Writing as Being: On the Existential Primacy of Writing for a Deaf Scholar

Abstract

This article employs analytic autoethnography to study online events and social media that I participated in as a deaf scholar during the COVID-19 pandemic. With reference to Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, this article asserts the existential primacy of writing as a critical subject of inquiry for confronting normative language ideologies about what language is and how and where language is produced, received, understood, and performed.

“The competition between the history of writing and the science of language is sometimes lived out in terms of hostility rather than collaboration.”

—Jacques Derrida (2016, p. 89)

Introduction

This article employs analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006) to study online events and social media that I participated in as a deaf scholar during the COVID-19 pandemic. With reference to Derrida’s (1978, 2016) philosophy of deconstruction, this article asserts the existential primacy of writing as a critical subject of inquiry for confronting normative language ideologies about what language is and how and where language is produced, received, understood, and performed. Derrida’s views may be useful in terms of accounting for the complexity of what language means for different people with differing access to different affordances, or with “assymetries” in terms of the senses and other orientations (De Meulder et al., 2019; Kusters et al., 2017). In addition, the concept of semiotic repertoire, including, but not limited to, linguistic resources (Kusters, 2021; Kusters et al., 2017), can better account for a range of communicative practices by people who do not always have access to the same languages, modalities, affordances, and orientations. Reciprocity is the basis for language emergence and communication (Edwards, 2014). At the same time, with reference to writing and to non-normative communication, we can consider where and how reciprocity may occur.

Derrida’s philosophy is of interest because of the challenges he poses to structuralist views of language and writing that remain pervasive in various language-related disciplines and that emerged in the social media encounters reported in this article. Structuralism sustains “a system of metaphysical oppositions” (Derrida, 1978, p. 19) between binary concepts such as nature and culture, presence and absence, sound and vision, and speech and writing. Structuralism relies on the notions of a “center or origin” (p. 289) for language as an autonomous, internal grammatical system and of a “transcendental signified” (p. 280) for meaning. Derrida shows these notions are always outside the structures in themselves and therefore contradictory. In other words, language has no point of origin and meaning is never complete. Yet, he preferred to reinhabit and deconstruct rather than destroy this vast school of thought. As Derrida (2016) writes, “the movements of deconstruction are not interested in structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, they cannot take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures” (p. 25). In this article, I will attempt to elucidate some of his ideas further.

Analytic autoethnography is concerned with the researcher’s particular experiences in terms of understanding broader social phenomena (Anderson, 2006). In privileging the relational and embodied nature of knowledge and experience, autoethnography does not involve a specific set of methodologies (Adams & Jones, 2014). However, in analytic autoethnography, the researcher is a “full member” in the research setting and visible in her published texts (Anderson, 2006, p. 375). The autoethnographer’s insights emerge from “engaged dialogue” as well as from introspection and reflexivity (Anderson, 2006, p. 382). Indeed, the original idea for this article emerged during email conversations with an autistic faculty colleague, Jason Nolan, regarding communication and behavioral expectations that we have come up against before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such exchanges and personal communications with colleagues drive many of the findings and analyses reported in this article.

This article advances a view of identities as relational accomplishments and writing as freedom of speech (Adams & Jones, 2014; Derrida, 1978). In the next section, I recount a main online exchange that gave shape to many ideas contained in this article. I discuss non-normative approaches to defining language using a deconstructionist framework that questions the idea that writing represents reality instead of constituting a way of being, and provide several examples from deaf, deafblind, and autistic people’s languaging. These examples complicate the categorization of what is seen as (a) language and as not being language, specifically writing. Following this, I discuss some problems with normative orientations and sociality related to the role of institutions, including universities, in reproducing social relations. Finally, I outline issues related to mediated communication via sign language interpreters and non-normative approaches toward understanding.

Where Is Language?

Part of the inspiration for this article came from a Twitter exchange in April 2021 where I was unsuccessful in attempting to argue for a view of writing systems as (a) language. The original tweet featured an image of Egyptian hieroglyphs accompanied by a comment from the tweeter, a professor of linguistic anthropology, about the time spent explaining to her students that writing systems are not languages. This attracted my interest as I regard writing as a primary, unmediated means of communication. As a deaf faculty member and researcher, I regularly deliver lectures, meet with students, and perform the other teaching and service functions of my role in a context of mediated communication via a sign language interpreter. I replied to her tweet asking what she meant and was told, “Writing is a modality that can be used for language, but a writing system is not ‘a language.’ Hieroglyphs are not a language any more than the Roman alphabet is a language. It’s a way of representing other languages.” This scholar explained that beginning students of linguistics “tend to equate writing with languages” and that languages without writing systems are often viewed as incomplete. Thus, sensibly, this scholar was challenging the hegemony of written language, and my seeming defense of it was incongruous. Indeed, there are hierarchies of semiotic resources and modalities dependent on context, power relationships between people, and access to resources (Kusters et al., 2017). Moreover, diverse semiotic repertoires are not equally available to all people (Moriarty & Kusters, 2021). Therefore, both ideologies and counter-ideologies of language and writing are contextual, with shifting stakes that depend on context.

