Applied Linguistics Advance Access published June 20, 2016

Applied Linguistics 2016: 1–18 ß Oxford University Press 2016

doi:10.1093/applin/amw016

Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
E-mail: Alastair.pennycook@uts.edu.au

Posthumanism urges us to reconsider what it means to be human. From proc-

lamations about the death of ‘Man’ to investigations into enhanced forms of

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being, from the advent of the Anthropocene (human-induced planetary change)
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. After reviewing the broad field of post-
humanist thought, this paper investigates—through an overview of a series of
recent research projects—the notion of repertoire, to show how this can be
better understood by stepping out of the humanist constructs of the individual
and the community and looking instead at the notion of distributed language
and spatial repertoires. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of
posthumanism for applied linguistics, in particular the ways we understand lan-
guage in relation to people, objects, and place.

INTRODUCTION: THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION

Posthumanist thought is a fairly broad and, at times, chaotic field. At its heart is
the question of what it means to be human: How did humans come to be
human? What do such definitions exclude? How may the notion of the human
be changing? The posthuman condition, suggests Braidotti (2013: 1–2), ‘intro-
duces 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’. Posthumanism may refer to a range of concerns,
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 reevalua-
tion 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.
The question posthumanism presents us with is how and why we have come
to think about humans in particular ways, with particular boundaries between
humans and other animals, humans and artefacts, humans and nature.
Posthumanism, according to Barad (2007: 136), ‘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 be-
tween interiority and exteriority’. Posthumanist thought thus questions the
boundaries between what is seen as inside and outside, asking where thinking
occurs, and what role a supposedly exterior world may play in cognition and
2 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

language. Posthumanism ‘doesn’t presume the separateness of any-‘‘thing,’’

let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that
sets humans apart’ (Barad 2007: 136). This brings under scrutiny what Latour
(2004b) describes as the Great Divides between nature and society, human and
non-human.
Such thinking suggests important concerns for language, cognition, and the
human subject, issues central to applied linguistics. On one level this extends
recent applied linguistic considerations of the role of practice (in Bourdieu’s
sense as a theory of the practice of language study) (Kramsch 2015: 455) and
the need ‘to fully appreciate the challenge represented by poststructuralism’

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(McNamara 2015: 475). Adding to Busch’s (2012, 2015) poststructuralist ac-
count of temporary and dispersed subjects forged through discursive, bodily,
and affective interaction, the posthumanist subject, as understood by Braidotti
(2013: 188), is ‘materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded’.
Posthumanist materialism follows a line of thought running from Spinoza to
Deleuze rather than Hegel to Marx, suggesting an alternative politics centred
less on material infrastructure, political economy, and the demystification pro-
jects of ideology critique (which reduce political agency to human agency) and
instead on a politics that reorients humans towards their ethical interdepend-
ence with the material world (Bennett 2010).
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 post-
humanist applied linguistics does not assume rational human subjects engaged
in mutually comprehensible dialogue; the multimodal and multisensory semi-
otic 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 personal, of languages as entities we acquire, or of intercultural communi-
cation as uniquely human. Posthumanist thought urges us not just to broaden
an understanding of communication but to relocate where social semiotics
occurs.
Posthumanist thought also brings a different set of ethical and political con-
cerns to the applied linguistic table, issues to do with human relations to the
planet and its other inhabitants. As Chakrabarty (2009: 209) has remarked,
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 rela-
tions between humans and history and humans and nature change consider-
ably (Chakrabarty 2015). The challenges posed by human destructiveness,
environmental degradation, diminishing resources, and our treatment of ani-
mals (Cook 2015) 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 inequal-
ity (perpetrated, let us not forget, by humans).
 A. PENNYCOOK 3

The case I make in this paper is neither that all this is new (discussions of
ecology, nexus analysis, the poststructuralist subject, and language as a local
practice have raised related questions) nor that posthumanist thought offers
necessarily the only way forward from the stasis that seems to have befallen
applied linguistics over the past decade. Rather, a host of recent developments
across applied linguistics and the social sciences can be better understood by
looking through a posthumanist lens. Key aspects of this thinking will be re-
viewed in the next section, through a focus particularly on converging tech-
nologies, animal–human relations, the Anthropocene (the geological period
where humans have had a major impact on the earth’s ecosystems), and the

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new materialism. This will be followed by a discussion—through an overview
of a series of recent research projects—of the notion of repertoire, suggesting
that it can be better understood by stepping out of the humanist ideas of in-
dividual and community and looking instead at the notion of distributed lan-
guage and spatial repertoires. This will be followed by a further discussion of
the implications for applied linguistics.

