• ‍The blurt. Stutterers pepper their language with so-called “fillers” that ostensibly sit outside of, and even detract from, the message. We sometimes grimace and groan in the act of speech. In addition, we sometimes find ourselves in the midst of speaking sounds, words, or phrases we didn’t fully intend.‍
• The misfire. The phenomenon of stuttering includes both prolongation and repetition. Stuttering can extend the opening sounds of a message (e.g. ---aaaaaaaagree or bo-bo-bo-book), which an ableist grammar recodes as misfires that communicative parties can tacitly agree to ignore.‍
• The stall. A repetition can be a redundant redundancy (one that serves no discernable purpose), like repeating most of a sentence multiple times to get a “running start” on the difficult finish that was long ago anticipated by our impatient interlocutor. Or, in a hard block, the voice suddenly and unexpectedly runs dry. A word stops in your throat, and you must wait for infra-bodily traffic to clear while the absence of meaning gapes wide and dangerous in the social world.‍
• Crossed wires. A regular experience for stutterers, crossed wires describes the state of “talking past each other” that might begin when one party “mishears” the other and then feedbacks error into the conversation.‍
• The swerve. Clinicians prefer the term “avoidance” to describe the strategy stutterers employ when we sense an oncoming phoneme over which we expect to trip. I might, for example, begin to say “I agree” but change course, swerving around a potential misfire to substitute on the fly: “I don’t know.”‍
• The cut-off. This accident is one of attempted repair, caused when interlocutors or bystanders rush to the scene of an accident, interrupt, and reimpose order by attempting to predict and finish the stalled (or otherwise damaged) message according to a dominant grammar.‍
• The gridlock. Stuttering ferociously at the front of a queue, for example, halts the flow of information, people, and capital; it stalls a lane of traffic and tempts impatient honks in the form of tapped toes and glances, as everyone waits for an undetermined time until information and thus bodies will once again flow free.

Rethinking covert stuttering (Constantino, Manning, Nordstrom, 2017)

• How do people who pass as fluent constitute themselves?
• Expected a straightforward study of ableism and repression.
• Got stories of resistance and agency.
• Participants did not see why stuttering was any more authentic than fluency.
• Passing is not repressed stuttering but a unique form of stuttering constituted by specific practices of self.
• Passing resists both how biology suggests a stutterer must talk and what privileges society says stutterers should have access to.

The Questions we need to ask

Who needs to change? What do they/we need to change?

Acknowledging the natural variation, the unique skills, experiences and traits of neurodivergent children.

— Constantino (2018)

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Client who stutters

What do they understand about stuttering? And their stuttering in particular?

Cons for the Client

• Exposure: "I stutter".
• Risk of failure.
• Lack of acceptance by self and others .

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The Speech and Language Therapist

What do we understand about stuttering? Turn the tables on the process of normalising judgement As therapists we need to enquire into what a person thinks of the judgement they have been assigned. What if stuttering was the norm? If stuttering was cool…

Cons for the Therapist

• Exposing beliefs contrary to the medical model.
• Perceived risk of ‘failure’.
• Lack of acceptance by peers, clients and client's families.

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Who needs to change?

How do we do this? Is this our responsibility alone?

• Ourselves as SLTs
• Families.
• Parents.
• Teachers.
• Employers.
• School systems.
• Health services.
• Shop keepers.

• One of the hall-marks of affect is ‘In-between-ness’.

… the most fundamental insight of affect theory: that no embodied being is independent but rather is affected by and affects others bodies, profoundly and perpetually as a condition of being in the world.

— Ahern, A Feel for the Text. (2018)

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The challenge for researchers is that affect is not something, but rather is “in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter”; rather than housed in or controlled by the individual, it “arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.

— Ahern, The Affect Reader. (2010)

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• ‘Affect’ as dynamic – emotions not static but in process – changing as they move between bodies.
• Robert Solomon recommended ‘thinking of emotions as acts’, as ‘something we do, not just have’.
• 'Affect’ captures maybe better than emotion that embodied aspect of experience (something felt before it’s understood).

To stutter is often to feel the edges and the walls of lamguage, in the mouth, in the glottis, on the face, in the chest. It can be to experience those parts of language which do not signify but that force us to encounter the stuff that language is made of and the other buccal functions from which language is inseparable, such as eating, breathing, chocking, kissing, humming, hissing, coughing, drinking, sucking, vomiting, licking, swallowing, wheezing, and blowing. We often avoid paying attention to the stuff of language because it reminds us of the mechanical and involuntary crust upon the transparent flow of social and economic institutions and the rational expectations of social interactions.

