Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

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Is ‘the posthuman’ educable? On the convergence

of educational philosophy, animal studies, and
posthumanist theory

Helena Pedersen

To cite this article: Helena Pedersen (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, 237-250, DOI: 10.1080/01596301003679750

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Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Vol. 31, No. 2, May 2010, 237
250

Is ‘the posthuman’ educable? On the convergence of educational

philosophy, animal studies, and posthumanist theory
Helena Pedersen*

Department of Natural Sciences, Environment and Society, School of Education, Malmö

University, 205 06 Malmö, Sweden

Formal education in Western society is firmly rooted in humanist ideals.

‘Becoming human’ by cultivating certain cognitive, social, and moral abilities
has even symbolised the idea of education as such in Enlightenment philosophical
traditions. These ideas are increasingly coming under scrutiny by posthumanist
theorists, who are addressing fundamental ontological and epistemological
questions about defining an essential ‘human nature’, as well as the elastic
boundary work between the human and nonhuman subject. This paper responds
to the ongoing discussions on the diverse articulations of posthumanism in
education theory and animal studies by investigating possibilities of a shared
conceptual framework that allows for a productive dialogue between them. By
analysing some of the meanings attached to the notion of posthumanism in
education theory and animal studies, the paper begins to identify some
instabilities of humanist traditions/ideals of education and explores posthumanist
challenges to research on the institutionalised production, mediation, and
development of knowledge.
Keywords: posthumanism; critical education theory; human
animal relationships;
intersubjectivity; species performativity

Prologue
Theories of education have been, and, I would argue, still are, preoccupied with what
Robert McKay (2005) has called ‘compulsory humanity’.1 ‘Becoming human’ by
cultivating certain cognitive, social, and moral abilities has even symbolised the idea
of education as such in enlightenment philosophical traditions (see Biesta, 2006).
Now, in the wake of posthumanist theorising in other areas of the humanities and
social sciences, the question arises whether there is such a thing as ‘posthumanist
education’? This paper responds to the ongoing discussions on the diverse meanings
and manifestations of posthumanism, focusing on education theory and animal
studies, and is also a contribution to a dialogue between these two research fields.
My inquiry into this topic begins with two examples from the world of fiction:
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
(2003). These two novels share a common concern: they situate institutions of formal
education in a specific socio-temporal space, where education becomes a key actor in
processes that trouble boundaries and conceptualisations that articulate the category
of the ‘human’. In both novels, the organisation of education is deeply embedded in,

*Email: Helena.Pedersen@mah.se
ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01596301003679750
http://www.informaworld.com
238 H. Pedersen

and also exerts a profound and concrete force on the immediate development of ‘our’
human society and its multiple, complex entanglements with ‘nonhuman’ life forms.
In Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the educational setting is a respectable boarding
school named Hailsham, located in the idyllic surroundings of the English
countryside. The Hailsham pupils spend their childhood in an educational
environment that provides not only for their development of formal knowledge
but also for their artistic and aesthetic cultivation and moral and emotional
development, attending to all their needs during their upbringing. To the pupils,
Hailsham becomes home, and the tutors (called ‘guardians’), substitute parents. But
Hailsham prepares its children for a particular ‘career track’, from which there is no
return: these individuals are clones, produced within a specific biotechnological
context (‘donation programme’) with the sole purpose of providing the human
population in the country with organ reserves:
After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthrough in science followed one
after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions.
Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so
many previously incurable conditions. This was what the world noticed the most,
wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared
from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum. (Ishiguro, 2005, p. 240)

In order to rationalise the use of these children, they are denied human identity:
How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask
such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going
back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming
concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not
die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept
in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they
tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human,
so it didn’t matter . . . Here was the world, requiring students to donate. While that
remained the case, there would always be a barrier against seeing you as properly
human. (Ishiguro, 2005, p. 240)
Occupying an uncomfortable border zone between the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’,
the pupils are kept isolated from the outside world and from contacts with people
other than their guardians, until the time has come for them to ‘graduate’ from
Hailsham. They are then moved on to the next stages of preparation for their
‘donations’ of organs, one at a time, until the end, or ‘completion’ (usually occurring
at the time of their third donation, although some survive to make a fourth).
Hailsham, has, however, an agenda that goes beyond the raising of cloned
children for the instrumental purpose of the organ donation programme. Hailsham
is run by a ‘movement’ aiming at producing evidence that the clones have a soul,
purportedly, to reduce the gap between them and the human population, to convince
society of their ‘humanness’, and raise public opinion for giving the clones a
‘humane’ and protected upbringing until time has come for them to start donating:
You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever
take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham
would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept
things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you. I suppose you could even
call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods.
(Ishiguro, 2005, p. 245)
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 239