POSTHUMANISM: FROM THE DEATH OF MAN TO

ENHANCED HUMANS
In the same way that different approaches to postmodernism may be categor-
ized as either postmodernity (the real effects of changed lives in late modern-
ity) or postmodernism (the epistemological challenges to modernist thought)
(Pennycook 2006), so posthumanism might be considered either in terms of
changes to the human condition brought about by environmental and techno-
logical change or as challenges to the notion of humanity as a modernist ideal.
Posthumanism is an umbrella term responding to the need to rethink what it
means to be human in light of both ‘onto-epistemological as well as scientific
and bio-technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries’ (Ferrando 2013: 26). Hard at times to separate, both perspectives suggest
the importance of engaging with ‘human’s ontological precariousness’ (Fuller
2011: 72).
The ontological question has its locus classicus in Foucault’s (1966: 398; my
translation) proclamation at the end of Les Mots et les Choses1 that Man is a
recent invention and perhaps one nearing its end. Foucault’s point was that
the development of the human or social sciences from the 18th to the 20th
centuries rendered humans a collective worthy of scientific study. It was the
idealist and positivist programmes of the Enlightenment that produced ‘uni-
versal humanity’ as both a scientific object and a political project (Fuller 2011:
70). The human era only evolved during the period of Western modernity and
was neither presaged nor followed by periods where the human necessarily
had such obsessive salience (Wolfe 2009). Humanity, Douzinas (2007: 51)
suggests, ‘is an invention of modernity’. Along with the emergence of this
notion of the human came what Latour (1993) terms the ‘modernist
4 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

settlement’—those broadly agreed divisions between humans and animals,

humans and objects, an interior (the mind) and an exterior (society, the
environment).
Another significant part of the posthumanist argument focuses on the ways
that ‘humans are improving their capacity to manipulate and transform the
material character of their being’ (Fuller 2011: 109). Here we enter the domain
of ‘converging technologies’ that transcend, enhance and prolong life through
a range of enhancements to mind and body. While some aspects of this post-
humanist (or transhumanist) thought tend towards futuristic cyborg fantasies
of integrated humans and machines, this also needs to be understood in terms

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of more profound social and political changes, nowhere more so than in
Haraway’s (1991) Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway’s focus was on a new politics
‘faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism’ (1991: 149) that challenged
‘the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the
tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the production of cul-
ture’ (150). This could be made possible by three boundary breakdowns: be-
tween human and animal, animal–human and machine, and physical and
non-physical. The cyborg metaphor suggests the possibility of transcending
traditional lines of gender, feminism, politics, and identity. ‘The cyborg is a
creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal
symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness. . .’
(1991: 150).
Alongside the possibility of enhanced humanity, the posthuman condition
also suggests a need to rethink the relation between human and non-human
animals. 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 connec-
tion with animals’ going back over millions of years (Shipman 2011: 13),
human exceptionalism (emphasizing a distinction between humans and ani-
mals) has been the ‘the default view’ (Cook 2015: 591). For Haraway (2008:
4), by contrast, ‘species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a sub-
ject- and object-shaping dance of encounters’.
A related set of concerns emerge with the recognition that humans now
play a major role in the evolution of the planet: We have, in other words,
entered the era of the Anthropocene, when climate and other environmental
changes are clearly no longer just ‘natural’. Latour (2015: 146) notes that 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 Anthropocene potentially marks the end of the nature/culture divide
that has been a central part of the thinking of Western modernity (inhuman
nature, human culture). The assumptions of modernity—that nature is ex-
ternal, 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
 A. PENNYCOOK 5

coming under scrutiny. As Žižek (2010: 330) also notes, the concerns
posed by the Anthropocene challenge the focus on knowledge and ‘intellec-
tual labour’ as the prime concerns of our times since ‘materiality is now
reasserting itself with a vengeance’ as we struggle over resources and
pollution.
This return to materialism involves a reconsideration of what matter
means, Meillassoux (2008: 121), for example, positing a speculative materialism
as a way forward in his critique of humanism, metaphysics, and anti-materi-
alism in Western philosophy. Matter, asserts Barad (2013: 17) ‘is not mere
stuff. It is not an inanimate givenness’. Barad’s (2003: 808) posthumanist

