Introduction
The pedagogical poverty of posthumanism is a result of its position as a comparatively young field of methodological inquiry and an essentialized and often jeopardized understanding of the same due to the neoliberal fetish for transhumanism, which largely seeks to ‘enhance’ the subsequent components that form a human. Posthumanist studies also seek to stand as a challenging alternative to the popular construction of human, as a discourse propagated by the Western Philosophers to exclusively refer to the image of a white, cosmopolitan Englishman. It is due to this exclusive categorisation of human that a particular section of the world’s population has been provided with unending access to power and domination over the not-so-human counterparts, the factored consequences of which are colonisation, followed by the advent of capitalism and economic monopolisation through neo-colonialism and neoliberalism. A rough understanding of humanism, implies the use of measurable characteristics for being identified as a human and the enhancement of the same through additional techniques. Although posthumanism established itself as a critical alternative to the quantifying elements of humanism, instead of challenging the objectives of the latter, studies on the former largely follow a similar path of enhancement.
The “[neoliberal form of] government make it possible for their subjects to conceive of rational human behaviour as self-interested and economy calculating” (Steuart, 2012). Neoliberalisation brought to the forefront the concept of transhuman to manufacture its ideal citizens through technological aids. The economically rational actor of post-enlightenment was to be moved away from the emotional beings to more technical, disciplined citizens. Foucault refers to this ideal subject as ‘Homo Economicus’. The transhumanists who view technology as the foremost solution to underdevelopment reduce individual bodies to storehouses of information, that can be controlled and manipulated. Posthumanist Scholar Hayles, in ‘My Mother Was a Computer’ argues against such technophilic transhumanism through her theory of how “information lost its body” (Steuart, 2012). Biotechnological enhancement underpins the objective of transforming the “imperfect” human into a “perfect” one that would be economically beneficial, a methodological junction whereby transhumanism and neoliberalism intersect with each other and become one. The mind occupies the rank of being “more human” as against the body. Consequently, the transhumanist breakthroughs, which had initially claimed to benefit all, remained restricted to the wealthiest sections of the American society.
Many of the posthumanist scholars like Weaver and Pettman emphasised on the merging of humans and machines to enhance human capabilities, often reasoned out on the ground of the already established bond between the two (Snaza et. al, 2014). In the face of rising right-wing extremism in India, accompanied by a wave of corporatisation and capitalist consumerism, state-sponsored surveillance to achieve homogenous rationality and efficacy, has grown too. Educational institutions are the most susceptible to a transhumanist and technophilic posthumanist transition to manufacture desired citizens as deemed fit by the State. A prime strategy in doing so has been the introduction of a close-ended Multiple Choice Questionnaire, for the computerized evaluation of a ward. Absolute Knowledge codified into facts serve as the only basis for evaluation. As Herbrechter (n.d.) says, the posthumanist school and university, in a reductive economist sense, “together with the accelerating and intensifying reliance on (new) media technologies, therefore already presupposes the reality of an ongoing process that might be called ‘posthumanization’.” The question, however, is that if we proceed to do away with the traditional and lofty concepts and discourses for their rigidity and unidimensionality, why and how are we aware of what is absolute and perfect? This paper seeks to analyse the motives behind the MCQization of Academia, in the context of neoliberal India amidst rising capitalism and monopolisation, and how posthumanist interventions can and must be used to do away with it, providing space for imagination and opinions, which also is a dire necessity.
