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Posthumanist Applied Linguistics
Posthumanist Applied Linguistics
Posthumanist Applied Linguistics
Alastair Pennycook
~ ~~~;~:n~1~up
_o DON AND NEW YORK
First published 20 18
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© 20 18 Alastai r Pennycoo k
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G Mutual misunderstanding 90
Mu tu a I intelligibility 9()
Dogmas of' intersubjective conformity 9 I
Rhubarh, rhubarb, rhubarh 94
Thinking otherwise I()()
Alignment, assemblages and attunement I ()3
References 145
Index 163
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Pennycook, A and E Otsuji (20 I Sb) 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 histo1ical disjuncture, with millions of refugees
muggling to find alternative places to survive among increasingly reluctant and
· ostile hosts while walls and fences become the new response to mobile populations;
"'ith the rise of trenchant fon11s of xenophobic and isolationist populism in Europe, the
~ SA and elsewhere diiving deep divides between people of different backgrounds
::!Il.d faiths while new fo1ms of religious fundamentalism draw deeper battle lines
:ietween people; with the redistribution of income away from labour and towards
:rofit b1inging greater inequality as capital is concentrated in the hands of the very rich
-:bile huge economic disparities are ideologically n01malized; with a new emergent
s of mobile, impoverished and insecure workers supporting growing extra-
o-ances by the wealthy while the very idea of welfare and the public good is
reasingly on the retreat; with human rights abuses escalating in many pm1s of the
orld while the idea ofuniversaljustice stJ.11ggles to make those abusers accountable.
Why, one might ask, amid all this, retreat from the idea of humanity? Isn't the idea
: our shared humanity the strongest argument to counter racism, sexism, homo-
- obia or any other fo1ms of discrimination against our fellow humans? Aren't
.=rrnan rights one of the few successes we can celebrate as we head backwards from a
~ of liberal democracy? Isn 't a call to posthumanism a denial of the human
~tract that helped humanity survive as a species through the last few centuries?
·r a common sense of what it means to be human- humanity not just as a species
~ as a moral project- the only way of saving ourselves from ourselves? And yet,
~ e a view of the u·iumphant goodness of human nature might provide grounds for
:imism, human destrnctiveness towards each other and the planet does not suggest
- a focus on humans above all others is a likely solution.
_ light it not now be time to think ourseives out of the dilemmas we find ourselves
not by appeal to a belief in the idea of the noble human, of some vague and
lausible universal notion such as human nature - concepts that have become
arkably suspect in recent times - but by rethinking our relation to everything we
-ider non-human: animals, objects, nature, the environment and much more?
2 ln troduction
This first chapter takes up such questions and argues tha t posthumanism offers
us alternative ways of thinking about the human predicament that present new
political and intellectual possibilities. The posth uman condition , suggests Braidotti
(20 13 , ppl - 2), " introduces a qualitati ve shift in our thinking abo ut what exactl y is
the ba sic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationsh ip 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 un it of the human and where it sits in
relation to everything around us (or why, to stait w ith , we think in tenns ofhumans as
distinct from a ll that suITounds us). Of eq ual impo1tance for thi s book is the question
of why this matters for applied linguistics - w hy a posthumanist applied li nguisti cs
suggests important ways of thinking about language, the individual, contex t,
cognition and communication that open up new avenues for research and education.
Posthumanist challenges
The notion of posthumanism, or more particularly posthumani st 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? lsn 't human ism 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 rea ll y just about an imal rights Uust because I'm against wha ling 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 network s 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 th is got to do with app lied 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 leaming)'l While also
wary of these challenges, I shall discuss b1ietly below how these legitimate concerns
may be overcome.
A starting point is to clarify the relati on between posthumanism and humanism.
Posthuman ism may embrace a range of positions, including transhumanism
(generally the idea th at we may be transcending th e human through new techno l-
ogies) and anti-human ism (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). Posthurnanism 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 th inking from Darwin to
Marx and Freud that has decentred the position of humans as separate from other
animals, in co ntrol of their history, and in charge of their own minds, posthumanism
continues this wo rk ofrepositioning 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 th at we thought we 'd
finally got over? Well, yes and no. Posthumanism very obviousl y 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 fa r more
constrained than the free-willed ind ividual in vented in eighteenth-century Europe.
From Lacan to Althusser, Foucault to DeITida, various projects that have since been
labelled postmodern or poststructuralist have conti nued this quest to rethink the
human subject (Angemrnller, 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 a11other in a line of post arguments. Posthuman ism 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
cl imate 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 impo1iant) but rather by presenting alternative ways of
thinking about materialism (Bennett, 201 Oa).
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 fonns 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
;hat it is not poststructuralist of postcolonial theory that is the problem so much as
:heir appropriation by the bourgeois academy and its humanist principles. As
_1cNamara (2015) points out, applied linguistics has not yet fully engaged with
poststructuralist thinking and the ground-breaking challenges it poses to how we
:mderstand language and humans.
A different concern suggests that the focus on an alternative relation to the other
mhabitants of the planet is really just animal rights dressed up as posthumanism.
r hould admit a ce1iain weariness when some authors in the field go on about their
pets (or when the acknowledgements include 'poor old Tootsie, who missed her
.:ili:ernoon 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
·onders such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Every year I volunteer my
services to the Saving Philippines Reefs (SPR) project, which needs experienced
-~u ba divers to help monitor the health of Philippine reefs and the matine ecosystems ')
ii.ey are paii of (White et al. , 2016; and see front cover picture). So while I do not
·eep pets or actively campaign for animal iights, which Braidotti (2013, p76) cat- •
~01izes as a post-anthropocentric neohumanist stance on the grounds that the focus is
according to animals the same rights that humans enjoy, rather than questioning
-.-bat it is to be human in the first place, I do consider very seriously the relation
x tween humans and the ecosystems we are ruining.
I am more interested in sharks than dogs (Appleby and Pennycook, 2017), not as
::eatures to construct alarmist discourses about (Australia is a context where shark
-·-courses abound) but in line with ecofeminist arguments that a renewed politics
- ds to engage differently with all that is not human. This is also about the
~gnificance of embodied practice in relation to sociolinguistics (Bucholtz and
~ ll, 2016): just as walking may be understood as "an important practice in the
xrfo rmative coproduction of knowledge and space" (Sundberg, 2014, p39),
swimming with sharks may be a significant practice in coming to know the world
12 introduction
different ly. The impo11ance of work such as Cook's (2015) on the discourses that
construct our relation with other animals is to understand that humans are in pa11
defined by "a connection with an imals" going back over millions of years (Shipman,
2011 , p 13). 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 th at the relations between human and non-human communication need to
be carefully considered?
The focus on cyborgs and human enhancement - sometimes tenn ed 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 th is book, though I will inevitably return at various
points to questions about conve1ging 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 bein g" (Fuller, 2011 , p 109). Enhanced reality or the hard questions
concerning bi onic ears for the Deaf community will be discussed in Chapter 4, for
example. Body modifi cations - prosthetic limbs, bi onic ears, camera eyes, or simply
RFID implants that encode personal deta ils - 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 impo11ant to understand the question of
cyb01gs (cybernetic 01gan isms with restored or enhanced abilities through the
integration of organic and biomechatronic body pai1s) in political tenns , going back
to Haraway's focus ( 1991 , p 149) on a new politics "faithfu l to feminism, socia li sm
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 transcendi ng 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, 20 l 4 ).
The focus on objects as actants , which has emerged pai1icularly in Actor Netwo rk
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 , p 111)
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 foc us on networks rather than even~(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 fabu lation''.
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
th ink in te1ms of mediants to avoid the potential social and pol_itical paralysis of
analyses where agency is eve1ywhere. It is wo11h 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
omplete equality among all things and people.
As we shall see in Chapter 8, some arguments even suggest that such thinking opens
up the long-te1m imperative to ' give voice ' to the marginalized and dispossessed by
looking at marginalization in broader te1ms: 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
rniceless objects when so many voiceless humans are still waiting to be heard? The
argument, however, is not that we shou ld listen to a cat, a flagpole, an alann clock or a
offee table before we pay attention to people who need to be heard. It is not that we
-bould not listen, as the late great Leonard Cohen put it, to the words of "a beggar
leaning on his wooden cmtch" who said '"You must not ask for so much"' or to the
words of"a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door" who c1ied '"Hey, why not ask
for more? '" ('B ird on a Wire'). It is to appreciate, however, that the crntch and the
wooden door are not just props to contextualize these speakers but are part of the action
roo. So the question becomes what new relations emerge in research and political
2ctivism when voices have to be understood as not only emerging from a human
::apacity 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
?Dint of view, as I suggested above, humanism generally only turns up in specific
:enns in relation to things such as humanist psychology (about the whole person)
m d humanist pedagogy (person-oriented activities in the classroom). Such ideas are
:eally only humanist in a rather 1970s Euro-Ame1ican flower-power way of thinking
:!bout 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
=enerally, humanism in applied linguistics needs to be seen as a broader philo-
sophical background to the ways we think about language, people and communi-
.:ation that focuses on humans as creative thinkers and independent actors.
Humanism p1ivileges human minds as the source of knowledge and ethics, as
iJlasters 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-
·ons that posthumanism starts to question, and it is these assw11ptions that sit at the
~eart of much of applied linguistics, when we talk of linguistic or communicative
.:ompetence, when we suggest that people choose what items to use from a pregiven
inguistic system and when we assert that humans use language in particular
.:ontexts rather than seeing these as profoundly integrated.
14 Introduction
The argum ents 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 renderthem more than just passive actors. In a mock discussion between two
examiners trying to ensure that they are abl e to assess an indi vi dual in complete
cognitive isolation (they have already ensured that there are no other people, books
or potential so urces of knowledge present) one rejects the suggestion that the
candidate mi ght be allowed pencil and paper:
"No no no no. The pencil is a tool that brings w ith it all kinds of thoughts. When
yo u write yo u change your thoughts and your mind and yo u learn all kinds of
things. We want to find out what she knows a ll by herself now. Writing will
make her change. So no paper. No penc il."
(Murphey, 2012, p75)
While this can be read as a reiteration of the old truism that writing is not so much the
repmtin g of though ts but the creation of ideas , it may also be read as suggestin g that
this pencil and thi s sheet of paper become actors in a network of relati ons, and
that the penc il does indeed have very real effects on our th inking. Indeed these
two examiners go on to reject not only their own presen ce but also furniture:
'"No tab le ... 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. A nd as we shall see further in Chapter 7, ta bles 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 extensi ve system ofrelations" (Fe1Tando,
2013, p32) .
A useful posthumani sm does not deny the existence of humans (thi s woul d
not be a very credible way forward) but rather arg ues aga in st particular ways in
wh ich humans have been understood . As Bucholtz and Ha ll (20 I 6 , p 186) note,
"the decentering of human signification as the site of agenc y does not make
posth umani sm any less a theory about humanity". The point is not to d isco unt
humans in the search for a more object-oriented ontology but to reconfigure where
human s sit, to unsettle the position of humans as the monarchs of bein g and to
see humans as entangled in beings and imp/ica-ted in other beings (Bogost, 2012).
Ne ither is th is about dismiss ing humanism and all that it has achi eved, no r an
argument for or against religion. To question the premises of humanism is not to
deny its role in taking human thought forw ard, nor to return to some sort of reli -
giosity. It is not an argum ent for species equi valence (humans and ani mals are all
equal) but rather suggests that tl1-e absolute divide betw een them ~ erhelpful
-
nor sustainable . -~-
Nor 1s it an argument that machines --='
and - --
techno logy are ou r
inevitable future and that humans are dissol ving in to cyborgs , in some dystopian
image of the world run by half humans/half robots. Rather this is a posthumanism
1
that..51 uestions human hubris , quest ions human minds as centra l to knowledge,
/
ethics, action and intention and questions the distinctions between humans an d
" other creatures and obj ects.
Introduction 15
__ - in which language has been bound up with human exceptionalism and seeks an
~ative way forward through a new understanding of language, power and
--ibility.
-:Ile case I make in this book is neither that all this is new (discussions of ecology,
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 develo pments across applied linguistics and the soc ial sci-
ences can be better understood by looking through a posthumanist lens that gives us
some exciting new directions for a renewed applied lingui stics. By taking up ideas
drawn from the recent thinking on the Comrnons or spatial activism , by rethinkin g
relations between humans, language, objects and space, and by considering more
carefully what distributed agency, language and cognition may mean , a critical
po sthumanist applied lingui stics offers important ways forward for a renewed
engagement with language beyond human hubris.
Note
The peace lingui stics poetry circulated by Fransisco Gomes de Matos is a good example
of a humanistic approach to language and global peace. Few wo uld di spute the importance
of connecting lingui stics to global peace, but this articulation of these relations recalls a
particular humani st orientation. My thanks to Francisco for granting permi ss ion to use his
poetry here.
Talk of posthumanism may make many a linguist or applied linguist uneasy. Not
only does it propose a challenge to the cherished ideals of humanism, but it also
potentially suggests a continuation of poststructuralist themes, which, at least for
ome, seemed to lead applied linguistics down theoretical pathways that went
against the grain of a practice-oriented discipline. We shall return later in this chapter
·o the discussions of the relations between posthumanism and various post the01ies,
but first it will be useful to try to get a handle on the humanism that posthumanism
-eeks to supersede. Most obviously humanism is a philosophical movement that
laced humans at its centre. Such anthropocentric ideals, however, had other
::mplications: humanism as a secular counterpoint to religion, humanism as a belief
m the commonality of the species, humanism as a concern with human values
- distinct from more scientific or technicist approaches to life. For Grayling
_0 13, pl41), it was Renaissance humanism that gave bi1ih to the humanities, the
--nidy and enjoyment of history, poetry, philosophy, drama, letters". In this line of
-;hinking, humanism and the humanities are tied to the arts and human creativity and
-<>rm a bulwark against the sciences .
Arguing for sociology to be understood as a "humanist discipline", Berger \
j
. 963, p 187) warned sociologists against being seduced by statistical methods
d broad generalizations and advised sociology "not to fixate itself in an
~li tude of humourless scientism that is blind and deaf to the buffoonery of the
:uman spectacle". More recently Taylor (2016) has called for a more humanist
proach to language studies that draws on a broad and poetic version of
guage tied to imagination, creation and culture rather than the narrow tech-
- ist fo1ms of analysis of the linguistic sciences. Here humanism is invoked to
pose the reductive information-processing view of language and humans that
-? held sway since transhumanist ideologies swept through cognitive and Jin-
= istic sciences, operating from an assumption that humans could be mapped
plinst computers. It is in pa11 on these grounds that some are understandably
~ uctant to question humanism, since it is seen as presenting a way of engaging
.th the better aspects of humanity (art, music, philosophy) in relation to the
an condition while also opposing the technicist ideologies of the social
:ences.
20 Th e strange humanist subject
Yet it is the social sciences that have kept humanism in place, since the notion ofa
universal humanity is what has made these disciplines possible. It was the social
(or human) sciences that emerged in the eighteenth century that gave particular
salience to the idea of the human. There is perhaps an irony here that it was precisely
because of the successes in the natural sciences - the discovery of the laws of
physics, biological categorizations, geological and astronomical breakthroughs -
that attention turned towards the human sciences to see ifuniversal laws ofhumanity
could be derived. So it was human engagement with things, animals, rocks, plants
and space, and the belief that humans might indeed be subject to the same kind of
laws of nature, that gave rise to the notion of uni ve rsal humanity: "It was surely
reasonable to suppose that man had an examinable nature, capable of being
observed, analysed, tested like other organisms and fonns of living matter" (Berlin,
2003 , p34). It is therefore the social sciences more than the humanities that may be
challenged by posthumanism (Fuller, 2011 ).
Humanism can be seen in man y ways as a child of the European Enlightenment,
though , as Foucault ( l 984b) warns us , it is important not to conflate the two .
" The Enlightenment was a set of complex historical processes that occuJTed within
European societies and included social transformation , particular political insti-
tutions , technological developments and projects of rationalization. Gray ( 1995,
p2 l 8) explains that the "legacy of the Enlightenment project - which is also the
legacy of Westernization - is a world ruled by calculation and wilfulness wh ich is
humanly unintelligible and destructi ve ly purposeless" . Humanism , by contrast, is
a set of shifting themes that have changed greatly in relation to what they are
opposed to: humanism as a critique of Christianity or of religion more generally;
forms of Christian humanism that emphasized human val ues over more ascetic or
theocentric forms of worship; humanism in opposition to science or positivism.
We can talk in terms of Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment humanism, secular
humanism , Marxist humanism , existentialist humanism , National Socialist
humanism and so on. What has been termed humanism has "always been obliged
to lean on certain conceptions of man botTowed from religion , science or politics"
(Foucault, 1984b, p44).
For applied linguists, placing humans (people, indi vi duals) at the centre of our
work alongside the central quality that is said to define us as humans - language -
may be hard to give up, even if we can't so easily agree whether our work is pait of a
more social-scientific approach to humans as objects of investigation or a human-
ities approach to humans as subjects. What is meant by humanism, however,
depends greatly on different conceptions of what it means to be human. Post-
humanism is less dependent on these different configurations of humanism than on
the assumptions about the centrality of Man that underpin them , but it will be
impoitant to pursue some of these conceptions of humanity fmther before tiying to
pin down posthumanism. In the following sections I shall look in greater depth at the
notion of the human subject, the relation between humanism , religion and science,
the notion ofhuman rights, the emergence of new fonns of materialism and the links
between posthumanis m, postmodern ism and poststructurali sm.
The strange humanist subject 21
is the ethical outlook that says each individual is responsible for choosing his or
her values and goals and working towards the latter in the light of the fonner,
and is equally responsible for living considerately towards others, with a special
view to establishing good relationships at the heart oflife, because all good lives
are premised on such.
(Grayling, 2013, p239)
.: is hard to argue with much of what is taken to be humanist, since it is about "living
-· oughtfully and intelligently, about rising to the demand to be informed, ale11 and
:esponsive, about being able to make a sound case for a choice of values" and so on
Grayling, 2013 , pl39). These are all surely estimable qualities for living a good life
ut we need to dig a bit deeper here to see the pai1icularity of such claims. There is a
:Nong emphasis on the individual: this humanism is already dependent on a par-
:icular kind of human, a view of the human from a perspective that rom_ote~ t~e
- - - - -- -- - - -
dividual over the collective. There is also a strong emphasis on choice and free
i ll: a central focus here is on the freedom of the individual to make ethical choices
--
:Iee ofreligious dogma and moral prescriptions. Such an emphasis on the freedom of
:he individuaiclearlyd epends-On- a-Spe~ultural and political understanding
..f what it means to be human, one that at times can start to look like the discourses of
:hoice and responsibility that have become so much part of neoliberal ideology,
"hich suggests that "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating indi-
i dual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
:haracterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade"
Harvey, 2005 , p2). Although there are many other possible relations between
"umanism and political economy, it is quite possible to trace this line of thinking
:5-om humanistic individualism to neoliberal consumerism.
~ --«-- -- -- - -
The nature of all other creatures is defined and restiicted within laws which We
have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your
own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the
lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world,
so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about
you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of
22 The strange humanist subject
heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the
free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the fonn you may
prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish fonns of life; you
will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders
whose life is divine.
From here, European humanism developed into its strongest version as a fo1m of
Enlightenment philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, celebrating
~- humans as creative thinkers and independent actors. Schatzki (2002) outlines sev-
( era! principal aspects of this movement: an epistemological humanism privileging
the mind of the human subject as the source of knowledge; a psychological
assumption that humans are masters of their own minds and intentions; a moral
,• u rgument that humans define their own ethical val ues rather than receive them from
-} God or some natural order of things; an agential focus that assumes the power and
uniqueness of human agency; and a definition of humanity as separate and distinct
L from all other fom1s of life. While this understanding of humans has had strong
emancipatory goals and effects - it puts humans at the centre of the world , in control
of themselves, their thoughts and desires, their ethical and rational conduct - it also
has many obvious shortcomings. In consh·ucting this vision of the emancipated
indi vi dual it gave no space to all that inhibits such freedoms: language, class, gender,
race, sexuality, discourse, ideology, subconscious desires , discrimination and much
' more. Although humanists may argue that the goal of humanism has been precisely
to overcome such constraints, the idealism that underpins this humanist subject
provides few tools for such emancipatory projects.