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performativity, bringing together Butler’s (1997) account of performativity
and a renewed focus on materiality, ‘calls into question the givenness of
the differential categories of ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘nonhuman’’, examining the
practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and
destabilized’ (2003: 808). This focus on ‘the vital self-organizing and yet
non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself’ (Braidotti 2013: 2) suggests
the need to rethink the relations between languages, humans, and objects:
there is no longer a world ‘out there’ separate from humans and represented
in language but rather a dynamic interrelationship between different
materialities.
Pulling these different strands of posthumanist thought together, several
themes emerge. We need to take the ontological precariousness of humanity
seriously. Those ideas that have come along with the notion of humanity—
humanism, human nature, human rights—have never been as inclusive as
suggested (Douzinas 2007; Phillips 2015). The volatile idea of what is meant
by ‘human’ is ‘contested and policed with demonic precision’ (Bourke 2011:
5). Such contestation has been of particular importance to those ‘others’ who
have often not even been accorded the status of the truly human (the epitome
of which is ‘Man’). As Douzinas (2000: 109) points out, 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’.
A posthumanist position seeks a rethinking of the relationship to all those
Others that suffered in the construction of humanity (gods, machines, objects,
things, animals, monsters, women, slaves, and so on; Latour 2004b; Haraway
2008) while also shifting the idea of what it means to be human. The notion of
what constitutes the human and the divides that are made between human
and non-human animals and objects are worthy of reinvestigation, particularly
at a time when human destructiveness suggests not only a very real precar-
iousness but also a need to consider the divisions humans have made between
culture and nature. Posthumanist thought takes us in the direction of a recon-
sideration of materialism, an insistence on embodiment, and reassessment of
the significance of place. I shall return to the implications for applied linguistics
6 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

after investigating in greater depth the theme of linguistic repertoires as hu-

manist or posthumanist conceptions.

REPERTOIRES: FROM INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL TO SPATIAL

AND DISTRIBUTED
In order to make the discussion here more concrete, I turn in this section to a
series of recent studies that suggest that sociolinguistic repertoires need to be
understood in terms of spatial distribution, social practices, and material em-

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bodiment rather than the individual competence of the sociolinguistic actor
who has held centre stage over the past few decades. The notion 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 signifi-
cant interaction’ (Gumperz 1964: 137). The importance of the idea of a lin-
guistic 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 exist-
ence of a plurality of codes or code varieties in the same linguistic community’
(Giglioli 1972: 15).
From that point on, the notion of repertoire has been used in numerous
ways, re-emerging most recently as part of what has been described as ‘post-
Fishmanian’ sociolinguistics (Blommaert et al. 2012: 18), a desire to move
away from the sedimented terminology of bilingualism and code-mixing to-
wards a more flexible account of how people deploy different linguistic re-
sources in their everyday practice (Pennycook 2016). The difficulty for the
notion of repertoire, however, is that it has constantly hovered between the
modernist ideals of the individual and society [‘in here’ or ‘out there’ as Latour
(1999) puts it]. Platt and Platt (1975: 36) made a distinction between speech
repertoire as ‘the repertoire of linguistic varieties utilized by a speech commu-
nity which its speakers, as members of the community, may appropriately use’
and verbal repertoire as ‘the linguistic varieties which are at a particular speak-
er’s disposal’. While this terminology gained little traction, a similar idea re-
appears 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:
158). Thus while some sociolinguists recognized this tension, a broader con-
sensus seemed to follow Wardaugh’s (1986: 129) suggestion that ‘The 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 inscription of social language use into a notion of individualized com-
petence takes us back into the head of the humanist subject. More recent
sociolinguistic orientations questioning the possibility of the notion of
 A. PENNYCOOK 7

community under current conditions of mobility and fragmentation have simi-

larly had to focus on the individual and their life history as the locus of the
repertoire because there is no coherent community to hold the notion of rep-
ertoire in place: ‘Repertoires are individual, biographically organized com-
plexes of resources, and they follow the rhythms of actual human lives.’
(Blommaert and Backus 2013: 15). Rymes’ (2014: 9–10) notion of the commu-
nicative 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

