ABSTRACT
Posthumanism not only invites us to rethink the basic unit of reference for the human being and the human sciences, but also expands the concept of social (practice) to encompass human beings and nonhuman agents, interacting socially in a more horizontal and symmetrical way. The research on literacy, in this new way of looking at the world, requires a new theoretical proposal that surpasses usual binarisms in this field of study such as digital/analog and multiple/single, among others. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a reflection on the concept of literacies as social practices from a posthumanist perspective, considering new ideas in the posthumanism literature on agency, cognition and subjectivity. The methodology used in this paper is the bibliographic research and the main references are the works of the philosopher Rosi Braidotti on the critical posthumanism, the literary critic Nancy Hayles on the posthuman condition, the feminist theorist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad on the agential realism, and the applied linguist Alastair Pennycook specifically on his proposal of a posthumanist applied linguistics. The result of this theoretical reflection indicates that a posthumanist conception of literacies demands that these practices be understood as material-discursive practices, that is, practices in which matter and discourse emerge together by intra-action, implying another look at what the contexts, the subjects, and the objects of the literacies would be. Consequently, it is also necessary to consider that the constitutive meanings of the literacies are not isolated in units as words or ideas of signifiers, but in the material-discursive network constructed by intra-action.
Keyword:
literacies; posthumanism; agential realism