Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

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

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

Alastair Pennycook is Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and

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

Alastair Pennycook
First published 2018
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Contents

List of figures vii

Preface and acknowledgements viii

1 Introducing posthumanist applied linguistics 1

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

2 Posthumanism and the strange humanist subject 19

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

3 Distributed language, spatial repertoires and

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

4 The human hierarchy of senses 56

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

5 Animals and language 72

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

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

7 Re-engaging with reality 108

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

8 Towards a posthumanist applied linguistic commons 126

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

References 145
Index 163
Figures

3.1 Pre-dive briefing map 41

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

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

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

Taylor and Francis:

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

Oxford University Press:

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

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

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

The planet, the people, animals and objects

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

Posthumanist applied linguistics

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

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

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

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

On Global Peace: A poetic reflection

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

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
some, 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
to the discussions of the relations between posthumanism and various post theories,
but first it will be useful to try to get a handle on the humanism that posthumanism
seeks to supersede. Most obviously humanism is a philosophical movement that
placed humans at its centre. Such anthropocentric ideals, however, had other
implications: humanism as a secular counterpoint to religion, humanism as a belief
in the commonality of the species, humanism as a concern with human values
as distinct from more scientific or technicist approaches to life. For Grayling
(2013, p141), it was Renaissance humanism that gave birth to the humanities, the
“study and enjoyment of history, poetry, philosophy, drama, letters”. In this line of
thinking, humanism and the humanities are tied to the arts and human creativity and
form a bulwark against the sciences.
Arguing for sociology to be understood as a “humanist discipline”, Berger
(1963, p187) warned sociologists against being seduced by statistical methods
and broad generalizations and advised sociology “not to fixate itself in an
attitude of humourless scientism that is blind and deaf to the buffoonery of the
human spectacle”. More recently Taylor (2016) has called for a more humanist
approach to language studies that draws on a broad and poetic version of
language tied to imagination, creation and culture rather than the narrow tech-
nicist forms of analysis of the linguistic sciences. Here humanism is invoked to
oppose the reductive information-processing view of language and humans that
has held sway since transhumanist ideologies swept through cognitive and lin-
guistic sciences, operating from an assumption that humans could be mapped
against computers. It is in part on these grounds that some are understandably
reluctant to question humanism, since it is seen as presenting a way of engaging
with the better aspects of humanity (art, music, philosophy) in relation to the
human condition while also opposing the technicist ideologies of the social
sciences.
20 The strange humanist subject
Yet it is the social sciences that have kept humanism in place, since the notion of a
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 if universal laws of humanity
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 universal humanity: “It was surely
reasonable to suppose that man had an examinable nature, capable of being
observed, analysed, tested like other organisms and forms 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 many ways as a child of the European Enlightenment,
though, as Foucault (1984b) warns us, it is important not to conflate the two.
The Enlightenment was a set of complex historical processes that occurred within
European societies and included social transformation, particular political insti-
tutions, technological developments and projects of rationalization. Gray (1995,
p218) explains that the “legacy of the Enlightenment project – which is also the
legacy of Westernization – is a world ruled by calculation and wilfulness which is
humanly unintelligible and destructively 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 values 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 borrowed from religion, science or politics”
(Foucault, 1984b, p44).
For applied linguists, placing humans (people, individuals) 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 part 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
important to pursue some of these conceptions of humanity further before trying 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 of human rights, the emergence of new forms of materialism and the links
between posthumanism, postmodernism and poststructuralism.
 The strange humanist subject 21
The peculiar human subject
Humanism, according to Grayling,

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 former,
and is equally responsible for living considerately towards others, with a special
view to establishing good relationships at the heart of life, because all good lives
are premised on such.
(Grayling, 2013, p239)

It is hard to argue with much of what is taken to be humanist, since it is about “living
thoughtfully and intelligently, about rising to the demand to be informed, alert and
responsive, about being able to make a sound case for a choice of values” and so on
(Grayling, 2013, p139). These are all surely estimable qualities for living a good life
but we need to dig a bit deeper here to see the particularity of such claims. There is a
strong emphasis on the individual: this humanism is already dependent on a par-
ticular kind of human, a view of the human from a perspective that promotes the
individual over the collective. There is also a strong emphasis on choice and free
will: a central focus here is on the freedom of the individual to make ethical choices
free of religious dogma and moral prescriptions. Such an emphasis on the freedom of
the individual clearly depends on a specific cultural and political understanding
of what it means to be human, one that at times can start to look like the discourses of
choice and responsibility that have become so much part of neoliberal ideology,
which suggests that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating indi-
vidual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”
(Harvey, 2005, p2). Although there are many other possible relations between
humanism and political economy, it is quite possible to trace this line of thinking
from humanistic individualism to neoliberal consumerism.
Europeans cannot claim ownership of humanism (it would surely be contra-
dictory to do so), since humanist ideas can be clearly traced in other systems of
thought (Daiber, 2013). The development of the particular type of humanist thought
of interest here can nevertheless be sketched out over several centuries in Europe.
Renaissance humanism was articulated in one of its clearest forms by Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola (1463–94) in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). As the
Supreme Maker explains to humans:

The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted 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 form you may
prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms 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 form of
Enlightenment philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, celebrating
humans as creative thinkers and independent actors. Schatzki (2002) outlines sev-
eral 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
argument that humans define their own ethical values 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
from all other forms 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 constructing this vision of the emancipated
individual 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-determination 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
undermined 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 universal thought, knowledge and humanity. Although
writers such as Marx undermined aspects of humanist belief (Marxism destabilizes
the rational knowing subject of history and economics), and has been seen by
some (Althusser in particular) as carrying forward an anti-humanist agenda, Marx
arguably still maintained aspects of humanism, notably both individualism and
universalism. MacIntyre (2007, p261) draws 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 socialized
Robinson Crusoe, as Marx put it.
Marxism, as Barrett (1991, p61) points out, “represented itself as a universal
discourse of emancipation” but has been shown “to speak with a very particular
historical voice”: “Classical Marxism may have enabled bourgeois men to analyse
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
Eurocentric in context”. Likewise, humanism has always been made in its propo-
nents’ image (white, male, university-educated, upper-middle class). As Bourke
(2011, p2) notes, “two of the most distinguished traditions of modern times –
theology and humanism – were founded on espousing hierarchies of humanity”.
This tradition not only devised a great hierarchy of beings, from the Creator to
the smallest being, but also placed certain of these – “human-sisters, non-white
Europeans 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
more rights than women. In fact, Bourke notes (2011, p2), “the status of women was
much worse than that of the rest of the animal kingdom”. It would be good, the
woman argued, if women could “become animal” in order to gain wider rights.
Historically, as Phillips (2015, p10) observes, “the human has been conceptualised
in culturally loaded, gender-coded, and strongly normative terms that have then
served as a basis for denying significant groups of humans the name”.
Despite its claims, humanism was never really founded on the principle of a
shared humanity: “[t]he humanist insistence on an autonomous, wilful, human
subject capable of acting independently in the world had been forged in the image of
the male, white, well-off, educated human” (Bourke, 2011, p3). The universality of
humanism has never been universal: it has been blind to difference, culture and
diversity. The notion of the human has

operated to exclude as much as to include. The characteristics deemed

essentially human have turned out, again and again, to be modelled on
particular groups of humans, and the history of the term has been more marked
by hierarchy than equality.
(Phillips, 2015, p10)

As Henrich et al. (2010, p63) note, “leading scientific journals and university
textbooks routinely publish research findings claiming to generalize to ‘humans’ or
‘people’ based on research done entirely with WEIRD [Western, Educated, Indus-
trialized, Rich, and Democratic] undergraduates”, or what, as we saw in Chapter 1, we
might call SWEEMEs (straight, white, educated European male elites).
Grayling’s (2013) long list of great humanists, starting with Confucius and pas-
sing through the Greeks and Romans (Cicero, Epicurus) to the later European
thinkers (Montaigne, Voltaire, Darwin) and contemporary atheists (Dennett,
Hitchens, Dawkins), gives only a passing nod to non-European–American thinkers
(Confucius, Mencius and Ibn Rushd) and includes only one woman (Barbara
Wootton). Not only is the list a rather confused account of great thinkers in the
humanist tradition (Plutarch, Diderot, Marx, Schopenhauer, Mill and so on) and
non-religious thinkers (Confucius is in the list largely to make the point that Con-
fucianism is not a religion, while the presence of more contemporary campaigners
such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins notes their contribution to contemporary
atheist debates), but it is also clear that humanists have been almost exclusively male
and mainly white. Thus Leslie Stephen, the author of An Agnostic’s 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 particular history that put white men at
the forefront of European thought (thus humanism is perforce a position developed
by white men), but one would surely need to counter that this raises serious questions
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 narrow view of humanity?
Indeed in the same way that religions have held highly masculinist ideologies
(male Gods, male priests, male hierarchies), so humanism has a similar history:
“[h]umanism installed only some humans at the centre of the universe” (Bourke,
2011, p3). The argument that humanity has never been a very inclusive category
may invoke several different responses. Leaving aside those who would just reject
the proposition on the basis that humanity has always meant everyone equally
(which is demonstrably not the case), the more obvious response is one that urges
greater inclusion: if it has indeed been the case that some have not been seen as fully
human (a position that certainly can’t be denied historically, but surely still has force
today), then the solution is to make humanity ever more inclusive until everyone has
been safely allowed in.
This is seductive as a form of social inclusion agenda but problematic, since it
retains a sense of humanity as the central unassailable category. One might also
argue that humanism as a truly universal ideal may still be upheld despite its betrayal
by the exclusionary European account of the human (too many were discounted or
mistrusted on the basis of class, gender, race, ethnicity, politics, culture and so on),
its collusion with patriarchy, racism, misogyny and homophobia, its Eurocentrism
(identification of progress and norms with European life and Christianity), its
individualism that discounted community and other forms of belonging and its
exclusive identification of reason and science as drivers of progress. From this point
of view, even if Europeans betrayed the ideals of humanism, even if they colluded
with forms of discrimination against the majority of humans, even if they were the
great exporters of violence,1 weaponry and a readiness to use these against all others
(whether armed or not) (Frankopan, 2015) at the same time as they extolled their
supposed virtues – a strong Christian morality, the development of reason and ethics,
an entrepreneurial spirit and humanist ideals – 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 in
the name of humanism. Rather than the betrayal of an ideal,2 these humanist
calumnies are better understood as showing the impossibility of a universal ideal
without a locus of enunciation (Mignolo, 2009). It is not in the end possible as a
human to articulate a universal humanism from a position that transcends the
historical, cultural and social point of its articulation. This is why many critical
posthumanists and ecofeminists have chosen to pursue an alternative politics – not
so much a battle to be allowed in to the great hall of humanity but rather to question
its very presumptions. While it is probably true that acknowledging that humanity
 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.

Religion, science, immanence

One concern is that a posthumanist stance may undo the humanism that has been so
important as a counterpoint to religion. For many, humanism is the movement that
crucially overcame the dogmas of religious belief and opened up an era of secular
science, art and thought that was central to the development of much that is to be
praised in Western modernity. In his ethnographic study of an evangelical school in
Poland, Johnston defines his own position as a researcher as

an unreconstructed humanist – I carry a powerful belief in the value of each

unique human life, and the concomitant conviction that, in Terence’s words,
humani nil a me alienum puto:3 I count nothing human alien to me.
(Johnston, 2017, p38)

He later talks of his “secular humanism – that is, my belief in the importance of moral
values uncoupled from any belief in a supreme being or a sacred text” (p123). So the
question for posthumanism is whether it retains a scepticism towards religion or, by
questioning the anthropocentrism 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
term in conjunction with humanism (secular humanism), can it still tag along with
posthumanism (secular posthumanism) or does this also become postsecular?
To come to grips 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 everything else, even if God retained dominion over humans), while
humanism also needs to be understood as venerating Man in a way that echoes the
worship of God it supposedly superseded, as Nietzsche (1887/1997) observed.
Hardt and Negri (2000, p91) point out that there is a “strict continuity between the
religious thought that accords a power above nature to God and the modern ‘secular’
thought that accords that same power above nature to Man”. Secular humanism is a
transcendent philosophy in the same manner as religious thought and fosters related
forms of hierarchy.
The relations between science, religion and humanism also become complex
here. Grayling’s (2013, p145) list of great humanists starts with Confucius and ends
with Dawkins, though Dawkins has much less to say about humanism than he does
about science, inferring “the non-existence of a supernatural realm simply because it
26 The strange humanist subject
cannot be accessed through science” (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 (p192): “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 meme – 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 Darwinian 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, p511) 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 part of a greater whole. Dawkins 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 absurdity of creationism
or the vapid both sides of the argument position for including creationist thought in
the curriculum (akin to the both sides of climate change argument). But if Dawkins
is a humanist thinker, this is also a humanism that fails to engage with what religious
thought can mean for others (Fuller, 2011). As played out in his campaign against
religious belief, his atheism reflects his 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, p31), making various forms of spirituality
more possible from a posthumanist perspective, ranging from traditional engage-
ments with religious thought to pantheistic forms of nature worship. Here it is useful
to note some of the lineages of pantheism, or immanence (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
distributed throughout the world), that are seen as precursors to posthumanism in
the ideas of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) (1907/2001, 2002) and Baruch Spinoza
(1632–77) (1677/2003). Posthumanism is neither a refutation of humanism as an
escape from the confines of religious dogma nor a return in any way to religious
delusions. We do not need to be humanist to be sceptical about religion. To take up a
posthumanist position is to seek alternatives to religious doctrine, humanist hubris
and scientific reductionism. It is to a philosophy of immanence (as opposed to
transcendence) that we need to turn in order to rethink forms of dominance. Anti-
humanism, understood as a refusal of transcendence, is not therefore a negation of
revolutionary potential but “the condition of possibility of thinking this immanent
power, an anarchic basis of philosophy: ‘Ni Dieu, ni maître, ni l’homme’” (Hardt
and Negri, 2000, p92).

Human rights and situated ethics

Arguably one of the most powerful ideas that emerged from Enlightenment
humanism was that of human rights. So familiar – and so abused and trivialized – has
this notion become to us today that it is worth considering again its very power:
“Everyone is born free and equal in dignity and in rights” (Article 1 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights) (UDHR, 2017). It is important to understand the
strengths and weaknesses of such a proposition: these rights adhere to all people at
all times (they are inalienable); they do not have to be granted for they always exist.4
The idea that all humans, irrespective of background, share a set of basic rights has
been a powerful and compelling argument that has surely done a great deal of good in
the world. And yet its very abstraction, the notion that these rights obtain irrespective
of culture or local legal frameworks – the idea of a universal humanity – is also open
to critique from various sides. The problem for this abstract and universalist notion
of rights is that it has to confront not only the very obvious constraints of circum-
stance, culture and law (which are potentially surmountable) but also the problem
that the notion of humanity 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
their status. Indeed it is in such struggles that we can see how different versions
of humanity are at stake. The crudest of such battles – particularly where crimes
against humanity are concerned (these overlap with but are not the same as infrin-
gements of human rights) – overtly deny the humanity of some people. In response to
the UN critique of his policy to kill drug users and pushers, President Duterte of the
Philippines simply discounts such people as humans: “That’s why I said, ‘[W]hat
crime against humanity?’ In the first place, I’d like to be frank with you, are they (drug
users) humans? What is your definition of a human being? Tell me” (Ramos, 2016).
More recently, in response to an Amnesty International report of these abuses, the
Justice Minister, Vitaliano Aguirre, reiterated these arguments: “The criminals,
the drug lords, drug pushers, they are not humanity. They are not humanity. In other
words, how can that be [a crime against humanity] when your war is only against
those drug lords, drug addicts, drug pushers?” (Parry, 2017). Such arguments
only strengthen 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 struggles 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 libertarian view of the
individual: free to speak, free from government, free to operate in an unfettered
market. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), for example, whose webpage
carries a prominent image of Martin Luther King with the words “Fighting for moral
justice in an intolerant world”, focuses on freedom of religious expression and is
opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage.5 The Australian government appointed
Tim Wilson6 in 2014 as Australian Human Rights Commissioner, one of the goals
being to change section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (on the grounds that
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, 2013)

But for Indigenous and Muslim Australians subject to increasing levels of racial
vilification, this insistence on freedom of speech as more fundamental than the right
not to be racially abused looked very different.
Meanwhile, in early 2016 Phillip Ruddock was appointed Australian Special
Envoy on Human Rights to the UN. His goal was 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 term. Phillip Ruddock, as Minister for
Immigration and Multicultural Affairs from 1996 to 2003 (subsequently Attorney
General7 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 his
lapel – yet clearly these detention camps breach a number of human rights (the right
to seek asylum, the right against arbitrary detention, the right to legal access, the rights
of the child). For some, including himself and a conservative government, Ruddock is
a human rights champion; for others (including much of the UN), he is not.
The fact that there are different views on what constitutes human rights, or which
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 universal humanity that is itself questionable, while the
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
the 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 forms 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 favour of human rights and that it
is the violation of such rights that is the problem. One can also argue that the fact that
the recognition of certain forms of crime against humanity have been slow and
selective – it is only relatively recently (1993) that systematic rape of women as a
tool of war has been recognized as a crime against humanity (Sexual Violence and
Armed Conflict, 1998) – is nonetheless the result of the constant pressure for uni-
versality 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
politics of late modernity. For all the talk of universality, rights “remain essentially
individualistic and litigious” (Bourke, 2011, p159). Abstract notions of equality
only make sense when they are realized in concrete social and political contexts.
We should indeed strive to develop better means of protecting children, preventing
torture, 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
nature presupposed by human rights discourse generalizes specifically Western
historical experience at the expense of other ways of understanding humanity. The
tendency to view humanity along abstract, individual or universal lines rather than in
historical, 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
often rested on the same notions of human exclusivism that constrain humanism
more generally. It is based on a projection of a particular way of thinking about
humans, and indeed, as Douzinas argues, has played an important role in the
development of thinking about humans more generally: “Human rights construct
humans” (Douzinas, 2000, p371). From a moral philosophical point of view,
MacIntyre (2007, p70) suggests that natural or human rights are “fictions” devel-
oped in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project to reclaim morality from a
secular vantage point. Like utilitarianism and moral philosophy, rights discourse is
one of the “unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the
predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with
a secular, rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him” (MacIntyre,
2007, p68). The problems at the heart of the humanist project – the insistence on a
30 The strange humanist subject
radical individualism that depends on the rational, autonomous, self-disciplining
subject of the Enlightenment dream (that starts to look like a very particular kind of
individual) – emerges again here in combination with the claims to certainty and
universality, leading MacIntyre (2007, p69) to argue that “there are no such rights,
and belief in them is one with belief 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 of
struggle. To suppose a transcendent panhuman agreement on what it means to be
human is arguably to deny what it means to be human, to extend a particular vision
of the human to all humans. The notion of human rights is subject to many of the
same questions that a notion of universal humanity has to face. Current “English
language traditions of political theory emphasize individual liberty and individual
rights. Human beings are thought of as self-subsistent atoms who enter into
relationships with other human beings” (Hacking 1999, p15). Humanity, Douzinas
(2000, p372) argues, is a “graded and ranked status with many shades and tiers
between the ‘superhuman’ Western, white, heterosexual male 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 practices
of human rights.

often express the imagination of the one and homogenous world society,
in which the extension of formal equality and negative freedom and the
globalisation of Western capitalism and consumerism will equate society with
its ‘ideal’ picture drawn by governments and international law experts.
(Douzinas, 2000, p375)

It was on related grounds that I argued (Pennycook, 1998a) for an idea of situated
language ethics rather than language rights. The language rights movement employs
a problematic vision of both language and of rights. As Pupavac (2012, p20) notes,
“assertions of global law in a world of international inequalities are problematic for
emancipatory politics”. The advocacy of “highly prescriptive” regimes of govern-
ance (p25) that assume rights of intervention by global elites, the applicability of
global governance to local contexts, the importance of language preservation over
human emancipation and the reification of languages as unitary entities all raise
questions for any language rights movement that operates under the banner of
human and linguistic universality (Abdelhay et al., 2017). One of the effects of a
posthuman turn, Braidotti (2013, p53) suggests, is to displace the idea of “Europe as
the cradle of Humanism”. This in turn means displacing European conceptions of
language, humanity and rights, or at the very least seeing them in their cultural
specificities. So just as I have argued that posthumanism may be centrally a chal-
lenge to human hubris, so a posthumanist turn may imply not a wholesale rejection
of the idea of rights but rather a more grounded, localized understanding of situated
ethics that is less sure about the projection of Euro-American universalism as the
human norm. To propose a transcendent panhuman understanding of language use is
arguably to deny what it means to use language.
 The strange humanist subject 31

New materialisms
One of the key debates in human rights discourse is over the distinction between
freedom from (torture, imprisonment, slavery) and freedom to (speech, education,
food, water). In terms of language rights, we can distinguish between freedom from
oppressive language regimes (where languages are proscribed, in classrooms that
insist on the use of only English, for example) and the freedom to use and be
educated in a language of choice. But rather than drawing on those philosophical
traditions in which concepts of autonomy and freedom – central concerns for
understanding agency – have been conceptualized in relation to the deprivatory
power of the dominant or oppressive Other (a dialectical framework that derives
from Hegel via Marx), others have sought an alternative politics based around
different understandings of the subject and materiality. Elizabeth Grosz (2010) turns
to a conceptual framing that allows for a more positive understanding of freedom to,
of freedom as the capacity for action. Rather than thinking in terms of debates in
political philosophy between liberalism, historical materialism and postmodernism
over agency as freedom in terms of “reason, rights and recognition” (2010, p140),
Grosz seeks an understanding of life and the capacity to act.
Looking away from the constraints and counter-struggles of much contemporary
thought on feminism and agency, she argues, is not a depoliticization of the subject
but an attempt to find other ways of thinking about the subject and politics. The
problem, she suggests, “is not how to give women more adequate recognition (who
is it that women require recognition from?), more rights, or more of a voice but how
to enable more action, more making and doing, more difference” (Grosz, 2010,
p154). The challenge is not so much to enable women to gain a more equal place
within existing frameworks but rather to “enable women to partake in the creation of
a future unlike the present” (p154). One way forward here is to take up a new form of
politics based around an alternative understanding of our relation to the world,
understanding matter in a less hierarchical and more dynamic manner, presenting
“human and nonhuman actants on a less vertical plane” (Bennett, 2010a, pix). What
would happen to our politics, asks Bennett (2010b, p47), if we took more seriously
“the idea that technological and natural materialities” (she uses the example of a
power blackout) were “themselves actors alongside and within us – were vitalities,
trajectories, and powers irreducible to the meanings, intentions, or symbolic values
humans invest in them”?
This is to engage with the new materialism, with new ways of thinking about what
matters. Key here is Barad’s (2003, 2007) development of posthumanist perfor-
mativity. Taking issue with claims that performativity as developed in the work of
Butler (1993, 1997; and Pennycook, 2004a, 2007a) is an overextension of post-
structuralist discursive power, Barad (2007, p133) insists that it “is not an invitation
to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, perfor-
mativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to
determine what is real”. We need to understand the relation between discursive
practices and materialization. Discourse, Barad insists, should not be reduced to a
notion of language (this would be to fall into the representational trap) and material
32 The strange humanist subject
should not be seen as some inanimate world of objects out there waiting to be
described. Rather, following Butler’s (1993) critique of both social constructionist
(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, p181)
explain, this understanding of the “very real material consequences of discursive
regimes” has implications for many areas of sociolinguistics – not just language,
gender and sexuality but also other categories where an embodied understanding of
language is important, 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 represent
them. Language, suggests Barad,

has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the
interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every
“thing” – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some other
form of cultural representation.
(Barad, 2007, p132)

From an applied linguistic point of view, this might seem an unlikely line of thought
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 it
should be? The argument I shall be developing in the following chapters, however, is
not to cut language out of the picture but to complexify language and its relation to
the world. As Bucholtz and Hall (2016, p187) suggest, although it was tempting to
celebrate the linguistic or discursive turn in critical theory as making a case for the
importance of socio- or applied linguistics, a challenge to the dichotomy between
discourse and materiality may equally allow for a broader role for social semiotics
and sociocultural linguistics in an understanding of the relations among language,
bodies and the world.
Materiality, Hayles (2012, p91) argues, unlike physicality, is “an emergent
property. 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 important material and discursive, social
and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors”. The post-
humanist part of this account questions the assumed distinctions between the human
and non-human, while the performative aspect “shifts the focus from questions of
correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g. do they mirror nature or
culture?) to matters of practices, doings and actions” (Barad, 2007, p135). The shift
that these accounts allow is a move from “radical constructivism” to “posthuman
intra-relationality” (Lather, 2015, p99). By reclaiming materiality and realism from
the negative space that constructionism had for them, by focusing on assemblages
and relationality, we can come to understand how the social and the real, objects
and people are intertwined. What is new here, suggests Lather (2015, p100), is
 The strange humanist subject 33
“the ontological insistence on the weight of the material and a relational ontology
that transverses binaries”.
One of the most significant parts of this move has been the relocation of agency,
for even though poststructuralism sought to remake the subject as discursive
product, as fragmented and in struggle (Norton, 2000), this subject was always still
susceptible to the gravitational pull of humanism, to the move that ensures the
subject is still some disembodied agent running things from inside the human
head. The new materialist subject, Braidotti argues (2013, p51), is “materialist and
vitalist, embodied and embedded, firmly located somewhere, according to the
feminist ‘politics of location’”. For Barad (2007, p226) “agential realism’s recon-
ceptualization of materiality diverges from traditional Marxist conceptions of
materiality” and “advances a new materialist understanding of naturalcultural prac-
tices that cuts across these well-worn divides”. This rethinking of the subject and
materiality is a political project, and such vital materialism, Bennett (2010b, p47)
argues, can “run parallel to a historical materialism focused more exclusively upon
economic structures of human power”. We shall return to some of these concerns in
discussions of assemblages in the following chapters and of speculative realism
(Chapter 7).

Posthumanism and poststructuralism

While new materialism may be a fairly new addition to the broad domain of post-
humanist thought, the term posthumanism can be traced back to Ihab Hassan’s
(1977, p212) reluctant use of it: “five hundred years of humanism may be coming to
an end as humanism transforms itself into something we must helplessly call
posthumanism”. Yet such searches for origins all too often miss the point of broader
intellectual movements. Foucault had already sketched out part of the agenda in Les
mots et les choses (literally, words and things, translated as the Order of Things),
arguing that “L’homme est une invention dont l’archeologie de notre pensee montre
aisement la date recente. Et peut-être la fin prochaine” (Man is a recent invention and
perhaps one nearing its end) (Foucault, 1966, p398). Foucault’s point was that the
development of the human or social sciences from the eighteenth to the twentieth
centuries that had rendered humans a collective worthy of scientific study was
possibly nearing its end. It was the idealist and positivist programmes of the
Enlightenment that rendered “universal humanity” both a scientific object and a
political project (Fuller, 2011, p70), hence critical legal scholars such as Douzinas
(2007, p 51) argue that humanity “is an invention of modernity”.
The questioning of the subject in the work of Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and
Derrida made these thinkers “representatives of an anti-humanist moment in French
intellectual life” (Angermuller, 2014, p140). From Lacan’s Freudian-inspired
questioning of the subject entangled in the symbolic, or Althusser’s Marxian
insistence on the subject being hailed into existence (interpellated) by ideology, to
Foucault’s location of the figure of Man as a passing historical idea, or Derrida’s
questioning of presence, there had already been a long tradition that interrogated the
idealist, self-determining subject of humanism. So posthumanism may be seen as
34 The strange humanist subject
part of that tradition of thought sometimes called postmodern or poststructuralist
that questions the ways in which humans locate themselves at the centre of their own
lives, thinking, making decisions, choosing, acting as free-willed, independent and
sovereign subjects. Just as Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida drew on earlier
thinkers, notably Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, so it is important to see the intellectual
roots of posthumanism as emerging from this longer tradition of critical philosophy.
Some years ago I suggested it was perhaps time to get beyond the posts (post-
structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism) because of the ways they always
seemed to be looking backwards to things that came before. Instead I proposed a
take-up of trans approaches (transcultural, transgressive, transtextual and so on)
(Pennycook, 2007a). Certainly, given the rise particularly of translanguaging over
the past decade, this suggestion seems in line with recent trends, and it is worth
considering that the current take-up of translanguaging might be traced not only to
its ostensible origins in the work of Williams (1996) but also to a broader interest in
trans ideas (transculturation, transnationalism, transgender and so on) that emerged
around that time (Pennycook, 2016a). It would be a mistake, however, to see these
two trends – the post and the trans – in opposition to each other. Given recent trends
to caricature post positions as apolitical, relativist, focused on diversity and con-
cerned with the individual over the collective, and then to suggest that this empty
pluralism is complicit with neoliberal ideologies, it is important to understand the
role these lines of thinking have played.
In his castigation of his own earlier writing as a de facto poststructuralist/ post-
modernist, Block (2014, p17) lists a series of potential problems in positions he took,
including an emphasis on difference, relativity and pluralism, a focus on identity
and agency and a portrayal of reality as socially constructed with a concomitant
reluctance to discuss it. Kubota (2016, p487) similarly criticizes the effects of
poststructuralist, postmodernist and postcolonialist thought in supporting a “multi/
plural turn” that “parallels the underlying ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism –
that is, individualism, difference-blindness, and elitist cosmopolitanism rather than
critical acknowledgement of power”. Poststructuralist writing doubtless has some
challenges to face here: it is probably true that poststructuralism put too many eggs
in its discursive basket and thus was never very good at articulating how we can get a
grip on reality or the material world (it was much better at showing how reality was
constructed than working with reality). I shall deal with this in much greater detail in
Chapter 7. These characterizations of poststructuralism as relativist, individualist
and pluralist are nonetheless more of a pastiche of poststructuralist positions than an
engagement with critical philosophy. Poststructuralism, after all, has been critiqued
precisely for its lack of attention to agency (from a poststructuralist point of view, the
subject is a product of rather than a producer of discourse).
The various arguments that Block (2014), Kubota (2016) and Flores (in press) are
making is that multilingualism has shifted from a matter of social and political
activism to an object of neoliberal commodification (cf. Hardt and Negri, 2000), and
that poststructuralism and its allies are partially responsible for the depoliticization
of diversity that enabled such a move. While this critique of neoliberal multi-
culturalism – the commodification and celebration of superficial diversity – sheds
 The strange humanist subject 35
light on ways in which linguistic and cultural diversity has become an object of
commodification, it is equally significant to understand that this focus on diversity
reinforces a belief in commonality. The focus on diversity can be understood not
only, as these critiques suggest, as a means to co-opt difference as part of a neoliberal
agenda but also, and more importantly, as a neohumanist capitalist focus on
underlying similarity. This can be seen, for example, in the recent “Shot on iPhone”
commercials, with images of different people accompanied by the late Maya
Angelou narrating her poem ‘Human Family’, which starts “I note the obvious
differences in the Human Family”, continues “I’ve seen the wonders of the world;
not yet one common man” and ends “We are more alike, my friends, than we are
unalike”. Likewise, the Coca Cola commercial that aired during the 2014 Superbowl
with ‘America the Beautiful’ sung in different languages that caused so much
controversy – Flores (in press) refers to this as the Coke-ification of diversity – or the
United Colours of Benetton advertisements that were prevalent in the 1990s, can
equally be understood in terms of neohumanist capitalism – that is to say, a toke-
nistic focus on difference that emphasizes underlying similarity. This focus on
diversity, then, is the contemporary manifestation of the long-term complicity
between capital and humanism, between a focus on the freedom of the individual
and the liberalization of individual entrepreneurial freedoms.
It is not helpful to suggest that poststructuralism focuses on the individual (it is
opposed to the idea, focusing instead on relations between discourse, power and
knowledge) or that postcolonialism is blind to difference (it developed an intensive
critique of Eurocentric constructions of difference) or that postmodernism supports
elitist cosmopolitanism (it was a critique of European assumptions about knowledge,
progress and universalism). It is also unhelpful to suggest that poststructuralism is
apolitical or lacks a concern with material conditions. Weedon’s (1987) feminist
poststructuralism, which was influential in the development of poststructuralist
perspectives in applied linguistics (for example, Norton, 2000), focuses on “the
material nature of ideology, or, in poststructuralist terms, discourse, the importance of
economic relations of production, the class structure of society and the integral
relationship between practice and theory” (Weedon, 1987, p31). These critiques fail to
acknowledge the complexities of post forms of politics, which, for all their faults (and
their incorporation into the liberal academy), attempted to combat the humanist
dream, whether in terms of postcolonial struggles against the imposition of European
humans as a global ideal, postmodernist critiques of the subject of modernity or
poststructuralist underminings of the sovereignty of the humanist subject. A critique
of poststructuralism based on spurious claims to individualism, pluralism and relat-
ivism may pander to conservative critiques of poststructuralist politics, fail to
acknowledge the locus of enunciation of critique and support humanist ideals of the
individual.
To turn one’s critical attention on studies of diversity, as if these were auto-
matically linked to neoliberal agendas, runs the danger of being co-opted by such
agendas by failing to see that what is really at stake here is a neohumanist ideology
(we’re all the same underneath). The discourses of neoliberal multiculturalism
suggests we need to be cautious about emphasizing diversity without a politics
36 The strange humanist subject
of difference, but the way forward is not to critique a focus on diversity just
because neoliberalism has co-opted it, lest this also supports a panhumanism that
promotes forms of universalism that are exactly the message of global neohu-
manist capitalism. As Phillips (2015, p10) reminds us, “[w]hen the human is
invoked today, it is most commonly in order to deny the significance of differ-
ence”. Block’s (2014) call to overcome the erasure of political economy in applied
linguistics and Kubota’s (2016) insistence on the need to focus on social, econ-
omic and racial inequalities rather than some empty focus on diversity for its own
sake are arguments it would be hard to disagree with from a critical standpoint. But
we should be cautious about caricaturing poststructuralist, postmodernist or
postcolonial positions as supporting individualism, agency and diversity – though
these may have been the bourgeois concerns they took on once inscribed into the
academy – since this critique reproduces a reactionary agenda that has always
opposed anti-humanist philosophies.
 zek (2011) remarks, to continue as before once a major
It is impossible, as Zi
rupture or revolution has occurred. Drawing on Adorno’s example of Schoenberg’s
atonal revolution in music – one can certainly continue to compose in the old tonal
style but this will always be in relation to atonal music – Zi zek asks whether one
can still be Hegelian, still deal with metaphysics and absolute idealism after
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Marx. The same may be asked of linguistic thought
after the poststructuralist rupture. Can one still be Saussurean after Foucault, Derrida
and Butler? While many linguists apparently avoided the implications of such
thought, carrying on with their various forms of structuralism8 as if nothing had
happened, there really is no going back to an age of structural innocence once the
challenges to language, discourse and the subject posed by poststructuralism have
been made. All writing in the structuralist mode occurs now in relation to post-
structuralist thought across the humanities and social sciences, even though this may
not be apparent from within such structures of thought.
Poststructuralism can be understood as focusing mainly on the decentring of the
subject (the subject is no longer a unitary being but a set of discursive positions) and
the rejection of historical teleology (human progress as a purposeful upward march).
It has had important effects on applied linguistics,9 Busch’s (2012, 2013, 2015)
accounts of the lived experience of language (Spracherleben) – combining interac-
tional (third person), poststructuralist (second person) and phenomenological (first
person) accounts of how we experience language – being but one recent example.
McNamara (2015, p475) suggests that “the most important challenge currently facing
us” as applied linguists is to “fully appreciate the challenge represented by
poststructuralism”, which would constitute “a revolutionary change for Applied
Linguistics”. The “theoretical critique available in poststructuralism is farreaching”,
McNamara (2015, p475) suggests, with “implications for many areas of Applied
Linguistics, including second language acquisition, studies of multilingualism,
language and identity, genre studies, and language testing”. And such accounts are all
about language, power and the body. The point, as Weedon (1987, p32) explains, is
that a poststructuralist position does not assume that discourse and social power are
“reducible to the capital–labour relationship”. The more interesting way forward
 The strange humanist subject 37
is not to parody poststructuralism, nor to suggest it buys into neoliberal ideologies, but
rather to ask how we go about understanding material relations.
It is not, as Bennett (2010a, pxvi) reminds us, that we need to reject the old
materialisms (class and economy still matter) but rather that a “dogged resistance to
anthropocentrism” opens up an alternative way of thinking about “vital materi-
alism” alongside “historical materialism”. By drawing on the lessons of post-
structuralism, bringing new insights to how we can think about materialism and
reality and rethinking the posthumanist subject in materialist, vitalist, embodied
and embedded terms (Braidotti, 2013), posthumanism takes up the challenge that
poststructuralism started – itself drawing on a longer line of thinking from Marx to
Freud and Nietzsche – questioning the assumptions of humanism. It has not been
my goal here to argue for or against poststructuralism but rather to understand the
complexity of a line of thought that has sought to undermine Eurocentric con-
ceptions of humanity and to insist that as applied linguists we need to be able to
engage with theory (which is not juxtaposed with practice). As more perceptive
writers on the role of poststructuralism in relation to applied linguistics have
suggested, the possibilities of drawing on “poststructuralist theories of knowledge
and power” (Kramsch, 2015, p458) or “poststructuralist theories of language use
that focus on diversity, variation, and change” (p462) are important avenues for
applied linguistic research.

