Cronenberg pedagogy and fleshy possibilities for educational futures

Abstract

Instead of seeking the slick aesthetics of consumer-friendly creative stories, this paper ventures to the sublime of the incomprehensible and invites us to look into the abyss of education’s possibilities. Drawing inspiration from Jeff Vandermeer’s 2017 novel, Borne, and filmmaker David Cronenberg’s aesthetic, this paper aims to tell a story that unfetters easily compartmentalized notions of creativity in education. Borne tells the story of a young female scavenger who finds and proceeds to care for a sentient—and quite vocally curious—experimental biotech remain, while Cronenberg’s films famously bridge science fiction and body horror. Popular culture, in identifying this aesthetic, developed the slang term “to Cronenberg,” meaning to affectively highlight exaggerated mutations. To this end, this paper explores specific questions for educational futures: what does creativity mean for a Cronenberg pedagogy and how does the ethics of creativity inform future educational policy directions?

“I’m very concerned about my body…where are our real bodies?”

—Ted Pikul, character in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ

“‘I’m learning every day, Rachel,’ Borne said in exasperation, as if I could not see the most obvious things. ‘I read and sample and observe every day. It is what I do.’”

—Borne, character in Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne

Bounded bodies and educational habits

Too often we become habituated to thinking of the world as ‘our’ world. To think of the world in this way centers the human experience and conveys a sense of mastery (Singh, 2018). However, the world is simply never our world despite persistent anthropocentric arrogance (Kupferman, 2020a). As Eugene Thacker (2011) points out, simply paying attention to the terms used—planet, earth, and world—can easily turn conceptualizations of ownership on its head. Only one of these terms actually centers the human: world. In a time of accelerating political, economic, social, technological, and environmental problems, reconsidering how bodies relate and what we can learn from them becomes paramount. However, it may also be necessary to expand “our” to include entangled human–nonhuman networks.

This special issue encouraged papers to explore educational futures by engaging the counterfactual “what if” scenarios with prefactual questions that “ask us to imagine the world before we even know what those facts will be” (Kupferman, 2020a: 5). Although Steven Shaviro suggests “neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future,” which effectively “turns everything into an eternal present” (2015b: 10), perhaps with science fiction we can think about the futures that are already present. From Octavia Butler’s prescient works to Black Mirror’s embedded-in-the-world storylines that straddle the uncanny valley, there are places to look for inspiration. Yet, in an educational present where neoliberal capitalism’s voracious appetite increasingly streamlines “novelty, innovation, and creativity” (Shaviro, 2015b: p. 10), how can we resist the pull of sterile habits and instead creatively imagine education’s future possibilities?

Yet, habits run deep. So deep, in fact, that William James (1890 [1918]) says it is better to simply abandon a bad habit rather than expending effort to improve it. Sometimes, though, it is not easy to recognize the bad habits. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed some of those habits that at best were no longer useful and at worst, habits that continually exacerbated harmful inequities. Science fiction with its turn towards speculation calls attention to these habits and invites us to engage with them.

Science fiction’s uncanny ability to interrogate current realities and habits perceived as self-evident while imagining various technological, social, and biofuturistic possibilities provides a path to recapture the experimental sense of creativity (Butler, 2019 [1993]; Kupferman, 2020a; Kupferman and Gibbons, 2019; Shaviro, 2015a; Whitehead, 2020). Particularly, the vibrant fields of Afrofuturism, indigenous, and queer futures engage vital critiques of imperialism, racism, colonialism, sexism, and environmental destruction while reminding us how these oppressive systems percolate within science fiction’s own habits. When reading Octavia Butler’s foreboding of a Trump-like president emerging amidst social and ecological chaos in The Parable of the Sower (2019 [1993]), it is difficult to not also consider Butler’s critique of the lack of racial representation in her essay, “The Lost Races of Science Fiction” (Butler, 2016). Although science fiction pushes for creative imaginings, it is not immune to the same practices it critiques. However, science fiction also enables us to perceive the ethical implications of these imaginings (Coole and Frost, 2010).