I have two examples about what it might mean to experience the matter of language queered. The first I’ll call wood, and it comes from the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben. Agamben writes in his essay “The Idea of Matter:”

“There where language ends is not where the unsayable begins, but rather the matter of language. He who has never reached, as in a dream, that woodlike substance of language that the ancients called silva remains, even when he is silent, a prisoner to representations.”  

— Agamben.

This is a very loaded assertion, but by “prisoner to representations” Agamben is referring to a use of language that is reduced to transparent meaning, pre signification, supple communication, and pure intelligibility that conceals the medium of that which you use to communicate. You’re a fly in a box who doesn’t see the glass walls. Silva, meaning wildwood, is also a term for a poetic form enjoyed by the ancient Romans, and it trades on its metaphorical meaning as material for construction. If language is woodlike, it has a texture, a grain, colour, rings. It is hard while it can be broken down, built up, pulped, and refigured. It is attached to non-wood things like leaves. Agamben’s reference to the dream gives it a more ethereal resonance. Without going too deeply into the dream theory, Freud noticed that words are often treated in dreams as though they were things. Jean-Francois Lyotard provides an example from a poster of what dreaming does to language. In Frédéric Rossif’s poster Révolution d'Octobre, the words are physically folded as if rippled on a 3D surface by the wind, and the letters become distorted. Conor Foran’s stuttering font is another example of the distortion of words by the pressures of desire upon language. Language can do a great deal outside of representation.

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‍

Committee for the Big Stutter Party

Self disclosure/stereotype threat:

• Children can develop a “growth mindset” through learning that success takes effort.
• mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow from.
• This mindset encourages children to seek out new challenges and fulfil their potential.

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Therapeutic practices must adapt to shifts in the conditions of people’s lives.

— Winslade (2013)

It is no longer enough to give people a relationship in which they are free from being judged. What they need is an opportunity to actively deconstruct the normalising judgements operating on them and to push back against the effects of these judgements.

— Winslade, p.8 (2013)

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Mind your Ps and Qs is an English language expression meaning "mind your manners", "mind your language", "be on your best behaviour", "watch what you're doing".

• To our self.
• To others.
• How we talk about children who stutter.
• How children who stutter hear us talk about stuttering generally.

Action: helpful self talk to counter stereotypes.

• Gather evidence in real-life situations will lead to generating more balanced thoughts on the basis of their findings.
• People can identify helpful self-talk that will positively influence their emotional reaction and behaviour in a situation.
• Helpful self-talk can also be generated by reflecting on previous experiences that have gone well and what the person was saying to himself or herself at the time.

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For the Speech and Language Therapist

• Be aware of own thoughts, feelings and expectations around stuttering and our role as an SLT.
• Communication trumps fluency.

Action: helpful self talk.

• Handouts for teachers.
• Powerpoint for school presentation.
• Advice leaflet for parents (Generate discussion about what works in therapy  and helpful versus unhelpful advice).

This ‘still-here’ can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and not just verbally – ‘corresponding’ to something.

In other words: language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which, however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens.

This ‘still-here’ of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature.

This shows the poem yet more clearly as one person’s language become shape and, essentially, a presence in the present.

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.

Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?‍

I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find a… meridian.

With you and Georg Büchner and the State of Hesse, I believe I have just touched it again.

— Celan (1960)

• How the meaning/cultural currency of feelings/emotions change over time.
• Emotions as shaped by cultural/political forces‍
• Representation of emotions in literature/film as revealing of the power structures at work.
• ‘Affect’ is used in different ways in different fields (neuroscience, psychology and literary/cultural studies).
• Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai – critics for whom affects are crucially connected to structures of power (social/cultural/political); also interested in how affective states stretch our capacity to name them but haven’t cut loose from language and cognition.
• Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings), she’s interested in those feelings that are seen as unproductive/marginalised.

My dilemma as an SLT

How best to support speech and language therapists who are working with children and adults who stutter so that they work as allies in the context of evidence which shows that stuttering therapy has an overall positive effect.  No one treatment approach for stuttering demonstrates significantly greater effects over another treatment approach. Herder, Howard, Nye, & Vanryckeghem (2006).

• Need to validate professional identities that support.
• Learning from people who stutter.
• Therapy which focuses on positive outcomes in terms of children and adults living the lives they want  to live and the development of therapy that focuses on education and resistance to normalising discourses.
• Resists focus on fluency and cure in therapy.
• Focus on confidence, fun and delight in finding and validating identities which fit with our dreams, hopes and ambitions.

