ABSTRACT
I’d put my money on some non-hegemonic multiple that includes ‘trans’ and Afro-pessimism/futurism and queer and feminist and indigeneity and decolonization in an assemblage weighted differently in different contexts and made paradoxical by the insistences of a post-humanism driven by the quantum physics that interrupts it all. Critiques of the dominant combined with the need for imaginaries of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) answer to the continued humanism from which we can’t escape. Under ecological and technological stress to think against ourselves as intentional agents and doers and world makers, we explore what it means to leave human exceptionalism behind. The move is, rather, into some Deleuzean realm of machinic intensities, becomings and flows in new knowledge formations that refuse the humanities-sciences and nature/culture splits. As educators in the service of creating capacities in those we serve, we reside uncomfortably betwixt and between, one foot in Enlightenment beliefs and the other in some recognition and even welcoming of an anti-humanism that might save the world from us. Maybe this entails a new brain, rewired out of ecological necessity to what Clare Colebrook (2014) terms, after Deleuze and Guattari, ‘becoming imperceptible’: a self beyond what we are, a counter ethics beyond self-furtherance ‘given the barely adequate witness that we are to planetary crisis.’
