Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

Drawing on a range of contexts and data sources from urban multilingualism to

studies of animal communication, Posthumanist Applied Linguistics offers us
alternative ways of thinking about the human predicament, with major implications
for research, education and politics.
Exploring the advent of the Anthropocene, new forms of materialism, distributed
language, assemblages, and the boundaries between humans, other animals and
objects, eight incisive chapters by one of the world’s foremost applied linguists open
up profound questions to do with language and the world. This critical posthumanist
applied linguistic perspective is essential reading for all researchers and students in
the fields of Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics.

Alastair Pennycook is Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and

Education at the University of Technology Sydney and a member of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities. He is the author of numerous award-winning books,
including Metrolingualism: Language in the City (with Emi Otsuji), Language as a
Local Practice, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Critical Applied
Linguistics: A Critical Introduction, and The Cultural Politics of English as an
International Language (all Routledge).
Posthumanist Applied
Linguistics

Alastair Pennycook
First published 2018
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Contents

List of figures vii

Preface and acknowledgements viii

1 Introducing posthumanist applied linguistics 1

The planet, the people, animals and objects 2
Posthumanist applied linguistics 6
Posthumanist challenges 10
From humanism to posthumanism:
navigating this book 15

2 Posthumanism and the strange humanist subject 19

The peculiar human subject 21
Religion, science, immanence 25
Human rights and situated ethics 27
New materialisms 31
Posthumanism and poststructuralism 33
Beyond human exceptionalism 37

3 Distributed language, spatial repertoires and

semiotic assemblages 40
Finding your way underwater 40
Extended and distributed cognition 44
From individual trajectories to spatial repertoires 47
Distributed language 51
Conclusion: towards vibrant assemblages 52

4 The human hierarchy of senses 56

There’s nothing there 56
Locating smell 57
vi Contents
Cities, smells and the Other 59
Semiotic, linguistic and sensory landscapes 63
Language in the absence of sound 66
Multisensory assemblages 69

5 Animals and language 72

The killer whales of Eden 72
Animal smarts 74
Language and animals 79
Missing the point 83
An expanded account of language 87

6 Mutual misunderstanding 90
Mutual intelligibility 90
Dogmas of intersubjective conformity 91
Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb 94
Thinking otherwise 100
Alignment, assemblages and attunement 103

7 Re-engaging with reality 108

On mugs, rocks and tables 110
The cat at the bottom of the garden 112
Speculative and other realisms 117
Back on the table 120
Conclusion: critical posthumanist realism 121

8 Towards a posthumanist applied linguistic commons 126

Entangled humans 126
Posthumanist trends in applied linguistics 130
Reclaiming the commons 136
Conclusion: towards a critical applied
linguistic commons 140

References 145
Index 163
Figures

3.1 Pre-dive briefing map 41

4.1 “No durians” 61
4.2 “No outside fruits” 62
6.1 Saussure’s talking heads 92
Preface and acknowledgements

As part of the acknowledgement of the dispossession of Indigenous people that daily

life in Australia represents, it has now become customary and appropriate to preface
a meeting or event with an Acknowledgement of Country, a statement about the
people whose country (locally understood) has been usurped. So I would like to
acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands
much of this book has been written. I would also like to pay respect to the Elders
both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of know-
ledge for this land. While such acknowledgements may appear to do little for any
substantive reconciliation (as our Aotearoa/New Zealand colleagues point out, it is a
pity that such Acknowledgements of Country are so rarely uttered in Indigenous
languages), their iterative force nonetheless constantly draws attention to a history
of dispossession and an imperative to recognise Indigenous culture and thought.
But what if we took this acknowledgement of Indigenous knowledge seriously?
What if we really engaged with Indigenous ways of knowing, relations to land and
country, understandings of animals and the ways these are intertwined? What if we
started to think in terms of animals and their spirits, of the active role of land and
objects in everyday life, of the idea of the climate as commons (Todd, 2016)?
To think in posthuman terms is not just to question the human and its boundaries,
or to take up the challenges of humans and new technologies: it is also to look back,
to ask how it is we came to think in the ways we do and to look for alternative forms
of knowledge. The rediscovery of the commons, of the need for collective action,
concern about the environment, reorientation to the more-than-human world – all
this has been a concern, a knowledge, of Indigenous people around the world for a
long time. To take questions of Indigenous language and knowledge seriously is
about far more than ‘language revival’ or about languages as representational sys-
tems (knowledge of plants and animals embedded in languages); rather it is about
rethinking a relationship to place, to the world around; it is about listening, under-
standing the world, acting with humility, showing respect (yinjamurra in Wiradjuri).
So I want to pay respect not only to the Gadigal people and their lands on which this
book was written, not only to the Elders as the traditional custodians of knowledge
for this land, but to the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing
for understanding our relationship to place, to the importance of Indigenous ways of
knowing for understanding our surrounds and the relations to language.
 Preface and acknowledgements ix
This book has its origins in many corners of my life and interests, though it was
only very recently that it struck me as useful to pull these together within a frame-
work of posthumanism. The poststructuralist connections to posthumanism go back
a long way (see e.g. Pennycook, 1994). I was also very fortunate – though I don’t
think I really appreciated it at the time – to be present at a debate in 2002 between
Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller (Barron, 2003) on the motion that a strong distinction
between humans and non-humans is no longer required for research purposes.
I enjoyed this debate as performance, as theatre (as in many debates, the debaters
tended to talk past each other), and I have been known on occasion to imitate the two
performers: the tall, scraggly Steve Fuller, striding across the stage, arguing that
“Social science was – and is – undeniably a moral project” (p83), that “the ‘human’
or ‘the social’ is demarcated for the normative purpose of creating the project of
humanity” (p84) and that, although it is hard to draw a line between the human and
non-human, it may be premature to abandon the distinction. Meanwhile the urbane
Bruno Latour shrugs and reiterates his “very simple point: most of the social sci-
ences and most of philosophy since Kant have been without a world. Things do
nothing” (p79). Aside from a bit of theatre, part of this debate clearly got under my
skin, as I started to wonder more recently why we operate so insistently with dis-
tinctions between people and things, humans and other animals.
One of the great privileges of my current position is being able to have numerous
discussions around the world with some of the smartest and best-read applied lin-
guists, sociolinguists and social semioticians on the planet. Over the last year or so
I have been filling their ears with ideas about posthumanism and receiving as always
interesting, sceptical and informed feedback. Unfortunately these discussions are
too many to recall and acknowledge in their entirety, so I hope some of my
acknowledgements here do them justice. Above all I would like to thank those who
not only listened and commented and questioned but also followed up with
additional materials. Of particular help with promised references and ideas were
Adam Jaworski, Rodney Jones, David Malinowski, Luisa Martin Roja, Alison
Sealey and Crispin Thurlow. Many of my usual interlocutors have also been
involved with these discussions, and I’d like to thank among many others: Samy
Alim, Adrian Blackledge, David Block, Jan Blommaert, Brigitta Busch, Suresh
Canagarajah, Julie Choi, Stephen Cowley, Angela Creese, Nik Coupland, Ophelia
García, Christina Higgins, Awad Ibrahim, Martha Karrebæk, Andy Kirkpatrick,
Claire Kramsch, Ryuko Kubota, Sirpa Leppännen, Li Wei, Angel Lin, Beatriz
Lorente, Ahmar Mahboob, Tim MacNamara, Sinfree Makoni, Stephen May,
Tommaso Milani, Janus Møller, Brian Morgan, Cynthia Nelson, Bonny Norton,
Tope Omoniyi, Brian Paltridge, Sari Pietikäinen, Ingrid Piller, Ben Rampton, Elana
Shohamy, Lynn Mario Menezes de Souza, Chris Stroud, Steve Thorne, Ruanni
Tupas, Theo van Leeuwen and Zhu Hua.
Thanks, too, to various people who helped make some of these connections
possible, particularly Annelies Kusters for inviting me to a wonderful symposium
on translanguaging and repertoires across signed and spoken languages at the Max
Planck Institute in Göttingen in 2016, which greatly helped me understand aspects
of sign languages that had been obscure to me before. Thanks to Stephen May for the
x Preface and acknowledgements
opportunity to speak about mutual misunderstanding (which no one seemed to get)
at the LED Conference in Auckland in November 2015. And thanks to Kleber
Aparecido da Silva, Simone Reis and the other organizers for the invitation to the
First International Critial Applied Linguistics conference in Brazil, where I first tried
out some of these ideas in 2015. A number of close colleagues and co-writers have
also played a significant role in developing my thinking on these topics. In particular
I would like to thank Emi Otsuji, with whom many of the ideas discussed here
were developed in our joint work on metrolingualism; Sender Dovchin and Shaila
Sultana, with whom a productive collaboration has moved my thinking forward in
several directions; Ros Appleby, with whom discussions and writing about sharks
and ecofeminism greatly sharpened my ideas; and Keiko Yasukawa and Jacquie
Widin, with whom many discussions of animals, politics and the environment
helped me think through how and why these things mattered. Dominique Estival
once again had to bear with me as I launched into yet another reading, writing and
thinking frenzy, had the patience and interest to give me very useful critiques of
some draft chapters, and more generally listened to my ideas with a sceptical ear
while remaining supportive throughout.
Some of the ideas in this book have been published elsewhere in very different
form and I would like to thank the publishers for permission to use material from:

Taylor and Francis:

Appleby, R and A Pennycook (2017) Swimming with sharks, ecological feminism
and posthuman language politics. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. doi:
10.1080/15427587.2017.1279545

Oxford University Press:

Pennycook, A. (2016b) Posthumanist applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics
https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amw016.

John Benjamins:
Pennycook, A and E Otsuji (2015b) Making scents of the landscape. Linguistic
Landscape, 1(3) 191–212.
1 Introducing posthumanist applied
linguistics

This book asks how thinking along posthumanist lines can enhance our work in
applied linguistics. Posthumanist thought is a fairly broad and at times chaotic field but
at its heart is the question of what it means to be human. But why, one might ask,
question the notion of humanity, particularly at this moment in history? We are
arguably living at a point of major historical disjuncture, with millions of refugees
struggling to find alternative places to survive among increasingly reluctant and
hostile hosts while walls and fences become the new response to mobile populations;
with the rise of trenchant forms of xenophobic and isolationist populism in Europe, the
USA and elsewhere driving deep divides between people of different backgrounds
and faiths while new forms of religious fundamentalism draw deeper battle lines
between people; with the redistribution of income away from labour and towards
profit bringing greater inequality as capital is concentrated in the hands of the very rich
while huge economic disparities are ideologically normalized; with a new emergent
class of mobile, impoverished and insecure workers supporting growing extra-
vagances by the wealthy while the very idea of welfare and the public good is
increasingly on the retreat; with human rights abuses escalating in many parts of the
world while the idea of universal justice struggles to make those abusers accountable.
Why, one might ask, amid all this, retreat from the idea of humanity? Isn’t the idea
of our shared humanity the strongest argument to counter racism, sexism, homo-
phobia or any other forms of discrimination against our fellow humans? Aren’t
human rights one of the few successes we can celebrate as we head backwards from a
path of liberal democracy? Isn’t a call to posthumanism a denial of the human
contract that helped humanity survive as a species through the last few centuries?
Isn’t a common sense of what it means to be human – humanity not just as a species
but as a moral project – the only way of saving ourselves from ourselves? And yet,
while a view of the triumphant goodness of human nature might provide grounds for
optimism, human destructiveness towards each other and the planet does not suggest
that a focus on humans above all others is a likely solution.
Might it not now be time to think ourselves out of the dilemmas we find ourselves
in not by appeal to a belief in the idea of the noble human, of some vague and
implausible universal notion such as human nature – concepts that have become
remarkably suspect in recent times – but by rethinking our relation to everything we
consider non-human: animals, objects, nature, the environment and much more?
2 Introduction
This first chapter takes up such questions and argues that posthumanism offers
us alternative ways of thinking about the human predicament that present new
political and intellectual possibilities. The posthuman condition, suggests Braidotti
(2013, pp1–2), “introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is
the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to
the other inhabitants of this planet”. This book is an attempt to come to terms with
this challenge for how we think about this basic unit of the human and where it sits in
relation to everything around us (or why, to start with, we think in terms of humans as
distinct from all that surrounds us). Of equal importance for this book is the question
of why this matters for applied linguistics – why a posthumanist applied linguistics
suggests important ways of thinking about language, the individual, context,
cognition and communication that open up new avenues for research and education.