Drawing from Jeff Vandermeer’s 2017 novel, Borne, and filmmaker David Cronenberg’s aesthetic, this paper aims to tell a story that unfetters easily compartmentalized notions of creativity in education. Borne tells the story of a young female scavenger who finds and proceeds to care for a sentient—and quite vocally curious—experimental biotech remain, while Cronenberg’s films famously bridge science fiction and body horror. Popular culture ran with this aesthetic and developed the slang term “to Cronenberg,” meaning to affectively emphasize exaggerated mutations. The phrase serves as a referential wink for science fiction fans. For example, “Rick Potion No. 9” (2014) of the animated series, Rick and Morty—imagine an intentionally less wholesome Back to the Future duo where the brilliant scientist is also the teenager’s alcoholic, self-absorbed grandfather—demonstrates the term’s aesthetic application. Dealing with a disastrous love potion that causes a global obsession with Morty, Rick attempts to rectify the situation using different genetic serums to counteract the infection. The first serum turns the infected into praying mantis-human hybrids still obsessed with Morty. Rick’s second serum seems successful when the infected briefly return to humans. However, they rapidly then transform into a profusion of random, exaggerated, and grotesque fleshy bodies. Rick remarks, “Boy, Morty, I really Cronenberged the world up, didn’t I?” (“Rick Potion No. 9,” 2014: 15:47).

Both Borne and a Cronenberg-aesthetic reinterpret corporate-appropriate creativity. Being open to imagining creativity beyond an anthropocentric scope, they provide ways to imagine what a “dehumanist education” (Singh, 2018: 67) could look like. By referring to select Cronenberg films and Vandermeer’s novel, I draw inspiration from Tyson E. Lewis and Richard Kahn’s (2010) call to “learn from the monster” (1) and their work on exopedagogy, an approach that seeks “an education out of bounds” (11). Here, the unruly monstrous is not required to seek resolution or taming. In doing so, we can imagine the nonhuman immanent pedagogies that surround us in the world, if only we took that effort to be aware of them.

Instead of seeking the slick aesthetics of consumer-friendly creative stories, this paper ventures to the sublime of the incomprehensible and invites us to look into the abyss of education’s possibilities to imagine our own stories. Stories require an antagonist and a protagonist; the stories that stick actually muddy each role’s boundaries. The story of education is no different. Students, teachers, and education policies that inadequately address accelerating inequities play a role in shaping our collective stories. To this end, this paper’s story explores specific educational questions: what does creativity mean for a Cronenberg pedagogy and how does the ethics of creativity inform future educational policy directions?

Two science fiction vignettes of feeling and bodies

Cronenberg crash course

True to body horror, the Cronenberg aesthetic is obsessed with flesh and embodiment. More recent films like Eastern Promises are stylistically less attuned to sci-fi body horror; yet, they still remain fixated on the body. It is not possible in a Cronenberg film to detach one’s self or sensibility from questions of embodiment and what it truly means to inhabit flesh.

While this paper explores the aesthetic of Cronenberg films from the 1980s and 1990s, it is not an analysis of the films. It focuses on aesthetic qualities that inform the films’ recognizable styles. Larger and more in-depth critical discussions could be had about the themes that span across the films and the specific role of bodies, flesh, and exaggeration; instead, I hope to point to how the embodied focus of the films provide a way to re-approach embodied pedagogies for possible educational futures. Four films, Scanners; Videodrome; The Fly; and eXistenZ, both directed and written by Cronenberg (co-written in the case of The Fly), from this period point to the pedagogical capacity of an aesthetic attentiveness to expressive, feeling bodies.

Scanners (1981) follows several powerful telepaths with telekinetic powers. Able to read each other’s thoughts and move objects using their minds, most of the group are aligned with a security firm who uses them for its own purposes. One telepath rebels. Another telepath attempts to stop him. In one scene, a telepath makes another telepath’s head explode.