Beyond human exceptionalism

Posthumanism is a broad term that embraces a number of questions about what it
means to be human. The transhumanist line of thinking focuses specifically on the
domain of human enhancement: what are the implications for humans once we
consider that they may be improved by the addition of new limbs, eyes, memories
and organs, or that declines in arterial or cerebral functioning may be halted? Linked
to extropianist views – humans can be continuously improved on – there are many
strands to this line of thought, including transcending humanity (genetic interven-
tions to improve humans), enhancing humanity (technologies that improve what
humans can do), prolonging humanity (reversing age-related decline), translating
humanity (moving human capacities to silicon-based and virtual platforms such
as avatars) or incorporating humanity (seeing humans as an intrinsic part of a
co-evolving larger world). Here the great carbon–silicon divide (Fuller, 2011, p78)
leads us to consider whether we are intellects that for now operate in animal bodies
(Kurzweil, 1999, 2005) or animals that for now have distinct intellects (Singer,
1975, 1999). Rather than Vitruvian man – that da Vinci-drawn image of the male
human enclosed within the perfect circle that became the model of European self-
representation and the focus of opposition in anti- and posthumanist discourse
(Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2008) – Mitchell (2003, p39) suggests we become a
“spatially extended cyborg”. This is the post-Cartesian world where “I link, there-
fore I am” (Mitchell, 2003, p62).
Transhumanist thought from this broad perspective forms a backdrop to some of
the discussion here. It is always worth considering the ways in which human
38 The strange humanist subject
enhancements and converging technologies raise significant questions for any prior
assumptions about what it now means to be human (we shall return at various points
to cyborgs and the incorporation of humanity into a broader ecosystem). This
“classist and techno-centric movement” (Ferrando, 2013, p28), however, will not be
a major focus of this book. Among the various other strands of posthumanist thought
(alongside ultrahumanism, metahumanism and so forth), the ones of most interest to
applied linguistics are those that come under the critical and feminist posthumanist
challenge to anthropocentrism (post-anthropocentrism) and those that take a more
particular stance on humanism (anti-humanism) by “de-linking the human agent
from this universalistic posture, calling him to task, so to speak, on the concrete
actions he is enacting” (Braidotti, 2013, p23). It is these that form the background to
much of the discussion in this book as I work towards a form of critical post-
humanism that seeks to “move beyond the traditional humanist ways of thinking
about the autonomous, self-willed individual agent in order to treat the human itself
as an assemblage, co-evolving with other forms of life, enmeshed with the
environment and technology” (Nayar, 2014, p4).
Establishing the relations among posthumanism, humanism, religion, science,
materialism and the humanities or social sciences, as this chapter has shown, is
complex. These ideas overlap, invade each other and cannot be seen as either static
or in simple opposition. The posthumanism I am pursuing here, however, is less
dependent on pinning down an understanding of humanism and its relation to
religion, rights, reason or recognition. It is the discursive production of humanity
that is of greater importance to the project. This is about “taking issue with human
exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we play in the differential
constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both
living and nonliving)” (Barad, 2007, p136). This has serious implications for
linguistics and applied linguistics since they have played an important role in the
maintenance of human exceptionalism through the idea that it is language that
separates humans from non-humans. Shifting this relationship between language,
humans and our surrounds changes the ways we think about where language and
thought are located. It is to a consideration of distributed language and cognition that
I turn in the next chapter, asking what happens to ideas such as resources and
repertoires once we start to rethink these boundaries between humans and non-
humans, between interiority and exteriority.

Notes
1 Although Europe’s fairly long period of relative non-violence might accord with Pinker’s
(2011) arguments in favour of the non-violent trends in human nature, the history of
European violence in the world needs to be recognized.
2 Another line of thought sees the betrayal of humanism in the focus on class, race and gender
that ignores the centrality of the individual (Good, 2001). From this point of view, human-
ism can be recouped by a return to European individualism and high culture.
3 Humani nihil alienum (from Terence) is also the motto of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities, to which I was recently elected, so I too, in some ways, am bound by this
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 agreeing with
some of my arguments here). As she explained (critiquing an earlier version of this
chapter), as a slave in La Martinique (freed in 1852), her great-great-grandmother (Pauline
Chalono) always had human rights. 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 marriage in January 2016.
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 resigned in early
2016 to seek election to the Australian parliament.
7 Ruddock introduced the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill in 2004, which defined
marriage as between a man and a woman, thus pre-empting possible court rulings in favour
of same-sex marriage or civil union.
8 Linguists may no longer use the structuralist label, having 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, p127) trenchant critique of O’Regan’s (2014) “epis-
temological intolerance” and absence of “responsible critical thinking” in his discussion of
English as a lingua franca misses the point that O’Regan’s understanding of politics and
poststructuralist thought represents a far more sophisticated understanding than many other
recent accounts.
3 Distributed language, spatial
repertoires and semiotic
assemblages

Finding your way underwater

For scuba divers, underwater navigation is a practice of some significance,
especially on boat dives (you need to get back to the boat). A dive often starts with a
dive briefing on the surface, with a dive master or instructor explaining the under-
water topography. This may be done with the help of a fairly simply drawn map on a
white board (Figure 3.1) – a sketch of features, currents and directions – along with
various written details – maximum dive time (either in minutes or in terms of
remaining air supply/pressure, e.g. 500 psi/50 bar), maximum dive depth (26 meters)
and a reminder about a safety stop before resurfacing (3 minutes at 5 meters). This is
often also accompanied by various other safety checks, such as ensuring familiarity
with the signs for amount of air consumption, intention to surface and possible
problems during the dive. The briefing may also be done with only a verbal
orientation, accompained by various hand gestures (the wall runs about 30 meters
south – a flat hand showing the wall – before dropping down to a sandy bottom –
other hand shows flat bottom – at about 25 meters’ depth – and so on).
Converting this information into actual underwater navigation, where all sorts of
other factors – visibility, fishlife, recognizing shapes and colours – come into play is
a complex act of resemiotization in Iedema’s (2003) terms, or, as I prefer to see it
(Pennycook, 2010), relocalization: this is not only a process of remaking meaning
in different contexts, of the reinscription of different meanings onto different sur-
faces, but also of a redistribution of meaning in physical space, a reorientation of
meaning in relation to the body and the physical sourroundings. As Hutchins
(1995) reminds us too, maps are themselves computational devices, repositories of
stored and measured information about the world that help us to understand the
physical space we are in. With established maps (and note in Figure 3.1 there is a
small section of a printed map in one corner that locates the island in a larger
context), this information has been gathered and ordered and checked over time and
with considerable effort. With the more hastily drawn guide to the dive site, the
information is gathered from recent diving experience or from other divers. All
sorts of information and knowledge feed into this map, its presentation and our
interpretation, organizing how we think about the site and how we will engage with
the underwater terrain.
 Distributed language 41

Figure 3.1 Pre-dive briefing map

Once underwater, there are many different factors involved. One obvious nav-
igational tool is a compass: at its simplest, taking bearings in one direction and
reversing in the other (though a dive is usually more complex). The timing of the
dive and monitoring of air pressure is another navigational element (20 minutes in
one direction, or until the tank pressure is at 100 bar, and then return). A dive console
typically provides these important pieces of information: length of dive (watch or
dive computer), air pressure (pressure guage) and direction (compass). Distance
may also be calculated using a knowledge of how far one travels with each kick of
one’s fins. These calculations of distance and time are compounded by current,
which may be observable (fish typically face into the current, while weed, soft coral
and other items can be seen to move with the current) or also felt in a more bodily
manner (finning is harder in one direction than another). One of the most obvious
navigational aids is the underwater topography: particular features in the underwater
environment, such as rock and coral formations, patches of weed or bommies (an
Australian diver and surfer term from the Indigenous bombora for an area where
waves are breaking over a shallow rock or coral outcrop). Fish are less reliable as
navigational aids, since, like divers, they are interested in checking out their
surrounds.
Navigating according to physical features is itself made more complex by the
variability of the environment (sand, rocks and seaweed can be harder to differen-
tiate than a section of a coral wall) and visibility (in clear water with 20 meters’
42 Distributed language
visibiity, it ought to be hard to go wrong; in murky, stirred-up water, with less than
5 meters’ visibility, disorientation is easy). Also important is the fact that we always
dive at least in pairs (with a buddy), and thus although communication is fairly
limited underwater (nonverbal), we navigate together. We also use sound, which
carries further underwater and is better for attracting attention (we often carry
devices that produce sound under water, or use a hard object to bang on the air tank).
Diving at night (only for the experienced), we use lights instead. Navigation while
diving – and all sorts 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 physical environment, using a series of instruments and
measurements (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, will
generally have different features), orienting in a bodily fashion (feeling the current,
sensing water temperature (thermoclynes), gauging speed through the water) and
staying in touch with and communicating with other divers (watching, sending
signals, attracting attention, monitoring problems).
Navigation comes up at various points in this book (we will consider the nav-
igational feats of birds and other animals in Chapter 5), since it provides a significant
example of how humans and other animals operate in relation to their environment.
Some of the most complex and fascinating navigation is that of Micronesian sailors
who have navigated across wide expanses of the Pacific without charts. Once out of
sight of land, they imagine that their canoe is stationary in relation to the stars while
the islands around them move. By superimposing the imagined movement of an
island in relation to the star bearings, navigators create a model of the voyage that
they can then manipulate from their own standpoint on the deck of the boat or canoe.
The organization of different Western and Micronesian models of navigation “relies
on both the organization of conceptual content and on the structural opportunities
presented by the material world” (Hutchins, 2005, p1569). Hutchins’ analysis helps
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 example) may be material resources that exist independently.
Our cognition, and particularly when we are engaged in activities such as nav-
igation, includes these material anchors. When we’re diving, of course, the
materiality of the ship’s anchor, nestled between rocks 20 meters down from the
safety of the boat, is often a welcome recognition that we have safely completed our
return journey. But the point here is about how these material anchors become part of
our cognition. As Hutchins (2005) points out, it would be a mistake to assume that a
compass needle, for example, is the crucial player; rather it is the compass rose
(the markings indicating directions) that plays the more important role. As navi-
gators we use this compass rose as part of our thinking: one basic navigational
technique while sailing is to work out the bearings of parts of the ship as seen from
the vantage of the person at the helm (next to the binnacle, holding the compass). We
choose various items – stanchions or a winch 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 turn 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 surrounds 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
softened”. The apparent necessity of drawing such a boundary between inside and
outside, he goes on, “is in part a side effect of the attempt to to deal with the indi-
vidual 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
view 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 terms of “distributive agency” (Bennett, 2010a, p21). The
seeds of this thinking, Bennett (2010a) 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,
2017). From a posthumanist point of view, we can start 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
Schatzki (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
objects play an active role in human life. For Schatzki (2002, p201), the proliferation
of agency in, for example, ANT does little more than correct “a misguided
humanism that proclaims people the sole agents”. Rather than running the danger of
assuming intentionality alongside agency, Schatzki (2002, p200) proposes that “the
language of doing” can accomplish the same thing and is “applicable without
prejudice to humans and nonhumans alike”. One might on the other hand contend
that 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
themselves 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 (2010a) on distributed agency,
we can start to see that things may be part of the action.

Extended and distributed cognition

Asking whether machines can think or, put the other way round, whether the human
mind is like a computer program, John Searle (1986) developed his famous Chinese
Room adaptation of the Turing test. For Alan Turing (1950), the test of whether a
machine can think could be based on the degree to which it exhibits intelligent
behaviour or passes as intelligent to outsiders: if people cannot tell whether a
machine or a person is delivering answers, then we can grant intelligence to a
machine. Turing’s rather exteriorized and one might say behaviourist position (still
used for the Loebner prize today) is countered in various ways by Searle’s inter-
iorized framework. More specifically, Searle was objecting to what he saw as the
strong Artificial Intelligence argument that computers can be considered intelligent.
To argue that machines can be intelligent, to suggest that artificial intelligence
is constantly closing the gap between machines and humans, is to threaten the
humanist presumption of a unique and separate cognition that cannot be replicated.
In Searle’s Chinese Room he asks us to suppose he is inside a room with Chinese
text coming in and Chinese answers coming out. To produce this output, however,
the Searle inside the machine, who knows no Chinese, is working with a set of rules
for making correlations between input and output text. That is to say, the supposedly
thinking part of the machine does not actually understand what it is doing. Searle
uses this analogy to suggest that we cannot assume that machines can think since
they may simply operate on input and produce output without comprehension. This
argument has engendered huge debate from a number of directions, but of interest to
the discussion here is the way in which Searle makes the human inside the room the
crucial arbiter of understanding (setting aside the problems that the human is also a
“native speaker of English” who is dealing with the perenially othered Chinese).
Taking issue with this position, Hutchins argues that it unhelpfully separates aspects
of the problem into different entities. The more interesting proposition is in fact that
it is the whole Chinese Room that does the thinking as a “sociocultural cognitive
system” (Hutchins, 1995, p362).
From the point of view of distibuted cognition, we do not need to assume that the
lack of knowledge of Chinese by the human in cognitive isolation within the room
means that more broadly the system itself cannot think. For Hutchins, the useful
thing about Searle’s problem is that it shows that “the cognitive properties of the
person in the room are not the same as the properties of the room as a whole”
(Hutchins, 1995, p362). One of the problems with trying to understand cognition is
that it has happened in laboratories, in experiments where aspects of cognition are
isolated. A very similar problem happened with the cognitive turn in second-
language acqusition (SLA) studies. Rejecting the behaviourist assumptions that
 Distributed language 45
language was learned by repeating the input, cognitivist models sought to study
atomistic aspects of language (morpheme acquisition orders being a good example)
as they are acquired by atomistic individuals in cognitive isolation (or possibly in
contrived interaction). The pendulum swung from the over-externalized assump-
tions of behaviourism to the over-internalized notion of cognition in isolation. What
we really need to know, argues Hutchins, is what “cognition in the wild” looks like,
an endeavour that needs “cognitive ethnography” (Hutchins, 2005, p371).
The notion of extended mind takes us one step towards an alternative under-
standing of human thought, emphasizing how particular objects and tools – such as a
mobile phone – may extend our thinking outside our own heads (Clark, 1989, 2008).
In many ways there is nothing new here: from the development of writing to the use
of telescopes and watches, humans have been enhancing their own thinking through
new technologies. Mitchell (2003, p38) suggests that it is now possible to see
ourselves as mobile cyborgs as new communication technologies change the
relations between humans and city spaces. There is no clear distinction, he argues,
between “internal cognitive processes and external computational ones”: we per-
ceive, act, learn and know “through the mechanically, electronically, and otherwise
extended bodies and memories that we construct and reconstruct for ourselves”.
People who have access to modern technologies – and that is a considerable pro-
portion of the world with the rise of mobile devices – have “cognitive capacities that
extend into the environment, tap into virtually limitless memory storage, navigate
effortlessly by GPS, and communicate in seconds with anyone anywhere in the
world” (Hayles, 2012, p97).
For Hayles (2012), as we work with digital technologies and appreciate the ways
in which machines and networks carry out complex tasks on our behalf, the com-
mon interface we employ – the keyboard – starts “to seem an extension of one’s
thoughts rather than an external device on which one types”. This form of
embodiment “takes the form of extended cognition, in which human agency and
thought are enmeshed within larger networks that extend beyond the desktop
computer into the environment” (Hayles, 2012, p3). Extending Clark’s (2008, p70)
notion of “epistemic actions” that modify the environment “to provide crucial bits
of information just when they are needed most” (Hayles, 2012, p38), Hayles (2012,
p98) suggests that such actions “modify both the environment and cognitive-
embodied processes that adapt to make use of those changes”. Take the screen
swipe, for example, which young children are now learning at a very early age: this
action changes both how we access knowledge and how we understand it. We
therefore have new types of embodied experiences (virtual reality), new types of
cognitive scaffolding (touch screens) and new kinds of extended cognitive systems
(mobiles, video games) (Gee, 2015b).
As Clark (2008) points out, objections to extended cognition on the basis that
objects cannot have cognitive capacity – that a pencil cannot think, for example –
fundamentally misrepresent the argument. The point, he argues, is that the pencil
may be part of a cognitive routine. Questions such as ‘Does a chair have agency?’ or
‘Can a pencil think?’ are not really worth pursuing (unless we are really prepared to
radically change what we mean by agency and think), but trying to understand what
46 Distributed language
role a chair may have as part of our thinking and doing and languaging, as part of a
vibrant assemblage, and asking what role a pencil might play in a broader process of
cognition become more interesting and indeed more researchable. Likewise, with
language: the argument is not that, say, a zucchini or a mango think, have feelings or
are linguistic items. But it does become clear in the discussion below that they play a
part in the action, they take on meaning, they play a semiotic role, they are part of a
communicative routine and they may interpellate us as we walk through a market.
They therefore become part of the spatial repertoire and distributed language.
For Clark (2008, pp218–9), once we stop privileging “the inner, the biological,
and the neural”, we can start to see that the human mind “emerges as the productive
interface of brain, body, and social and material world”. Both extended mind and
distributed cognition share the central tenet that “human cognition is non-local”, that
it “draws on brains, bodies and surroundings, including other cognizers, artefacts,
social relations and environmental structures” (Steffensen, 2012, p186). While
extended mind thus operates on a spatial scale larger than the individual, showing
how our thinking involves much more than just what is inside our heads, distributed
cognition expands such insights to look not only at these cognitive affordances in
immediate time and space but also broader cognitive ecosystems. As Michaelian
and Sutton (2013, p6) explain, cognition may be “multiply distributed, both within
neural networks and across bodies, artifacts, and social groups”. Distributed cog-
nition, unlike extended mind, is not a kind of cognition, moving out from an
assumed centre, but rather the condition of all cognition: “Distributed cognition
begins with the assumption that all instances of cognition can be seen as emerging
from distributed processes” (Hutchins, 2014, p36).
So from this perspective, we can see how the cognitive processes involved in
diving navigation engage mental, bodily and material practices. From a more tra-
ditional approach to cognition (which in any case would approach any such study not
ethnographically, underwater and in a wet suit but rather through disembodied means
of mind isolation, on dry land and in a lab coat), the question would be how the brain
computes input from different sources before sending directions to the body to react.
From an extended mind point of view, the particular interest would be in those
devices, such as the dive computer or depth gauge, that start doing some of our
thinking for us. From a distributed cognition point of view, it is the wider underwater
world that becomes part of the the processes of cognition. Navigation involves
understanding and calculating distance, pressure and time, recognizing rocks, coral
and sand, feeling current, speed and temperature, sensing and communicating with
other divers, using the material anchors around us as part of our thinking.
Thinking in these terms has important implications for opening up a more post-
humanist perspective, but where does language sit here? For Clark and Chalmers
(2008, p232), language “serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways
that onboard devices cannot”. While this framing of the role of language as a crucial
tool in extending cognition is helpful, the tool-based metaphor is also limiting. As
Steffensen (2012) notes, while both Clark and Hutchins open up alternatives for
thinking about cognition, neither escapes a more traditional view of language as a
representational system. We need to turn to alternative ways of thinking about
 Distributed language 47
language in order to arrive at a more developed understanding of distributed
language. In order to do so, I turn in the next section to a consideration of the idea of
linguistic repertoires, asking how we can understand the locality of language.
We shall then return to a discussion of distributed language.

From individual trajectories to spatial repertoires

In a series of explorations of the idea of repertoire (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014a,
2014b, 2015a, 2015b) it became clear as Emi Otsuji and I looked at busy market
places, shops, kitchens and restaurants that sociolinguistic repertoires need to be
understood in terms of spatial distribution, social practices and material embodiment
rather than the individual competence of the sociolinguistic actor who has held
centre stage over the last few decades. The notion of repertoire in sociolinguistics
goes back to the work of Gumperz and others in the 1960s and was explained as “the
totality of linguistic forms regularly employed in the course of socially significant
interaction” (Gumperz, 1964, p137). The importance of the idea of a linguistic
repertoire as a means to describe a plurality of codes within a community is
grounded in the sociolinguistic imperative to deal with “actual speech instead of
with langue”, obliging the researcher “to recognize the existence of a plurality of
codes or code varieties in the same linguistic community” (Giglioli, 1972, p15).
From that point on, the notion of repertoire has been used in numerous ways,
re-emerging most recently as part of “post-Fishmanian” sociolinguistics (Blom-
maert et al., 2012, p18), a desire to move away from the sedimented terminology of
bilingualism and code-mixing towards a more flexible account of how people
deploy different linguistic resources in their everyday practice (Pennycook, 2016a).
The difficulty for the notion of repertoire, however, is that it sits uncomfortably
between an indeterminate notion of a speech community (the totality of linguistic
options available to a group of people who share certain linguistic practices) and the
individual (the totality of linguistic options available to a person from their linguistic
life history). Platt and Platt (1975, p36) made a distinction between speech rep-
ertoire as “the repertoire of linguistic varieties utilized by a speech community
which its speakers, as members of the community, may appropriately use” and
verbal repertoire as “the linguistic varieties which are at a particular speaker’s
disposal”. While this terminology gained little traction, a similar idea reappears in
Bernstein’s distinction between repertoire (“the set of strategies and their analogic
potential possessed by any one individual”) and reservoir (“the total of sets and its
potential of the community as a whole”) (Bernstein, 2000, p158).
While some sociolinguists recognized this tension and proposed terminology to
deal with it, a broader consensus seemed to follow Wardaugh’s (1986, p129) sug-
gestion that “[t]he concept of ‘speech repertoire’ may be most useful when applied to
individuals rather than to groups. We can use it to describe the communicative
competence of individual speakers. Each person will then have a distinctive speech
repertoire”. This was the moment where social language use became inscribed into a
notion of individualized competence, when an internalized competence came to be
seen to include a sociolinguistic dimension. More recent sociolinguistic orientations
48 Distributed language
questioning the possibility of the notion of community under current conditions of
mobility and fragmentation have similarly had to focus on the individual and their
life history as the locus of the repertoire, since there is no coherent community to
hold the notion of repertoire in place: “Repertoires are individual, biographically
organized complexes of resources, and they follow the rhythms of actual human
lives” (Blommaert and Backus, 2013, p15). Rymes’ (2014, pp9–10) notion of the
communicative repertoire as “the collection of ways individuals use language and
other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function
effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate” extends the
communicative possibilities of what may be contained in a repertoire but centres
nonetheless on the individual deployment of a repertoire of semiotic resources.
The larger question, however, is not whether there is a way to return to a more
social understanding of language but rather how we got caught in this framework
to start with, hovering between the humanist ideals of the individual and society
(“in here” or “out there”, as Latour (1999) puts it). Taking up a more posthumanist
account of language that is embodied, embedded, extended and enacted (more than
just social or individual) can help us reconsider the ways in which language is
distributed. In studies designed to shed light on the notion of repertoire in both online
and face-to-face interactions it became clear that to see the notion of a linguistic
repertoire residing in either the individual or community could not adequately
account for the diversity of resources deployed. Studies of online and offline
communication by young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh (Dovchin et al., 2015;
Dovchin et al., in press; Sultana et al., 2015) suggest that the interactants in both
online and offline environments are not merely the obvious participants but also the
semiotic resources distributed across networks. Once we start to think in terms of
networks of texts, artefacts, practices and technologies (Gourlay et al., 2013), the
distinction between being online and offline, between real and virtual, and between
paper text and screen text become much less important than an understanding of the
relations among linguistic and cultural assemblages.
Different linguistic resources might be drawn not only from the obvious contexts
of first languages (Mongolian and Bangla) or major languages encountered in
school and through popular culture (English): Turkish, Hindi, Korean, German and
Japanese all turn up too and are linked to a range of popular cultural forms, from
Bollywood films to sumo wrestling. These resources also include a range of other
semiotic devices. When a young Mongolian woman, Altai, for example, updates her
Facebook status with “Ai syopping @ Louis Vitton : : : güzel çanta : : : ”, using
transliterated Korean English (Ai syopping (아이 쇼핑); eye shopping is window
shopping), the online symbol @ to show her location at the French handbag store
Louis Vuitton, accompanied by Turkish, güzel çanta (lovely bags), she is not only
indexing her bourgeois consumerist identity as she looks at bags in the window but
also drawing on her background at a Turkish high school in UlaanBaataar, making
use of her engagement with Korean dramas and playing with the multimodal and
multispatial affordances of online interaction.
The Facebook posting of another Mongolian participant (Sultana et al., 2015) –
“Zaa unuudriin gol zorilgo bol ‘Oppa ajaa ni Gym-yum style’ Guriineee kkkkk”
 Distributed language 49
(“OK, today’s main aim is ‘Your lady is in the mode of Gym-yum style’. Keep on
doing it! Hahaha”) – points to the importance of the posthuman affordances of
online, spatial and material resources. Alongside the selfie of herself at the gym
(an artefact with wide semiotic potential), there is the playful reworking of the
Korean 오빤 강남 스타일 (Oppan Gangnam style), with its intertextual reference to
Gangnam style (Sultana et al., 2013) (modified with Gym and yum), adaptation of
Korean Oppa (older male/brother) and Mongolian ajaa (older sister), the ono-
matopoeic giggling, kkkkk, popular among Korean and Mongolian online users, and
the use of contemporary Mongolian youth slang (“Guriineee” (“Keep on doing
it!”)). While the translingual resources form one part of this online interaction,
equally important are the use of sounds, emotive expressions and engagement with
particular genres of popular culture.
The notion of repertoire in such contexts can consequently be understood as an
emergent and interactant affordance of the online space rather than an individual or
communal capacity. From this point of view, digital literacies can be understood as
social practices that are produced collaboratively through the manipulation of
human and non-human resources (Gourlay and Oliver, 2013). While online activity
allows for a particular dispersal of resources, online and offline contexts interact
(Thorne, 2013), with people relating their offline experiences online (shopping or the
gym, for example) and talking about their online lives offline (in daily conversa-
tions). Indeed, as online environments have become increasingly integrated with
daily life – mobile devices are part of everyday interactions – the distinction between
online and offline becomes increasingly irrelevant. Virtual repertoires have become
integrated into daily lives, and daily lives have become part of online contexts.
When we observe the interactions of linguistic and spatial resources in a busy
kitchen, it also becomes evident that the notion of repertoire is best understand as
spatial and distributed rather than tied to individuals or communities. With its flows
of people, linguistic resources and activities, it is hard to define the kitchen at the
Patris Pizza restaurant in Sydney in terms of a speech community (Pennycook and
Otsuji, 2014a). Nischal, from Nepal, who speaks Nepalese, Bangla, “a bit of
Gujarati, Punjabi : : : definitely a lot of Indian” as well as “a bit of Czech and
Slovak”, claims that the language of the kitchen is Polish, while the two brothers,
Krzysztof and Aleksy, of Polish background, claim it is English. But into this space
come other resources: Jaidev, an Indian waiter, drops by to ask for a cigarette from
Nischal, an exchange using Hindi and English resources (“Acha ye last pada hua
hai?” (“OK, this is the last one?”); “It’s alright (.) it’s all yours”); not unexpectedly
food terms such as mozzarella and formaggio turn up in conversations between the
cooks; and after Aleksy’s Columbian girlfriend has called him on his mobile, Nis-
chal teases him (“Hola, como estas?” (“Hi, how are you?”)). A range of semiotic
resources is distributed within and outside this busy workplace, criss-crossed by
trajectories of people (cooks, floor staff, phone calls), artefacts (knives, sieves,
plates, ingredients) and practices (washing, chopping, cooking, serving).
Likewise, the material artefacts and activities in a small bistro in Tokyo – bringing
food and plates, squeezing through the small and crowded restaurant, menus, food
orders, music, wine bottles – all play a role in the spatial repertoire of Petit Paris
50 Distributed language
(Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014a). Within a short period of time, Nabil moves around
the small restaurant floor, negotiating with the chef about the dish, passing between
tables, dealing with customers (“Sorry, gomen nasai” (“Sorry”)), serving food
(“hotate no carpaccio” (“scallop carpaccio”); “Voilà, bon appetit” (“Here it is, enjoy
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, Nabil is engaged in a
range of tasks which do not map in any discrete, functional fashion onto the lin-
guistic resources he uses. Of importance here, then, are the interrelationships
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 Otsuji,
2014b; 2015a), we can see how the merchandise itself becomes a central part 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 (“ : : : twenty
four”). I told him. He wants to try and get it for cheaper. Arba wa ashreen”), the fact
that the zucchini they are trying 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
(“Isfar : : : we understand isfar in Lebanese”). As in the Tokyo bistro we can see the
circulation here of linguistic resources and artefacts, all of which are part of this spatial
repertoire. 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 of Turkish, Pakistani,
Moroccan, Sudanese-Egyptian, Somalia and Philippino backgrounds); it matters that
the customer can summon up some common terms from a shared crossover between
Maltese and Arabic; and it matters that the zucchini have started to turn yellow.
As we look across these different sites, it becomes evident that the language
practices are embedded within a wider spatial repertoire. When a young man in a
smaller market (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014b), who, by his account uses Hokkien,
Indonesian, Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin and English resources, tells us, as he
husks corn over a large green bin, “乜都有, 撈埋一齊” (“All sorts of languages are
mixed together”), we have to consider how these linguistic resources intersect with
the spatial organization of other repertoires, 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 “呢呢呢呢 : : : 係呀, 係呀. 呢個色好食” (“Look, look, look : : :
yeah, yeah. This colour tastes good”), the mangos themselves, their colour, taste and
smell, become part 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 repertoires from which communication 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 of languages 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 of language,
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
orthodox modern linguistics, corresponds to any determinate or determinable object
of analysis at all, whether social or individual, whether institutional or psycho-
logical” (Harris, 1990, p45).
The point here is not merely that language serves communicative purposes but
rather that language is part 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 predetermined set of linguistic options, and instead to embrace the radical inde-
terminacy 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 translingual practices, suggesting that “communication transcends
individual languages” and “communication transcends words and involves diverse
semiotic resources and ecological affordances”. Harris (2004) himself, however, saw
little value in the idea of distributed language, pointing to the limited theories of
language that underpin extended and distributed cognition and reiterating the
importance of integration rather than distribution: “integrating mind” might work
instead, 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 integrationist
approach” (Harris, 2004, p738).
Yet while Harris was right in his critique of the limited vision of language in
extended and distributed cognition, his insistence on integration – the mind is
integrated with the body and its surrounds – fails to take the more radical step of
exteriority that suggests the mind is not just integrated with but part of that exterior
world. Steffensen’s (2012) and Cowley’s (2012) melding of distributed cognition
and integrational linguistics takes us into a more helpful space than integrational
linguistics alone: language cannot be reduced to a notion of system, is bound up
with real-time activity and plays a role in socially moulded cognitive and linguistic
niches rather than individual cognition. From this perspective, “far from being a
synchronic ‘system,’ language is a mode of organization that functions by linking
people with each other, external resources and cultural traditions” (Cowley, 2012,
p2). The focus on language-as-system located in the mind-in-the-body of single
organisms masks the “interdependency of voices, gestures and artifacts” (Cowley,
2012, p2), overlooks the centrality of activity and practice and “excludes real-time
dynamics” (p3).
The shift away from a Cartesian view of a mind engaged in symbol processing
involves an understanding that humans are metabolic before they are symbolic.
From this point of view, 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 repertoire 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.
While 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 occurring in and between humans.

