in a historical tradition of art, which teachers might want to utilise for analytical as well as creative educational purposes (see fig. 2).
The other, more novel idea concerning memes has to do with the modes of reception and production required for understanding them. Memes are usually grouped by thematic concerns – confession, as mentioned above, or outrage, cheeky observation, nostalgia and “first-world problems” – and demand students to be able to identify these concerns in order to relate. The “most hated neologism” is really helpful now when we try to understand how the relatively necent form of aesthetic and communicative pleasure of memes works: it is by creating links of relationality amongst users and by requiring but also engendering empathetic identification. Every “When you …”-mini-narrative requires identification and perspective taking, and every abstract visualisation of awkward moments or confession necessitates perspective coordination.1
Emblem and Meme (see also Bartosch 2016). Emblem “Mentem non formam plus pollere”, taken from the Emblematum Liber, Augsburg 1531 (Wikimedia Commons).
This is of course a cognitive and affective operation well known in literature pedagogy. Educators often teach literary fiction with an eye on moments of empathy and identification – and they are certainly well-advised to pay heed to the fact that similar concerns motivate contemporary usage of digital communications. Memes therefore not only tie in with established concepts in literary and cultural learning. They moreover point to an aspect of digital communication sometimes overlooked in educational debates which understand digitisation as a methodological project rather than a question of subject formation and interaction in complex media environments. If anything, thinking about posthumanism in education underlines how important such questions are, however. Instead of the digital methodocentrism to be found in policy documents and “innovative” suggestions for what ultimately is little more than sugar-coated behaviourist rote learning of vocab and grammar, thinking about memes thus asks us to think about posthumanist potentials rather than transhumanist enhancements (of the teaching situation and the educator’s role and proficiency). Learning with memes points to lessons in relatability: a lesson worth learning under the new posthuman dispensation, it seems.
5. Outlook: Posthumanism, Post-Covid
Apropos “new dispensation”: It is difficult to speak of post- or transhumanist imaginaries as if Covid-19 did not exist. After all, much of what some years ago would have been discussed as either post- or transhumanist future fantasy has become reality for a global community of learners. This includes biopolitical control and media-enhanced surveillance, on the one hand, and increased vulnerability, pandemic risks of death and disease, but also solidarity and moments of reflection and deceleration, on the other. One can correlate these developments with the posthumanism/transhumanism illustration I have drawn upon in this chapter, and it is likewise possible to understand people’s reactions to the current crisis via the notions of relatability and stubborn subjectivity, respectively. If we accede that posthumanism seeks to decentre the human(ist) notion that we are the measure of all things and that transhumanism underlines that very notion via technological determinism, posthumanist learning after Covid-19 would be more-than-human, yet humane. It would rethink educational practices and the value of solidarity, community and collaboration. Transhumanist learning, by contrast, celebrates the new digital realities, takes remote education for granted and dreams of its economic potentials. And this is where posthumanism comes in just as much as the many experiences of educators all around the world: Transhumanising technology, understood as prosthetic enhancement just as well as tablet-based remote learning, exacerbates social injustice, privileges the privileged while it disenfranchises the disenfranchised, as school lockdowns everywhere have shown. It lacks in social warmth and, yes, relatability, but abets instrumentalising and algorithmic teaching procedures. The main reason why so many teachers have been and still are exhausted and frustrated is not because it is hard or impossible to scan and send around a worksheet. It is knowing that this is only a tiny fraction of educational practice, which overlooks meaningful interaction and communication. No wonder we find new cultural practices in online communication which centre on exactly this kind of interaction. A posthumanist lesson in relatability if ever there was one!
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