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centres nonetheless on the individual deployment of a communicative
repertoire.
While dress and accessories in this version start to open up a broader under-
standing of what is involved in communicative interaction, it takes a more
poststructuralist account to show how the subject itself is a temporary and
dispersed entity, a product of the discourses that make it, rather than an indi-
vidual with linguistic competencies (Busch 2012, 2013). The focus on the
bodily and emotional dimension of intersubjective interaction in the ‘lived
experience of language’ (Spracherleben) (Busch 2015: 2) does not take individ-
ual languages as its starting point, but focuses instead on ‘the experiencing
subject with his or her multilayered linguistic repertoire’ (2015: 3). Yet the
phenomenological underpinnings of Spracherleben retain a sense of the experi-
encing subject. The notion of a dispersed subject, of distributed language and
learning across a wider set of possibilities than just the individual and society,
can be enhanced by thinking in terms of materialist, vitalist, embodied, and
embedded subjects and repertoires.
In a series of studies designed to shed light on the notion of repertoire in
both online and face-to-face interactions,2 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. The
Facebook posting of a Mongolian participant (Sultana et al. 2015), for ex-
ample,—‘Zaa unuudriin gol zorilgo bol ‘‘Oppa ajaa ni Gym-yum style’’
Guriineee kkkkk’ (‘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 po-
tential), there is the playful reworking of the Korean (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 onomatopoeic giggling,
‘kkkkk’, popular among Korean and Mongolian online users, and the use of
contemporary Mongolian youth slang (‘Guriinee’ – ‘Keep on doing it!’).
Rather than trying to identify these translingual (use of items across lan-
guages), transmodal (use of sounds, pictures, and texts), and transtextual (ref-
erence to varied forms of popular culture) semiotic practices (Pennycook 2007)
8 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

in terms of an individual or online community repertoire, it becomes more

useful to think in terms of a distributed set of online semiotic possibilities.
When Ria in Dhaka (Bangladesh) starts a Facebook posting with: ‘ouffffffffffff
arrey jala jala jala ei ontore arrey jala jala. . .’, she is doing a number of things:
she uses particular textual means to emphasize her impatience (ouffffffffffff),
uses another written sound (arrey) to show she agrees with an earlier com-
ment, and then switches into Bangla song mode (fire, fire, fire, this heart is on
fire) with a transtextual reference to a well-known Bangladeshi film and song
title (Dovchin et al. 2015). This is then taken up by Aditi: ‘hai hai, pran jaye,
pran jaye jaye pran jaye!: P LMAO!: P’ with another written expression of

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sound (hai hai, expressing surprise or joy), a further takeup of Bangladeshi
filmic song (my heart is falling deep in love), followed by a common emoticon
(:P) and expression LMAO (laughing my ass off).
These examples suggest that the interactants in such online environments
are not merely the named people but also the semiotic resources distributed
across online and offline networks. While the translingual resources form one
part of this online interaction, equally important are the use of sounds, emo-
tive expressions, and engagement with particular genres of popular culture: In
the example above, Bangladeshi love songs are taken up, and elsewhere these
young adults draw on Hindi film scripts, Korean dramas, popular music such as
Gangnam Style, Sumo wrestling, Pepsi commercials, hip hop, and much more.
These online environments help us see how the range of resources at their
disposal may be drawn from different languages, paralinguistic possibilities,
texts, and genres of popular culture. The notion of repertoire can consequently
be understood as an emergent and interactant affordance of the online space
rather than an individual or communal capacity.
While online activity allows for a particular dispersion of resources, such
virtual spatial repertoires are not so distant from the spatial repertoires of off-
line contexts. When we observe the ways in which activities, linguistic re-
sources, and the particularities of place interact in kitchens, restaurants, and
markets, it also becomes evident that the notion of repertoire is best under-
stood 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 com-
munity (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; after Aleksy’s
Columbian girlfriend has called him on his mobile, Nischal teases him
(‘Hola, como estas?’ – Hi, how are you?). A range of semiotic resources are
 A. PENNYCOOK 9

distributed within and outside this busy workplace, criss-crossed by trajectories

of people (cooks, floor staff, phone calls), artefacts (knives, sieves, plates, in-
gredients), 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 reper-
toire of Petit Paris (Pennycook and Otsuji 2014a). Within a short period, 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