Hailsham operates on the double logics of repression and protection
not unlike
animal welfare organisations working for ‘humane’ treatment and improved
conditions for animals who in the end still are destined for use and slaughter (see
Svärd, 2008)
and needs to find strategies for coping with the ambivalences arising
from the daily routines of the school. Unable to raise the funding and support
necessary to run the school, the ‘movement’ is finally forced to give up their struggle
and Hailsham is closed. The rearing of the cloned students is once again left to vast
government ‘homes’ providing unimaginably deplorable conditions. The story draws
closely on the issue of xenotransplantation, only that one ‘nonhuman’ category
(animals) is replaced by another (cloned humans). If the human
nonhuman
boundary in a certain sense collapses in the process of xenotransplantation (Tiffin,
2007), so does the boundary between ‘representation’ and ‘real’ in Never Let Me Go.
In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), the education establishment is no
longer a site of conflict between diverse politico-ideological interests. In this version
of future society, those with privileged positions
such as directors and scientists

live safely protected from the outside slum districts (the ‘pleeblands’) in corporate
Compounds, which also operate the schools. The main character, Jimmy, has a father
who is being headhunted for a top job at a subsidiary of the biotech company
HelthWyzer, and so Jimmy goes to HelthWyzer High School in the HelthWyzer
Compound, a school where competition is fierce:
If Jimmy had been from a Module school, or
better
from one of those dump bins
they still called ‘the public system’, he’d have shone like a diamond in a drain. But the
Compound schools were awash in brilliant genes, none of which he’d inherited from his
geeky, kak-hearted parents, so his talents shrank by comparison. (Atwood, 2003, p. 174)
In Atwood’s scenario of the future of education, not only privatisation, but
incorporation of education in the capitalist system has been carried to its logical
extreme. Both content and organisation of education as well as its primary ‘raw
material’, i.e. the students, have been commodified. Upon graduation from
HelthWyzer High, a student’s future is determined by a ‘Student Auction’ where it
is decided what post-secondary education institute the students will go into. The
Student Auction makes the successful students attractive targets for top-notch
corporative education establishments:
Crake was top of the class. The bidding for him by the rival EduCompounds at the
Student Auction was brisk, and he was snatched up at a high price by the Watson-Crick
Institute. Once a student there and your future was assured. It was like going to Harvard
had been, back before it got drowned. (Atwood, 2003, p. 173)
For Jimmy, however, the Student Auction ends in an expected, but nonetheless
disappointing way:
After a humiliating wait while the brainiacs were tussled over by the best EduCom-
pounds and the transcripts of the mediocre were fingered and skimmed and had coffee
spilled on them and got dropped on the floor by mistake, Jimmy was knocked down at
last to the Martha Graham Academy; and even that only after a long spell of lacklustre
bidding. Not to mention some arm-twisting
Jimmy suspected
on the part of his dad,
who’d known the Martha Graham president from their long-defunct mutual summer
camp and probably had the dirt on him. Shagging smaller boys, dabbling in black-
market pharmaceuticals. Or this was Jimmy’s suspicion, in view of the ill grace and
excessive force with which his hand was shaken.
240 H. Pedersen

