Introduction: the utopia of Man

[This] demand for a world-otherwise emerges from the historically specific structure of this world defined by the “overrepresentation of Man” or the substitution of a single genre of being human for the generic category of Human Being (Hantel 2018, p. 62).

It is rare in contemporary times to encounter international education policy reports that envision personal fulfilment, international solidarity, a sense of wonderment for what it means to be in the world, such as we encounter in the 1972 report of the International Commission on the Development of Education, chaired by Edgar Faure. Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow, also known as the 1972 Faure report, was commissioned and published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the advent of the Second Development Decade (1970–1980). The Faure report, like many educational policy ventures, was seized with a sense of urgency at a time of “unprecedented demand for education” (Faure et al. 1972, p. vi), its goals no less than the generation of “over-all solutions to the major problems involved in the development of education in a changing universe” (ibid., p. v). “[F]or the first time in history”, the authors announced, “education is now engaged in preparing men for a type of society which does not yet exist” (ibid., p. 13; italics in original).

At once philosophical, “of a practical nature” and aiming “to lead to action” (Faure et al. 1972, p. vii), the report set out to offer governments, scholars and educational actors of many kinds evocative concepts with which to prepare for this society-to-come, including lifelong education (and later, lifelong learning), the learning society, international solidarity and personalised learning (Elfert 2018; Faure et al. 1972). The authors of the Faure report subverted views prevailing at the time that education should be rationed for the elite, and that the nature of knowledge was that of a static corpus, to be consumed “once and for all” early in life (ibid., p. 160). The authors of the Faure report envisioned instead a new mode of continuous, “dialectical thought” (ibid., p. 148) “reaching out to embrace the whole of society and the entire lifespan of the individual” (ibid., pp. 161), fit for the ever-changing knowledge of the scientific age and empowered by endlessly innovative technologies and the efficiencies they promised: a commitment to evidence and reason over dogma; to science over myth, to concrete realities and experience over standardised testing regimes abstracted from everyday life. The report’s authors even imagined “dialogue between man and machine” (ibid., p. 143; italics in original), datafied educational subjects, and a computer-enhanced intellectual revolution that would “fre[e] the human mind” from routine cognitive labour (ibid., p. 126; italics in original).

The report is unapologetically utopian and firmly rooted in the Western imaginary of Universal Man. According to the report's authors,“changing the fundamental conditions of man’s fate necessarily contains a utopian element” (Faure et al. 1972, p. 163); one that envisions “the complete man” (ibid., p. 158) as a modernist project to realise man’s destiny at the centre of the universe. The authors distinguish between this complete man, and the “concrete being”, the everyday man who is born “biologically unfinished” (ibid., p. 157) and who must learn constantly in order to survive and evolve. The purpose of education in this utopia is to “help man […] find his path through reality” (ibid., p. 158). Man “never ceases to ‘enter life’, to be born in human form. This is the major argument in favour of lifelong education” (ibid.).

The Faure report began a tradition of futurist thinking in international education policy, proposing that learning must be in the “service of man himself” (Faure et al. 1972, p. 146), his autonomy, freedom, mobility and desire to learn, and not, it implies, in the service of narrow vocationalism or political ideologies. The report gathers knowledge and ideas as both a call to action and a heritage to future generations who will need to make their own decisions about how to live in the world. Steven Hodge et al. call this an enabling orientation to future-making in adult education and lifelong learning, in that it seeks to “reserve the future as a space of design for those who will inhabit it, and give citizens of that future […] a heritage whose uses should not [be] decreed in advance” (Hodge et al. 2021, p. 196). This is in contrast to the contemporary ‘determining-the-future’ approach to education policymaking that Hodge et al. argue amounts to “proprietorship over the future” as powerful actors claim to “already ‘kno[w]’ what people will have to contend with (e.g. Industry 4.0) and what ‘competences’ they will need when they get there” (ibid., p. 194). Future-making is a politics of power.

Perhaps the enabling qualities of the Faure report explain its continued influence on adult education policies and pedagogies, so that the terms adult education, lifelong learning and lifelong education are often coupled together or used interchangeably. The Faure report remains compelling enough for UNESCO to decide to re-issue it in 2013 to “inspire a new generation of educationalists with the wisdom of past thinking” (Bokova 2013), at a time when still, again, we find ourselves in crisis, rapid economic change and other global societal transformations.