Neoliberalism, Communalisation of Education and Manufacturing Ideal Citizens under Surveillance
Multiple Choice Question format, by focusing on mathematical precision, renders critical articulation as dangerous since it does not fit into the absolute or standardised answers. Abhijit Pathak defines this process of standardisation as the “poverty of pedagogic imagination” due to their attempt at viewing knowledge as the acquisition of mere facts, especially in the field of social sciences and liberal arts. The teachers are deprived of their agency to think and merely act as agents in formulating ‘objective’ questions and generating MCQ question banks. More recently, teachers are even barred from participating in the question-framing process in general, with the National Testing Agency (NTA), an Indian government agency set up in 2017, taking the mantle of selecting questions for the National Eligibility Test (NET) for determining junior research fellowship and so on. Even entrance examinations to qualify for a postgraduate Masters degree in Educational Institutions like Jawaharlal Nehru University, are now conducted under and regulated by the NTA. While both transhumanism and posthumanism aim to replace how knowledge has been constructed for aeons (privileging a small group of people over the majority of others) with a newer version of it, the latter “might need to undo rather than replace knowledge with a conceptual creativity that potentializes a new vocabulary that invites complexity and the chance for change” (Snaza et. al, 2014).
It is through interaction with each other and the world that knowledge is produced. However, this process is disrupted by the growing importance allotted to the acquisition and storage of information in the form of facts that are not to be disagreed with and must not be placed under contestation. According to Howlett (2018), “the times we live in seem to necessitate a reassertion of the human precisely because it is part of what is threatened by neoliberalism’s adjudication, making the non-profitable or productive life indispensable, exemplified by the turn in teacher education to conflate good teaching with good data collection” (108). Taking a glance at the recent political unfoldings leading to an intensification of youth movements and protests against the decisions of the State which has resulted in an attack on democratic and premiere educational institutions in the country whereby scholars and activists have been unjustly imprisoned, beaten up and humiliated to suppress their voice and crush dissent, “profitable” would exclusively denote the ones who accept the authoritarian regime and its words as the ultimate truth and act as loyal subjects.
Moreover, scholars and historians like Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee and Nandini Sundar have researched on and expressed their disdain for the way education has been communalised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing, Hindu paramilitary organisation working under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. A network of private schools like Vidya Bharati and Saraswati Sishu Sadan are run across various states in India, following a similar pattern of civilizing mission based on humanism that was earlier followed by the Christian missionaries, with the exception that now a Hindu man, enlightened with knowledge gained from Vedas, Upanishads and other Hindu texts is recognised as an ideal human being. As Sundar (2004) states, “for them [the Hindu Nationalists], social science, especially history, is intimately connected with inculcating national identity and patriotism. The ‘nation’ is identified with dominant groups in society and only narratives that value the role of these groups positively are seen as patriotic” (1605), and hence, it is time we delve deeper into the most pathological effect of fact-construction. The New National Curriculum Framework was introduced in 2000 to serve the new communal agenda where chapters written by Secular Historians in NCERT textbooks, were removed. Ones opposing it were labelled as “anti-nationals” or “anti-Hindu, Euro-Indians” (Chandra, 2008). Gandhi’s assassination was removed from the textbooks. Gujarat State Social Studies textbook categorised minorities as “foreigners”. Anti-Muslim rhetoric was propagated as they came to be considered barbaric and uncivilized.
An extract, in a somewhat similar question-and-answer pattern, from the publication of Vidya Bharati taken from ‘RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi’ (Mukherjee et. al 2008):
“(i) The credit for lighting the lamp of culture in China goes to the ancient Indians.
(ii) India is the mother country of ancient China. Their ancestors were Indian kshatriyas….
(iii) The first people who began to inhabit China were Indians.
(iv) The first people to settle in Iran were Indians (Aryans).
(v) The popularity of the great work of the Aryans—Valmiki Ramayana—influenced Yunan (Greece) and there also the great poet Homer composed a version of the Ramayana.
(vi) The Languages of the indigenous people (Red Indians) of the northern part of America were derived from ancient Indian languages.” (23-24).
“Q. Which Muslim plunderer invaded the temples in Ayodhya in AD 1033?
A. Mahmud Ghaznavi’s nephew Salar Masud.
Q. Which Mughal invader destroyed the Rama Temple in AD 1528?
A. Babur.
Q. Why is Babri Masjid not a mosque?
A. Because Muslims have never till today offered Namaz there.
Q. Which day was decided by Sri Ram Kar Sewa Samiti to start Kar Sewa?
A. 30 October, 1990.
Q. Why will 2 November 1990 be inscribed in black letters in the history of India?
A. Because on that day, the then Chief Minister by ordering the Police to shoot unarmed Kar Sewaks massacred hundreds of them.