Videodrome (1983) famously turns Marshall McLuhan’s keen observation, “The medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1996: 7) into a classic sci-fi body horror film. Max Renn is a president for a late-night cable television channel that plays softcore porn and violent shows. When the ‘trashiness’ of his channel is pointed out (and when he attempts to find out who films “Videodrome,” which he thinks is simply a show), Max replies, “Better on TV than in the streets.” The catch is that Videodrome is quite sentient, motivated, and flesh-bending.

In Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986), scientist Seth Brundle develops the world’s first teleportation device. Unfortunately, when he impulsively decides to try out the teleportation device on himself, a fly joins in on the ride and the computer merges their two genetic codes. Brundle-self and Fly-self struggle internally with the fly ultimately gaining the upper hand. The film ends with Brundle-Fly merging with one of the teleportation devices.

eXistenZ (1999) is set in a near future. The film begins as a celebrated game designer unveils her newest game that promises an immersive experience; in order to participate in this game, one has to “jack in” to their personal game console. ¹ The game console, like most technology in this future, is fleshy and lively. Multiple assassination attempts on her by different camps of people ensue. A central theme of eXistenZ is the confrontation between groups who celebrate these immersive games and the Realists who oppose games that enable escape into a virtual reality separate from the real world. In this film, timelines and realities tangle with the flesh, incorporating a twist at the end.

Flesh and the body are recurring themes in the films. Bodies are not limited to human bodies. All bodies and flesh types are welcome and playfully, if not creepily, examined. Want a living, gasping, talking, and breathing television that undulates as it talks, beckoning you to engage with it? Sure! Check out Videodrome. From the exploding head in Scanners to the body ports located at the base of the spine required to jack into the game system in eXistenZ, the body and what it can do figures prominently.

Cronenberg films cultivate an aesthetic attention, almost an obsession, with bodies and flesh. And this is not a detached attention, like a disinterested analysis of the body’s shapes and tendencies; rather, it is an immersive experience. It is not possible to turn away from the fleshiness and affective encounters in the film. The camera does not turn away from the flesh and its possibilities beyond the human form. It forces you to confront the feeling body in all of its terrible and creative possibility.

Nonhuman complications of learning in Vandermeer’s Borne

Vandermeer’s Borne follows a woman, Rachel, who navigates a ruined city previously run by a mysterious biotech firm referred to as The Company. Many dangers abound, from various violent factions trying to control the city to a giant bear-like biotech creature called Mord who terrorizes the city’s inhabitants. Although a science fiction narrative, teaching and learning emerge as shimmery themes.

One day while scavenging off of a sleeping Mord, Rachel finds a unique piece of biotech. She names this biotech creature Borne and begins referring to the biotech as he/him. Borne defies easy categorization. Plant-like and with a fleshy sort of plasticity, he is practically indescribable, in part due to his ability to camouflage and mimic. Borne’s sensory capacity far exceeds that of Rachel’s, and she eventually admits that she does not know how he feels. When Borne asks her if he is human, Rachel responds that he is a person. As Borne grows, so does Rachel’s attachment to him.

An undercurrent of Vandermeer’s novel is its exploration of the complicated ecologies of relationships, particularly when the participants in a relationship include those beyond human. These relationships—between Borne and Rachel, between Rachel and her memories, and between Borne, Rachel, and the city as its own lively organism—complicate the notion of what it means to learn, how we create knowledge, and how we engage habits of knowing within our networked relationships. There is, to use a term Borne might use himself, a faint taste of pedagogy. Since Borne has nonhuman sensory capabilities, how he learns and what it means for him to learn reconfigures educational habits within these relationships. At first, Rachel does not appear to fully appreciate how his nonhuman senses unsettle anthropocentric pedagogical assumptions.

The section titled “How Borne Taught Me Not to Teach Him” addresses this problem. Rachel attempts to formally educate Borne. Borne, now older and more mature, resists these attempts. Rachel desires to give Borne a “standard education” even though she readily admits that a “standard education” is a logistically unrealistic luxury. To Rachel, education consists of books.

