn  218 ‘dysbiosis’ in PD  38 early childhood education (ECE)  182 early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS)  182–4, 192, 193 n.1 egalitarian connectivity  185 egocentric representations  63 Einkorn  110 n.5 electronic LSD  155, 159 embodied identity  22 embodied resistive force  45 embodiment  65, 74 n.8 epidermal frontiers of bodies  44, 45 ergodic  139 ethico-onto-epistemo-logy  167, 175 n.4 European Enlightenment  2, 6, 69 exemplar therapy  66 ‘exhibitionary logic’  151 experiment  162 n.5 fabulation  123 faecal transplant  31 ‘false’ thumb  29 n.2 Ferrando, Francesca  4, 115, 125 fictional cyberspace  18 finitude  51 anthropocentric basis of  52 ‘Flag for No Nation’  119 flat ontology  135, 185 flattened co-constitutive relationship  192 The Flavor of Biodiversity (Dunn)  105 Fleck, Ludwig  38 Florilegium  231, 238 n.12 Floyd, George  119 Focquet, Vincent  129 n.1 foil  119–20 Foti, P.  152, 153 free energy principle  68 Freire, P.  217 Freud, S.  51 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie  20 gatekeeping  233 Gatti, Bernardette  202

244 general human universality, principle of  152 germ theory of disease  45 Gibson, William  18 Giddings, S.  141 gluten  101 GoPro camera  186 GoPro recording  191 Gosden, Chris  151 Graphic User Interfaces (GUI)  150, 159 Guattari, F.  187, 203, 204, 209 Guillerm, Johann Le  116 Gumbrecht, H.U.  2 Halberstam, Jack  20, 217 hands and handedness  20–3 Hands of X project  22, 23, 29 Haraway, Donna J.  3, 5, 18, 32, 82, 107, 150, 176–7 n.18, 183, 186, 192, 193 n.3, 220 natureculture  154, 155, 160 sense of sympoiesis  79, 81 harm avoidance principle  172 Hayles, N. Katherine  20, 160, 162 n.4 ‘hegemonic human’  58, 69–70 Heidegger, M.  21 Helmreich, Stefan  43 Hillys (Hillyans)  134, 135, 140, 141 hi-tech shopping, techniques of  158 Hohwy, Jakob  68 Homo microbis  43 Homo sapiens. See humans hooks, bell  217 Hultman, K.  186, 187 human-centrism  79 power structures  88 human ‘deanimalization’  221 human development, pursuit of  50 human exceptionalism  1, 49 constraints of  184–8 humanist narratives of  79 humanism  6 n.4, 213, 214, 222 crude caricature of  2 posthumanist critique of  20, 220 quasi-monopoly humanism  214 humanist conservation practice  169–72 humanistic museum  167–9 humanist ontology  34 humanist thinking, ‘the Human’ of  2

Index humanist transhumanism  7 human-microbial relationality  44, 48, 52 human-non-human dichotomy  128 humans  5–6 category of  58 humanist vision of  6 materiality of  20 human skin  44 human subject  32, 69, 80, 227 human subjectivity, status of  79, 80, 90 humble circus  115, 129 n.1 Huyghe, Pierre  170, 171 hydroelectric system  189, 192 icy pond  191 ideological state apparatus  219 ‘ignorant school master’  218 ‘immunity-as-defence’ paradigm  45, 46 ‘immuno-cosmopolitanism’  46 immunology, concepts of  45 improvisation  97 Information Age gallery  153 Ingold, Tim  176 n.17 “the instruments of instruments”  21 interdisciplinary project  17 Interface exhibition  147 Interface: People, Machines, Design  147 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  91 n.1 International Institution for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC)  167 interpellation mechanism  219 intra-actions  40 n.5, 110 n.6, 193 n.1, 199 intra-space  125, 130 n.22 IRIS Network  134, 143 Ironstone, Penelope  108 Isozaki Arata  122 Jacotot, Joseph  218 Jade  134 AI pack inventory system  138 DomZ High Priest  143 posthuman intersection  142–3 tools and objects  139–42 Jenkins, Henry  212 Johnson, Barbara  218