‘Welcome to Martha Graham, son’, said the president with a smile fake as a vitamin-
supplement salesman’s. (Atwood, 2003, pp. 174
175)
Whereas the Martha Graham Academy is an outdated, shabby, low-status Arts-and-
Humanities college
Jimmy needs to wear a nose-cone filter to protect himself from
the mildew during his visits to the college library
the Watson-Crick Institute is a
‘palace’ in comparison. Not only does the Institute’s Student Services provide sex
workers ‘of any colour, age, and body type’ for its elite students
(‘They deduct the
price from your scholarship, same as room and board. The workers come in from the
pleeblands, they’re trained professionals. Naturally they’re inspected for disease’;
p. 208)
Watson-Crick’s students also have unlimited resources to conduct their
individual biotech research projects, including the creation of new life forms for
commercial purposes. For example, an innovation in chicken meat for human
consumption (called ‘ChickieNobs’) is developed in one of the Institute’s ‘Neo
Agriculture’ labs:
‘This is the latest’, said Crake. What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that
seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellowed skin. Out of it came twenty thick
fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
‘What the hell is it?’ said Jimmy.
‘Those are chickens’, said Crake. ‘Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve
got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.’ (Atwood, 2003,
p. 202)
Jimmy feels revulsion toward this streamlined product of technoscientific food
development, although the ‘ChickieNobs’ have rendered previous exploitative
factory farming practices obsolete:
‘But there aren’t any heads’, said Jimmy. He grasped the concept
he’d grown up with
sus multiorganifer, after all
but this thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his
childhood hadn’t lacked heads.
‘That’s the head in the middle’, said the woman. ‘There’s a mouth opening at the top,
they dump the nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.’
‘This is horrible’, said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein
tuber. (Atwood, 2003, p. 202)

The school, however, provides Jimmy with coping strategies to help him normalise
the ‘ChickieNobs’ and make them seem not only ethically acceptable, but desirable
(see Arluke & Hafferty, 1996; Pedersen, 2008, 2010):
‘Picture the sea-anemone body plan.’ said Crake. ‘That helps.’
‘But what’s it thinking?’ said Jimmy. The woman gave her jocular woodpecker yodel,
and explained that they’d removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with
digestion, assimiliation, and growth.
‘It’s sort of a chicken hookworm’, said Crake.
‘No need for added growth hormones’, said the woman, ‘the high growth rate’s built in.
You get chicken breasts in two weeks
that’s a three-week improvement on the most
efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the
animal-welfare freaks won’t be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain.’
(Atwood, 2003, pp. 202
203)
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 241

The education institutions in both novels, Hailsham and Watson-Crick, are forces in
societies where there is no space for raising conventional ‘humanist’ questions about
ethics, justice, or equality, and where the issue of social segregation has taken on new
meanings. With a mission as active providers of innovative technologies to the
‘outside’ society and with a view toward social and/or economic progress, the schools
engage in processes that render certain humans as well as nonhumans (or, in the case
of Hailsham, the troubling category ‘in-between’) as raw materials and resources for
what often has been named the ‘common good’.
Ishiguro’s and Atwood’s works present dystopic scenarios of possible relation-
ships between education, society, and what might be called ‘the posthuman
condition’ (Pepperell, 1997). In this paper, these and other possibilities and
ramifications of the dialectic between the formal education system and posthumanist
theorising will be explored by investigating what the notion of ‘posthumanism’
means in education research and animal studies, respectively. Inspired by Badming-
ton’s (2004) account of the potential of posthumanism as a cross-disciplinary
concept connecting scholarly discussions in a variety of research areas, my primary
question is whether it is possible to create a shared conceptual space that allows for a
productive dialogue between education theory and animal studies. Or, to put it
differently, create a space where these two ‘species’ of knowledge can ‘meet and
mingle’. The paper thereby begins to identify some instabilities of ‘humanist’
traditions and ideals of education as they have appeared in Western society, and
explores posthumanist challenges to research on the institutionalised production,
mediation, and development of knowledge.

Animal studies and education research: an unholy alliance?

Despite the so-called ‘animal turn’ that has taken place in the humanities and social
sciences over the last two decades (Armstrong & Simmons, 2007), education science
seems largely absent from these developments. With a few exceptions, such as the
practice-based tradition of humane education2 in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the
practices of animal-assisted therapy that are dealt with in some areas of education,
education science has, in my experience, not been very visible in the dynamic theory
development of animal studies. There are several possible reasons for the ‘silence’ of
education research in the study of human
animal relationships. First, Western
pedagogy is firmly rooted in a ‘humanist’ tradition, where the human subject is
considered both the instrument and the end product of education. Second, the
church and the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose conventional interpretations
include a distinct human
animal boundary, have historically had a strong grip on
the school and the formal education system in many Western societies.3 Thirdly, from
a perspective of critical education theory (e.g. Kanpol, 1999; McLaren, 1998), the
school can be viewed as an arena where conflicting interests and ideologies are
involved in continuous battles over the power to shape ‘our common future’ that the
school has come to symbolise. Clearly, in-depth critical inquiry into human
animal
relations is unlikely to be given high priority in the education and socialisation of the
next generation of citizens in a consumer society largely characterised by economic
expansion and competition. Seen from this perspective, the school may even be
viewed as an institution which, through a complex web of social processes and
interactions, not only continually reinscribes and ‘closes’ categories of ‘human’ and
242 H. Pedersen

