ABSTRACT
Over many years, the significance of the discourse of lifelong learning has been much disputed. For some, lifelong learning is integrally linked to the project of neo-liberal economic development. For others, it is a way of framing educational opportunities for all throughout the life course. For yet others, it is a way of reframing adult and second-chance education. These debates have largely focused on the multiple purposes of lifelong learning. What, perhaps, has been less the focus of discussion has been the concept of learning itself within lifelong learning. This chapter will explore lifelong learning as a human-centric project of subjectification and will suggest that educational practices could be framed alternatively around the possibilities for a post-human condition of responsible experimentation (Edwards 2010). The chapter suggests that, while Lyotard (1984) argued that the post-modern condition of knowledge
was one of incredulity to grand narratives, this can also be extended to an ontological condition, challenging human-centric ways of enacting being, including learning. This entails being incredulous to the centring of the human within our discussions of the world. Here, even as the ‘need’ for lifelong learning is articulated ever more stridently, there is an incredulity to the notion that being framed by learning is at all adequate to the socio-material challenges of the world. This arises not least because of the ecological and material uncertainties to which material existence – human and non-human – is subject. What I want to suggest is that Lyotard’s argument for the post-modern condition of knowledge points to the collapse of representationalism as an assumed way of relating the world to the word, in which learning is something that humans do in learning about the world. By contrast, I want to suggest a post-human condition of existence, wherein there is a shift from learning as a set of meanings or understandings about the world to experimenting as a conditional set of ontological practices within the world. Taking seriously human existence as part of the world raises issues for notions of learning that position humans as separate from and learning about the world. While the discussion takes as its starting point some of the prior debate about the modern and post-
modern, in particular in relation to the centring and decentring of the human subject, it is important that the ‘post-’ in post-human is not read simply as ‘anti-’, or ‘after-’ human, but rather as a reframing of the human within the material world. I am therefore not using post-humanism as simply referring to a time period after-humanism or suggesting simply the death of the humanist subject. Nor am I using it to refer to those who advocate a dystopian or utopian future of genetically modified embodied technologies. In this chapter, post-humanism refers to an enactment that deconstructs the separation of subjects and objects, the human and the non-human, and with that the focus on the human subject as either a representative of an
essentialised human nature or in a state of constant becoming. What I am suggesting is that post-human refers to the possible end of the learning subject as the focus of educational discourses and practices. However, it is also the case that this deconstruction requires a subject and object to deconstruct. As with Lyotard’s (1992) reflections on the ‘post-’ in post-modernism, therefore, the ‘post-’ in post-humanism is constantly at play with precisely that which it deconstructs. It is not ‘after’ humanism in terms of going beyond, but in terms of offering a constant experimentation with the human (Badmington, 2003). In an over-simplified way, the argument that follows derives from a focus on ontology – experimenting/
intervening – rather than epistemology – representing/knowing. Here, the focus on ontology is not human-or subject-centric, with an interest in the practices of human learning, but points to experimenting as a condition of the entanglement of the human and non-human, as, without the non-human, humans would neither exist nor be able to act as part of the world. Here, people are taken to be part of the material, rather than distinct or separate from it. Humans are always already in assemblage within worlds: ‘humans are already congeries of things that are not us. We are not self-identical’ (Haraway, 2003: 54). In our age of ubiquitous digitalisation, this is sometimes referred to as a cyborg condition (Gough, 2004), which points to the entanglement of the fleshy and technical – the materiality of things. More fundamentally, we can claim that humans have always been cyborgs, entangled in the non-human and material. Central to this post-human condition could be entanglements in the world that entail practices of:
conditionality – what could be, rather than should be; fallibility – intervening and the possibility of failure; and responsibility – responding to others and otherness.