 Index 245 Kallas, Aino  71, 72 Karpowicz, Guillaume  125 Kasturirangan, R.  50, 51 Klevjer, R.  138 Knead  100 film still  97, 98, 104 photograph  96 kneading bodies intra-actions  102 kneading dough  102 microbial ‘messmates’  105–10 philosophical discourses  102–4 Knight, John  215 Koch, Robert  45 Konstcentrum, Gävle  119 Kukkonen, Karin  2 Kuntz, A.  199 Lactobacillus  105 Landberg, Alison  18 language teacher education  199, 200 arboreal metaphor  201 critical language teaching  201, 204 desire  206–7 entanglements of structures and agencies  201 lesson plan on household chores  204–5, 205 nomadic and rhizomatic endeavour  200 posthumanist problematizations  208 transjective beings  204 Larson, Frances  151 Latour, Bruno  220 Laurenson, Pip  168 L-cysteine  109 Leeds project  19, 29 Leeds team  23 prototype models  23–4 Leroi-Gourhan, André  155 Letras: Inglês  201 Lewy Bodies  40 n.10 liberal humanist subjectivity  214 licenciaturas  202 literacy  222 arch-humanist notion of  213 Livingston, Ira  20 Lomax, Yve  103 Lopes, A.  200, 208

Lorimer, Jamie  47, 48 Lury, Celia  18 Lyttleton-Smith, J.  139 Ma  122 MAAS Collection Policy Document  162 n.9 Madden, Anne  104, 105 mammals, social behaviour in  46 ‘Man’  152 The Mangle of Practice (Pickering)  33, 37 Marchesini, Roberto  223 mash-up  188 material bodies, moving with ability to listen to another body  99 agency of dough  100 contact improvisations  96–100 liveliness of dough  97 wearing materials on body  96 material-semiotic experiment  128 Me, My Self, and the Multitude: Microbiopolitics of the Human Microbiome (Ironstone)  108 media-technological developments  213 Mellon, Andrew W.  168 meshwork  169, 172, 176 n.17 metalized polyethylene terephthalate (MPET)  119 microbes  46 microbial ‘messmates’  97, 105–10 microbiology  38 microbiomania  47 microbiome-informed understandings of body  37 microbiopolitics  43 shifting  44–8 microbiotica-gut-brain-axis  108 Mignolo, Walter  218 milieu-for-another  52 The Milky Way  108 Mondrian, Piet  37 paintings  37 monstration  126 Montreal theatre company TRS-80  238 n.17 monumental paradigm shifts  191 MPP+  34 MPTP  34 Multiverse  125

246 choreographic approach to  126 performative site of  126 sonified walking stick  127 Talking Stick  126–7 walker costume  127 Muriel, D.  137, 139 museal structures  168 Museum of Applied Arts and Science (MAAS) technology  147, 148, 150, 153 museums  151, 152, 161 epistemic cultures in  169 objects in  147 space  152, 153 structure of  169 Mylius, B.  49 ‘Myo armband’  125 ‘Nathanaëlle Ravelling the Multiverse’  123–4 National Galleries of Scotland in 2009  170 natureculture  154, 155, 160, 183 Nayar, Pramod  20, 22, 24 NBIC technologies  6 Neimanis, Astrida  52 Nelson, Mike  170 The Network for Conservation of Contemporary Art Research (NeCCAR)  176 n.16 neurodegenerative diseases  36 neurology  31 New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA)  176 n.16 No Ghost Just a Shell (Parreno and Huyghe, 1999–2002)  170, 171, 173 nomadic body image  67–9 nomadic ethical considerations  116 nomadic subjectivity  67–9 critical/productive articulation of  71 nomadic subjects  207 nomadic thinking  187 non-human actors  35, 184 nonhuman animals  222 non-human bodies  99 contact improvisations to  98