However, this presents a distinctive problem in the horror of a post-Company city. First, in a pragmatic observation, books have really no value for those scavenging amongst the city’s remains. What does it mean to have a standard education when your days consist of scavenging for food and whatever meager amounts of questionably valuable biotech you can find? Standards go out (what is left) of the window. When one is simply trying to survive, you cannot eat the ideas in a book. Second, books act as tenuous connections to the memories of her deceased parents and their emphasis on education. The books she thinks of no longer exist, nor does the world in which those books existed. The book is a stand-in for the memories lost and the comforting routine and structure that ‘education’ can bring.

Rachel’s turn to memories and her passing disclosure on the irrelevance of this educational approach for both Borne and their surroundings deserves more attention. The memories bely hidden motivations for pursuing such a normative and structured approach to education amongst an environment teeming with vibrant and terrible experiments in learning. Nostalgia reinforces the performative bent of Rachel’s desire to educate Borne: “Nostalgia is an imaginative process of finding words to make sense of memories laden with uncomfortable images and feelings evoked in the present but linked to what has been lost from the past” (Field, 2008: 114). In doing so, she seeks to reproduce unreliable memories to grasp at feelings of fondness amidst the real horrors of the post-Company city. The standard education is a known approach: comfortable, reliable, and with clear instructions to progress. There is comfort in knowing the process and educational destination, however, these comforts remain habits.

Alternatively, the post-Company city requires a different type of pedagogical approach: one that maneuvers as creatively and strategically as the various creatures that haunt it. For this pedagogy, the end is not known because the end is not the intent. Attending to the immediacy of the surroundings and what those sensations reveal is a pedagogy that revels in the aesthetic sensations and exaggerated possibilities of what can be rather than being mired in educational habits of transcendence. This kind of pedagogy disrupts the fairy tale of transcendence propagated by vertical approaches to education (Meyerhoff, 2019).

Borne’s disinterest in Rachel’s imposition of a ‘standard education’ makes the artifice of the ritual strikingly obvious. It is a performance on the part of the student and the teacher, with artificial, preconceived roles unconcerned with even attempting to be rooted in the actual world and their experiences. Borne incisively draws a clear distinction between “education” and “learning.” Borne actively resists an unembodied education and engages an immanent form of embodied study. For Borne, learning is intimately connected to the act of being in the world and not something that disconnectedly transcends everyday surroundings.

“How Borne Taught Me Not to Teach Him” invites readers to confront an uncomfortable yet necessary question: who is learning truly for? This act of educating Borne is conditional and not entirely an act of kindness. Like other things, unsaid desires and motivations permeate the spoken act of teaching. The act of formally educating is a diversion for Rachel to disregard the growing space between her and Borne spurred by his longing for more independence. When we ask, “Who is learning truly for?” we forefront the ethics of the pedagogical process. Rachel declines to ask Borne, who is clearly an intelligent creature completely capable of making his own decisions, if he even wants to be educated. In doing so, Rachel forecloses Borne’s agency at the outset. Borne pushes back. In doing so, he accentuates the ersatz and non-participatory nature of standard education in an apocalyptic world to instead teach Rachel. This is an educational method from a bygone era, an approach that holds no relevance in a world where survival is key and scavenging is the norm.

A loose recipe for Cronenberg pedagogy

“Something [the flesh] is getting lost in translation.”

—Seth Brundle, character in David Cronenberg’s The Fly

“That’s why I don’t need your books, Rachel. I’m learning too much too fast already. I feel it filling me up, and I can’t stop.”

—Borne, character in Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne

Just like Cronenberg’s attention to the flesh, the attention to feeling immersed in the world drives Borne. Instead of a standard education, what Borne asks of Rachel is a Cronenberg pedagogy. What would be the three guiding principles or general proportions so that we can imagine in a prefactual manner the creative spaces we yearn for and the strategies to obtain them? Let us imagine what a Cronenberg pedagogy could look like for someone like Borne.

Borne says he samples. That is how he learns.

When Borne says he learns by sampling, he also pragmatically gestures to the material method of his learning by absorbing actual things, peoples, and creatures. The world is truly his oyster. There is no distinctive purpose other than to relish in the experience of experiencing: sampling, collecting, and tasting. Eventually these actions may come to have a purpose, but their drive is not organized according to a predetermined purpose or end. In this world there are no course learner objectives besides to experience learning—and again to remember that to learn is approached in a much less constrictive manner. It is experimentation. A Cronenberg pedagogy cannot follow a set path because the path is continually remade. Even the path’s history is reworked.