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appétit’ – 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 onegaishimasu’ – 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 linguistic 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, 2015), 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. I told him. He wants to try and get it for cheaper. Arba wa ashreen’ –
Twenty-four), the fact that the zucchini they are trying to sell have turned
yellow (‘Hadol misfareen. Misfareen 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 Filipino back-
grounds); 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 ‘ , ’ (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
10 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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 mangoes at her stall insists to her customer ‘ ... ,
. ’ (Look, look, look. . . yeah, yeah. This colour tastes good), the
mangoes themselves, their colour, taste, and smell, become part of the action,
and indeed we might suggest that these yellow mangoes interpellate the cus-
tomer as much as anyone or anything else in the market. Yellowing zucchini
(down goes the price) and yellowing mangoes (up goes the price), the noise
and urgency of market selling, all play crucial roles in how various resources
will be used and taken up, and therefore what constitute at any place and time

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the repertoires from which communication can draw.
Rather than being individual, biographical, or something that people pos-
sess, repertoires are better considered as an emergent property deriving from
the interactions between people, artefacts, and space. They are more akin from
this point of view to the notion of assemblages where ‘materiality and mediation
are best treated as mutual conditions of possibility and as effects of each other’
(Appadurai 2015: 233). Kell’s (2015: 442) discussion of how ‘things make
people happen’, suggests that ‘objects, in and of themselves, have conse-
quences’. Repertoires are the product of social spaces as semiotic resources,
objects, and space interact. To imagine that repertoires are somehow an inter-
nalized individual competence (Wardaugh 1986) or can be found in a com-
munity reservoir (Bernstein 2000) is to overlook the dynamics of objects, places,
and linguistic resources.

POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

The notion of spatial repertoires takes us into the terrain of posthumanist
thought, with a stronger and more dynamic role for objects and space, focusing
on ‘how the composite ecology of human and nonhuman interactions in
public space works on sociality and political orientation’ (Amin 2015: 239).
From this point of view, there is a strong focus on both practices—those re-
peated 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: concre-
tions, settings and flows’ (Thrift 2007: 9). The move towards ‘performative
alternatives to representationalism’, Barad (2007: 135) argues, ‘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’.
This shift in thinking has major implications for applied linguistics.
Posthumanist thinking is closely related to a number of themes that have
been emerging over the past decade. There has been a move to expand the
semiotic terrain (beyond language more narrowly construed) in relation to
material surrounds and space, with an increased focus on place, objects, and
semiotics (linguistic landscapes, geosemiotics, nexus analysis), as well as on
 A. PENNYCOOK 11

emergent and distributed accounts of identity and cognition (language ecol-

ogy, sociocultural theory, poststructuralism). As Van Lier (2000) explains, for
example, rather than following nativist, constructivist, or behaviourist as-
sumptions that learning occurs as the brain processes information, an ecolo-
gical perspective emphasizes the notion of emergence from a range of
interactions that occur in the wider environment. Scollon and Scollon’s
(2004) nexus analysis focuses on how people, places, discourses, and objects
together facilitate action and social change.
Integrational linguists have argued something similar for a long time (with-
out necessarily subscribing to a posthumanist perspective). Instead of standard

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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 (Cowley, 2012), which
places communication (broadly understood) at the core and suggests languages
are not central to this process. This urges us to rethink what is at stake when
we look at language. As applied linguists we like to think we have a broader
view of communication than is common in linguistics, but 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. Likewise, while under-
standing literacy as situated social practice has greatly enhanced the contextual
understanding of literacy practices, it has not yet opened up to a more post-
humanist understanding of the role of ‘material artefacts of literacy such as
paper, pens, keyboards and mobile devices’ (Gourlay 2015: 485).
To the extent that linguistics has often supported the view that language
separates us from the animals, it has played a key role in the maintenance of
human exceptionalism. Human language is considered unique and unrelated
to animal communication (Evans 2014), a necessary proposition for the belief
that language is a system separate from broader modes of communication, a
system that sprang into being in an evolutionary jump rather than a more
commonplace development from animal modes of communication. A central
goal of linguistics has long been to uncover the laws that ‘pertain to all human
languages, representing the universal properties of language’ that are part of
‘the human biologically endowed language faculty’ (Fromkin and Rodman
1997: 19). Universalism and nativism, as well as such notions as human
nature, are the flipside of human exceptionalism: in order to posit a notion
of humans as distinct from other animals (or objects), humanism also had to
posit a commonality across humans, hence universalism (applying to all but
only humans) and nativism (human characteristics are biologically endowed),
though the latter is by no means a prerequisite for a belief in the former.
It is only more recently that a much deeper understanding of great ape
thought and communication (Tomasello 2014) undermines this great divide.
Great apes ‘cognitively represent the world in abstract format, they make com-
plex 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’
12 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