Conclusion: towards vibrant assemblages

Humanist conceptualizations of language and mind have located both firmly in the
human head. We may think or talk in different contexts but our thought processes
and our linguistic systems are located in our skulls (context is where talk happens,
not part of the talk itself). Sensory or linguistic input comes in, is processed by our
cognitive apparatus and dispatched again as action or output. This cognitive sand-
wich (Hurley, 1998) approach (cognition is the filling between perception as input
and action as output) is challenged by situated, extended or distributed cognition,
which seeks to understand cognition as extending outside humans into their physical
and social environments (Waters, 2012). Too much of the study of language
development has suffered from the same sandwich approach: language comes in as
input, is processed by the language-oriented parts of the cognitive sandwich and
then sent back into the world as output (speech, writing). If the “comprehensible
 Distributed language 53
output hypothesis” (Swain and Lapkin, 1995) – arguing that language production
helps learners perceive a gap in their knowledge and to adjust and develop their
competence accordingly – was an advance on the even more reductive “compre-
hensible input hypothesis” (Krashen, 1982) – language acquisition occurs as result
of receiving comprehensible input – both nonetheless suffer from a view that
language enters the head (input) and is processed by a cognitive sandwich before
being sent out again (output).
Like Searle’s Chinese Room, the problem here is a focus on highly reduced forms
of language and cognition (Pepperell, 2003). Asking the question “Where is
language?” – a question that may make little sense to the mainstream of language
studies – Finnegan (2015) suggests that the “cognitive language-centred model of
the nature and destiny of humanity”, with its focus on language in the mind, misses
so much that matters, including not only many other cultural modes such as music,
dance and drama but also “the gestural, pictorial, sculptural, sonic, tactile, bodily,
affective and artefactual dimensions of human life” (Finnegan, 2015, p18). This is
not just to include nonverbal communication in our model, or to acknowledge that
context plays a role in language use, but rather to shift the locus of where things
happen and to suggest that language use is not an internally motivated process of
choice between language items – not the white-bread output resulting from the
cognitive processing of sandwich filling but a far more distributed process, invol-
ving places, things, senses, bodies. Alongside verbal language people also “exploit
such diverse tools as facial expression, gesture, bodily orientation, spatial indi-
cations, movement, touch, images, and a variety of material objects, from sceptres,
flags or guns to meaningful apparel, stethoscopes and pulpits” (Finnegan, 2015,
p77). And these are all part of the action, part of distributed language.
From this perspective, “the human is not approached as an autonomous agent, but
is located within an extensive system of relations” (Ferrando, 2013, p32). Thrift
(2007, p8) talks of a “material schematism in which the world is made up of all kinds
of things brought in to relation with one another by many and various spaces through
a continuous and largely involuntary process of encounter”. Material surrounds are
understood not so much as a context in which we interact but rather as part of
an interactive whole that includes people, objects and space through a focus on
“how the composite ecology of human and nonhuman interactions in public space
works on sociality and political orientation” (Amin, 2015, p239). This puts a strong
emphasis on both practices – those repeated social and material acts that have gained
sufficient stability over time to reproduce themselves – and on “the vast spillage of
things” which are given equal weight to other actors and become “part of hybrid
assemblages: concretions, settings and flows” (Thrift, 2007, p9). Bennett (2010a,
p6) is likewise interested in thing-power – “the curious ability of inanimate things to
animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” – and the ways these things
come together in assemblages.
The idea of assemblages developed in part from the work of Deleuze and
Guattari, who focus on an “assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an
intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” as well as a “collective assem-
blage of enunciation, of acts and statements of incorporeal transformations
54 Distributed language
attributed to bodies” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p88).1 For Deleuze and Guat-
tari, the notion of assemblages addresses the need to combine qualities of both
stasis and change together in any understanding of the properties of a thing. Their
concern was to develop an understanding of assemblages as “concrete collections
of heterogeneous materials that display tendencies towards both stability and
change” (Adkins, 2015, p14). Although their work is often seen as emphasizing
change – ideas such as becoming have been widely taken up – it is important to see
that this was part of an argument against an overemphasis on the stability of things
and indeed of languages as systems. The two in fact have to be taken together, an
argument similar to the position Emi Otsuji and I argued (Otsuji and Pennycook,
2010) in terms of fixity and fluidity: we may appear to live in a world of fluidity but
fixity is always at play.
Assemblages can be understood as “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of
vibrant materials of all sorts”, as “living, throbbing confederations” (Bennett, 2010a,
p23). They are “temporary arrangements of many kinds of monads, actants, mol-
ecules, and other dynamic ‘dividuals’ in an endless, nonhierarchical array of shifting
associations of varying degrees of durability” (Appadurai, 2015, p221). The focus
here is on how certain things come together at particular moments, on “the effects of
relational interactions and assemblages, in various kinds of more-than-human net-
works entangled with one another, that may be messy and incoherent, spread across
time and space” (Fenwick and Edwards, 2011, p712). With their “uneven topo-
graphies”, assemblages are not centrally governed by one material or event:

The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties,

emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected
materialism, a blackout, a hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of
the vital force of each materiality considered alone.
(Bennett, 2010a, p24)

Assemblages describe the way things are brought together and function in new
ways, and they provide a way of thinking about how consciousness (Pepperell,
2003), agency (Bennett, 2010a), cognition (Hutchins, 1995) and language (Cowley,
2012) can all be understood as distributed beyond any supposed 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 vibrant, changeable exchanges of everyday life. Rather than viewing language
in segregational terms as linguistic choices made by people in various contexts, this
allows for an appreciation of a much wider range of linguistic, artefactual, historical
and spatial resources brought together in particular assemblages in particular
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 remains 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 terms than individualistic
 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 of interacting objects, places
and alternative forms of semiosis.

Note
1 The term 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. The 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 theory – has been discussed in more
detail by Phillips (2006).
4 The human hierarchy of senses

There’s nothing there

In a discussion of different scapes that included what was probably the first use of
the notion of a smellscape, Porteous (1990) offers a useful example that bridges the
work on extended and distributed cognition in the previous chapter, the overview
of sensory scapes in this chapter and the further exploration of relations between
animals and humans in the next chapter. When we take a dog for a walk (an activity
which, it must be acknowledged, is not necessarily one for the majority of the
world), it is hard not to notice how the dog’s sensory world is dominated by smell,
as it moves, nose down, from tree to post to plant. But how often, Porteous asks,
have we become frustrated with the dog, pulling it away from some unexceptional
place, urging the dog to get a move on because ‘there’s nothing there’. And how
wrong, Porteous notes, we always are when we make this observation. This speaks
to several important points: we live with dogs – indeed a defining aspect of
humanity is our relation with other animals (Shipman, 2011) – and over several
thousand years we have trained them to do various types of work that they are
better suited to (or we have become less adept at as we have outsourced these tasks
to dogs): sniffer dogs at airports, dogs to herd sheep, hunting dogs, or the common
use of dogs to alert us to intruders.
Guide dogs (seeing-eye dogs, also known as assistance dogs) for the blind or
visually impaired are an example of both the closeness of relations and the
specialization of functions in relation to particular animals, also pointing to the ways
in which such animals become part of an extended sensory and cognitive apparatus.
It has long been observed that a “blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him,
and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity,
extending the scope and active radius of touch, and proving a parallel to sight”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p143). For Merleau-Ponty, the stick of a blind person was no
longer an object used by the body but an extension of the body, an incorporation of
an object as part of the body and sensory apparatus. These kinds of embodiment
relations, as Ihde (1991, pp29–30) calls them, are “existential (bodily-sensory), but
they implicate how we utilize technologies and how such use transforms what it is
we experience through such technologies”. As Barad (2007, p157) notes, such
observations undermine “the taken-for-granted distinction between the inside and
 The human hierarchy of senses 57
outside of the body”, raising questions for our understanding of our relation to, and
indeed construction of, objects, and how and why we draw boundaries where we do.
The example of the guide dog takes us into a different domain again, suggesting
that animals themselves can become part of our distributed cognition. It is not just
that we are able to use the better eyes of the dog to help us see, but also that our
thinking and sensing extends out beyond our bodies into a wider world through the
dog. Our relations with other animals – and the fact that animals such as dogs do
some of our sensing and thinking for us – point to the need to question the ways in
which we construct divisions between ourselves and other creatures, which will be
the focus of Chapter 5. The fact that we stress the capacity of the guide dog to see
when the vision of its owner/companion is impaired, however, also points to the
ways in which we anthropocentrically assume that the role of the dog is merely that
of its better vision assisting the weaker vision of its owner/companion. But the dog is
doing at least two other things: making decisions in conjunction with its human
companion about where and how and when to go in certain directions, and using
other senses – both its acute hearing and its excellent sense of smell – to do so.
Yet we often overlook the importance of smell because it has been relegated to a
less important position in the human hierarchy of the senses. Why do we pull the dog
away, saying ‘there’s nothing there’? Our oversight is to focus on our dominant
sense: the visual. We assume the dog is smelling something that we can see – has it
found a dead rabbit, an old shoe, a discarded pizza crust? We are less attuned to the
fact that it has found a smell (and given the origin of many of the smells that interest
dogs, we are even less interested in checking out that smell for ourselves). As
humans, our sense of smell has been relegated to another domain, linked to animals
and various others. Smell is considered much less important than sight or sound.
How did this come about? What happened in the construction of the human subject
that pushed smell to the periphery, and what does this tell us about what counts as
human? This chapter explores smell and the senses in the construction of what it
means to be human, suggesting that the downplaying of smell was part of a particular
construction of language, literacy and rationality. A posthumanist challenge to these
assumptions brings back the body and questions how we might approach multi-
sensorial semiotic asssemblages.

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 history 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 The human hierarchy of senses
Epicurus, Aristotle and Locke (the empiricists) maintained, come from our senses?
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, Hume, Kant –
set in motion one of the basic divides that has only been convincingly 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 Critique of Pure
Reason that our knowledge does not need to conform to objects but rather objects
conform to our knowledge. From this point of view, our senses cannot relate 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 of this argument in Chapter 7, in a discussion of discourse and reality,
exploring further why recent thinkers such as Meillassoux (2008) reject this cor-
relationist proposition, which Bogost (2012, p4) terms 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 these debates – Aristotle saw
smell as one of the three “nobler senses” along with sound and sight (Ree, 1999,
p347), and touch was seen as important 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 particular ways. The mind/body division in European
thought not only allocated particular roles to the senses but also particular senses to
particular bodies, so that the eyes and ears were invited 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 involved 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, physical 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 of rationality, civilization and progress, attaining
its apotheosis in the alphabetic writing of the West” (Finnegan, 2015, p18). 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 deprivation experiment” that excluded many significant aspects of
 The human hierarchy of senses 59
language and the senses (Steffensen and Fill, 2014, p7). What this account is missing
is all the relations between bodies and the world, bodies and objects, the tactile,
affective and sensual elements of human 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 narrow, 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
particularly 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 Cartesian subject, as
Barrett notes, is

made in the image of his inventor. He is white, a European; he is highly

educated, he thinks and is sensitive, he can probably even think in Latin and
Greek; he lived a bit too soon to be a bourgeois but he has class confidence; he
has a general confidence in his existence and power; he is not a woman, not
black, not a migrant, not marginal; he is heterosexual and a father.
(Barrett, 1991, p90)

This is the same WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)
human (Henrich 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 part of his philosophical investigations,
nor giving off odours as a result of manual work. Part 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 construction
(Pennycook, 1998b), as the colonies started to smell bad, so the West became
odourless. “For a society to become civilized and modern,” Low (2009, p167)
suggests, “sanitary wars have been and are staged to combat dirt and foul scents,
regarded as emblems of disorder.” Groups deemed inferior to white, odourless,
bourgeois men – women, working people, ethnic minorities, the elderly, rural
workers – were increasingly seen both as a source of smell and as more sensorily
engaged with smells as part of their less refined ways of living (Cockayne, 2007).

Cities, smells and the Other

As we know from many sources – Süskind’s (1986) remarkable novel Perfume
being but one example – cities were known as malodorous places from medieval
times to the nineteenth century, and a major focus of urban planners has been to
remove the smells from the city (Henshaw, 2013). Although for many urban
dwellers today it may be the countryside that smells, with its odours of animals and
60 The human hierarchy of senses
their excrement, for a long period of time it was the cities that stank in relation to the
sweet-smelling countryside. As Gresillon (2010, p9) notes, it is still common for
those from outside Paris to subscribe to the view that the city smells: Paris, ça pue
(Paris stinks). It is not always so clear what Paris smells of – people’s olfactory
reaction to an underground station in Paris showed a wide variety of descriptions
(excrement, sweat, people, machines, dust, tobacco, humidity, orange, marijuana,
dirt, unclean people and so on) (Gresillon, 2010, p75) – but the city smells and in
negative ways. The odourless modern city started to become a goal of urban renewal
and construction (Henshaw, 2013).
Cities were designed so that wealthier inhabitants were upwind of the polluting
industries. It was the urban poor who were subject to and seen as producers of city
smells, a malodorous population that needed to be settled away from the sweet-
smelling classes (Howes and Classen, 2014). New cities in North America were
designed to promote airflow through grid systems of streets, while the wealthy could
live higher up, above the smells of urban production and decay (Urry, 2011b). For
those involved in urban design, concerns about smell in the city can range from
automobile and industrial pollution to food smells from restaurants, public hygiene
and toilets or the design of public parks and streets to provide a more sweet-smelling
environment. In “contemporary urban smellscapes”, Henshaw (2013, p12) points
out, “the interrelated effects of modernism, city design and urban management
practices have reduced the perceived role of odour to one that is limited and seen as
having a generally negative influence within the urban environment”.
Smells therefore became associated with the working class, the rural worker, the
migrant: “The olfactory challenge for those in power”, argue Classen et al. (1994,
p161) is “how to preserve their inodorateness from the ontological onslaught of
odours emanating from these peripheral groups which always seem to be pressing in
towards the centre”. In his study of the smellscapes of Singapore Low (2009, p14)
argues that “smell functions as a social medium employed by social actors towards
formulating constructions and judgements of race-d, class-ed and gender-ed others”.
Smell thus takes on a moral character: those that smell – workers, the poor,
immigrants – are judged in moral terms as smelling inappropriately, and smell is
often then assumed by appearance: in many contexts of migration, a darker skin is
met with a grimace on the basis of an assumed odour (Low, 2013; Howes and
Classen, 2014). There are also religious connections to this olfactory morality, with
hell and the devil seen as evil smelling, while religious establishments create their
own sweet-smelling environments with incense.
Smell is “keenly associated with different dimensions of personhood” intertwined
with “social and moral violations” (Low, 2009, p81). Into this picture of the odourless
city comes the immigrant community, resettling from parts of the world where smells
are part of the urban environment, setting up restaurants whose fragrant cooking wafts
out onto the street or establishing shops whose shelves of imported odours change the
way the city smells. As Low (2009, p102) explains, “the sense of smell aids the
individual social actor in continuously carving out olfactory zones of racial differ-
entiation”. Despite a growing globalization of sensation in contemporary culture,
“sensory differences remain a source of social tension and social tensions continue to
 The human hierarchy of senses 61
be expressed in terms of sensory difference” (Howes and Classen, 2014, p89). It is not
the sensory differences in themselves – the actual smell of dried fish or body odour in
isolation – that inaugurate the social tension, but the sensory becomes the social when
associations are made with social and racial hierarchies.
The regulation of smell in urban environments has to struggle against many factors,
including industry, climate, location and local practices. It is a struggle to be modern
and sits alongside the grand strategies of modernity, such as standardization, regu-
lation and homogenization. The making of the nation state, with its national language
and national curriculum, was also the making of an odour-free society through urban
planning, regulation of markets and construction of shopping malls. Singapore, a city
known for its strong orientation to hygiene, has signs in the subway banning not only
smoking, flammable goods and eating and drinking but also the pungent durian
(Figure 4.1). In a hotel in Sandakan (Sabah, East Malaysia) a permanent brass sign by
the elevators warns hotel guests: “No outside fruits: Durian Cempedak Tarap”, while
another tells guests not to bring raw or preserved seafood to their rooms (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.1 “No durians”

62 The human hierarchy of senses

Figure 4.2 “No outside fruits”

The hotel is 10 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 sulit, ikan keropok, ikan
kurau, ikan tenggir, and the ubiquitous small dried anchovies, or ikan bilis.
At the far end of the market, near the rusting fishing boats pulled up at the wharf,
gleam a range of fresh fish, crabs, prawns and shellfish. In between there are stalls of
fruit 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, garlic, onions, cinnamon, star anise, chilli,
cardamom, lemon grass, cumin, turmeric and more (many of the ingredients for the
beef rendang for sale at stalls around the corner 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: tarap (its scientific name gives us
a clue: Artocarpus odoratissimus), cempedak and durian. The upmarket tourist hotel
on the waterfront has no such sign, not because they would be happy to have tarap and
ikan bilis in the rooms, but because they assume their clients are not the kind of people
who would bring such goods from the market. But for the other hotel in Sandakan,
keeping its rooms relatively sweet-smelling is a struggle, located where it is in a town
with lively markets, uncontrolled migration and vibrant multilingualism. We shall
return to multilingual, multimodal and multisensory relations below.
 The human hierarchy of senses 63
Smells thus become a terrain of struggle since they “often carry 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 modern societies: relegated to a lower level of perception, to a
bodily encounter with the environment, it has become tied to the negative counter-
constructions 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 industry (a product designed both to disguise certain smells and to attract
with expensive odours) or bouquets in the wine industry 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
the relation of smells to linguistic domains, asking how we can start to incorporate a
sense of smell into our semiotic inventory. This will be followed by a discussion of the
other side of this picture – the issue for the Deaf community of having to perform
language in a bodily medium rather than via auditory channels. The struggles over
cochlear implants – that transhuman enhancement that divides the Deaf community –
will also be a focus of this discussion. Finally I shall explore how we can start to bring
smells together into a broader posthumanist semiotic assemblage.

Semiotic, linguistic and sensory landscapes

How do we start to make sense of this from an applied linguistic point of view? It is
all very well to argue that smell may be important in how we interpret our surrounds,
but it is less clear how this relates to linguistic concerns. The humanist project
located meaning so much in the relation between thinking heads and written words
that the body, smells, touch and feeling were largely eliminated from the equation.
So in developing a posthumanist applied linguistics I want to pursue the question of
how we can open the door again to a broader semiotics. On one level, since smells
are one way in which race, class, gender and ethnicity are demarcated, smells may
also be related to specific languages. While a Singaporean may turn their nose up at a
Bangladeshi worker on the basis of a mix of odours from food and sweat, this also
has linguistic correlates when a group of such workers are talking together in Bangla
(Low, 2009). Since “different odors and aromas can create the effect of ‘olfactory
maps’ of cities, which enable people to ‘conceptualize their environment by way
of smell’” (Classen et al., 1994, p18), there are possible associations to be drawn
between maps of smells and languages.
In the Sandakan market Cantonese and Hakka (Sandakan was once known as
“little Hong Kong”) hover around the odorous fruit; Sabah Malay can be heard
around the dried fish; and the languages of the mobile fishing communities – Tausug
(or Suluk, a language of the Sulu Sea), Visayan, Bajau (the Sea Gypsies) and
others – mix with the smells of fresh fish, while Sabah Malay, or its creole variety,
Baku (King and King, 1984), may circulate in between. But to assume that one can,
64 The human hierarchy of senses
in a sense, sniff out languages runs the danger of implausibly fixing both language and
smell in a context where mobility and fluidity are more salient. As the discussion
of restaurants and markets in the previous chapter suggests (Pennycook and Otsuji,
2015a), to assume that such contexts have clearly demarcated languages or an easily
identifiable lingua franca is to overlook the ways in which language, space, people
and artefacts interact. Thinking in terms of the spatial repertoires of the market, the
goal becomes not so much one of seeking out correlations between smells and
identifiable languages but rather of exploring the ways in which semiotic assemblages
may work.
Amid the multiple components involved in communicative events – the people
involved, the different channels, modes and codes, the settings and the forms and
topics of messages – Hymes (1964/1972, p22) suggested that channels of com-
munication might include, alongside speaking, writing and nonverbal communi-
cation, “smelling, tasting and tactile sensation”. Here, however, we confront another
linguistic dilemma, for while there is a limited vocabulary in European languages for
words for taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter), there are virtually no words for smells
(acrid is one). Smell terminology either borrows from taste (“it smells sour”) or
describes 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 their origins: dried fish, fruit and spices. Domains
that need to deal with smells, such as wine appreciation, have been subject to ridicule
for always having to invoke other smells and tastes (Gluck, 2003; Silverstein, 2003),
from fruit (cherries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries) and positively oriented
sweet flavours (chocolate, toffee) to more rural odours (farmyards 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 smell to language, however, I am less interested in correlations between
languages and odours or the ways languages cut up the osmology in very different
ways (Howes and Classen, 2014) and more in how we can understand the semiotics of
smell in relation to other forms of social semiosis. Placing odours alongside other
“semiotic resources” (van Leeuwen, 2005, p3) allows for a broader understanding
of the semiotic landscape. Already 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 linguistic landscapes focus generally on “the presence, represen-
tation, meanings and interpretation of languages displayed in public places” (Sho-
hamy and Ben-Rafael, 2015, p1), 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 central and has
started to engage with a broader semiotics, including space, place, bodies 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, p134). Recent work, Shohamy (2015, pp153–4) suggests,
 The human hierarchy of senses 65
incorporates “images, photos, sounds (soundscapes), movements, music, smells
(smellscapes), graffiti, clothes, food, buildings, history, as well as people who are
immersed 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 terms of the semiotic
landscape (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010). Yet smell presents us with a problem in
relation to common definitions of semiotic landscapes, not only with respect to
“visible inscription” but also “deliberate human intervention” (Jaworski and
Thurlow, 2010, 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 truism
(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
semiotic 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
carry significant semiotic weight but so too may the fact that a sign has become old
and faded), but rather to contemplate the semiotic quandary 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
semiotic object was almost certainly accidental (even if deliberately discarded) –
smells and their interpretation may be largely unintended.
This relates to part of the discussion in the previous chapter about agency and
intentionality. 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
property that may include the role of objects in the world, however, the intention
behind a sign may become less important than its role as a semiotic actant. The
significance of smell, furthermore, is also in its power to evoke, its connections to
memory, place and emotions. Smell is strongly linked to memory (Dove, 2008), with
a particular capacity to evoke memories of place (Rodaway, 1994). For Porteous
(1990, p25), “the concept of smellscape suggests that, like visual impressions, smells
may be spatially ordered or place-related”. This has implications for how we do
research, since it necessitates an engagement with smells and places through sensory
ethnographies and “smellwalking” (Gresillon, 2010; Henshaw, 2013; Low, 2009).
As Serres’ critique of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the phenomenology of per-
ception suggests, there is “lots of phenomenology and no sensation” (cited in Connor,
2005, p318). While there are a lot of significant insights here – such as the blind
person’s stick as an extension of the body (see above) – the phenomenological project,
Serres suggests, is based around language and introspection rather than throwing
oneself into a full bodily appreciation of the senses and the “empire of signs”, as Serres
himself 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 armchairs on how perceptions are linguistically realized.
But the social and political dimensions of the senses are also crucial here, an element
missing from Serres’ more personal account (Howes and Classen, 2014). As Pink
(2008, p193) suggests, “it was by walking and eating with others, sharing their gazes,
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 form of
engagement, rather than simply in terms of vision” (Pink, 2008, p180).
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 ways
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 his 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 corner 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 (2010, p287) focus on semiosis in situ insists not only on an
engagement with linguistic and pictorial signs but also with “the materiality of context,
and the attributes of multi-sensory fields that topo-sensitive signs necessarily occupy”.
If we wish to incorporate those other senses that have been overlooked in the European
male sensorium – taste, touch and smell – we need to approach semiotic landscapes
not only with a focus on multimodality (Jewitt, 2009) but also a more embodied
engagement with multisensoriality. Smells intersect with other senses (particularly, of
course, taste) but also evoke memories 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 privilege humans, texts and
intentions in the same ways that more traditional approaches to the linguistic 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.

Language in the absence of sound

One side of the humanist construction of language in the head has been the elevation
of sight and hearing over the other, lower senses, and thus the denigration of those
bodily ways we sense and feel and of those bodies that do the feeling. The other side
 The human hierarchy of senses 67
of this image of humans using language through their ears and eyes (linguistic input
and output processed via a cognitive sandwich) is that the language practices of
those who have – according to this model – a deficit in one of these areas may not be
seen as fully linguistic. And given that a defining quality of what it means to be
human is to have command of a language, if one appears to have a lesser linguistic
capacity, one may not be deemed to be a full member of the exclusive category of the
human. This has long been a struggle for the Deaf community, not only to counter
the denigration of sign languages as mere gesture but also to make the case that sign
languages are at the very least equal to (and in some ways greater than) spoken
languages. As Bourke (2011, p50) explains, “the main explanation for downgrading
the humanity of mutes was because language was assumed to be inseparable from
the faculty of reason”. The struggle for Deaf people therefore, like the struggle for
speakers of creoles, is to make the case that sign languages are full and complete
languages, thus allowing users to be admitted into the category of the fully human.
This has always been a battle against dual prejudices: since people who are deaf
are considered to have a disability (a definition much contested in the Deaf com-
munity), and creole speakers are almost all people of colour, arguments for their
languages being real languages are always part of the cycle of discrimination that
renders such languages inadequate on the basis of the users (Deaf, Black) and the
users inadequate on the basis of their languages (sign languages and creoles) (Alim,
2016). We know, too, from any understanding of the politics of standard languages,
that pace Honey (1997) and others who argue that the doors will open to anyone who
can speak standard language, that neither having one’s language accorded the status
of a real language nor learning to use the preferred standard will overcome levels of
discrimination. The “somber reality for many African Americans is that, still, no
matter how ‘articulate’ yo ass is, upon visiting in person, can’t nuthin fool the
landlord now, baby – you Black, Jack!” (Alim and Smitherman, 2012, p55).
The struggle for the recognition of sign languages has also always had to compete
with the primacy of the oral mode, as an assumption about what constitutes language,
and a peripheralization of all bodily forms of communication, including gesture,
posture, facial expression and so on (McNeill, 2005). Although sociolinguistics has
been better than its logocentric linguistic cousin in acknowledging various roles for
the body – studies of nonverbal communication, for example – the body has often been
conceived as “secondary to language rather than as the sine qua non of language”
(Bucholtz and Hall, 2016, p174). Or, as we might say in the context of sign languages,
the body is language. There are a range of threats to sign languages due to a declining
population of sign users, akin in some ways to the threats to spoken languages, as they
get assimilated into regional sign languages or smothered by major sign languages
(American Sign Language is often promoted), but also due to improved medical care,
mainstreaming of Deaf children in schools, medical interventions such as cochlear
implants and developments in genetic science: “the continued and growing stress
exerted on the Australian Deaf community by declining incidence and prevalence
rates, ever-increasing mainstreaming, and virtual saturation levels of cochlear
implantation” are threatening “the minimal viable size for a linguistic community in
both numbers of users and functional range of use” (Johnston, 2004, p372).
68 The human hierarchy of senses
For some in the Deaf community, cochlear implants are a threat to their minority
status (Blume, 2010), a return to the types of intervention that always assume that
Deaf communities are better off when assimilated into the hearing world. In simple
terms this is a struggle between a medical model, which sees deafness as a condition
to be cured or overcome, and a sociocultural model that defines the Deaf in terms of
minority communities with their own languages and cultures (Power, 2005). The
controversy centres particularly on fitting pre-lingually Deaf children with the
implants, on the basis that this leads to the greatest success in relation to language
and speech. The counter argument is that this is an intrusive normalization process
based on hearing-world assumptions about what is best for non-hearing people. This
is not therefore a simple issue of transhuman enhancements, where the modified
body is better than the original – as is arguably the case with a new generation of
hearing aids that can connect via Bluetooth and the internet to a range of smart
household appliances, such as doorbells, electrical appliances, heating systems and
so on – but a much more difficult argument about the relation between minority
rights and perceived disability. Transhumanist enhancers need to be able to grasp
that not all humans want to transcend their humanness even if that humanness is not
considered as fully human by a human majority.
New ways of thinking about this – of integrating sign-language learning with
cochlear implants – but also of thinking about Deafness more broadly in terms of its
spatial and visual culture (Bahan, 2008; Haualand, 2008) are opening up new ways of
understanding Deaf culture and advantage, moving the frame from hearing loss to
Deaf Gain (Bauman et al., 2009). To have to make the claim that sign language is as
good as any other language has also been to reduce sign language to a negative
equivalence. It is this insistence on equivalence (rather than difference) that is the
downside of the humanist dream: unless others can adhere to a normative conception
of humanity, they and their habits, cultures and languages will not be admitted. A
different argument, however, suggests that sign languages are more than just equal to
spoken languages. Sign languages can help us see how communication is about a
much more complex assemblage of semiotic means. It can help us understand gesture
(now that we’re over the derogatory idea of mere gesture); it can help us understand
language in spatiotemporal and embodied terms. Studies of “signed, gestured and
spoken language interaction in multimodal (simultaneous) configurations” provide
the opportunity to “observe communication between individuals with semiotic
repertoires that do not show significant overlap, including between individuals who
do not share the same primary ‘languages’ , ‘codes’ or ‘modalities’” (Kusters et al.,
2017, p229). By understanding how sign languages work we can rediscover “the multi-
dimensional nature of spoken language – its strategic use of time, of space through
gesture and body language, and of tone” (Branson and Miller, 2007, p119). Deaf
languages are not just equivalent to spoken languages; they are much more than this.
Deaf people are almost inevitably multilingual, especially once they have
experienced schooling and literacy. Finger spelling (spelling out the letters of a
word) is a practice in translanguaging – spelt words can only be from languages
different from sign languages and occur in a different modality. Deaf people also
operate multimodally in ways that exceed the more limited multimodalities of
 The human hierarchy of senses 69
gesture. And while their sensory world may be seen as restricted because of the lack
of an auditory channel, the visual and spatial work of language is also in a dimension
that exceeds what the hearing world can do. All of this has implications for how
we think about what it is to be human. Studies of disability and its formation start to
unravel “the politics of ‘normal’ bodies, by showing the constructedness of the
human/non-human boundaries and by suggesting that bodies, able or not, live in
conjunction with the environment” (Nayar, 2014, p123). The location of language
in the head (ears, eyes), tied to a form of alphabetized cognition, and the idea that
it is this that separates us (where that us was always a rather under-investigated
centre) from other animals, has been a central humanist trope. Just as the humanist
construct of rationality came to define contemporary understandings of madness
and mental illness (Foucault, 1965), and the construct of normality defined the
disabled (Branson and Miller, 2002), so the construct of a particular kind of language
came to define humanity, normality and civilization.