“But who, we?” Jacques Derrida posed this provocative question at the close of his 1969 lecture The Ends of Man (Derrida 1969, p. 57; emphasis added), delivered during another moment of global crisis, notably the racist, colonial onslaught of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the white supremacist attack on Black freedom that this represented. Derrida proposed that the “referent-we of Man and of its ends […] is not the referent-we of the human species itself” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 24; italics in original), but an imagined and imposed “we” of the Universal Man. As Sharon Stein et al. (2017) observe, for human and nonhuman beings that are the objects of colonialisms past and present, those excluded from the ‘referent-we’, there has never been a not-crisis; many have already lived through life-changing assaults on their being and becoming, and continue to do so every day. But is it possible, facing whole-world climatic collapse, that this is a different moment, prompting us to look to education and to past wisdom, something we might have forgotten along the way, to restore hope, to reclaim a lost future? Can the Faure report continue to inspire?

My task in this article is to bring the “dizzying future” of education envisioned in the Faure report (Faure et al. 1972, p. 90), with Universal Man as its animating force, into conversation with an alternate future of the human invented by feminist philosopher Sylvia Wynter. Wynter has long observed that Man is not a mere linguistic convention or patriarchal relic, but a powerful and persistent politics of erasure, whiteness, colonialism and (hu)man exceptionalism that is leading the world to ecological and social collapse (Wynter and McKittrick 2015; Stein et al. 2017). I explore the idea central to Wynter’s work that if we are to learn our way out of perpetual crises, of socio-bio collapse, if lifelong learning can be a potential force for equity, democracy and justice of the kind envisioned by the authors of the Faure report, then it must be de-coupled from this overrepresented, “biocentric” Man-as-human (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 16).

I begin by describing Wynter’s insights into the emergence of Universal Man as a colonial logic, one that gave humans a “biocentric”, or race-centred, “descriptive statement” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 29) and later, a capitalist imperative. I then turn to Wynter’s insights into how this Man has become naturalised, made synonymous with being human. For Wynter, Universal Man is a story that has arisen out of the Western episteme (Foucault 1970); it survives by erasing or replacing stories and experiences of Indigenous, Black and gender nonbinary humanity. In redefining what it means to be human, Wynter recuperates these stories and also asks what other kinds of stories are possible to “give humanness a different future” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 9).

In the third section, I consider the material groundings of my scholarship and practice as an adult educator and researcher and how I might conduct these differently, how adult education and lifelong learning might be different, if we take seriously the implications of Wynter’s proposal that being human (and so also, learning and possible futures) is not the accomplishment of the complete Man, an ideal that has justified the exploitation, exclusion and genocide of so much of humanity, but is instead a praxis (Wynter and McKittrick 2015), a collective knowing and doing that matters in the world-making of the present, making futures possible.

Wynter’s work of over 50 years has attracted attention of late among education scholars. Nathan Snaza and Aparna Mishra Tarc observe in their 2019 special issue of Curriculum Inquiry,

scholars are looking back at her work to move forward in the “wake up” time in which education and its institutions, but also the undercommons that surround them, need her compelling thought the most (Snaza and Mishra Tarc 2019, p. 5).

Karishma Desai and Brenda Sanya, in Gender and Education, appraise the unique contribution of Wynter’s work to decolonial and gender studies, as she surpasses binaries between human and anti-human discourses that have dominated post-structural theory, moving beyond critique of the human to recover and create new spaces for Indigenous and Black knowledges that Man-as-human “pushed to the margins” (Desai and Sanya 2016, p. 710).