‘animal’,4 but also tends to sustain and reinforce the incorporation of animals into
capitalist-specific modes of production and consumption. The formal education
system is thus embedded in, and is also a co-creator of, particular forms of species
performativity5 that are the basis of posthumanist critique (Pedersen, 2010).

Meanings of posthumanism
I will now explore some of the meanings attached to the notion of posthumanism by,
primarily, animal studies and education theorists, respectively, with the aim of
finding a conceptual basis through which mutual concerns and divergences between
the two research areas can be addressed.
Some of the early tenets of posthumanism start with Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Marx (e.g. Badmington, 2000; Rossini, 2006), but posthumanism has been given new
interpretations by scholars such as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Cary
Wolfe. The concept posthumanism does not only refer to yet another form of
chronological progression or historical moment (i.e. the ‘end of humanism’, or what
comes ‘after humanism’), but addresses fundamental ontological and epistemologi-
cal questions relating to the problematic project of defining an essential ‘human
nature’ (Wolfe, 2008). Posthumanism may be seen as a response to humanism’s
inability to meet its own criteria of value pluralism, tolerance, and equity for all (e.g.
Wolfe, 2008); not to mention its limitations in addressing whatever may emerge from
the multiple interfaces between organic and inorganic, material and virtual, cultural
and natural worlds (see Whatmore, 2004). From a structural perspective, post-
humanism also implies, in Bartlett and Byers’ words, a view on human dominance as
‘not an inherent or essential attribute, but a negotiated position within a system, a
position that can be overturned’ (2003, p. 29). These understandings identify
posthumanism as both an object of analysis and as an ‘analytical-philosophical
position’ (Castree & Nash, 2004).
One of the most familiar posthumanist trajectories is the ‘cybernetic’ orientation
toward relationality, focusing on human
machine interaction and hybridity (e.g.
Hayles, 1999). Major concerns of the present paper are rather primarily oriented
toward the potentialities of posthumanist theory to highlight the dynamics through
which human and animal subjectivities and corporealities are produced within a
nature
culture dichotomy/collapse/symbiosis. Acknowledging that a shift toward
more flexible ‘models’ of understanding social and environmental processes emerge
in other research areas as well (Pedersen & Dian, 2010), these dynamics can be
viewed as a form of ‘systems theory’ where both humans and animals constitute each
other through constant interaction with each other and with their common
environment (e.g. Rossini, 2006). In contemporary Western society, however,
relationships are frequently mediated by, and incorporated in, various technologies,
institutions and structures within a realm of global economic expansion and
commodification processes. Critical posthumanism
as inflected by Simon (2003),
Rossini (2006) and others
views ‘the posthuman’ as more or less an extension of
liberal humanism (Bartlett & Byers, 2003), and as such, largely as a sophistication
and intensification of familiar patterns of differentiation and domination, adapted to
the expanded conditions of late capitalism. Castree and Nash (2006) suggest an
analogy between critical posthumanism and postcolonialism on the grounds that
both signal a political-analytical perspective as a response to historical (and, I would
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 243

add, historical-material) conditions. These complexities provide a framework for my

subsequent accounts of posthumanism in education theory and in animal studies.