The planet, the people, animals and objects

Posthumanist thought asks how and why we might want to get beyond the anthro-
pocentrism that bedevils our understanding of ourselves. An example (Hutchins,
1995, p81) of how easily we fall into anthropocentric thought might be useful. Get up
at dawn (or imagine you are doing so), point at the sun and imagine this line extending
through space to the sun. Then repeat the activity at midday: point at the sun and
imagine the line going to the sun. Then ask yourself where these two lines intersect.
Think about this. Where do the two lines intersect? The common answer seems to be,
well, me. They intersect at me, the pointer. But think again. They in fact intersect at the
sun. The earth and the pointer have moved (not the sun) and these two lines converge
from different positions at the sun, not at the pointer (we’ll come back to pointing later,
in Chapter 5). So much for the Copernican revolution. This serves as a good illus-
tration of the ways in which, despite all the supposed moves to decentre humans, we as
humans have not been able to make the bigger leap into a decentred, posthuman
landscape. We need, as Bogost puts it (2012, p3), to escape the “tiny prison of our own
devising” to which we have confined ourselves, and in which our only concerns are
“the fleshy beings that are our kindred and the stuffs with which we stuff ourselves”.
Hutchins (1995) in fact uses this example to point out not merely our anthro-
pocentrism but also our inability to grasp the worldviews of other humans. In his
discussion of Pacific Island navigation (a major theme in his work on distributed
cognition, and to which we shall return in Chapter 3) he explains how navigators
assume a stationary canoe in relation to a moving island and its position relative to
the stars. This conception (which has worked remarkably for thousands of years
up to the present), with the world moving towards a stationary canoe, appears
egocentric to Western navigators with their different conceptualization of ships’
movements in relation to a fixed set of bearings. Hutchins gives the example of
pointing at the sun at different times of the day to show how difficult it can be to shift
our orientation from one centrism to another, raising an important further point for
the discussion here. Not only are there problems with the egocentricity of anthro-
pocentrism, but humanism has also been consistently blind to human difference.
Despite its claims to describe a common human condition, humanism has long been
 Introduction 3
both exclusionary – it was never a category that included everyone – and specific to a
particular version of humans.
It is on such grounds that some, such as Braidotti (2013, p16), take up a
specifically anti-humanist position, asking why, as a woman, she would want to be a
member of a category (human) that has been so consistently exclusionary: “I am
none too fond of Humanism or of the idea of the human which it implicitly upholds”.
Humanism generally assumes a fixed universal commonality for all humans, and as
many critics of this position have remarked, this position was all too often Western,
Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) (Henrich et al., 2010).
We might add White, Male and Straight to that list. For Braidotti (2013, p23), this
anti-humanism “consists of de-linking the human agent from this universalistic
posture, calling him to task, so to speak, on the concrete actions he is enacting”.
From a feminist anti-humanist point of view, the issue is not to seek entry into the
exclusive category of the human but rather to seek to unravel an idea that has never
been as open as it claims. This supposed human universalism cannot grasp the
different cosmology of the Polynesian sailors just as we may struggle to see that the
lines pointing at the sun must intersect there, not here. We do not necessarily need to
take up an overt anti-humanism to see that there is something very troubling about
the anthropocentrism at the heart of humanism.
So anthropocentric are we, indeed, that we have now named a geological era
after ourselves: the Anthropocene. On the plus side, however, this naming of the
Anthropocene both acknowledges the destructive force that humans have become for
the rest of the planet, and raises significant questions about how we might understand
humans and nature in different ways. The assumptions of modernity – that nature is
external, a resource to be exploited, that humans are separate, self-governing, on an
upward spiral of self-improvement to escape the limits of nature – are coming under
scrutiny as the implications of the Anthropocene are taken up in different fields.
As Chakrabarty has remarked (2009, p209), once the historical and philosophical
challenges posed by climate change force us to consider humans as “a force of nature
in the geological sense”, the relation between humans and history and humans
and nature change considerably (Chakrabarty, 2015). For Latour (2015, p146), the
Anthropocene may help us finally reject the “separation between Nature and Human
that has paralysed science and politics since the dawn of modernism”.
The challenges posed by human destructiveness, environmental degradation,
diminishing resources and our treatment of animals present a range of ethical and
political concerns that are deeply interconnected with struggles around neoliberalism,
racism, gender equity, forced migration and many other forms of discrimination and
inequality. The world is going through a major period of transformation as we see the
centre of power shifting from the West (the dominance of Europe and the USA and
their languages, cultures and imperial politics) back to the East and the Silk Roads
that link across the great Asian land mass (Frankopan, 2015). The rallying cry that
brought Donald Trump to the US presidency – Make America Great Again – is a
symptom of passing American power, as the final struggles to hold on to control of
wealth and ideology by invading Afghanistan and Iraq are fought out. The Shanghai
Co-Operation Organization (SCO) that was set up to link Russia, Kazakhstan,
4 Introduction
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and China is becoming a major force, and as this
new Silk Road Economic Belt, as this One Road, One Belt (一帶一路) grows, it is
no longer the EU that countries such as Turkey wish to join. And with this shift in
global power comes major ideological change: the notion of the human that was at
the centre of Western notions of humanity, humanism and human rights is being seen
not as a category of universal commonality but rather as a cultural, temporal and
geographical idea from what is now becoming the new periphery.
This shift is also accompanied by serious challenges in terms of climate change,
population growth, resource scarcity and urbanization, as well as major shifts in
technology and communication. There are significant changes underway to the
ways in which the human somatic niche (Berson, 2015) – the ecological space that
our bodies have produced – is constructed and experienced. Not only is climate
change having profound effects on the lives of many – Pacific Islanders and people
in the Philippines, for example, have suffered hugely as both the intensity and the
pathway of typhoons cause devastation to people’s lives and livelihoods – but many
other changes to the somatic niche are changing the way we live. Urbanicity and the
growth of large cities, with the particular effects of “urban tempo” (Berson, 2015, p74),
is changing the lives of increasing numbers and proportions of people. Sites of
mobility and impermanence – the bus station, sea or airport, the fishing boat or
inflatable dinghy crowded with asylum seekers, the temporary camps of mobile