The humanist beliefs in self-detem1ination and transparency - the beliefs that
humans control their destiny and their minds, the beliefs that bourgeois self-reliance,
moral probity and rational thought would provide goods for all - were progressively
undennined by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Foucault and many others: it turned out that
humans are in fact very closely related to monkeys and other animals, the products
rather than the instigators of market forces , not nearly as much in control of our-
selves as we'd hoped, a product in any case of a particular episteme, and subject to
rather delusional ideas about uni versal though t, knowledge and humanity. Although
writers such as Marx unde1mined aspects of humanist belief(Marxism destab ilizes
the rational knowing subject of history and economics), and has been seen by
some (Althusser in particular) as can-ying fo1ward an anti-humanist agenda ,~ 1~
arguably still maintained aspects of humanism, notably both individualism and
uni versali sm. M-;clntyre (2007 , p261 ) d~m~;-attention to the "radical individualism"
that underpins the Marxist proposition of a community of free individuals who have
agreed to common ownership of the means of production, a sort of soc ialized
Robinson Crusoe, as Marx put it.
Marxism, as Barrett (1991 , p6 I) points out, ·'represented itself as a universal
discourse of emancipation" but has been shown "to speak with a ve1-y particular
historical voice": "C lass ical Marxism may have enabled bourgeois men to anal yse
society from the point of view of the industrial proletariat but it has subsequently
been shown to have occupied a position that was both masculinist in content and
The strange humanist subject 23
:=urocentric in context". Likewise, humanism has always been made in its propo-
:::rents' image (white, male, university-educated, upper-middle class). As Bourke
_011 , p2) notes, "two of the most distinguished traditions of modern times -
:heology and humanism - were founded on espousing hierarchies of humanity" .
illis tradition not only devised a great hierarchy of beings, from the Creator to
:be smallest being, but also placed certain of these - "human-sisters, non-white
:=mopeans and children" among others - in a category lower than white men and
sometimes lower than other animals. Bourke discusses a letter written in 1872 by an
-Earnest Englishwoman" complaining (quite rightly) that animals at the time had
ore rights than women. In fact, Bourke notes (2011 , p2), "the status of women was
::mch worse than that of the rest of the animal kingdom". It would be good, the
·oman argued, if women could "become animal" in order to gain wider iights.
3.istorically, as Phillips (2015 , p 10) observes, "the human has been conceptualised
culturally loaded, gender-coded, and strongly no1mative terms that have then
.::crved as a basis for denying significant groups of humans the name" .
Despite its claims, humanism was never reall,Y- founck.d...Qtl.!_he rinci le of a ,
-- ared humanity: "[t]he humanist insist~e on an autonomous, wilful, human
5lli>ject capable of acting independently in the world had been forged in the image of
=:e male, white, well-off, educated human" (Bourke, 2011, p3). The universality of
.::umanism has never been universal: it has been blind to difference, culture and
- versity. The notion of the hionan has ---
- - Henrich et al. (2010, p63) note, "leading scientific journals and university
-~tb ooks routinely publish research findings claiming to generalize to 'humans' or
:te0ple ' based on research done entirely with WEIRD [Western, Educated, Indus-
-..alized, Rich, and Democratic] undergraduates", or what, as we saw in Chapter 1, we
"ght call SWEEMEs (straight, white, educated European male elites).
Grayling 's (2013) long list of great humanists, starting with Confucius and pas-
g through the Greeks and Romans (Cicero, Epicurus) to the later European
:::nkers (Montaigne, Voltaire, Darwin) and contemporary atheists (Dennett,
-::: hens, Dawkins), gives only a passing nod to non-European- Ame1ican thinkers
'""onfucius, Mencius and Ibn Rushd) and includes only one woman (Barbara
·ootton). Not only is the list a rather confused account of great thinkers in the
anist tradition (Plutarch, Diderot, Marx, Schopenhauer, Mill and so on) and
-religious th inkers (Confucius is in the list largely to make the point that Con-
·anism is not a religion, while the presence of more contemporary campaigners
·h as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins notes their contribution to contemporary
--eist debates), but it is also clear that humanists have been almost exclusively male
mainly white. Thus Leslie Stephen, the author of An Agnostics Apology (1903)
24 The strange humanist subject
is in the list but not his daughters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Wolf - or Mary
Wollstonecraft, or Frantz Fanon, or ... but the list of exclusions is too massive to
contemplate.
One might object that this is a result of the pai1icular history that put white men a
the forefront of European thought (thus humanism is perforce a position developed
by white men) , but one would surely need to counterthat this raises serious questio n
for any account of who counts as human, and at the very least it has had an effect on
how that history of the human has been developed. Surely we have to ask if these
were all such great humanists, how did they have such a nanow view of humanity?
Indeed in the same way that religions have held highly masculinist ideologie-
(male Gods, male priests, male hierarchies), so humanism has a similar history:
"[h ]urnanism installed only some humans at the centre of the universe" (Bourke.
2011, p3). The argument that humanity has never been a very inclusive catego ~
may invoke several different responses. Leaving aside those who would just rejec-
the proposition on the basis th at humanity has always meant everyone equall~
(which is demonstrably not the case), the more obvious response is one that urge-
greater incl us ion: if it has indeed been the case that some have not been seen as fu ll ~
human (a position that ce11ainly can't be denied historically, but surely still has force
today), then the solution is to make humanity ever more inclusi ve until eve1yone has
been safely allowed in.
This is seductive as a forn1 of social inclusion agenda but problematic, since i•
retains a sense of humanity as tl}_e central unassailable catego1y. One might also
; j argue that humanism as a truly universal ideal may still be uphel ddes pite its betrayal
by the exclusionaiy European account of the human (too man y were discounted or
mistrusted on the basis of class , gender, race, ethnicity, politics, culture and so on).
its collusion with patriarchy, racism, misogyn y and homophobia, its Eurocentrism
(identification of progress and nonns with European life and Christianity), its
indivi dualism that discounted community and other fo1ms of belonging and its
exclusive identification ofreason and science as drivers of progress . From this poi n-
of view~ even [f Eu1:opeans betrayed the ideals of humanism , even if they colluded
with fonns of discrimination against the majority of humans, even if they were the
great exporters of vio lence, 1 weapomy and a readiness to use these against al I others
(whether armed or not) (Frankopan, 2015) at the same time as they extolled their
supposed virtues - a strong Christian morality, the development ofreason and ethic .
an entrepreneurial spirit and humanist ideal s - we can still hold on to a humanism
that has not been besmirched by European hypocrisy.
Yet such idealism seems hard to maintain in the face of all that has been done ir.
the name of humanism. Rather than the betrayal of an ideal ,2 these humani :
calumnies are better understood as showing the impossibility of a uni versa l idea:
w ithout a locus of enunciation (Mignolo, 2009). It is not in the end possible as a
human to articulate a uni versal humanism from a position that transcends the
historical , cultural and social point of its articulation. This is why many critica,
posthumani sts and ecofeminists have chosen to pursue an alternative politics - no·
so much a battle to be al lowed in to the great hall ofhurnanity but rather to questi or.
its very presumptions. While it is probably true that acknow ledging that hurnani ~
The strange humanist subject 25
is a diverse category- Queer, Black, using sign languages , overeating, abusing its
children, taking drugs, enjoying a joke, taking dogs for a walk, spending a lot of
time on Facebook, going fishing, picking reusable items from garbage dumps -
may helpfully expand what it means to be human beyond the rational decision-
making bourgeois individual, a more productive route may be to ask how we might
go about understanding our place on the planet differently.
He later talks of his "secular humanism - that is, my beliefin the importance of moral
rnlues uncoupled from any belief in a supreme being or a sacred text" (p 123 ). So the
question for posthumanism is whether it retains a scepticism towards religion or, by
questioning the anthropocenttism that was crucial in the decentring of God, it allows
religion back into the fold. Put another way, if secular is the most commonly used
enn in conjunction with humanism (secular humanism), can it still tag along with
posthumanism (secular posthumanism) or does this also become postsecular?
To come to g1ips with these concerns we again need to see that humanism itself
developed in opposition to a range of different ways of thinking (not just religion),
infused many contemporary modes of thought and arguably became an equally
dogmatic way of thinking. Religions such as Christianity (though not, for example,
Buddhism) can be seen as similarly anthropocentric (humans were always given
dominion over eve1ything else, even if God retained dominion over humans), while
:mmanism also needs to be understood as venerating Man in a way that echoes the
worship of God it supposedly superseded, as Nietzsche (188711997) observed.
Hardt and Negri (2000, p9 l) point out that there is a "strict continuity between the
:-eligious thought that accords a power above nature to God and the modern 'secular'
:hought that accords that same power above nature to Man". Secular humanism is a
:ranscendent philosophy in the same manner as religious thought and fosters related
:orms of hierarchy.
The relations between science, religion and humanism also become complex
ere. Grayling 's (2013 , p 145) list of great humanists sta1ts with Confucius and ends
i th Dawkins, though Dawkins has much less to say about humanism than he does
.!bout science, infe1Ting "the non-existence ofa supernatural realm simply because it
26 The strange humanist subject
cannot be accessed through sc ience" (Fuller, 2011 , p78). In this light it is interesting
to consider Dawkins ' militant atheism (2006) in relation to his scientific work.
Dawkins' scientific reputation rests in part on his discussion of the selfish gene
( 1989), which presents a gene-centred account of evolution - or, put another way, a
view in which humans are rather unimportant mechanisms for the reproduction of
genes . For Dawkins ( 1989, p2) "we, and all other animals, are machines created by
our genes" . All life, he argues, "evolves by the differential survival of replicating
entities", which for us is the DNA molecule (p 192): "The fundamental unit, the
prime mover of all life, is the replicator" (p264). While he also introduced the new
replicator we have to contend with , the nzeme - the unit of cultural transmission that
is passed on by humans (just as genes reproduce themselves by leaping from body to
body, so memes move from mind to mind through imitation)- the idea of a selfish
gene replicating itself is arguably a posthumanist idea ushered in by neo-Darwinist
thought. Fuller (in Barron, 2003, p82) indeed suggests that Dawkins' selfish gene
shares a great deal with Latour's Actor Network Theory, and that for Dawkins
"breaking down the human-non-human distinction is important for understanding
what evolution is about, namely, genes propagating themselves".
Dawkins' most important work has arguably been the notion of the extended
phenotype ( 1982), which suggests that phenotypes affect not only the organism
itself but the wider environment. Extended phenotypes (beavers ' dams, birds ' nests,
spiders ' webs) are those extensions of animal behaviour that help its genes to
reproduce, so a beaver dam is no less a phenotype than its teeth and tail and has
evolved through Da1winian selection (Dawkins, 1989, p248). As Steffensen (2012)
points out, the notion of extended phenotypes can be fruitfully brought to bear on
ideas of distributed language (Chapter 3). Waters (2012 , p5 l l) develops the argu-
ment in greater depth, suggesting that "[t]hrough language , human phenotypes and
affordances are more than extended; they are distributed". Both the selfish gene
and the extended phenotype, it might be argued, are ideas that lend themselves to
posthumanist far more than humanist thinking, downplaying and decentring the
roles of humans and viewing organisms as pai1 of a greater whole. Dawki ns may be,
in Grayling's (2013) humanist hagiography, the latest in a long line of thinkers that
construct significant arguments against religion , but Dawkins ' main counterpoint to
religion is his own scientific rationalism , which shows the absurdi ty of creationism
or the vapid both sides of the argument position for including creationist thought in
the cwTiculum (akin to the both sides ofclimate change argument). But if Dawkin
is a humanist thinker, this is also a humanism that fails to engage with wh at religious
thought can mean for others (Fuller, 2011 ). As played out in his campaign against
religious belief, his atheism reflects hi s own inability to understand difference.
to appreciate what religious thought entails.
To be sure, "one of the side-effects of the decline of Humanism is the rise of the
post-secular condition" (Braidotti , 2013 , p3 l ), making various fom1s of spirituality
more possible from a posthumanist perspecti ve, ranging from traditional engage-
ments with religious thought to pantheistic fo1ms ofnature w orship. Here it is useful
to note some of the lineages of pantheism, or )mmanen ~ (a view based not so much
on an anthropomorphic god - made in Man 's image - but rather a god immanent or
The strange humanist subject 27
.istributed throughout the world), that are seen as precursors to posthumanism in
~e ideas of Henri Bergson (1859-1941 ) (1907/2001 , 2002) and Baruch Spinoza
: 632-77) (1677/2003). Posthumanism is neither a refutation of humanism as an
::sc~_e from the confine~freligious dogma -nor a return in any way to r_eligLous_
.:: lusions. We do not need to be humanist to be sceptical about religion. To take up a
: thumanist position is to seek alternatives to rel igious _doctrine, humanist hubris -< ·~
d' sC!entific reductionism. It is to i1:. phi1o~£h_J'. of imn'!!_lnence (as OIJRQ§.~£1- to I
=ansce!1dence) that we need to turn in order to rethink forms of dominance. Anti-
manism, understood as a refusal of transcendence, is not therefore a negation of
~-o]utionary potential but "the condition of possibility of thinking this immanent
_ wer, an anarchic basis of philosophy: 'Ni Dieu, ni maitre, ni l' homme '" (Hardt
_d Negri, 2000, p92).
- e idea that all humans, irrespective of background, share a set of basic rights has
xen a powerful and compelling argument that has surely done a great deal of good in
~world. And yet its very abstraction, the notion that these iights obtain irrespective
-- ulture or local legal frameworks - the idea of a universal humanity- is also open
critique from various sides . The problem for this abstract and universalist notion
· rights is that it has to confront not only the very obvious constraints of circum-
ce, culture and law (which are potentially sunnountable) but also the problem
,. the notion ofhumanity on which it is based has never been as inclusive as hoped.
The fact that human rights are a site of struggle by no means undermines
· status. Indeed it is in such struggles that we can see how different versions
.:humanity are at stake. The crudest of such battles - particularly where crimes
~ st humanity are concerned (these overlap with but are not the same as infrin-
ents of human rights)-overtly deny the humanity of some people. In response to
critique of his policy to kill drug users and pushers, President Duterte of the
'ppines simply discounts such people as humans: "That's why I said, ' [W]hat
e against humanity?' In the first place, I'd like to be frank with you, are they (drug
-iOrS) humans? What is your definition of a human being? Tell me" (Ramos, 2016).
re recently, in response to an Amnesty International report of these abuses, the
·ce Minister, Vitaliano Aguirre, reiterated these arguments: "The criminals,
drug lords, drug pushers, they are not humanity. They are not humanity. In other
m:ls, how can that be [a crime against humanity] when your war is only against
- drug lords, drug addicts, drug pushers?" (Parry, 2017). Such arguments
y sh·engthen the general argument in favour of human rights: whether you are a
28 The strange humanist subject
drug user or pusher, you have the same rights to legal process, rights that are here
being violated.
In other strugg les over human rights , however, we can see more clearly how
different projections of what it means to be human are debated. Conservative and
neoliberal accounts of human rights stress individuality and a libe11arian view of the
individual: free to speak, free from government, free to operate in an unfettered
market. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), for examp le, whose webpag
catTies a prominent image of Martin Luther King with the words "Fighting for mora,
justice in an intolerant world", focuses on freedom of religious expression and i:
opposed to abortion and same-sex matTiage. 5 The Australian government appointed
Tim Wilson 6 in 2014 as Australian Human Rights Commissioner, one of the goaL
being to change section I SC of the Racial Discrimination Act (on the grounds thar
it runs against the right to freedom of speech). Wilson argued that he would seek.
to defend our traditional human rights from a principled position because they
are vital to the preservation of a free society. The focus in defending human
rights in recent years has been on free speech. This is appropriate as free speech
is arguably our most fundamental right. Without free speech the capacity to
defend all other human rights is diluted.
(Wilson, 20 13)
But for Indigenous and Muslim Australians subject to increas ing levels of racial
vilification, this insistence on freedom of speech as more fundamental than the right
not to be racia lly abused looked vety different.
Meanwhile, in early 2016 Phillip Ruddock was appointed Australian Special
Envoy on Human Rights to the UN. His goal v..as to focus on advancing what were
seen as Australia's human rights priorities, such as good governance and freedom of
expression, while actively promoting Australia 's candidacy for membership of the
Human Rights Council for the 2018-20 tenn. Phillip Ruddock , as Min ister for
Immigration and Multicultural Affairs from I 996 to 2003 (subsequently Attome
General 7 from 2003 to 2007), designed and implemented the Pacific Solution:
the incarceration of asylum seekers (including women and children) in offshore
detention centres. Ruddock has long been a member of Amnesty International - the
organization asked him not to wear their badge, which can often be seen on hi s
lapel - yet clearly these detention camps breach a number of human rights (the right
to seek asylum, the right against arbitra1y detention , the right to legal access, the right
of the child). For some, including himself and a conservative govenunent, Ruddock is
a human rights champion; for others (incl uding much of the UN). he is not.
The fact that there are different views on what constitutes human rights, or wh ich
rights should take precedence over others, does not constitute an argument against
such rights. Like many aspects of moral philosophy or criminal or constitutional law.
the question is always one of interpretation. The idea of human rights, however.
depends on a notion of universa l humanity that is itself questionable, whi le th e
implementation of human rights depends largely on their application through local
legal frameworks. The struggle over human rights is not just a dispute over where
The strange humanist subject 29
:he lines should be drawn, for example, between freedom of speech and safeguards
against racial vilification, but more broadly a struggle over what it means to be
human: is one 's vision based on an individualistic account of the free individual or a
more social account of social responsibility and inequality? Does one 's account of
humanity include unborn children on the one hand or gay, lesbian and transgendered
people on the other? Does it incorporate an understanding of inequality that renders
freedom of speech relative to fonns of discrimination? And violations of human
rights are not necessarily dependent on whether countries are signatories to inter-
national agreements: many asylum seekers to Australia, a signatory to the human
right to seek asylum, are incarcerated in offshore camps with the threat of indefinite
incarceration, resettlement in the region or refoulement.
One might still argue that this is an argument in fa vour of human rights and that it
;- the violation of such rights that is the problem. One can also argue that the fact that
:he recognition of certain fonns of crime against humanity have been slow and
selective - it is only relatively recently (1993) that systematic rape of women as a
w ol of war has been recognized as a crime against humanity (Sexual Violence and
.-\nned Conflict, 1998) - is nonetheless the result of the constant pressure for uni-
·ersality to mean everyone. The fact that human rights are so widely violated or
disputed by no means renders them invalid; indeed it points to the need for a better-
implemented framework of human rights. There are nonetheless good reasons why
we should be cautious about proclaiming humans rights the great emancipatory
tx>litics oflate modernity. For all the talk of universality, rights "remain essentially
individualistic and litigious" (Bourke, 2011 , p 159). Abstract notions of equality
only make sense when they are realized in concrete social and political contexts.
"\\'e should indeed strive to develop better means of protecting children, preventing
:orture, demanding access to education, food and clean water, but we should not do
so under the banner of universal humanity. The notion of the human and of human
::!ature presupposed by human rights discourse generalizes specifically Western
:::.istorical experience at the expense of other ways of understanding humanity. The
:endency to view humanity along abstract, indi vidual oruniversal lines rather than in
:';.istorical, communal, cultural or material terms renders this notion of the human at
odds with other cultural traditions (Holleman, 1987; Peterson, 1990).
The notion of human universality on which human rights are based has all too
"ften rested on the same notions of human exclusivism that constrain humanism
ore generally. It is based on a projection of a particular way of thinking about
.:umans, and indeed, as Douzinas argues, has played an impo11ant role in the
velopment of thinking about humans more generally: "Human rights construct
.-:umans" (Douzinas, 2000, p3 7 1). From a moral philosophical point of view,
_ laclntyre (2007, p70) suggests that natural or human rights are "fictions" devel-
ed in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project to reclaim morality from a
:ecular vantage point. Like utilitaiianism and moral philosophy, rights discourse is
.,e of the "unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the
:Tedicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with
_ -ecular, rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him" (Macintyre,
:. 07, p68). The problems at the heai1 of the humanist project - the insistence on a
30 Th e strange humanist subject
radical indi vidual ism that depends on the rational, auto nom ous, self-disc ipl in in.=
subject of the Enlightenment dream (that starts to look like a very particular kind o--
individual) - emerges agai n here in combination with the claims to ce11ainty anc
uni versali ty, leading Mac intyre (2007 , p69) to argue that "there are no such rights..
and belief in them is one with beli ef in witches and unicorns".