Sylvia’s Wynter’s project to “give humanness a different future” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 9) is propelled by conceptual and philosophical inventiveness. Creating different futures through scholarship means departing from well-trodden theoretical terrain, reading and writing not only what is, but what has been lost, and what could be (Nxumalo 2021). A playwright, poet, dancer, novelist and philosopher, Wynter reads across and against traditional disciplines, identifying fissures, openings and new concepts. Her career spans the publication of her MA thesis in 1953 (a critical edition of a Spanish play, A lo que obliga el honor by Antonio Enriquez Gómez; Wynter 1953), a 1962 novel The Hills of Hebron (Wynter 2010 [1962]), and appointments to various universities including professor emerita of Stanford University where she taught between 1977 and 1997. An important source that has sparked new attention to Sylvia Wynter’s ideas is Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (McKittrick 2015, p. x), an edited volume that features 10 years of conversations between Kathleen McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter, as well as essays by anti-colonial scholars who engage with Wynter’s work. McKittrick (2015) describes how Wynter works out ideas in a unique mode of thinking-talking-writing with feminisms, the Stoics, Ancient and contemporary physics, neurocognitive science, post/anti-colonial literatures, Critical Race Theory and the humanities, science and technology studies, politics, current affairs (ibid., pp. 6–7). Particularly influential on Wynter’s work is the writing of fellow Caribbean scholar Aimé Césaire, who has called for recreating a human “made to the measure of the world” and not only to the measure of Man; that is, a human inclusive of all humans (Césaire 2000 [1955], p. 73). From Franz Fanon’s astounding book Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon 1967 [1952]) came sociogeny, the idea that humans are both biology and stories (bios and mythoi). Fanon’s insight inspired Wynter’s hybrid human and being human as praxis, concepts that I elaborate below and that are central to her project to reorient the Human towards the whole “horizon of humanity” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 24).

Universal Man and lifelong education

Reading diverse, divergent ideas through one another, Wynter puts established concepts to new purposes, and generates new ones. For example, her concepts Man1 and Man2 are shorthand references to knotted, powerful histories, allowing her to trace the emergence of Universal Man as a particular kind of story.

Man1 and Man2

Katherine McKittrick (2015) introduces Wynter’s Man1 as homo politicus, a figure that emerged in the Renaissance’s studia humanitatis as “differentiated but not wholly separate from the homo religiousus conception of human” (McKittrick 2015, p. 10; italics in original). Homo religiousis, or “True Christian Self”, as Wynter (2003, p. 265) describes it, had already created Others through which to define itself in the form of heretics, enemies of Christ, infidels. As the True Christian Self “transmuted” to Rational Self, coinciding with the time of Europe’s “expropriation of the New World lands” (ibid., p. 290) and the Africa slave trade, Indigenous and Black peoples were “made to reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness” (ibid., p. 266). Man1, homo politicus, is thus ‘tethered’ to a secular, rational, political subject, but one made also in the image of a white, Christian God. Man1 was given a “biocentric descriptive statement” (ibid., p. 312), in other words, a statement of what it means to be human that is centred on race, and the “bourgeois Western white male overrepresenting all humanity” (Hantel 2018, p. 64). As Wynter explained in an evocative interview with David Scott (2000), the West used (and still uses) race to attempt to answer the questions of who and what humans are – particularly after the Enlightenment period that unveiled religion as incapable of answering such questions. Man1, Wynter argues, is Europe’s response to its genocidal colonial encounter with the Americas, a political-moral impetus to define ‘Man-as-human’ so to also define the non-human/inhuman (McKittrick 2015).

Wynter then presents her deep reading of the histories of science, and in particular the politics of narrow Darwinism, Malthus and scientific racism, to chart the emergence of liberal homo oeconomicus or Man2 that arrives in the latter half of the nineteenth century, precipitating and rationalising the Industrial era. Man2 has a capitalist imperative tied to its biocentric statement which is “divided between the naturally selected (Europeans) and the naturally ‘dysselected’ (those racialised as naturally inferior)” (Tilley n.d., para. 2). As Desai and Sanya explain, homo oeconomicus is “largely based on the idea that humanness is based on accumulation” (Desai and Sanya 2016, p. 713). According to Wynter and McKittrick,

These figures, both Man1 and Man2, are also inflected by powerful knowledge systems and origin stories that explain who/what we are. These systems and stories produce the lived and racialized categories of the rational and irrational, the selected and the dysselected, the haves and the have-nots as asymmetrical naturalized racial-sexual human groupings that are specific to time, place, and personhood yet signal the processes through which the empirical and experiential lives of all humans are increasingly subordinated to a figure that thrives on accumulation (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 10).