Perhaps a Cronenberg pedagogy would resemble a loose recipe guided by proportions rather than distinctive measurements and steps. Other additions are clearly welcome after including the primary components. However, like any good recipe, it needs that special something to make it distinctive. I call this “something” the bay leaf element of Cronenberg pedagogy. A bay leaf mysteriously adds a distinctive element to a dish; however, you notice the flavor’s absence more so than the presence. This masterful refusal to be defined by what it is in favor of what it is not creates an affective tension—for example, refer to The Awl’s 2016 article “The Vast Bay Leaf Conspiracy” (Conaboy, 2016)—analogous to the fleshy creativities in Cronenberg pedagogy.

These affective tensions, demonstrated by Borne’s literal sampling of others’ experiences, express the uncanniness necessary to begin engaging with fleshy creativities. The desire to engage the uncanny and discomfort of the incomprehensible is the bay leaf for Cronenberg pedagogy. This desire is the lure of the Kantian sublime—an internal recognition of one’s inadequacy to fully grasp an unsettling encounter—that draws one to consider looking into the unknown of the abyss in the first place. The pull of the sublime lies in its ability to be inexplicable and uncontainable as opposed to beauty, which is bounded, knowable, and comfortable (Kant, 2000; Shaviro, 2012). Think of the fleshy television set in Videodrome, Seth Brundle’s disturbing transformation into Brundle-Fly, and Borne’s unbounded capacity to shapeshift. These are examples of the terrifying fascination of the sublime, and not because of their external existence but rather the internal reactions they provoke in ourselves. ²

We can now consider loose qualities to what constitutes a Cronenberg pedagogy. Remember, we are working backwards from the prefactual:

A Cronenberg pedagogy entails an embrace of the uncanny.

A Cronenberg pedagogy incorporates play, but this is a fleshy, nonhuman concept of play where the body is neither forgotten nor contained.

A Cronenberg pedagogy, to use a term by Connolly (2017), teleo-searches. It is purposive but simply for the satisfaction of experiencing aesthetic sensations. There is a kind of eerie joy in the satisfaction of feeling learning. And this satisfaction requires a body or flesh, broadly conceived.

This kind of pedagogy is immanent to the body and flesh for it is entangled with the uncontainable aesthetic experience. It shows how preposterous it is to presume to know by specifically pointing to how we are unable to even name the experience.

Philosophies generated by nonhuman beings

“Because, it has something you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy and that is what makes it dangerous.”

—Masha, character in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

Neoliberalism played a pretty nifty trick on us. In education—still haunted by the ghostly habits of positivism—it convinced us that things, postures, feelings, and ideas were indeed nameable, knowable, and measurable. The glamour of accountability belies the world’s actual profusion of complexities, contradictions, and possibilities. Creativity becomes yet just another thing to cultivate for capital. Instrumentalized and contained, a predetermined end directs the drive that sustains creativity. No longer creating simply for creating’s sake, creativity is managed and processed.

In particular, the Cronenberg aesthetic, as well as Vandermeer’s novel, Borne, remind us that we tend to take what it means to know, learn, and consciousness for granted as 1) a human quality and 2) relegated to the realm of cognition. These vignettes demonstrate that it is not possible to remove feeling from our definitions of what it means to be sentient and hold consciousness (Shaviro, 2015a). The feeling is an unruly factor that informs experience and our creations of it. It is an atypical philosophy of the flesh, one that discards with books in order to reckon with the aesthetic experience. It is science fiction philosophy.