It is not just that human rights are a contested domain, but rather that they are a
site of struggle because the notion of what constitutes a human is also a site o:
struggle. To suppose a transce ndent panhuman agreement on what it means to be
human is arg uably to deny what it means to be human , to extend a particul ar vision
of the human to all humans. Th e notion of human rights is subjec t to many of the
same questions that a notion of universal humanity has to face. C urrent "Engli h
language traditions of political theory emphasize individual liberty and individual
rights. Human bein gs are thought of as self-s ubsistent atoms who enter into
relationships w ith other human beings" (Hacking 1999, p 15) . Humanity, Douzin as
(2000, p3 72) argues , is a "graded and ranked status with many shades and ti ers
between the 's uperhuman ' Western , white , heterosexual mal e at the one end and the
non -human, the concentration camp inmates or the fleeing refugee, at the other...
From the point of view of critical legal theory, therefore , the institutional practice
of human rights.
::\ew materialisms
One of the key debates in human rights discourse is over the distinction between
7-eedom from (torture, imprisonment, slavery) and f reedom to (speech, education,
rood, water). In tenns oflanguage iights, we can distinguish between freedom from
pressive language regimes (where languages are proscribed, in classrooms that
n sist on the use of only English, for example) and the freedom to use and be
~ucated in a language of choice. But rather than drawing on those philosophical
:raditions in which concepts of autonomy and freedom - central concerns for
derstanding agency - have been conceptualized in relation to the depri vatory
;iower of the dominant or oppressive Other (a dialectical framework that derives
Zorn Hegel via Marx), others have sought an alternative politics based around
3fferent understandings of the subject and materiality. Elizabeth Grosz (2010) turns
- a conceptual framing that allows for a more positive understanding offreedom to ,
- freedom as the capacity for action. Rather than thinking in tenns of debates in
?Olitical philosophy between liberalism, historical materialism and postmodernism
\-er agency as freedom in tenns of "reason, rights and recognition" (2010, pl40),
Grosz seeks an understanding of life and the capacity to act.
Looking away from the constraints and counter-struggles of much contemporary
==.ought on feminism and agency, she argues, is not a depoliticization of the subject
ut an attempt to find other ways of thinking about the subject and politics. The
xoblem, she suggests, "is not how to give women more adequate recognition (who
..:. it that women require recognition from?), more rights, or more ofa voice buthoW
enable more action, more making and doing, more difference" (Grosz, 2010,
::· -4). The challenge is not so much to enable women to gain a more equal place
:thin existing frameworks but rather to "enable women to partake in the creation of
_;:Uture unlike the present" (p 154). One way forward here is to take up anew fonn of
_ litics based around an alternative understanding of our relation to the world,
derstanding matter in a less hierarchical and more dynamic manner, presenting
-=uman and nonhuman actants on a less vertical plane" (Bennett, 201 Oa, pix). What
uld happen to our politics, asks Bennett (201 Ob, p4 7), if we took more seriously
-:::e idea that technological and natural materialities" (she uses the example of a
- wer blackout) were "themselves actors alongside and within us - were vitalities,
: ectories, and powers irreducible to the meanings, intentions, or symbolic values
ans invest in them"?
This is to engage with the new materialism, with new ways of thinking about what
j ers . Key here is Barad's (2003 , 2007) development of posthumanist pe1for-
livity. Taking issue with claims that performativity as developed in the work of
~_J er (1993 , 1997; and Pennycook, 2004a, 2007a) is an overextension ofpost-
acturalist discursive power, Barad (2007 , p 133) insists that it "is not an invitation
:urn everything (including mate1ial bodies) into words; on the contrary, perfor-
\ rity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to
- :ermine what is real". We need to understand the relation between discursive
rices and materialization. Discourse, Barad insists, should not be reduced to a
·on oflanguage (this would be to fall into the representational trap) and material
32 The strange humanist s u~ject
should not be seen as some inanimate world of objects out there waiting to be
described . Rather, following Butler's (1993) critique of both soc ial constructioni
(gender is a discursive production) and pre-discursive (sex is a pregiven materiality)
accounts of the body, she argues that we need to understand the dynamic process of
materialization though discursive practices. As Bucholtz and Hall (2016, p 18 1)
explai n, this understanding of the "very real material consequences of discursive
regimes" has impl icatio ns for many areas of sociolinguistics - not just language.
gender and sexuality but also other categories where an embodied understanding of
language is impo11ant, such as race, health and disability.
For Barad, like Thrift (2007), one of the problems we need to overcome is the
representational assumption that there are things out there and words that represen
them. Language, suggests Barad,
has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn , the semiotic turn, the
interpretative turn, the cultura l turn: it seems that at every turn lately every
"thing" - even materiality - is turned into a matter of language or some other
fonn of cultural representation.
(Barad, 2007 , p 132
From an appl ied linguistic point of view, this might seem an unlikely line ofthough1
to pursue: isn't part of the struggle faced by linguists to make the central role of
language in social life clearer to all those who see it as a transparent medium or who
believe that anyone has a right to pronounce on language and what it is and what i
shou ld be? The argument I shall be developing in the following chapters, however, i
not to cut language out of the picture but to complexify language and its relation to
the world. As Bucholtz and Hal I (2016, p 187) suggest, although it was tempting to
celebrate the lingui stic or discursive turn in critical theory as making a case for the
impo11ance of socio- or applied linguistics, a challenge to the dichotomy between
discourse and materiality may equally allow for a broader role for social semiotic
and sociocultural linguistics in an understanding of the relations among language.
bodies and the world.
Materiality, Hayles (2012, p9 l) argues, unlike ph ysical ity, is "an emergen:
prope11y. It cannot be specified in advance, as though it existed ontologically as a
discrete entity" . Barad (2003 , p808) proposes "a specifically posthumanist notion
of performativity" that " incorporates imponant material and discursive, social
and sc ientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors". The post-
humanist pai1 of this account questions the assumed distinctions between the human
and non-human, while the perfom1ative aspect "shifts the focus from questions o -
CO!Tespondence between descriptions and reality (e.g. do they mitTor nature or
culture?) to matters of practices, doings and actions" (Barad, 2007 , p 135) . The sh ift
that these accounts allow is a move from "radical constrnctivism" to " posthumar.
intra-relationality" (Lather, 2015 , p99). By reclaiming materiali ty and realism from
the negative space that construction ism had for them , by focusing on assemblages
and relationality, we can come to understand how the social and the real, objects
and people are inte11wined. What is new here, suggests Lather (2015 , p 100), i:
The strange humanist subject 33
the ontological insistence on the weight of the mate1ial and a relational ontology
:hat transverses binaries".
One of the most significant parts of this move has been the relocation of agency,
-or even though poststructuralism sought to remake the subject as discursive
roduct, as fragmented and in struggle (No1ton, 2000), this subject was always still
5USCeptible to the gravitational pull of humanism, to the move that ensures the
subject is still some disembodied agent running things from inside the human
:..ead. The new materialist subject, Braidotti argues (2013 , p5 l ), is "materialist and
i talist, embodied and embedded, finnly located somewhere, according to the
:eminist 'politics of location'". For Barad (2007, p226) "agential realism 's recon-
~p tualization of mate1iality diverges from traditional Marxist conceptions of
ateriality" and "advances a new materialist understanding of naturalcultural prac-
..; es that cuts across these well-worn divides". This rethinking of the subject and
;:;iateriality is a political project, and such vital materialism, Bennett (201 Ob, p4 7)
~es, can "run parallel to a historical materialism focused more exclusively upon
xonomic structures of human power". We shall return to some of these concerns in
....i.scussions of assemblages in the following chapters and of speculative realism
Chapter 7).
Notes
Although Europe·s fa irly long period of relative non-Yiolence might accord with Pin ker's
(2 011) argu ments in fa vour of the non-violent trends in human nature, the histoty of
European vio lence in the world needs to be recognized .
2 Another line of thought sees the betrayal of human ism in the focus on class , race and gender
that ignores the centra li ty of the individual (Good, 200 I). from this po int of view. human-
ism can be recouped by a return to European individualism and high culture.
3 Huma11i nihil alien um (from Terence) is also the motto of the Austra lian Academy of th e
Human ities, to which l was recently elected, so I too, in some ways, am bound by this
\. .r L
motto . A posthumanities academy was not available.
The strange humanist subject 39
4 I am indebted to Dominique Estival for making this clear to me (while not agree ing with
some of my arguments here). As she explained (critiq uin g an earlier version of this
chapter), as a slave in La Martinique (freed in 1852), her great-great-grandmother (Paul ine
Chalono) always had human 1ights. These may have been deeply violated by slavery but it
was never the case that she did not have such rights or that these rights were not granted:
rights are inalienable.
5 Profoundly conservative former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott found it a good
place to air his views on maniage in Janua1y 20 16.
6 Wilson was appointed by the Attorney General, Senator George Brandis, who argued in the
senate that " [p ]eople do have a right to be bigots" (Griffiths, 2014). Wilson res igned in early
2016 to seek election to the Australian parliament.
Ruddock introduced the MaiTiage Legislation Amendment Bill in 2004, which defined
maniage as between a man and a woman, thus pre-empting possible court ru lings in favour
of same-sex maniage or civil union .
Linguists may no longer use the structuralist label, havi ng invented almost as many schools
of thought as there are supposedly languages, but this is surely what they still are as they
construct systems within which they can look for answers (McNamara, 2015) .
9 It's a pity that Widdowson 's (2015, p l 27) trenchant critique of O'Regan 's (20 14) "epis-
temo logical intolerance" and absence of"responsible critical thinking" in his discussion of
English as a lingua franca misses th e point that O'Regan's understanding of politics and
poststru cturalist thought represents a fa r more sophisticated understanding than many other
recen t acco unts.
3 Distributed language, spatial
repertoires and semiotic
assemblages
1\PJtZ2. 2.0at.
ft;Dc.1iac. ~ 5f»r/fbpJ(
~~~~"""'
5atbb ~f= ~~~\'@. ·»rr:..~
SU~ ~tUnd\ve, ~·C._,4t~1~ *°-ir<i-'4-~
Once unde1water, there are many different factors involved. One obvious nav-
.gational tool is a compass: at its simplest, taking bearings in one direction and
:-eYersing in the other (though a dive is usually more complex). The timing of the
~ - ,-e and monitoring of air pressure is another navigational element (20 minutes in
ne direction, oruntil the tank pressure is at 100 bar, and then return). A dive console
::.-pically provides these important pieces of information: length of dive (watch or
.::\·e computer), air pressure (pressure guage) and direction (compass). Distance
::iay also be calculated using a knowledge of how far one travels with each kick of
e's fins. These calculations of distance and time are compounded by cun-ent,
--b.ich may be observable (fish typically face into the cunent, while weed, soft coral
d other items can be seen to move with the cun-ent) or also felt in a more bodily
:=lall1er (finning is harder in one direction than another). One of the most obvious
,,,·igational aids is the unde1water topography: particular features in the underwater
-Yironment, such as rock and coral formations , patches of weed or bommies (an
-.. tralian diver and surfer term from the Indigenous bombora for an area where
_yes are breaking over a shallow rock or coral outcrop). Fish are less reliable as
~,igational aids, since, like divers, they are interested in checking out their
ounds.
~avigating according to physical features is itself made more complex by the
_·ability of the environment (sand, rocks and seaweed can be harder to differen-
than a section of a coral wall) and visibility (in clear water with 20 meters'
42 Distributed language
visi biity, it oug ht to be hard to go wrong; in murky, stirred-up water, w ith less than
5 meters' visibility, disorientation is easy). Also important is the fact that we alway
dive at least in pairs (w ith a buddy), and th us although communication is fairl y
limited undetwater (nonverbal), we navigate together. We also use sound, which
carries fu11her undetwater and is better fo r attracting attention (we often catTy
devices that produce sound under water, or use a hard object to bang on the air tank ).
Diving at night (on ly for the experienced), we use li ghts instead. Navigation while
diving - and a ll so11s of problems may ensue if you don't make it back to where you
started - thus involves a range of practices that include relocalizing a diagram
or description into a physica l environment, using a series of instrum ents and
meas urements (time, air pressure, depth, direction) , observing and remembering
topographical features (rocks, coral outcrops, sand patches), using one 's knowledge
of reef structure (seaward and landward sides of a reef crest, for example, w ill
generally have different features) , orienting in a bodily fash ion (feeling the cutTent,
sensing water temperature (thermoclynes), gauging speed through the water) and
staying in touch with and communicating w ith other divers (watching, sending
signa ls, attracting attention, monitoring problems).
Nav igation comes up at various points in this book (we wi ll consider the nav-
igational feats ofbirds and other animals in Chapter 5), since it provides a significant
example of how humans and other anim als operate in relation to their environment.
Some of the most comp lex and fascinating navigation is that of Micronesian sail ors
who have navigated across w ide expanses of the Pacific w ithout charts. Once out of
sight ofland, they imagine that their canoe is stationary in relation to the stars wh ile
the is lands around them move. By superimposing the imagined movement of an
island in relation to the star bearings, nav igators create a model of the voyage that
they can then manipulate from their own standpoint on the deck of the boat or canoe.
The organ ization of different Western and Micronesian model s ofnavigation "re lies
on both th e organization of conceptual content and on the structural oppo11unities
presented by the material world" (H utchin s, 2005 , p 1569). Hutchins ' anal ysis he lps
us see that a dichotomy between "conceptual models" and " material resources for
thinking" is unhelpful: some elements of our conceptual model (the position of stars,
for examp le) may be material resources that exist independently.
Our cognition, and pm1icularly when we are engaged in acti vities such as nav-
igation, includes these material anchors. W hen we ' re diving, of course, the
materiality of the ship's anchor, nestled between rocks 20 meters down fro m the
safety of the boat, is often a we lcome recognition that we have safely completed our
return journ ey. But the point here is abo ut how these material ancho rs become pa11 of
our cogn ition. As Hutchins (2005) points out, it would be a mistake to assume that a
compass need le, for example, is the cruci al playe r; rather it is the compass rose
(the markings indicating directions) that plays the more impo11ant role . As navi -
gators we use this compass rose as part of our thinking: one basic navigational
technique wh ile sailing is to work out the bearings of parts of the sh ip as seen from
the vantage of the person at the helm (next to the binnacle, holding the compass). We
choose vari ous items - stanchions or a w inch or shroud - and mark their compass
bearings so that we know that, say, a boat passing behind the port shroud is at
Distributed language 43
roughly 320 degrees relative to the ship's heading. Such material anchors are in a
sense a secondary form of the compass rose. This in tum is a very different kind of
mind extension than, say, the GPS and charting software on the computer.
While researchers in the fields of extended and distributed cognition rarely, if
ever, connect their work to posthumanist thought, the argument I wish to make here
is that to understand language and cognition as distributed in our sunounds helps us
decentralize the human brain in processes of thought. The "heavy interaction of
internal and external structure", Hutchins (1995 , p288) argues, "suggests that the
boundary between inside and outside, or between individual and context, should be
oftened". The apparent necessity of drawing such a boundary between inside and
outside, he goes on, "is in pai1 a side effect of the attempt to to deal with the indi-
\·idual as an isolated unit of cognitive analysis without first locating the individual in
a culturally constructed world" (Hutchins, 1995, p288). Thinking from this point of
Yiew is spatial: the humanist conception of thought being locked away in a mind
(in there) that is separate from a world (out there), as Latour (1999) puts it, is
challenged by framing cognition - and language - as distributed.
This relates to arguments in the new materialism, or in Actor Network Theory
(ANT) (Latour, 2005), that it may be useful to think of things having agency (being
actants ), or to think in tenns of "dist1ibutive agency" (Bennett, 201 Oa, p2 l ). The
seeds of this thinking, Bennett (201 Oa) suggests, can be seen in the structure-agency
debates of the social sciences (the limits on human agency enacted by various social
forces), but these structures remain too abstract to be seen as actors in themselves.
Instead we need to move to the level of assemblages (to which we shall return) and
an understanding of the ways in which agency may be "distributed across an
ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human
body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts" (Bennett, 2010a, p23).
This is a broader challenge to the humanist conception of agency than work that
seeks mainly to acknowledge that agency may be distributed among different
people, that agency should not be assumed to coincide with the individual (Enfield,
_O17). From a posthumanist point of view, we can stai1 to think of language, cog-
nition and agency not merely as distributed across different people but rather as
distributed beyond human boundaries and as playing an active role in a world that is
not limited to human activity alone.
Such a proposition, where objects are seen as agential, may seem a step too far. For
chatzki (2002), the notion of agency has been paradigmatically applied to humans,
and to start to extend it to other objects may obscure rather than assist the point that
Q-
obj ects play an active role in human life. For Schatzki (2002, p201 ), the proliferation J-~
of agency in, for example, ANT does little more than conect "a misguided ~
'.m manism that proclaims people the sole agents". Rather than running the danger of~
suming intentionality alongside agency, Schatzki (2002, p200) proposes that "the
anguage of doing" can accomplish the same thing and is "applicable without
prejudice to humans and nonhumans alike". One might on the other hand contend
:hat to think of objects having agency is to change what is typically meant by the idea
of agency. Extended mind, for example, implies an extended self and "agents
'1lemselves as spread into the world" (Clark and Chalmers, 2008, p232). If there are
44 Distributed language
good reasons to question the idea that only humans have agency, we also need to be
cautious not to apply a humanistic account of agency (implying intentionality) to
actants more broadly. Whether through Schatzki 's focus on practices (Schatzki,
1996, 2001 ; and Pennycook , 2010) or Bennett's (20 I Oa) on distributed agency,
we can start to see that things may be pa11 of the action.
(Pennycook and Otsuji, 20 l 4a). Within a short period of time, Nab ii moves arou n ·
the small restaurant floor, negotiating with the chef about the dish , passing betweer
tables , dealing with customers ("Sm:ry, gomen nasai " ("Sorry" )), serving fo oc
("hotate no carpaccio" ("scallop carpaccio" ); "Voila, bon appetit" ("Here it is , enj o~
your meal " )), before passing on orders for bread ("pain") and another plate ("Encore
une assiette" ), either side of a direction to another member of the floor staff to attend
to two new customers who have just arrived ("Two people, and two people one-
gaishimasu" (" ... please")). As he moves between tables, takes orders, delivers
meals , directs staff and manages the restaurant more generally, Nab ii is engaged in a
range of tasks which do not map in any discrete, functional fashion onto the lin-
guistic resources he uses. Of impo11ance here, then , are the inteJTe!ationship
between restaurant multitasking, linguistic resources and the role that food and
material artefacts play in the spatial repertoire.
Turning to the context of two busy markets in Sydney (Pennycook and Otsuj i.
20 l 4b ; 20 l 5a), we can see how the merchandise itself becomes a central pm1 of the
action . As the two brothers, Talib and Muhibb, negotiate zucchini prices with a
customer using English and Lebanese Arabic ("Tell him arba wa ashreen (" ... twen ty
four"). I told him. He wants to t1y and get it for cheaper. Arba wa ashreen "), the fact
that the zucchini they are tiying to sell have turned yellow ("Hadol misfareen. Mis-
fareen hadol" ("These are yellowing. They ' ve gone yellow")) requires a renegotiation .
especially when the customer of Maltese background recognizes the word for yellow
("ls.far . .. we understand is.far in Lebanese" ). As in the Tokyo bistro we can see the
circulation here of linguistic resources and a11efacts, all of which are part of this spatial
repe11oire. It matters that this exchange is happening early in the morning (it's still dark
outside) in a section of a huge open market area where many of the workers are of
Lebanese background (though not all: their seven employees are ofTurkish , Pakistani ,
Moroccan, Sudanese-Egyptian, Somalia and Philippi no backgrounds); it matters that
the customer can summon up some common tenns from a shared crossover between
Maltese and Arabic; and it matters that the zucchini have stai1ed to turn yellow.
As we look across these different sites, it becomes evident that the language
practices are embedded within a wider spatial repe11oire. When a young man in a
smaller market (Pennycook and Otsuji , 20 I 4b), who, by his account uses Hokkien,
Indonesian , Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin and English resources, tell s us, as he
husks corn over a large green bin , " L!.W/;:fi", J#.1:111 ~1f ' ("All sorts oflanguages are
mixed together"), we have to consider how these linguistic resources intersect with
the spatial organization of other repe11oires, while the practices of buying and
selling, bartering and negotiating, husking corn and stacking boxes bring a range of
other semiotic practices into play. When a woman selling mangos at her stall insists
to her customer "19t'.19t'.Wt'.19t'. . . . f* lj;f, f*l !;f. 11/t'. fllil EJf ~" ("Look , look, look ...
yeah , yeah. This colour tastes good"), the mangos themsel ves, their colour, taste and
smell , become pm1 of the action , and indeed we might suggest that these yellow
mangos interpellate the customer as much as anyone or anything else in the market.