We are far afield from the benevolent Man-as-human of the Faure report’s utopia. The Faure Commission’s evocation of global solidarity and the report’s brief mentions of racist ideologies as belonging to those of “blocked societies whose sole purpose is their own perpetuation” (Faure et al. 1972, p. 59) (for example, South Africa in 1972), might suggest an intersection with Wynter’s project to expose and reject the white supremacist biocentricity of Man. The authors of the Faure report write:

Children of the poor or those who belong to groups suffering racial or social discrimination are in a difficult position from the outset, whether from lack of due care for physical and mental requirements of early childhood or lack of pre-school education. They are handicapped, sometimes irremediably so, in comparison to children of the wealthier classes or from backgrounds more favourable to proper growth and development. Where school places are increasingly limited as pupils mount the promotion ladder, a more or less arbitrary selection process prevents many who are capable of continuing their studies from doing so (Faure et al. 1972, pp. 71).

Acknowledging the effects of racism does not undo the power systems in which it thrives. Wynter observes the ‘autopsy’ genre of inquiry and policy that emerges from the normativity of Man-as-human, whereby Indigenous and Black people are represented as perpetually in a state of ruin or damage; ostensibly this is to call attention to social injustice and discrimination, but the effect is that those “symbolically coded on the side of life” create and depict marginalised populations as “already given over to death […] laid out flat for inspection” (Hantel 2018, pp. 61–62). As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang have shown, this genre of damage-centred inquiry reinforces the racist logics of the system under critique (Tuck 2009; Tuck and Yang 2014).

The Faure report for the most part avoids an analysis of race, racism or difference, or the systemic neocoloniality of the ‘North–South’, ‘developing–developed’ foundations of the imagined global order in 1972. What matters is not what the Faure report says, but what it forgets. The authors criticised the revival of Malthusian solutions to the perceived problem of an overpopulated globe, a concern closely linked in the 1970s to environmental and economic disaster, and mostly directed at ‘Third World’ countries. These policies called for a rationing and limiting of education opportunity to those most likely to benefit, closely calibrated to their employment prospects, an approach the authors of the Faure report firmly rejected (Faure et al. 1972, p. xxxi). Yet the report is also silent on the “power/knowledge” systems (Foucault and Gordon 1980) that connect Malthusianism with scientific racism, and the dehumanising work of science itself. The solution to population growth, the report authors argued, was a redistribution of resources, and an attention to the quality and currency of curricular methods so that “The new man [is] capable of understanding the global consequences of individual behaviour […] shouldering his share of joint responsibility involved in the destiny of the human race” (Faure et al. 1972, p. xxv).

In this and many other ways, the report stumbles into the origin stories of Man1 and Man2 in its assumptions of a human-centric universe, propelled by economic growth, organised according to logics of the selected and dysselected, the enlightened and the condemned, those emerging from the dark and into the light. In the report’s preamble “Education and Man’s Destiny”, the authors appeal to the reason and self-interest of “better-endowed nations” to engage in solidarity with the Third World:

The great changes of our time are imperilling the unity and the future of the species, and man’s own identity as well. What is to be feared is not only the painful prospect of grievous inequalities, privations and suffering, but also that we may be heading for a veritable dichotomy within the human race, which risks being split into superior and inferior groups, into masters and slaves, supermen and submen. Among the risks resulting from this situation would be not only those of conflict and other disasters (for present-day means of mass destruction might well fall into the hands of destitute and rebellious groups) but the fundamental risk of de-humanisation, affecting privileged and oppressed alike. For the harm done to man’s nature would harm all men (Faure et al. 1972, p. xxi).