(p. 150). The whole assumption of universalism has also been convincingly
shown to be a chimera because ‘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: 429).3 It is now clear that ‘the distinctive qualities of human
language’ do not suggest ‘a sharp divide between human language and non-
human communicative systems’ (Evans 2014: 258).
Posthumanist thought can help us think through a more distributed under-
standing of the location of semiotic resources and cognition. The notion of
extended mind takes us one step towards an alternative understanding of

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human thought, emphasizing how particular objects and tools—such as a
mobile phone—may extend our thinking outside our own heads (Clark
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: 38) suggests,
however, that it is now possible to see ourselves as mobile cyborgs as new com-
munication technologies change the relations between humans and city
spaces, suggesting there is no clear distinction between ‘internal cognitive
processes and external computational ones’: We perceive, act, learn, and
know, he suggests, ‘through the mechanically, electronically, and otherwise
extended bodies and memories that we construct and reconstruct for our-
selves’ (p. 38). Rather than Vitruvian man—that da Vinci image of the male
human enclosed within the perfect circle that has become the focus of oppos-
ition in anti- and post-humanist discourse (Haraway 2008; Braidotti 2013)—
Mitchell (2003: 39) suggests we become a ‘spatially extended cyborg’. This is
the post-Cartesian world where ‘I link, therefore I am’ (Mitchell 2003: 62).
While extended mind thus operates on a spatial scale larger than the indi-
vidual, 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: 6) explain, cognition may be
‘multiply distributed, both within neural networks and across bodies, artifacts,
and social groups’. Distributed cognition, 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 in-
stances of cognition can be seen as emerging from distributed processes’
(Hutchins 2014: 36). 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.
Neither language use nor language learning occurs solely inside our skulls.
An extended mind approach would see them as occurring additionally outside
the head, while a distributed cognition approach takes this further by suggest-
ing not only that mind and language stretch outside the head but that they are
located across physical space: ‘The emergence of a language is a cognitive
process that takes place in an evolving cognitive ecosystem that includes a
 A. PENNYCOOK 13

shared world of objects and events as well as adaptive resources internal to

each member of the community’ (Hutchins 2014: 37). In applied linguistic
domains, this line of thinking shares a number of affinities with Vygotsky’s
(1978) social theories of the mind and what has been termed sociocultural
theory (Lantolf and Thorne 2006). From this perspective ‘the human is not
approached as an autonomous agent, but is located within an extensive system
of relations’ (Ferrando 2013: 32). Thrift (2007: 8) 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 though a continuous and largely
involuntary process of encounter’.

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Lest it appear that the human dissolves altogether in this sea of other objects,
various arguments have suggested modes of regrouping in the face of strong
posthumanist stances. As Thrift (2007) notes, while Actor Network Theory
(Latour 2005) 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’ (Thrift
2007: 111)—it is also limited in its focus on networks rather than events (and
an inability to deal, therefore, with the unexpected; Pennycook 2012), and on
a ‘flattened cohabitation of all things’ at the expense of ‘specifically human
capacities of expression, powers of invention, of fabulation’ (p. 111).
Appadurai (2015: 233) 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 so as 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.
Posthumanist thought has major implications for how we think about the
subject (the individual, identity, the person). The autonomous and free-willed
subject of humanism is clearly no longer under consideration, opening up a
way of thinking about the subject that is not caught up in the endless vacil-
lation between structure and agency, neither an effect of the system, nor a
property of the individual. Neither does the subject from this perspective need
to rest only on anti-foundationalist (non-essentialist) or discursive processes,
where the poststructuralist identity-in-struggle subject arguably retains aspects
of a humanist subject by assuming internal fragmentation rather than spatial
dispersion. While it may be useful to resist the stronger claims around objects
as actants, we can nonetheless start to consider the subject in more material
terms, as part of a wider distribution of semiotic and material resources, as
interpellated by objects, as no longer the guarantor of meaning, as a product
rather than a precursor of specific interactions.
A posthumanist perspective requires us to rethink claims to both human and
linguistic exceptionalism and can also take us beyond the ‘hackneyed debate
between scientific realism and social constructivism’ (Barad 2003: 805): ‘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
14 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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: 296). Both realists and social constructivists, Barad (2003, 2007) argues,
share a belief that scientific knowledge mediates access to the material world,
differing on the grounds of that divide between nature (how things really are)
and culture (how they are seen). Both positions, she suggests, subscribe to a
form of representationalism that the new materialism can help us avoid. The
belief that we have better access to representations of things than the things
themselves, Barad (2003: 806–7) suggests, is ‘a contingent fact of history and
not a logical necessity; that is, it is simply a Cartesian habit of mind’.

