Posthumanism and pragmatics
Table of contents
Posthumanism, simply put, shifts the focus of research and politics away from humans; like Chakrabarty’s (2000) call to ‘provincialize Europe’, it pushes humans to the margins. The challenges posed by human destructiveness, environmental degradation, climate change, population growth, resource scarcity, urbanization, diminishing resources, our treatment of animals, as well as major shifts in technology and communication present a range of ethical and political concerns to which posthumanism responds by decentring the human. While there are many strands to this thinking, for pragmatics it raises a central question: What would the pragmatics of communication look like if humans are either peripheral or even absent from the communication? Put another way, how can we understand communication if we decentre human language as commonly conceived, and instead look at humans and other animals, animals and other animals, humans and machines, machines and machines, animals and machines, and any of these in relation to other possible actants — plants, rocks, spirits, rivers, or forests? If pragmatics has always assumed human actors as central to its endeavour, what does this mean if humans and their language are provincialized? What might a more-than-human pragmatics start to look like? To pursue this, we will look firstly at the background of posthumanist thought and why it matters, and then focus on general issues for communication from this perspective, including ideas such as distributed language and communication.
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