An ecological theoretical approach to developing pedagogical futures engages social networks as well as the sensuous while being firmly aware of the realities, expectations, and constrictions of one’s surroundings. However, this ecological immersion in the real via the body and sensation is not that of a “consensus reality as a genre of naïve realism” (Grove, 2019: 18). Rather, it is one that draws from the uncanny productivity of speculation and science fiction (Grove, 2019; Kupferman, 2020b; Shaviro, 2015a). In Videodrome, when Masha, an adult film agent, warns the main character Max from trying to discover Videodrome’s creator, she cautions that Videodrome has a philosophy driven by intention, desire, and a keen awareness of sensation’s full affective capacities. While the primary medium of Cronenberg’s films is visual, they retain an ability to touch: see-feel, see-hear, see-smell, and see-taste. You grab your own stomach when Max reaches inside his to hide a handgun. When characters caress the fleshy game pods in eXistenZ, the game pods shiver in response.

Machinic technologies and the flesh really are not that far off from each other. We assume there is a distance but as a Cronenberg aesthetic portrays and Borne imagines, bodies and technologies intermingle. The intermingling pulsates, retracts, and tangles itself again. Within this fleshy intermingling are pedagogical refrains that open spaces for as yet imagined creativities unhindered by predetermined and constrictive requirements. When Brundle-Fly fuses with Telepod 2 at the end of The Fly, we witness another quality of creativity often neglected by diluted neoliberal definitions: its capacity towards horror and its ability to lay bare the implications of unfettered hubris. These pedagogical refrains for creativity can go in multiple ways, whether the set forms of acceptability (marketability) that ensure creative labor is recaptured for capital or expressive forms that defy these attempts. Grove (2019) discusses the refrain in terms of one quality of modern improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in order to reconceptualize the IED as ecological rather than simply an object. Thinking the refrain through IEDs (machinic technologies), Grove reminds us that Deleuze and Guattari’s (1978) concept of refrains “leave open the possibility that the creative advance at any level could also deterritorialize a given refrain, leading a new or differently creative thing to diverge from what came before it” (Grove, 2019: 124).

These fleshy, pedagogical refrains demonstrate how science fiction’s creative explorations further push Spinoza’s thought by playfully interrogating the “not yet” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 3) aspect of bodily capacity. While Spinoza famously remarked, “No one has yet determined what the body can do” (1994: 155), Cronenberg’s fleshy characters and Borne’s refusal to adhere to both Rachel’s educational and physical limitations allow us to consider boundless, becoming bodies undetermined by human forms and habits. These bodies continue to be relational and elude fixed determinations (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010).

Cronenberg pedagogy draws upon the aesthetic sensibility and bodily capacity of Cronenberg’s science fiction body horror films in order to develop a loose conceptual framework. Aesthetic sensibility is key here, particularly in the context of science fiction precisely because science fiction offers a peculiar, yet productive aesthetic (Kupferman, 2020a; Kupferman and Gibbons, 2019; Shaviro, 2015a). Shaviro (2015a) identifies how science fiction presents different aspects of a literary experiment “that takes place (conceptually, if not grammatically) in the future tense” (2015a: 8). However, even in these future imaginings, science fiction remains rooted in the experience of being in a world, however that world might look. Significantly, the experience of being rooted in a world and attending to bodies (again bodies broadly conceived) reconceptualizes how we can approach embodied pedagogies. Just like the Cronenberg aesthetic, with science fiction at the helm, we can exaggerate that embodiment even more to consider the possible in educational futures. Shaviro (2015a) observes,

But instead of approaching its issues abstractly, as philosophy does, or breaking them down into empirically testable propositions, as physical science does, science fiction embodies these issues in characters and narratives. By telling stories, it asks questions about all sorts of things: consciousness and cognition, the future, extreme possibilities, nonhuman otherness, and especially the deep consequences-the powers and limitations-of both our ideologies and our technologies. (8–9)

We have philosophy and we have physical sciences; why not extend this futuristic, yet embodied, questioning to expanding what pedagogy can do and what this means for rethinking approaches to educational policies?

Fleshy possibilities for creative educational futures

“Long live the new flesh!”