Yellowing zucchini (down goes the price) and yellowing mangos (up goes the price)
and the noise and urgency of market selling all play crucial roles in how various
Distributed language 51
resources will be used and taken up and therefore what constitute at any place and
time the repe1ioires from which conummication can draw.
Distributed language
Once we take the idea of a spatial repertoire seriously - the idea that linguistic and
other semiotic resources are not contained in someone's head, nor just choices
available within a speech community, but are spatially distributed - we can start to
explore an understanding of language not just as a tool for extended cognition to
reach out beyond the human head, to do things that "onboard devices" cannot
achieve (Clark and Chalmers, 2008, p232), but as a concept with much broader
implications. The focus on spatial repertoires allows us to return to the notion of
distributed language, a concept that challenges the idea oflanguages as internalized
systems or individual competence and suggests instead an understanding of
language as embodied, embedded and distributed across people, places and time.
This focus emerged, in Cowley's (2012) account, by linking integrational linguistics
(Harris, 1998, 2009) with distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995).
Integrational linguists have been arguing for something akin to a distributed view
of language for some time. Instead of standard linguistic assumptions - that the
linguistic sign is arbitrary, that words have meanings, that grammar has rules, that
languages exist, that we need to speak the same language to communicate - Harris
(2009) and others have argued for a wider and more distributed version oflanguage,
which places communication (broadly understood) at the core and suggests
languages are not necessarily central to this process. Linguistics, Harris (1990, p45)
points out, "does not need to postulate the existence of languages as part of its
theoretical apparatus". This urges us to rethink what is at stake when we look at
language, since it is unclear whether "the concept of 'a language,' as defined by
01ihodox modem linguistics, corresponds to any detenninate or determinable object
of analysis at all, wheth~r social or individual, whether institutional or psycho-
logical" (Hairis, 1990, p45).
The point here is not merely that language serves communicative purposes but
rather that language is paii of a much broader set of semiotic possibilities. The
central goal of integrational linguistics is to reject the segregational view of
language, by which we assume that communication is a process of choosing among
a predete1mined set of linguistic options, and instead to embrace the radical inde-
rerminacy of the sign and to see that communication is a set of open-ended oppor-
tunities (Harris, 1996). This is akin in various ways to Canagarajah 's (2013 , p6)
understanding of trans lingual practices, suggesting that "communication transcends
individual languages" and "communication transcends words and involves diverse
-emiotic resources and ecological affordances". Harris (2004) himself, however, saw
'.ittle value in the idea of distributed language, pointing to the limited theories of
ianguage that underpin extended and distributed cognition and reiterating the
w portance of integration rather than distribution: "integrating mind" might work
rnstead, since "the notion that one's mental activities are indeed jointly integrated with
52 Distributed language
one's bodily activities and one's environment is at the core of the integrationi.:-
approach" (HaITis, 2004, p738).
Yet wh ile HaITis was right in his critique of the limited vision of language ·
extended and distributed cognition , his insistence on integration - the min d is
integrated with the body and its suITounds - fails to take the more radical step o:"
exteriority that suggests the mind is not just integrated with but part of that exteri o~
world. Steffensen 's (2012) and Cowley's (2012) melding of distributed cognitio
and integrational linguistics takes us into a more helpful space than integration<L
linguistics alone: language cannot be reduced to a notion of system, is bound up
with real-time activity and plays a role in soc iall y moulded cognitive and linguisti
niches rather than individual cognition. From this perspective, "far from being a
synchronic 'system ,' language is a mode of organization that functions by linkin
people with each other, external resources and cultural traditions" (Covvley, 20 l _.
' p2). The focus on l anguage-as-system located in the mind-in-th e-body of single
organisms masks the "interdependerlcy of vo ices, gestures and a11ifacts" (Cowley.
2012 , p2), overlooks the centrality of activity and practice and "exc ludes real-time
dynamics" (p3) .
The shift away from a Cartesian v iew of a mind engaged in symbol processi ng
involves an understanding that humans are metabolic before they are symbolic.
From this point of v iew, language and cognition are on the one hand embodied.
embedded and enacted (far more than representational activity in the mind) and on
the other hand extended, distributed and situated (involving the world outside the
head) (Steffensen, 2012). The spatial repe11oire of a market therefore may include
not only multiple languages , dialects, registers, gesture, mime, dress, posture and
physical performance (Blackledge et al., 2016) - the embodied, embedded and
enacted aspects of distributed language - but also artefacts, space and sensory
domains - the extended, distributed and situated domains of distributed language.
'vVhile language can still be understood as a human capacity (an issue to which I shall
return in greater depth in Chapter 5), its operation and distribution are not limited to
a process occutTing in and between humans.
Assemblages describe the way things are brought together and function in ne~
ways, and they provide a way of thinking about how consciousness (Pepperel l.
2 mD}, agency (Bennett, 20 I Oa) , cognition (Hutchins, 1995) and language (Cowley.
2012) can all be understood as distributed beyond any s41pposed human centre.
An understanding of semiotic assemblages (Pennycook, 2017 ; Pennycook and
Otsuji, 2017) gives us a way to address the complexity of things that come together
in the vi brant, changeable exchanges of everyday life. Ratherthan viewing language
in segregational tem1s as linguistic choices made by people in various contexts, this
allows for an appreciation of a much wider range oflinguistic, m1efactual , historical
and spatial resources brought together in pat1icular assemblages in pa11icular
moments of time and space. It also decentres the human actor and pushes language
outside the head. The point here is not to suggest that humans and human heads are
not involved at all in semiotic activity- it remain s hard to see what this could mean -
but rather to position them in a different relationship to place, object and meaning.
Looking at language use in relation to distributed language and semiotic assem-
blages gives us a way to think in much more inclusive tenns than indi vidualistic
Distributed language 55
accounts of linguistic or communicative competence or notions such as language in
context. The focus , rather, moves away from the humanist concern with individuals
and systems in their heads and looks at a greater totality ofinteracting objects, places
and alternative forms of semiosis.
Note
The tenn assemblage in English is the most commonly used translation of the French
agencement, meaning something like arrangement; it is the particular arrangement of
things and ideas that give them their meaning. Deleuze and Guattari do not use the French
term assemblage (which, it should be noted, operates in a different register from the English
assemblage) in this way in their work. :rhe distance between the notion of agencement -
with its connections to ideas such as becoming - and assemblage - with its different
connections to domains such as dynamic-systems theo1y - has been discussed in more
detail by Phillips (2006).
4 The human hierarchy of senses
Locating smell
Smell is often regarded as the least important of our senses (Classen et al., 1994, p2):
·'In spite of its importance to our emotional and sensory lives, smell is probably the
most undervalued sense in the modern West". Aside from the long hist01y of out-
sourcing our senses to other animals (particularly smell and hearing to our close
canine companions), and the concomitant deterioration of the human sense of smell,
we need an explanation for this. The origins of the value we give to different senses
can be traced back through philosophical traditions (and that value is therefore very
different in different cultural traditions) dealing with the question of where our
knowledge comes from (Ree, 1999): did our knowledge, as Plato, Descartes and
Leibniz (the rationalists) argued, derive primarily from our intellect, or did it, as
58 Th e human hierarchy of'senses
Epicurus, Aristotle and Locke (the empiricists) maintained, come from our senses 0
Aristotle 's argument that all knowledge was based on the five senses - that there was
nothing in our intellect that was not first in the senses - held sway through medieval
times but received a major challenge from Descartes in the seventeenth century.
For Descartes, the senses were physical , bodily attributes that were entirely
secondary to the working of the intellect, to "ideas". This argument, while also much
disputed by the next generation of European philosophers - Locke, Hurne, Kant -
set in motion one of the basic divides that has only been con vincingly challenged in
more recent times: the divide between mind and body. Meanwhile, the debate
continued, with Locke arguing for a division between Sensation (experience derived
from the senses) and Reflection (intellectual work on such experience). It was
Immanuel Kant who claimed to solve the problem , arguing in his Critiqu e of Pure
Reason that our knowledge does not need to confom1 to objects but rather objects
confonn to our knowledge. From this point of view, our senses cannot re late to the
world without the prior operation of the intellect, or, put another way, the way we
understand the world is shaped by how we think. I shall take up some of the
implications ofthis argument in Chapter 7, in a discussion of discourse and reality,
exploring funher why recent thinkers such as Meillassoux (2008) reject this cor-
reLationist proposition, which Bogost (2012, p4) tenns the "the tradition of human
access that seeps from the rot of Kant" .
The question I want to return to is what happened to smell in all this? The problem
goes back to Plato and the elevation of the higher senses (sight and hearing) over the
other three. Although the other senses were part of th ese debates - Aristotle saw
smell as one of the three " nobler senses" along with sound and sight (Ree, 1999,
p34 7), and touch was seen as impo11ant in the eighteenth -century debates about how
we understand shapes - smell was commonly relegated to the lower senses: touch,
taste and smell. So here we have an equally important history, not so much the
question of how the mind experiences the world, but how humans , the senses and
bodies were divided up in very pa11icularways . The mind/body division in European
thought not only al located particular roles to the senses but also pa11icular senses to
pai1icular bodies , so that the eyes and ears were inv ited to accompany the mind (eyes
and ears becoming, strangely, disembodied), while the mouth, nose and skin were
assigned to the body. One of the legacies of the European Enlightenment was
therefore an idealization of the senses deemed to be in volved with language and
thought (sight and sound) and a relegation of the lesser senses that involved the body
(touch, taste and smell). This division needs to be brought back into an under-
standing of the social , phys ical and material world from which these ideas emerged
(and from which they tried to escape).
The philosophical position that could argue for a mind separated from the world
stems from the same " Enlightenment ideology in which language, and especially
written language, is the condition ofrationality, ci v ilization and progress, attaining
its apotheosis in the alphabetic writing of the West" (Finnegan, 2015 , p 18). The
linguistics that developed in this tradition through the work of Saussure, Hjelmslev
and Chomsky, with its focus on language as a system " threw linguistics into a lar-
gescale sensory depri vation experiment" that excluded many significant aspects of
The human hierarchy of senses 59
language and the senses (Steffensen and Fill, 2014, p 7). What this account is missing
is all the relations between bodies and the world, bodies and objects, the tactile,
affective and sensual elements ofhw11an life. The philosophical tradition that gave
us a mind separated from a body was a gendered, classed and racialized one, and the
linguistics that emerged in this tradition was similarly nanow, excluding all those
bodily aspects of life that only some people can afford to ignore.
The finer intellectual senses (sight and hearing) were linked to men (or more
pmiicularly white, upper-middle-class men), while the more bodily sensual and less
controllable senses (touch, taste and smell) were linked to women (Classen, 2005).
As Bourke (2011 , p7) explains, "what tied humans to the rest of the animal kingdom
was feminine , while what distinguished humans from other animals was masculine.
Woman is an animal; man is the exemplary human". The Cmiesian subject, as
BmTett notes, is
This is the same WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)
human (Hemich et al. , 2010), or SWEME (Straight White Educated Male Elite) (see
Chapter 1), around which the universality of humanity is proclaimed.
The humanist subject that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe did not smell,
neither actively smelling the environment as pmi ofhis philosophical investigations,
nor giving off odours as a result of manual work. Pmi of the gendered and racial
hierarchies of the time, bodily senses were linked to animals, women and other races,
while the higher senses were linked to the peak of social and biological evolution
(White Man). And as with other processes of occidentalist colonial constrnction
(Pennycook, l 998b ), as the colonies started to smell bad, so the West became
odourless. "For a society to become civilized and modern," Low (2009 , pl67)
suggests, "sanitary wars have been and are staged to combat di11 and foul scents,
regarded as emblems of disorder. " Groups deemed inferior to white, odourless,
bourgeois men - women, working people, ethnic minorities, the elderly, rnral
workers - were increasingly seen both as a source of smell and as more sensorily
engaged with smells as pmi of their less refined ways of living (Cockayne, 2007).
No eating
No smoking
or drinking
No flammable No durians
goods
The hotel is I 0 minutes' walk through the busy streets of Sandakan from the large
market down on the harbour front, where stacked high in several stalls near the
entrance are a wide variety of dried fish: ikan putih, ikan su/it, ikan keropok, ikan
kurau, ikan tenggi1~ and the ubiquitous small dried anchovies , or i/r..an bi/is .
At the far end of the market, near the rusting fishing boats pulled up at the whaif,
g leam a range of fresh fish, crabs, prawns and she llfi sh. In between there are stalls of
fru it and vegetables: the enticing rambutan, long an, duku (langsat) bananas , pine-
apple, star fruit, pomelo, calamansi, a range of local vegetables as well as varieties of
edible seaweed, spice stalls offering ginger, garl ic, on ions, cinnamon, star anise, chilli,
cardamom, lemon grass, cumin, tunn e1ic and more (many of the ingredients for the
beefrendang for sale at stalls around the comer from the market). Odours of discarded
remnants from the market stalls, from fish to rotting fruit and vegetables, mix with the
sweet smell of kretek, the clove cigarettes smoked widely across Indonesia. But taking
precedent over all other smells are the pungent fruit: ta rap (its scientific name gives us
a clue: Artocmpus odoratissimus ), cempedak and durian. The upmarket tou1ist hotel
on the waterfront has no such sign, not because they wo uld be happy to have ta rap and
ikan bi/is in the rooms, but because they assume their clients are not the kind of people
who wou ld bring such goods from the market. But for the other hotel in Sandakan,
keeping its rooms relatively sweet-sme lling is a struggle, located where it is in a to wn
with livel y markets, uncontrolled migration and vibrant multilingualism. We shall
return to multilingual, multimodal and multisensory relations bel ow.
The human hierarchy of senses 63
Smells thus become a terrain of struggle since they "often cany particular social
weight due to the transgressive qualities of odour and its associations with ethnic
identify and physical hygiene" (Howes and Classen, 2014, p88). Smell plays an
ambivalent role in modem societies: relegated to a lower level of perception, to a
bodily encounter with the environment, it has become tied to the negative counter-
conshuctions of the humanist subject, that supposedly universal rational person, who
turns out to be classed, raced and gendered. While upmarket smells such as scents in
the perfume indush)' (a product designed both to disguise certain smells and to attract
with expensive odours) or bouquets in the wine industl)' have positive connotations,
the very idea that something smells is often assumed to be a negative judgement
(he, she, it smells). Smell is one of the lower senses (touch, taste and smell), relegated
to non-language (and the kitchen, the workhouse, the slums and all those places where
embodied Others dwell) . Smells are connected to those others whose humanity is less
than full: women, animals, immigrants, working people. In the next section I look at
rhe relation of smells to linguistic domains, asking how we can start to incorporate a
-ense of smell into our semiotic inventoty This will be followed by a discussion of the
other side of this picture - the issue for the Deaf comm1mity of having to perfonn
IB11guage in a bodily medium rather than via audit01)' channels. The struggles over
~ochlear imp !ants - that transhuman enhancement that divides the Deaf c01mnunity-
will also be a focus of this discussion. Finally I shall explore how we can start to bring
:illlells together into a broader posthumanist semiotic assemblage.
in a sense, sn iff out languages runs the danger of implausibly fixing both language ar.
smell in a context where mobility and fluid ity are m ore salient. As the discussio-
ofrestauran ts and markets in the previous chapter suggests (Pennycook and Otsu~ ·
20 I 5a), to ass ume that such contexts have clearly demarcated languages or an easil_
identifiable lingua franca is to overlook the ways in w hi ch language, space, peop ~
and artefacts interact. Thinking in tenns of the spatial repertoires of the market, th~
goal becomes not so much one of seeking out correlations between smell s an-
identifi abl e languages but rather of exploring the ways in w hich semiotic assemblages
may work.
Am id the multiple components invol ved in communicative events - the people
involved, the different channels, modes and codes, the sett ings and th e fonns anc'.
topics of messages - Hymes ( 1964/1972, p22) suggested that channels of com-
munication migh t include, alongs ide speaking, writing and nonverbal commu ni-
cation, "smelli ng, tasting and tactile sensation" . Here, however, we confront another
lingui stic dilemma, for wh ile there is a limited vocabul ary in European languages for
words for taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter), there are virtually no word s for smell:
(acrid is one). Smel l te nni no logy either borrows from taste ("it smells sour") or
desc tibes the source of the smell (the smell of bacon, coffee, toast, seaweed.
strawberries and so on). Thus in the description of the Sandakan market above_
smells were invoked by recourse to thei r origins: dried fish, fruit and sp ices. Domain-
that need to deal w ith smel Is, such as wine appreciation, have been subj ect to ridicule
for always hav ing to invoke other smells and tastes (G lu ck, 2003; Silverstein, 2003 )_
from fruit (cherries, rasp berries, gooseberries, blackbeti-ies) and positi vely orien ted
sweet flavours (chocolate, toffee) to more ru ral odours (fa1111yard s or horse saddles).
As van Leeuwen and Djonov (2015) point out, the vocabulary of smell may be a
lexese, an inventory of unrelated signs. It is only the few who work in smell-related
professions, such as the perfume business, who may have a much more language-like
modular structure of smell components (base, body and head).
In linking sme ll to language, however, I am less interested in coffelations between
languages and odours or the ways languages cut up the osmolog_F in very different
ways (Howes and Classen , 2014) and more in how we can und erstand the semiotics of
smell in relatio n to other fonn s of soc ial semiosis. Placing odours a longside other
"sem iotic resources" (van Leeuwen , 2005, p3) allows for a broader understanding
of the sem iotic landscape. A lready in an early definition of linguistic landscapes
Shohamy and Gorter (2009, p4) suggested it is "a broader concept than documentation
of signs; it incorporates multimodal theories to include sounds, images, and graffiti".
While studies of lingu istic landscapes focus generally on "the presence, represen-
tation, meanings and interpretation of languages displayed in public places" (Sho-
harny and Ben-Rafael , 20 15, p 1), a wider understanding also incorporates the non-
visual (sounds) along with the visual. As this field has developed , it has moved beyond
the logocentric approaches of early work that took text and signs as centra l and has
started to engage with a broader semiotics, including space, place. bod ies and senses.
Studies of tattoos make central "the body (the material stuff of identity and affect) as a
corporeal linguistic landscape, or skinscape, a collection of inscriptions in place"
(Peck and Stroud, 2015, pl34). Recent work, Shohamy (2015, ppl53-4) suggests,
The human hierarchy of senses 65
incorporates "images, photos, sounds (soundscapes), movements, music, smells
(smellscapes), graffiti, clothes, food, buildings, histmy, as well as people who are
inunersed and absorbed in spaces by interacting with LL in different ways" .
To avoid the subsumption of the semiotic resources of smells within an under-
standing of the linguistic, it may be more productive to think in tenns of the semiotic
landscape (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010). Yet smell presents us with a problem in
relation to cmmnon definitions of semiotic landscapes, not only with respect to
"visible inscription" but also "deliberate human intervention" (Jaworski and
Thurlow, 20 I 0, p2). While smells may be deliberately propagated for a range of
reasons - to encourage people to buy coffee or bread, to attract sexual partners, to
enhance the smell of a toilet - to focus only on the intentional excludes a broader
domain of the unintended sensory landscape. It is of course a semiotic trnism
(though one that is all too often ignored in the emphasis on design, function and
purposeful activity) that the intention of a sign-maker and the interpretation of a
sign may be at odds. This is not merely to draw attention to the ways in which all
emiotic acts may have unintended consequences (for a skateboarder, a sign saying
·'No skateboarding" may function as an invitation to do so), or to the ways in which
unintended as much as intended aspects of signs may convey meaning (design may
cany significant semiotic weight but so too may the fact that a sign has become old
and faded), but rather to contemplate the semiotic quandaiy that smells may be
neither deliberately produced nor deliberately interpreted. Akin in some ways to
Kallen 's (2010, p54) discarded cigarette packet on a Dublin street - whose Roma-
nian health warning becomes, at least to a passing semiotician, "indexical of the
enhanced flow of traffic between Ireland and Romania", yet whose appearance as
-emiotic object was almost certainly accidental (even if deliberately discarded) -
-mells and their interpretation may be largely unintended.