people waiting on the borders between Turkey and Europe, Kenya and Sudan – are
now central to human life.
The speed of social change, and the lack of old supports that once provided food,
clothing, medicine or education, have produced new forms of precarity – indeed,
a whole new precariat class of mobile workers across construction sites, care
industries, domestic work and other low-paid jobs with minimal levels of security,
support or protection (Standing, 2014). Changing relations between humans
and other animal species, such as livestock in factory farms, diminishing ocean
resources through overfishing, and close contact with urban pets (a complex and
sometimes abusive relationship; Pierce, 2016), shift the physical and ethical
boundaries with animals. And alongside all this, the major technological changes
that both surround us and become part of us are challenging the very idea of what it
means to be human. Instrumentation, the growth of data and new forms of moni-
toring and sensing around our bodies (the new health monitors on first-world wrists,
for example) are changing the way we understand and perceive humanity, with an
ever increasing monitoring and surveillance of behaviour.
Such instrumentation is also bringing in a world of objects. The Internet of Things
(IoT), referring to “the networked interconnection of everyday objects, which are
often equipped with ubiquitous intelligence” (Xia et al., 2012, p1101), focuses on
the new forms of interconnectivity among smart devices, from GPS and heart
sensors in watches to biochip transponders in farm animals (see also The Internet of
Beings: Bell, 2016), drones that can deliver mail in rural areas or support emergency
services, or hearing devices that can not only assist those with hearing difficulties
but also connect to smart devices in the home (cooking, lighting, heating, enter-
tainment systems, fridges and so forth). These things are increasingly connected to
 Introduction 5
each other and linked back to humans, so that it is not only humans who are
responsible for data on the internet but also things. The challenge posed by what
Berson (2015, p78) calls instrumentation – the ways in which human bodies are
reconfigured by ever increasing forms of data – may be as great as that of the
Anthropocene, for “if climate change strikes us where we live, instrumentation
strikes us in our skin, upsetting long enregistered conventions” of how the body is
configured through sensory and motor activities.
Posthumanism presents both dystopian and utopian possibilities as we consider
that humans might be “displaced as the dominant form of life on the planet by
intelligent machines” (Hayles, 1999, p283) or, even more disturbingly, may be
about to cause sufficient environmental damage for the extinction of the species
(and a whole lot of other species as well) to come sooner than originally thought.
The short span of time that humans have dominated the planet will be given over to
those more flexible creatures such as cockroaches. “Humans can either go gently
into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but
is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves”
(Hayles, 1999, p283). While both these possibilities – the rise of intelligent
machines and the destruction of the ecosystem – indeed form a backdrop to the
posthumanism to be discussed here, this book is not intended as a dystopian
lament that all is now lost for humans, for there are more optimistic sides to the
posthuman, evoking “the exhilarating prospect of getting out of the old boxes and
opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means” (Hayles,
1999, p285).
This may lead to a more humble sense of humanity – a more inclusive one,
a reconsideration of why all those others were always being left out along lines of
class, race, gender, sexual orientation or disability. The volatile idea of what is meant
by human is “contested and policed with demonic precision” (Bourke, 2011, p5).
Such contestation has been of particular importance to those others (women, people
of colour), who have often not even been accorded the status of the truly human
(the epitome of which is Man). As Douzinas points out (2000, p109), following the
great announcements of human rights, “All assertions of human rights by the groups
and classes excluded from citizenship, women, blacks, workers or political and
social reformers, were dismissed as selfish attacks against the common good and the
democratic will”. Posthumanism, suggests Ferrando (2013, p29), can be seen as
post-exclusivist: “an empirical philosophy of mediation which offers a reconcili-
ation of existence in its broadest significations”. It can ask again what our relation
is to the planet, to other animals and to the objects around us, and ask how it is we
came to swallow ideas such as human agency, human nature or universalism. What
were we thinking? Posthumanism thus draws on multiple strands of thought and
points in multiple directions, from a questioning of the centrality and exceptionalism
of humans as actors on this planet, or the relationship to other inhabitants of the
earth, to a re-evaluation of the role of objects and space in relation to human thought
and action, or the extension of human thinking and capacity through various
forms of human enhancement. Posthumanism takes “humanity’s ontological
precariousness” seriously (Fuller, 2011, p75).
6 Introduction
From proclamations about the death of Man to investigations into enhanced forms
of being, from the advent of the Anthropocene to new forms of materialism
and distributed cognition, posthumanism raises significant questions for applied
linguistics in terms of our understandings of language, humans, objects and agency.
Posthumanism urges us to ask how and why we have come to think about humans in
particular ways, with particular boundaries between humans and other animals,
humans and artefacts, and humans and nature.
Questioning the ways in which humans have been defined in opposition to ani-
mals is in part an inquiry into what it means to be human – the ways in which we
define the human and non-human, animals and non-human animals. The division
between animals and humans ties to the broader divisions between nature and
society/culture, between the natural sciences and the humanities/social sciences,
which as Urry (2011a, p7) points out, “mostly operate on the clear separation
between nature and society.” Sloterdijk’s (1998) ontological constitution incorp-
orating humans, animals, plants, and machines makes a similar intervention into the
culture/nature divide: “nature and culture are linked by a broad middle ground of
embodied practices – containing languages, rituals and technical skills” (Sloterdijk,
2013, p11). Posthumanism, according to Barad (2007, p136), “eschews both
humanist and structuralist accounts of the subject that position the human as either
pure cause or pure effect, and the body as the natural and fixed dividing line between
interiority and exteriority”. Posthumanist thought thus questions the boundaries
between what is seen as inside and outside, where thought occurs and what role a
supposedly exterior world may play in thought and language. Posthumanism is best
seen not so much as an identifiable philosophy, a fixed body of thought, but rather as
an umbrella term, a navigational tool for understanding a present undergoing
massive change, a way of responding to the need to rethink what it means to be
human following both “onto-epistemological as well as scientific and bio-techno-
logical developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (Ferrando, 2013,
p26). Posthumanism “doesn’t presume the separateness of any-‘thing,’ let alone
the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets humans
apart” (Barad, 2007, p136).