Multisensory assemblages
Smell does a lot of important 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
intertwined – 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 of language 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 surrounds 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, governmentality 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,
small 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
commercial environments, and odours are destined to spill out into city streets
in the form of commercial scenting activities at an increasing rate over the years
to come.
(Henshaw, 2013, p221)

It is something of an omission, then, that critical discourse studies, even in their

more multimodal version, do not appear to have focused on smell as discourse,
while guides to research in sociolinguistics (e.g. Holmes and Hazen, 2014) do not
70 The human hierarchy of senses
address the importance of smell as a sociolinguistic category. Sensory literacies
(Mills, 2016, p145) is one of the few language-related areas that has started to
explore olfactory questions and an understanding that “[s]ensorial literacies give
attention to the interaction of multiple senses in one’s perceptual space in literacy
practices”. To better understand urban smellscapes but also, as Mills (2016) argues,
to better understand literacy practices we need to venture out into the urban world
and engage in “smell walking” as a research method (Henshaw, 2013).
There is more at stake here than merely adding smell to our linguistic or semiotic
inventory. Smelling itself is a more complex activity than often portrayed. The
act of smelling often involves the rhythmic characteristics of human sniffing
behaviour – nose in the air, repeated sniffs, concentration on the eyebrows – and
the chemoreceptors of the olfactory lobe. But it also, as Berson notes (2015, p72),
involves “the anatomy of sensory integration and the affective appraisal of mul-
timodal sensory ensembles”. It involves “participation in a multidirectional causal
network in which nervous, endocrine and biomechanical constituents of behav-
iour” (Berson, 2015, p72) are finely interwoven. Smelling itself, then, is a process
of affective engagement with sensory assemblages. As my studies with Emi Otsuji
of sensory landscapes have suggested (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015b), we need to
avoid the pitfall of trying to map languages against smells, or of adding a set of new
items to our semiotic catalogue, and to try instead to rethink semiotic relations.
The role of smell suggests a different kind of semiotics, one where intentionality
may be largely left behind and affect and memory play a larger role. While the
linguistic landscape, as Kramsch (2014) notes, interpellates us, we need to con-
sider how spaces are sensorily organized in relation to broader social, linguistic
and cultural practices. In the same way that we have come to understand that place
is not a flat surface or backdrop but something that is made (Scollon and Scollon,
2004) we need to understand that smell is much more than mere background,
wafting among other activities. Smells call to us, summoning associations with
people, places, times and activities. Such associations are not simply between
smell and object, or smell and place, or smell in the present and the past. Nor are
they simply part of an individual life trajectory. Rather, smells open up a different
terrain of semiosis, one that associates meaning with objects, people, affect and
places in a different way.
In their call for “an embodied sociocultural linguistics” Bucholtz and Hall (2016,
p174) argue not only for making more salient bodily aspects of communication
commonly acknowledged but often peripheralized, such as voice (“the embodied heart
of spoken language”, p178) or style (where clothing, posture and attitude may do a lot
of the work of enregisterment), but also for understanding how the body is discursively
constructed and how recent thinking has sought to understand how the body is
“imbricated in complex arrangements that include nonhuman as well as human par-
ticipants, whether animals, epidemics, objects, or technologies” (p186). This starts to
open the possibility of a posthumanist sociolinguistics that takes the idea of semiotic
assemblages (Chapter 3) seriously, that acknowledges that multisensory, multimodal
and multilingual resources that converge at particular moments are worthy of our study
if we are to overcome the narrowness of the humanist conception of language.
 The human hierarchy of senses 71
In order to arrive at a better understanding of semiotic landscapes therefore we
need to move beyond the commonplace focus on multilingualism and multimodality
to bring in the multisensorial nature of our worlds. This is important not just to
accomplish better and more complete urban ethnographies but also to redress an
historical imbalance that has placed language and cognition in the head, while
relegating the body and the senses to the physical. Recent shifts to encompass an
understanding of the body, senses and material artefacts have brought greater
attention to “touches, sights, smells, movements, material artefacts” and “shared
experiences, dynamic interactions and bodily engagements” to go beyond the
narrow story of cognition and language in the head (Finnegan, 2015, p19). This,
I have been arguing, is part of a much larger picture: the making of Man as a rational
and literate being, whose sensual engagement with the world is through eyes and
ears. Not only has this signalled problems for those considered lacking in these
dimensions – so that the Deaf have long struggled to argue an equivalence, while
arguments in favour of sign-language advantages have been even harder to make –
but it has also meant that humans and their world have been narrowly conceived.
The ways that the senses have been perceived in different cultural and historical
framings need to be understood within a broad understanding of social change.
Western scepticism towards (or even pathologization of) synaesthesia – the con-
joining of senses – is linked to changes in living patterns, literacy and the way we
understand the individual. According to Howes and Classen (2014, p170), the
“processes that led to the separating out of persons and senses in the West” included
“the growth of cities, the mechanization of society, and the heightened role given to
analytic thinking”. Crucial, too, was the increase in literacy, allowing for infor-
mation to be stored separately from collective memory. Indeed, they suggest, one
reason Westerners are less likely to make “collective sensory associations” is
because of a reliance on “collective knowledge being stored outside of human
bodies and minds in written texts” (Howes and Classen, 2014, p171).
The synaesthetic understanding of the senses operating in complex conjunction
became, in the West, the realm either of the artistic or the pathological periphery.
As more recent research has suggested, however, both the separation of the senses
into distinct and non-related domains and the assumption that there are only five
senses are questionable propositions. With the discovery of receptors for pain,
pressure, temperature and balance, for example, an understanding of senses has been
greatly enlarged (Wade, 2009). It is also clear when we deal with animals that this
has been part of our limited understanding of their abilities: how do birds navigate or
sharks detect prey? We marvel at the particular acuity of eagles’ eyes, owls’ eyes and
ears, dogs’ noses or the echolocation of bats (making it hard to imagine what it’s
really like to be a bat; see Chapter 8) but still we miss the capacity of animals to sense
through many other means. It is to the world of animals that I turn in the next chapter
and the significance that language is given in making the distinction between
humans and other animals.
5 Animals and language

The killer whales of Eden

A few hundred kilometres down the coast from Sydney, in the small town of Eden,
the pride of the Killer Whale Museum is a skeleton of Old Tom. A groove runs along
the teeth on one side, caused, it is said, by his practice of holding onto harpoon ropes
once a whale had been lanced or perhaps, too, by dragging whaling boats out to
where his pod of orcas had captured a group of whales. Whaling was established in
Twofold Bay in the 1830s (Wellings, 1996) and, as it became more established in the
1860s, employed local Thaua people of the Yuin nation in the boat crews. For these
long-term Indigenous inhabitants of the coast, the orcas (Orcinus orca, or killer
whales, a member of the oceanic dolphin family), who turned up with the whales,
were special creatures, and they urged the European boat crews not to harm them.
Over time, and over several generations of both humans (especially the Davidson
family of Twofold Bay) and orcas, these whalers developed a special relationship
with the killer whales (Mead, 1961/2002).
Each year, as winter comes to the southern oceans, whales migrate north along the
east coast of Australia, turning up now and then in Sydney Harbour in June or July. This
particular pod of orcas would drive humpback whales into Twofold Bay, and while
some patrolled the exit, others would swim further into the bay to where the Davidsons
had their rough cottages, breaching or signalling with their tails (“flop-tailing”, as the
Davidsons called it) to attract the attention of the whalers. The whalers would then row
their boats out to where the captured whales were trapped – sometimes, apparently,
even being towed out by the orcas – kill them with their harpoons and then row home
after tying an anchor and buoy to the carcass. The orcas would then feed on the lips and
tongue of the humpback whales (the “law of the tongue”) before leaving the rest for the
local whalers. There are also stories of Tom protecting crew members who had fallen
overboard from the sharks that also followed the chase. When Tom died and was
washed ashore, his carcass was stripped and the skeleton preserved (Mead, 1961/2002).
Also from the same Twofold Bay a collection of barnacles was sent to Charles
Darwin in 1850. Darwin was particularly pleased by the diverse collection (Darwin,
1850), the study of which was important in establishing Darwin’s work as a biol-
ogist. The sender was Syms Covington, who had settled in nearby Pambula in 1844
(his red-roofed former inn on the coast road is now known as Covington’s Retreat).
 Animals and language 73
Darwin had sent Covington a replacement ear trumpet a few years before to help him
with the problems of his growing deafness. This, it is thought, may well have been a
result of the many years Covington had spent shooting birds for Darwin as his
assistant on the second voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–36). Originally a cabin boy on
the Beagle, Covington had become Darwin’s servant and helper, and he shot many
thousands of birds and animals – including the Galapagos finches that would be
so important to Darwin – to assist in Darwin’s work, leading to his sobriquet of
Darwin’s Shooter (McDonald, 1998).
Twofold Bay thus plays several different roles in the story I want to tell here about
animals and humans. The story of the killer whales sheds light on the intelligence of
many non-human animals, their ability to act collaboratively, both with each other
and with humans, and their ability to communicate: the ritual signals of the orcas to
alert the whalers to their prey over generations suggests both an ability to com-
municate and an ability to learn. One part of this story, then, is the question of animal
intelligence. Another is the way that human life cannot be understood in isolation
from other animals. Part of what makes humans human is the relationship with
animals (Shipman, 2011). But these two accounts point to another side of this story:
the Twofold Bay whalers may have developed a remarkable relationship with this
pod of orcas, but their business was killing whales to provide the oil that was a
significant part of nineteenth-century industrialization (used particularly for lamp
oil but also as a lubricant in machinery and for making soap, paint and varnish) as
well as whalebone (in fact baleen from whales’ mouths), used largely in women’s
corsets but also for horse whips and other products, and meat for food.
Darwin, meanwhile, played a crucial role in the understanding of animal evol-
ution and biological science more generally. On the one hand he showed that
humans are animals: not only have we evolved in similar ways to other animals but
much of what was thought of as human – facial expression, for example – can be
explained in terms of its animal origins (Darwin, 1872). His broad interest in ani-
mals, on the other hand, led him to appreciate that animals were capable of thought
and emotions, that there “was no fundamental difference between man and the
higher mammals in their mental faculties” (Darwin, 1871, p446) and that even the
decisions earthworms made about which leaf to use to plug their holes (Darwin,
1881) could be understood as a form of cognition (Morell, 2014). He also, of course,
played a crucial role in the shift of scientific thought away from Godly creation, and
it is still in his name that humanist arguments against religion are made (Dawkins,
2006). At the same time, however, this nineteenth-century collecting for natural
science was a murderous affair, and the role of Covington – going deaf probably as a
result of his role in shooting so many animals for Darwin’s collections – also speaks
to the way humans have so easily slaughtered their fellow animals.
Why does all this matter for a posthumanist applied linguistics? Two important
reasons. The first has to do with the general proposition of rethinking relations
between humans and non-humans, and particularly non-human animals. This is not
so much a focus on animal rights, a notion that has been widely critiqued not only by
diehard humanists, who want to keep humans and their rights pure and separate, but
also by a more diverse range of thinkers. Braidotti (2013, p76) categorizes animal
74 Animals and language
rights advocates as “post-anthropocentric neo-humanists” on the grounds that
while the focus may be on animals rather than humans (post-anthropocentric), it
nonetheless uses a humanist (neohumanist) concept of rights that should be
granted to animals. The last things animals need is human-subject status, argues
Haraway (2008). For Derrida (2008), to grant rights to animals would be a serious
error since it would reinforce a particular ideal of the human. While animal rights
may nonetheless have an important role to play in redressing human–animal
relations, my interest here, by contrast, is in the implications of the questioning of
human exceptionalism: why have humans worked so hard at distinguishing
themselves from other animals and what are the consequences?
The second reason is that it is language that is so often invoked to separate humans
from other animals. Much of the work that has been done to construct humans as
separate and unique has focused on language. Long lists of features unique to human
language have been used to reinforce this divide (Evans, 2014). Recent research,
however, has started to break these distinctions down and to suggest that humans and
animals share more than had been thought. What becomes clear is that almost all, if
not all, of the features that were taken to be distinctly human – tool making, empathy,
cooperative behaviour, language and culture – have some form of precursor or
correlate in animal behaviour (De Waal, 2016). That is to say, they are not exclu-
sively human. This does not by any means mean that there is no difference between
animal and human language or consciousness; what it does mean, however, is that
the absolute distinction does not hold. Examining questions such as whether it is
only humans that can point, this chapter discusses the implications for rethinking
language and communication from a perspective that includes the more bodily
aspects of animal communication. This has implications both for our relationship to
animals and for our understanding of what language is.

Animal smarts
Unlike a number of the writers on humans and animals (Haraway, 2008; Safina,
2015; Morell, 2014) who, alongside powerfully martialled arguments for under-
standing this relationship differently, can’t resist a picture of their dog and a slippage
into an argument along the lines that “of course s/he’s part of the family”, I do not
start from any such position. I don’t have a dog; nor do I see myself in any particular
way as an animal lover.1 As a scuba diver and volunteer for an organization working
to save reefs in the Philippines, however, I do have a knowledge and admiration of
fish (including sharks; see Appleby and Pennycook, 2017; and see front cover). As
my work to maintain the quality of Philippine reefs has also made very clear, caring
about reefs is about more than endeavouring to halt the destruction caused by cli-
mate change, overfishing, dynamite fishing and the collecting of fish, shellfish and
other creatures for aquariums. It is also about more than ensuring that local fish
stocks are maintained so that people can live sustainably from the local environment,
or ensuring that reef quality can ensure a local tourist industry. It is about a much
more integrated and entangled set of relations between humans and non-humans,
reefs and the land, religion and poverty.
 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
(Balcombe, 2016). The much maligned and misunderstood shark is also far more
interesting and intelligent than popular discourse allows (Appleby and Penny-
cook, 2017). The octopus and the other cephalopods (cuttlefish and squid) –
“‘evolutions’ only experiment in big brains outside of the vertebrates” (Godfrey-
Smith, 2017, p160) – 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, p197) – 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, p13), human exceptionalism (emphasizing a distinction between
humans and animals) has been the “the default view” (Cook, 2015, p591). That form
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, p159)

Sometime after our ancestors left Africa and met up with American canids, a special
relationship started to evolve between humans and wolves, in some ways the animal
closest to us (not biologically but in terms of our shared history, flexibility, forming
of pair bonds and relation to changing hierarchical social structures). The story we
like to imagine is of an early human taking in a young wolf cub (Rudyard Kipling’s
1894 story of Mowgli in reverse) and starting the process of domestication. But
this account, like so many of our animal stories, 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, sniffer dogs – now do all sorts 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
animals: 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, p143) study of the language of wildlife documentaries shows, they are
often replete with anthropomorphizing discourses, from the use of gendered
pronouns that promote “individualized, active, and ‘socially’ contextualized”
portrayals of different creatures to suggestions of intentionality, motivation or
causality that cannot be appropriately apportioned to the animals’ 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 works).
As Safina (2015) points out, an accusation of anthropomorphism was the flag
raised to warn those studying animals not to confuse human and animal
behaviours. Particularly from a behaviourist perspective, it contravened scient-
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 awareness
were utterly taboo.2 “By banning what was considered anthropomorphic,”
he suggests (Safina, 2015, p27), behaviourist biologists “helped institutionalize
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 foolishness, but to attempt to under-
stand in terms of profound difference. Just as humanist universalism has tended
to bring all humans into the same framework – we have underlying cognitive
structures and a universal language capacity – so a rethinking of animal–human
relations runs the danger of a new universalism that includes animals. The
problem therefore

in describing creatures’ behavior may be less anthropomorphism – as we are

pulled toward encoding the behavior of fish, birds, insects, and even plants as
 Animals and language 77
though what they are doing is what we would do, to be described in largely the
same terms – and more the limitations of anthropocentrism.
(Sealey and Oakley, 2013, p416)

The second problem is that because some humans have quite deep emotional
relationships with their animals – particularly 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
comfort for their 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 smarter than we thought, forming
social groups and developing cultural behaviours. Sperm whales form 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 sperm 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, sperm whales appear to have the
capacity to memorize large social networks. Orcas, meanwhile, form groups based
in part on different diets (salmon or marine mammals, 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 (driving 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 of brown falcons and black kites
in Australia 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 future, to adopt another’s perspective, to learn from one another”
(Ackerman, 2016, p11). Many of our “cherished forms of intellect”, Ackerman
suggests (2016, p11), “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 try 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 whole, 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 (with different types of ant, different means
for signalling information) provide an overall structure that enables “an organism to
be ‘intelligent’ in any reasonable sense of the word” (Hofstadter, 1970, p324). The
collective whole, the multilayered 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 terms 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 story 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 animals: our stories and religions and
rituals have been filled with different creatures. They turn up everywhere: the ox and
ass in the nativity in the Christian tradition (often seen as standing for obedience,
docility or innocence; 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 Al-
Buraq (‫ ﺍﻟُﺒﺮﺍﻕ‬lightning) – similar in many ways to Pegasus in Greek legend (though
often portrayed with a human face) – who is said to have carried Prophet Muhammad
from Mecca to the seven heavens and back (via the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem)
during the Isra 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 well
as day-to-day existence, and have been linked to both death and some of life’s
greatest challenges” (Tidemann et al., 2010, pp5–6). Many birds, from kingfishers
through eagles, emus and ostriches to cockatoos and parrots, occur widely in the
stories told to children or the narratives of adulthood. From Ancient Egyptian
depictions of hoopoe or ibis to Maori spiritual guardianship of kereru and tı tı
(muttonbird, sooty shearwater, or Puffinus 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 smarter 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 tı tı ) a similar 65,000 kilometres; 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 turtles 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 of fish, Balcombe 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 particularly
before the domestication of plants and the development of writing – was a matter of
degree rather than kind (Safina, 2015).

Language and animals

One of the most striking aspects of writing on language, humans and animals is the
constant reiteration of the point that it is language that separates humans from other
80 Animals and language
animals. Language, according to Richards (1936, p131), “is the instrument of all our
distinctively human development, of everything in which we go beyond other
animals”. Finnegan (2015) lists a number of similar quotes, from Keesing and
Strathern’s (1998, p26) “language is the specific human character, the essence of our
humanity” to Rosengren’s (1999, p28) claim that “only with language did we
become really human”. It has long been an assumption of both academic and popular
discourse that what separates humans from animals is language. The study of
language is therefore the study of what is distinctly human. As Chomsky has
reiterated many times, from his point of view language is “a true species property”
(1986, pxxvi), “varying little among humans and without significant analogue
elsewhere” (2000, p3).
Such claims may seem either unexceptional – after all, human language is rather
special – or specific to various schools of thought about language – the assumed
irrelevance of Chomskyan thinking to applied linguistics is a truism in many
quarters. The argument I want to elaborate here, however, is that the insistence on a
deep distinction between humans and other animals on the basis of language, while
having a particular salience for nativist accounts of language and language
development, is part of a much broader approach to language in and beyond lin-
guistics. This account has had major implications for how we think about language,
since the attempt to show that language is species-specific and universal (all humans
and only humans have language) has led to its definition and study along very
particular lines. While nativist accounts of human language (it is a biological rather
than a cultural endowment) have a very strong investment in claiming that language
is a unique human capacity, the general tenets of anthropocentric approaches to
language are far more widely spread.
Let us start, however, with that particular line of thinking that runs from early
Greek thought through Descartes to Chomsky and is generally termed rationalist –
that is to say, it falls heavily on one side of the already problematic divide between
empiricists, who claim we derive our understanding of the world through our senses,
and rationalists, who insist it is the ideas in the mind that are crucial (see Chapters 4,
6 and 7 for further discussion). It was Descartes, whose rationalist scepticism led
him to question all understanding we gain through the senses (so that the only thing
we could be sure of was that we were thinking beings), who insisted that human
linguistic abilities – the medium of thought – were a central criterion for dis-
tinguishing mankind from both animals and machines. Language, Harris (2004,
p731) notes, “is thus crucial to the Cartesian account of mind”. Descartes’ view of
human thought depended on a distinction between humans and animals (and
machines – he likened animals to mere machines) based on a belief that “logos is
something special that human beings have, but other animate creatures lack” and
“that there must be something unique about what goes on inside the human skull and
does not occur inside the skulls of comparable vertebrates” (Harris, 2004, p731).
Chomsky has long reiterated this view. “There is no serious reason,” Chomsky
(2000, p3) insists, “to challenge the Cartesian view that the ability to use linguistic
signs to express freely-formed thoughts marks ‘the true distinction between man and
animal’ or machine.” This stark division between human and non-human animals,
 Animals and language 81
which can be traced back to Descartes’ particular kind of rationalism, has also
informed broader accounts of linguistics. As Fromkin and Rodman (1978, p45)
explain, “[a]ll the studies of animal communication systems provide evidence for
Descartes’ distinction between the fixed stimulus-bound messages of animals and
the creative ability processed by the human animal”. Thus they can conclude that
“the kind of language learned and used by humans remains unique to the species”
(p51). It is important to understand what is at stake here. This argument has several
consequences: it insists on human exceptionality, which then requires an account of
an evolutionary leap in human communication (rather than a more gradualist
evolution from gesture to language). It therefore focuses on those features of human
language which appear distinctive, ignoring the bigger picture of gesture, nonverbal
communication or other sensory domains. And it excludes animals a priori from
being able to communicate in any related way.
There is no real doubt that there is a “remarkable species-specific ability to acquire
any human language” (Berwick and Chomsky, 2016, p1), but it is in the premises of
what this “faculty of language” entails that there are many grounds for dispute.
For Berwick and Chomsky (2016, p1), for example, the “Basic Property” of
language is that “a language is a finite computational system yielding an infinity of
expressions”. Already in this formulation language has been internalized, formal-
ized and grammaticalized: we need to account for the evolutionary development of a
capacity to generate grammatically formed sentences. For Berwick and Chomsky
(2016, p2), an account of the evolution of the “the key component of human
language – the basic engine that drives language syntax” is now more plausible since
the model of syntax has become simpler. The question for the biolinguistic program
is how to account for the appearance of “human language, a particular object of the
biological world” (p53). Language is a “curious biological object” that has devel-
oped in very recent times, a “species property of humans, a common endowment
with no significant variation” (p55). At the heart of this latest version of universalist
thinking is the simple proposition that syntax can only be explained in terms of
hierarchical rather linear processing, and that there is “a single operation for building
the hierarchical structure required for human language syntax, Merge” (p10).
The difficulty from an evolutionary point of view is that since only humans have
the capacity to learn language, we need some kind of explanation for this unlikely
evolutionary leap. Chomsky’s position is that of radical discontinuity: only humans
have human language and so the break with other animals cannot be explained in
terms of the more common accounts of gradual continuity in evolutionary theory.
Such saltationary theories (from Latin saltus, jump), positing sudden macromuta-
tions, are not generally given much credibility in evolutionary theory, particularly
since they are, by and large, non-explanations (it just happened) (Dawkins, 1986). In
trying to understand the evolution of the human mind, this “extreme approach” –
associated with Cartesian rationalism and dating back to Aristotle – proclaims a
“discontinuity when it comes to the human mind” (Donald, 1991, p21): “The human
mind is qualitatively different, language is qualitatively different, the realm of
symbolic representation is qualitatively different, from what went before”. While for
some, the evolutionary challenge for language is to explain its evolution as part of a
82 Animals and language
broader social and cultural phenomenon, there remains, as Waters explains (2012,
p508), “a large ‘cognitive sandwich’ group that views internalized grammars as the
putative phenomena that natural selection must explain”.
As Donald (1991) points out, the high point of this way of thinking in the 1960s
(when Lenneberg (1967) posited his views on the biology of language and Chomsky
(1965) his on a language-acquisition device and universal grammar) predated many
of the more recent discoveries in human evolution and animal sign use and the
subsequent move back towards a greater synthesis of ideas and a continuity between
animals and humans. The problem is that once you posit a radical discontinuity – a
self-contained biological system with no connection to what had gone before – it is
hard to go back or modify the argument. And, as Donald points out (1991, p23), this
discontinuity approach “leaves language without a frame of reference in the external
world”, since it had to spring into life without precursors. A more plausible account
than the sudden-leap-into-existence view (saltation) for either language or con-
sciousness is a gradualist one that seeks to account for and understand continuity
and to show how change occurred from one stage to another (Godfrey-Smith, 2017).
The problem, however, from early gradualist accounts such as Darwin’s (1871)
through to many more recent arguments, is that they have focused centrally on the
development of oral capacities and the vocal tract. As Tomasello (2008) points out,
this continued focus has missed the significance of nonverbal communication,
which he sees as central to human development. Ultimately, Tomasello (2008, p55)
argues, “ape gestures – in all of their flexibility and sensitivity to others” rather than
ape vocalizations are the “original font from which the richness of and complexities
of human communication and language have flowed”.
This particular focus on the uniqueness of human language has other implications,
particularly in the model of language developed in linguistics, which has been typ-
ically universal and asocial. Language, Berwick and Chomsky (2016, p64) observe,
“can of course be used for communication, as can any aspect of what we do: style of
dress, gesture and so on”, but the “overwhelming use of language is internal – for
thought”. From this point of view, the development of language was not driven by
communication, cooperative behaviour or other such external or social demands but
rather by language as an “inner mental tool”, “the conceptual-intentional interface”
(p164). Here, then, we see the Cartesian position in all its asociality, and we can see
how this definition of language as an internal cognitive tool (that may be used for
communication if need be) derives from this line of humanist thought, where language
is disembodied and desocialized. The very existence of strange linguistic offshoots
such as sociolinguistics is a result of this humanist linguistic project (much broader
than the narrower Cartesian–Chomskyan line of thinking) that sought to understand
language in terms of an internally occurring cognitive system.
This peculiar account, developed from a nativist point of view but also common to
many mainstream accounts of language, was necessary as part of the structuralist
argument that language is a system unto itself. Thus in one of the most widely used
introductions to linguistics Fromkin and Rodman (1978, p11) suggest the goal of
linguistics remains the pursuit of the laws that “pertain to all human languages,
representing the universal properties of language” that derive from universal
 Animals and language 83
grammar. To maintain a belief in a distinct human property of language, linguistics
had to assume universality. Even if this was not reliant on nativist assumptions about
an innate biological capacity for language, it nonetheless posited a commonality
across all languages: if humans are distinct from all animals and it is language that is
a central part of this distinction, then linguistic properties must be shared across all
humans. To this end, lists of features that were supposedly common to all human
languages but not animal communication – arbitrariness, cultural transmission,
discreteness and so on – as well as lists of universal features of language (such as
common word and phrase classes, verb affixes, anaphoric elements) were devised.
Summarizing recent research that has challenged such lists (sign languages,
for example, unsettle assumptions about iconicity of signs and directionality;
humpback whale communication is culturally transmitted), Vyvyan Evans con-
cludes that “the distinctive qualities of human language” do not suggest “a sharp
divide between human language and non-human communicative systems” (Evans,
2014, p258). As for the claims to universality, it is only recently that the whole
assumption of universalism has also been convincingly shown to be a chimera, since
“languages differ so fundamentally from one another at every level of description
(sound, grammar, lexicon, meaning) that it is very hard to find any single structural
property they share” (Evans and Levinson, 2009, p429). For Nick Evans and Ste-
phen Levinson, “a new approach to language and cognition that places diversity at
centre stage” (Evans and Levinson, 2009, p429) would be a more appropriate way of
understanding language. Thus while linguists of various types may still insist that
languages share universal properties, some insisting further that these are biologi-
cally endowed as structures in the brain, and while many would still adhere to claims
that the distinctions between animal and human communication are too profound to
bridge, growing evidence suggests this is not the case. This is by no means an
argument for equivalence – human language and animal communication are not the
same – but it is an argument against human exceptionalism.

Missing the point

One area of research – and there is an immense amount of work on this – that sheds
further light on these issues is pointing. The strong claim is that “human index-finger
pointing is biologically based and species specific” (Butterworth, 2003, p9) and a
crucial step in the process of language development. This position is based on the
argument that pointing, like language, requires a theory of mind (an understanding
of others’ minds), developed at an important point in human evolution (possibly
even more significant than the opposing thumb that greatly assisted humans in tool
use) and emerges in young children at around 12 months of age. In his book on the
significance of pointing, Tallis (2010) goes to great lengths to show that the
relationship between the pointer, the pointing finger and the pointee is a relationship
that can only be grasped by humans. “The direction of pointing,” he argues, “is only
self-evident if you have the idea of pointing, more specifically, the idea of someone
wanting to point something out to you – the idea, in short, of meant meaning
mediated by a sign” (p39). His argument that it is the forefinger and its role in
84 Animals and language
pointing things out, rather than the thumb and its role in manipulating objects, that
“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 that
Tallis tautologically dismisses all other forms 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, 2010, 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 subject”, 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 parts 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 uniquely
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” (Butterworth, 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 about
language above. Can animals point? Is pointing universal? 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 arm 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 orient from a different position to the object one is pointing to, and of
presuming that that person can in turn 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 orientation 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 (Butterworth, 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 universal 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 forms of imitative learning) are uniquely human and crucial in human
evolution: human pointing rests on shared intentionality and cooperation, and it is this
cooperative principle that underpins human 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 joint attention in acts of shared intentionality” (Tomasello, 2006, p518).
So Tomasello’s argument seems to support forms 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 particular generally seem to understand 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 animals 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 laboratories 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 terms 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, p135), 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, p144)
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 terms 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 things 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 form of challenges to its uni-
versalism. Wilkins (2003, p171) shows through analysis of Arrernte speakers from
central Australia that “pointing with the index finger is not a universal in socio-
cultural and semiotic terms”. The assumptions about universalism have been based,
once again, on a narrow cultural sample that is generalized to include all humans.
Where lack of pointing has been observed, this is explained away in terms of sup-
pression: it is a universal feature that may not be expressed in some contexts or may
be expressed differently because of reasons of politeness or other factors. But unless
we examine the gestural patterns of a community, both in emic and etic terms – 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 narrow populations and
inadequate anthropological data – and that some animals may share some pointing
capacities with humans.
For some, such as Tomasello (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 cognitive ability
that I call the ‘third mode of processing others’ eyes’ (or, more in general, the ‘duality
of mental centres’)”. For Bejarano (2011, p1), “human beings are the only animal
capable of conceiving the inner states of another 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 undermines 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 of language in
order to support this divide. For Tomasello (2014, p150), great apes “cognitively
represent the world in abstract format, 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,
furthermore, 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, p155). That is to say, gesture is
where language emerged from and gesture is a crucial part of language, not just an
addition to it. Once again this demands a more expansive version of language than
is common in applied linguistics.

