Posthuman education in the age of the Anthropocene: two alternative life affirmative visions

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to dwell upon how we ought to ‘educate’ ourselves, as (post)human beings, in the Anthropocene age, we are now living in. It is proposed that the dominant logic of education today is based on an ethical problematic late-Holocene “scenic, technical and human-centered” world- and self-understanding. Further, it is argued that this can only be fully recognized today because we are beginning to understand our self and the world differently. Thus, it is suggested that we today live in an aporetic transition situation in between two different world understandings; where the new one is more “dialogical, poetical and zoe-centered”. From this perspective the posthuman theory of Braidotti (2011, 2013) is critically assessed trough the key question: What kind of world- and self-understanding is the theory based on? Braidotti argues herself that her affirmative and ethical strand of posthuman thought is able to rethink what human beings together with “earth” others are cable of doing and what we/they ought to become to make this whole planet sustainable. If this is so, it also has educational consequences and calls for redoing our educational institutions. Yet, it is argued that her Deleuzeian account of nonpersonal “zoe-centered egalitarianism” is not totally based on the new emerging world-understanding and therefore lack some of the vital potentiality it could have possessed if it otherwise had been more attentive to the “new understandings of our present situation”. The distinction between the two Greek life-concepts Bio and Zoe is on this background rethought, bringing forward a more singularized account of human beings and other “critters” (Haraway 2016). The upshot is two alternative, but different visions of future education in the Anthropocene; one based on potentializing unpersonal life-forces, another based on Wo-Wei-singularity-blossoming-activities summoning both human beings and other critters to educational co-life-gatherings.