Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

Alastair Pennycook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315457550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistique

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 linguistics 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.

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 extravagances 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, homophobia 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?

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 anthropocentrism 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 illustration 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 anthropocentrism 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 anthropocentrism, but humanism has also been consistently blind to human difference. Despite its claims to describe a common human condition, humanism has long been 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, 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 monitoring 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, entertainment systems, fridges and so forth). These things are increasingly connected to 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 reconciliation 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).

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 animals 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 incorporating 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-technological 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 political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, questioning forms of authority and arguing for a strongly individualistic and student-centr...