This relates to part of the discussion in the previous chapter about agency and
:ntentionality. If we operate with humanist conceptions of agency, then intentionality
may remain part of the definition. If we are able to see agency as a distributed
roperty that may include the role of objects in the world, however, the intention
:>ehind a sign may become less important than its role as a semiotic actant. The
iignificance of smell, furthennore, is also in its power to evoke, its connections to
emmy, place and emotions. Smell is strongly linked to memory (Dove, 2008), with
_particular capacity to evoke memories of place (Rodaway, 1994). For Porteous
_990, p25), "the concept of smellscape suggests that, like visual impressions, smells
y be spatially ordered or place-related". This has implications for how we do
_ earch, since it necessitates an engagement with smells and places through sensmy
!"".hnographies and "smellwalking" (Gresillon, 2010; Henshaw, 2013 ; Low, 2009).
As Sen-es' critique of Merleau-Ponty's approach to the phenomenology of per-
-~tion suggests, there is "lots of phenomenology and no sensation" (cited in Co1mor,
.: 5, p3 l 8). While there are a lot of significant insights here - such as the blind
on 's stick as an extension of the body (see above)- the phenomenological project,
~s suggests, is based around language and introspection rather than throwing
elfin to a full bodily appreciation of the senses and the "empire of signs", as Senes
elf attempts in his book Les cinq sens (1985). We need to engage with the senses
66 The human hierarchy of"senses
rather than reflect from our an11chairs on how perceptions are linguistically realized.
But the social and political dimensions of the senses are also crucial here, an elemen:
missing from SeITes ' more personal account (Howes and Classen , 2014). As Pink
(2008, p 193) suggests, " it was by walking and eating with others, sharing their gaze .
rhythms, sounds, smells and more and by attuning my imagination to their own
imaginings for the future material , social and sensory environment" that she was able
to grasp "an ethnographic place with a remembered past, a direct present and an
imagined future". Urban ethnography works best as " a multi-sensorial fo1111 of
engagement, rather than simply in tem1s of vision" (Pink, 2008, p 180).
The smellscape therefore requires an analytic approach that avoids common
semiotic assumptions about multimodality and intended meaning. Kramsch
(2014, p242) focuses on the ways in which signs " interpellate us in different way
and force us to respond with our senses and our memories , and our imagination'·.
Smells take us into interpretive relations different from those of more standard
semiotics: not only do our research processes have to be different (rather than the
instant recording of the digital image, we have to work with different types of
description) but smells as signs are associational and interpellative, varying
widely from simple associations (this smells like vinegar) to complex relations of
place. Fahey (2009) recalls Sydney smells of hi s youth , including "the hot potato
chips sold at the Ramsgate saltwater swimming baths", which somehow also had
the "accompanying smell of wombat, dingo, roo and monkey poo"; the smell of
fried fish for breakfast, of the firecrackers from bonfire night; the "olfactory
expedition" to the local comer store, with its fare of sausages , ham and cheese. The
spatial repertoire of such places allows us to see how languages are emergent
among other forms of semiosis. Smellscapes make central the capacity of the
senses to connect across time and space.
Chmielewska's (20 l 0, p287) focus on semiosis in situ insists not only on an
engagement with linguistic and pictorial signs but also with "the material it'; of context.
and the att1ibutes of multi-sensory fields that topo-sensiti ve signs necessaril y occupy".
If we wish to incorporate those other senses that have been overlooked in the European
male sens01ium - taste, touch and smell - we need to approach semiotic landscapes
not onl y with a focus on multimodality (Jewitt, 2009) but also a more embodied
engagement with multisensoriality. Smells intersect with other senses (pa1iicularly, of
course, taste) but also evoke memo1ies and places. And it is these spatial relations
between smells, identities, places and languages that are of particular interest to a
posthumanist approach to social semiotics that does not p1i vilege humans, texts and
intentions in the same ways that more tradi tional approaches to the 1inguistic land-
scape have done. The non-intentional and non-representational modes of aromatic
semiotics open up an understanding of the role of the non-human in assemblages.
Multisensory assemblages
Smell does a lot of impmiant semiotic work, particularly in its interpellative and
associational capacities: it evokes memories, people, activities and places. These
may also have linguistic correlates - people, language and places are closely
inte1iwined - but the mobility of such resources suggests we should treat these
connections with caution. Of greater interest are the complexity of relations among
the diversity oflanguage and everyday activities (buying, eating, fishing, growing,
selling and cooking) and the larger linguistic and sensory scapes within geopolitical,
economic and historical settings. Smells are an important part of how we make sense
of our smTounds and how we interpret, associate and invoke relations of culture and
taste, as well as assumptions about gender, class, background and development. And
just as linguistic proscriptions (against Singlish in Singapore, for example) tell us a
great deal about language, language ideologies, govemmentality and politics, so
smell proscriptions (smelly fruit and dried fish) tell us a lot about smells, smell
ideologies, places, people and aspirations.
Understanding the city smellscape can be crucial for appreciating the role of
different people, foods, restaurants and shops in any urban mixture. Companies,
-mall businesses and manufacturers of various kinds (not just soap and perfume
makers) are very aware of the potential of smell to attract buyers. Smell is
playing an ever more important role in the design of products, services and
cmmnercial environments, and odours are destined to spill out into city streets
in the forrn of commercial scenting activities at an increasing rate over the years
to come.
(Henshaw, 2013 , p221)
Animal smarts
Unlike a number of the writers on humans and animals (Haraway, 2008; Safina,
20 l 5; Morell, 20 l 4) who, alongside powerfully mat1ialled arguments for under-
standing thi s relationship differently, can 't resist a picture of their dog and a slippage
into an argument along the lines that " of courses/he 's pa11 of the famil y", I do not
start from any such position. I don't have a dog ; nor do I see myself in an y panicular
1
way as an an ima l lover. As a scuba diver and vol un teer for an organization working
to save reefs in the Philippines, however, I do have a know ledge and admiration of
fish (including sharks; see Appleby and Pennycook , 20 17; and see front cover). As
my wo rk to maintain the qua li ty of Philippine reefs has also made ve ry clear, carin g
about reefs is about more than endeavouring to halt the destruction caused by cli-
mate change, overfis hin g, dynamite fishing and the collecting offis h, she llfish and
other creatures for aq uariums. It is also about more than enswing that local fish
stocks are maintained so that people can live sustainabl y from the local env ironment,
or ensuring that reef quality can ensure a local tourist ind ustry. It is about a much
more integrated and entangled set of relations between humans and non-humans,
reefs and the land, religion and povet1Y.
Animals and language 75
If you have seen a rock-mover wrasse (Novaculichthys taeniourus) shifting
stones and other debris out of the way so that its partner (they often work in pairs)
can grab some prey, or if you have seen the remarkable sand patterns created by
the white-spotted pufferfish (Torquigener albomaculosus - only ' discovered' in
2014) - possibly the most complex construction produced by any non-human
animal - you will know that fish can do more than you might have expected
(Balcom be, 2016) . The much maligned and misunderstood shark is also far more
interesting and intelligent than popular discourse allows (Appleby and Penny-
cook, 20 17). The octopus and the other cephalopods (cuttlefish and squid) -
'"evolutions' only experiment in big brains outside of the vertebrates" (Godfrey-
Smith, 2017, p 160) - meanwhile, have remarkable intellectual capacities that
shed new light on the idea of embodied cognition (see Chapter 3): "The octopus is
suffused with nervousness; the body is not a separate thing that is controlled by
the brain or nervous system" (Godfrey-Smith, 2017, p75) . And if you have had the
privilege to spend time watching a giant cuttlefish (Sepia apama)- a creature with
"considerable brainpower" (Godfrey-Smith, 2017, p 197) - off Sydney Heads,
moving across different substrata (rocks, sand, seaweed, sponges) and changing
its colour accordingly in fractions of a second - giant cuttlefish use chromato-
phore cells to change colour - you will know that animals can do things that
humans cannot.
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. Although a "defining trait" of what it means to
be human has been "a connection with animals" going back over millions of years
(Shipman, 2011 , p 13 ), human exceptionalism (emphasizing a distinction between
humans and animals) has been the "the default view" (Cook, 2015 , p591). Thatform
of human exceptionalism that emphasizes the superiority of humans over other
animals was perhaps most amusingly described in a famous passage from The
Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy:
Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he
had achieved so much - the wheel , New York, wars, and so on -while all the
dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But
conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent
than man - for precisely the same reasons.
(Adams, 1979, pl59)
Sometime after our ancestors left Africa and met up with American canids, a special
relationship staiied to evolve between humans and wolves, in some ways the animal
closest to us (not biologically but in terms of our shared history, flexibility, fonning
of pair bonds and relation to changing hierarchical social structures). The stmy we
like to imagine is of an early human taking in a young wolf cub (Rudyard Kipling 's
1894 sto1y of Mowgli in reverse) and starting the process of domestication. But
this account, like so many of our animal stmies, suffers from an anthropocentric
76 Animals and language
assumption that it is humans that do the domestication. Safina (2015, p223)
suggests, by contrast, that "wolves unintentionally domesticated themselves to
humans" - that is to say, it was not so much the case that humans picked up a wolf
cub and started the process of domestication but rather that wolves found it useful to
hang around humans and changed their behaviour accordingly. But this process
went both ways: humans also changed in response to this canine presence. In
becoming reliant on humans, dogs made humans reliant on them: "We became like
each other" (Safina, 2015, p225). Human relationships to other animals, particularly
dogs , have changed what it means to be human. As I suggested in the previous
chapter, dogs - sheep dogs, guide dogs, sn iffer dogs - now do all s01is of work for
humans, so that dogs have become an extended part of our senses and cognition.
Viewed historically, we have, in a sense, outsourced some of our capacities (smelling,
hearing , barking, running, biting) to dogs, who have in turn outsourced some of
their needs to us (shelter, food, exercise).
Two immediate problems present themselves when we try to deal with other
anima ls: the first is the tendency towards anthropomorphic thinking: we map
human ideas and emotions onto animals and try to understand them according to
our own ways of thinking rather than in their own terms. As Sealey and Oakley's
(2013, p 143) study of the language of wild li fe documentaries shows , they are
often replete with anthropomorphizing discourses, from the use of gendered
pronouns that promote "individualized, active, and 'socially' contextualized"
po1irayals of different creatures to suggestions of intentionality, motivation or
causality that cannot be appropriately apport ioned to the anima ls' observed
behaviour. There is often a double loop of thinking here, whereby we map human
gendered relations onto animals (many otherwise respectable wildlife docu-
mentaries assume a male-centric world) and then map this back onto humans (see,
this is how nature \\'Orks).
As Safina (2015) points out, an accusation of anthropomorphism was the flag
raised to warn those studying animals not to confuse human and anima l
behaviours . Pa1iicularly from a behaviourist perspective, it contravened sc ient-
ific norms of observation. Although there is indeed much to be wary of here, the
strength of this concern meant that discussion of animal feelings or GJl'areness
were utterly taboo .2 "By banning what was considered anthropomorphic,"
he suggests (Safina, 2015 , p27) , behaviourist biologists "helped insti tutionalize
the all -too-human notion that only humans are conscious and can feel anything."
The real challenge when we deal with animals is not to assume that they think
like us , they understand us , or any similar foo li shness, but to attempt to under-
stand in tern1s of profound difference. Just as humanist universa lism has tended
to bring all humans into the same framework - we have underl ying cognitive
structures and a universal lan guage capacity - so a rethinking of animal- human
relations runs the danger of a new universalism that includes animals. The
problem therefore
The second problem is that because some humans have quite deep emotional
relationships with their animals - paiiicularly cats and dogs - there is a tendency not
only to anthropomorphize (my cat understands me) but also to idealize and sen-
timentalize the relationship between humans and pets. As Pierce (2016) observes,
human treatment of their pets - or companion animals, as they are commonly known
these days - ranges from the overindulgent (much greater sums lavished on the dogs
of the wealthy than on the children of the poor) to the incredibly cruel, neither of
which is very good for the animals themselves. From the remarkably high figures of
bestiality- described elsewhere as interspecies sexual assault (Beirne, 2000) - which
Pierce notes is a key and much ignored problem for domestic animals, or childhood
cruelty to animals (which is a good predictor of subsequent sexual assault), to the
problem that those who seek out animal comfort are often the least able to provide
comfmi fortheir animals, human relations with animals reveal much of what it is to be
human - cruel, ugly, vicious and abusive, as well as loving, caring and capable of
bonding with other species more strongly than we do at times with our own.
Animals, we have come to understand, are smaiier than we thought, fonning
social groups and developing cultural behaviours. Sperm whales fonn clans which
pass on distinctive dialects of sonar clicks to each other, enabling them to syn-
chronize diving and feeding (Whitehead and Rendell, 2015). Female spenn whales
share the care of the young of their clan by staying at the surface with a young whale
while its mother dives for food. Like elephants, spenn whales appear to have the
capacity to memorize large social networks . Orcas, meanwhile, form groups based
in part on different diets (salmon or marine ma1mnals, for example), refusing to mix
with others, interbreed or change diet. Like sperm whales, these clans have dis-
tinctive vocalizations that facilitate coordination of their hunting (d1iving humpback
whales into Twofold Bay, for example) and caring for each other (Whitehead and
Rendell, 2015). And the number of studies showing the remarkable capabilities of
birds is growing all the time. Crows have diverse tool-using capabilities (they will
drop pebbles into a water container to raise the water level, for example) and an
ability to solve quite complex tool-using tasks, suggesting a capacity for problem
solving and abstract thought that has largely been considered only to exist in the
realm of great apes and humans. There are accounts ofbrown falcons and black kites
in Aush·alia picking up burning sticks from bushfires and dropping them into dry
grass to flush out animals hiding there (Derla, 2016). 3 Studies have now shown birds
capable of "toolmaking, culture, reasoning, the ability to remember the past and
think about the fuhire, to adopt another's perspective, to learn from one another"
(Ackennan, 2016, pl 1). Many of our "cherished fonns of intellect'', Ackerman
suggests (2016 , p 11 ), "appear to have evolved in birds quite separately and artfully
right alongside our own" .
And all this before we even get to dogs and the great apes (discussed in part in the
next section). One further consideration when we h)' to understand the cognitive
78 Animals and language
capacities of animals is to bring in an understanding of extended or distributed
cognition. If suggesting that a dog 's cognition is extended by taking a human for a
walk (or that dogs have traded their sense of smell for human 's broader cognitive
capacities, akin in some ways to Douglas Adams' dolphins enjoying the sea) is a step
too far, an alternative consideration is to look at cognitive systems as a who le, and
the way that, say, a colony of ants may operate (Morell , 2014 ). The issue is not
to suggest that ants think in human terms or have a theory of mind , but rather
that they operate collectively in a way that resembles a thinking organism. The
different subsystems of an ant colony (w ith different types of ant, different means
for signall ing infonnation) provide an overal 1structure that enables "an organism to
be 'intelligent' in any reasonable sense of the word" (Hofstadter, 1970, p324 ). The
collective whole, the multi layered structure, the internal modes of communication
make it possible to draw an analogy between the human brain and an ant colony as
producing collective ways of thinking. Like Hutchins ' Chinese Room (Chapter 3),
the point is not whether the process inside the colony resembles processes of
understanding in human tenns but how the collective whole operates.
Humans have a long and complex relationship with other animals, and human
evolution is closely linked with our relationship to animals (Shipman, 2011 ). The
Jungle Book sto1y of Mowgli (brought up by wolves and befriended by Bagheera,
the black panther, who has been reared by humans) points to another important
aspect of the relations between humans and anima ls: our stories and religions and
rituals have been filled with different creatures. They tum up everywhere: the ox and
ass in the nativity in the Christian tradition (often seen as standing for obedience,
docility or inn ocence; hundreds of years of iconography and interpretation have
given many layers of meaning to this scene, though they' re not in the original
gospels); the serpent representing the devil in the Christian Bible, turning up in many
other myths and religions as a guardian figure (the Buddha protected by a naga, or
cobra, in the carvings at Angkor Wat, for example), a symbol of medicine and other
diverse roles in Amazonian cultures (see the 2015 Colombian film , El abrazo de la
serpiente; and see also de Souza, 2002; snake symbols and meanings are so wide-
spread it is impossible to do more than touch on them here); the winged horse A l-
Buraq (Jl_).ll lightning)- similar in many ways to Pegasus in Greek legend (though
often portrayed w ith a human face) -who is said to have caiTied Prophet Muhammad
from Mecca to the seven heavens and back (via the Al -Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem)
during the lsra and Mi 'raj, or Night Journey. From the Hindu Ganesha (with the head
of an elephant) or the Egyptian sphinx (body of a lion) to the Greek minotaur (head
of a bull), human and animal have often been mixed together.
Birds have " been prominent in art, literature and sculpture, have been accredited
with supernatural powers, have played a role in songs, ceremony and dance, as we ll
as day-to-day existence, and have been linked to both death and some of life's
greatest cha ll enges" (Tidemann et al., 2010 , pp5-6 ). Many birds. from kingfishers
through eagles, emus and ostriches to cockatoos and paiTots, occur widely in the
stories told to children or the nanati ves of adulthood. From Ancient Egyptian
depictions of hoopoe or ibis to Maori spiritual guardianship of kereru and tT tT
(muttonbird, sooty shearwater, or Pujjinus griseus , depending on your point of
Animals and language 79
view), from images of peacocks in paintings and jewellery to stories of doves as
birds of peace or romance, from the use of birdsong in music to the keeping of
songbirds in cages, from the use of bird feathers in headdresses to the role of bird
heads and beaks in ceremonies, from stories of migrating birds as metaphors of
travel and journeying souls to stories of birds such as the red-backed kingfisher
making fires that became coal deposits in Adnyamathanha (central Australia)
mythology, humans have long used birds as part of the way in which they understand
and relate to the world. Through centuries of philosophy, literature and art humans
have tried to work out their relation to animals, to reconcile the animal in the human
(passions, instincts) and the human in the animal (loyalty, understanding) and then to
ask again whether these qualities are human or animal. Agamben (2004, p80)
suggests that "the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is
that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin
Western politics is also biopolitics".
Recent studies have started to show that many animals are much smaiter than we
previously acknowledged. We might interpret this to mean they are a little more
human than we had thought but that would be to fall back into our anthropocentric
and anthropomorphic ways. When we think of the navigational feats of different
animals (making the navigational feats of a scuba diver (Chapter 3) look pretty
ordinary) - arctic terns travel 70,000 kilometres from the Arctic to Antarctic and
back; sooty shearwaters (Maori ti tf) a similar 65,000 kilomeh·es ; humpback wales
(especially now that whaling no longer occurs at Twofold Bay or elsewhere) can
travel over 20,000 kilometres from the poles to the warm equatorial seas and back;
leatherback tu1tles can travel 20,000 kilometres before returning to a beach in the
region in which they were born (others such as loggerhead and hawksbill sea turtles
return to the exact beach) - we are reminded that animals can do things that humans
cannot, or at least not without a lot of technological and mechanical assistance.
What we need to do is shed our human assumptions as far as possible - both those
that would denigrate navigational capacities as simply evolved biological traits and
those that would claim that crows can think like us - and to try to understand animals
on their own terms. Exploring the realm offish, Balcom be asks (2016, p6) "what the
world looks like to fish, how they perceive, feel, and experience the world". Whether
we are able to do this- Nagel (1974) argues that we cannot imagine what it is like to
be a bat, for example, because we are limited by our own subjective experiences of
being (Chapter 8) - is a question we need to leave open. Finally it is worth asking
why it has taken humans so long, with all our mental and scientific capacities,
to understand that the differences between humans and many other animals -
particularly elephants, dogs, great apes, orcas, dolphins and the like, and pa1ticularly
before the domestication of plants and the development of writing -was a matter of
degree rather than kind (Safina, 20 15).
pointing things out, rather than the thumb and its role in manipulating objects, tha:
"has lifted man above other living creatures" (pxv) depends crucially on the argu-
ment that it is only humans that point.
It is in light of such exclusionary humanism that we need to view the ways tha:
Tallis tautological ly dismisses all other fo1111s of pointing since they do not fit the
prior definition of human pointing. Pointer dogs (dogs used for finding game in
hunting) do not point, he argues (Tallis, 20 I 0, p39), because "being a dog, not a
human", a pointer dog "had a consciousness that had not woken out of sentience··
nor any "sense of objects independent of himself: lacking the existential intuition...
