Postdigital Education and the GenAI-Human Relation: Orientalism, Paternalism, Extractivism

Abstract This article argues that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)-human relation in postdigital education takes shape through three tendencies: orientalism, paternalism and extractivism. Orientalism renders the textures of student life (expression, hesitation, revision and attention) legible in advance; paternalism enacts care that pre-empts student authority and extractivism treats those textures as available for yield. The first two tendencies, in the current conjuncture, increasingly operate within the ambient conditions set by the third. What each tendency shares is a structural move of presupposing, in advance, who the student is, and then organising the student’s doing and knowing accordingly. Drawing on Heidegger’s ontological difference, the article develops a postdigital occupational framework in which being, doing and knowing are held as a unity, and through which the who-question can be kept alive against the pressure of ontic multiplication. The article contributes to postdigital theory by naming the normative organisation at work beneath entanglement, and to postdigital research by showing how ontological difference can function as a methodological passageway across ontic phenomena and existential stakes.