In responding to this thread, I was attempting to address what I saw as the underlying perception of language as a formal linguistic system that is a priori or anterior to what takes place when someone writes (in other words, the modality of writing is an expression of the named language as a complete linguistic system, which a priori resides elsewhere than in the act of writing and is just being borrowed or channeled in one modality when writing takes place). While the discipline of linguistic anthropology purports to reject structuralism, it remains informed by it, and structuralism also remains pervasive in theoretical linguistics. Nativist and constructionist views of language acquisition are also based on the idea that writing systems are not language (McCracken, 2021). Thus, as this exchange shows, these disciplines can have a problematic yet authoritative categorization of what is (a) language and what is not language, specifically writing. Derrida’s (2016) philosophy is based on deconstructing these structuralist imaginings, which can be traced back to Aristotle, who held that “spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words” (p. 11). Saussure, to whom Derrida (2016) directed many of his arguments, was a chief proponent of a structuralist framework in linguistics and argued that “languages are independent of writing” (p. 44) and writing exists to represent language. Ironically, in light of the above-mentioned tweet’s image of hieroglyphics, Saussure’s view of writing is relevant chiefly to phonetic writing as a nonphonetic and nonarbitrary writing system contradicts his thesis that writing represents the “internal system” of (spoken) language (Derrida, 2016, p. 36). However, Derrida (2016) argues, writing is not a representation of language or “a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs” (p. 46).

Furthermore, what Derrida terms a logocentric view of writing and language overlooks how writing is a way of being in the world rather than representing it. Derrida (2016) held that writing itself is language and not “exterior” to it (p. 46). In other words, there is no site of origin for language except what emerges in writing. I am not representing speech when I write, and writing is not a degraded version of the original, uncontaminated language. This nonrepresentational view is supported by on-the-ground language practices of people with different sensory orientations that highlight how the valence of certain practices or instruments, such as writing, changes according to their affordances. This point also illustrates how all resources work together as an assemblage for meaning-making (Canagarajah, 2021).

For example, as Manning (2020) writes, “DeafBlind culture has a longstanding tradition of letter-writing and email listservs” that dates from the emergence of tactile codes. In March and April 2021, I participated in the Protactile Theory Seminar led by deafblind educator and poet John Lee Clark. This experience has influenced my view of language, representationalism, and affordances as a deaf writer. A main aspect of this seminar was a profusion of written communication in the form of emails between seminar participants. In this context, it does not seem reasonable to think of deafblind people’s extensive written communication and sociality merely in terms of representing a language that exists somewhere else as a site of origin or in a more authentic way, such as being heard, spoken, or seen. This is a very particular way of regarding literacy, language, and thought (Pennycook, 2018). For some deafblind and deaf people (and other people), writing is the only way this particular language and form of communication exists; writing is the language itself that emerges from situated interactions (Goico, 2021). The primacy of writing also emerges with autistic people, many of whom demonstrate advanced literacy skills even when they are nonspeaking (McCracken, 2021). Tactile codes used by deafblind people have resulted in a profusion of written communication and community building; similarly, the growth of orthographic messaging technology has supported the flourishing of autistic culture and visibility (McCracken, 2021). Thus, writing can be a world-making project. In some respects, this perspective invokes a New Literacy Studies perspective that understands texts, writers, and literacy practices as being in the world, social, and spatial (Gee, 2008).

Ironically, however, on Twitter I found that I was unable to fully articulate how writing is being in the world. This may have been partly because on Twitter, in writing as an unmediated form of communication, I am not immediately recognized as a deaf person who does not speak, and thus the authority of my being was not visible. As Brueggemann (2010) wrote, “through writing, I pass” (p. 219). Similarly, McCracken (2021) has noted that autistic people’s language and communication differences are less salient in writing. Although deaf, deafblind, and autistic people with proficiency in written languages may be more likely to “pass” in writing where our social identities are less apparent, these identities are at the crux of giving narrative accounts of ourselves (Butler, 2005). As Butler (2005) notes, “certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call for the recognition of new norms” (p. 24). These ruptures or “events” shake the foundations of structuralism as they are not supposed to happen according to the system.