An expanded account of language

“The linguistic myth of human history,” argues Finnegan (2015, p18), despite its
claims to universality, is a very particular version of language and humanity: “The
essence of human-ness is posited as language; and language in its two predestined
modes, first oral then written, as unrolling the stages of human history.” In order to
unpick this history, we need to understand the ways particular visions of language
were projected onto humans. The human exceptionalism that emerged in Europe in
the age of Enlightenment had already had to deal with the Copernican revolution that
decentred the human planet from its place in the universe. But this blow to humans’
cosmic centrality was manageable until further setbacks in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, particularly Darwin’s evolutionary thinking that drew humans
into a much closer relation with animals, followed by Freud’s insistence on the
importance of unconscious thought: no longer were humans unique, disconnected to
animals and ruled only by rational thought; instead we were another type of animal
subject to all sorts of animal impulses and desires.
Language was one of the last things we could hold on to as separating us from
animals, and so language was defined in such esoteric ways that it could not be
something possessed by animals. Let us be clear about what is at stake here: human
language is indeed a remarkable achievement that has been central to human
development. Animals do indeed communicate: from bees to birds, orcas to dogs,
there are many ways in which animals communicate with each other and with
humans. But this communication is not in itself usefully termed language unless we
want to reduce the idea of language to all forms of communication (to suggest, for
88 Animals and language
example, that a lighthouse flashing in the night to warn a ship of a nearing coastline is
a form of language). Some see this as an anthropocentric argument in itself – to hold
on to language as human is to remain fixated on human capacities – but I think this
objection misses the point. Human language is vastly more complex than birdsong
(though birdsong is fascinating in itself and has often been underappreciated) but the
distinction is not an absolute one: humans are animals and our communicative
systems have emerged from animal communication. And just as an ant colony as a
collective whole may in some ways resemble the multilayered functioning of a
brain, so animals, like lighthouses and compass roses (Chapter 3), may be part of
larger forms of distributed cognition.
While it is not useful to make unwarranted claims about animal communication
(maybe dolphins can talk about humans in the same way that we can talk about
them), neither is it useful to draw an outright divide here, suggesting that the
distinction is an absolute one rather than one of degree. Animals do communicate,
and in diverse and complex ways, but human language is indeed a very special and
particular accomplishment. As linguists, we should be able to agree on this. Where
we may disagree is that human language is so different that it needs a special and
separate evolutionary history. The problem here is another circular argument:
language is defined as a system of syntactic structures isolated from the rest of
communicative capacities (the segregational view, according to integrational
linguists; see Harris, 1998), and this singular capacity needs to be explained. But
this is a very limited and peculiar understanding of language (it surely includes
much more than this). For applied linguists, and many linguists, too, it is all too
easy to reject Chomsky’s “speculative, abstract, judgmental, acultural and men-
talist analysis based in a theory of generative grammar”, since it is “not only
unattractive : : : but inconsistent with the evidence” (Finnegan, 2015, pp112–13),
but this would be to miss the point that Chomsky’s is only an extreme example
of a more widely shared view that it is language that separates humans from
other animals.
Linguistics has been one of those disciplines that have played a key role in the
maintenance of the idea of human exceptionalism. A posthumanist perspective
requires us to rethink these claims to both human and linguistic exceptionalism.
Among the many responses to Evans and Levinson’s (2009) refutation of univer-
salist claims – many still trying to hold on to little bits of universalism that haven’t
yet been disproved – Margoliash and Nusbaum (2009, p459) make a more inter-
esting proposal that if this means that linguists can finally move away from their
speculative claims about humans and animals, then they could come to appreciate
that “animal studies are informative, and a synthesis of animal and human work
becomes a useful goal to try to conceive”. The point is not that other animals have
similar linguistic capacities, but rather that the claim that humans and their com-
munication systems are unique is unhelpful. Just as Evans and Levinson (2009) call
for a new era of linguistics focusing on diversity rather than universality, so we can
start to expand what counts as the linguistic here. Rather than conceiving language in
terms of an internalized computational generative system of syntax and lexicon
located in the brain – a way of thinking about language that derives in part from the
 Animals and language 89
very impulse to make an absolute distinction between humans and other animals –
language can be understood as embodied, embedded, enacted and distributed.

Notes
1 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 reports a recommendation in the journal Science not to study animal perceptions unless
you already have tenure.
3 This practice is still 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 assumption in a great deal of work on
language and communication 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 form
of mutual comprehension. For those working in areas such as the use of English as a
lingua franca, for example, with all the threats such a notion poses when compared
with more stable forms of communication, we are often assured that mutual intel-
ligibility can still occur: “when people choose to communicate via a lingua franca”,
Seidlhofer (2011, p99) explains, “they are usually conscious of having to make
a certain effort to ensure mutual intelligibility and communicative efficiency”.
Whereas from some perspectives, mutual comprehension may only be assured by
the use of a shared and standardized form of language, the argument here is that
using English as a lingua franca, which is always a more open-ended and negotiable
process, can nonetheless arrive at a similar end point of mutual intelligibility.
Staking out a realist approach to language (Carter and Sealey, 2000) (to which we
shall return in Chapter 7) – “languages are objective and real” and “language practices
endorsed by a group have to be upheld within a linguistic and ideational environment
that is anterior to them and that will shape profoundly the sorts of practices they
uphold” (Sealey and Carter, 2013, p273) – Sealey and Carter (2013, p273) suggest that
languages “enable mutual intelligibility among their speakers”. These positions share
several similar assumptions: by communicating in the same language people can
arrive at a state of mutual comprehension; this is done by sharing a code and the ideas
that are then passed to and fro in that language; and the fact that we understand each
other or not is a demonstration 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 elsewhere (Pennycook,
2007b), myths about English as an international language depend on this assumption
of understanding: since people around the world are apparently able to communicate
with 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 languages.
On the face of it these might appear reasonable arguments, 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 turn in this chapter. I shall explore first the premises that underpin
notions of language and understanding as very particular ways of thinking about
language and communication that derived from the humanist focus on talking
heads (see also Chapter 4). I shall then explore in more depth through an analysis of
metrolingual data (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015a) 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 turn as part of an expanded posthumanist framework of semiotic
assemblages.

Dogmas of intersubjective conformity

Amid the various discussions about a theory of mind – the ability to attribute states
of mind (intentions, desires, beliefs and so on) to others (Chapter 5), the ability that
perhaps only humans share to know what others are thinking – the question of how
well humans actually do understand each other in the first place is often overlooked.
The argument focuses on whether advanced species understand that other creatures
have minds, and whether therefore they can attribute mental states to each other.
For some, this is a defining quality of humans, possibly part of what defines con-
sciousness, while for others, it may also be an ability shared to some extent by other
animals, such as dogs, dolphins and apes (Hare et al., 2001). Safina (2015), how-
ever, takes issue with the underlying premise that humans understand what is going
on in each other’s minds to start with. While we may conduct any amount of research
to try to discover the extent to which chimpanzees can infer mental states in humans
92 Mutual misunderstanding
or each other, we also need to explore the extent to which the question is reliant on
particular assumptions about the human capacity to understand each other.
Bailey suggests that the term misunderstanding

points to an implicit ideology of communication: that to ‘understand’ is normal,

and to ‘misunderstand’ represents a breakdown or failure of something that
is natural. The positive value assigned to understanding veils the conflict,
ambiguity and uncertainty that are part and parcel of communicative worlds.
(Bailey, 2004, p395)

One aspect of the universalist beliefs that underpin humanism is an assumption of

commonality coupled with a model of communication that starts with the idea of
minds communicating with each other through words. Much of linguistic thought
has been premised on a model of mutual understanding, of passing encoded
messages back and forth from one head to another, and doing so within a speech
community with agreed norms for language use and comprehension. This is the
model of communication that the late Roy Harris spent much of his life critiquing as
the telementational fallacy, whereby “linguistic knowledge is essentially a matter of
knowing which words stand for which ideas” (Harris, 1981, p9). In this model
individuals “are able to exchange their thoughts by means of words because – and
insofar as – they have come to understand and to adhere to a fixed public plan for
doing so” (p10).
The epitome of this model can be seen in the Saussurean heads (Saussure, 1922/1983)
passing messages back and forth from one to the other, encoding and decoding ideas
(Figure 6.1). As Harris (1981) explains, however, this model has a much longer
history and wider application, going back to Aristotle, passing through Locke and
then Saussure and infusing much of linguistic and wider communicational
assumptions. Locke and Saussure both broadly subscribed to the telementational
view of communication but from different positions. As Taylor (1990) explains, for
Locke the question was a normative one: this mutual understanding was not the normal
state of affairs but something to which we should aspire. As Locke (1690/1975) wrote
in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, “The chief End of Language in
Communication being to be understood, Words serve not well for that end : : :
when any Word does not excite in the Hearer, the same Idea which it stands for
in the Mind of the Speaker” (cited in Eco, 1995, p212). He aimed therefore at

A B

Figure 6.1 Saussure’s talking heads

 Mutual misunderstanding 93
“constraining the behaviour of individual linguistic agents” so that speech could
more closely resemble the ideal telementational model of ideas passing accur-
ately to and fro (Taylor, 1990, p125).
For Saussure, by contrast, this was in fact how language really operated, a
general characteristic of the linguistic system that operates independently of the
will of the speakers. The starting point for the “speech circuit” is in “the brain of
one individual” where “concepts are associated with representations of linguistic
signs or sound patterns by means of which they may be expressed” (Saussure,
1922/1983, pp11–12). A “given concept triggers in the brain a corresponding
sound pattern” which is transmitted from one person to the other, where the reverse
process allows for the “association of this pattern with the corresponding concept”
(p12). Once we consider this from a social perspective, Saussure argues, we can
see how “individuals linguistically linked in this manner : : : will reproduce –
doubtless not exactly, but approximately – the same signs linked to the same
concepts” (p13).
While we traditionally consider the Lockean perspective to be more prescriptive –
like grammars, language tests and much of what is done in language education, the
right way to do things is prescribed – and the Saussurean tradition a descriptive one –
this is how the system works – it is clear that the “dogma of intersubjective
conformity” is based on a premise that speakers either can or should be able to
understand each other, that unless the same words convey the same meaning,
communication would fail in its underlying purpose of “mutual understanding”
(Taylor, 1992, pp38–9). This is more than just arguing about how approximate
Saussure’s “approximately” really is: it questions the core of the model itself. As
Toolan explains (1997, p86), telementation, or ideas-transfer, assumes “that when
A speaks to B the same idea that A used and encoded into speech is picked out,
highlighted, or re-created in B’s head”. As in Saussure’s model, a telementational
view of language views is as a conduit (Reddy, 1979) through which one person can
receive a copy of the other person’s idea. What this is missing is the context of
communication, the messiness of communication, the conflict, ambiguity and
uncertainty of communication, the role of bodies, places, artefacts, clothes, feelings,
smells, social relations, gender, race, class and so much more. Indeed it is missing
almost everything.
There are several issues at stake here. This is far more than making a case that
language happens in context, that meaning is contextually realized, that nonverbal
communication also plays a role in communication or that meaning may be inter-
preted differently by an interlocutor. This is not only to grasp the point that language
serves purposes other than the merely communicational. Halliday’s (1978) meta-
functions suggest that at the very least language serves ideational, interpersonal and
textual functions – that is to say, interpersonal communication is but one of three
metafunctions of language. Nor is this merely to take seriously the sociolinguistic
truism that language may be used for phatic purposes, that we need to understand the
“importance of unimportant language” (Blommaert and Varis, 2015, p4), those forms
of “low-intensity social engagement” that are “seemingly superficial but critical
for : : : assuring social cohesion, community belonging and social comfort” (p8).
94 Mutual misunderstanding
Rather this is a question about the model of understanding itself, the assumption that
when we talk, we understand each other.
This is to take up the non-representational arguments of Thrift (2007) and Barad
(2007) – there are strong parallels between Thrift’s and Barad’s critiques of rep-
resentational views of language and Harris’ (1998) critique of surrogational and
telementational models of language – that question “the cognitive notion that talk
is primarily communication (or rule-governed and concerned with exchanging
meanings)” (Thrift, 2007, p122). As Thrift explains, this is to acknowledge that “talk
is responsive and rhetorical, not representational; it is there to do things” (p122).
And this doing is far more than a reiteration of speech act theory – which, it is worth
recalling, emerged from the same cognitivist assumptions of mind, communication
and intention as the Chinese Room paradox discussed in Chapter 3 (Searle, 1969,
1986; Pepperell, 2003) – it is rather “an attempt to understand knowing from within a
situation, a group, social institution, or society” (Thrift, 2007, p122). This is to grasp
that the humanist assumptions about rational humans engaged in mutually com-
prehensible dialogue is an unlikely way of thinking about communication.
Or, as Saramago puts it in his novel Cain (2009, p73), “The history of mankind is
the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we
don’t understand him”. More broadly we might say that this is far more widespread
than misunderstanding supposed gods, who humans have, after all, created in their
own image. The history of humankind is the history of misunderstanding each other.
Before pursuing this further, however, I shall look at an example of mutual mis-
understanding. In an earlier discussion of this data (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015a),
Emi Otsuji and I emphasized the point that the misunderstandings evident in this
extract were contrary to the norm – that is to say, in contexts of multilingual language
mixing people nonetheless manage to figure out what each is trying to say. But a
further consideration of this data suggests a different approach: it is not so much that
we normally understand each other even when multiple languages and difficult
communication environments are at stake, but rather that a better starting point
might be mutual misunderstanding. At the very least, we need to move beyond a way
of thinking that posits isolated heads passing messages back and forth through
language, or the assumption that understanding is normal, common or complete.

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb

It is common in work on multilingual communication to stress that despite the
different languages at play, despite the complexity of the translingual and trans-
cultural relations, communication is nonetheless achieved through “translingual
negotiation strategies” such as recontextualization (providing alternative contexts
for interlocutors) or other interactional and textual means (Canagarajah, 2013,
pp80–2). In the context of English as a lingua franca Kirkpatrick (2007, p55)
suggests that communication in the main is “characterised by mutual under-
standing, which is itself achieved by a spirit of collaborative communication by
peers”. It has been important to stress the effectiveness of communication in such
contexts because of the constricted communicational models that have assumed
 Mutual misunderstanding 95
that everyone needs to speak the same language in order to communicate (Harris,
2009) or that multilingual communication is less effective than its monolingual
counterpart. Given the models of monolingual communication that have governed
much of what is assumed about language and communication, it has been
important to show that multilingual communication works.
Just as Kirkpatrick (2007) goes on to show an example of miscommunication to
demonstrate that this is the exception to the rule, so our earlier analysis of the
interaction below (Excerpts 6.1–7) was framed within an argument that this was
something of an aberration, a moment when multilingual communication breaks
down, an exception that proves the rule that multilingual communication normally
works. At the same time, however, we need to ask what this “mutual under-
standing” is that language users may achieve. The point is not to suggest that
translingual communication doesn’t work but that the model for working is based
on a particular framework of mutual understanding. I now want to look again at
this interaction and suggest that far from being the example of miscommunication
that proves the rule of mutual understanding, it in fact provides the model for the
messiness of mutual misunderstanding. In the rapid metrolingual multitasking of
workplaces, language comes and goes, people interact, swear, turn away, do
something else, and often it’s not clear that shared meaning ever is established, or
that it ever could be.
The example comes from New Year’s Eve in Petit Paris, a small French-themed
bistro in Tokyo, run by Nabil, of Maghrebi background (see also Chapter 3 on spatial
repertoires).1 Nabil brings a dessert dish to a regular customer of Japanese back-
ground seated on his own at the counter chatting with the chef and other staff (who
are of various Francophone backgrounds).

Excerpt 6.1
(N: Nabil, C: Customer)
Japanese italics; English plain (translations in brackets)

1 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: セロリ) and stew (ni: 煮), Nabil
and his customer appear to have arrived 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 celery stew.

Excerpt 6.2
(N: Nabil, C: Customer)
Japanese italics; French bold; English plain (translations in brackets)
96 Mutual misunderstanding
1 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, you 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 term betterave (line 6, with
his distinctive apical [r] and shift from word-final stress). The French word for
beetroot does not appear to be of much help to his customer, however, and in any
case Nabil quickly (line 8) rejects this in favour of another 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). Celeri remoulade 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 unlikely (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 (celeri 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 dessert. Not surprisingly, the customer continues in confused
persistence.

Excerpt 6.3
(N: Nabil, C: Customer)
Japanese italics; French bold; English plain (translations in brackets)

1 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: Celeri rouge? (Red celery?)
9 C: No no.
10 N: [referring to another customer’s question about his meal] Chicchai? Koko?
: : : Sorry? Koko? (Small? This? : : : Sorry? This?)
 Mutual misunderstanding 97
11 N: Chef! Chef! C’est quoi celeri rouge en France? (What’s red celery in
France?)
12 N: [referring to the other customer’s query about the size of the portion he has
been served] Il 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 array of linguistic resources, Nabil
finally seems to sense something is wrong with both celery and beetroot as descriptors
of the dish. Recognizing the customer’s confusion, Nabil accommodates with a more
Japanese sounding pinku 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: ピンク), and is pronounced in this data section in both styles, is
one of those many terms that seems to hover between languages. Here Nabil clearly
attempts to accommodate to his customer with his extra emphasis on the final vowel of
pinku::. Nabil now tries celeri rouge (red celery) as a description of the dish, though
the customer’s apparent rejection of this suggestion (No no) may equally suggest both
the fact that he doesn’t understand celeri rouge as well as his continued struggle
against the initial suggestion that this is celery (but pink).
In response to the customer’s rejection of his attempt to convince him that it is
celeri rouge, Nabil then turns to the chef (line 10) to ask what red celery (celeri
rouge) is in French/France. After a brief pause, both cooks (Patrick, Chef 1, and
Pierre, Chef 2) chime in with rhubarbe.

Excerpt 6.4
(N: Nabil, Ch1: Chef1, Ch2: Chef 2)
French bold (translations in brackets)

1 Ch1: Ah! Rhubarbe!

2 N: Rhubarbe! Rhubarbe!
3 Ch2: Rhubarbe.
4 N: Ahh, rhubarbe. Ahh, rhubarbe. C’est pas celeri. Oui oui, rhubarbe.
(It’s not celery. Yes yes, rhubarb.)

At first sight, the ability of the cook to correctly decode Nabil’s question about red
celery is a remarkable piece of interpretation: celeri rouge/red celery is not a very
obvious term for rhubarb (red celery does in fact exist in its own right as a type
of celery). 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 tart he has
just passed to the customer. The spatial arrangements, cooking practices and spatial
repertoire contribute here to the naming of this red dish.
98 Mutual misunderstanding
Now that the missing term rhubarbe has finally been established, Nabil turns to
Pierre (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 the customer: Rhubarbe, nihongo wa? J’ai oublie. Pierre? (Rhubarb, in
Japanese. I’ve forgotten. Pierre?).
Nabil’s Japanese question (nihongo wa?) is taken up by the other chef, Patrick.
Pierre by then has moved on to another task.

Excerpt 6.6
(N: Nabil, C: Customer, Ch1: Chef 1)
Japanese italics; French bold; English plain (translations in brackets)

1 Ch1: Rhubarbe nihongo no namae:: (Rhubarb in Japane::se.)

2 C: Serori. Serori. (Celery. Celery.)
3 N: No no no.
4 Ch1: Aka serori? (Red celery?)
5 C: Serori serori.
6 N: Nihongo wa? (In Japanese?)
7 C: Nihongo mo serori. (Also celery in Japanese.)
8 N: Ahh, hontou desu ka? (Ah, really?) Aka serori? (Red celery?)
9 C: Serori.

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
uncertainly, a Japanese translation (line 4) – aka serori (red celery) – of Nabil’s
earlier 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 confirm the chef’s aka serori
(red celery) (line 6), getting the reply in line 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 only that the word for celery is more or less the
same in English or French and Japanese. But Nabil appears to think that he has
received confrmation of his chef’s claim that the Japanese for rhubarb is aka serori
(line 8).
So, finally, although Nabil has finally worked out what it is he has served the
customer – rhubarb tart – he now appears to believe that rhubarb is aka serori in
Japanese (not commonly known, the term rubaabu (ルバーブ) is in fact the most
usual). Fortunately, 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
1 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 à la rhubarbe. C’est très très bon. (Rhubarb tart. 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 of terms – 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 celeri 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 metrolingual 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 referring to French cuisine: Tarte à la rhubarbe. C’est très très 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 particular foods
under discussion also clearly play an important mediating role here: they are part 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
participants. Rhubarb is an exotic vegetable (or perhaps a fruit, depending on how it
is cooked) in Japan and therefore has a very 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 terms 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 of linguistic 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 rule – understanding – but rather a luminous example of the everyday ways in
which mutual misunderstanding is our communicative norm. Rather than the flat-
tened humanist vision of a common humanity where we understand 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 preferred 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 always seeking forms of
100 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)

are more interested in specifying what it is to understand and how we under-

stand than in asking whether we understand : : : The fact that communicators
ordinarily understand each other is a pre-theoretical given, the sine qua non of
academic discourse on language, meaning, and interpretation.
(Taylor, 1992 p3)

It is to another realm of this mutual understanding that I now turn: intercultural

communication.

Thinking otherwise
One of the goals of intercultural communication is to arrive at forms 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 arrive at forms
of shared understanding. Bowe et al. (2014, p1), 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 communication, is crucial 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 worldviews 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 discussed 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 (1969/1991), 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
(1969/1991, 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 irreducibility to the I, to my
thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of
my spontaneity, as ethics” (Levinas, 1969/1991, p43).
For Levinas, central to any philosophy must be an ethics of responsibility 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 runs 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 of anthropological 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,

the knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the known,

although modern epistemology (e.g. the hubris of the zero point) managed to
conceal both and created the figure of the detached observer, a neutral seeker of
truth and objectivity who at the same time controls the disciplinary rules and
puts himself or herself in a privileged position to evaluate and dictate.
(Mignolo, 2009, p162)

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 undermine 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
starting with “I am where I do”, acknowledging one’s locus of enunciation in ways
that Descartes’ disembodied, delocalized, “je pense, donc je suis” can never do.
Mignolo (2011, p99) “flatly rejects the assumption that rational and universal truths
are independent of who presents them, to whom they are addressed, and why they
have been advanced in the first place”. As Foucault (1984a) 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) terms critical resistance. Many forms 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, p313) insists, the
decolonial option needs a process of delinking from “Eurocentric categories of
thought which carries both the seed of emancipation and the seed of regulation and
oppression”. In Maldonado-Torres’ words, the de-colonial turn

refers to a shift in knowledge production of similar nature and magnitude to the

linguistic and pragmatic turns. It introduces questions about the effects of
colonization in modern subjectivities and modern forms of life as well as
racialized and colonialized subjectivities to the production of knowledge and
critical thinking.
(Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p262)

Or, put another way, the “hubris of the zero point” that Mignolo (2009, p162) 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, questioning 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 oneself:

we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments

of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when
our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of
becoming human.
(Butler, 2005, p136)

If we can bring together Foucault’s thinking otherwise, Levinas’ ethics of respons-

ibility towards the other, Mignolo’s (2010, p313) decolonial struggle to “change the
terms and not just the content of the conversation” and to “de-naturalize concepts
and conceptual fields” and Barad’s (2007), Bennett’s (2010a) and Butler’s (2005)
 Mutual misunderstanding 103
alternative accounts of materiality and performativity, we have the grounds for a new
way of doing critical work that takes us away from the humanist assumptions that
have underpinned many critical projects to date. This takes us beyond the suppo-
sitions of mutual understanding, which, like many claims of the humanist dream,
remain both Eurocentric and anthropocentric.

Alignment, assemblages and attunement

Many of our assumptions in linguistics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics
operate with a belief in mutual understanding as part of a bigger picture of brains
passing words back and forth. Languages are agreed-upon systems that “enable
mutual intelligibility among their speakers” (Sealey and Carter, 2013, p273). This
assumes that the purpose of language is communication, and that when we com-
municate we achieve a form of mutual understanding, an intersubjective conformity.
For Saussure, two speakers speaking the same language “must understand the same
utterances in the same way: for the characteristics of the structuralist concept of
sharing a language (langue) are : : : logically derived from the premise of mutual
understanding” (Taylor, 1992, p88). This model of language and communication
also relies on several other ways of thinking about human communication that were
discussed in previous chapters: the very notion of communication centrally invol-
ving heads, eyes and ears is one that emerged from a particular way of considering
literacy, language and thought.
It is only recently that shifts to encompass an understanding of the body, senses
and objects has brought much greater attention to “touches, sights, smells, move-
ments, material artefacts” and “shared experiences, dynamic interactions and bodily
engagements” to go beyond the narrow story of cognition and language in the head
(Finnegan, 2015, p19). The dogma of intersubjective conformity derives from the
premise that “communicators ordinarily understand each other”, that language users
as speakers or writers are normally successful in conveying their ideas to their
hearers or readers: “Communicators are assumed generally to signify the same ideas
by the same words because, if this were not so, linguistic communication would not
typically produce mutual understanding” (Taylor, 1992, pp38–9). It is this model of
language, cognition and mutual understanding that arguably underlies a great deal of
work in fields of applied linguistics from sociolinguistics to critical discourse
analysis or communicative language teaching. Sociolinguistics has for too long
assumed notions of speech communities guaranteed by a shared understanding.
Linguistic analysis, Pratt (1987, p50) suggests, might be better served not by
studying the utopian notion of a community assumed to share a language but rather
by studying “a room full of people each of whom spoke two languages and
understood a third, and held only one language in common with any of the others”.
Communicative language teaching has long assumed that the purpose of
language is for communication, and if we can encourage communication in the
classroom, students will learn to communicate by communicating. But what model
of communication underpins such assumptions? As Lin argues, not only is com-
municative-language-teaching methodology “intimately linked to the production of
104 Mutual misunderstanding
a certain kind of student and worker subjectivity suitable for participating in a certain
kind of political economy” (Lin, 2013, p540), but the model of communication it
presupposes overlooks the “plurilingual nature of classroom interactions and
communicative repertoires of both learners and teachers in multilingual settings”
(p522). Communicative language teaching assumes that to understand each other
we should use one and only one language, thereby presupposing the notions that
communication is the purpose of language, that single languages guarantee
understanding and that intersubjective conformity is the goal of language education.
As Kumaravadivelu (2016, p80) argues, if we want to disrupt or dismantle the
hegemonic structures that dominate a field such as English-language teaching, we
need to do more than just think otherwise: we also need to act otherwise. As he goes
on, “merely tinkering with the existing hegemonic system will not work; only a
fundamental epistemological rupture will”. It is towards such a rupture that I am
arguing here.
It is these Western humanist assumptions about thought and language that the
decolonial option starts to question. In his plea for a greater space for opacity and
his questioning of notions of transparency, Glissant (1997, pp189–90) suggests
that if “we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the
perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement
for transparency”. This presupposition that transparency and clarity are the ideal
state of communication underpins approaches to critical discourse analysis: the
normal state of affairs of mutual understanding between rational humans is dis-
torted and disordered by ideological manipulation. The goal therefore is to engage
in textual analysis as part of an ideology critique that can ultimately locate these
distorting forces in the material conditions of an inequitable society. This
way of thinking draws on Habermas’ insistence on the possibility of universal
“conditions of discourse and rational consensus”, based on the “supposition
of an ‘ideal speech situation’” (McCarthy, 1978, p325). The communicative
rationality that Habermas espoused “is expressed in the unifying force of speech
oriented towards reaching understanding, which secures for the participating
speakers an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, thereby securing at the same time
the horizon within which everyone can refer to the same objective world”
(Habermas, 1998, p315).
To get beyond these rationalist, universalist assumptions about mutual under-
standing, communicative transparency and intersubjectively shared lifeworlds,
Thurlow mounts his case for the need for a queering of critical discourse studies
(CDS). For too long, he argues, CDS has been based on a form of textualism, a
centring of texts and transcripts that “leaves us struggling to read between the lines,
to understand the gaps and the traces, the unspoken and the unspeakable” (Thurlow,
2016, p487). While CDS may have started to catch up with the focus on the visual
through a commitment to multimodality, it has far less to say about materiality,
objects, embodiment or affect. CDS, Thurlow argues, always tends towards “the
stable, uniform, coherent, and consonant, rather than the dissonant, paradoxical,
varied, and unstable” (2016, p507). We are “so dependent on the portability and
manageability of decontextualized texts” that we have few ways of engaging with
 Mutual misunderstanding 105
affective, embodied, material performances, and it is only by queering CDS that we
can move beyond this rationalist endeavour to ensure clear understanding.
A presumption of mutual understanding based on a model of heads in isolation
passing ideas back and forth through words that have been mutually agreed to have
the same meaning is woefully inadequate for a means of conceptualizing com-
munication. According to Steffensen and Fill (2014, p18), language is not so much
an “instrument for externalising thought or for communicating” but rather a “real-
time, interbodily coordination that enables us to achieve results that are unreachable
for a single human body or person”. As Gee (2015a, pp300–1) points out, “even
when we interpret ourselves – our own thinking, intending, and speaking – we are
not actually, for the most part accurately assessing internal mental states. Even less
are we doing so when we interpret what others say, mean, and do”. Whatever we may
do cognitively towards some sort of understanding, this is not in itself under-
standing, which “is a public and social state” (Gee, 2015a, p301).
Understanding “is not a state in which minds share the same content, but is rather a
dimension of coordinated social interaction itself” (Bailey, 2004, p409). Under-
standing is not a matching of meanings, a state where some internal schema in one
head is matched with one in another head, but rather a social process of alignment.
Processes of alignment give us a much better way of thinking about how com-
munication works. Alignment can be understood as ways in which people flexibly
adapt to each other – bodies, interactions, words, environment – in ongoing pro-
cesses of adaptation (Atkinson et al., 2007). From this perspective, communication
is made possible by a series of negotiations and adjustments. Participants

“do their own thing,” but still communicate with each other. Not uniformity, but
alignment is more important for such communication. Each brings his or her
own language resources to find a strategic fit with the participants 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 between deaf persons who do not know any sign language in
common : : : characterized by the strategic recruitment 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 two 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 two signers must know the same sign
language in order to communicate. Rather, they need to know “how to integrate their
106 Mutual misunderstanding
own semiological activities with those of their interlocutor” (Harris, 2009, p75) or to
engage in practices of alignment with their co-signer.
These practices of alignment, as Gee (2015a) notes, are far more than individuals
orienting towards each other, since they involve multiple interlocking levels of talk
(accent, intonation, pragmatics), ways of interacting, language styles (registers,
social varieties), genres (textual organizations) and discursive organizations of
meaning. To this picture we also need to add a focus on bodies, clothes, artefacts
and the environment: “Our thinking cannot be complete or successful without
participation of other 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 of language 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 form
of tuning in rather than lining up with – attunement2 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 of voices, including more-than-human
life and forms of material agency” (Brigstocke and Noorani, 2016, pp1–2). 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 of animals, objects and places.
From Indigenous activism that connects the decolonial critique of European uni-
versalism (Mignolo, 2011) with Indigenous understandings of the agency of 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.
Understanding how a place speaks to us – Larsen and Johnson (2016) discuss,
for example, the Waitangi Treaty Grounds on the North 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, p153).
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 conformity. Drawing on the notion of
attunement – meaning-making occurs in relational terms rather than in linguistic or
cognitive systems – and semiotic assemblages – the coming-together of diverse
groupings of vibrant materials – we can see the importance of “the role of spirits,
animals, 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 with 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 performance, 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,
p410). 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
entirely shared.