—Max Renn, character in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

A Cronenberg pedagogy immerses so much in the experience of experiencing that it can resemble an aesthetic playfulness towards engaging in the world. However, its aesthetic of exaggeration retains an important political and ethical component: by exaggerating and exceeding habits of how we conceive of the body, knowledge, and education in policies, it simultaneously exposes how trivial those boundaries were in the first place. Why have creativity bounded in by expectations and learner objectives when a generative creativity surpasses any static expectations of what it means to teach, to learn, to know, and importantly for a Cronenberg pedagogy, to feel? The exaggeration—how can one forget the grotesque transformation of Jeff Goldblum’s character from man to fly as his fingernails fall out and his cravings for sugar intensify—has tinges of silliness and cynicism or a sophisticated form of play.

But do not assume that this sophistication belies a return to the ease of Rachel’s “standard education.” With a wink and a nod, Cronenberg pedagogy keeps moving. Like Borne, it is always sampling and experimenting, finding new ways for different body parts to feel and to feel the world. This is a feral and unruly pedagogy unsatisfied to have to comply with static and standardized demands. Creativity and aesthetic attentiveness take a political and ethical bent here. Per Massumi’s exploration of animal playfulness and its meaning for rethinking politics, I extend the animal playfulness to include nonhuman playfulness:

[T]he political animal does not recognize any rigid opposition between the frivolous and the serious, which is to say, between the enthusiastic expenditure of creative energies and the anchor of function and utility. It nourishes itself on the productive paradox of their processual alliance. Nonnormative ethico-aesthetics resists, with bursts of supernormal propulsion, the leaden demands, so frequently heard, that one’s actions be “relevant” at all cost and that they “contribute to society” in a way that is already recognizable. The animal politics of education seriously needs to play on such demands. (Massumi, 2014: 40)

Preconceived notions of what creativity should look like foreclose the possibilities of what it could be. Cronenberg pedagogy does not lose itself so much in the experience of experiencing as it relishes in the capacity for sensations to expose different and unexpected paths for creativity. Using Cronenberg pedagogical approaches for educational futures entails resisting the comfort that nostalgic approaches of what education used to offer in favor of the possible, the unknown, and what could be.

Creativity in education calls us to recognize its ethical dimensions. When I refer to an ethics of creativity, I draw from the perspective of an affirmative, generative ethics, one that views ethics as intimately connected with expanding our perception of meaningful encounters to include nonhuman forces, creativities, and agencies (Bennett, 2015, 2020; Connolly, 2017; Grove, 2019). Connolly (2017) observes, “Creativity makes human freedom both real and risky; it also renders conscious agency and intentionality more uncanny than they would otherwise be” (67). In short, ethics of creativity for educational spheres gesture to the agency of the learner to act and be acted upon with an emphasis on the learner’s capacity to do the acting and exploring.

Conclusion

Exploring educational futures forces uncomfortable confrontations with habits taken for granted in education. Science fiction exposes those habits of thought. By forcing us to confront limits preemptively decided for ways to imagine possible, probable, and preferable futures, stories like Borne and the films by Cronenberg prod us from the comforts of “consensus reality” (Grove, 2019: 30) and towards the yet unknown. Neoliberal notions of creativity parade the ever-present new (Shaviro, 2015b) when in fact they are repetitive refrains that numb the potential of radical, creative approaches to escape reactive habits in education in favor of proactive approaches (Tesar, 2021). These creative approaches are immanent to our feeling, learning bodies.

The Cronenberg aesthetic is productive for engaging an experimental posture towards pedagogy (Ellsworth, 2005), one that appreciates the lively “wickedness” of pedagogical possibilities for educational futures (Ellsworth, 2011). The attention to affect, flesh, and embodiment resists streamlined, homogenous aesthetics regarding creativity and curiosity. Borne’s curiosity is key to this fleshy creativity in a Cronenberg pedagogy. From Borne’s perspective, we can ask what would it be like to learn by constantly sampling, an embodied act reminiscent of rhizomatic and entangled study? How can we blur Cartesian habits of the feeling-body and thinking-mind in educational policies by first imagining if the immersive fleshy technologies in eXistenZ were a reality rather than a science fiction tale? Seriously considering these questions reveals the proactive maneuvers sorely needed in our contemporary educational condition. ³