Q. When was the Shilanyas of the temple laid in Sri Ram Janmabhumi?
A. 1 November 1989.”
Misrepresentation and misinformation, accompanied by a State monologue are constructed as facts, which need to be memorized, without questioning– students are barred from finding out the reasons behind what led to the formation of these facts, or how history has shaped them. Post-2014, under the Prime Ministership of Narendra Modi, the most charismatic leader of the BJP bandwagon, the politicisation and monopolisation of education has intensified and worsened. A similar pattern of MCQ is now considered as the most correct form of evaluation where one has to choose the ‘right’ objective of a policy introduced by the government, whether or not the policy had been implemented at all, whether it distorts and disrupts the democratic structure of the country and whether or not it promotes discrimination and violence.
The need for Empathy and Memorialisation
N. Katherine Hayles, in her book ‘How We Became Posthuman’ (1999), explained the intensifying desire among the neoliberal States to erase the boundaries and burdens of a human body and transform it into non-matter, into mere information. The civilizing mission of taming and silencing that has remained abated from the medieval to post-enlightenment to neoliberal era, have made us go from what Donna Haraway (1984) says, “the comfortable old hierarchical denominations to the scary new networks called the informatics of domination” (20). When posthumanism seeks to decry the western tradition of humanism, it must not entirely focus on object-oriented ontology like cybernetics, computerized communications, biotechnology and so on. Posthumanism, in a globalized age, must first realize the limits and democratic possibilities of humanism, in relation to interactions between a coloniser and the colonized (Snaza et. al, 2014), the majority and the minority, the head of a multinational corporation and their workers.
Isabella Stengers (1997; 2010), opined that instead of a closed one whose research finding would either be a “disconfirmation” or “confirmation”, we need open science, “a science that is not afraid of remembering the cultural-political-historical construction of science within humanist networks” (Snaza et. al, 2014, 52). Posthumanism ‘without’ technology which diverts the focus away from technological determinism and technocentrism, towards a more general anthropological trajectory (Herbrechter, 2018) is thus needed. “Destabilising ‘securely bound’ concepts via paying attention to the performativity of complex agents/agencies provides a thoroughly heightened form of critical engagement not only with a subject but moreover, with the method of inquiry itself” (Bayley, 2018, 249). Hence, the students must have their agency to empathise, to memorise and memorialise, to lean on minute complexities of everyday life while engaging in a discussion. In the face of a communalist and corporatized threat where human bodies are reduced to mere statistics, into “bare lives”, it is important for both the teacher and the student to engage in discussions where empathy, solidarity and personal grievances play an important role in pedagogical performativity. For what good does education serve if it accepts genocide, war and exploitation as mere facts? There is also no absolute truth. One school of thought can and is interpreted in various ways. For instance, reducing Karl Marx to just dialectical materialism and class struggle, would be a sheer anomaly. Besides being a philosopher, Marx’s position as an ecologist is seldom discussed. Is it even possible to ‘describe’ exploitation in a word or two, and how do you know what is rightly known as exploitation and what isn’t? Hence, there is no absolute knowledge, no single truth.
Conclusion
There is a pressing need to redefine humanity before moving into posthumanism, and perhaps that should be the ideal goal of posthumanist pedagogy. According to Barbara Grant, “we don’t necessarily need new methods [in academia]: rather we need to imbue our procedures with new forms of alertness and new forms of representation” (Bayley, 2018, 251). Zakiah Iman Jackson (2015) posits the question of whose conception of humanity we are trying to move beyond to exclaim that instead of reframing the problem, posthumanism erases it. Scholars of posthumanism need to engage themselves in academic underpinnings and a prime way of doing so is to place the system of MCQization under scrutiny as it does exactly what posthumanism seeks to challenge— reducing the human to their ability to perform rational judgements that maintains the hierarchy of life, ultimately.
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