Notes
1 For more background about this research, see Pennycook and Otsuji (2014a, 2015a).
2 While I find the notion of attunement useful, I am aware of its auditory 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 solutions emerge from the “judicious study of discernible reality”
(Suskind, 2004). The advisor went on to explain that this 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 arguably 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
of fake 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 “reality-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 claims to
knowledge – can suddenly find itself apparently on the same side of a debate as a
so-called climate sceptic (both agree that we should be sceptical about claims to
scientific knowledge). How did we get to the point, Latour asks, where social
critique – work inspired by Bourdieu or Foucault, for example – starts to look a bit
like conspiracy theories? What should we make of “those mad mixtures of knee-
jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful expla-
nation from the social neverland” when they start to look like “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, p146) argues that we need “an acknowledgement of the existence of ‘truth’
and ‘reality’ outside of the particular texts in question”. Is it useful to suggest
that “texts about the Holocaust or slavery, or about global warming constitute
yet further or more textual representations of the world?” (Luke, 2013, p146).
The problem, Luke (2013, p136) suggests, is that since the linguistic or discursive
turn, 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?”
(p146). 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” (p146). In a similar vein, Latour argues
that

a certain 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 friends by the
wrong sort of allies because of a little mistake in the definition of its main target.
(Latour, 2004a, p231)

This error, Latour argues, was that in critiquing empiricism or positivism or par-
ticular claims to truth, critical work came to focus on the ways in which truth or
reality were constructed – it moved away from reality – rather than trying to get
closer to the facts. What we need, Latour argues (2004a, p231), 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 empirical inquiry is actually describing. As some argue, the discursive turn in
applied linguistics, in which “social science methodologies foregrounded the
importance 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).
If we 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,
if reality relates to materialism (one way of thinking about reality is to engage with
material conditions), we also need to consider, as Bennett (2010a) makes clear, the
relationship between old and new materialisms. That is to say, if the 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 relativism
and realism that is so often invoked in these discussions (constructionism, post-
modernism and so on are labelled relativist in opposition to a more solid realism).

That there was once a time when a war could be waged between “relativists,”
who claimed that language refers only to itself, and “realists,” who claimed that
language may occasionally correspond to a true state of affairs, will appear to
our descendants as strange as the idea of fighting over sacred scrolls.
(Latour, 1999, p296)

As a number of writers from a posthumanist perspective (Barad, 2007; Bogost,

2012) have suggested, this 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 forward here by thinking about matters of concern (Latour,
2004a), critical realism (Bhaskar, 1997; Haslanger, 2012) and speculative realism
(Meillassoux, 2008; Gratton, 2014), but first let us consider what is at stake here as
we start to make claims about reality.

On mugs, rocks and tables

Every so often, in discussions about discourse, reality, relativism and social con-
struction, a challenge is thrown out to the so-called constructionists that they deny
reality, and this is then countered by appeal to something that is obviously real.
Latour (2004a, p234) suggests that it may be the fact that philosophers need to drink
a lot of coffee that explains the occurrence of “an inordinate quantity of pots, mugs,
and jugs” in these debates. For others, it is common to look for immutable laws, such
as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which, as Hacking (1999, p84) suggests,
appears to be “as real as rocks” and which therefore comes close to being an object, a
being in the world. Rocks themselves are a good example, since they represent a
solidity that is appealing as a way of thinking about what is real, though, as Hacking
(1999) shows, the effectiveness of such an argument rather depends on whether one
is simply evoking a banal piece of granite or whether, by contrast, the focus is on
something more complex, such as dolomite.
Arguments against the idea of construction thus often return to basic relations of
materiality. In a critique of “postmodernist excursions into relativism” Harris (2009,
p147) suggests that it is “vacuous to insist that a truth is only relative”. As he goes
on to argue, such supposed relativists “would make highly dysfunctional doctors.
Few victims of road accidents are likely to be consoled with the thought that they
have not actually lost a limb at all but only lost a concept embedded in one particular
conceptual system” (Harris, 2009, p147). The problems with such arguments are
not hard to discern: not many people, under normal circumstances, are likely to deny
that rocks, coffee cups or limbs exist. But once we complicate the objects (language
instead of rocks, for example), or once we explore how the loss of a limb is
understood (transhumanist discourses of enhanced humanity through prosthetic
limbs, for example, or discourses of former soldiers about ability, disability, change
 Re-engaging with reality 111
and loss), we enter a more complex territory. In order to take this discussion further,
I shall explore in greater depth what in my experience has been the most common
item of reality invoked in such discussions: rather than limbs, rocks or mugs, it is
tables that are grabbed, touched and tapped (this tactile dimension also being
important for our engagement with reality).
Tables also have the advantage of being something many people encounter in their
daily lives. When we sit and talk or write about reality and social construction, a table
of some sort is often involved – something we can touch, hold and rely on to reassert
reality. Where does this invocation of tables as reality – or the possible rejection of
this argument in favour of the social construction (rather than the material con-
struction) of tables – get us? It appeals most obviously to the here and now, the
empirical: we are sitting around this particular, indisputable table; our glasses or cups
are supported by it and this is where we have assembled to have coffee; the material
existence of the table is what prevents my cup of tea from crashing to the ground; we
can touch, feel, rest our elbows on, spill milk across and set up our laptop on this
concrete four-legged object. So far so good. Here is an object that surely refutes any
argument that all reality is socially or discursively constructed.
We cannot deny that this table is here to be touched, seen, heard (if it is moved
across the floor), and possibly tasted and smelt (if one wanted to cross-check with the
other senses). We couldn’t even be having this conversation were it not for the very
conditions provided by the table. And yet this assuredness in the sensory argument
and its attendant transparent naming (this is a table) doesn’t necessarily achieve quite
as much as it claims. It is unlikely that anyone around the table wants to seriously
refute the reality of the table, so what kind of doubts creep in? The empirical veri-
fication of reality is only one part of the picture. We also have to start to think about
what a table is, how we know this, what functions it serves and whether we indeed all
agree that a given object is indeed a table. The Scottish philosopher David Hume also
invoked tables in his attempt to understand the relation between the empirical work
of the senses and the workings of the mind: “This very table”, he suggests, starting as
many of us do with the place we work or sit, “which we see white, and which we feel
hard, is believed to exist, independent of our perception, and to be something
external to our mind, which perceives it” (Hume, 1777, x118 (1975, pp151–2)).
The common assumption, he suggests, is that such a table continues its existence
independently of our presence. The problem, however, is that “nothing can ever be
present to the mind but an image or perception”, with the senses only providing a
passage for perception rather than a direct link between mind and object (Hume,
1975, p152). “The table”, he continues, “which we see, seems to diminish, as we
remove further from it; but the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no
alteration: it was, therefore, nothing but its image, which was present to the mind.”
Such observations, Hume goes on to argue, are the “obvious dictates of reason”, and
it is very clear that when we refer to objects in the world, we in fact refer to “per-
ceptions in the mind, and fleeting copies or representations of other existences,
which remain uniform and independent”. This, Hume goes on to suggest, raises a
serious contradiction: if we believe on the one hand in the objective reality of a
table independent of the mind, and on the other that when we refer to a table we are
112 Re-engaging with reality
talking of a mental image, how can we know that a table in the mind represents
a table in the world?
While we might wish at this point to argue with Hume – his representational or
surrogational assumption, for example, that objects in the world are represented by
images or words in the mind (Chapter 6) – it is of more interest that it was Hume’s
thinking on these matters that raised Kant from, as he put it, his “dogmatic slumber”
and helped him towards his own transcendental idealism. Realizing that time and
space are not given entities of the world, but rather products of the human mind
(space is our map of the external world, time our ordering of that world), Kant
(1787/1998) argued that the way we understand the outside world is fundamentally
through the prism of human experience: the objects we perceive are not the “thing-
itself” (Das Ding an sich) but a representation of this experience. Kant, like Hume,
took issue with Descartes’ idealism, which questioned the grounds on which we can
claim to know an outside world (all we can be sure about is our own thinking). As
Kant pointed out in Critique of Pure Reason (1787/1998), existence is not a property
of a thing (and one cannot therefore argue for the existence of God as a supremely
perfect being on the basis that such perfection must include existence); rather
existence is the condition by which an object can have properties. Thus we cannot
say of a table that “it is made of wood, has three legs, is round” and “it exists”, since a
table could have other characteristics (metal, square and so on) and still be a table,
but it could not be non-existent and still be a table (Grayling, 2013, p88).
Unlike Berkeley’s subjective idealism – the denial of external existence (all we
can be sure of are our sensory impressions)1 – Kant argued that mental images do not
reflect an outside world, which was essentially unknowable, but rather reality must
conform to the concepts in the human mind. Reality only exists insofar as humans
experience it. From Kant onwards, we have had to contend with transcendental
idealism, the problem that it is human perception of objects that counts. And this, as
Latour (2004b), Bogost (2012) and others suggest, is where the humanist project
really takes on its most problematic position, that the existence of everything else is
dependent on human perception. Kant, as Hacking (1999, p41) explains, “was the
great pioneer of construction”. So, although the linguistic, or discursive, turn in the
social sciences towards the end of the twentieth century did indeed render discourse
central – if all things are socially constructed, our focus needs to turn to the dis-
cursive construction of reality – the move to see the world in terms of its human
construction was a Kantian move. So it will not suffice simply to grab a table and
pronounce on reality: such a position is at the very least philosophically naïve.
In order to find a way out of these concerns over reality and social construction I shall
consider in the next section what it means to perceive and report on some form of
reality, in particular a cat at the bottom of the garden.

The cat at the bottom of the garden

In what might have seemed at the time a fairly innocent passing remark in his book
After Epistemology, Harris (2009, pp163–4) suggests that “When I say I see a cat at
the end of the garden, I am not reporting some mysterious activity in my brain; I am
 Re-engaging with reality 113
reporting my spontaneous interpretation of a visual experience”. As we saw in the
previous chapter, part of Harris’ concern is that the classical model of language that
has been handed down to linguistics assumes a linguistic system independent of
individual action. We encode and decode our thoughts in and out of a language. For
Harris, by contrast, we do not see a cat and then transform that experience into
language (for a listener to decode the message back into an understanding of a cat at
the bottom of the garden) but rather “transform an optical image into a meaningful
sign of something happening here and now in my life” (2009, p163). From this
integrational perspective knowledge is not so much a process of gaining access to
something external to oneself but a product of the human capacity for sign-making.
The external world supplies input but does not determine the outcome, which arises
from the integrational process of sign-making.
This argument is part of Harris’ broader concern that the Western model of
epistemology has been built on a flawed understanding of language, one that
assumes a universality of cognition rather than a context- and communication-
dependent development of knowledge. Traditional epistemology, Harris (2009, p3)
asserts, “lacks any sound semiological basis” and “floats in a philosophical and
social vacuum of its own making”. Harris’ comment on the cat at the bottom of the
garden was also the catalyst for a series of papers, first by Teubert (2013), arguing for
a social-constructionist case for how we understand the cat at the bottom of the
garden (this whole experience is mediated by discourse). This prompted a lengthy
response by Sealey (2014), arguing a realist case (that languages, like other objects
in the world, have a material reality irrespective of human perception) while also
taking issue with Teubert’s views on cats. Finally (so far) another paper-length
response by Pable (2015) followed, critiquing both constructionist and realist
positions and reasserting an integrational perspective. This extended debate on
representation, reality and construction opens up an important consideration for a
posthumanist applied linguistics, especially since, from an alternative perspective,
the whole debate is stuck in the problematic epistemologies of representationalism,
surrogationalism or correlationalism (signs stand for things in the world, and reality
is about a relation between things in our head and things out there in the world).
Teubert (2013) takes exception to Harris’ view that reporting a cat at the end of the
garden is a form of observational knowledge “created through integrating sensory
stimuli with what has been remembered from previous experiences (as in the case of
seeing a cat at the bottom of the garden) and what might be expected from the present
situation” (Harris, 2009, p164). Teubert’s main objection is to Harris’ assertion that
from an integrational perspective such “observational knowledge is pre-linguistic
knowledge in the sense that it does not depend on the words in which it might – at a
later stage – be expressed” (Harris, 2009, p165). It is this notion of pre-linguistic
knowledge that sets off alarm bells for Teubert, since from his point of view it is not
possible for humans to have thoughts that have not been mediated by our discursive
learning experiences. For Teubert,

without taking part 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.
(Teubert, 2013, p275)

Teubert argues strongly against the fallacy of unmediated experience and indeed
starts to look quite posthumanist 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

just a copy of what generations of people have experienced before. People,

particularly in the west, do not like to see themselves as no more than a
cogwheel in a collective mechanism. Ever since the enlightenment they prefer
to see themselves as autonomous individuals creating all their experiences out
of their own self.
(Teubert, 2013, p278)

Here, then, is a critique of transcendent humanism, of the idea that humans

experience and interpret the world from inside their heads. And yet the argument that
is used to sustain this position sits rather uncomfortably with the arguments I have
been trying to develop in this book, for it rests on the assumption that it is humans
and only humans that operate in this way. On the one hand, then, by ascribing
“primary intentionality to discourse, not to the individual” Teubert (2013, p295)
develops an argument that it is not humans so much as discourse that runs the world
since “discourse contains all the symbolic interactions that have taken place within a
discourse community, and it is in these interactions that the reality confronting us is
constructed”. On the other hand, to maintain this strong discursive position, he has to
maintain that other animals can never do this.
While he is right that the notion of a garden is socially constructed, he assumes,
for example, that animals such as chimpanzees “probably do not have an abstract
concept of a border of a territory like a garden as something that is based on an
agreement in or between societies that presupposes the even more abstract concept
of property”. For a chimpanzee, like a cat, there can be no notion of a garden as an
abstract idea because the idea is something based in human discourse. Animals
could only perceive of a garden if it was bounded by walls or fences that delimited
it in absolute fashion, and even then, their understanding would never be an
equivalent idea of a garden understood in human terms. Animals cannot deal with
“representations” or “symbolic content”: “They cannot share ideas. They are
monadic individuals, equipped by nature to interact with each other in ways with
which nature has equipped them or which they have learnt through trial and error”
(Teubert, 2013, p296). Here we may note both the ways in which he connects these
monadic animals with his reading of Harris’ pre-discursive individual – any ani-
mal without discourse, or a human assumed not to have access to discourse, is a
simple isolated organism – and the assumption, similar in some ways to the dis-
cussion of pointer dogs and other animals in Chapter 5, that animals are located
 Re-engaging with reality 115
firmly in Nature and unable to engage in abstract thought since this, tautologically,
is something that only humans can do.
Sealey (2014, p300) objects to the discourse-centric and anthropocentric aspects
of these arguments, refuting Teubert’s “reduction of what human beings can know to
the limits of the discursive realm”. A cat, for example, will “identify another cat with
which to breed without benefit of human labels” thus providing “strong evidence for
the extra-discursive existence of things in the world” (Sealey, 2014, p302). She takes
him to task particularly for his claims about animal cognition, pointing out that much
recent research on apes points to a rather different picture, in which Lyn et al. (2011)
and Segerdahl (2012) report acquisition of symbolic capacities, the use of symbols
for objects, the making of semantically based combinations, declarative pointing,
the making of tools and understanding others’ beliefs. Teubert has to maintain
an absolute and categorical distinction between human and non-human animals in
order to “sustain his miasmic model of discourse, which separates us from the other
species on the planet, permeates every aspect of our consciousness, and creates
all the meaning in our experience” (Sealey, 2014, p311). From Sealey’s “realist”
position, by contrast, there are all sorts of other phenomena that “our empirical
senses cannot perceive, but that are nevertheless real, perceptible by other kinds of
creatures, and not reducible to the labels we invent in discourse” (p311).
There are two main strands to this argument. On the one hand is a realist
position that insists that the world exists out there independent of human perception:
“Realist approaches recognize the social world as existing independently from
our descriptions of it, and that language, structure and agency are different kinds
of phenomena in that world, with different kinds of properties and powers” (Sealey,
2007, p644). On the other hand is an insistence that we need to recognize “the
interplay between non-living matter, living organisms and human culture, including
language and discourse” (Sealey, 2014, p313). By disregarding “the continuities
between humans and other species”, she argues, Teubert also overlooks the ways in
which humans live an embodied existence – the ways humans feel, sense and engage
in the world. As the discussion in Chapter 4 suggested, the ways in which language,
literacy and cognition were theorized to involve only the eyes and ears rather than
any of the lower senses (body, smell, touch and taste) led to a dissociation of
language and the world. As Sealey argues, however, “the way human beings engage
in and develop discourse is emergent not only from our intra-discursive interactions
with other people, but also from our animal, material being in the world” (Sealey,
2014, p316), a view that accords with Bucholtz and Hall’s (2016) approach to
sociolinguistic embodiment, which shifts the focus away from mentalist or cogni-
tivist models of communication to incorporate bodies, affect and a different sense
of interaction.
Pable (2015, p457) also sees “deeply troubling consequences for what it means
to be ‘human’” in the position taken by Teubert. The question of what it means to
be human, as I have repeatedly argued in this book, cannot be separated from
the question of how we understand language and communication. Because the
assumption that language is central to humanity is extended to assume, even more
dangerously, that knowledge of a language is also a prerequisite for humanity,
116 Re-engaging with reality
we are left with the dangerous proposition that “if you don’t possess a language, you
are not human, or not fully human” (Pable, 2015, p457). Pable also rejects both
Teubert’s social constructionism and Sealey’s linguistic realism on the grounds that
both fall into the trap of segregational (as opposed to integrational) and surrogational
linguistics, whereby words are assumed to stand for things. For Teubert, reality is a
discursive construct, while for Sealey, material reality is independent of discourse,
and neither of these positions helps us understand the radical indeterminacy of
the sign.
How to sort all this out? Teubert’s (2013, p278) strong case for social con-
struction makes good sense up to a point: both the idea that “we learn what to
experience and how to experience it” through processes of socialization and the
view that humans are not the autonomous, free-willed subjects they like to see
themselves as (but rather the products of an agential world of discourse) make good
sense. But the position he takes on a fundamental division between humans and
animals or that we do not perceive anything non-discursively do not hold up.
We are left with dumb animals and disembodied humans, which is certainly not the
kind of world of humans and language that a posthumanist position would suggest.
An absolute human/animal distinction is not, however, a prerequisite for a strong
social-constructionist position. Even if we accept the premise that human enga-
gement with the world is always discursively mediated, there is no concomitant
reason to insist that animals might not also in some cases and to some extent view
the world in ways other than through direct sensation. So we should not necessarily
reject Teubert’s social constructionism on the basis of his anthropocentrism.
At the same time, his critique of Harris’ sign-creating individual does point to the
rather asocial understanding of the human at the heart of integrational perspectives.
Harris’ (2009, p3) insistence that “the self is at the centre of human communication”
and that “questions of knowledge are concerned first and foremost with self-
knowledge. We are what we know” doesn’t accord with more decentred notions of
the human. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we are what we know, then we
are a misunderstood being, since, as Gee (2015a) makes clear, our understandings of
ourselves are always constrained. The integrationist critique that both realist and
constructionist positions adhere to a surrogational argument whereby words stand
for things is less easy to evaluate. There is a tendency among integrational linguists
to divide the world into integrationists and the others (segregationalists): as Pable
(2015, p468) remarks, according to Harris “only two views have been theorized in
Western intellectual history, namely a ‘segregational’ one and an ‘integrational’
one”. Akin to Orman’s (2013) critique elsewhere that the new terminology in
sociolinguistics, and particularly polylanguaging (Jørgensen, 2008), is really the
same old linguistics dressed up in new terminology, there is a tendency from an
integrational point of view to castigate everyone else for upholding a supposedly
segregational view of language. While a stronger case can be made that Sealey’s
(2014) realism relies on a position that words stand for real things in the world, it is
less clear that this is the case in Teubert’s constructionist perspective.
While the different protagonists in this debate stake out intriguingly different
perspectives, we do not, from a posthumanist perspective, need to align ourselves
 Re-engaging with reality 117
with one or the other. It is not that difficult to agree that certain things exist inde-
pendent of human perception: there is no good reason to cling to the anthropocentric
insistence that the world is only there insofar as humans perceive it. Animals
perceive it too, and while it is unlikely that a cat understands the notion of a garden in
the same way that humans might, the cat’s construction of a garden would almost
certainly be an interesting one in its own right. To suggest that things exist inde-
pendently of human perception does not mean, however, that human discourse
plays a minimal role in how we understand the world. It depends on what we are
talking about. As Hacking reminds us, it matters what is being socially constructed –
a simple object or a social order. As he goes on to suggest, it may indeed be
tautological to suggest that gender is socially constructed: it’s a social category to
start with, so it can only be socially constructed: “If gender is, by definition,
something essentially social, and if it is constructed, how could its construction be
other than social?” (Hacking, 1999, p 39).2 Likewise we might argue that to say that
language is a social construction is tautological: what else could it be?

Speculative and other realisms

To suggest that language is a social construction (it takes an odd version of language
to argue otherwise) does not, however, mean language is not real. Unfortunately
none of these positions is going to help us in the end to sort out what is at stake here.
The debate between realism and social constructionism is not helpful. If a social
constructionist gets a bit carried away and starts to deny the reality of the table
around which the conversation is happening (though I can’t ever recall this hap-
pening), it may be useful for the realist to call on empirical data to reassure us that the
table is there. But if the realist starts to extend these arguments to a world of objects
that correspond to images or words in the mind (the word table describes tables out
there) or to the reality of all things we can talk about (languages exist because we
have names for them), it may be useful for the constructionist to step in and show that
what is real is almost inevitably bound up in social relations. To say that “reality is
socially constructed” (Teubert, 2013, p290) does not mean it is not real.
Bhaskar’s (1997, 2002) explanation of the epistemic fallacy – ontological ques-
tions about reality are conflated with epistemological questions about how we can
know reality – is helpful here, since it shows how “a real world which consists in
structures, generative mechanisms, all sorts of complex things and totalities” can
exist independently of the epistemological question of how this reality becomes
knowledge, which is always “socially produced” and subject to “geo-historically
specific social processes” (Bhaskar, 2002, p211). Bhaskar’s critical realism (first
known as transcendental realism) has informed a number of applied linguistic
projects, including Fairclough’s (2003) critical discourse analysis, Block’s (2014)
analysis of social class in applied linguistics, Sealey’s (2007) realist perspective on
sociolinguistics and most notably Corson’s (1997) emancipatory philosophy for
applied linguistics. Bhaskar offers us a tempting option that allows for an acceptance
of an external reality and an appreciation of the fact that the ways we know about this
are socially informed and social facts themselves.
118 Re-engaging with reality
For Haslanger (2012, p111), resisting reality is an important political project,
since it points on the one hand to the inadequacy of simple claims to reality. To give
up the idea of objective reality is to “give up the idea that there are things which
determine, in and of themselves, without any social factors playing a role, how
they are known”. The problem with claims to objective reality is that they
overlook the ways in which “language and knowledge are socially conditioned”
(Haslanger, 2012, p111). Ultimately there can never be objective things of this
sort. But to question objective reality is not to question independent reality.
Drawing on contemporary feminist and race theory, Haslanger (2012, p5) shows
why it is so important to understand that “race and gender are socially constructed”
yet at the same time to avoid an “anti-realist approach” to such social categories:
race and gender are socially constructed and we need to understand the “reality of
social structures and the political importance of recognizing reality” (p30). On the
other hand to resist reality is also to acknowledge that these social categories are no
less real: since this is a deeply unjust social world, “this reality must be resisted”
(p30). The important goal for Haslanger is to understand differences that are
socially constructed but not recognized as such (gender and race being obvious
examples).
These approaches to critical (social) realism clearly help us out of the assumed
opposition between social construction and realism, suggesting that social facts –
social constructions – are real, and that we therefore need to appreciate the political
importance of recognizing reality. An alternative step in getting beyond the
“hackneyed debate between scientific realism and social constructivism” (Barad,
2003, p805) is to question the premise that humans need to be involved in the
judgement of reality. Central to the long history around senses and ideas – the
question apparently solved by Kant’s transcendental idealism, whereby the world
accords with human thought – has been the question of access: how do humans
access the outside world? This is what Meillassoux (2008) terms correlationism –
the idea that being rests in a relationship between mind and world, that things exist
only for us as humans, that there are no objects, events, laws or beings that are not
already correlated with the point of view provided by human access. As Meillassoux
notes, along lines similar to Latour’s (1999, 2004b) critique of the divisions of
modernity, we have split the world into humans and nature and then asked how the
former comes to understand the latter. But clearly this is not the only way we can
address questions of reality.
An alternative move has been to re-engage questions of materialism and
reality through what has been termed speculative realism (Meillassoux, 2008) or
Harman’s (2002, 2005) object-oriented ontology, which places things at the centre
of being. Philosophy has been remarkably silent on matter and yet “as human
beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world” (Coole and Frost, 2010, p1): “We
live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter. We are ourselves
composed of matter”. As Bryant et al. (2011, p3) explain, phenomenology, struc-
turalism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism – the long focus
on discourse, text, culture, power and the construction of reality – have all been
“perfect exemplars of the anti-realist trend in continental philosophy”. It is into
 Re-engaging with reality 119
this space that several related ways of thinking about reality and materiality have
stepped. While speculative realism does not represent a particularly coherent
standpoint – the very notion of speculative realism has been variously disowned by
its supposed adherents (Bryant et al., 2011), and Harman (2011) suggests that
others, particularly Meillassoux (2008), do not really engage with the real objects of
the world – it nonetheless takes on a challenge to return to questions of materialism
and realism.
Bennett’s (2010a, 2010b) vibrant materialism is useful here, since it offers a
political and ethical way of thinking about the material world, a “recognition of
human participation in a shared, vital materiality” (Bennett, 2010a, p14). We are
both surrounded by such materiality and part of it, so the “ethical task at hand here is
to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perpetually open
to it” (2010a, p14). The danger, however, is that we end up with a horizontal reality,
or a flattened hierarchy, in which it is hard to differentiate any political actors,
a concern raised about a number of these approaches’ expanded notion of the
importance of non-human actors, including the many actants of Latour’s (2005)
Actor Network Theory. There is a risk here of “replacing ontology with a narra-
tology of things”, of producing “descriptions of blackouts and garbage dumps,
while denying the implications of language, conceptual schemes, societal appara-
tuses, modes of access to those things” or other political or ontological concerns
(Gratton, 2014, p125). It is in part to avoid such flattened object-oriented ontologies
that Appadurai (2015) proposes thinking in terms of mediants rather than actants,
suggesting that while it is important to acknowledge that humans are not the only
actors that count, they are nonetheless actors with a particular responsibility to
the planet.
The position that emerges from these various approaches to reality and
materialism points in several directions: the debate between so-called realists and
constructionists is an unhelpful one that we should move beyond. Reality cannot
be objective but it may be independent. Reality, and particularly when we look at
more obvious social categories such as gender, race or language, is socially con-
structed, but this does not make it any less real. We also need to engage with the
more-than-human world, the materiality that is around and part of us. If it is
perhaps a step too far to place things above humans in an ontological hierarchy,
there are good arguments for a more balanced settlement. This emphasis away
from humans is not to back away from a critique of capitalism, patriarchy or
racism, but to reconfigure both the ways different materials work in the structures
of power and to suggest alternative ways forward. Grosz (2010), like a number of
ecofeminists (Adams and Gruen, 2014), argues that the answer for women is not to
look for more of the share taken by men but to reconfigure the possibilities of the
material world. What I am proposing is a form of critical posthumanist realism,
which, following Haslanger’s (2012) critical social realism, Hoy’s (2004) critical
resistance (Chapter 6) and Bennett’s (2010a, 2010b) political ontology of things,
takes the critical in line with critical social theory (a focus on inequality and
injustice) while also embracing social construction and the importance of the
material world.
120 Re-engaging with reality

Back on the table

The claims to reality made by touching a table – surely you can’t deny the existence of
this table? – rely on both a fairly raw empiricism (physical touch is equated with
material reality) and potentially an assumption about the category of tables (is it just
this table that is real or all tables?). They also assume that reality exists insofar as
humans can perceive through their senses, particularly touch. The relationship
between tables and humans, however, is a complex one. Tables come in many shapes
and sizes, have many different roles and are often deeply bound up with culture and
locality. There is, for example, the kitchen table (in modern architecture often
replaced by worktops and benches). In traditional European kitchens this was the
main workspace, where vegetables were chopped, pastry rolled, sauces mixed.
Kitchen tables also took on, in various contexts, other roles – a place for an informal
meal, a casual conversation, a relaxed game of cards.3 There are hall tables (some of
which may not have four legs), bedside tables, billiard tables, dining tables and many
more, all linked to certain sets of cultural and architectural ways of running our lives.
There are concrete chess tables in city squares, drawing in an audience to watch a
game; wooden picnic tables in parks, where families gather to eat and drink; plastic
tables under umbrellas on seaside terraces, where swimmers place their cold drinks;
folding tables in a village hall, opened out to carry pots of jam, sandwiches and
cakes; coffee tables used to display large, image-laden books. There are round tables
(famously surrounded by knights, more commonly surrounded by customers in
Chinese restaurants) and rectangular tables (at which, one might, according to some
histories and images, be eating the last supper).
Where we sit at tables may matter: there is the head of the table (traditionally a
gendered position of authority) and different ways of ordering guests around the
table. There are social rules around tables when we eat, and one may need to be
excused from the table (to ask permission to leave). There are different words for
different types of table. The table one chooses to put one’s laptop on may remain a
table if that’s what its primary function is seen as, or it may have already been
designated as a desk. In schools and offices we work at desks and drink coffee
around tables: this is how we know whether we are working or socializing (it doesn’t
actually work like this, it must be admitted, since the table conversation may also be
work and we drink coffee at our desks – who has time for coffee breaks anymore?).
As we know, too, these tables are cut up differently in different languages and serve
different purposes in different cultures. For those for whom the floor – covered in
tatami, or woven mats, or carpets – is the place to sit, a table may play a different role
in social relations. Since the Japanese kotatsu (炬燵) – a low table with a heat source
underneath (traditionally charcoal cooking fires but in modern times heat-giving
lamps) and a covering (futon:布団) between the table legs and the table top to
insulate the sitters – like the korsi (‫ )ﮐﺮﺳﯽ‬in Iran or other such tables elsewhere, is
often now linked to traditional homes, family gatherings, staying warm in winter and
other connections, it comes with many associated memories and affective relations.
So, yes, tables do of course have a material existence, and tables are also of course
social constructs (and are no less real for being so). They usually have four legs and a
 Re-engaging with reality 121
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 artefacts.
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 of ourselves, 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 constructed, we also need to
understand that this is very much part 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 particular 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 very particular 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 of reality) – 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, drink 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, cutlery, conversations), as actants that interpellate us into forms 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.