In asking where language resides if not in writing systems that are used as a primary means of communication, we are formulating an existential question and not a representational question. Derrida (1978) argued that writing is “inaugural”: “It creates meaning by enregistering it, by entrusting it to an engraving, a groove, a relief, to a surface whose essential characteristic is to be infinitely transmissible” (pp. 11–12). He quotes Merleau-Ponty: “My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think” (Derrida, 1978, p. 11). Scholars of new materialism similarly argue that reality is composed of and emergent in phenomena rather than in things (Barad, 2007). New materialism also questions representationalism, or the idea that language encodes knowledge or represents reality instead of being a material practice in itself (Barad, 2007; Canagarajah, 2021). Meaning and knowledge fully emerge in activity rather than in a primary site of origin, and language is embodied (Canagarajah, 2020). Texts are not representations but phenomena; they are “condensations or traces of multiple practices of engagement” (Barad, 2007, p. 53). This echoes Derrida’s (2016) concept of the trace, or “a signifier referring in general to a signifier signified by it,” that is “a possibility common to all systems of signification” (p. 50). In other words, trace is the mark of an anterior presence, the “origin of the origin” where writing begins but which is never reachable (Derrida, 2016, p. 66). Trace is akin to “différance” as the ineffable concept that Derrida seeks to convey and that is the condition of, possibility for, and process of becoming language and meaning. Not only is there no original language that exists intact from writing, but also language has been writing all along (Derrida, 2016, p. 61).

Access and Affordances

In arguing on Twitter that writing is (a) language, I was also conscious of differing access and different affordances that shape our view of what language is and where it resides. I was challenging the primacy of speech from the perspective of someone who does not have access to it, while my interlocutors on Twitter were perhaps thinking of (spoken) languages without writing systems, or of languages with a multiplicity of writing systems and scripts, such as Punjabi or Japanese. However, Derrida (2016) argued that communities who are stated to lack writing systems “never lack more than a certain type of writing” (pp. 90–91), as naming is a function of all societies and a practice of writing, and as logocentrism, or the metaphysics of phonetic or alphabetic writing, is fundamentally ethnocentric.

This issue illustrates how when a semiotic resource becomes primary for communication, the view of language changes. For example, as shown in research regarding interactions between deaf and hearing people in Mumbai, the distinction between gesture and sign language is blurry and may collapse depending on the context (Kusters & Sahasrabudhe, 2018). Indeed, in much of the global South, deaf and hearing people may engage in signed communication that is not labeled as a (national) sign language (Kusters & Sahasrabudhe, 2018; see also Green, 2017). This challenges the modality chauvinism that views speech as language or gesture as nonlinguistic. Moreover, signed communication used between deaf and hearing people in these contexts illustrates the importance of unmediated communication without sign language interpreters who “can create other kinds of barriers and boundaries between deaf and hearing people” (Kusters & Sahasrabudhe, 2018, p. 61). Thus, the affordances of particular semiotic resources shape our views of what language is and expose how such views are ideologically constructed. This in turn extends to writing by deaf, deafblind, and autistic persons as a primary semiotic resource.

As Kusters et al. (2017) note, individuals acquire semiotic resources “over the course of their life trajectories through membership or participation in various socio-cultural spaces in which their identities are measured against normative centres of practice” (p. 4). People can also lack or have limited access to resources, or lose access over time. The affordances of particular semiotic resources emerge within sensory ecologies that in turn emerge from and shape life trajectories and our interactions with others (Hoffman-Dilloway, 2021).

Most of us are born into a world where language is already there. We hear sounds and voices in utero and are born to parents and caregivers whose sensory ecologies are reciprocal with ours (Kusters, 2017). Other uses of language, including writing, that we acquire are subsequent to and follow from this initiation to the world. However, if we are born deaf or deafblind, we may encounter language not immediately but elsewhere (as we may not fully access language in our home environment). Such language and our mastery of it may not (ever) be viewed as complete in normative terms. Deaf and deafblind children born to hearing and sighted parents may not receive a habitus from or experience reciprocal communication with their primary caregivers but rather within a school or community later in childhood or possibly much further beyond (Edwards, 2014; Edwards & Brentari, 2020; Hoffman-Dilloway, 2021).

