shifting centres?

 

Producing and maintaining humans as the seldom acknowledged and unmarked norm against which all Others are measured means that humans have come to believe they have privileged access to knowledge production. Yet disrupting the place of humans at the the centre of knowledge production could offer possibilities for shifting subjectivities (in the poststructural sense) and centre's.

 

Is a shifting centre possible? Can sharing the centre with non-human Others open up more space for "multiply heterogeneous, inhomogeneous, accountable, and connected human agents" (Haraway, 1991a, p. 4)? What would happen if the place of humans at the centre was conceived as a shifting or shared one?

 

And what if even those who wish to do otherwise might be unwittingly complicit in (re)positioning humans at the centre as the unmarked norm and as a result, (re)inscribe a human/nature binary? For instance, what is the effect of assuming that the choices we might make when moving through this hypertext are ours alone? And what might be the effect of a different interpretation of reader choices? In the moment of decision-making, I encourage readers to ask: What was it that caused me to make that decision? To choose this link over that?