“Hello? Are you still there?”

Publication

The action of making 
something generally known.

— Oxford Dictionary

The format that the text / typeface is packaged in is as important as the textual content or typeface itself. Kind of like how in JJJJJerome’s work, there’s an interesting relationship to song or score sheets, through his use of a publication that is linked to his music. The format of this requires a unique level of engagement from the reader and listener.

Since I created the first issue of Dysfluent, I have been thinking about how the format of a publication defines the intent behind the work. It made me think about while there is a certain power to publication, there is also a quietness and consideration to it. At least from a design or artistic perspective, it requires a great deal of engagement from the viewer.

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Protest

A statement or action expressing disapproval of 
or objection to something.

— Oxford Dictionary

Recently I have been thinking of this concept of display, or posters, or for lack of a better term, protest.

Protest to me is really interesting from a creative or design stand point. For a person to display a poster, it is a deliberate act of reflecting an inner voice or identity, for the world to see.

I think of teenagers pinning up posters in their bedrooms, and of people marching on the streets voicing concerns. There is a certain passion or aggression (maybe not the right word?) to the idea of posters.

How does the idea of protest or display speak to earlier discussions on stigma?

I was interested to see what Fiona showed earlier in our talks, that banner where children visualised their stammer. There is something really nice there in terms of displaying their dysfluency.

It gets me thinking then. What is the content of the posters? What do they say? Do they need to say anything? or can they just be visualisations of dysfluency?

You have to see yourself in society to be a part of that society

Visual activism to confront and challenge societal preconceptions:

Look → Think → Act

Simi Linton (1998) in Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity quoted by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson:
 "We wield that white cane, or ride that wheelchair or limp that limp” … luxuriate in that stammer?

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The portrait invites us to stare, engrossed perhaps less with the “strangeness” of this woman’s disability and more with the strangeness of witnessing such dignity in a face that marks a life we have learned to imagine as unliveable and unworthy, as the kind of person we routinely detect in advance through medical technology and eliminate from our human community.

— Garland-Thomson (2009)

Flaunt the visible marks of disability. The relish with which disabled people can live their identity and present themselves to the starees.

What is the fluent gaze? Can we see it in cinema? Is the gaze the right conception due to the auditory nature of stammering? Is there an oppositional gaze: a stammered/dysfluent gaze?

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‘The scene for the portrait is designed by a stammerer; photographed and painted by a stammerer; of a stammerer stammering. The stammered gaze.’ — Patrick Campbell

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Close-up of Dysfluent mono typeface, in use in Dysfluent magazine issue 1.

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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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