A dog cannot "experience himself as an embodied subj ect", does not understand
other embodied subjects and cannot appreciate the rules of pointing. Pointer dogs are
"one trick ponies" who do not point at things other than game (or thrown sticks), or
in other circumstances, or using other patts of the body. They do not "grasp the
underlying principles of the pointing convention: their pointing is acquired by dumb
imitation or wired in by instinct" (p40). From this point of view, pointing is uniquel y
human, and animals can never do it. It is taken to be a key step in the evolution of
language, the "royal road to language for babies" (B utterworth, 2003 , p9), and an
innate component of the human language-acquisition device. Similar to the defi-
nition of language discussed above, as only something humans can do (all other
aspects of language are cast aside as non-language), pointing is defined as uniquely
human and pointer dogs are dismissed as "one-trick ponies".
So here we have a similar set of questions to those raised more broadly abo ut
language above. Can animals point? Is pointing universaJ'J Does it have a biological
base') Let us first of all be clear about what is meant by pointing here, since it is easy to
fall into the trap of assuming that when, for example, a companion animal attracts our
attention to a ball, an empty food bowl or a lead hanging by the door, it is pointing.
Pointing, in the tradition under discussion here, is seen as usually involving the index
finger and ann extended to indicate an object to which one intends another person to
pay attention. It is this aspect of being aware of another 's mind, of assuming that that
mind can 01ient from a different position to the object one is pointing to, and of
presuming that that person can in tum discern one's intention that makes pointing an
act that involves not just interaction but also a capacity to infer others ' thoughts and
assume their capacity to do likewise. It is the lack of dialogue between pointer dog and
hunter, as well as the fact that the whole-body 01ientation of the dog means it is
unaware of its own pointing gesture (unlike a finger held in our line of vision), that
renders the pointer dog less than a human pointer (Butterwonh, 2003).
When we assume that a pet looking at the door is pointing, we are potentially guilty
of our old anthropomorphic games. We assume that a dog is aware of our line of vision
and is indicating a lead, a door or a ball to us with the intention of inviting us to go for a
walk or throw a ball. At the same time, however, there is an equal anthropocentrism
running though many of the arguments that discount dog and ape pointing, an
insistence on constructing an idea of a uni versal human capacity so that only humans
can be seen to do it. Several arguments make this distinction harder to maintain .
Tomasello (2006, p507) argues that although there is evidence of captive chimpanzees
pointing to draw the attention of humans - so that "apes can , in unnatural
Animals and language 85
circumstances with members of the human species, learn to do something in some
ways equivalent to pointing" - there is no evidence of apes pointing among them-
selves (and see Povinelli et al. , 2003). For Tomasello (2008), pointing (and pan-
tomiming, or fonns of imitative learning) are uniquely human and crucial in human
evolution: human pointing rests on shared intentionality and cooperation, and it is this
cooperative p1inciple that underpins hwnan development and that apes lack. So
human infants point and apes do not because "only humans have the skills and
motivations to engage with others collaboratively, to form with others joint intentions
and ~G\nt att~x\t\Gn \\\ act<s Gf <sh?t1~\\ \n\~\\lll)Y1'.:\\\ty" \1om<a-s~\1Li, 10%, pS \ %).
So Tomasello 's argument seems to support fonns of human exceptionalism but
only up to a point. Although "humans' closest primate relatives do not point for one
another", apes growing up in human captivity do learn to point to "out-of-reach food
so that a human will retrieve it for them" (Tomasello et al., 2007, p717). This leads
on to a wider observation that animals that live with humans tend to do quite well
understanding pointing: dogs in pa1ticular generally seem to w1derstand pointing,
and the research suggesting that dogs do well while wolves do not (a process
therefore of domestication rather than canine ability) has more recently been shown
to be flawed, since the wolves were separated by a fence and thus could not react
equally (Safina, 2015, p243). As for productive pointing, the evidence is less clear,
though it does seem to be the case that anin1als that point only do so in the context
of their interactions with humans and not with each other. Pointing in apes, in
Tomasello's interpretation (2008, p37), is "a natural extension of their attention-
getting gestures", and the fact that they do not use pointing among themselves is
evidence that they are aware that humans can be cooperative (they may go and get
the out-of-reach food that is being pointed to) while other apes are not (they know
that pointing to food that another ape can reach is just not going to work).
While for some, this might suggest that pointing is therefore ' unnatural' in ani-
mals since they only do it with humans, such a position overlooks the conjoined
natural history of humans and other animals. As Segerdahl (2012) argues, not only
does comparative psychology generally fail to acknowledge sufficiently that
monkeys in laborato1ies are very different from enculturated apes (questioning
therefore the basis for claims about what is natural, as well as raising concerns about
the experimental tradition) but many researchers operate from the premise that the
human and non-human is always the necessary contrast. To dismiss pointer dogs as
not really pointing is also to fall into the trap of assuming we must judge other
animals by the same criteria. If, by contrast, we understand pointer dogs in tenns of
phylogenetic enculturation (Hare et al. , 2002)-the ways in which they have become
so integrated with human social worlds that they exceed our closer cousins (such
as chimpanzees) in understanding human communication - and if we understand
their capacities in relation to distributed cognition (we have, after all, been training
pointer and retriever dogs to hunt with humans for thousands of years) , then we can
see that the "one trick pony" argument misses the role they play in conjoined activity.
The lives of dogs are often "intimately entangled with those of their human
masters" (Kohn, 2013 , p 135), an entanglement that does not just involve immediate,
local circumstances of home but also both relations with other living things and a
86 Animals and language
broader sociopolitical world that regulates many other relationships of food.
economy and sociality. And we socialize with dogs through what Kohn (2013 , p 144)
has called, at least in the case of the Avila Runa of Amazonian Ecuador, a form of
"trans-species pidgin" , containing elements typical of a pidgin , such as reduced
Quichua grammar, syntax and lexicon , but also particular tem1s used only with dogs.
As Kohn makes clear, it is the entangled nature of dog and human lives, dog and
human relations that replicate colonial relations in other ways, as well as the lin-
guistic features that are similar to pidgins, that make this analogy work. Looking at
dogs and humans more broadly, it becomes clear that to interpret the capacity of a
dog to do th ings in isolation from the social relations of which it is part is to fall into
precisely the same trap that befalls studies of humans as isolated monads.
Another weakening of the argument comes in the fonn of challenges to its uni-
versa lism. Wilkins (2003 , p 171) shows through analysis of Arrernte speakers from
central Australia that "pointing with the index finger is not a universal in socio-
cultural and semiotic tem1s" . The assumptions about universalism have been based,
once again , on a nan-ow cultural sample that is generalized to include all humans.
Where lack of pointing has been observed, this is explained away in tenns of sup-
pression: it is a universal feature that may not be expressed in some contexts or may
be expressed differently because ofreasons of politeness or other factors. But unless
we examin e the gestural patterns of a community, both in emic and etic tenns - not
assuming therefore that something that looks like pointing means pointing, and
exploring instead the local interpretations of meaning - we cannot make such
assumptions. The position that emerges is not that pointing doesn't matter, nor that it
does not play an important role in human life, but rather that claims to universality
and human uniqueness are at best suspect - based on naJTow populations and
inadequate anthropological data - and that some animals may share some pointing
capacities with humans.
For some, such as Tomase llo (2008, 2014), the difference between humans and
chimpanzees is a matter of degree, whereas for others, such as Bejarano (2011 , 64 ),
behaviours such as pointing are a result of the "exclusively human cogniti ve ability
that I call the 'third mode of processing others' eyes' (or, more in general , the 'dual ity
of mental centres ' )" . For Bejarano (2011 , p I) , " human beings are the only animal
capable of conceiving the in ner states ofanother individual looking at them", and it is
this process of interpreting others' gazes that is the crucial phase in perceiving the
minds of others, from which unfold many other abilities peculiar to humans,
including syntax. The distinction here, then, is that if we assume that pointing must
necessarily be based on the capacity to process where others ' eyes are looking and
what is going on inside their heads, and if we can show that only humans are able to
do this, then pointing must be uniquely human. If, however, we appreciate that some
animals do share some features of cooperation and consciousness with humans, and
that they do, at least when interacting with humans, use fingers or other directional
means to draw attention to something else, then the divide may be less than absolute,
and pointing may no longer be assumed to be something that all and only humans do.
Tomasello 's (2014) work partially undenn ines this great divide. For Tomasello
et al. (2007, p720) , "human-style cooperative communication does not depend on
Animals and language 87
language"; the dependency is the other way round. Pointing may therefore rep-
resent a key phylogenetic and ontogenetic transition from "nonlinguistic to lin-
guistic forms of human communication" (p720). From this point of view, there is
no great mystery about the development of language in evolutionary terms: its
origins lie in the nonverbal communication of our closest relatives . And there is no
reason to denigrate animals or develop pointlessly esoteric versions oflanguage in
order to support this divide. For Tomasello (2014, p 150), great apes "cognitively
represent the world in abstract fonnat, they make complex causal and intentional
inferences with logical structure, and they seem to know, at least in some sense,
what they are doing while they are doing it". Importantly, too, this means, as
suggested in Chapters 3 and 4, that human language is best understood in inte-
grational rather than segregational terms. There is good evidence to suggest,
furthennore, that in languages such as Murrinhpatha (an indigenous Australian
language), whose speakers appear to use minimal or no terms of spoken spatial
deixis, "co-speech pointing gestures accompanying demonstratives are not merely
helpful additions but are a necessary part of spatial deixis, and presumably this
holds true with all languages" (Blythe et al., 2016, p 155). That is to say, gesture is
where language emerged from and gesture is a crucial part oflanguage, not just an
addition to it. Once again this demands a more expansive version oflanguage than
is common in applied linguistics.
Notes
Though I do have some goldfish in a large ceramic bowl on the balcony, and I like playing
anthropomorphic games around them, telling visitors that they will answer to their names.
Stand above the bowl and call Socrates, Jean-Paul (Sartre - the one with bulging eyes) and
Simone (to keep Jean-Paul company) and they'll come to the surface, mouths open.
2 He repo11s a reconunendation in the journal Science not to study animal perceptions unless
you already have tenure.
3 This practice is sti ll to be fully attested though there are many accounts by park rangers and
Indigenous Australians of these raptors starting fires. This also ties to the arguments by
Tidemann et al. (2010) that in order to learn more about animals we need to engage with
Indigenous knowledge.
6 Mutual misunderstanding
Mutual intelligibility
A common and perhaps fairly reasonable ass umption in a great deal of work on
language and commun ication is that the purpose of language is to communicate
ideas between people, and that the general effect of such activity is to arrive at a fonn
of mutual comprehension. For those wo rking in areas such as the use of English as a
lingua franca , for example, with all the threats such a noti on poses when compared
with more stable forms of communication , we are often ass ured that mutual intel-
ligibili ty can sti ll occur: "when people choose to communicate via a lingua franca",
Seidlhofer (201 1, p99) explains, "they are usuall y conscious of having to make
a certain effo1t to ensure mutual intelli gibili ty and communicati ve efficiency".
Whereas from some perspectives, mutual comprehension may only be assured by
the use of a shared and standardized fonn of lang uage, the argument here is that
using English as a lingua franca, which is always a more open-ended and negotiable
process, can nonetheless atTive at a similar end point of mutual intelligibility.
Staking out a realist approach to language (Caiter and Sealey, 2000) (to wh ich we
shall return in Chapter 7)- "languages are objective and real" and "language practices
endorsed by a group have to be uph eld within a lin guistic and ideational environment
that is anterior to them and that wi ll shape profoundly the so1ts of practices they
uphold" (Seal ey and Carter, 2013 , p273) - Sealey and Carter (201 3, p2 73) suggest that
languages "enable mutual intelligibility among their speakers". These positions share
several simil ar assumptions: by communicating in the same language people can
atTive at a state of mutual comprehension; this is done by shating a code and the ideas
that are then passed to and fro in that language; and the fact that we unders tand each
other or not is a demonstrati on of the distinctive existence of different and separate
languages (we don't understand people who speak different languages, and we do
understand those who speak the same one). As I have argued e lsewhere (Pennycook,
2007b), myths about English as an international language depend on th is assumption
of understanding: since people around the world are apparently abl e to communicate
w ith each other in English , then it's obvious that English exists. Or, from the other side
of the coin, since people around the world can't understand each other, they must be
speaking different lan guages.
On the face of it these might appear reasonable arg uments, but on closer inves-
tigation it becomes clear that they assume as premises what they set out to
Mutual misunderstanding 91
demonstrate. Thus to claim that we need a thing called a common language in order
to communicate successfully (assuming therefore both the successful effects of
communication as well as the grounds for its effects), or to assert that if we don 't
understand each other, we must therefore be using different languages (assuming
therefore both the unsuccessful effects of communication and the nature of the
impediments to communication), is to have already presupposed that languages
exist as distinct entities that facilitate or hinder communication, and that under-
standing is the result of speaking the same language and misunderstanding the
result of speaking different languages. Not only does this way of thinking overlook
many other ways we may understand each other - from the role of translingual
registers (Pennycook, in press) to a wider understanding of semiotic assemblages
(Pennycook, 2017) - but it also assumes that mutual understanding is both possible
and the goal generally of using language.
This view of language is also based more generally on a model of cooperative
behaviour that exists outside relations of power, inequality and antipathy. As
I suggested a number of years ago (Pennycook, 2003), while we may at some level
wish to acknowledge the usefulness of English as a language of global com-
munication , we clearly also need to acknowledge it as the language of global
miscommunication, or perhaps discommunication. This is not merely a question
of misunderstanding but rather of the role of English as a language that is linked to
inequality, injustice and the prevention of communication. It is to the topic of
human understanding and the possibility of mutual misunderstanding (Taylor,
1992) that I tum in this chapter. I shall explore first the premises that underpin
notions of language and understanding as very pai1icular ways of thinking about
language and communication that derived from the humanist focus on talking
heads (see also Chapter4 ). I shall then explore in more depth through an analysis of
metro lingual data (Pennycook and Otsuji, 20 l 5a) how contexts of apparent mis-
understanding may shed more light on processes or communication than do
assumptions about understanding. It is to ideas of alignment or attunement that we
can more usefully tum as part of an expanded posthumanist framework of semiotic
assemblages.
A B
Excerpt 6.1
(N: Nabil, C: Customer)
Japanese italics; English plain (translations in brackets)
N: Kore ... Mash serori. Ni serori. (This ... mashed celery. Celery stew.)
2 C: Ni serori. (Celery stew)
3 N: Ni serori. (Celery stew)
Here, using the Japanese words for celery (serori: -t a 1J ) and stew (ni: .;ft), Nabil
and his customer appear to have anived at a reasonable agreement about what is
being served and eaten, even though a celery stew seems a slightly unlikely dish,
especially as a dessert. But then the customer becomes puzzled noticing the colour of
the supposed cele1y stew.
Excerpt 6.2
(N: Nabil, C: Customer)
Japanese italics; French bold; English plain (translations in brackets)
96 Mutual misunderstanding
C: Pinku. Serori. Ehhh? (Pink. Celery. Ehhh'?)
2 N: Pink?
3 C: ( ... ) Serori.
4 N: Eh?
5 C: Ahh.
6 N: Nani betterave. (What beetroot.)
7 C: Eh?
8 N: Betterave, no? Ahh. Celeri remoulade, yo u know? (Beetroot, no? Ahh.
Celery remoulade.)
At this point things have become rather confused. Also puzzled by the pink colour.
Nabil now explains that it 's beetroot, using the French tem1 betterave (line 6, with
hi s distinctive apical [r] and shift from word-final stress). The French word fo r
beetroot does not appear to be of much help to his customer, however, and in an
case Nabil quickly (line 8) rejects this in favour ofanother option, celeri remoulade.
a common dish using grated celery root (also known as celeriac) and a remoulade
sauce (a mayonnaise-based sauce also used to accompany fish) . Ce/eri remou/ade is
a common dish (a cousin in some ways to coleslaw), which might also be served with
other crudites (traditional French appetizer), such as beetroot, hence possibly the
connections for Nabil between the pink dish he has served, celery and beetroot. But a
celery remoulade seems unlikel y (it's a fairly ordinary dish even for a bistro, and in
any case it's neither pink nor a dessert). There is no obvious relation between his two
offerings (ce/eri remoulade and beetroot) - or only to the extent that they might
both be part of a plate of crudites - nor between either of these and the dish he has
served, especially as desse11. Not surprisingly, the customer continues in confused
persistence.
Excerpt 6.3
(N: Nabil, C: Customer)
Japanese italics; French bold; English plain (translations in brackets)
C: Pinku pinku pinku kore (.) Serori serori serori serori. (Pink pink pink this(.)
Celery, celery, celery, celery.)
2 N: Pinku? (Pink?)
3 C: Pinku pinku (Pink pink.)
4 N: Pinku:: (Pinnnk.)
5 C:( ... )
6 N: Ahh.
7 C: Serori serori serori. (Celery, celery, celery.)
8 N: Ceteri rouge? (Red cele1y?)
9 C: No no.
I0 N: [referring to another customer's question about his meal] Chicchai? Koko?
... Sorry? Koko? (Small? This? ... Sony? This?)
Mutual misunderstanding 97
11 N: Chef! Chef! C'est quoi celeri rouge en France? (What 's red celety in
France?)
12 N: [refetTing to the other customer's query about the size of the potiion he has
been served] II dit c'est grand. (He says it's big.)
Here, while as always dealing with several things at once (a comment by another
customer about the size of a dish), and using his atTay oflinguistic resources, Nabil
finally seems to sense something is wrong with both celery and beetroot as desc1iptors
of the dish . Recognizing the customer's confusion, Nabil accommodates with a more
Japanese soundingpinku and even the exaggerated version ,pinku:: (lines 2 and 3), by
inserting a vowel after the consonant. The word pink, which occurs in both English
and Japanese (pinku: 1::0
Excerpt 6.4
(N: Nabil, Chl: Chef! , Ch2: Chef2)
French bold (translations in brackets)
At first sight, the ability of the cook to conectly decode Nabil 's question about red
celery is a remarkable piece of interpretation: ceJeri rouge/red celery is not a very
obvious tenn for rhubarb (red celery does in fact exist in its own right as a type
of cele1y). At second glance, however, we might suggest that the chefs' quick
interpretation here was assisted by the fact that they prepared the rhubarb dish to start
with and may also have overheard some of this confused conversation. Rather than
translating celeri rouge as rhubarbe with only linguistic clues, they have worked
out that Nabil 's odd question about red celery in fact refers to the rhubarb tati he has
just passed to the customer. The spatial anangements, cooking practices and spatial
repe110ire contribute here to the naming of this red dish.
98 Mutual misunderstanding
Now that the missing tenn rhubarbe has finally been established, Nabil turns to
PielTe (Chef 2) to ask if he knows what the Japanese for rhubarb is, since it is not
clear that rhubarbe - like the earlier and mistaken betterave - has clarified things
for th e customer: Rhubarbe, nihongo wa:> J'ai oublie. Pierre :> (Rhubarb, in
Japanese. I've forgotten. Pie1Te?).
Nabil's Japanese question (nihongo wa?) is taken up by the other chef, Patrick.
Pie!Te by then has moved on to another task.
Excerpt 6.6
(N: Nab il , C: Customer, Ch l: Chef I)
.Japanese italics; French bold; English plain (translations in brackets)
While the customer continues almost to chant his confused serori refrain in the
background - he does not appear to have picked up on the revelation that it is in fact
rhubarb - the chef tries to recall the Japanese for rhubarb, and offers, a little
uncertain ly, a Japanese translation (line 4) - aka serori (red celery) - of abil 's
earl ier celeri rouge (red celery). Nabil, apparently not picking up on the custo-
mer 's continued chanting of serori and assuming instead that the customer now
knows this is in fact rhubarb, asks the customer to confinn the chef's aka serori
(red celery) (line 6), getting the reply in lin e 7 that it's the same in Japanese
(Nihongo mo serori). The customer, however, who is still puzzling over the idea of
celery, appears to be commenting onl y that the word fo r celery is more or less the
same in English or French and Japanese. But Nabil appears to think that he has
received confrmation ofhis chef's claim that the Japanese for rhubarb is aka serori
(line 8) .
So, finally, although Nabil has finall y worked out what it is he has served the
customer - rhubarb tai1 - he now appears to believe that rhubarb is aka serori in
Japanese (not commonl y known , the tenn rubaahu ( J~ 1' - 7 ) is in fact the most
usual) . Fortunatel y, they return to the safer ground of discussing the taste.
Excerpt 6. 7
(N: Nabil , C: Customer)
Japanese italics ; French bold ; English plain (translations in brackets)
Mutual misunderstanding 99
N: Aa, soo. Tarto sugoi oishii deshou ? (Ah, right. The tart is really tasty, isn't
it?)