Is ‘the posthuman’ educable? Posthumanism in education theory

I introduced the prologue to this paper with a remark about education theory’s
preoccupation with the project of ‘the human’. Thus, ‘posthumanism’ in the context
of education research has not primarily been concerned with cross-species
intersubjectivities, agencies, and entanglements, but has rather been understood as
a symbolic decentering of the human subject. When Biesta (1998a), drawing largely
on Foucault’s analysis of the subversion of the modern conception of ‘man’, states
that ‘pedagogy has to do without humanism’ (p. 1), he argues for an open-ended
approach to human subjectivity without interrogating the position of ‘the human’ in
education as such. In this sense, the category of ‘the human’ is still ascribed
authority, with inquiries into the co-constitution of human
animal subjectivities and
alterities closed off, and without conceptual space for dealing with the myriad ways
in which nonhuman animal presences are always already part of ‘our’ human selves,
cultures, and societies (education practices included). The answer to Biesta’s (1999)
question, whether there is a way to think in a more reflexive and more ‘radical’ way
about intersubjectivity (and what this would imply for education), must then be that
whoever comes after the Subject is, still, expected to belong to the category Homo
sapiens sapiens: ‘I argue that we can only come into presence in a world populated by
other human beings who are not like us’ (Biesta, 2006, p. 32). The idea that the
‘other’ necessarily has to be human in order to be acknowledged as a ‘proper’
partner in identity-forming relationships is, however, contested not only in animal
studies, but also in some educational fields such as the previously mentioned animal-
assisted therapy/intervention in its various forms (for some examples, see Haraway,
2008, p. 314 n38), and in animal caretaker education (see Pedersen, 2010).
Figuring not only a posthumanist theory, but also practice of education, Gough
(2004) draws on Latour and Haraway to explain how he, as a science educator, has
approached ‘posthumanist pedagogies’:
Making these connections between material bodies and discursive formations helped me
to question aspects of my practice that were occluded by the epistemological and
ontological categories and dualisms that frame and permeate the humanist discourses of
contemporary schooling and higher education, especially those that divide humans from
others, such as human/animal and human/machine. (Gough, 2004, p. 2)
In this process, Gough imagines teaching and learning as
material-semiotic assemblages of sociotechnical relations embedded in and performed
by shifting connections and interactions among a variety of organic, technical, ‘natural’,
and textual materials. (2004, p. 2)

Other education scholars have located posthumanism in critical social theories of

education rather than in education philosophy. Spanos (1993) embeds posthuman-
ism in his socio-political critique of the liberal humanist developments of the
American university after World War II, and Knight (1995) maps a corporatist,
‘posteducational’ landscape where mass schooling, commodification of knowledge,
and the replacement of ‘the (human-educational) referent’ by flexible human units of
production/consumption (p. 24) are closely interlinked. In this settlement, Knight
244 H. Pedersen

fears that an effective synthesis of biological/psychological/sociological technologies

for understanding ‘human nature’ will themselves be part of posteducational
rationales, and markers of ‘the posthuman’. This is a far cry from cyborg and other
theories arguing that the (post)human subject can only be understood in relation to
its inseparability from other nonhuman organisms and units, although Knight shares
his critique with more recent critical posthumanist scholars who have pointed out
that the fluidity, flexibility, and boundary-dissoluting features inscribed in post-
humanist theory seem strikingly similar to the attributes of global capitalism (e.g.
Bartlett & Byers, 2003). Taken to its extreme, ‘posteducation’ might imply an idea
(originating from the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk) that education, as we know it,
could be outmoded and rendered superfluous by genetic engineering’s more effective
tools of achieving human improvement (in terms of health, intelligence, or even
ethical behaviour) by selection and creation of genetic characteristics (Didur, 2003;
Verducci, 2008).6 This posteducational scenario is not far from the images of
education in Ishiguro’s and Atwood’s speculative fiction outlined in the prologue of
the present paper. Assuming that the ‘measures of human improvement’ rely on
extrapolation of experimental data obtained from animal biotechnology, the species-
performative boundary work involved (as well as education’s role in it) is further
complicated: what ontological, discursive, and material (im)possibilities are
(dis)closed by education’s negotiations of the human
animal interface?
A very different perspective of what posthumanism might mean for education
comes from the research area of environmental/sustainability education. Seeing the
current ecological crisis as a crisis of humanism as well as of other aspects of
modernity, Stables and Scott (2001) speak of posthumanism as signalling ‘an attempt
to move away from a defining structure which is now seen as inadequate, but in
which our thinking is nevertheless clearly grounded’ (p. 273). A posthumanist
environmental education would emphasise the role of cultural studies in the
understanding of science and involve a critical engagement with humanist modernity
at all curricular levels, including the tacit assumptions underpinning environmental
education programmes and the notion of sustainable development itself. Still, Stables
and Scott’s (2001) vision of posthumanist environmental education curricula remains
rooted in humanist regimes:
A post-humanist, as well as a postmodernist, critique is called for; at the very least, a
retrospective on the aims and means of modernity; at its most ambitious, a reworking of
humanist assumptions with a view to greater valorisation of the non-human, though this
will inevitably emanate from and respond to human concerns: for example, increasingly
recognising non-human life as necessary and not just as desirable and self-renewing
resource. (pp. 277
278)
In the above analysis of a posthumanist environmental education, there is little
space for the various forms of multispecies agencies, identities, and cross-formations
of lifeworlds increasingly highlighted by cultural studies (including animal studies).
The ‘human’ is still conceived as the rights-granting, voice-giving, and value-
ascribing uncontested authority, and the use value of a posthumanist curriculum is
modestly expressed as a ‘greater care for ecology and the environment’ (Stables &
Scott, 2001, p. 276). Similarly, Bonnett’s (2004) view on posthumanism ‘does not
deny our power but acknowledges its limits and recommends that we refrain from
using it in ways essentially destructive to ourselves in nature’ (p. 168). These
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 245