Posthumanist applied linguistics

But what, one might ask, has any of this to do with applied linguistics? Neither the
broad epistemological questions of posthumanism – asking how we might think
differently about the notion of the human – nor the more specific questioning
of how humans relate to the non-human – asking why we maintain particular
boundaries between people and things – appears to have much to do with applied
linguistics. As an applied linguist, one might justifiably ask how any of this relates
to language education, language policy, language use in professional contexts,
translation, second-language learning or other domains in which applied linguists
are active. From an applied linguistic perspective, the only dalliance with humanism
(and the only possible need therefore for posthumanism) may appear to be with the
era of humanist psychology and pedagogy that emerged alongside other social and
 Introduction 7
political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, questioning forms of authority and
arguing for a strongly individualistic and student-centred approach to psychology
and education. Reactions to the reductionism of the behaviourist psychology of
Skinner (1957) took two different directions, one, such as Chomsky’s (1971,
1986), insisting on a return to the inner, cognitive operations of the brain, while
the other turned to a more inclusive whole-person approach, arguing for the need
for self-actualization and positive psychology (this was also a reaction to the
perceived negativity of psychoanalysis). Based around Rogers’ (1961) client-
centred therapy and Maslow’s (1970) hierarchy of human needs and motivations,
so-called humanistic psychology focused on empathy, self-help and the whole
person.
This was a rather warm, fuzzy, positive kind of humanism, focusing on the
individual, freedom and finding oneself. The effects of humanistic psychology on
educational movements were quite extensive in the 1970s and 1980s, critiquing
teacher-led education and emphasizing student-centred learning. It was one of the
formative influences on communicative language learning, the apotheosis perhaps
being Gertrude Moskowitz’s popular book Caring and Sharing in the Foreign
Language Class, with its focus on “self-actualization and self-esteem” (Moskowitz,
1978, p2). Typical activities, illustrating the particular focus on individualist self-
interest that was at the core of this orientation, included “Accentuate the positive”
(#89), “I enjoyed, I enjoyed” (#114), “What made me me” (#131), “Step right up
and see me” (#136), “What I want from life” (#151), “The best product – me”
(#160), “I hear happiness” (#180), “Read all about me” (#214), “From me to me”
(#215) and so on. More generally, “humanistic techniques” were seen to “encourage
learners to express what they themselves want to say”, to reduce the role of the
teacher in the classroom and to “enable the students to proceed autonomously”
(Cormon, 1986, p281).
As similar activities became part of the global English language teaching (ELT)
enterprise, however, critics elsewhere started to object, not only because they
seemed trivial and non-serious in contexts where learning and education were
seen as serious enterprises, but also because this labelling of Western language
teaching as “humanistic” seemed to imply “the ‘inhumanity’ of things non-Western”
(Ting, 1987, p59). The use of such techniques in Western ELT, Ting (1987, p59)
went on to suggest, may fail to work because “self-interest is chosen as the starting
point. People assume that only the pursuit of self-interest is humanistic, and to many
of them the assumption has become a mind-set”. Claims to what is human are often
very particular claims. Here, an individualistic focus on the self and self-interest,
marketed as humanistic, clashed with alternative ways of thinking about humans
and their responsibilities to others. For many applied linguists, this is doubtless very
much a bygone era – things have moved on – and the idea of a humanistic approach
to language education is rarely invoked (though see, for example, Murphey, 2012).
Nonetheless, it is worth noting the continued effects of this thinking in anything
from student-centred ideologies and learner autonomy to peace linguistics.1
To suggest that these caring and sharing classroom activities somehow encap-
sulate humanist orientations in applied linguistics, however, would be to
8 Introduction
underestimate the much deeper connections between humanism and ways of thinking
about language. Many applied linguists may see themselves as committed to
humanism and the humanities in a much broader sense: applied linguistics as a dis-
cipline that sits alongside history, philosophy and literature, or applied linguistics as
a field of inquiry that helps us understand the central role of language in human
relations. Rather than a particular focus on language teaching and the individual
from the 1970s, humanist assumptions underpin a great deal of thinking in applied
linguistics. Both the humanistic reaction to behaviourism – emphasizing the
whole person – and the cognitivist reaction – emphasizing universal human
commonalities – are undergirded by different strands of humanist thought. Cog-
nitivist rationalism may not sit comfortably with whole-person psychology, but
both stem from related assumptions about humanity, communication and mutual
understanding. Central here is the “linguistic myth of human history” – with its
claims to universality – that the essence of what it means to be human is claimed to
be language; and that human history is an account of the development from oral to
written language (Finnegan, 2015, p18). Applied linguistics has taken on board,
and indeed been a major promoter of, humanist accounts of language, literacy and
learning. To the extent that applied linguistics has for a long time supported a
view of humans as self-governing individuals and languages as separable objects it
has been an important player in the promotion of a humanist vision.
So there are several reasons for taking up posthumanist thought in relation to
applied linguistics. Across different areas of the humanities and the social sciences
there has been serious discussion of posthumanism for many years. Geographers,
historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, philosophers and many others have
opened up discussions of posthumanism. This obviously does not imply that applied
linguistics – all too often a rather rudderless domain of work that reacts to whatever
new trend turns up on the radar – should swing with the new tide and take up
posthumanism simply because it’s there. But it does suggest that we would do well to
engage with this line of thinking lest we find ourselves once again stuck within a
discipline unable to engage with a more-than-human world while claiming to do
otherwise. Many of the themes discussed in this book – new materialism, speculative
realism, distributed cognition – are common points of discussion in other areas of the
humanities and social sciences, and we should at least be able to join that discussion.
Posthumanism, furthermore, is far more than a rather abstract engagement with
what it means to be human: many of the topics that will be taken up here are very
real and urgent, from climate change and the planet to humans, communication
and technology.
Posthumanism may also be understood as an umbrella term for work that is
already going on in applied linguistics. There is currently a climate of thought
seeking an increased emphasis on space, place, things and their interrelationships.
From studies of place and semiotics, linguistic landscapes, geosemiotics, nexus
analysis and language ecology to sociocultural theory, sociomaterial approaches
to literacy and poststructuralist accounts of repertoire, there has been an expressed
desire to expand the semiotic terrain (beyond language more narrowly construed)
in relation to material surrounds and space. From the prescient work of Scollon
 Introduction 9
and Scollon (2004) on nexus analysis as a “semiotic ecosystem” (p89) where
“historical trajectories of people, places, discourse, ideas, and objects come
together” (p159) to recent work on social semiotics suggesting that “things make
people happen” and that “objects, in and of themselves, have consequences”
(Kell, 2015, p442), there are many related approaches that may arguably be
considered as posthumanist whether they make this connection themselves or not.
The broad scope of posthumanism allows this discussion to draw on multiple
related areas without being reduced to them: thus we can look at nexus analysis,
sociocultural theory, ecological approaches to language, Actor Network Theory,
distributed cognition and more, without needing to follow one line or the other. A
