Communication accidents & the transmission model of communication, Joshua St. Pierre

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To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.
To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.
To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.

— Virilio (2007)

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Transmission and Social Acceleration

The most obvious, and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of intentional, goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production (2003, 6).

— Rosa (2003, p. 6)

The center of this idea of communication is the transmission of signals or messages for the purpose of control. It is a view of communication from one of the most ancient of human dreams: the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space.

— Carey (2009, p. 12)

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Functional Accidents and Distributed Agency

[an accident is] a failure in a subsystem, or the system as a whole, that damages more than one unit and in doing so disrupts the ongoing or future output of the system.

— Perrow (1999, p. 66)

[O]n June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company.

— Gleik (2012, p. 166)

Who or what is responsible?

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Untidy Systems

Philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled.

— James, (1996, p. 45)

[James takes seriously] a place for something like an element of chanciness or volatility within [the world’s] loose regularities and historical flows.

— Connolly (2005, p. 73)

In an untidy world, the actant is “a being or entity that makes a difference in the world without quite knowing what it is doing [emphasis added]” (Connolly, 2005, p. 72).

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Resistance

Disability

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Resistance

Disability

Time

Resistance

Disability

Time

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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.

Source file

Joshua St. Pierre (2021) ‘Communicating by Accident: Stuttering, the Involuntary, and the Catastrophic’. Metaphoric Stammers & Embodied Speakers: Cultural Workshop, Online, 15 Apr 2021.

References

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.

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Joshua St. Pierre

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Cultural

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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.

Source file

Joshua St. Pierre (2021) ‘Communicating by Accident: Stuttering, the Involuntary, and the Catastrophic’. Metaphoric Stammers & Embodied Speakers: Cultural Workshop, Online, 15 Apr 2021.

References

Lipardi, L. (2014). Listening, thinking, being: Toward an ethics of attunement. PennState University Press.

Info

‍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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‍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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Joshua St. Pierre

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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.

Source file

Joshua St. Pierre (2021) ‘Communicating by Accident: Stuttering, the Involuntary, and the Catastrophic’. Metaphoric Stammers & Embodied Speakers: Cultural Workshop, Online, 15 Apr 2021.

References

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/

Info

Communication as Ritual

Communication, commonness, communion.
James Carey: the model directs our attention “not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs".
Akin to religious mass.
Akin to reading a paper “[n]ews reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world [emphasis added]” (p. 16).

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Dysfluent Accidents as Ritual

Carol Padden: Ritual emphasizes “performance, activity, and the materiality of communication itself. In this framework, meaning is not so much the definition of a word or sentence but instead is constructed in situ, in social and cultural activity” (p. 44).
Unlike sending a message, 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).
Moreover, since communication happens “on site,” time cannot be transcended or otherwise avoided with speed but must be lived through.

Crossed Wires: perhaps it's not that my grumpy co-worker “misheard” my stuttered speech, but that he didn’t want to listen and did not want to belong in time to a common world with this disabled person.
The Stall: “Part of it feels like my body goes into a kind of supplication or prayer almost. I have a friend who once referred to it as ‘watching me ask for the word’” (Ellis, 2020, n.p.).
The misfire: “The unexpectedness of stuttering forces both listener and speaker into a space of trust and vulnerability. They must both give up control of the situation. The person speaking does not know when and for how long they will stutter. Likewise, the person listening does not know when to expect a stutter. In order for both people to communicate, they must trust one another. (Constantino 2016, para. 5)
Ritual? Anti-ritual?

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Communication as Ritual

Communication, commonness, communion.
James Carey: the model directs our attention “not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs".
Akin to religious mass.
Akin to reading a paper “[n]ews reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world [emphasis added]” (p. 16).

<hr>

Dysfluent Accidents as Ritual

Carol Padden: Ritual emphasizes “performance, activity, and the materiality of communication itself. In this framework, meaning is not so much the definition of a word or sentence but instead is constructed in situ, in social and cultural activity” (p. 44).
Unlike sending a message, 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).
Moreover, since communication happens “on site,” time cannot be transcended or otherwise avoided with speed but must be lived through.

Crossed Wires: perhaps it's not that my grumpy co-worker “misheard” my stuttered speech, but that he didn’t want to listen and did not want to belong in time to a common world with this disabled person.
The Stall: “Part of it feels like my body goes into a kind of supplication or prayer almost. I have a friend who once referred to it as ‘watching me ask for the word’” (Ellis, 2020, n.p.).
The misfire: “The unexpectedness of stuttering forces both listener and speaker into a space of trust and vulnerability. They must both give up control of the situation. The person speaking does not know when and for how long they will stutter. Likewise, the person listening does not know when to expect a stutter. In order for both people to communicate, they must trust one another. (Constantino 2016, para. 5)
Ritual? Anti-ritual?

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Chris Constantino

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Clinical

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Source file

Chris Constantino (2021) ‘Stuttering as resistance: Lived experience, agency, and disability theory’. Metaphoric Stammers & Embodied Speakers: Clinical Workshop, Online, 12 Feb 2021.

References

Info

In our zeal to resist medical conceptions of stuttering do we just substitute one normalizing litmus test for another?

By rejecting fluency in and of itself or by asking whether forms of knowledge are consistent with our favorite model of disability, what ways of being do we disqualify?

I’m not comfortable telling another stutterer how to think/feel about their stuttering.

Stutterers are always already resisting how they are constituted.

How are they currently resisting societal demands for fluency?

How are they currently resisting their body’s demands for effortful speech?

Rather than see therapy as a means to liberate the self (be it fluent or stuttered) I suggest we see it as an exploration of the stutterer’s resistance and agency.

We explore how the stutterer has been constituted not to determine who they must be but to determine who they do not have to be.

We explore how they got here but leave where they’re going up to them.

In my clinical experience, most stutterers value both an increase in their ability to resist societal pressures to speak fluently and an increase in fluency, or at least easier stuttering.