Conclusion: critical posthumanist realism

I started this chapter by asking how we should respond to the concerns raised by
Latour (2004a) and Luke (2013) that the critical project has gone off the rails if it
cannot make claims to reality, if the central focus is on the construction of reality
rather than facts themselves. It is of course useful to recall that most critical con-
structionist questioning of reality was not so much a denial of reality, as some
122 Re-engaging with reality
claimed, but rather a critique of the ways in which particular people, or particular
ways of doing research or particular regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980) make par-
ticular claims to be able to represent reality. This was a critique of relations of power
and knowledge. To the extent that this line of thinking on occasions assumed that we
only have access to discourse and therefore cannot make claims about reality,
however, it abrogated its critical responsibility to be able to speak truth to power. If
Latour and Luke are right that it is time to reclaim reality, to develop “a stubbornly
realist attitude” that deals with matters of concern rather than matters of fact (Latour,
2004a, p231), we need to make various clarifications about what this means, since
rudimentary claims to reality are not going to help us.
Hardline constructionists and realists may already be starting to get a bit edgy
here: on the one hand to talk of reality may be anathema to a constructionist while on
the other hand to suggest that we need to approach reality with caution might start to
look rather relativist to a realist. In general, however, these two positions are not
really so far apart: constructionists may wish to insist that no experience can avoid
discursive mediation but at the same time few would really want to suggest that a
table isn’t real (we may mean different things by the word and have different
experiences of and relations to tables, but they do exist). The issue becomes harder
when more complex ideas are involved, so that while a constructionist may want to
argue that, say, what we mean by poverty is discursively mediated, they would be
foolish to deny that the experience of poverty is real. Similarly, while realists may
posit a reality beyond human experience, most also acknowledge that access to this
reality is mediated, and that language is an important player here.
Rather than reproducing this discussion – the constructionist critique that
assumes no way of criticizing matters of fact other than by focusing on the con-
ditions that made them possible, and the realist critique that posits a reality
but acknowledges it may be hard to get at – it may be more fruitful to take up the
challenges of the new materialism (Barad, 2007, 2013). From this point of view, the
“belief that representations serve a mediating function between knower and known”
shows a “deep distrust of matter” (Barad, 2007, p133). The “representationalist
belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is the metaphysical
substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs,
perpetuating the endless recycling of untenable options” (2007, p133). For Barad,
in a way not dissimilar to Latour (2004a), the way forward is not to recycle debates
about constructionism and realism but instead to seek a way forward in which our
“thinking, observing, and theorizing” are understood as “practices of engagement
with, and as part of, the world in which we have our being” (Barad, 2007, p133).
Bogost (2012, p14) likewise questions the supposed opposition between scientific
naturalism (true knowledge irrespective of context) and social relativism
(emphasizing the contingencies of context), suggesting they are “cut from the same
cloth”: “For the scientific naturalist, the world exists for human discovery and
exploitation” while for the “cultural relativist, humans create and refashion the
world”. The endless debates between these supposed oppositional views have long
clouded what is really at stake here, since both “embody the correlationist conceit”
(2012, p14).
 Re-engaging with reality 123
These questions pose several broad challenges for applied linguistics: the status of
languages as real entities, the relationships between language and a real world, and
the possibilities of thinking in alternative ways about language and reality. Elder-
Vass (2013) suggests “seven ways to be a realist about language”: empirical realism
(the world, including language, exists independent of human thought), scientific
realism (language events are caused by real factors), native realism (the innate
human language-acquisition device is real and in the brain), semiotic realism (signs
are real and causally significant), social realism (social structures are real and
causally significant), linguistic systems realism (linguistic systems exist indepen-
dently of what exists in individual heads) and linguistic norm circles realism
(linguistic norms are maintained by linguistic groups). Aside from the point that
these categories overlap and work in different ways, Sealey and Carter (2013, p268)
suggest – from their own realist point of view – that the “seven ways” may not be
so much variants of realist theory, but rather “attributable to alternative conceptions
of what ‘language’ is”.
Sealey and Carter therefore take issue with Elder-Vass’ (2013, p263) proposition
that “we need not commit ourselves to the notion of a language as a unified and
well-demarcated system”, since from their position “languages” are “varieties of the
real phenomenon of language” and “exist in the empirical realm” (Sealey and
Carter, 2013, p270). One of their arguments in favour of the existence of languages
rests on the claim that mutual understanding is proof of the existence of different
languages (Chapter 6). Yet Elder-Vass’ (2013) caution against committing to the
idea of separate and well demarcated languages may be more credible than Sealey’s
(2007, pp650–1) sociolinguistic realism, which suggests that we can “distinguish
between competing accounts and descriptions in part by recognizing that they are
accounts of different kinds of things” and that accounts of distinct languages are
“attempts to describe phenomena that do exist independently of our descriptions
of them”. It might make more sense to argue, following Haslanger’s (2012) critical
social realism, that languages are social constructs but no less real for being so.
It is then more possible to engage in a project of resisting the reality of languages not
so much by discounting reality altogether but rather, in the same way that we may
resist the ways in which gender and race operate, by questioning the work languages
are made to do.
Skuttnabb-Kangas and Phillipson (2008, p10) argue that “it is unhelpful to
denounce the existence of concepts like language or mother tongue as social con-
structs with little or no basis in reality”, since this undermines projects such as those
aimed to develop language rights. To argue that languages or mother tongues are
social constructs (how could they not be?), however, is not to suggest they are not
real. It is not useful therefore to insist either that languages or mother tongues are real
nor that critics deny this reality. As Steffensen and Fill (2014, p9) put it, since
“linguists have sound theoretical and empirical reasons to regard the concept of ‘a
language’ as a folk construct, and thus reject essentialist views of what language is”,
it does not help by insisting on a particular version of linguistic realism on the basis
that only by adhering to such a belief in language realism can we take the language-
rights agenda forward. If we can agree that the conditions faced by a certain group of
124 Re-engaging with reality
people – in social, educational, economic, cultural and material terms – can be
helped by strategies to assist in the use of a particular set of language practices, we do
not need to agree on the ontological status of a language. But if we put supposed
language realities – in terms of language ontologies – before the real conditions of
people undergoing major changes in their lives, we risk elevating the salvation of
invented language objects over the concerns of real people, putting bourgeois
academic idealism before questions of language and poverty (Mufwene, 2010).
Luke (2013, p139) argues for the need to “bring together two distinct philosophies
of text and representation: historical materialist critique of the state and political
economy, on the one hand, and poststructuralist and postmodern theories of
discourse, on the other”. While a position seeking to reconcile poststructuralist
discourse and political economy is far more useful than the insistence that these are
incompatible approaches based in relativism and realism (Chapter 2), there are also
good reasons to try to move forward from the view that “unpacking the relationship
between discourse representation and reality is the core question of critical literacy
as theory and practice” (Luke, 2013, p146). Specifically, following new materialist
arguments, this position suggests both a questionable take on representation
(a relationship between discourse and reality) and a limited account of what con-
stitutes materialism (historical materialism and political economy). It is not by any
means that political economy doesn’t matter – as Block (2014) has cogently argued,
applied linguistics urgently needs to pay much closer attention to questions of class
and inequality – but rather that reality should not be ceded to those who claim to have
the only line on material conditions.
Latour’s approach to matters of concern rather than matters of fact takes us in a
useful direction here by urging us to consider a new form of realism not so much by
focusing on the conditions of possibility for facts to be so but rather by engaging in a
“multifarious inquiry” (2004a, p246) drawing on diverse modes of research to
understand how different participants (broadly understood) converge to render
things as things. Such an approach eschews appeals to reality based on a crude
empiricism that makes unwarranted claims about objects. The discussion of how we
perceive and talk about the cat at the bottom of the garden – a discussion which,
rather interestingly, was to some extent hijacked by the cat – suggested that neither
constructionist nor realist arguments are really going to solve things for us here. New
materialism and speculative realism do not by any means offer us the only way
forward, and indeed the flattened ontologies they propose (where everything starts
to look a bit the same) may limit what they can do. They nonetheless offer a balance
to particular claims for reality and construction, suggesting at the very least that it’s
time to move on and that there are good reasons to reclaim reality from bland realists.
The discussion of the cat also pointed to a posthumanist way forward: not only do
we need to be careful about the assumptions we make about how a cat may perceive
the world – claiming that all human perception is discursively mediated, which
cannot therefore be the case for other animals – but we also need to consider whether
reality is something that needs human arbiters. The discussion of tables suggested
the need to avoid simple empiricism (I touch the table, therefore it is) but also
transcendental idealism (tables must conform to human ideas of tables). Instead it
 Re-engaging with reality 125
became clear that we need to consider the ways in which our lives are entangled with
tables – the ways tables are part of momentary assemblages that include people, talk,
coffee, iPads, croissants, phở. This critical posthumanist realism gives us a way of
speaking truth (or reality)4 to power by emphasizing the critical of critical social
theory (Haslanger, 2012; Pennycook, 2001), a realism that allows for social con-
struction and resistance (Haslanger, 2012; Hoy, 2004) and a posthumanism that
incorporates a political ontology of things that stresses human interrelationships
with the material world (Bennett, 2010a). Some tentative directions for a critical
posthumanist applied linguistics are offered in the final chapter.

Notes
1 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, x120
(1975, p153)). The dilemma is nicely captured in Ronald Knox’s (1888–1957) poem:

God in the Quad

There was a young man who said “God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there’s no one about in the quad.”
Reply:
“Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.”

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-table 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 table, with more serious play,
scoring and bidding.
4 I have avoided in this chapter the difficult relation between truth and reality; for discussion,
see Blackburn (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-
humanism, but it is not posthumanism ultimately that 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 interrelated ways of
thinking. Posthumanism is not a theory, or even a coherent set of propositions, but
rather a collection 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 what is missed in the world when humans take themselves so seriously and
consider themselves the centre of all that matters. This is to question the ways
humanism has privileged the human mind as the source of knowledge and ethics
and assumed that humans were masters of their own intentions and desires, uniquely
capable of asserting agency. Posthumanism takes “humanity’s ontological pre-
cariousness” seriously (Fuller, 2011, p75), though the version of posthumanism
I have been developing here is neither drawn to a dystopic anti-humanist nihilism
that rejects humans and their place in the world, nor is seduced by utopian visions of
a transhumanist future in which humans are integrated with machines and tech-
nologies and may achieve immortality. Rather, following Bryant (2011), the goal is
to unsettle the position 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, p10). For some, this might seem
a question too far, an impossible interrogation of being: we simply cannot know
what it’s like to be something else, nor can we conceive of non-sentient things that
are aware of their own being. As Thomas Nagel (1974, p439) asked in his well
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 upside down during the day, fly around at night
and sense the world through echolocation, but rather “what is it like for a bat to be a
bat”. This, he argues, we cannot know, since we are limited by our own subjective
experience. So when it comes to asking 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, surely a thing can only fall on the negative
side of this dividing line. Even if, as did Darwin (1881, p305), we believe that
 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 127
earthworms might be smarter than some think and indeed “have played a more
important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first assume”,
and even if we decided to grant them some form of agency – even if we decided this
might constitute some form of awareness and granted some form of knowing to the
wormy part of an earthworm – we would nevertheless likely draw the line at the
earthy part, 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 of reductionist 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 form of hermetic
subjectivism that, in suggesting the unknowability of others, emphasizes the sepa-
rability and uniqueness of humans. Asking the question “What does it feel like to be an
octopus?” Godfrey-Smith (2017, p77) argues 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 of life 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 of knowability 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
other.
As this line of inquiry developed through the book, we touched on questions of the
senses, on the assumptions about how we believe knowledge arises in our heads and
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,
2012, p30). To ask what it’s like to be a thing therefore compels us to start to think
otherwise, to move away from assumptions about humans, knowledge, subjectivity
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 of humanity as an end in itself does
not have a particularly good record. An alternative approach that can “raise the status
of the materiality of which we are composed” (Bennett, 2010a, p12, emphasis in
original) offers an alternative to the dominant Kantian version of morality in which
128 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
those who “do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or
other) model of personhood” routinely suffer (p13).
The challenges posed by posthumanist thought emerge from many directions.
Perhaps the most alarming derive from the very real concerns about what we, as
humans, have done to the planet. Of course in the long run we know humanity will
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 necessary. While
the environment might have been seen as a rather soft political issue in the past, the
awareness that the planet itself is under serious threat has shifted the urgency of
 zek, 2010). As Klein (2015) argues, the solution cannot be
environmental politics (Zi
through capitalist-based forms 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 warm at alarming 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 forms of collective action based on forms 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 He 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 form 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 meticulously 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 apart 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 story, 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 (2012, p30) points out, taking us back to the discussion of the
previous chapter. It is important 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 is: 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
particular 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, if indeed 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, former 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 of religious 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 referring particularly 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 story: 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
forms of critical 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 terms of
“giving voice to marginalized subjects”; but what happens, they ask,

when we attempt to attune ourselves to forms of agency that do not possess a

conventionally recognized voice to be amplified? What new intersections
among research, invention, and political agency might emerge when voices
have to be assembled rather than merely amplified, and when new methods of
listening need to be invented?
(Brigstocke and Noorani, 2016, p2)

Before taking up such questions through an exploration of what an applied linguistic

commons – following a broader discussion of reclaiming the commons as a political
and spatial project – might start to look like, I shall discuss in the next section the
affinities between many aspects of posthumanism and current trends in applied
linguistics that are opening up to a broader, distributed understanding of the relations
between semiotics, things and places.

Posthumanist trends in applied linguistics

One of the problems with any field such as applied linguistics is that the more radical
implications of ideas all too easily get watered down or pulled back towards a
more anthropocentric and normative framework as they are taken up more broadly.
The social and material implications of Vygotskyan ideas (Holborow, 1999), for
example, have been diluted to become little more than a focus on cooperative
learning. Thus a framework that insists on materiality, and which was also highly
influential in the development of more activity-oriented theories of learning, gets
refocused on the relations between people or the quasi-technical ZPD (zone of
proximal development). Just as the more open-ended possibilities of a notion such as
code-switching became individualized through the ortholinguistic pull of traditional
sociolinguistics, and just as the dynamics of its replacement, translanguaging –
which “considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous
language systems as has been traditionally the case, but as one linguistic repertoire”
(García and Li Wei, 2014, p2) – get quickly reduced again to a notion of bilingual
activity (Pennycook, 2016a), so a focus on translanguaging and distributed
cognition (Pontier and Mileidis, 2016, 97) all too quickly becomes a focus on
“bilingualism as a resource” that supports “collaborative work toward various
instructional goals”. Translanguaging is reduced to bilingualism and distributed
cognition is reduced to pair work.
Yet posthumanist lines of thinking have major implications for applied linguistics,
not only as a broad background against which we need to understand language use
in contemporary life – increased flows of people caused by wars, environmental
degradation and the continued impoverishment of the majority world – but also in terms
of how we understand cognition, context and communication. Much of the study of
second-language development has operated with an understanding of language and
mind located firmly in the human head. Sensory (oral or visual) linguistic input comes
 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 131
in, is processed by the cognitive sandwich and dispatched again as action or output.
But once we start to question the version of language that has been constantly proposed
as the thing that separates us from the animals – a rather strange, esoteric, disembodied
version of language that was developed in such a way as to exclude the possibility that
animals might be capable of related practices – we can start to see it as embodied,
embedded, enacted and distributed. We might indeed ask ourselves: what’s it like to be a
language? What’s it like to be acquired (as a second language)?
Once we consider that the only serious way to study language and cognition is
ethnographically (Hutchins, 1995), and once we start to consider the social, spatial and
embodied dimensions of language learning, an understanding of second-language
development as a distributed process starts to open up. Questioning the sensory
deprivation experiment that the making of Man as a rational and literate being has
entailed, we can also open up to the possibility that language learning happens in and
around a much wider set of semiotic assemblages including touch, smell, taste, things
and places. This has implications for how we think about communication more
generally, since what is at stake here is neither mutual understanding nor mutual
misunderstanding but rather a series of adjustments, interpretations, connections,
affiliations and adaptations, or what we might call attunements. Many of the ideas I
have drawn on in this book do not overtly tie themselves to a posthumanist framework,
but the idea of posthumanism has made it possible to pull together a range of inter-
connected ideas under one roof and to explore this emerging landscape that reposi-
tions people, places and objects in a new configuration.
A great deal of recent applied and sociolinguistic research under various labels –
nexus analysis, the new sociolinguistics, linguistic landscapes, ecolinguistics,
sociomaterial and sensory literacies – converges with many of the ideas I have
been expanding on here without subscribing to the posthumanist label. One of the
reasons for using the broad scope of posthumanism is that it allows this discussion
to draw on multiple related areas without being reduced to them: thus we can look
at nexus analysis, sociocultural theory, ecological approaches to language, Actor
Network Theory or distributed cognition without having to commit to one
framework or the other. Between radically isolated versions of cognitive proces-
sing and more distributed versions of language practices, a range of sociocultural
and sociomaterial accounts of language, learning and literacy bridge the isola-
tionist view I have critiqued and the posthumanist vision I have proposed.
Vygotskyan (1978) social theories of the mind, for example, and what has been
termed sociocultural theory, which “assigns concrete communicative activity a
central role in mental development and functioning” (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006, p17),
share a number of affinities with the social and material approaches discussed
here. At the very least, sociocultural theory suggests that cognition does not unfold
according to some internal script but rather develops through social interaction and
material engagement.
The move away from a humanist focus on rational choice, individual liberalism
and languages as entities towards a more distributed understanding of people,
language and thought (registers, repertoires and a broad semiotics) certainly shares
assumptions similar to posthumanist thought. One might argue, for example, that a
132 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
so-called post-Fishmanian (Blommaert, 2013, p621) era of sociolinguistics that
aims to supersede older sociology of language studies is in part a posthumanist
project. The older macro-sociolinguistic orientation to “whole languages and
their distribution and usage within society” (Bell, 2014 p8), with an “emphasis on
rational choice associated with the discourse of individual liberalism” (Williams,
1992, p122), has been challenged by the new “critical-constructivist sociolinguistics”,
where language is understood as a “social practice, with speakers drawing on all kinds
of linguistic resources for their own purposes” (Bell, 2014, p9). From this perspective,
researchers start to approach sociolinguistic questions not from the standpoint of how
individual humans make rational linguistic choices among the language varieties
available to them, but rather from how they engage in a variety of social practices with
linguistic implications, or from how semiotic resources become available in spatial
repertoires (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014a, 2015a).
One domain of work that has always been in the vanguard of a push to understand
language in terms of practices and material relations has been literacy studies.
Combating the cognitivist bias in studies of reading (literacy could be understood in
terms of how written text was processed in the brain), the New Literacy Studies
(Barton, 1998; Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1985) insisted on the importance
of ethnographies of literacy practices, of understanding texts (broadly understood)
and their readers as being in the world, and of literacy practices as social and spatial.
As Gourlay (2015, p485) suggests, however, while understanding literacy as situ-
ated social practice has greatly enhanced the contextual understanding of literacy
practices, it has not yet opened up to a more posthumanist understanding of the
role of “material artefacts of literacy such as paper, pens, keyboards and mobile
devices”. Despite the ethnographic focus, new literacy studies have “fallen
short in providing adequate theoretical purchase in terms of the materiality of
literacy practices, particularly in contemporary digitally mediated communi-
cation” (2015, p498). These new approaches to literacy therefore not only take up
an understanding of literacy as a social practice but also emphasize a broad
semiotics and a materialist approach to text.
A sociomaterial approach to literacy explores the ways in which “literacies are
assembled though public discourses and materialised through everyday, educational
testing and policy practices” (Hamilton, 2015, p7). For Hamilton, texts can be seen
from this perspective as “devices through which realities are framed and shared so
that material effects travel through and with them” (2015, p8). Texts from this point
of view “are not inert beings but have real effects when they are activated through
networks” (2015, p8). Once we start to think in terms of networks of texts, artefacts,
practices and technologies (Gourlay et al., 2013), the distinction between being
online and offline, between real and virtual, between paper text and screen text
become much less important than an understanding of the relations among parts of
what we might call a literacy assemblage. For Mills (2016, p137), drawing on many
ideas similar to those discussed in Chapter 4, it is also important to consider “the
sensoriality of literacy practices”, which might include “the aesthetic enjoyment of a
film, curling up with a book on the sofa, and the entanglement of the body and the
senses in sensory walks with a camera” (p138).
 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 133
For veteran Australian detective-fiction writer Peter Corris, signalling the end of
his 42-volume Cliff Hardy series due to failing eyesight, writing is a physical, spatial
and sensorial activity:

I loved sitting down with a glass of wine beside me, opening up a file and
clattering 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 memory and physically with my hands. To do anything else
wouldn’t feel like writing.
(cited in Turnbull, 2017)

Mills (2016, p123) is nonetheless wary of a posthumanist focus, suggesting that

“if there are no humans there are no textual practices. There is no human learning, no
schools and no discipline of education to research”. Yet this is to misunderstand
posthumanism, since the goal is not to imagine a world without humans, nor to
suggest that language and literacy could exist without humans, but rather to propose
that we need to rebalance the centrality of humans, to bring in, as she does in her
work, the more-than-human world. In making similar proposals for sociomaterial
literacies, Gourlay (2015, p488) is more prepared to embrace a posthumanist per-
spective, suggesting that a posthuman approach to literacy practices enables an
understanding of authorship as “distributed between the human, machine and the
distributed agency of internet-based texts” and allows portable electronic devices to
“be seen as agentive co-workers in the creation of what could be termed a posthuman
assemblage” (p497).
As can be seen from literacy studies, one of the identifiable shifts in current socio-
and applied linguistics is a constant broadening of semiotics. We see a widening of
the scope of linguistic landscape research from the identification of languages on
signs in the public space to an engagement with sound, smell, movement, bodies,
clothes, food, graffiti, buildings and artefacts (Shohamy, 2015). Some of this broader
interest can be linked back to the prescient work of the Scollons and the notion of a
nexus of practice as a “semiotic ecosystem” (Scollon and Scollon, 2004, p89). Nexus
analysis focuses on how people, places, discourses and objects together facilitate
action and social change. A nexus describes a site of repeated engagement – like
practices, these are a result of sedimented action – where discourses in place (dis-
courses within material conditions), physical layout and tools, Goffman’s inter-
action order (the organization of social events) and historical bodies come together.
For Scollon and Scollon (2004, p87), the nexus of practice is where larger forms of
discourse and action intersect: “the historical bodies of the participants, the inter-
action order they establish in that system, and the discourses which circulate through
that moment of human action”.
The Scollons’ point is that at any moment of interaction, when two or more people
engage in some form of discussion, negotiation, transaction and so on, many
different elements come together – the bodies with their predispositions, the social
order that positions them relative to each other, the discourses that they draw on. Hult
(2010, p12) describes nexus analysis as “a holistic methodological approach to
134 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
discourse analysis” that avoids the pitfalls of focusing narrowly on speech acts or
events and instead tries to incorporate as much as possible of the interacting forces
that come to bear on any moment of interaction. To call it a form of discourse
analysis might appear to narrow the scope of what is at stake here, but the point is that
just as linguistic landscape research is opening up to a very wide set of social
semiotics, so discourse is being called on to embrace a very wide set of practices,
artefacts and intersecting trajectories. Nexus analysis questions “the premise that
cultures and languages are best conceived of as bounded and discrete entities”,
shifting the focus away from groups and boundaries and taking “action as the
organizing unit of analysis” (Scollon and Scollon, 2007, p612). Nexus analysis
focuses on “moments of action rather than on abstractable structures such as cultures
and languages” (2007, p620). Such an approach has a number of affinities with the
idea of assemblages that I have been developing in this book (see also Pennycook,
2017; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2017).
To talk of a semiotic ecosystem (Scollon and Scollon, 2004, p89) also brings into
focus a wide array of applied linguistic research that has used ecology as a metaphor.
Steffensen and Fill (2014) identify four different ways in which language has been
understood ecologically: as part of a symbolic ecology (the co-existence of languages
in a particular area); a natural ecology (relations between languages and biological
and ecosystemic surroundings); a sociocultural ecology (language and sociocultural
relations of speakers and communities); and a cognitive ecology (the dynamics
between biological organisms and their environment that enable flexible and adaptive
language and cognition). Pupavac (2012, p220) sees such ecolinguistic approaches
as part of “the growing anti-humanism in global ethics and human rights discourse”.
By adopting a holistic philosophy emphasizing natural and organic relations,
ecolinguistics “questions human uniqueness and its transcendence of nature”
(2012, p208). Pupavac’s concern is particularly with the “pastoral trope of indigenous
communities” that echoes the growth of advocacy for non-political subjects (children,
refugees, animals and the environment) that has emerged as people have become
disillusioned with “the ideal of the common man and the decline of collective political
movements or, even ethnic minority political movements” (2012, p220).
Here we encounter a concern on the one hand with the ways that some language-
ecology frameworks have constructed a romantic ideal of language communities in
need of preservation – while also mapping precarious analogies between languages
and species (May, 2001; Pennycook, 2004b) – and on the other hand a concern with
the politics of posthumanism that may appear to undermine human politics in favour
of a concern for a larger world of objects and non-political subjects. Steffensen and
Fill’s (2014, p21) unified ecolinguistic framework, however, attempts to bring the
different viewpoints together in such a way that ecolinguistics can be understood as
both a human-oriented focus on “the study of the processes and activities through
which human beings : : : exploit their environment in order to create an extended,
sense-saturated ecology that supports their existential trajectories” and a more
ecologically focused “study of the organismic, societal and ecosystemic limits of
such processes and activities : : : for both human and non-human life on all levels”.
And as Bennett (2010a, 2010b) Grosz (2010) and others have argued, there are good
 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 135
reasons to move away from the assumption that adult humans are the principal or
only political subjects. Children, refugees, objects and the environment may also be
political actors, and collective political movements towards the commons can unite
these ideas without returning to pastoral tropes or humanist ideals.
Another concern from an applied linguistic point of view is not only that humans
are being pushed aside in this greater recognition of multiple actants, but also that
language is being marginalized as semiotics comes to include a much wider variety
of forms of meaning-making. Posthumanism does not seek to efface humans but
rather to reorganize the relationships among humans and other animals and objects,
to move towards a new settlement that is less anthropocentric. Another way to think
about the posthumanist project therefore is in terms of provincialization. European
thought, Chakrabarty (2000, p6) argues, is “both indispensable and inadequate in
helping us to think through the various life practices that constitute the political and
the historical in India”. Chakrabarty’s argument is that it is impossible to think of
political modernity – that is, the rule of modern state institutions, bureaucracy and the
capitalist enterprise – without invoking a range of concepts that have their roots in
Western modernity. It is not possible to think of political modernity without invoking
concepts such as citizenship, civil society, human rights, equality before the law,
relations between public and private, the subject, democracy, social justice and so on,
concepts that “found a climactic form in the course of the European Enlightenment
and the nineteenth century” (Chakrabarty, 2000, p4). These were the ideas of
Enlightenment humanism preached by the European colonizer but denied in practice.
So for Chakrabarty, the dilemma is how to acknowledge the debt owed to this
tradition – the critical analytic approach of Marx and the hermeneutic project of
Heidegger, for example – while also provincializing it in relation to Indian history,
institutions and cultures. How to dislodge or decentre European thought in the
world, a provincializing project that does not seek to reject European thought but
rather to find its rightful, provincial place? Following this line of thinking, Motha
(2014, p129) argues for an understanding of “provincialized English” so that
“inherent in the learning of English would be an intense awareness of the effects of
English’s colonial and racial history on current-day language, economic, political
and social practices”. Such a project likewise seeks to acknowledge the role English
has played in the world: its possible indispensability within current conditions of
globalization, but also its inadequacy for communication, difference and equality.
This is to appreciate its usefulness in universalizing, liberating, making certain
things possible but also its insufficiency for global communication, its role in the
perpetuation of inequalities, its destructiveness in relation to other languages and
cultures. English and English teaching cannot be rejected but need be understood in
their specific localities. English needs to be rendered provincial.
Thurlow (2016) takes the provincializing project one step further, arguing that we
need to reconsider the limits of language in critical discourse studies. In his queering
of discourse studies, Thurlow draws on Kohn’s (2013, p39) call to “provincialize
language because we conflate representation with language” – that is to say, we
universalize the human propensity towards representation “by first assuming that all
representation is something human and then by supposing that all representation has
136 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
languagelike properties”. For Kohn, it is important to understand that while sym-
bolic representation may be distinctly human, iconic and indexical representation
may not be so. Thurlow (2016) also takes on Thrift’s (2007) non-representational
theory of “the more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensory nature of social
life” (Thurlow, 2016, p496), as well as ideas of synaesthesia and the importance of
understanding the “critical-cultural significance in the trajectories, and biographies
of objects” (p499). From these insights – which tie closely to the arguments pre-
sented in previous chapters – he argues that the point here is “not to deny language
but to provincialize it: to recognize its limits, to acknowledge its constructedness,
and to open ourselves up to a world of communicating and knowing beyond – or
beside/s – words” (Thurlow, 2016, p503). This, he suggests, will “require a more
committed decentering of language than even multimodal analysts have been able to
manage” (p503).
This is to acknowledge that we need a much broader semiotics than the language-
plus-image or language-plus-gesture work common to multimodal studies. As
I have argued in previous chapters, we need to think instead in terms of entangle-
ments, assemblages and attunements. This book builds on this line of thinking and
seeks to provincialize both language and humanity in a renewed approach to critical
applied linguistics. For some, to ditch language and humanism from a critical
linguistic project might seem retrogressive. As Bucholtz and Hall (2016, p187)
suggest, “just as critical theory’s discursive turn once validated our object of study,
the posthumanist turn may seem to threaten to undermine it”. And yet, as they go on
to suggest, many areas of sociocultural linguistics have already contributed to a
posthumanist understanding of people and things, in a way that “dissolves the
discourse-materiality dichotomy by analyzing semiosis as a process that emerges in
the mutually constitutive actions that take place between human bodies and the other
entities with which they interact” (Bucholtz and Hall, 2016, p187). The aim is not to
get rid of humans and language but to reorganize them, to put them where they
belong, not always at centre stage but in the periphery, as a part of a larger under-
standing of semiotics and politics.