[the open secret is] a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.

— François (1999)

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Homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.

— de Villier (2012)

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Linking the stutter and the unspeakable are logics of subterfuge, to be sure, but I find that Sedgwick’s construction of the “open secret” more closely relates to the kind of secrets that animate stuttering. The open secret is a form of coded disclosure that Sedgwick links to the closet, and it mobilizes language around the secret in order to disclose only to those in the know and hide from those on the outside. Anne-Lise Francois describes it as “a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.” The open secret is that which everyone knows but cannot discuss. I select this construction for the stutter because, while some stutterers can and do pass as fluent and come out of the closet by a discursive disclosure like “I stutter,” more often, the stuttered voice betrays her before any such disclosure can be made, and knowledge of the stutter is created without being acted upon or acknowledged. The stutter’s unspeakability is subtended by its audibility and uncontrollability. Sedgwick’s example of the open secret actually comes from a text featuring a stutterer, Herman Melville’s short story, Billy Budd. However, it is not the eponymous character’s stutter that reveals the structure of the open secret for Sedgwick but rather the possibility of mutiny onboard the ship on which Billy is impressed.

Like queerness, certain forms of discrimination against stutterers or unwanted social interactions often express themselves through a desire to know, and to know it as a symptom. Nicholas de Villier in The Opacity of the Closet argues that it is important to pay attention to the ways that “homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.” Similarly, stutterers often encounter the diagnostic desires of others, the desire to know why and from whence. An example from my childhood: I was at summer camp and sitting in the camp nurse’s office for something mild. The nurse asked me questions about myself and I answered. Then we changed topics and I talked to her about my brother. She interrupted me and said, “did you know you only stuttered when you were talking about yourself, not your brother?” The nurse created her own interruption in my speech as if to master my stutter with her own impediment, and sought to psychologize the root of it as a symptom. This diagnostic desire is a practice of what Sedgwick calls, in a different work, paranoid reading, a kind of analytic reading that seeks to treat the text as a puzzle or stratagem to be untangled. Stuttering attracts this desire to know, in part, because it is an exemplary object of non-knowing. No one knows why people stutter. The stutter speaks to a great opacity within us, and that opacity might be productive of a different way of understanding the self and its relations to others.

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Society will not tolerate… that I should be… nothing, or, more precisely, that the something I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant.    

— Barthes (1981)

Our starting-point is again ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living.’ Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have just seen, the garment was to the body itself—inert matter dumped down upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be produced as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the other. And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown the soul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. But that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena may be formulated as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OUR ATTENTION TO THE PHYSICAL IN A PERSON WHEN IT IS THE MORAL SIDE THAT IS CONCERNED.

— Bergson (1912)

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Bergson’s theory that laughter functions as social correction

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

— Bergson (1912)

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In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but then it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease to change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a like animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the complete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.

We begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.

The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.

— Bergson (1912)

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Alanka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008)

• Zupančič argues Bergson misunderstood the primary thrust of his theory that we laugh when we recognize the mechanical encrusted upon the living.
• The missed revelation of Bergson’s theory is comedy’s unceasing vacillations between the living and the mechanical.

Albert Gutzmann (1837–1910)

• Published article on stuttering, Treatment of stuttering by organized and practically proven method (1879).

Hermann Gutzmann (1865–1922)

• Son of Albert Gutzmann.
• Medical doctor.
• Considered ‘The father of logopedics’.

Emil Froeschels (1884–1972)  

• Founded the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics in 1924 (IALP).
• Stammering as psychological origin.
• Chewing method.
• Incorporated different theories.

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1931 – University of Iowa researchers, psychiatrist Samuel Orton (1897–1948) and psychologist Lee Edward Travis (1896–1987)

• Cerebral Dominance Theory of Stuttering.

1940s – Wendell Johnson (1906–1965)

• Diagnosogenic theory.
• ‘Anticipatory hypertonic avoidance reaction’.

1972 – Charles Van Riper (1905–1994)

• The Nature of Stuttering (1972).
• Stuttering stigma.
• Learning theories.
• Attitudes.
• Psychogenic desensitization.
• Neurogenic: acquired ‘Hesitation Phenomena’.

1959 – Howard Maclay and Charles E. Osgood

• Filled and unfilled pauses, repeats, false starts

1969 – Howell & Vetter

• '… cognitive complexity of the utterance…’

1961; 1968 – Goldman-Eisler

• Pausing.
• Interjections.
• Repetitions.
• Tempo changes.
• ‘Normal’ non-fluencies: filled and unfilled pauses 30% of the time.