2 C: Oishii. Kore oishii. (Tasty. This tastes good.)
3 N: Tarte a la rhubarbe. C'est tres tres bon. (Rhubarb tati. It 's very, very
good.)
Although from the outside we can work out more or less what is going on, and
although we can see various multilingual strategies at work, they generally misfire,
with a number oftenns - betterave, aka serori - not registering with various of the
participants, with Nabil suggesting terms in French that don 't seem to make much
sense (from celeri rouge to ceteri remoulade) and now possibly believing that aka
serori is the Japanese for rhubarb (which it isn 't), and the customer still confused
(though happy enough with the dish). Such is the way that meaning gets negotiated
across and against languages. Finally, Nabil settles the interaction by returning to a
discussion of the taste of the food, by employing his subtle metro lingual accom-
modation strategies, where, in the first line in Japanese, tart is made more Japanese
with its added ending tarto sugoi oishii deshou? and by using the capital afforded by
French and refening to French cuisine: Tarte ala rhubarbe. C'est tres tres bon.
There are several implications of this exchange. It should come as no surprise that
the negotiation of meaning in metrolingual contexts may be unsuccessful, partially
successful or just rather foggy (it is New Year's Eve, after all) . The patiicular foods
under discussion also clearly play an imp01iant mediating role here: they are pati of
the action. Such foods and tastes not only mean different things to the participants as
they move in and around their attempts to establish what is on the plate, but they also
have very different meanings according to the different culinary backgrounds of the
patiicipants. Rhubarb is an exotic vegetable (or perhaps a fruit, depending on how it
is cooked) in Japan and therefore has a ve1y different meaning to how it may be
understood in France. This customer, however, who is also in the restaurant industry,
is persistently curious about the ingredient of the dessert dish. The mobility of
ingredients and meanings and people and linguistic resources thus come together in
this place as part of its spatial repertoire. As discussed in Chapter 3, we can then start
to see this in tem1s of an assemblage, a coming together of people, languages, places
and objects to provide a particular set of semiotic possibilities.
Despite what are perhaps an unusual set oflinguistic resources - an unfavourably
busy context of communication late at night in a small bistro - this is what com-
munication looks like. This is not the exception - miscommunication - that proves
the rnle - understanding - but rather a luminous example of the everyday ways in
which mutual misunderstanding is our communicative nonn. Rather than the flat- -1*:.
tened humanist VtStOn of a common humanity where we unaerstand each other -
where the common universal property of language enables us to reach mutual
comprehensibility- the ways we communicate are based in misunderstanding. But
misunderstanding here is not taken in its negative sense, based on the assumed
possibility of understanding as a prefened norm, but as a way of considering that
humans are not universally united in cognitive similarity, able to understand each
other as long as they speak the same language, but rather are c:lways seeking forms of
I 00 Mutual misunderstanding
alignment as they work each other out. As Taylor notes, language theorists (literary
scholars, linguists, discourse analysts, semioticians, philosophers of language,
theorists of rhetoric or communication)
Thinking otherwise
One of the goals of intercultural communication is to atTive at fonns of mutual
understanding that are otherwise obfuscated by our cultural frameworks. Once we
get beneath the surface of culture, our shared humanity can help us to an-ive at fonns
of shared understanding. Bowe et al. (2014, p 1), for example, argue that an
understanding of "a wide range of factors that contribute to the interpretation of
language in context" and "how these principles interact in a given language, and in
intercultural conmrnnication, is crncial to the development of mutual understanding
in the global world". As we go through the many stages of disorientation , confusion,
recognition or alienation that engagement with cultural difference can entail , an end
goal may be the development of an increasing awareness of oneself, of one 's own
difference, of how one may look through the eyes of others. Dealing with the
complexities of intercultural communication, according to Sercu et al. (2005 , p2),
requires a range of characteristics and competencies, including not only a will-
ingness to engage with other cultures and avoid essentialist judgments but also an
"ability to look upon oneself from the outside, the ability to see the world through
others' eyes".
This is an appealing goal: to step out of ourselves, to shed our assumptions, to see
ourselves as others see us. To question such a possibility might seem to presuppose a
relativism that rests on cultural incommensurability: in the same way that we cannot
know what it's like to be a bat (Chapter 8), we cannot know each other because we
are too deeply bound up with our own worldviews. This is not the argument I wish to
make, however. Rather than all people being locked inside cultural world views from
which there is no escape, we are nonetheless always located in social, cultural and
political ways that render any model of mutual understanding unlikely. To be human
is to be different. Too many of the premises of intercultural communication rest on
the same principles of mutual understanding di scussed above. To be sure, they start
from a potentially different standpoint: this is not so much the telementational vision
of words conveying meanings from head to head as it is different groups trying to
reach understanding through the murkiness of different cultural understandings .
And yet there remains an assumption that we can know another and that we can
Mutual misunderstanding 101
know how another knows us. To suggest that one can see oneself through others'
eyes implies not only a capacity to step outside oneself, to think outside one's own
locus of enunciation, but also to enter the position of another, to know how a cultural
other is framing the world, and in addition to know how this other is framing you.
The problem here is the assumptions of humanist commonality, of an underlying
knowability that is obscured by culture but which can also be overcome.
For Levinas, Western philosophy has consistently denied the alterity of the other,
insisting instead on similarity, on the incorporation of the Other into totalizing
frameworks of universality. Western philosophy, argues Levinas (196911 991), has
long been caught up with the dual obsessions of Being and the Same. It has sought to
account for human ontology through an appeal to similarity. Thus in his critique of
Heidegger (whose great work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) is directly alluded to in
Levinas ' (1979) Le temps et l'autre (Time and the Other)) Levinas insists that the
philosophical tradition that has focused on being - ontology - has failed in the
ethical demand to engage with difference. "Western philosophy," Levinas asserts
( 1969/1 991 , p43 ), "has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the
same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of
being." We need, by contrast, a philosophy that takes otherness seriously as an
ethical concern. "The strangeness of the Other, his in-educibility to the I, to my
thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of
my spontaneity, as ethics" (Levinas, 196911 991 , p43).
For Levinas, central to any philosophy must be an ethics ofresponsibility towards
the other: how can one coexist with the other while still leaving their being, their
otherness, intact? To claim that one might be able to see the world through others'
eyes mns the risk of overlooking the location from which both the knower and the
known, and the perceived knowledge of the other's understanding of the knower, are
enunciated. Thus Fabian (2007, p27) sees the failure ofanthropological discourse as
"a failure to recognize the epistemological significance of alterity". This failure to
engage with difference is therefore both an ontological and epistemological one, an
attempt to squeeze human difference into categories of sameness. There is no zero
point from which I can know the other, he or she can know me and I can believe to
know both. Hence, as Mignolo insists,
Tempting though a belief in seeing oneself through others' eyes may be, we need to
do more work here to understand space, politics, ethics and the other. This is why the
decolonial politics of Mignolo and others seeks to undennine the epistemologies
of humanism and diversity, which fail to engage in otherness by assuming, in both
ethnocentric and anthropocentric ways, the centrality of particular visions of
102 Mutual misunderstanding
humanity. It is on these grounds that Mignolo (2011) argues for the importance of
sta11ing with " I am where I do", acknowledging one's locus of enunciation in ways
that Descai1es' disembodied, delocalized, "je pense, done je suis" can never do.
Mignolo (2011, p99) "flatly rejects the assumption that rational and universal trnths
are independent of who presents them, to whom they are addressed, and why they
have been advanced in the first place". As Foucault ( l 984a) argued, it becomes
indispensable at a certain point in life to try to think otherwise - penser autrement -
or, as Kearney ( 1988, 364) puts it, to take up "the ethical demand to imagine
otherwise", if we want to continue to think and reflect usefully. If philosophy is to do
anything other than continue to rethink the already thought, we have to ask how and
how far we can start to think otherwise.
This line of thinking is what Hoy (2004) tenns critical resistance. Many fo1111s of
resistance to power and domination and many " utopian imaginings of freedom may
not be aware of the extent to which they presuppose the patterns of oppression that
they are resisting" (Hoy, 2004, p3 ). Hence, Mignolo (2010, p3 l 3) insists , the
decolonial option needs a process of de/inking from "Eurocentric categories of
thought which carries both the seed of emancipation and the seed of regulation and
oppression". In Maldonado-Toll"es' words, the de-colonial turn
Or, put another way, the "hubris of the zero point" that M ignolo (2009 , p 162) alludes
to- the assumption that one can speak from an anonymous , generalizable, universal
position - brings into focus the same problem of human hubris that I have been
pursuing throughout this book.
This is the work that posthumanist thinking can do, question in g assumptions
about the commonality of humanity, the relationships among humans, animals and
things, our position in the world. As Butler (2005) puts it at the end of her discussion
of what it means to give an account of'oneselj:
"do their own thing," but still communicate with each other. Not uniformity, but
alignment is more imp011ant for such communication. Each brings his or her
own language resources to find a strategic fit with the pa11icipants and purpose
of a context.
(Canagarajah, 2007a, p94)
Such processes of alignment can be seen, for example, in the ways in which Deaf
people communicate through what is known as International Sign: "a mode of
signed communication benveen deaf persons who do not know any sign language in
c01mnon . . . characterized by the strategic recrnitment of lexical and syntactic
resources rather than a stable grammar, and thus by rampant variation" (Green,
2014, p446) . As Green (2014, p446) notes, "what is particular about deaf people is
their capacity for connecting and forging commonalities with other deaf people,
rooted in and materialized through the ability to communicate in sign across
languages". This involves "the socially expected turning of one ' s corporeal, cog-
nitive, and moral attention towards another" (Green, 2014, pp446- 7) or what one
might call alignment. Just as Harris (2009, p74) observes that there is no need to
postulate that nvo speakers "must both know the same language in order to engage in
verbal communication'', so the practices of deaf communication suggest even more
strongly that there is no need to postulate that nvo signers must know the same sign
language in order to communicate. Rather, they need to know "how to integrate their
I 06 Mutual misunderstanding
own semiological activ ities with those of their interlocutor" (HaJTis, 2009, p75) or to
engage in practices of alignment with their co-signer.
These practices of alignment, as Gee (20 l 5a) notes , are far more than individuals
orienting towards each other, since they invo lve multiple interlocking levels ohalk
(accent, intonation, pragmatics), ways of interacting, language styles (registers,
social varieties), genres (textua l organizations) and discursive organizations of
meaning. To this picture we also need to add a focus on bodies, clothes, a1tefacts
and the environment: "Our thinking cannot be complete or successful without
pmticipation ofother people, resources and things" (Canagarajah, 2013 , p32). This
in turn needs processes of adaptation so that "the meaning-making potential of
language ... emerges through processes of alignment and adaptation , and does not
reside in the system oflanguage or cognition" (Canagarajah , 2013 , p32) . Suggesting
a more varied adjustment than alignment - both in terms of an expanded notion of
~ what we need to adapt to (people, language, objects, place) and a more delicate fonn
::::,~~ of tuning in rather than lining up with - attunement 2 arguably provides a more useful
~~ way of thinking about how we understand each other.
The idea of attunement brings a focus on "new ways of collaborating with, lis-
tening to, and granting authority to new kinds ofvoices , including more-than-human
life and fo1111s of material agency" (Brigstocke and Nooran i, 2016 , pp 1- 2). It thus
brings an avowedly posthumanist slant to the discussion , urging us to attune not just
to the alterity of our interlocutors but also to the world ofanimals , objects and places.
From Indigenous activism that connects the deco Ionia! critique of European uni-
versa li sm (Mignolo, 2011) with Indigenous understandings of the agency o,/'place
(Larsen and Johnson , 2016) to class-oriented activism that seeks a new appeal to
interconnectedness that can provide an alternative to nationalism (Blencowe, 2016),
attunement opens a broad space of engagement with the other-than-human.
Understand ing how a place speaks to us - Larsen and Johnson (2016) discuss,
for example , the Waitangi Treaty Grounds on the orth Island of Aotearoa/
New Zealand, where Maori chiefs and agents of the British Crown signed the Treaty
of Waitangi in 1840 - "requires that we listen to places as a more-than-human
assembly" (Larsen and Johnson , 2016 , p 153 ).
Attunement, like alignment, allows for a more complex and diverse way of
thinking about how humans and non-humans orient towards each other than notions
of mutual understanding or intersubjective confonnity. Drawing on the notion of
attunement - ~eaning -m aking occurs in relational te1111s rather than in linguistic~
cognitive systems - and semiotic assemblages - the corning-together of diverse
groupings of vibrant materials - we can see the importance of "the role of spirits,
an imals, objects, and other actors in the coproduction of the world" (Brigstocke and
Noorani , 2016 , p3 ). Any understanding of meaning "requires attentiveness to
contact zones, to modes of encounter and translation " (Brigstocke and Noorani,
2016 , p3 ): "When objects, forces , and spirits that exceed the spaces and times of
human experience press themselves on us wi th increasing force, this creates
heightened challenges for attuning to our environments". This focus brings together
Thurlow's (2016) queering of CDS, with its emphasis on embodiment, materiality,
affect and perfonnance, with the notion of semiotic assemblages as momentary
Mutual misunderstanding 107
constellations of diverse things and places and the need for processes of attunement
as a useful way to consider the complexity of mutually related meaning making.
A posthumanist applied linguistics does not assume rational human subjects
engaged in mutually comprehensible dialogue. It does not start from a premise of
human universality but instead from a point of difference, from a position that
demands we understand the alterity of the other, that "places diversity at centre
stage" of linguistic understanding (Evans and Levinson, 2009, p429). Nor does a
posthumanist applied linguistics in fact assume mutual misunderstanding - the
phrase is used here to counter the normative premises of understanding- but rather
suggests that our "interactions - and misunderstandings - take place in cultural and
sociohistorical contexts that are never neutral or natural, and they reflect and
reproduce a world that includes conflict, ambiguity and uncertainty" (Bailey, 2004,
p4 l 0). Communication involves multimodal and multisensory semiotic practices of
the everyday, including the dynamic relations between semiotic resources, activi-
ties, artefacts and space. The point is not that we never understand each other, but
rather that understanding is messy, incomplete, different, complicated and never t
entirely shared.
Notes
l For more background about this research, see Pennycook and Otsuji (2014a, 201 Sa).
2 While I find the notion of attunement useful, I am aware ofits auditoty connotations, which
might make it less suitable for discussion of deaf communication.
7 Re-engaging with reality
In a 2004 article in the New York Times, Ron Suskind quoted an unnamed advisor
(later claimed to be Karl Rove: Danner, 2007) to George W Bush who mocked the
journalist as part of "what we call the reality-based community" - that is, people
who believe that so lutions emerge from the "jud icious study of discernible reality"
(Suskind, 2004 ). The advisor went on to explain that thi s was not how things worked
any more . The USA was an empire that decided what counted as reality, and in any
case people were far less swayed by appeals to reality than appeals to faith , style or
presence. Fast-forward to 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as President. Part
of that story has arguabl y changed: claims to empire might still have been plausible
early in the twenty-first century, but a decade or so later Trump 's rallying cry to
"Make America Great Again" is so evidently a response to the decline of American
power that the emperor is starting to look rather naked. But the dismissal of a
" reality-based community" that believes in the careful study of reality has only
gained strength while the empire has weakened: a major discussion following
Trump's election (though the issue clearly has a longer history) has been the use
offake news and alternative.facts in a post-truth era. The widespread production of
news that bears no relation to reality, the easy dismissal of news as fake and the
acceptance of the possibility that facts have alternatives is shifting the landscape of
journalism, news and ideas of reality (Amarasingam , 2011; Marchi , 2012).
Now for those of us who have been tempted over the years to place scare quotes
around 'reality ', this raises an alarming concern . If we are not in this "real ity-based
community", since we also questioned the social construction of reality, whose
side are we on? Also noting the problem of how we relate to issues such as climate
change (a discussion that looms ever larger as we start to understand what it means
to have entered the Anthropocene ), Latour (2004a) wonders how it is that a critical
philosophy of science - one that has been sceptical about scientific cl ai ms to
kn.owl edge - can suddenly find itself apparentl y on the same side of a debate as a
so-ca lled climate sceptic (both agree that we should be sceptical about claims to
scientific knowledge). How did we get to the point, Latour asks , where socia l
critique- work inspired by Bourdieu or Foucault, for example - starts to look a bit
like conspiracy theories? What shou ld we make of"those mad mixtures ofknee-
jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful expla-
nation from the social neverland" when they start to look Iike " the weapons of
Re-engaging with reality 109
social critique" (Latour, 2004a, p230)? How has it come to this, when either we are
derided as members of a "reality-based community" or we find ourselves aligned
with climate change sceptics or proponents of empire?
Pointing to problems in critical literacy and critical discourse analysis, Luke
(2013 , p 146) argues that we need "an acknowledgement of the existence of 'trnth'
.
and 'reality' outside of the particular texts in question". Is it useful to suggest
that "texts about the Holocaust or slavery, or about global warn1ing constitute
.
yet further or more textual representat10ns of the world?" (Luke, 2013 , p 146).
The problem, Luke (2013 , p 136) suggests, is that since the linguistic or discursive
tum, in the social sciences, the "conventional wisdom" has been that "realities are
socially constructed by human beings through discourse". But what about "truths,
facts about history, social and material reality that they purport to represent?"
(p 146). Luke goes on to argue that critical literacy or critical discourse analysis
needs "a commitment to the existence and accessibility of 'truth ', 'facts ' and
'realities ' outside of the texts in question" (p 146). In a similar vein, Latour argues
that
a ce11ain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us
to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as frien ds by the
wrong s011 ofallies because ofa little mistake in the definition ofits main target.
(Latour, 2004a, p23 l)
This etTor, Latour argues, was that in critiquing empiricism or positivism or par-
ticular claims to trnth, critical work came to focus on the ways in which trnth or
reality were conshucted - it moved away from reality - rather than trying to get
closer to the facts. What we need, Latour argues (2004a, p23 l ), is to change the focus
of critique, to cultivate "a stubbornly realist attitude" through a realism that deals not
so much with "matters of fact" but with "matters of concern".
For applied linguists, such concerns echo not only through domains such as
critical discourse analysis but also research more generally and the understanding of
what empi1ical inquiry is actually describing. As some argue, the discursive tum in
applied linguistics, in which "social science methodologies foregrounded the
impo11ance of discourse as constitutive of social being", may be responsible for the
"one gaping hole in the work of many applied linguists today", namely the tendency
to overlook "the economic and material base of human activity and social life"
(Block et al., 2012, pp 3-4 ). The erasure of social class in applied linguistics is
coupled with an inability to engage with real material conditions (Block, 2014).
Ifwe heed this call to re-engage better with reality, to develop a stubbornly realist
attitude, however, there is some difficult work to be done. Among other things,
ifreality relates to mate1ialism (one way of thinking about reality is to engage with
material conditions), we also need to consider, as Bennett (201 0a) makes clear, the
relationship between old and new materialisms. That is to say, ifthe argument is that
one path to escape what are seen as idealistic (non-realist) conceptions of the world is
to engage more readily with forms of materialism, the question still remains as to
what approach to materialism should be given priority.
110 Re-engaging with reality
We also need to get ourselves out of the supposed opposition between relativ ism
and reali sm that is so often invoked in these disc ussions (construction ism , post-
modern ism and so on are labell ed relativist in opposition to a more solid realism).
That there was once a time when a war could be waged between " relati vists,"
who claimed that language refers only to itself, and "reali sts," who claimed that
language may occasionally correspond to a true state of affairs, w ill appear to
our descendants as strange as the idea of fighting over sacred scro lls.
(Latour, 1999, p296)
As a number of writers from a posth uman ist perspecti ve (Barad, 2007; Bogost,
20 12) have suggested, thi s division is a product of humanist thought that is, at the
very least, unhelpful. We shall return to this more general discussion of how
we might find a way fo1ward here by thinking about matters of concern (Latour,
2004a), critical realism (Bh askar, 1997; Haslanger, 2012) and specul ative realism
(Mei 1lassol!x , 2008; Gratton, 2014 ), but first let us cons id er what is at stake here as
we start to make claims abo ut reality.
without taking pait in discourse, without being (or, at least, having been) a
member of a discourse community, we have no way of "knowing" what we
114 Re-engaging with reality
experience. Only as a participant in discourse, only as someone who is (or was)
engaged in symbolic interaction, can we make sense of what we experience, can
we observe a cat at the bottom of a garden .
