Recent interest in posthumanism and the new materialisms in applied linguistics has generated questions about how to engage in analysis from these theoretical perspectives (e.g., Canagarajah, 2018; Gurney & Demuro, 2019). Particularly challenging is that these theories not only critique the privileged role of language and representation in Western thought, but also that they decenter the human as an agentive, meaning-making subject (Coole & Frost, 2010). Scholars such as Lamb and Higgins (2020), Pennycook (2018), and Toohey (2018), however, have demonstrated the potential of putting language on the same ontological level as the more-than-human by attending to the spatial and material aspects of communication and to the role of non-human agency in language events. Yet, there remains a need to engage more thoroughly with "the materiality of language itself" (MacLure, 2013, p. 663) as well as how it provokes activity outside of a representational model of analysis.
The purpose of this presentation is therefore two-fold. First, it seeks to lay out the onto-epistemological plane in which posthumanist and new materialist theories exists. Second, it seeks to illustrate how language can be analyzed from a nonrepresentational perspective. Data for the illustration comes from a participatory action research project carried out with multilingual youth in the southeastern United States. In particular, the presentation zeroes in on a drama game youth played to highlight how language exceeded its representational bounds through disjunction, repetition, and asignifying ruptures. The presentation also draws out the theoretico-methodological tool that enabled such a focus, namely, Deleuze's (1997) concept of stuttering. Additionally, it provides a point of entry for using other posthumanist and new materialist concepts as methods to carry out discourse analysis that moves beyond representation. Implications include the need for more theoretico-methodological work in applied linguistics that attends to nonrepresentation in language analysis as well as how diversity in thought can open up and affirm different ways of knowing, being, and languaging to create more just and equitable futures with and for the multilingual populations we engage in research with.
References
Canagarajah, S. (2018). Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: Expanding the paradigm
beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 31-54.
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Duke
University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays critical and clinical (D.W. Smith & M.A. Greco, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1993)
Gurney, L., & Demuro, E. (2019). Tracing ne ground, from language to languaging, and from
languaging to assemblages: Rethinking languaging through the multilingual and
ontological turns. International Journal of Multilingualism, 1-20.
Lamb, G., & Higgins, C. (2020). Posthumanism and its implications for discourse studies. In
A. D. Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of discourse
Studies (pp. 350-370). Cambridge University Press.
MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-
qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658-667.
Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Routledge.
Toohey, K. (2018). The onto-epistemologies of new materialism: implications for applied
linguistics pedagogies and research. Applied Linguistics, 40(6), 937-956.
