- 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.
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It is a common feeling for stutterers to feel out of control, veering beyond intentions and other guardrails. Also common feeling for stutterers to be a scapegoat for the structural sins of communication.In the mode of transmission, Lisbeth Lipardi writes “the accuracy of the message, the efficiency of delivery, and the precision of reception are in the foreground…” (p. 10). Greater control over these variables is meant to quicken the incident-free relay of messages in the pursuit of greater instrumental power.
- Lipardi, L. (2014). Listening, thinking, being: Toward an ethics of attunement. PennState University Press.
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Communication in this mode emphasizes the shared act of constructing, celebrating, and repairing common worlds.Carey famously suggests that communication is here akin to attending religious mass, where the point is not to transmit information but to draw people together in communion—to produce and maintain a shared view of the world through repeated practices. What makes the prayer, chant, and ceremony significant is their function as both social practices and techniques of the self. Through their repetition, we develop collective sensibilities and patterns of perception by which we can build common worlds. —meaning gets enacted in the very midst of unruly bodies that excrete “all levels of expression, from the minute details of discourse—from pitch, emphasis, gesture, head tilts, and eye gaze” (p. 44). Twitching bodies, stuttering tongues, signing fingers, and slurred lips (and all the affect they carry along) are no longer distracting “accidentals,” but the very materiality of communion. —In the mode of transmission, meaning would flee this scene, yet in the mode of ritual, the frozen supplication is a link to the body’s ancient relation to meaning and language, one in which we do not command but must together wait in the unexpected.
- Carey, J. (2009). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Routledge.
- Padden, C. (2015). Communication. In R. Adams, B. Reiss & D. Serlin (Eds.), Keywords for Disability Studies (pp. 43-45). New York University Press.
- Constantino, C. (2016). Stuttering gain [Paper presentation]. International Stuttering AwarenessDay Conference. http://isad.isastutter.org/isad-2016/papers-presented-by-2016/stories-and-experiences-with-stuttering-by-pws/stuttering-gain-christopher-constantino/
What does it mean to invent fluent communication?
James Carey – communication at this time meant both the movement of material things as well as the movement of immaterial ideasIn this model, “successful” communication is marked by a correspondence between the intentional idea of the sender encoded in the message and the idea reproduced in the mind of the receiver. This makes the process of communication brittle and prone to error, for the dream of imperial control it offers rests ultimately upon speeding the message, while protecting it from damage along the voyage.
Who or what is responsible? Where was the "message damaged"?? Systems theory can get us a little further than common sense understandings by attending to distributed agency. I agree with Perrow (1999) that individual failings cannot sufficiently explain “damage” to “symbols, communication patterns, legitimacy, or a number of factors that are not, strictly speaking, people or objects” (p. 64). But leave system theory insofar as deviations in functional systems must be errors, damage defined against system output.
Before going to ritual. so many actants crowd the stage that “it’s never clear who and what is acting” (Latour, 2007, p. 46). This gets at two senses of communicating by accident. For instance, I might say a good class is one in which I communicate a concept well. Yet the passive voice is far more honest. Can lead to resentment. Resentment against an untidy world I, I think, is a central component of disablist feelings against stutterers.
- Carey, J. (2009). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Routledge.
- Gleik, J. (2012). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. Pantheon Books.
- James, W. (1996). A pluralistic universe. University of Nebraska Press. Connolly, W. (2005). Pluralism. Duke University Press.
- Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
- Perrow, C. (1999). Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies. Princeton UniversityPress.
- Rosa, H. (2003). Social acceleration: Ethical and political consequences of a desynchronized high-speed society. Constellations, 10(1), 3-33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00309
- Virilio, P. (2007). The original accident (J. Rose, Trans.). Polity.
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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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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Sveinn Snær Kristjánsson, Malbjorg (National Stuttering Association in Iceland).
Sveinn Snær Kristjánsson. My Photo Project Shows That Stuttering Should Not Be Ashamed Of.
- Facilitating cultural competence and awareness
- Understanding the dynamics of stigma, self-stigma and masking and the psychological consequences of living with a concealable stigmatised identity
- Exploring the lived experience and feelings associated with stammering in an ableist world that privileges fluency
- Understanding minority stress and ableist trauma
- Supporting the development of new affirming narratives around stammering
- Finding own unique stammering aesthetic
- Disclosure and self-advocacy
- Community
- Public information and education programmes
- Reducing barriers – creating a stammer-friendly environment and culture
- Campaigning
- Lobbying
- Representation
- Cultural change
- Celebration of stammering and difference
- Facilitating cultural competence and awareness
- Understanding the dynamics of stigma, self-stigma and masking and the psychological consequences of living with a concealable stigmatised identity
- Exploring the lived experience and feelings associated with stammering in an ableist world that privileges fluency
- Understanding minority stress and ableist trauma
- Supporting the development of new affirming narratives around stammering
- Finding own unique stammering aesthetic
- Disclosure and self-advocacy
- Community
- Public information and education programmes
- Reducing barriers – creating a stammer-friendly environment and culture
- Campaigning
- Lobbying
- Representation
- Cultural change
- Celebration of stammering and difference