Time

My contribution to The Stammering Collective was a talk reflecting on my work carried out over the last 10 years in relation to public understanding and awareness of stammering.  I questioned how stammering is perceived and defined by the public, spoke about how we might change wider understanding of stammering, and how we might be able to move beyond popular narratives of “overcoming” stammering.

Media engagement has been part of my professional roles with the Irish Stammering Association, the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists and the International Communication Project. A consistent theme I have promoted in print media, online publications, and in radio and television interviews is that, essentially, it is ok to stammer. Furthermore, it need not be seen as a negative quality needing to be fixed and it should certainly not limit the possibilities for an individual. These messages need to be repeated.

As the talk was intended as a conversation starter, it did not have a neat conclusion. Public engagement will continue over the coming years. I look forward to seeing where the conversation leads to in 2032 and again in 2042. I would hope that the “overcoming” narrative has changed and that I am able to listen to many more stammering voices on my hologram device. I also hope that these stammering voices are talking about lots of interesting things beyond the topic of stammering.  

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).

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?

• ‍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.