Education in and for Cosmopolitics: A Speculative Vital Materialist Approach to Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Taking Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Bruno Latour’s theory of action seriously, this article suggests that neither human individual nor any unit of human collective should be the starting point for a discussion on cosmopolitanism. Instead, I contend that a vital materialist approach that takes nonhuman actants/existents as seriously as the humans offers a more appropriate ontological horizon for a discussion of cosmopolitanism and its concomitant pedagogical forms, especially in the way human subjectivity is formed and transformed. If we can conceptualize transnational publics, which are constituted as much by nonhumans as by humans, cosmopolitanism then cannot merely be conceived as an orientation of openness to foreign humans, but it is also an openness to foreign nonhumans. A philosophical grounding of cosmopolitanism within a neomaterialist horizon is necessary to encourage a renewed engagement with the political and pedagogical projects of cosmopolitanism. The question is: how would the analyses of cosmopolitanism change if we were to take the force of nonhumans, what Bennett calls the thing-power materialism, seriously? Within an ecology of human and nonhuman material bodies, or actants, as potential members of constantly mutating “parliament of things,” a vital materialist cosmopolitics seeks to enhance awareness of our entanglements with the world understood as a local, open and contingent achievement of human and nonhuman configurations and reconfigurations.