This is not the undoing of Man2, homo oeconomicus, but a re-inscription of its major themes. Even as Faure rejects Malthusianism, dysgenics (the belief that some humans carry traits that threaten the well-being of the race) underwrites the text. The voice of the ‘referent-we’ forgets that dehumanising privations on the basis of master and slave, those deemed superior or inferior, are historical fact, not dystopic future. Here is Wynter, as if in a direct rebuttal:

Symbolic death, therefore, is that of having been naturally dysselected and mastered by Malthusian natural scarcity: as are the globally homogenized dysgenic non-breadwinning jobless poor/the pauper/homeless/the welfare queens. Poverty itself, therefore, is the “significant ill” signifier of ultimate symbolic death and, consequently, capital accumulation, and therefore symbolic life signifies and narrates a plan of salvation that will cure the dysselected significant ill! The systemic reproduction of the real-life categories of both signifiers are indispensable to the continued enactment of the ruling-class bourgeoisie’s governing code of symbolic life/death and the defining of liberal (now neoliberal) monohumanist Man2 (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 37; italics in original).

For those who look back at the Faure report with nostalgia for a world before neoliberalism, Wynter allows us to trace its already-presence in the universalising utopias of global solidarity, and the plea to unity and collective responsibility to tackle the problems of Man2, including those of the climate crisis. This appeal to solidarity evokes UNESCO’s post-war culture of ‘unity in diversity’, which, as Maren Elfert (2015, 2018) has observed, sought to abolish race and with it, racism. After all, recent world history had taught that wars and conflict erupted on the basis of difference:

Diversity was perceived as the main cause of war, and the belief that the emphasis on difference needed to be overcome in favour of the solidarity of mankind was enshrined in UNESCO’s constitution […]. The claim to universality of UNESCO’s educational paradigms, from “fundamental education” to “lifelong learning” to “Education for All,” is rooted in this line of thinking (Elfert 2015, p. 101).

Elfert (2015) goes on to observe that the ‘unity in diversity’ of the Faure report and other UNESCO endeavours has had two consequences that persist today: visions for lifelong learning, and ‘education for all’ that are so generalised and universalised as to not be actionable as policy; and a policy tradition of ‘speaking for’ those “emerg[ing] from the colonial period” (Faure et al. 1972, p. xix). This tradition of the ‘referent-we’ persists in lifelong learning (LLL) policy imaginaries in 2022 that are seized by the climate crisis:

Through learning opportunities accessible to all – no matter their age, nationality, education level, socio-economic background or ethnicity – populations can become sensitized to the ways in which the climate is changing, and the consequences being brought to bear at the international, national and local level. Secondly, LLL fosters resilience in response to climate change. While the trends and many of their expected consequences are clear, we do not yet know all the ways in which climate change will affect the way we live, and there are some consequences which are not yet knowable. A global population of resilient lifelong learners, who can identify and evaluate changes in their environment, formulate responses and find solutions to emerging issues, will be needed in the years ahead (UIL 2022, pp. 29–30).

This sea of universalities and erasures makes inclusive futures impossible. “It’s perhaps the final insult”, write Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in an exchange of letters processing Black and Indigenous experience during the COVID-19 pandemic,

that you and I, our respective communities, only enter, exceedingly belatedly, and only abstractly and contingently, into the universal “we” once it is time to identify the architects of the climate disaster, only to disappear from it again in the next headline, thought, etc. (Maynard and Simpson 2022, p. 19).

Universal Man has run out of steam. In the next section, I depart from the Faure report and turn to Wynter’s speculative method for undoing Man-as-human, creating the possibility for doing, being and studying humanness differently.

Bios and mythoi, skins and masks, the hybrid human

If we have been sociogenically articulated as subjects in relation to Man – some of us “human”, many of us less-than-human – then other sociogenic becomings are always possible (Snaza and Mishra Tarc 2019, p. 2).

To give humanness a different future is to think the human ‘otherwise’ to Man2. Vital to this is how Wynter works with Franz Fanon’s sociogenic principle. Fanon argued that human being (or experience) cannot be reduced to phylogeny (biological determination) or ontogeny (endowment with inherent and static traits), rather, these are in dynamic relation with sociogeny; stories generated within historically-materially-culturally specific contexts that give meaning to experience. This is different to the idea that the social ‘constructs’ or ‘shapes’ human experience; the sociogenic principle overrides Cartesian dualisms of self–other, human–nonhuman (Scott 2000) and locates the human as practice, at once social-cultural-biological-material-political, a storied work in progress. If humans are both bios and mythoi then humans are hybrid, and within this hybridity open new and different genres of being.