Index as creative partners in performance  95 normative anthropocentrism  49 normative discontent  57, 64 NZT-48  7 n.5 object manipulation  116, 118 objects-of-knowledge  17 Obrist, Hans Ulrich  171 ‘On Touching - The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’ (Barad)  25 Open Bionics  23 ‘Orientalism’ (Said)  92 n.9 originary technicity, idea of  155 Paintings Conservation Studio  176 n.13 Pandemic Theory Response Group  235 Paralympic Military Program  22 Parkinson’s disease (PD)  31, 39 n.1 biomedical translation  38 conceptual framework of translation  38 microbiota restoration  39 nondualist and posthumanist ontologies  36–7 scientific understanding of  37–8 trajectory of  33–6 Parreno, Philippe  170, 171 Participatory Research in More-thanHuman Worlds (Bastian)  233 Pasteur, Louis  45 bacteriological insights  45 Paxson, Heather  43, 48 Paxton, Steve  97 ‘pedagogy without humanism’  215 Pedersen, Helena  221, 222 Pennycook, A.  200, 202, 206 perceptual anthropocentrism  49 perceptual body image  57, 63, 64 Petitfils, Brad  221 Pey’j  135, 138, 143 Philosophical Posthumanism (Ferrando)  4, 125, 234 Pickering, Andrew  32, 40 n.2 plant blindness theory  86 plant de-coherence concept  79, 85, 87, 88 Planting My Arm  84 Plumwood, Val  49 food chain  52

 Index 247 Polhemus  159 Pollan, Michael  88 Polli, N.  66 pond  189 and dead ‘tadpoles  191–2 discovery of  190 ‘popular caricature’  2 Porous Bodies  182, 188 ‘possessive individualism’  45 post-anthropocentrism  3 posthuman  6 avatar-gamer as  134–7 ‘the Posthuman condition’  20 posthumanism  3, 7. See also individual entries aims  2–4 approaches  2, 9 conception of body  24 conservation practice  172–4 critical modes  20 critical strategies  17 education  212, 214, 216, 219 embodiment  17 equation  32 ethics of care  174 model of scientific practice  35 orientation  11 reframing  181 theory and set of practices  32 posthumanist material feminism  11, 227, 230 posthumanist subject  219–21 posthumanist thinkers  86 Posthuman Knowledge (Braidotti)  19, 231, 237 n.10 post-human landscape  220 posthuman prosthesis  18–20 posthuman work  40 n.2 post-Pasteurianism  48 approach  43 microbiopolitics  8 poststructuralist anti-humanism  215 Powell, S.  188 Powerhouse  147, 156 Prática Oral 2 de Inglês (English Oral Practice 2)  198, 199 Predictive Processing framework  68 Presnall, M.  199 preventive conservation  165

‘Promethean Gap’  161 n.3 prosthesis  18 cultural formations of  19 cultural iterations of  18 disability-led investigation of  23 ‘seductive’ nature of  18 prosthetic-as-concept  18 prosthetic hands  17, 22, 28 prosthetic limb  18, 19 prosthetics  8 public touching  25–8 Puig de la Bellacasa, María  27, 28 Pullin, Graham  22 Puratos Center for Bread Flavour (Belgium)  104 quantum de-coherence  85, 86, 91 n.3 quantum theory  86 Queer walking tours  126 Quinn, Susan  11, 181, 188, 193 n.2 Quinones, G.  183 Radcliffe, Ann  84 radical ludology  138 Rancière, Jacques  218 Reflections on War and Death (Freud)  51 Reich, Steve  25 research methods  232 collaborative work  232 dissemination models  233 journal articles  233 unprecedented thinking  235 workshops  234–5 response-abilities  166, 167, 169, 170, 175 n.4, 192 ‘common worlds’  192–3, 193 n.4 educating conservators  173, 174 ‘rewilding’ education  222 rhizome concept  203 Rising, film stills of  100–1​ Riva, G.  65, 66 Romanillos, J.L.  51 Rook, Graham  48 Rossini, Manuela  20 Royal Institute of Technology  124 Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeasts)  104, 105, 107 from handmade to hand-taste  104–5

