Why Do Posthumanist Transdisciplinary Creativities Matter?

Late-20th-century creativity discourses in education remained, for the most part, limited by singular and individual humanist notions of creativity, such as “teaching creatively” or “teaching for creativity” (Jeffrey & Craft, 2006), “creative thinking” (Lucas & Spencer, 2017), or “creative pedagogies” (Cremin & Chappell, 2019). This includes scholarship in specific fields such as music creativity, mathematics creativity, scientific creativity, artistic creativity, computing creativity, and cross-cutting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary creativities.

Some innovations toward more “transdisciplinary creativities” (where sciences and arts meet, where technology often plays a valuable role in crossing cultural and disciplinary boundaries in music), including those framed through the lens of STEAM (Burnard & Colucci-Gray, 2020), have helped diversify understandings and appreciation of multiplicities of creativities in education contexts. While transdisciplinarity deterritorializes creative practices and generates new ways in which musical composition can entangle with other disciplines to make new creations, posthumanism re-sees the potential of more-than-human elements within this compositional process. Shifting away from notions of materials as inert, waiting to be manipulated by human skill and control (Ingold, 2009) toward materials as active “ontological heterogeneous partners” (Haraway, 2016, p. 17), engaging with us in “materialdiscursive” practices of becoming together, where we deliberately engage in how material entanglements make a difference to the realities of practices, (Murris, 2016, pp. 6-7) challenges Western art music and educational myths about composing.

This is particularly the case where compositional pedagogies focus on epistemic outcomes or compositional products as evidence of learning, commensurate with other “academic” subjects, rather than experiential, making, and exploratory/generative activity. Such generative activity does not begin and end with the human subject but includes and often features more-and-other-than-human worlds.

The 21st century and its provocations of rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, alongside the accelerator of COVID-19, have produced an opportunity for seriously reconsidering the interconnectedness of practices, places, relationships, and processes that we have traditionally considered as music composition. Like Grosz (2008) we include it, along with music, dance, and performance as forms and conditions associated with the invention/creation and pedagogies of composition. It is time for something new.

Posthumanist theory offers what some are calling a paradigm-shifting move toward thinking with nature in ways that can embed sustainability and eco-awareness in a new generation. By adopting posthumanism’s core beliefs of decentering the human from its pre-eminent position in the hierarchy of planetary beings, matter, and needs, pedagogues and practitioners of music composition have the opportunity to rethink whether there is something more to “composing” music and “composing” in the general sense that might enable a surprising and provocative outcome. The interdisciplinary (and transdisciplinary) possibilities constitute a radical assault on the very notion of “composing” through a lens of making with, becoming with, and experiencing with, rather than “teaching” or “learning” as separate activities.

While posthumanist theory has expanded into multiple disciplines since the start of the 21st century (see, e.g., Braidotti, 2013; Braidotti & Bignall, 2018), others have applied the lens of posthumanism to early childhood and primary education contexts and investigations (e.g., Somerville & Powell, 2019). Karen Murris’s (2016) seminal book The Posthuman Child shifts our focus from a “Western ‘adultlike’ knowledge basis for figurations of child as deficient (innocent, vulnerable, needy) to ‘child as rich, resilient, and resourceful’ ” (Murris, 2016, p. 177). Kerry Chappell (2018) has introduced us to the notion of posthumanizing creativity. She acknowledges that, with the passage of time, and the deepening of an “emergent ethical” understanding of ecological sustainability, we need to recognize the “other-than-human actants” with whom we collaborate (2018, p. 286).

In a new book on posthumanizing creativities in practice, Burnard (forthcoming) offers an assemblage of inter- and transdisciplinary configurations and types of authorship of music that shake up the routine logic through which we conceptualize music creativity. She finds manifestations of diverse creativities that, not surprisingly, reveal a special fascination with a collective assembly (mix and muddle) of human and non-human interactions that cross the boundary between people and things.

These interactions also challenge bifurcations in knowledge (and musical genres) such as those related to subject-object, classical-pop and nature-culture. As Stengers (2010) argues, ecology is the “science of multiplicities” and the field of ecological questions is one where the consequences of the meanings we create, the judgments we produce and to which we assign the status of “fact,” concerning what is primary and what is secondary, must be addressed immediately, whether those consequences are intentional or unforeseen. (pp. 34-35)