Sociogeny, the idea of hybrid human, is Fanon’s insight that emerged from an incident on a train, a comment of a little boy to his mother, “Look, a Negro” (Fanon 1967 [1952], p. 109), that jolted him into a different consciousness, that of being ‘other than human’. Moving from first and third person, Fanon processes the ‘double consciousness’ of this encounter in Chapter 5 of his now famous book Black Faces, White Masks:

But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self (Fanon 1967 [1952], p. 109).

Fanon is forced to see himself not as a man riding a train, but as a Negro, set apart, an object of conversation. “I did not want this revision, this thematization, all I wanted was to be a man among other men” (Fanon 1967 [1952], p. 112). He realises he cannot be seen on this train, in the world, as Black and a man. Someone remarks that he is handsome, this makes it worse, writing in the first person, he is dehumanised; in the third person, thinking with decolonial scholars and his poetic narration of the Black experience in such a society, he is angry. The encounter intensifies when the child’s mother waves her hand at him, “Take no notice sir, he doesn’t know you are as civilized as we …” (ibid., p. 113). The attempt at inclusivity only maintains the racist coding of the society-on-the-train, the myth of white Man-as-human that the child has spoken aloud.

Wynter argues that Fanon’s hybrid human, sociogenically formed, is a conceptual leap:

We therefore now need to initiate the exploration of the new reconceptualized form of knowledge that would be called for by Fanon’s redefinition of being human as that of skins (phylogeny/ontogeny) and masks (sociogeny). Therefore, bios and mythoi. And notice! One major implication here: humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 23; italics in original).

Judith Butler (2003) argued that gender is a performative enactment of codes, scripts, cultures, roles, hybridly human genres of knowing and being in the world. Thinking with Butler’s insight that gender is the performativity of genres of humanness, Wynter asks,

[w]hy not, then, the performative enactment of all our roles, of all our role allocations as […] inter alia, gender, race, class/underclass, and, across them all, sexual orientation? […] So here you have the idea that with being human everything is praxis. For we are not purely biological beings! (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, pp. 33–34; italics in original).

The material groundings of learning, pedagogy and scholarship for a hybridly human world-otherwise

[T]here can ostensibly be no alternative to [Man2’s] attendant planetarily-ecologically extended, increasingly techno-automated, thereby job-destroying, postindustrial, yet no less fossil fuel-driven, thereby climate-destabilizing free- market capitalist economic system, in its now extreme neoliberal transnational technocratic configuration (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 22; italics in original).

Thus far we have traced two events in Sylvia Wynter’s lifelong work to give humanness a different future. The first event was to show the co-emergence and dominance of Man1 and Man2 as a particular kind of biocentric, overdetermined, white supremacist, accumulative and extractive Man-as-human story that must end if futures are possible. We saw that the Faure report was located within the dys/topic vision of Man2, but that its authors were also invested in alleviating its excesses, particularly when these implicate environmental destruction and the spectre of an unliveable planet for all. We have seen that since the publication of the Faure report, lifelong learning and education have continued to be mobilised for unifying, future-making projects that also require the maintenance of ignorance and forgetting, including that “the climate crisis is not ‘coming’ – for some, its arrival began long ago” (Maynard and Simpson 2022, p. 14).

The second event departs from deconstruction and critique to consider what else might be possible, Wynter’s conceptual invention of new genres of being human (hybridly, sociogenically, as praxis rather than noun). New genres, new stories, new possibilities. The third event is now, the work to be done to answer Wynter’s speculative question:

How can we come to know/think/feel/behave and subjectively experience ourselves – doing so for the first time in our human history consciously now – in quite different terms? How do we be, in Fanonian terms, hybridly human? (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 45; italics in original).

For white, middle class professionals like myself who are selected to live comfortably in the Man2 logics of the world and academia, this question opens messy, speculative grounds (Stein et al. 2017), rich in uncertainty and mis/takes, faltering and starting over. McKittrick (2015) argues that the work of inquiry (and also, I would add, education, lifelong learning, policymaking), knowing what we know, is to consciously recognise when the logics of Man2 are at work and to breach them. I begin with the bibliographic narrowness, whiteness and Eurocentricity of education scholarship (Snaza and Mishra Tarc 2019), including my own.