environmental education scholars echo Murphy’s (1997) outlook on environmental

problems as emanating from a dysfunctional humanism. To Murphy, the
‘posthumanist challenge’ is to transcend the ‘anti-nature humanism’ and develop
a new ‘pro-nature humanism’ that harmonises human social action with the
determinisms of nature and ‘extends what counts as objects of value to nature and
its nonhuman species’ (pp. 290
291). This includes a rejection of the Enlightenment
dualism between humans and animals and emphasises a human
animal continuum
that situates ‘unique human qualities in the context of all that humans share with
nonhuman creatures’ (p. 291). Murphy, however, goes further in his call for a
normative regulation of human social action with regard to unsustainable and
unethical dimensions of material culture that affect nature and nonhuman species.
The role of education in this discussion on posthumanism is far from
straightforward. To see education as a remedy for everything gone awry in modernist
humanism is not only to apply an instrumental view of education, hoping that the
crises of humanism can be fixed by appropriate methods of teaching and learning,
but also to cultivate the naı̈ve idea that education can locate itself outside of ideology.
Here arises Biesta’s (2006) critique against education as a way to achieve certain
predefined ends
and, at the same time, the question of whether this is at all
avoidable.

Posthuman animals? Posthumanism in animal studies

In their introduction to the volume Knowing Animals, Armstrong and Simmons
(2007) capture the (meta)physics of human
animal interrelationships as follows:
The creatures that occupy our taxonomies are never purely nonhuman. They are never
free of us. Their bodies, habits and habitats are shaped by human designs; they are
contaminated by, but also resistant to, our philosophies, theologies, representations,
interests, intentions. On the other hand, and just as surely, our concepts and practices
are never purely human in the first place. For we are not free of the animals either,
although the tradition of humanism
whose ruins we inhabit
promised that we should
be. (p. 2)

Paradoxically, not only animals are the focus of posthumanist theorising in animal
studies. Mitchell (2003) mentions another set of nonhuman entities of organic
characteristics: intelligent machines, systems, swarms, viruses and coevolutionary
organisms, corpses (!), corpora, corporations, images and works of art, that are all
part of rethinking the human/nonhuman distinction and the immanent critique of
the trope of the animal. This points not only to an updated version of ecological
symbiosis within entangled life-systems and life worlds, but more importantly, to the
question of what to do with the inherent power asymmetries in the organisation and
experiences of these lived, hybridised relationships. Drawing on Latour, Novek
(2005) emphasises that posthumanism is not in any way ‘outside’ the thought
systems and structures of modern society, but part of the regime of maximising
industrial-economic output in which both human and nonhuman actants are
productively reorganised and reconfigured toward the ends of capital accumulation
(see Williams, 2004). As Zylinska (2006) indicates in her review of Donna Haraway’s
The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), it would take a lot to validate the
possibility of humans and other animals coexisting in a process reminiscent of
Habermasian deliberation, especially in a society whose systems of production forge
246 H. Pedersen

