Thinking through a deconstructionist philosophy of technology in education, part 1

‘Originary technicity’ and the invention of the student body

Abstract

This paper takes the ubiquity of personal mobile technologies today as a provocation to propose a fundamentally new understanding of the relations between knowledge, student bodies and educational technologies. It draws on recent deconstructionist philosophies of technology (principally Stiegler and Derrida) and the concept of “originary technicity” to theorise the relation between the human and the technical as not only mutually constitutive, but also ontologically undecidable. The case is especially so given the spatial and temporal connectivity and flexibility enabled by mobile technologies, the new economy of attention they facilitate, and the motile biological, technological, socio-material and semiotic intersections now endlessly working to produce the student body (individual and collective) in the digital university.