The Transhumanist Creep: Posthumanism, Pedagogy, and the Praxeological Mangle

Abstract

This contribution takes one of posthumanism’s most powerful conceptual distinctions – between posthumanist thought and its ill-famed doppelgaenger, transhumanism – as the starting point for a critique of posthumanist thinking in education. Pointing to moments in which both post- and transhumanism become harder to distinguish in educational theory and practice, it utilises the notion of the ‘creep phenomenon’ to describe how these seemingly opposite concepts and ways of thinking can become uncomfortably entangled in everyday practices of teaching and of marketing posthumanism. It thus makes a case for the need for empirical thick descriptions of practices in which theoretical posthumanist thought finds application and points to the unsought intersection and overlap between post- and transhumanist thought. Drawing on work on the cognitive and affective impact of literature, it suggests that literature pedagogy is one of the places where such convergences are explicitly reflected and that literature pedagogy as a form of applied literary and cultural studies provides helpful provocations and potential ameliorations of a prevalent practice-blindness in the field.