Breaching Man2: bibliographic narrowness

Katherine McKittrick, in her book Dear Science (McKittrick 2021), explains that “we invest in our present normative mode of existence in order to keep the living system – our environmental and existential world – as is” (ibid., p. 2; italics in original). This idea came alive to me in a lecture by Canadian author Esi Edugyan (2022), introducing her book Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling (Edugyan 2021). Edugyan started the first lecture asking,

If one of the unavoidable eventualities of art is to act as social history, what story is being handed down to us? (Edugyan 2022, n.p.).

[W]hat happens when some people’s stories get erased, neglected, forgotten in the making of our collective history? (ibid.).

Edugyan goes on to describe the art of the 19th century as one painting after another of white life, in which Black life is only made visible when it is painted into the supporting cast. ‘Who is that in the foreground?’, she asks. ‘And who is that in the background?’ ‘What are they doing there?’ Painting after painting, novel after novel, play after play, these representations repeat and intensify so that they are made to become the bio-mythoi order of white supremacy.

We may ask these questions too of education policy, pedagogy, inquiry, these ‘worlding’ texts and praxes in which scholars and policymakers etch out our/their erasures, orderings and desires: If education policy reports such as the Faure report constitute a social history of adult education, what is the history being handed down to us? Who is in the foreground? Who is in the background? What are they doing there? This is why Fanon’s sociogenic principle is a conceptual leap, he opened a way to get outside (while still inside) the Man2 mode of existence. How we think changes who we are. Or, according to Donna Haraway’s oft-cited insight:

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what worlds make worlds, what worlds make stories (Harraway 2016, p. 12).

It matters, the “bibliographical narrowness” and whiteness of education research (Snaza and Mishra Tarc 2019, p. 2). Who is that in my citation list or course syllabus? What are they doing there? Who is not there? It is not a matter of adding Indigenous and Black scholars to a reference list, but of rethinking the project in which I am engaged as an educator and writer. A fully active adult education policy and research practice is not possible when it neglects Black and Indigenous experience, falls into Black and Indigenous autopsy and damage-centred narratives.

Breaching Man2: speculative inquiry, life, learning after Man

How to make a world otherwise? Sylvia Wynter and Franz Fanon have taught us that a hybrid human invites “a rewriting of our present now globally institutionalized order of knowledge” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 18). What stories of adult education policy and praxis does the hybrid human write? All inquiry, policy, pedagogies are stories after all. As Sarah Truman observes, “While this storying capability has been used to uphold and reinforce the dominant world order, it also has the potential to rupture humanism from within” (Truman 2019, p. 110). Black feminist researcher Fikile Nxumalo (2021) mobilises theory to create alternative scenarios and to transform ‘storylines’ for the children and adults in her inquiries, making possible Black futures that did not exist before. This genre of speculative inquiry “materialize[s] orientations toward thought that has the capacity to shift reality” (Nxumalo 2021, p. 1192). Thinking, study and stories change us. Importantly, this work brings into being ecological survivance after Man2, “unsettling” Man-as-human (Nxumalo 2021, p. 1197) and its colonial logics and recentring the many different genres and ways to live.

This worlding genre of speculative inquiry, which merges bios and mythoi, is distinct from a ‘determining-the-future’ approach to lifelong learning policy. Returning to Hodge et al. (2021), contemporary experiments in ‘futures thinking’ seem to imagine a future that is very much like the present, only perhaps more precarious, with new ‘dread-ful’ technologies and modes of production to contend with (Goldberg 2021). The future is another territory to conquer with all of modernity’s stories and erasures intact.

Lifelong learning research, pedagogy, practice, a fully active adult education policy for a ‘world otherwise’ may engage instead the storytelling practices of Glissant’s circular nomad (Glissant 1997 [1990], p. 13), one who is “errant”, uprooted from the familiar discourses, entering into new relations with uncertainty, but also with new possibility:

One who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he [sic] will never accomplish this – and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides (ibid., p. 20).