Reclaiming the commons

1 May 2016: I find myself at a rally to protect the fig trees (Ficus macrophylla,
commonly known as the Moreton Bay fig or Australian banyan, a large evergreen
native to the east coast of Australia) that line Anzac Parade in Sydney. They are due to
be cut down to make way for a light-rail line (more public transport, good; cutting
down a long line of ancient trees, bad). There are posters everywhere about trees and
roots and pollution and the air, about respect for trees, about trees doing more for
the social good than the government. But what am I doing here, I ask myself,
on International Labour Day, when we should be marching for workers’ rights, with
a smallish crowd of tree-huggers, as environmentalists have often been so dis-
paragingly labelled in various forums? Well, for one thing, it’s Sunday, so any labour-
oriented marches will be going ahead early next week (though labour day in New
South Wales is on the first Monday in October). I’m not switching to tree-politics
 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 137
instead of people-politics, but what kind of distinction is this anyway? Viewing
materialism only in terms of its human dimensions – assuming materiality refers to the
conditions in which humans live – may be to overlook our broader relations to the
more-than-human world, and “to imagine politics as a realm of human activity alone
may also be a kind of prejudice: a prejudice against a (nonhuman) multitude mis-
recognized as context, constraint, or tool” (Bennett, 2010a, pp107–8).
We are also starting to understand that trees are more complex than we thought; as
Wohlleben (2016) makes clear, trees are interconnected in ways not dissimilar to ant
colonies (which, as suggested in Chapter 5, might be understood as akin to human
brains); trees communicate with each other, help each other out, warn each other of
danger, support members of their own species. And as Kohn (2013) suggests in his
anthropology beyond the human, once we understand the interconnected lives of
people,1 spirits, trees and animals, it is possible to understand how forests think. Still,
if this were only about the trees – magnificent, old trees though they be – this might
be a place where I feel uncomfortable. But this is also about much more. This is a
place of local activism; as the speeches make clear, this is about the city, about
quality of life, about Indigenous Australians (there’s a related issue about a site
where many Aboriginal artefacts have been uncovered), about the importance of
the history witnessed by these trees (the road is so named after the Australia and
New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), who marched along it on their way from
their barracks to the ships in the harbour during the First World War), about cor-
porate greed, about transparency in government, about lack of consultation, about
opposition to the Liberal government in power both at the state and federal levels and
to neoliberal ideologies and practices more generally.
These vast beautiful trees were actors in this world, and this is not just about
trees but about a much wider politics. This was also a week that saw two asylum
seekers (an Iranian man and a Somalian woman) on Nauru – one of Australia’s
disgraceful offshore processing camps for asylum seekers – set themselves alight.
This is not a question of choosing trees over people, nature over humans, greenery
before asylum seekers, figs before workers. All these matter, and it is their inter-
connectedness that is also at stake here. I was at the tree rally because it was local
and the trees were about to be cut down, because I was supporting a significant,
activist, local independent MP,2 because I was concerned about the corporate
dealing and the corrupt local politics that lay behind this. This was about an
attempt to reclaim the commons, to occupy land around the trees to prevent their
destruction, to slow construction of the light rail so that identification of Indi-
genous artefacts could be given more time, to support those trying to make the
local government accountable. It was about the relation between trees, people,
place, politics and history.
While I have argued at various points in this book that it is useful to separate new
and old approaches to materialism, it also vital to find ways in which they can be
combined. One fruitful way of thinking that has been gaining traction is the idea of
the commons. The notion of the commons derives from the idea of common land –
land that could be used by anyone – which was eventually threatened by processes of
enclosure in England in the eighteenth century. Enclosure and the establishment of
138 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
larger farms led to more productive farming practices – indeed, when combined with
new forms of mechanization, an agricultural revolution – and created a landless
working class of former small-scale farmers, who, suffering from a “radical sense
of displacement” Thompson (1963, p239), became labourers in the newly indus-
trializing cities, fuelling the industrial revolution. While 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 formerly been seen as public. The current era is one in
which the enclosure of the commons is conducted through increased privatization
and commodification of public goods determined 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 of resources, 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 public 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 occurred 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 alternatives to
the all embracing neoliberal times we live in. We have to appreciate that neoli-
beralism 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-
tailment of rights and liberties. Neoliberalism also has to be understood as a form 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 enterprise 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 terms other than the maximization of performance, constant production and
neoliberal governmentality. The way forward, Dardot and Laval (2009) suggest, is to
think in terms of the commons, of shared knowledge, mutual help, cooperative work
and common property.
Following a line 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 commodification,
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 platforms of cooperation and collective action,
from solidarity networks to digital commons, 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 encroachment 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 forms 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 form 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 struggle. The commons, or the common, has become the
term 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
struggle would not necessarily want to embrace the ideas laid out here under the
label of posthumanism, I would argue that in a number of ways they dovetail nicely.
When Hardt and Negri (2005, p218) argue that new global protests and struggles are
“a mobilization of the common that takes the form 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, p13). Akin in a number of
ways to the “place-based activism” of Larsen and Johnson (2016, p150), where the
agency of place “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 traditional
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, p145) while making a reclamation of the
commons a common goal.
140 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons

Conclusion: towards a critical applied linguistic commons

The politics that this book moves towards is a renewed focus on a critical applied
linguistic commons. This is not an argument that centres on either humanity as a
shared experience (even if this could ground the moral argument for greater equality
and shared results) or on the rights of animals and objects as equal participants in
society. Rather it is an argument that takes both a modified materialism from pol-
itical economy and a modified new materialism to make the case for a new way of
thinking about our ethical responsibility to each other and the world. This move
towards the commons, to consider the planet as a common whole, is far from a return
to humanism; it embraces the commons itself as a space and a process. If we invoke
the rallying cry that “we’re all in this together” (a phrase so hypocritically invoked
by neoliberal leaders to encourage more sacrifice from those already making them),
this is not a call just to all humans but to a more interrelated sense of the planet,
the earth, the animals, the things. To take a place that is dear to me, the Great Barrier
Reef – a place of astonishing beauty and diversity, now in a dangerously moribund
state – as a site of the commons, we can start to think not just in terms of a World
Heritage site for humans to enjoy, and not just as an important ecological domain for
fish to breed, for coral to spawn, for thousands of creatures to feed and shelter, but also
as a commons, as a place with which we as humans are connected in multiple ways.
From a posthumanist applied linguistic commons point of view, there are several
ways we can start to think about our work. Despite a considerable body of thought
arguing for the inseparability of feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist politics and a
focus on animals and the environment (Adams and Gruen, 2014; Haraway, 2008),
the significance and implications for critical applied linguistics has not received
much attention (Appleby and Pennycook, 2017). A rethinking of the relationship to
all those Others that suffered in the construction of humanity, and a shift in our
thinking about what constitutes the basic unit of reference for humans and our
relationship to other carbon-based and non-carbon-based inhabitants of this planet,
has important implications for any project in critical applied linguistics. For a start,
we can strengthen our resistance to the pull of humanist assumptions, questioning
those forms of pedagogy and research that assume humans at the centre of the world,
that language learning happens only in our heads, that literacy is a matter only of
textual decoding, that agency is something that only humans have and that the world
revolves around the human subject.
One obvious starting point is with various ecolinguistic projects borne out of the
realization that “mainstream linguistics has forgotten, or overlooked, the embedding
of humans in the larger systems that support life” (Stibbe, 2014, p585). From
Steffensen and Fill’s (2014) or Stibbe’s (2014, 2015) ecolinguistic frameworks that
include critical analysis of human exploitation of the environment and studies of
human and non-human social and linguistic ecosystems to Cook’s (2015, p588)
analysis of the “role of language in the conceptualisation of animals”, we can already
see ways in which a posthuman applied linguistic commons can imagine a different
world of humans and non-humans. Sealey and Oakley (2013, p416) suggest that
“as we are pulled toward encoding the behavior of fish, birds, insects, and even
 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 141
plants” the issue may be not so much one of anthropomorphism (assuming human
characteristics in animals) but rather the limits of anthropocentrism (the inability
to think otherwise). It is this capacity to think otherwise, this kind of critical
resistance, that needs to inform any such project.
Tying a posthumanist analysis of space, place, objects and discourse to a politics
of the commons, we can see how work on, for example, the Occupy (Indignados,
etc.) movements can shed new light on a productive way forward for politics and
applied linguistics. Such broad semiotic analyses can help us understand how the
“transformation and appropriation of the space took place through the production of
semiotic and linguistic resources within the occupation” (Martín Rojo, 2016a, p6).
This “occupation of urban space”, she continues, is “an appropriation of a power
locus, the creation of place for transgression that acquires great visibility” (p8). Thus
by bringing different forms of analysis to the ways in which Tahrir Square in Cairo,
for example, was transformed into a counter-space (Aboelezz, 2016), or the ways in
which protest signs in Los Angeles City Hall Park are relocated though different
media (Chun, 2016), we can see how multiple discourses critiquing corruption,
authoritarian rule, capitalism and neoliberalism are given voice in relation to the use
of public space.
Such analyses suggest not so much a rejection of traditional modes of critical
research and practice but a different relationship between text, critique and
practice. The relationship between humans, affect and lively objects is central to
Thurlow’s (2016) post-class critical discourse analysis. We need to understand the
politics of matter, not just of humans. As Bennett (2010a) makes clear, projects
of demystification (the bread and butter of critical discourse analysis) may be
useful up to a point, but by projecting onto politics the centrality of human
agency they obscure the vitality of matter and reduce political agency to human
agency. Thurlow’s (2016, p490) queering of critical discourse analysis “disrupts
and challenges the received ‘here-and-now’ wisdoms of academic theory and
promotes a more self-reflexive, openly subjective role for the scholar” while
remaining “committed to the future and to corporeal realities”. Alongside this
disruption of the academic gaze, Thurlow also advocates “more performativity in
our writing, allowing for alternative ways of knowing, and of showing what we
know” (2016, p491). This is a political project not in the Hegelian-Marxist line of
thinking, where social class and political economy define material realities and the
critical response is one aimed at exposing the obfuscatory work of ideology, but
rather a project of queering discourse studies as part of an alternative politics of
humans and the world using new ways of writing to engage with the material,
corporeal and affective world.
A posthumanist politics can help us see both the values and limitations of various
critical projects that rely on more traditional approaches to critical discourse analysis
or political economy. Holborow’s (2015, p1) critical examination of the language of
neoliberalism – “Mission has replaced policy, entrepreneurial has become the most
prized social trait, valued customers are what we are and competitive and market
efficient what we could be” – gives us a useful handle on the effects of such discourse
on daily practice. And yet, as she warns, if we draw too close a tie between languages
142 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
and neoliberal forms of exploitation by looking, for example, at the global spread
of English in terms of “linguistic capital accumulation” and “linguistic capital dis-
possession” (Phillipson, 2009, p133), we end up unhelpfully materializing language,
and suggesting that language can be the vehicle of a mode of production (Holborow,
2012, p27). A similar point can be made about the idea of commodification of
languages – where the idea of language as a commodity or resource is critiqued as a
product of late capitalism (Duchêne and Heller, 2012; Park and Wee, 2012) – in terms
of the ways in which such approaches materialize language (McGill, 2013; Block,
2014). Older forms of materialism based around analyses of political economy may
constrain our understanding of language in unhelpful ways.
Looking through the lens of the commons allows us to address modes of dis-
possession of common goods – from land to water, from education to healthcare –
brought about by the ever more rapacious processes of neoliberal-driven capital.
In relation to language, however, the focus needs to be not so much on languages as
entities that are enclosed, or on people who are dispossessed of their languages while
others accumulate them, but rather on more grounded analyses of local language
practices and assemblages, of the ways in which people, politics, place, economics,
policy and things come together (Pennycook, 2016c, 2017). Seeking redress fur-
thermore can no longer be by recourse to the failing structures of the twentieth-
century state – rights or democracy (most democracies currently offer no real
alternative while at the same time encouraging the rise of new forms of populist
nationalism) – nor through a belief that we can step outside or overturn the tide of
neoliberalism (the utopian dream of revolution or the escapist dream of avoidance).
Block (2014) rightly critiques many socio- and applied linguists for making
transformative recognition (cf. Sayer, 2005, p68) of inequality their main goal –
“problematizing and undermining group differentiations, such as gay vs. straight,
male vs. female, black vs. white, and so on” – when we would be better aiming at
transformative redistribution – “the arrival of socialism, as a deep restructuring of
the political economy of a nation-state”. Yet such goals remain utopian, dependent
on old modes of political structure and action and reliant on a constricted under-
standing of materialism.
The challenge from the perspective of the commons is to focus on “spatio-
temporal and ethical formations that are concerned with ways of living together that
resist the privatisation and individualisation of life” (Dawney, et al., 2016, pp12–13).
The question is how to resist the new forms of enclosure (privatization, incarcera-
tion, commodification) demanded by capital through a new focus on the commons,
as space, community and possibility. Moving beyond the rally, union or ballot box,
new modes of resistance have focused on more anarchist traditions of social-media-
connected occupation. In her analysis of linguistic practices and the contestation of
urban space during the occupation of Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Martín Rojo (2016b,
p49) shows how “the condition of production and circulation of linguistic practices
contribute to the ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ or urban space, by
which protestors replace the traditional organisation and uses of space with their
own beliefs, rituals, and communicative practices”. Such analyses that tie together
“wholesale disenchantment with and rejection of representational politics” and the
 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons 143
emergence of “physical multimodal communication” to facilitate “direct particip-
atory democracy” (Steinberg, 2016, p152) make it possible to see how new modes of
interaction, communication and politics operate in relation to space, and how a more
dispersed sense of language can help connect a politics of the commons with a
posthumanist applied linguistics.
If we take Indigenous knowledge seriously, we would also need to start to
understand our relation to the world around us differently, to see that the divisions
between humans and non-humans could be rethought, that the knowledge that
Indigenous people have about the world around us could usefully inform our ways
of knowing (Tidemann et al., 2010; Kohn, 2013): “To take Indigenous ontologies
seriously means allowing geographic thought to be affected by them” (Larsen
and Johnson, 2016, p149). Discussing the need to understand the “climate-as-
commons”, Todd points out that it might be as useful to consider not only current
ideas such as gaia philosophy – that “bastard child of climate sciences and ancient
paganism” (Stengers, 2015, p134), the idea that living organisms will affect the
nature of their environment to render it more suitable for their continued existence,
and that the earth might shrug off its human occupants in order to guarantee its
survival – but also the Inuit notion of Sila that is “bound with life, with climate, with
knowing, and with the very existence of being(s)” (Todd, 2016, p5). There are many
Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing that can inform our understandings of
the commons, of language, of politics and of our ethical responsibility to the planet
(Martin and Mirraboopa, 2003).
This rediscovery of the commons, of the need for collective action, concern about
the environment, reorientation to the more-than-human world – all this has been a
concern, a knowledge, of Indigenous people around the world for a long time. The
West with its talk of the Anthropocene is rediscovering Indigenous knowledges and,
as has also long been part of that history, claiming them for itself. An interest in
posthumanism is, in another way, an interest in prehumanism, in thinking before the
great rise of Western thought and destruction, in turning to alternative ways of
thinking about the world and our relationship to it. Just as Canagarajah (2007b)
suggests that we should return to precolonial as much as postcolonial times to
understand that translingual practices have long been the norm, so this engagement
with posthumanism is also about understanding other ways of thinking and being.
The challenge for a critical applied linguistics commons is to find ways to promote
a better understanding of the place of humans in the more-than-human world,
including an ecological approach to language that seeks to redress the ways humans
are embedded within larger systems that support life; a queering of discourse studies
that questions both the focus of analysis and the mode of writing in order to
engage differently with the material, corporeal and affective world; a more serious
engagement with the world of things so that studies of social semiotics can start to
account for dynamic assemblages of linguistic and non-linguistic resources; and an
understanding of entangled pedagogies that resist the separation of mind and body,
human and animal, reason and affect (Appleby and Pennycook, 2017).
The question of what it means to be human (defined always in relation to those
deemed non-human) needs to be taken as seriously as questions of gender, class and
144 A posthumanist applied linguistic commons
race (the two questions are deeply related). Questioning assumptions of human
exceptionalism suggests, in line with other erosions of the borders between humans
and non-humans, that language will need to be seen as involving a far broader set of
semiotic resources, sites and interactions than is posited by a humanist vision of
language. In order to align itself with current changes to the planet, humanity, theory
and politics, a useful way forward takes seriously posthumanist thinking
that eschews the line of thinking that has for so long separated the human and non-
human. A critical posthumanist applied linguistics seeks to unravel the ways in
which language has been bound up with human exceptionalism and to open up
alternative ways of understanding language in relation to people, place, power and
possibility.

Notes
1 Kohn’s (2013) project, however, is not to generalize to all forests but rather to understand
the relations between the forest and the Avila Runa of Amazonian Ecuador.
2 The NSW state government had recently changed local electoral laws to give business
owners two votes instead of one in an effort to unseat her; it later backfired – she was
re-elected with an increased majority.
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Index

actants 10, 12–13, 31, 43–4, 54, 119, 121, Arrernte 86

129, 135 assemblages: 13, 32–3, 38, 129, 136, 143;
Actor Network Theory (ANT) 9, 12, 26, 43, multisensory 69–70, 136; semiotic 43, 54,
119, 131 63–4, 68, 131; vibrant 46, 52–5
Adams, D 78 atheism see religion
Adnyamathanha 79 attunement 91, 106–7, 131, 136 see also
Agamben, G 79 alignment and assemblages
agency: distributed 18, 33, 43–4, 65, 133;
and feminism 31; human 5, 9, 11, 13, 22, Backus, A 48
45, 141; of objects 12, 14; of place 106, Bailey, B 92, 105, 107
139; political 9, 130 Balcombe, J 75, 79
Alim, S ix, 67 Barad, K 6, 15, 17, 31–3, 38, 56, 94, 102,
alignment 91, 100, 103, 105–6 see also 110, 118, 122
attunement and assemblages barnacles 72
‘alternative facts’ 108 Barrett, M 22, 59
Angelou, M 35 Barton, D 132
Angermuller, J 10, 33 behaviourism 8, 45
animals: apes 77, 79, 82, 84–5, 87, 91, 115; Bennett, J 9, 11, 15, 31, 33, 37, 43–4,
bats 71, 79, 100, 126–7; behaviour 26, 74, 53, 54, 102, 109, 119, 125, 127, 134,
76–7, 82, 86; bestiality 77; cats 11, 13, 77, 137, 141
112–17; chimpanzees 84–6, 91, 114; Berger, P 19
cuttlefish 75; dogs 11, 56–7, 71, 74–9, Bergson, H 27
84–6, 114; dolphins 16, 75, 78–9, 88, 91; Berlin, I 20
earthworms 73, 127; elephants 77, 78–9; Bernstein, B 47
orcas 72–3, 77, 79; pets 4, 11, 77, 84; Berson, J 4–5, 70, 139
sharks 11, 71, 72, 75; turtles 79; whales Bhaskar, R 110, 117
72–3, 77, 83; wolves 75–6, 78, 85 bilingualism 47, 130
animal rights 10–11, 73–4 bionic ears 12 see also cochlear implants
Anthropocene 3, 5–6, 108, 128, 143 see also biopolitics 79
Indigenous knowledge birds: 71, 73, 77–9; birdsong 79, 88; parrots
anthropocentrism 2–3, 10–11, 57, 76, 79, 80, 16, 78
88, 101, 115, 117, 127, 130, 135 see also Blackledge, A ix, 52
post-anthropocentrism Block, D ix, 11, 34, 36, 109, 117, 124, 142
anthropomorphism 76, 141 Blommaert, J ix, 48, 93, 132
ants 78 bodies: 4–5, 12, 16, 31–2, 46, 54, 57–9, 67,
Appadurai, A 13, 54, 119 69, 93, 106, 115, 136; embodied practice
applied linguistics 7–11, 13, 15, 18, 103 11, 52; enhancements 12, 38, 68;
Arabic 50 modifications 12; tattoos 64 see also
Aristotle 16, 58, 75, 81, 92 Cartesianism
164 Index
Bogost, I 2, 13–14, 58, 110, 112, 121, 123,
126–7, 129
boundaries: between people and things 6, 69,
128; internal and external 38, 43, 57; and
breakdowns viii, 12
Bourke, J 5, 23–4, 29, 59, 67
Braidotti, R 2–3, 11, 17, 26, 30, 33, 37–8, 73
Branson, J and Miller D 68–9
Bryant, L 118–19, 126
Bucholtz, M and Hall K 11, 14, 32, 67, 70,
115, 136
Butler, J 31–2, 102, 139
Busch, B ix, 36
Butterworth, G 83–4
Canagarajah, S ix, 51, 94, 105–6, 143
capitalism: 30, 119, 128, 138, 141–2;
anti- 140; neohumanist 35–6
carbon–silicon divide 37
Cartesian: subject 59; rationalism 81–2;
view 52, 80
cephalopods 75
Chakrabarty, D 3, 135
Chalmers, D 43, 46, 51
Chinese: Cantonese 50, 63; Mandarin 50
Chinese Room 44, 53, 78, 94
Chomsky, N 7, 58, 80–2, 88
Chun, C 141
cities: 4, 71, 138–1; and smells 59–63
see also precariat
Clark, A 9, 43, 45–6, 51
Classen, C 57, 59–64, 66, 71
climate change: 3–5, 8, 11, 26, 109, 128–9;
sceptics 9, 108–9 see also Anthropocene
cochlear implants 63, 67–8
cognition: cognitive ethnography 45;
cognitive sandwich 52–3, 67, 82, 131;
embodied 75; extended and distributed
6, 8–9, 15, 43–6, 51–2, 56–7, 78, 85,
88, 130; in the wild 45 see also agency
Commons: 135, 138–9; as climate viii, 139,
143; linguistic 130, 140–5; reclaiming
the, 136
communication: intercultural 17, 100;
nonverbal 42, 53, 64, 67, 81–2, 87, 93;
non-human 12, 16, 74, 81, 83, 85, 115
see also miscommunication, misunder-
standing, telementation
communicative: competence 55; events 64;
systems 16, 83, 88; repertoire 48, 104
constructivism: radical 32; and realism 17,
122; social 118
Cook, G 12
correlationism 118
Covington, S 72–3
Cowley, S ix, 51–2, 54
critical discourse studies 69, 104, 136, 141;
queering 105–6, 135, 141, 143
critical realism 110, 118; posthumanist 17,
119, 121, 125
critical resistance 102, 125, 141
Critique of Pure Reason see Kant, I
crows 77, 79
cuttlefish 75
cyborgs 12, 14, 37–8; mobile 45
Cyborg Manifesto 12 see also transhumanism
Daiber, H 21
Dardot, P and Laval, C 138–9
Darwin, C 10, 22–3, 26, 72–3, 82, 87, 126;
and Syms Covington 7
Dawkins, R 23, 81; extended phenotypes 26;
humanism 73; religion 25
De Waal, F 74
deafness: 16, 68, 71, 73, 105; Deaf com-
munity 63, 67–8; Deaf Gain 68; sign
languages 16, 25, 67–8, 71, 105 see also
cochlear implants and bionic ears
decolonial option 102, 104
Deleuze, G 9; and Guattari, F 53–4, 55 n
Derrida, J 10, 33, 34, 36, 74, 127
Descartes, R 57–8, 80–1, 102, 112 see also
Cartesianism
discursive: regimes 32; turn 109, 112, 136
diving 11, 40–2, 46, 74, 77, 79
dogs 11, 25, 56–7, 71, 76–9, 84–7, 91, 114
see also wolves
Donald, M 81–2
Douzinas, C 5, 29–30, 33
Dovchin, S x, 48
ecological linguistics 9, 134, 140
Elder-Vass, D 123
Enfield, N 43
English: language 30–1, 39 n., 44, 48–50,
90–1, 94, 104, 142; provincialized 135
English language teaching (ELT) 7
Enlightenment 20, 22, 27, 29–30, 33, 58, 87,
114, 135 see also humanism
embodiment: 45, 47, 104, 106, 115; relations
56; disembodied language 131
enclosure of the commons 138–9, 142
entanglements 14, 33, 75, 85–6, 125–6, 132
environment: 1, 3, 41, 45, 69, 90, 94, 105–6,
128–9, 134, 139–40, 143; degradation of
3, 5, 128, 130 see also climate change
 Index 165
ethics: towards the other 101–2; situated Harvey, D 21, 138
27, 30 Haslanger, S 110, 118–19, 123, 125
ethnicity 24, 63 Hassan, I 33
Evans, N and Levinson, S 83, 88, 107 Haualand, H 68
Evans, V 16, 74, 83 Hayles, K 5, 32, 45
evolution 26, 59, 78, 81–2, 85, 87–8, Hegel, G W F 9, 31, 36, 141
extended mind 45–6 Heidegger, M 101, 135
extended phenotype 26 see also Dawkins, R Henshaw, V 59–60, 65, 69–70
Holborow, M 130, 141–2
‘fake news’ 108 Howes, D and Classen, C 60–1, 63–4, 66, 71
Fenwick, T 54 Hoy, D 102, 119, 125
Ferrando, F 5–6, 14, 38, 53 Hult, F 133
fish 41, 61–6, 69, 140; overfishing 7, 74 human: enhancement 5, 12, 37–8;
freedom: of the individual 7, 21, 29–30, 35; transhuman enhancement 37, 63, 68
free markets 21 see also non-human
Finnegan, R 8, 53, 58, 71, 80, 87–8, 103 human rights 4–5, 15, 27–31, 39 n., 129,
fixity and fluidity 54 134–5; Amnesty International 27–8 see
Foucault, M 10, 20, 22, 33–4, 36, 69, 102, also animal rights and language rights
108, 122, 129, 139 Humanism: defined 20–1, 25; subject 9, 11,
Frankopan, P 3, 24 16, 21–3, 35, 74
French (language) 95–9; Petit Paris 49, 95 Hume, D 58, 111, 112, 125 n.
Freud, S 10, 22, 33–4, 37, 87 Hutchins, E 2, 9, 40, 42–6, 51, 54, 78, 131
Fromkin, V and Rodman, R 81–2 Hymes, D 64
Fuller, S ix, 5, 12, 20, 26, 33, 37, 126
Iedema, R 40
Gadigal people viii immanence 17, 26–7
García, O and Li Wei ix, 130 Indigenous Australians 28, 89 n., 139
Gee, J 45, 105–6, 116 Indigenous knowledge viii, 143, 89 n.
gender: 3, 5, 12, 16, 23, 32, 38 n., 60, 63, 76, individualism: freedom of the individual 7,
93, 123; as construction 117–18 21, 29–30, 35; humanistic 21; trajectories
geosemiotics 8 47; radical 22, 30, 127
Giglioli, P 47 instrumentation 5, 139
Glissant, E 140 intercultural communication 17, 100
Godfrey-Smith, P 75, 82, 127 integrational linguistics 51–2, 88, 116
Gluck, M 64 see also radical indeterminacy and
Gourlay, L 48–9, 132–3 segregational view
Gratton, P 110, 119 Internet of Things 4
Grayling, A 19, 21, 23, 25–6, 112 interpellation 9, 33, 46, 50, 66, 70, 121
Great Barrier Reef (Australia) 11, 41 see also intersubjective conformity 93, 103–4, 106
diving
Grosz, E 31, 119, 134 Japanese (language) 95–100
Gumperz, J 47 Jaworski, A ix, 65
Johnston, B 25
Habermas, J 104 Johnston, T 67
Hacking, I 30, 110, 112, 117
Hamilton, M 132 Kallen J 65
Haraway, D 12, 37, 74, 140 Kant, I ix, 58, 112, 118, 127
Hardin, G 138 Kearney, R 102
Hardt, M and Negri, A 25, 27, 34, 139 Kell, C 9
Harman, G 118–19 Kipling, R 75
Harris, R 51–2, 80, 88, 92, 94–5, 105–6, 110, Kirkpatrick, A ix, 94–5
112–14, 116 kitchen 49–50; tables 120 see also spatial
Harris, S 23 repertoire
166 Index
Klein, N 128 Mirandola, P 21
knowledge: and the senses 58, 71, 127 Mitchell, W 37, 45
see also Indigenous knowledge miscommunication 91, 95, 99
Kohn, E 85–6, 135–7, 143, 144 n. mobile devices and phones 15, 49, 132
Korean Gangnam style 149 mobility 4, 48, 64, 69, 99
Kramsch, C ix, 37, 66, 70 Mongolian 48–9
Krashen, S 53 Morell, V 73–4, 78
Kubota, R ix, 11, 34, 36 Moskowitz, G 7
Kuhn, G 139 Motha, S 135
Kumaravadivelu, B 104 Mufwene, S 124
Kurzweil, R 37 Murphey, T 7, 14
multilingualism 34, 36, 71 see also
language: between humans and animals ix, bilingualism and translanguaging
12, 38, 83–4, 116, 144; commodification multimodality 66, 71, 104
35, 142; education 6–7, 17, 93, 104 mutual misunderstanding 16, 90–5, 107, 131
language rights 15, 30–1, 123
Lantolf, J and Thorne, S 9, 131 Nagel, Thomas 79, 126–7 see also bats
Lather, P 32 nature 3, 20–1, 114–15; nature-human
Latour, Bruno, ix, 3, 9, 43, 48, 108–10, 112, divide 6 see also entanglements
118, 122, 124 see also Actor Network navigation 45, 71; underwater 40–2, 46
Theory (ANT) Nayar, P 17, 38, 69, 128
Lenneberg, E 82 neoliberalism 3, 11, 36, 142; as govern-
Levinas, E 101–2 mentality 138–9
Lin, A ix, 103–4 nexus analysis 8–9, 17, 131, 133–4; nexus of
linguistic: ecology 134; landscapes 64–5, 70, practice 133
133–4; system 52, 93, 103, 113, 123; turn 32 Nietzsche, F 25, 34, 37
literacy 70–1, 109, 132–3, 140 nonverbal communication 53, 64, 67, 81–2,
Locke, J 58, 92–3 87, 93; gestures 40, 48, 52–3, 67–9,
Low, K 59–60 80–1, 136
Luke, A 109, 121–2, 124 Norton, B ix, 33, 35

McDonald, R 73 objects 4–5, 9–10, 12, 32, 44, 57–8, 65, 104,
McGill, D 143 117; flattened hierarchy 12, 119;
MacIntyre, A 22, 29–30 object-oriented ontology 14, 118–19
McNamara, T 11, 36, 39 n. Occupy movements 141
Marx, K 9, 22, 31, 33–4, 36, 135 online (vs. offline) 48–9, 132
marginalization 13 Orman, J 116
markets (food) 50, 62 Otsuji, E x; and Pennycook, A 47, 49–50, 54,
Margoliash, D 88 64, 70, 91, 94, 107 n., 132, 134
Martín Rojo, L 141–2
materialism: material anchors 42–3, 46; Pable, A 17, 113, 115–16
material artefacts 50, 71, 103, 132; Patris Pizza 49
material schematism 53; materiality peace linguistics 7, 18 n.
32–3, 54, 110, 119, 127, 137; new Peck, A and Stroud, C 46
materialism 15, 17, 20, 31, 33, 43, 109, Pepperell, R 53–4, 94
122, 124, 140 pets 4, 11, 77
May, S ix performativity 15, 103, 141; posthumanist
mediants 13, 19 31–2; see also Barad
Meillassoux, Q 58, 110, 118–19 Petit Paris 49
Merleau-Ponty, M 56, 65 phenotypes 26
metrolingualism x, 91, 95, 99 Philippines: 4; human rights 27; Duterte, R
Mignolo, W 24, 101–2, 106 27; reefs 11, 74
Mills, K 70, 132–3 Phillips, A 23, 36, 55 n.
 Index 167
Phillipson, R 123, 142 resistance: critical 102, 119, 125, 141;
Piketty, T 138 material 121
Pink, S 66 Richards, I 80
Pinker, S 38 n. rocks 20, 46, 110–11 see also plants and
Platt J and Platt H 47 animals
plants 6, 20, 76; domestication of 79 Rodaway, J 65
polylanguaging 116 Rymes, B 48
pointing 16, 83–7
pointer, 2, 83 Safina, C 74, 76, 79, 85, 91
pointer dogs, 84–5, 114 Sandakan (Malaysia) 61–4
Porteous, J 56, 65 Saussure, F de 36, 58, 92–3, 103
post-anthropocentrism 38 scapes: linguistic landscapes 64, 131;
posthumanism: anti-humanism 3, 10, 27, 38, skinscapes 64; smellscapes 56, 60, 65–6,
134; critical posthumanism 38, 144; 69–70
critical posthumanist realism 17, 125; Schatzki, T 13, 22, 43–4
defined 2, 6, 30, 33, 128 see also Scollon, R and Scollon, S W 8–9, 70,
humanism 133–4
postmodernism 11, 31, 34–5, 110, 124 Sealey, A ix, 17, 76, 77, 90, 103, 113,
post-secularism 25–6 115–17, 123, 140
poststructuralism 20, 118; and Searle, J 44, 53, 94
posthumanism 33–7 secular humanism 25
Power, D 68 second language acquisition 36
practices: of engagement 122, 133; of Segerdahl, P 85, 115
language 10, 47, 50, 70, 124, 130–4, 142; segregational view 51, 54, 87–8, 116
social 47, 49, 53, 121, 132; translingual Seidlhofer, B 90
51, 143 semiotic: assemblages 48, 54, 64, 91, 106,
Pratt, M L 103 131; ecosystem 9, 46, 133–4;
precariat 4 landscapes 65–6, 71; resources 48–9, 51,
Pupavac, V 15, 30, 134 64–5, 107
Serres, M 65–6, 121
race: 5, 13, 22, 24, 32, 37 n., 60, 63, 93, 118, sharks 11, 71–2, 74–5
123, 144; racial discrimination 11; Racial Shipman, P 12, 56, 73, 75, 78
Discrimination Act (Australia) 28 see also Shohamy, E ix, 64, 133
gender and class sign languages 16, 25, 67–8, 71, 83
racism 3, 24, 59, 119 Silverstein, M 64
radical discontinuity 81–2 Singapore 60–3
radical indeterminacy 116 Singer, P 37
Rampton, B ix Skinner, B 7
rationalism 8, 26, 81; rationality 58, 69, 104 Sloterdijk, P 6
realism: critical posthumanist 17, 121, 125; smell: scapes 56, 60, 65–6, 69–70;
critical social 17, 110, 118, 123; linguistic walking 70
116, 123; speculative 117, 119, 124 sociolinguistics 11, 32, 47, 67, 69–70, 82,
reality: enhanced 12; resisting 118; as social 103, 117, 131–2
construction 9, 108–13, 117 somatic niche 4
Reddy, M 93 spatial repertoires see repertoires
Ree, J 57–8 Spracherleben 36
religion: atheism 23, 26; Christianity 20, speech community 47, 49, 51, 92–3, 103
24–5; immanence 17, 26–7 see also Spinoza, B 9, 27
post-secular and secular humanism Steffensen, S 26, 46, 52, 59, 105, 123,
relocalization 40 134, 140
repertoires: communicative 48, 104; vs. Steinberg, R 143
reservoir 47; spatial 47, 50–2, 64, 66, 97, Stengers, I 143
99, 132; verbal 47; virtual 49 Stephen, L 23
168 Index
Stibbe, A 140 Turing, A 44
Street, B 132 Twofold Bay 72–3, 77, 79
Sultana, S x, 48–9
Sundberg, J 11 universalism 35–6, 76, 83, 86, 88
Süskind, P 59 Urry, J 6, 60
Swain, M 53 USA 17, 108
SWEEME (straight, white, educated
European male elites) 15, 23 Van Leeuwen, T ix, 64
Sydney 49–50, 66, 72, 75, 136 Van Lier, L 9
Vitruvian man 37 see also cyborgs
tables 14, 111–12, 117, 120–5 Vygotsky, L 130–1
Tallis, R 83–4
Taylor, C 19 Wade, N 71
Taylor, T 91–3, 100, 103 Wardaugh, R 47
technology: converging 38; intelligent Waters, D 26, 52, 82
machines 5, 44 Weedon, C 35–6
telementation 92–4, 100 WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Teubert, W 17, 113–17 Rich, and Democratic) 3, 23, 59 see also
Thorne, S ix, 9, 49, 131 SWEEME
Thrift, N 12, 32, 53, 94, 136 whales 72–3, 77, 83; whaling 10, 72, 79
Thurlow, C ix, 65, 104, 106, 135–6, 141 Whitehead, H 77
Todd, Z viii, 143 Wilkins, D 86
Tokyo 49–50, 95 Williams, C 34
Tomasello, M 16, 75, 82, 84–7 Williams, G 132
Toolan, M 93 Wohlleben, P 137
transhumanism 10 wolves 75–6, 78, 85
translanguaging 34, 68, 130;
translingual negotiation 94; translingual xenophobia 1, 129 see also Trump, D
practices 51
trees 136–7 see also Kohn, E Zheng He 128
Trump, D 3, 17, 108  zek, S 36, 128
Zi