human
animal interaction into what Williams (2004) has called ‘a leviathan of

manufacturing violence’ (p. 53).
The violence Williams specifically analyses is the coercive and manipulative
violence of the meat industry, but could easily be extended to other species-coded
practices and institutions. Wolfe (2003) sees speciesism as such as an institution, that
is, a network of modes and practices of materialisation that have certain violent
effects on nonhuman animals and particular groups of humans similarly inhabiting
non-normative spaces. Following Wolfe, these socio-cultural, politico-economic and
techno-scientific arrangements, relations and intersections, as well as the species
performativities they accommodate, could be made essential objects of inquiry in
posthumanist research.
The radical potential of posthumanist theory merges for some critical animal
studies scholars into explicitly anti-speciesist approaches (e.g. Best, 2005; Rossini,
2006), but may also, for instance, appear primarily as a means to open up new
understandings of situated human
nonhuman relationalities. Pickering (2005) views
posthumanism in methodological terms, in which the ‘mutual becoming’ of the
human and the nonhuman requires a shift in the unit of analysis.7 To Pickering
(drawing on Deleuze and Guattari), posthumanism is a tool to transcend traditional
disciplinary boundaries between natural sciences and social/humanist sciences and
study the ‘evolving dialectic’ between human and nonhuman agencies; a dialectic
that produces a new kind of posthuman object, or assemblage, with a certain kind of
‘inner unity’. According to Pickering, this ‘posthuman’ object paradoxically precedes
the human and nonhuman objects of the traditional sciences, and this temporal
emergence of the posthuman object gives it a quality of ‘becoming’ that these
sciences lack. The posthumanist shift in the unit of analysis also opens up a different
and distinctive space of inquiry
the study of intertwinings and coupled becomings
of the human and the nonhuman.
Pickering also raises the crucial question of ‘so what?’, asking where posthuman-
ism, here perceived as just another object of scientific inquiry, actually takes us. His
answer focuses on a form of precautionary work: ignoring the specific couplings of
the human and the nonhuman may bring about disastrous environmental
consequences that will inevitably ‘strike back’. This leads back to the discussions
among the environmental education scholars referred to in the previous section.
Taken to its extreme, posthumanism thus implies a dystopic, literal post-humanism,
reaching beyond the specific notion of the ‘death of the subject’ to a scenario where
actual extinction is at stake; human
animal co-constitution and mutual reconfigura-
tion being inextricably bound together in vanishing ecosystems.

Conclusions
Haraway (2008) has identified the ‘posthumanities’ as ‘a useful notion for tracking
scholarly conversations’ (p. 308 n21). This paper has engaged with a similar task by
providing a brief overview of the notion of posthumanism as it is used in primarily
education theory and animal studies. But is posthumanism also a meaningful notion
in theorising the education
animal studies interface?
Biesta (1998b) has addressed the inherent ‘impossibility’ and unpredictability of
education: there is never any guarantee that its outcome will be as expected or
intended. What is to be found in education is thus an ontological and epistemological
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 247

insecurity that to some extent mirrors the impurities and imperfections of hybrid
relationships often emphasised by posthumanist scholars (for example, Castree &
Nash, 2006). Such insecurities emerge in several images and scenarios of education as
discussed earlier, but I want to further stress that education’s ‘community of those
who have nothing in common’8 already is an assemblage; a constellation of human