posthumanist stance makes it possible to push these lines of thinking beyond a
reluctance to forego the humanist subject as guarantor of meaning or to take on
board the possibility that objects may interpellate subjects.
Taking on posthumanist thought can also make new connections and lines of
thinking possible. Some areas of applied linguistics had become off-limits to those
steeped in critical and social theory: cognition was something of a dirty word,
since it was so linked to notions of the individual and thought-internal processes
that there seemed no possibility of redeeming the idea for a more socially and
critically oriented approach to thought. That this internalized approach to cognition
became the dominant mode of exploring second-language development has greatly
hindered the applied linguistic understanding of language learning. To be sure,
more social and ecological approaches to language development (Lantolf and Thorne,
2006; Kramsch, 2008; Van Lier, 2000) opened up alternative ways of thinking about
cognition, but it is when we look at issues of extended and distributed cognition
(Clark, 2008; Hutchins, 1995) – when we consider that the only serious way to study
cognition is ethnographically – that a consideration of the social, spatial and embodied
dimensions of language learning opens up an understanding of second-language
development as a distributed process.
Reality was also a bit of a no-go area, particularly to those who adhered to various
poststructuralist or social-constructionist positions that always placed ‘reality’ thus,
in scare quotes. For a number of reasons, however, it has now re-emerged as a
question we need to re-engage with more seriously, not least because a denial
of reality leaves us in an awkward position in relation to other deniers of reality
(climate-change sceptics, for example). As Latour (2004a) notes, always putting
questions of the real on hold may have been a tactical error. Materialism meanwhile
has long been tied to a rather heavy-footed Marxist theorization and its insistence on
the centrality of material infrastructure. Posthumanist materialism, by contrast,
follows a line of thought running from Spinoza to Deleuze rather than Hegel to
Marx, suggesting an alternative politics centred less on material infrastructure, pol-
itical economy and the demystification projects of ideology critique (which reduce
political agency to human agency) and instead on a politics that reorients humans
towards their ethical interdependence with the material world (Bennett, 2010a).
Posthumanist thought brings a different set of ethical and political concerns to
the applied linguistic table, issues to do with human relations to the planet and its other
inhabitants.
10 Introduction
Posthumanist challenges
The notion of posthumanism, or more particularly posthumanist applied linguistics,
may evoke a range of quite reasonable objections, from a concern that we shouldn’t
discard humanism quite yet (isn’t it humanism that helped us get away from
religious dogma? Isn’t humanism the best thing that ever happened to humans?) to a
distress that this is yet another of those rather pointless post-positions that do little
other than argue with the past (isn’t posthumanism just the latest version of post-
modernism?). Other concerns suggest that the focus on other inhabitants of the planet
is really just about animal rights (just because I’m against whaling doesn’t make me
against humans, too), or that the interest in enhanced humanity is little more than
science fiction (this talk of biological implants and distributed networks sounds more
like a Terminator film than an issue for linguistics), or that consideration of objects as
actants is both strange ontologically and risky politically (does it really make sense to
give equal weight to people and objects – a rock and a hard place, maybe, but a rock
and a human?). And, finally, what’s all this got to do with applied linguistics (we’re
concerned with everyday language practices, and speculations about what it means to
be human aren’t going to help us understand second-language learning)? While also
wary of these challenges, I shall discuss briefly below how these legitimate concerns
may be overcome.
A starting point is to clarify the relation between posthumanism and humanism.
Posthumanism may embrace a range of positions, including transhumanism
(generally the idea that we may be transcending the human through new technol-
ogies) and anti-humanism (an avowed rejection of the tenets of humanism). Post-
humanism therefore may be understood as both a broad stance on what it means to be
human (posthuman-ism) as well as a more specific critique of the philosophy of
humanism (post-humanism). Posthumanism is not therefore giving up on humans –
announcing the end of humanity – but rather calling for a rethinking of the
relationship between humans and the rest. In a line of thinking from Darwin to
Marx and Freud that has decentred the position of humans as separate from other
animals, in control of their history, and in charge of their own minds, posthumanism
continues this work of repositioning humans where they belong. The challenge is to
disidentify from anthropocentric norms and the unearned privileges that have come
with humanist assumptions. Posthumanism is not therefore so much anti-human
as it is opposed to human hubris.
Isn’t this, one might ask, just another of those post theories that we thought we’d
finally got over? Well, yes and no. Posthumanism very obviously draws on that
lineage of thought that took up the questions raised by Marx and Freud, among
others, about the autonomy and control of the human subject: humans are far more
constrained than the free-willed individual invented in eighteenth-century Europe.
From Lacan to Althusser, Foucault to Derrida, various projects that have since been
labelled postmodern or poststructuralist have continued this quest to rethink the
human subject (Angermuller, 2014). So in many ways the posthumanist project is
indeed part of that lineage of thinking. Yet there are also good reasons to question an
argument that it is just or another in a line of post arguments. Posthumanism does sit
 Introduction 11
in that critical line of thinking that has questioned the human subject, but by
exploring alternative ways of thinking about what is important in the world – from
climate change to the relations between humans and things – it reinvigorates our
understanding of what matters, not by rejecting older approaches (socioeconomic
inequality is still deeply important) but rather by presenting alternative ways of
thinking about materialism (Bennett, 2010a).
An appreciation of poststructuralist thought has not been helped either by the
uneasy relationship between applied linguistics and social theory or by the tendency
to caricature poststructuralist, postmodern or postcolonial thought as if they
were concerned with the individual, agency, relativism and diversity (which
they’re not). While recent calls to re-engage with political economy in applied
linguistics (Block, 2014) or to focus on forms of economic and racial discrimination
(Kubota, 2016) point to concerns that undeniably should be a central focus of
applied linguistics, the tendency to represent post theories as forms of humanist
ideology (focusing on individual agency and difference) and then to equate this
with neoliberalism (I return to this discussion in Chapter 2) is to overlook the point
that it is not poststructuralist of postcolonial theory that is the problem so much as
their appropriation by the bourgeois academy and its humanist principles. As
McNamara (2015) points out, applied linguistics has not yet fully engaged with
poststructuralist thinking and the ground-breaking challenges it poses to how we
understand language and humans.
A different concern suggests that the focus on an alternative relation to the other
inhabitants of the planet is really just animal rights dressed up as posthumanism.
I should admit a certain weariness when some authors in the field go on about their
pets (or when the acknowledgements include ‘poor old Tootsie, who missed her
afternoon walks’). I am not a dog- or cat-oriented person, though I do have very
serious concerns about the welfare of other creatures on the planet, and I am appalled
(particularly as a scuba diver) by the damage that has been done to great natural
wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Every year I volunteer my
services to the Saving Philippines Reefs (SPR) project, which needs experienced
scuba divers to help monitor the health of Philippine reefs and the marine ecosystems
they are part of (White et al., 2016; and see front cover picture). So while I do not
keep pets or actively campaign for animal rights, which Braidotti (2013, p76) cat-