Errancy, a studied practice of uncertainty and not-knowing is counter to the modernist imaginary in which adult education worlds have been made. By way of conclusion, I consider, tentatively, errant practices and questions that might guide us.

Concluding thoughts

Inspired by Michel Foucault (1970, 1977), philosopher Claire Colebrook (2017) traces the shift in philosophies of education from questions of how to live well and justly, to a ‘humanising’ project within the emergence of the social sciences that creates, numbs and disciplines subjects (i.e. through testing, measuring, diagnosing, labelling, predicting, managing and so on). Can a fully active adult education reanimate an ethic of not-knowing (Colebrook 2017, p. 652) in which concepts of life, lifetimes, lifelong learning become the objects of inquiry rather than a subject-forming, disciplinary apparatus? This is Wynter’s intellectual project, and following her, we no longer ask ‘how to include Black and Indigenous experiences into the world as it is’ and then generate recommendations for what we need “more and less” of (Colebrook 2017, p. 655), but instead ask, ‘What might worlds, life, learning, become when Man2 is not at the centre of a biocentric project called the social sciences, or policy or other such reproductions?’ ‘What worlds are possible when as hybrid humans we take the stories we create in everyday encounters seriously, with the humility and ethics of the errant?’ We don’t know the answers. Questions such as these, Colebrook (2017) argues, invite “new encounters – thinking, moving and responding in a manner that differs in kind and not just degree [so that] what counts as learning and pedagogy would also be different” (ibid., p. 655).

What other generative problems might we create? Philosophies are material practices. How to intervene in neoliberal world-making embedded in the material practices of contemporary academic study and inquiry? Active resistance to whiteness, modernity and bibliographical narrowness is a start. Life and learning touch everything, all at once. We can look for inspiration in Wynter’s radical, diffractive, expansive reading and storytelling across genres, theories, histories, poetics, asking not how things can be made to fit together but how to create something new with interdisciplinarity and difference.

Aspiring to errancy, can we re-orient or dis-orient the apparatus of granting and funding, tenure and promotion, conferences, journal editorial boards, research methods, languages and modalities of publication and so on, towards those communities and geographies most affected by climate crises and colonial extraction, those places where life is at stake and has always been as stake, where knowledge exists to live differently, to survive, to regenerate (Maynard and Simpson 2022)?

How can we intervene in the ubiquitous data surveillance of everyday lives and bodies that seek to know all, to decide futures so that some lives are deemed “futureless” (Goldberg 2021)? The Faure report expressed excitement and hope for technologies to enhance human potential and prosperity, but the authors were also worried about technology’s dehumanising effects. Fifty years on, we are still locked into stories of techno-solutionism, techno-determinism, techno-phobias. We create lifelong learning and digital literacy policy stories that cast digital technologies as tools to enhance human agency, empowerment, productivity, and citizenship.

But according to Achille Mbembe (2021), we have entered a new ‘magnetic field’ wherein capital, markets and corporations seek to sweep up all forms of life and transform them into datafied products. In these “expanding wave fronts of calculation” (Mbembe 2021, p. 27), “[l]ife itself is more and more perceived as a commodity to be replicated under the volatility of market consumption” (ibid., p. 17). In a world where modes of life – human, nonhuman, machinic, intelligent, conscious – are subject to deeply asymmetrical modes of calculation, being human as praxis is to come to terms with our entanglement and to learn to calculate differently. As Mbembe asks:

Will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the earth, of repairing and sharing the planet? (Mbembe 2021, p. 28).

Does the Faure report continue to inspire? The report is rich in theories, epistemologies, methods and pedagogies that sought to change ways of thinking and doing in the then present to make futures possible for living. It lives as a beacon of inspiration perhaps because it created a present that made (some) futures possible. Its authors were hopeful, and hopefulness is preferable and more actionable than a stream of grinding and grim predictions. But ‘hope for the future’ invested in the Faure report is hope for the perpetuation of the ‘referent-we’ of humanity that naturalises human-centredness, white supremacy, extractive capitalism as modes of living, learning and scholarship. The story of Universal Man and lifelong learning must be rescinded, knowing what ‘we’ know. We will need to get used to more uncertainty, more mistakes, more generative experiments for how to live and learn differently.