After Words: There Is No Language without Materiality

Pennycook, A

After Words: There Is No Language without Materiality

Pennycook, A

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Publisher:: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
Publication Type:: Journal Article
Citation:: Signs and Society, 2024, 12, (1), pp. 109-123
Issue Date:: 2024-12-01

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Pennycook, A https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4656-6187
dc.date.accessioned	2025-03-29T19:21:35Z
dc.date.available	2025-03-29T19:21:35Z
dc.date.issued	2024-12-01
dc.identifier.citation	Signs and Society, 2024, 12, (1), pp. 109-123
dc.identifier.issn	2326-4489
dc.identifier.issn	2326-4497
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/186292
dc.description.abstract	Posthumanist thought brings a set of ethical and political concerns to the (socio)linguistic table to do with human relations to the planet and its other inhabitants. This opens up a space for reconsideration of language and materiality. In some accounts, language is an immaterial medium whose relation to the material world is only symbolic or representational. New materialist accounts of language, by contrast, view it as embodied, embedded and distributed activity (language is assembled and extended by bodies in physical space). This is to suggest that language, both material and symbolic, is deeply entwined with a world both material and symbolic and that any approach to sociolinguistics that seeks to grasp language in the world needs to work with an understanding of the dynamic entanglements between an animated world of matter and a material world of language. This is to focus on the material foundations of communication, the corporeal, physical, or technological conditions of human and nonhuman communicative interaction and on the relationships between material realities and discourse. This is to ask what and where language is and to suggest that without material relations there is no language.
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
dc.relation.ispartof	Signs and Society
dc.relation.isbasedon	10.1086/728090
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
dc.title	After Words: There Is No Language without Materiality
dc.type	Journal Article
utslib.citation.volume	12
pubs.organisational-group	University of Technology Sydney
pubs.organisational-group	University of Technology Sydney/New Faculty
utslib.copyright.status	closed_access	*
dc.date.updated	2025-03-29T19:21:33Z
pubs.issue	1
pubs.publication-status	Published
pubs.volume	12
utslib.citation.issue	1

Abstract:

Posthumanist thought brings a set of ethical and political concerns to the (socio)linguistic table to do with human relations to the planet and its other inhabitants. This opens up a space for reconsideration of language and materiality. In some accounts, language is an immaterial medium whose relation to the material world is only symbolic or representational. New materialist accounts of language, by contrast, view it as embodied, embedded and distributed activity (language is assembled and extended by bodies in physical space). This is to suggest that language, both material and symbolic, is deeply entwined with a world both material and symbolic and that any approach to sociolinguistics that seeks to grasp language in the world needs to work with an understanding of the dynamic entanglements between an animated world of matter and a material world of language. This is to focus on the material foundations of communication, the corporeal, physical, or technological conditions of human and nonhuman communicative interaction and on the relationships between material realities and discourse. This is to ask what and where language is and to suggest that without material relations there is no language.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/186292