egorizes as a post-anthropocentric neohumanist stance on the grounds that the focus is
on according to animals the same rights that humans enjoy, rather than questioning
what it is to be human in the first place, I do consider very seriously the relation
between humans and the ecosystems we are ruining.
I am more interested in sharks than dogs (Appleby and Pennycook, 2017), not as
creatures to construct alarmist discourses about (Australia is a context where shark
discourses abound) but in line with ecofeminist arguments that a renewed politics
needs to engage differently with all that is not human. This is also about the
significance of embodied practice in relation to sociolinguistics (Bucholtz and
Hall, 2016): just as walking may be understood as “an important practice in the
performative coproduction of knowledge and space” (Sundberg, 2014, p39),
so swimming with sharks may be a significant practice in coming to know the world
12 Introduction
differently. The importance of work such as Cook’s (2015) on the discourses that
construct our relation with other animals is to understand that humans are in part
defined by “a connection with animals” going back over millions of years (Shipman,
2011, p13). A central question for all (applied) linguists is how we understand
the language question in all this: do we draw a deep divide between humans and
non-humans (language is what defines us as humans) or do we open the door to
consider that the relations between human and non-human communication need to
be carefully considered?
The focus on cyborgs and human enhancement – sometimes termed the trans-
human element of posthumanism – can also evoke images of a science-fiction
fantasy world far removed from the material realities I want to bring to the table.
I will not deal with these themes (robotics, extropianist views of human develop-
ment and so on) in great detail in this book, though I will inevitably return at various
points to questions about converging technologies that transcend, enhance and
prolong life through a range of enhancements to mind and body, the ways in which
“humans are improving their capacity to manipulate and transform the material
character of their being” (Fuller, 2011, p109). Enhanced reality or the hard questions
concerning bionic ears for the Deaf community will be discussed in Chapter 4, for
example. Body modifications – prosthetic limbs, bionic ears, camera eyes, or simply
RFID implants that encode personal details – can be seen as body enhancements
rather than just replacements, and this raises questions about what it now means to be
human (not so much biological givens as improvable bodies).
While the domains of converging technologies and human enhancements will not
be a major focus of this book, it is also important to understand the question of
cyborgs (cybernetic organisms with restored or enhanced abilities through the
integration of organic and biomechatronic body parts) in political terms, going back
to Haraway’s focus (1991, p149) on a new politics “faithful to feminism, socialism
and materialism” in her classic Cyborg Manifesto. This could be made possible, she
argued, by three boundary breakdowns: between human and animal, animal–human
and machine, and physical and non-physical. The cyborg metaphor suggests the
possibility of transcending traditional approaches to gender, feminism, politics and
identity. This line of thinking re-emerges in a different form in more recent ecofe-
minist work that argues that women’s struggles need to focus not so much on
equality with their supposed male Other but rather on a reworking of boundaries
between women and all those others deemed less than human in the humanist project
(Adams and Gruen, 2014).
The focus on objects as actants, which has emerged particularly in Actor Network
Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005), also provides ground for concern lest it appear that
the human dissolves altogether in a sea of other objects. As Thrift (2007, p111)
notes, while ANT provides many important insights – the agency of objects, the
notion of distributed and provisional personhood and the rejection of the idea of “a
centred human subject establishing an exact dominion over all” – it is also limited in
its focus on networks rather than events (and an inability to deal, therefore, with the
unexpected) and on a “flattened cohabitation of all things” at the expense of
“specifically human capacities of expression, powers of invention, of fabulation”.
 Introduction 13
Appadurai (2015, p233) is likewise concerned that while the notion of actants
usefully erodes the centrality of human agency, it may be more useful instead to
think in terms of mediants to avoid the potential social and political paralysis of
analyses where agency is everywhere. It is worth recalling that a posthumanist
position does not aim to efface humanity but to rethink the relation between humans
and that deemed non-human. While there are good reasons to reconsider the role
of things in our lives, and even perhaps to consider what it’s like to be a thing
(Bogost, 2012), there is also a need here to find a way forward that does not suggest a
complete equality among all things and people.
As we shall see in Chapter 8, some arguments even suggest that such thinking opens
up the long-term imperative to ‘give voice’ to the marginalized and dispossessed by
looking at marginalization in broader terms: not just those people who along lines of
race, gender, class and sexuality have not been heard in public debate but also objects
and forms of agency that have not been acknowledged by the humanist focus
on people (Brigstocke and Noorani, 2016). But why, we might ask, give voice to
voiceless objects when so many voiceless humans are still waiting to be heard? The
argument, however, is not that we should listen to a cat, a flagpole, an alarm clock or a
coffee table before we pay attention to people who need to be heard. It is not that we
should not listen, as the late great Leonard Cohen put it, to the words of “a beggar
leaning on his wooden crutch” who said “‘You must not ask for so much’” or to the
words of “a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door” who cried “‘Hey, why not ask
for more?’” (‘Bird on a Wire’). It is to appreciate, however, that the crutch and the
wooden door are not just props to contextualize these speakers but are part of the action
too. So the question becomes what new relations emerge in research and political
activism when voices have to be understood as not only emerging from a human
capacity to speak but also from assemblages of people, objects and places, when new
modes of listening urge us to be more attentive to the more-than-human world?
And what’s all this got to do with applied linguistics? From an applied linguistic
point of view, as I suggested above, humanism generally only turns up in specific
terms in relation to things such as humanist psychology (about the whole person)
and humanist pedagogy (person-oriented activities in the classroom). Such ideas are
really only humanist in a rather 1970s Euro-American flower-power way of thinking
about people and education, and it is not my intention here to suggest these as
examplars of humanism, which is a much more complex set of philosophies. More
generally, humanism in applied linguistics needs to be seen as a broader philo-
sophical background to the ways we think about language, people and communi-
cation that focuses on humans as creative thinkers and independent actors.
Humanism privileges human minds as the source of knowledge and ethics, as
masters of their own intentions, as uniquely capable of asserting agency and as
separate and distinct from all other creatures (Schatzki, 2002). It is these assump-
tions that posthumanism starts to question, and it is these assumptions that sit at the
heart of much of applied linguistics, when we talk of linguistic or communicative
competence, when we suggest that people choose what items to use from a pregiven
linguistic system and when we assert that humans use language in particular
contexts rather than seeing these as profoundly integrated.
14 Introduction
The arguments about distributed language and cognition (Chapter 3) are not
suggesting that a pencil can think, a sofa has agency or a coffee mug can talk, but
rather that the roles they may play in a larger domain of interconnected cognition and
activity render them more than just passive actors. In a mock discussion between two
examiners trying to ensure that they are able to assess an individual in complete
cognitive isolation (they have already ensured that there are no other people, books
or potential sources of knowledge present) one rejects the suggestion that the
candidate might be allowed pencil and paper:

“No no no no. The pencil is a tool that brings with it all kinds of thoughts. When
you write you change your thoughts and your mind and you learn all kinds of
things. We want to find out what she knows all by herself now. Writing will
make her change. So no paper. No pencil.”
(Murphey, 2012, p75)

While this can be read as a reiteration of the old truism that writing is not so much the
reporting of thoughts but the creation of ideas, it may also be read as suggesting that
this pencil and this sheet of paper become actors in a network of relations, and
that the pencil does indeed have very real effects on our thinking. Indeed these
two examiners go on to reject not only their own presence but also furniture:
‘“No table : : : no chair”’ (Murphey, 2012, p75). It is not just the role a pencil may
play in aiding thinking but the relations between humans and objects that are at stake
here. And as we shall see further in Chapter 7, tables are something we have to take
very seriously indeed. From this perspective, “the human is not approached as an
autonomous agent, but is located within an extensive system of relations” (Ferrando,
2013, p32).
A useful posthumanism does not deny the existence of humans (this would
not be a very credible way forward) but rather argues against particular ways in
which humans have been understood. As Bucholtz and Hall (2016, p186) note,
“the decentering of human signification as the site of agency does not make
posthumanism any less a theory about humanity”. The point is not to discount
humans in the search for a more object-oriented ontology but to reconfigure where
humans sit, to unsettle the position of humans as the monarchs of being and to
see humans as entangled in beings and implicated in other beings (Bogost, 2012).
Neither is this about dismissing humanism and all that it has achieved, nor an
argument for or against religion. To question the premises of humanism is not to
deny its role in taking human thought forward, nor to return to some sort of reli-
giosity. It is not an argument for species equivalence (humans and animals are all
equal) but rather suggests that the absolute divide between them is neither helpful
nor sustainable. Nor is it an argument that machines and technology are our
inevitable future and that humans are dissolving into cyborgs, in some dystopian
image of the world run by half humans/half robots. Rather this is a posthumanism
that questions human hubris, questions human minds as central to knowledge,
ethics, action and intention and questions the distinctions between humans and
other creatures and objects.
 Introduction 15
From humanism to posthumanism: navigating this book
Several major themes above clearly need unpacking. Chapter 2 explores the broad
background to posthumanism, tracing posthumanist thinking in relation to
modernism, humanism, religion and materialism, extending the discussion of
humanism and posthumanism with a particular focus on religion and human rights.
Humanism has played a significant role in pushing back the tides of religious dogma
and superstition, as well as grounding movements that claim a universality to the
human experience. If we intend to question the notion of humanism, we need to do
so with caution lest we reopen the door to dogma and despotism. An analysis of
humanism, however, also shows the particularity of its framing of what it means to
be human, an image based largely on straight, white, educated European male elites
(SWEEMEs) as a universal norm, emphasizing the individual and their mastery over
their own minds as the source of knowledge, agency and ethics, and the separation
of humans from all other beings and things. A discussion of human rights has
important implications for the applied linguistic focus on language rights, and the
problematic prescriptions of global language definition and intervention that flow
from this idea (Pupavac, 2012). This chapter further considers the relation between
poststructuralism and posthumanism, pointing to the continued failure in applied
linguistics to engage seriously with critical theory. One of the bridges here between
poststructuralist accounts of performativity and historical materialist approaches to
inequality can be found in the new materialism, particularly in the works of Barad
(2007) and Bennett (2010a) that provide compelling alternatives for thinking about
the material world.
These new approaches to materialism have significant implications for how we
think about language and cognition. Applied linguistics has long been held back by
the cognitivist traditions of linguistics and psychology, which have, rather strangely,
located thought in an isolated organ in the human head. Chapter 3 develops recent
work on distributed cognition. While extended cognition points to the ways we
outsource our thinking, as it were, to other systems, such as mobile phones,
distributed cognition focuses on the ways in which our thinking involves the
environment about us. Questioning the distinction between internal (the brain) and
external (our surrounds) domains, this line of thought poses serious questions for the
notion of where the human starts and ends. Extending this work into the domain of
language, this chapter argues (through examples from various studies) that language
can equally be seen as distributed in space. This takes us beyond a discussion of
language in the brain, in society or in context and urges us to think about language in
alternative spatial and material terms.
One point that emerges very clearly when we look at the history of Western
approaches to language and thought is how implicated they have been in a particular
history of sensorial hierarchies, where thought and language are tied to seeing and
hearing (the higher senses), while the lower senses (touch, taste, smell) are relegated
to non-language (and the kitchen, the workhouse, the slums and all those places
where embodied Others dwell). One initial question here is how on earth seeing
and hearing became disembodied. We have to see this in terms of a particular
16 Introduction
gendered and racialized history, where certain people (white men) had the luxury to
consider language, thought and literacy in terms of cognitively isolated activity.
Re-examining the role of the senses in relation to semiotics, Chapter 4 takes up the
posthuman challenge to reverse the gendered and racialized hierarchies that have
placed language in one domain and the senses in others. Important themes in this
chapter will also be sign languages and Deaf communities and the implications for
people who are discounted as fully human on the basis of their language not con-
forming to a particular image of humanity.
Much of the work that has been done to construct humans as separate and unique
has rested on the claim that language is that which separates us from animals.
Long lists of features unique to human language have been used to reinforce this
distinction. At least since Aristotle, as Tomasello (2014) notes, humans have
speculated on their relation to animals, a project limited for many centuries by the
lack of non-human primates as a point of comparison in Europe, making it easier to
posit reason or free will as distinguishing markers. Recent work has started to break
down this “sharp divide between human language and non-human communicative
systems” (Evans, 2014, p258). Looking particularly at the discussions of pointing –
do only humans point? – Chapter 5 discusses the implications for rethinking
language and communication from a perspective that includes the more bodily
aspects of animal communication. This has implications both for our relationship to
animals but also for our understanding of communication. Of course, we need to be
cautious here and not start to suggest that parrots can talk on as wide a range of topics
as humans or that dolphins could learn to read if given the chance. But it is worth
asking why we have worked so assiduously and with such circularity of argument
(human language is that which is unique to humans and only humans use human
language) to construct human language as unique, and how we might rethink
this relation.
The Western tradition of thought about language and communication has often
assumed that humans routinely understand each other. A humanist account of
communication suggests brains in cognitive isolation encoding and decoding ideas
in and out of language and passing messages back and forth between themselves.
Chapter 6 draws on posthumanist thinking to ask how communication might be
rethought when on the one hand we look at actual communication as it unfurls
between people, and on the other when we consider distributed language and the role
of bodies, senses and objects in communication. Mutual misunderstanding may be
an equally good way of conceiving how communication works. This does not mean
we should abandon communication but it does have implications for socio- and
applied approaches to language. Breaking down distinctions between interiority
and exteriority allows us to understand subjects, language and cognition not as
properties of individual humans but rather as distributed across people, places and
artefacts. A posthumanist applied linguistics does not assume rational human
subjects engaged in mutually comprehensible dialogue; the multimodal and mul-
tisensory semiotic practices of the everyday include the dynamic relations between
semiotic resources, activities, artefacts and space. No longer, from this point of view,
do we need to think in terms of competence as an individual capacity, of identity as
 Introduction 17
personal, of languages as entities we acquire or of intercultural communication as
uniquely human. Posthumanist thought urges us not just to broaden an under-
standing of communication but to relocate where social semiotics occurs.
The new materialism raises questions for how we think about discourse and
reality, or the relation between constructionism and realism. The arguments on this
topic have often tended towards mutual caricature (for constructionists there is no
reality, and for realists there is no mediating role of language). Chapter 7, drawing on
the work of Karen Barad (2007) Bruno Latour (2013) and others, returns to these
arguments from a new materialist perspective and argues for alternative ways of
thinking about these concerns. Taking up an extended debate between an avowed
constructionist (Teubert, 2013), a realist (Sealey, 2014) and an integrationist
(Pable, 2015) about how we might perceive a cat at the bottom of the garden, this
chapter seeks a way forward through the development of the idea of critical post-
humanist realism, which seeks to re-engage with reality by emphasizing the critical
in critical social theory, a realism that acknowledges the social role of knowledge
and a posthumanism that incorporates a political understanding of human inter-
relationships with the material world. This discussion of reality matters not only
because we need better ways of thinking about whether languages are real, and
alternative approaches to the relations between people and things, but also because
in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president of the USA new debates
have emerged about what it means to live in a post-truth era. How do we, who have
often placed ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in our beloved scare quotes, come to grips with
this new monster?
The final chapter pulls these themes together and focuses more closely on edu-
cational, socio- and applied linguistic concerns: if we question human exception-
alism, how might we start to understand language and communication differently?
What are the linguistic and educational implications of a revised understanding of
humans, animals and the planet? What would a critical posthumanist approach to
language education look like? This book aims to develop a form of critical post-
humanist applied linguistics. Critical posthumanism can be understood as a
“critical-philosophical project that unravels the discursive, institutional and
material structures and processes that have presented the human as unique and
bounded even when situated among all other life forms” (Nayar, 2014, p29). For
Braidotti (2016), critical posthumanist thought is a “caring disidentification from
human supremacy” (p22). Based on “philosophies of radical immanence, vital
materialism and the feminist politics of locations” this is not a universalist con-
struction of an abstract pan-humanity faced by global crises so much as “embedded
and embodied, relational and affective cartographies of the new power relations that
are emerging from the current geopolitical and post-anthropocentric world order”
(pp 23–4). A critical posthumanist applied linguistics therefore seeks to unravel the
ways in which language has been bound up with human exceptionalism and seeks an
alternative way forward through a new understanding of language, power and
possibility.
The case I make in this book is neither that all this is new (discussions of ecology,
nexus analysis, the poststructuralist subject and language as a local practice have
18 Introduction
raised related questions) nor that posthumanist thought offers the only way forward
from the stasis that seems to have befallen applied linguistics over the last decade.
Rather, a host of recent developments across applied linguistics and the social sci-
ences can be better understood by looking through a posthumanist lens that gives us
some exciting new directions for a renewed applied linguistics. By taking up ideas
drawn from the recent thinking on the Commons or spatial activism, by rethinking
relations between humans, language, objects and space, and by considering more
carefully what distributed agency, language and cognition may mean, a critical
posthumanist applied linguistics offers important ways forward for a renewed
engagement with language beyond human hubris.

Note
1 The peace linguistics poetry circulated by Fransisco Gomes de Matos is a good example
of a humanistic approach to language and global peace. Few would dispute the importance
of connecting linguistics to global peace, but this articulation of these relations recalls a
particular humanist orientation. My thanks to Francisco for granting permission to use his
poetry here.

On Global Peace: A poetic reflection

by Francisco Gomes de Matos a peace linguist Recife, Brazil (08/02/2016)
Global Peace may be hard to define,
but it may be easy to refine.
For Love of Humankind it subsumes,
and harmonious co-existence it assumes.
Global Peace may be hard to achieve,
but it may be easy to believe.
For human dignity it subsumes,
and a deep spirituality it assumes.
Global Peace may be hard to appropriate,
but it may be easy to communicate.
For a caring, compassionate interaction it subsumes,
and a nonviolent/nonkilling governance it assumes.
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