(Teube1t, 2013, p275)
Teube1t argues strongly against the fall acy of unmed iated experience and indeed
sta1ts to look quite posthurnanist in his objections to what he sees as an emphasis on
the autonomy of the monadic individual : what humans believe to be "their authentic
unadulterated experience" is in fact
flat top . They also serve a very wide range of functions , and above all it is the
different social and cultural roles that we bring to the table and that the table brings to
us that make a table what it is. Serres' (1985) chapter (in The Five Senses) on the
senses of taste and smell is titled 'Tables', since it is at tables that we sit to taste food
and drink, and where, he argues, we need to learn to differentiate according to taste
and smell rather than integrate according to language. Tables are human a1iefacts.
We perhaps forget too easily the processes of production - the carpentry - that may
have gone into a fine wooden table. The " intimate interconnection of tool use, wood
construction, and speech''. that Rose (2004, p85) describes in the carpenters'
workshop is all too often hidden from our thinking about the materiality of a table.
The carpenter, according to Bogost (2012, p93 ), "must contend with the material
resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philos-
ophy" . Tables are extensions ofourselves, and when we claim that touching the table
is proof of material existence, and aim thereby to refute what appear to be over-
extended claims about the ways in which reality is constrncted, we also need to
understand that this is ve1y much paii of our history, of our relation to tables, of our
architecture and design, of our social and cultural practices, which leads us to
interpellate the table into discourses about reality, and the table to interpellate us into
a pa1iicular set of social and cultural relations.
And so when someone claims that touching a table is a guarantor of reality, such a
claim is a ve1y pa1iicular one, resting on the immediate and the empirical and
excluding from the equation on the one hand the many social, spatial, historical and
cultural meanings that we also bring to the table. The table is a good, solid object, a
familiar one, a useful one; and when we operate in this mode - reality is tangible and
best addressed by using our sense of touch (putting aside the higher senses of sight
and hearing, which we tend to exclude at this point as arbiters ofreality) - we look
for presence and solidity. Yet the focus is often on tables because it is in their
presence that we have such discussions, which suggests that the table is not merely
an object with certain functions but also a social and cultural object. It is often around
tables that we gather to talk, socialize, eat, d1ink and discuss reality. On the other
hand the touching of the table is based on human assumptions that tables exist only
in so far as we touch and perceive them, only as mere objects that we can rest our
coffee cups on. Yet we might also consider them through alternative lenses, as
vibrant objects in temporary assemblages (that include chairs, tablecloths, food,
drink, cutle1y, conversations), as actants that interpellate us into fonns of social-
ization. It is not just a question of what the human brings to the table but also what the
table brings to the human.
Notes
A confounding element in the scepticism of Bishop Berkeley and others (things would not
exist unless sensed by humans - esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived)) was the question
of where a Christian God fits into the picture. For Hume, the question should be side-
stepped: "To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the
veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit" (Hume, 1777, §120
(1975, pl53)) . The dilemma is nicely captured in Ronald Knox 's (1888- 1957) poem:
2 Haslanger (2012) points out, however, that this argument potentially conflates causal and
constitutive construction: we need to avoid the conflation of social kinds and social causes .
3 I recall from my own youth the idea of kitchen-tab le bridge (the card game), as opposed to
the more serious game played in the rather pretentiously named drawing room of my
grandparents' farm house, on a proper felt-topped card tab le, with more serious play,
scoring and bidding.
4 I have avoided in this chapter the difficult relation between tmth and reality; for discussion,
see Blackbum (2005).
8 Towards a posthumanist applied
linguistic commons
Entangled humans
I have pulled together a range of themes in this book under the label of post-
human ism, bt1t it is not posthumanism ultim ately th at is under examination here.
The notion itself is less important than the constellation of concepts it makes
possible. It gives us a useful tool for assembling a series of interre lated ways of
thinking. Posthumanism is not a theory, or even a coh erent set of propositions, but
rather a col lection of projects that question the centrality of humans in relation to
other things on the planet. The central concern has been to interrogate human hubris,
to ask w hat is missed in the world whe n humans take themselves so seriousl y and
consider themselves the centre of all that matters. This is to question the ways
humani sm has pri v ileged the human mind as the source of knowledge and ethics
and ass um ed that humans were masters of their own intention s and desires, un ique ly
capab le of asse11ing agency. Posthumanism takes "humani ty's ontological pre-
cariousness" seriousl y (Fuller, 2011, p75), though the version of posthum ani sm
I have been developing here is neither drawn to a dystopic anti-humanist nihilism
that rej ects humans and their pl ace in th e wo rld, nor is seduced by utopi an v isions of
a transhumanist future in wh ich humans are integrated w ith machines and tech-
no logies and may ac hieve immortality. Rather, fo llow in g Brya nt (20 11 ), the goal is
to unsettle the pos ition of humans as the monarchs of being and to see humans as
entangled and implicated in other beings.
"What 's it like to be a thing?" asks Bogost (2012, p 10 ). For some, this might seem
a question too far, an impossibl e intenogation of being : we simply cannot know
w hat it 's like to be someth ing e lse, nor can we conceive of non-sentient things that
are aware of their own being . As Thomas Nagel (1974, p439) asked in hi s we ll
known paper ' What is it like to be a bat?', the issue is not whether as a human one
could imagine what it 's like to hang up side down during the day, fly aro und at night
and sense the wo rl d through echo location, but rather " what is it like for a bat to be a
bat" . Thi s, he argues, we cann ot know, since we are limited by our own subj ective
experience. So when it comes to as king what it's like to be a thing, even if we are
prepared to be fairly generous about where we draw the line between creatures that
have self-awareness and those that do not, surel y a thing can only fa ll on the negative
side of this dividing line. Even if, as did Darwin ( 1881 , p305), we believe that
A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 127
eaithwonns might be smarter than some think and indeed "have played a more
imp011ant pait in the history of the world than most persons would at first assume",
and even if we decided to grant them some fonn of agency - even if we decided this
might constitute some fmm of awareness and granted some form of knowing to the
wonny part of an earthwo1m - we would nevertheless likely draw the line at the
eaithy pa1t, at the soil itself. So if it is impossible to know what it 's like to be a bat
from a bat 's perspective, the question of what it's like to be a thing becomes doubly
impossible.
Yet such arguments remain stuck within their own anthropocentric ways of
thinking. Nagel 's (1974) position - a refutation ofreductionist or materialist argu-
ments that consciousness is the sum of its physical or bodily parts - cannot escape a
radical subjective individualism that owes much to the Kantian vision of the world
matching our perceptions. While there is good reason to be sceptical about our
capacity as humans to understand, as Derrida (2008, p9) put it, an "existence that
refuses to be conceptualized", there is also the danger here of a fo1111 of he1metic
subjectivism that, in suggesting the unknowability of others, emphasizes the sepa-
rability and uniqueness ofhumans. Asking the question "What does it feel like to be an
octopus?" Godfrey-Smith (20 17, p77) ai·gues that the problem with Nagel 's (1974)
question is the search for (or denial of) similarity. What we need to examine instead is
the question of what things feel like: "How can the fact oflife feeling like something
slowly creep into being?" (Godfrey-Smith, 2017, p78). The point from a posthumanist
perspective is to step outside anthropocentric ways of thinking, to question the div-
isions between humans and non-humans, to ask the question ofknowability from a
different perspective. The argument in Chapter 6 - questioning the idea that we can
know each other, that we can achieve mutual understanding - might at first appear
similar to a subjective standpoint (we can't know what it's like to be a bat because we
can't even know what it's like to be someone else). Rather than a focus on inter-
subjective unknowability, however, the goal here is to explore the complexity of :).
relations involved when we, ask what it means for persons or things to exist for each ~ µ..
other. ~~ _
what roles we give to bodies, things and places. Bogost's question points us in this
alternative direction. "When we ask what it means to be something", he suggests,
"we pose a question that exceeds our own grasp of the being of the world" (Bogost,
j
~his line of inquiry developed through the book, we touched on questions of the ,,,...._, v--:
senses, on the assumptions about how we believe knowledge arises in our heads and ~.._
2012, p30). To ask what it's like to be a thing therefore compels us to start to think
other.vise, to move away from assumptions about humans, knowledge, subjectivityl::
and things, and to pursue different questions about the edges of what and how
we know. To the objection that we need to maintain an ontological distinction between
humans and things in order to be able to maintain a moral distinction between different
effects of human actions (exploitation of the poor, for example), Bennett responds that
operating with a subject/object divide and a view ofhwnanity as an end in itself does
not have a paiticularly good record. An alternative approach that can "raise the status
of the materiality of which we are composed" (Bennett, 201 Oa, p 12, emphasis in
original) offers an alternative to the dominant Kantian version of morality in which
I 28 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
those who "do not confonn to a particular (Euro-Ame1ican, bourgeois, theocentric, or
other) model of personhood" routinely suffer (p 13 ).
The challenges posed by posthumanist thought emerge from many directions.
Perhaps the most ala1ming de1ive from the very real concerns about what we, as
humans, have done to the planet. Of course in the long run we know humanity wi ll
almost certainly fizzle out: life and planets and suns and stars come and go over time.
The problem is that we seem to be hastening our demise and quite a lot of other species
along with us (or in many cases before us) rather more quickly than necessaiy. While
the environment might have been seen as a rather so.ft political issue in the past, the
awareness that the planet itself is under serious threat has shifted the urgency of
environmental politics (Zizek, 2010). As Klein (2015) argues, the solution cannot be
tlu·ough capitalist-based fom1s of intervention since it is the very mechanisms of
capitalism - finding and exploiting resources- that are at the heart of the problem. In the
age of the Anthropocene, where we can see that it is not just the long stretch of geo-
logical time but also the effects of humans that matter, we are urged to stop and think.
Some of these concerns may still push us in useful , human-oriented directions:
if we don ' t all pull together and forget our petty differences, the planet will continue
to wa1111 at alam1ing rates and we (and other animals and plants) are going to have
to face serious consequences. From Klein's (2015) point of view, to limit the damage
of climate change we need fonns of collective action based on fonns of cooperation
far greater than anything capital and state governments can achieve. This might take
us towards a humanism that renders our collective action the only means of saving
the planet, but such reflections may also take us in alternative directions. What does
it mean to be human when we have become a force of nature? What do we make of
history when the Anthropocene -the geological period defined by human effects on
the planet - becomes as viable an era of study as, say, the Napoleonic Wars, the
voyages of Zheng I-le or the age of empire? Can we still hold on to our distinctions
between humanity and nature, when they are evidently part of each other? The
question that emerges here is whether a sustained belief in humanity as both problem
and solution to global crises is still convincing, or whether we need to rethink the
relation between humans and the world.
Other challenges to what it means to be human flow from these concerns.
Alongside threats posed by human destructiveness, environmental degradation and
diminishing resources, there is a renewed interest in how we relate to animals and the
other inhabitants of this planet. Posthumanism can be understood as a fo1m of
species cosmopolitanism (Nayar, 2014). What has it been about, this process of
constantly dividing humans from other animals, of emphasizing that human
language is so distinct from animal communication that it must have leapt into
existence in an unlikely moment of evolutionary extravagance? Why do we police
the notion of the human so insistently and carefully? And why have we come to
make the distinctions we do between humans and the world , not just humans and
other animals but humans and objects, that world that surrounds us but which we
have so meticulousl y separated ourselves from? Perhaps it is time to question what is
seen as inside and outside, what is assumed to happen within or without our heads,
where the boundary is assumed to lie between the body and the rest.
A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 129
From this point of view, humans are no longer set apmi from the world - distinct,
inalienable creatures who control the environment - but part of it, interwoven into
this fabric of things . And these things themselves play a role in our lives, are even
considered as agents or actants in some versions of this st01y, as part of a network that
may or may not include a human interactant, as assemblages where different things
and people and places and discourses come together. "That things are is not a matter
of debate'', Bogost (20 12, p30) points out, taking us back to the discussion of the
previous chapter. It is impo1iant to be able to acknowledge not only the reality of the
world (which includes the reality of socially constructed things) but also the question
- of how things exist in relation to each other: "What it means that something in
particular is for another thing that zs: this is the question that interests me" (Bogost,
2012, p30, emphasis in original). The notion of assemblages, discussed at numerous
points in the book, suggests a useful way to consider how things exist for each other,
how the relations between things, semiotic resources, people and space matter.
Many other social changes are underway that render human life precarious, in
paiiicular the undermining of supports that once provided food, clothing, medicine
or education. Indeed another take on posthumanism in neoliberal times -or populist
national xenophobic times, ifindeed the political climate is changing again - might
suggest that the humanism that developed in eighteenth-century Europe and perhaps
reached its apotheosis after the shame and devastation of the Second World War -
when refugee treaties were signed, international human rights were promoted, social
welfare and greater equality were championed, greater rights for women and people
of colour were achieved, fonner colonies gained their independence and goals were
set for assisting countries to rise out of poverty - has been wound back in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whatever gains had been made by an
emphasis on a shared humanity and escape from religious and autocratic authority,
we have started going backwards, returning to the folds ofreligious faith, nationalist
protectionism, xenophobia and the acceptance of the inevitability of inequality.
When Foucault (1966) suggested that the idea of Man was a recent invention that
had perhaps served its time, he was refeITing pmiicularly to the way humans had
been constructed by the human sciences, those academic disciplines that produced
humans as a coherent object of study. But he might equally, had he lived, been
talking of the ways in which this humanist ideal seemed no longer to count for what it
once had. Yet I do not wish to suggest that posthumanism leads us only down this
pessimistic path to a dystopian world. Technological advances present a rather
mixed sto1y: from some perspectives - utopian to some, dystopian to others - our
only way out is if we can merge with the machines we have created. In this trans-
humanist line of thought, the focus is on human enhancement, on the ways in which
humans are overcoming deficits and disabilities and producing new and improved
versions of humanity. From a different perspective again, Stables (2012) suggests
that a posthuman perspective might present not so much a negative description of a
species and an era but rather an ideal, something we can still aspire to even if we
are unlikely to ever attain it. I want to take a different line, however, and look at
fonns of c1itical and politically engaged research and action that open up alternative
directions.
130 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
As Brigstocke and Noorani suggest, critical work is often conceived in tenns of
"giving voice to marginalized subjects"; but what happens, they ask,
I loved sitting down with a glass of wine beside me, opening up a file and
clatte1ing the keys with my two index fingers and one thumb. I loved seeing the
words appear on the screen and to be immersed in the world I was creating out of
my imagination and memmy and physically with my hands. To do anything else
wouldn 't feel like writing.
(cited in Turnbull, 2017)
~
138 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
larger fam1s led to more productive fanning practices - indeed , when combined with
new fom1s of mechanization , an ag1icultural revolution - and created a landless
working class of fom1er small-scale fanners, who, suffering from a "radical sense
of displacement" Thompson ( 1963, p239), became labourers in the newly indus-
trializing cities, fuelling the industrial revolution . W11ile the enclosure of the com-
mons thus signalled an important stage in growth , development and wealth , it also
signalled an increase in the ways in which capital accumulation depended on the
privatization of what had fo1111erly been seen as public. The cutTent era is one in
which the enclosure of the commons is conducted through increased privatization
and commodification of public goods detennined by market values.
Central to our understanding of these processes has been Harvey's (2005) work
on the expansive logic of capitalism and its need for continual enclosure through the
incorporation ofresources, people , activities and land: a process of accumulation by
dispossession. The longer struggle over public ownership of natural resources -
land, water, air, trees - has been exacerbated by the rise in neoliberal ideological and
financial frameworks. After a postwar period of pub Iic ownership of shared goods -
typically the utilities (water, gas, electricity) in some capitalist social democracies,
but also mineral and manufacturing resources in more socialist systems - we have
seen across the globe a move towards private ownership of these common goods.
As Piketty's (2014) analysis of capital shows, the redistribution of income in
wealthy nations that occLmed in the middle of the twentieth century has been
reversed in the last 30 years, with increased capital in the hands of a tiny minority,
increased inequality across many societies and a return to the patrimonial capitalism
of nineteenth-century Europe. Private ownership is up, while public ownership is
down and increasingly denied to the vast majority.
It is nonetheless possible, argue Dardot and Laval (2009), to find alternati ves to
the all embracing neoliberal times we li ve in. We have to appreciate that neoli-
beralisrn is not merely a glorification of the market - that it is more than the
expansion of the commodity sphere and capital accumulation , more than the cur-
~\.1-~·v
jv 4 tailment ofrights and libe11ies. Neoliberalisrn also has to be understood as a fom1 of
governmentality, as a means by which social relations, ways of living and sub-
jectivities are produced: it enjoins us all , from wage-earners to professionals, to
operate in competition with each other, aligning the social world with the logic of
the market, promoting and validating increased inequality and pushing the indi-
vidual to operate as an enteq)rise themself. Standard political economy, whether
liberal of Marxist, does not have a solution to this , and yet it is possible to think and
act in tenns other than the maximization of performance, constant production and
neoliberal governmentality. The way forward, Dardot and Laval (2009) suggest, is to
think in te1111s of the commons, of shared knowledge , mutual help, cooperative work
and common prope11y.
Following a Iine of thought going back to Hardin's (1968) key paper on the
'Tragedy of the Commons ', there has been renewed interest in the idea of the com-
mons as a contemporary site of struggle and resistance. The challenge, as Amin and
Howell (2016) put it, is to reconceive the commons at a time when the most basic of
commons - the planet itself- is under threat. This rethinking needs to escape the battle
A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 139
lines between use value and exchange value, common use and conunodification,
communities and corporations - dividing lines that are defined by the old political
economy and materialism and are now weighted so heavily in favour of the final
enclosure - and instead embrace new platfonns of cooperation and collective action,
from solidarity networks to digital conunons, from commonalities to local affilia-
tions. This draws our attention to the constant taking over of the commons: the
grabbing of water, the enclosure of public space, the encroaclunent on public life of
the new technologies, of instrumentation (Berson, 2015), the new discourses of
compliance that insist on new practices of obedience. These new fonns of govern-
mentality- on our wrists, in our workplaces, in our cities - also suggest a need to push
back in different ways.
The idea of the commons has become a central organizing idea as an alternative to
neoliberalism, a fo1m of resistance to capital and a rallying point for alternative
politics and discourses (Dardot and Laval, 2014). The commons provides an
alternative in both thought and practice to the expansive private appropriation of the
social, cultural and life spheres. Useful here are the ways in which this line of
thinking maintains the good in the communal aspects of communism yet rejects the
state or totalitarian aspects it took on, opting instead for more anarchic (properly
understood) and local forms of action and making the climate, space and the
environment central to the snuggle. The commons, or the common, has become the
te1m for a regime of practices, struggles, institutions and research that opens up
the possibility of a non-capitalist future. And while many in this diverse field of
snuggle would not necessarily want to embrace the ideas laid out here under the
label ofposthumanism, I would argue that in a number of ways they dovetail nicely.
When Hardt and Negri (2005, p2 l 8) argue that new global protests and struggles are
"a mobilization of the co nun on that takes the fo1m of an open, distributed network,
in which no center exerts control and all nodes express themselves freely" , we are
again looking at ways in which distributed networks, agency, language and cog-
nition can be brought together towards a greater politics.
The politics of the commons takes place as a "spatial response" to processes
of enclosure, a "political idiom that evokes the collective production and claiming
of conceptual and physical space" (Dawney et al., 2016, p 13). Akin in a number of
ways to the "place-based activism" of Larsen and Johnson (2016, p 150), where the
agency ofplace "leads to a different understanding of the geographical self - to a
more-than-human geographical self', these approaches to place and activism shift
the grounds on which we think our politics. Rather than focusing on more u·aditional
questions of citizenship or social justice, there is a return here to alternative anarchist
roots, drawing on a range of thinkers from Mikhail Bakunin and Ivan Illich to the
postanarchist thought of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler (Day, 2005 ; Kuhn,
2009). In rethinking these politics we can therefore consider other forms of social
organization, whose horizontal structures resemble the horizontal relations I have
been proposing for how we think about material relations. We can then reconsider
our politics, epistemologies and pedagogies "in light of the needs and desires of an
anarchist society" (Armaline, 2009, pl45) while making a reclamation of the
conunons a common goal.
140 A posthunwnist applied linguistic commons
Notes
Kohn 's (2013) project, however, is not to generali ze to all fo rests but rather to understand
the relati ons between the forest and the Avi la Runa of Amazonian Ecuador.
2 The NSW state govern ment had recentl y chan ged loca l electora l laws to give bu siness
owners two votes instead of one in an effort to un sea t her; it later backfired - she w as
re-elected with an increased majority.
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