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Like other areas of the social sciences, applied linguistics has found itself
caught up in arguments whereby realists claim a reality independent of how
it is described, while acknowledging that our descriptions are always mediated
by discourse (Sealey 2007), and constructivists acknowledge reality but see it
as likewise discursively mediated. New materialist thought can help us rethink
the critical and political agenda through ‘the cultivation of a stubbornly realist
attitude’ based on a realism dealing with ‘matters of concern, not matters of
fact’ (Latour 2004a: 231). For Barad, a preferable approach is not to recycle
debates about constructivism 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: 133).

CONCLUSION
To align with current changes to the planet, humanity, theory, and politics, a
useful way forward for applied linguistics may be to take posthumanist think-
ing seriously. This is by no means to discard the concerns of old. At a time
when the claws of neoliberalism are undermining the possibilities of thinking
in terms of a common good, public ownership, welfare or safeguards against
discrimination and inequality, and producing newly mobile classes of the dis-
possessed (Standing 2014; Holborow 2015), this is not the time to turn our
back on more traditional understandings of materiality. As Appadurai (2015)
warns, a flattened world of equal objects may leave us without an adequate
mode of political action. And yet, as Haraway (1991: 181) suggested long ago,
thinking in terms of cyborgs, for example, can offer a new way of thinking
about life and politics, a ‘dream not of a common language but of a powerful
infidel heteroglossia’ that can take us towards other ways of thinking about
humans, culture, nature, and politics.
The takeup of questions of enhanced humanity, convergent technologies,
climate change, or human–animal relations does not suggest that these
should then be the primary focus of study. As Urry (2011: 8) suggests, the
challenge posed by climate change is a sociological one once we appreciate
that ‘the social and physical/material worlds are utterly intertwined’. The cen-
tral insights from Cook’s (2015) analysis of different discursive representations
 A. PENNYCOOK 15

of animals also concern the relations between language use and wider social,
economic, and ideological change in the domain of human–animal associations
and human exceptionalism. Studies of mobile communication (Deumert 2014)
may tell us a lot about new modes of communication but may be more signifi-
cant for what they reveal about distributed language and cognition.
So what might a critical posthumanist project look like? Linguistics, which
has long played an overly prominent role in applied linguistics, has been cas-
tigated for its separation of language and materiality, for being a cornerstone of
the misalignment of language and humanity (Latour 2013). A reshaped post-
humanist applied linguistics would do well to seize this opportunity to rethink

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these relations, to reconstruct a way of thinking in which a field that engages
seriously with a notion of practice (Kramsch 2015) can contribute greatly to
broader questions around language, practice, materiality, and agency. At stake,
as Amin (2015: 245) suggests, ‘is the reordering of social identity as a reciprocal
exchange between thinking bodies, machines and environments’. This re-
ordering is one that applied linguistics could benefit from considering
(Pennycook, forthcoming), as the ways we understand language in relation
to people, objects, and place, and the ways we consider a more distributed
understanding of language, cognition, and agency, have great implications
for a field such as ours.

NOTES
1 The original French title—Words and
things—rather than the common
English translation The order of things
suggests the continuing significance of
this work for the discussion here.
2 We do not have a strong tradition of
this kind of research macro-analysis
(pulling together one’s own research
projects) in applied linguistics, but I
am following the example of
Appadurai (2015) and others in this
approach. It means of course the details
of methodology and context are not re-
ported here, but it has the benefit of
enabling a broader argument and re-
interpretation of earlier studies.
3 Evans and Levinson (2009) nonethe-
less take this insight back to a human-
cognitivist perspective, suggesting that
humans are the only species with a
communication system that is funda-
mentally variable at all levels.

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18 POSTHUMANIST APPLIED LINGUISTICS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Alastair Pennycook is the author of numerous works on the global spread of English, critical
applied linguistics, and language as a local practice. He is Professor of Language in
Education at the University of Technology Sydney. His most recent book, with Emi
Otsuji, is Metrolingualism: Language in the City (Routledge). Address for correspondence:
Alastair Pennycook, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology
Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway 2007, NSW, Australia. <alastair.pennycook@uts.edu.au>

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