248 ‘Safe in the City’  123 photo series  117, 123 St. Pierre, E.A.  185, 188 SARS-CoV-2  91 Sawerschel, Marie-Claude  235 ‘semiotic maelstrom’ of cities  86 Serguis, Marcus  22 Serino, S.  66 Serres, Michel  102, 103 Sheldrake, Merlin  108 Shildrick, Margrit  18 Snaza, N.  216, 217, 222 Sobchack, Vivian  18, 19 Somerville, M.  188 Spanos, William  214, 215 Spivak, Gayatri  45 Srinivasan, K.  50, 51 sson mhat  105 ‘state of cacophony’  235 Staying With the Trouble (Haraway)  3, 7, 230 Stengers, Isabelle  38 Stewart, Kathleen  25, 28 Stiegler, Bernard  155 stressing hands  25 Sutre  110 n.1 Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum  147 symbiosis  47 sympoiesis  79, 80, 176–7 n.18 sympoietically produced artefacts  90 sympoietic art practice with plants  79 de-centring my human subjectivity  82–9 de-stabilize dominant relationality with plants  82–3 hierarchy-disrupting collective knowledge  80 plant-artist relationality  81, 91 planting arm in soil  84, 85 state of dynamic de-coherence  90 super-human senses in plants  89 trans-species alliance  80–2, 90 sympoietic processes  85 Synthetic-Atomic-Compressor  141 tactical athletes  22 Taguchi, Lenz  185–7 Talking Stick  126, 127 tamed bears  126

Index Tanenbaum, J.  137 Tanenbaum, K.  137 Taylor, C.A.  237 n.8 teaching methods  228–9 idea of stepping outside classroom  229 instructions to students, nature encounter  229–30 knowing subject  230 posthumanism and environmental philosophy  232 posthumanist material feminist principles  230 zoe-/geo-/techno-framed subject  230, 231 ‘teaching of ignorance’  218 teaching strategies  237 n.8 techno-euphoric approach  212 technologies defined  153–4 human-centred view of  154 technopoetics  130 n.23 technoscience  130 n.23 theory of diffraction in physics  186 “Thick Now”  124 ‘thing-matter-child’ encounter  183 ‘thinking through the body’ concept  24, 28 ‘thinking with touch’  27 three-digit hand, construction of  24 Thunberg, Greta  119 Tlostanova, Madina  218 ‘tools of consciousness’  25 transcendent truths  3 transhumanism  4, 6–7 celebratory mode of  22 techno-optimism  5 Transhumanist Manifesto  4 transhumans  6 trans-species alliance  80 Tsing, Anna  46 Uexküll, Jakob von  92 n.14 ‘Umwelt’  92 n.14 un cogito pétrisseur  102 undecided boundaries, multiplicities of  181 researching and teaching  182–4 UNESCO Biosphere Reserve  228

 Index 249 un-explaining  218 ‘ungrievable’ lives  6 University of Lincoln Research Ethics Committee  74 n.4 unlearning process  217–19 user-illusion  159 US Olympic Committee initiative  22 van Saaze, Vivian  171 Verlie, B.  236 n.3, 237 n.8 Verwilderung  222 vibrancy of matter  9, 95, 139–42 videogames avatar-gamer in  133–7 cutscenes  137–9 vibrant matter  139–42 Vinci, Leonardo da  69, 70 virtual reality (VR)  58 alien embodiment therapy  72, 73 body swapping  64–6 exhibition views  156, 156–7 Virtual Systems (Vince)  159 ‘VisionTrack’ technology  159 visualization, complex processes of  24 Vita-More, Natasha  4

Vitruvian Man  69, 70 void in-between bodies  122 VR-2000  151, 155, 159 Wald, Alan  217 Wasserman reaction for syphilis  38 Weaver, J. A.  216 Western-based linear world vision  116 When Species Meet (Haraway)  220 wild spinach plants  92 n.13 Wills, David  155 Wilson, Elizabeth  36 Wilson, Frank  20 W-Industries VR-2000 game station  155 Wolfe, Cary  4 The Wolf ’s Bride  71, 72 World Health Organization (WHO)  116 Young, Britt  29 n.6 Zalloua, Z.  134 zoe-/geo-/techno-framed subject  233, 237 n.10 zooanthropological condition  223 zoomimesis  223

250

 251

252