Lionel Wee’s Automation in communication explores the increasing usage of computable machines in our communicative practices and how such uses challenge our anthropocentric conceptions of language. The introductory chapter discusses how automation processes invite us to reevaluate notions of ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’—established notions within language studies—and to rethink the relationship between language and community. These categories serve as a starting point and are revised throughout the book to demonstrate how language is traditionally viewed as human-centered and dyadic, mainly centered on the ‘intentions’ of ‘individual subjects’, and that such assumptions do not explain current linguistic practices in which automative devices actively participate in meaning-making interactions.
Chapter 2 addresses the theoretical basis of posthumanism, casting doubt on the notion of ‘human’ as a given, clearly defined entity, and contradicting the view that entities pre-exist interactions with others. The notion of assemblage is here employed to argue that ‘agency’ should not be seen as an intentional process of a single human and instead has to be distributed through a myriad of other actants, including machines, that act together to produce communicative interactions.
The dispersed and unlocalized characteristic of assemblages underpins chapter 3, which questions the centrality of the speaker in linguistic theorization and argues that communication is significantly shaped by how hearers interpret and anthropomorphize automated entities. This leads to the development of a hearer-based pragmatics (chapter 4), which aims at giving greater importance to the role of the hearer in communication and claims that most of it happens due to the hearer’s inclination to treat entities, such as automated ones, as capable of having intention and empathy. Chapter 5 builds upon this and, by employing examples of communicative practices within automation, with varying degrees of anthropomorphism, further develops the idea of how the constitution of assemblages depends on the ascriptions of meaning from the hearer.
Chapter 6 addresses issues of linguistic creativity and linguistic heritage in automation and investigates how current communicative practices impel us to change its human-centric basis and redefine how much credit should be given to machinic productions. It shows that such traditional claims are founded in modernist ideologies, treating language as a stable entity with clear boundaries: Chapter 8 also outlines how we need to develop a posthumanist view of the roles that organizations play in society, which in turn helps the creation of linguistic policies that see languages as historically contingent and flexible assemblages instead of traditional fixed entities. The final chapter concludes the ideas developed throughout the book and reinforces the importance of developing a fluid and assemblage-based understanding of language, especially when dealing with automation in communication.
Although sometimes overly focused on linguistic theories that leave little room for a deeper exploration of posthumanist discussions or more detailed analyses of current phenomena, the book is a good point of departure for inquiries into automation in communication and the importance of incorporating posthumanist perspectives in language studies.
