109 What makes you so special?

The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special.

It’s a culture that’s clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence of what makes humans so special.

Posthumanism is a movement that challenges this assumption.

My position is that language does make humans exceptional, but not exceptional in the sense  of ‘better.’ I think language makes us less conscious than the material world.

A lot less conscious.

Find out what I mean through an exploration of nouns and copular verbs.

The stories I read in this episode are ‘Possessive’ and ‘The problem with talking to trees.’

If you enjoyed the ‘think of a word’ exercise, you can do it again in Episode 64, ‘The intimacy embedded in language.’

If you’d like to hear more about how language makes humans less conscious than the rest of the world, listen to Episode 94, ‘Language and the afterlife’ and Episode 104 ‘Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie.’ If you’d like to hear about the Earth’s language, try Episode 96.

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You can see what I did with the words my History of English students wrote on scraps of paper in Grammar for Dreamers, the screenplay, available here: jodieclark.com/screenplay

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