nonhuman ‘hybrid relationships’ that, in all of its unpredictable forms of imperfec-
tion, accommodates posthumanist dimensions. This understanding of posthumanist
education contrasts with the strands of environmental education previously
discussed, where posthumanism entails a pragmatic ‘corrective device’ to reform
education curricula in a more sustainable direction, without moving toward a
deconstruction of the authoritative position of human subjectivity.
Posthumanist education and animal studies are not only interlinked by spaces of
ontological/epistemological imperfection, but also by ‘radical’ intersubjectivities,
open-ended ways of ‘coming into the world’ by multiple possibilities of ‘becomings’
(see Braun, 2004) and a decentering of the ‘traditional’ human subject (however that
is defined). The animal question furthermore ‘forces’ itself onto education and
knowledge production since posthumanism asks us to rethink the idea of ‘the
animal’ as always already occupying the position of the subaltern, the natural-
cultural resource, and the raw material endlessly mutating into new commodity
forms; yet some biotechnologically oriented posthumanist trajectories seem to rely
on precisely the material and discursive accessibility of animal bodies for ends and
interests familiar from capitalist agendas. The sophisticated technoscientific devel-
opment that so often encloses certain posthumanist tracks is hardly created out of a
material vacuum, but requires continuous exploitation of human and animal labour
and other organic resources for its realisation, dissemination, and utilisation. In this
sense, posthumanism appears as repeating a strikingly modernist logic, and as yet
another product and a reiteration of Western hegemony, unequally distributed
resources, and exclusionary politics; a politics most productive for the already
privileged. This understanding of posthumanism contributes to redrawing the map
of globalised class relations across the species category, but upholds its fundamental
structure.
Guided by Adams’s (2006) question of what sorts of referents animals constitute
in scholarly discourses9 one may ask how theories of education, human
animal
relations, and posthumanism can be productively reworked within a common realm
of critical inquiry? Further research could address this question by exploring how
pedagogies are creatively tangled up with, and used by, regimes of biopower,
biocapital, and other forms of embodied commodification of interspecies relation-
ships (see Haraway, 2008), as well as how resistances are played out in various
constellations (see Coppin, 2003). For these purposes, I suggest making various
forms of human
animal corporeal-discursive intersections (as speculatively depicted
in the fictional works of Atwood, 2003 and Ishiguro, 2005, as well as in other
examples throughout this paper) a central node for critical posthumanist investiga-
tions into the bio-dynamics of the education/culture/society complex in late
capitalism (see Gane, 2006). Possible units of analysis of such investigations could
be, for instance, interspecies choreographies and emotional labour (e.g. Beardsworth
& Bryman, 2001; Bryman, 1999; Desmond, 1999); biosocial relations and
assemblages (e.g. Pickering, 2005); and materialities and microphysics of education
in various formal and nonformal educational settings.
248 H. Pedersen

Acknowledgements
I thank the internal seminar participants at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala
University, for valuable feedback. I am particularly indebted to Eva Hayward. I also thank
Mikael Pedersen for helpful comments on an early draft of this paper, as well as the Discourse
reviewers. Finally, I am very grateful to the GenNa programme at the Centre for Gender
Research at Uppsala University for funding and hosting my research fellowship.

Notes
1. Adopted from the notion of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ as articulated by Adrienne Rich
and Judith Butler, McKay frames ‘compulsory humanity’ as follows: ‘It is compulsory that
we ‘‘become’’ human, and this very becoming is a function of our renunciation of the
animal’ (2005, p. 218).
2. Humane education, an approach to teach children care and compassion toward animals
through formal and non-formal education, originated around 145 years ago as part of the
organised animal protection movement (Unti & DeRosa, 2003).
3. For instance, the Swedish National Curriculum (Lpo 94/Lpf 94) defines values that the
school should ‘represent and impart’ in accordance with ‘the ethics borne by Christian
tradition and Western humanism’ (National Agency for Education, 2006, p. 3).
4. Some educational situations manifest approaches to blur this human
animal divide.
However, the expression of human
animal continuities in the classroom (and elsewhere)
may, paradoxically, appear as an even more authoritative emphasis of the reinscription of
species boundaries (Pedersen, 2010).
5. By ‘species performativity’ I mean discursive practices and processes that produce and
reproduce nonhuman otherness in specific contexts of human
animal interaction. The term
is developed from Birke, Bryld, and Lykke’s (2004) application of Judith Butler’s notion of
gender performativity to human
animal relationships. (For a further account of species
performativity, see Pedersen, 2010.)
6. I thank Måns Andersson for alerting me to the point that biologists might be sceptical to
this idea, on the grounds that selection of complex genetic characteristics would be
extremely complicated in humans.
7. I am not sure whether Pickering would consider himself to be an animal studies scholar, but
I nonetheless regard his article to which I am referring as an interesting contribution to the
field of animal studies.
8. That is, a community in which we are all in a sense strangers to each other and which asks
us to respond to what is unfamiliar (see Biesta, 2006, pp. 55
71; Lingis, 1994).
9. The question of whether it is in animals’ interests to morph discursively or phenomen-
ologically into human/animal/technoscientific cyborg relationships or assemblages is, to my
experience, rarely raised in posthumanist scholarship. (For an example from critical animal
studies, see Weisberg, 2009.)

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