If we become, instead of being born, deaf or deafblind, we may need to give up the mastery of language and begin anew. For example, we may no longer be able to make use of the affordances of spoken or signed language via the auditory-oral modality and/or the visual/gestural modality that formerly we had access to, as with many deafblind people who were born sighted and gradually lose vision (Edwards, 2014). In these circumstances, the aural/oral and/or visual/gestural language may be unlearned or erode semiotically, and reciprocity in communication is lost (Edwards, 2014; Edwards & Brentari, 2020). Thus, other uses of language, including writing, may not be adjacent or subsequent to, but primarily how we interact with and interpret the world; they maintain and constitute the “psychological reality” of language (Edwards, 2014, p. 4). In writing, we can become a writer, which is a way of being in the world and not simply representing it. Language requires and entails just such a means of acquiring and occupying social positions (Edwards, 2014), which may not or may no longer be possible for newly deaf or deafblind individuals in an auditory and/or visual realm. Lack of access to a named and conventionalized language also restricts access to social, educational, and economic roles and resources (Hoffman-Dilloway, 2021). Losing or gaining access to language may mean losing or gaining social roles, including being seen as a source of knowledge (Edwards, 2021c).

Indeed, deaf and deafblind people and autistic people, including those without access to a conventionalized language, may make greater use of semiotic resources, and be more creative and proficient in multimodal communication, such as gesture and drawing, than typically hearing-seeing-speaking people (De Meulder et al., 2019; Green, 2015, 2017; Hoffman-Dilloway, 2021; Kusters, 2017). At the same time, deaf and deafblind people and autistic people’s language proficiencies are subject to policing by normative standards, such as when sign language learning by deaf children is restricted by governments and early intervention and inclusive education systems (Goico, 2021; Snoddon & Paul, 2020); or deaf or autistic people are judged negatively for not speaking, or for speaking with a “deaf accent” or autistic prosody; or deafblind people are pressured to perform according to sighted deaf signing standards, which privilege the notion that the world comes to us from a distance through sight or hearing instead of being readily available through touch (Clark, n.d.). Distantism constructs the individual “as a rational and literate being, whose sensual engagement with the world is through eyes and ears” (Pennycook, 2018, p. 71). Distantism is also a hallmark of neurotypicality, which privileges independence instead of “the emergent sociality that is woven into the vulnerability of existence” (Manning, 2020). Autistic people retain “more carnal, sensory and embodied ways of knowing” (Nolan & McBride, 2015, p. 1071) that are the target of reparative therapy aimed at “behavioural shaping toward the normative” (Yergeau, 2018, p. 29). In these ways, people’s humanity and intelligibility are verified or contested based on their approximation of normative communication (Edwards, 2014).

Languaging as an activity is a way to becoming an identity, as with the protactile movement led by deafblind people “that seeks to make increasing claims on the world” (J. L. Clark, personal communication, March 14, 2021) via the language of protactile. Since about 2010 in Seattle, protactile language has evolved from deafblind people’s “intuitions about tactile communication” (Edwards & Brentari, 2020; Granda & Nuccio, 2018) and “a shared desire for immediacy and co-presence,” and reciprocity (Edwards, 2014, p. 2). This process has to some extent replaced the mediated communication via sighted American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters that was largely how deafblind people had communicated with each other prior to the emergence of protactile (Edwards, 2021c). The process of “going tactile” and figuring out a language that deafblind people can use directly with one another and that embodies the tactile world is a way to confront the problem of existence. It means figuring out a way that the world can work for us. This process means reinterpreting the affordances of the tactile world and of language. Language is not there a priori but is created in the act of use. As Clark (2021) writes of protactile signers, “By bumping into, sniffing, tapping, brushing past, we are gathering intelligence of our own.”

The process of protactile language emergence has meant letting go of norms and identities based on visual ways of being and “re-uniting language with the affective and physical dimensions of the world” (Edwards, 2021c, p. 68). As such, protactile signers have created and assumed new identities. In turn, these identities have granted protactile signers greater access to social roles and economic resources, such as assuming leadership and educator positions within deafblind agencies and organizations (Edwards, 2021c). This illustrates how the ways in which we make use of instruments, such as writing, in terms of their affordances for action allow us to take on new roles and ultimately identities (Edwards, 2021c; Kockelman, 2006).

Orientation, Sociality, and Power

Kusters et al. (2017) note that contemporary social environments cannot presuppose straightforward associations between people we encounter and particular sociocultural groups and identities, or between people and communicative norms that become ascribed to membership in sociocultural groups and labeled as languages. In other words, we cannot assume there are “stable descriptions of stable tasks performed by stable persons with stable and always relevant social identities” (McDermott & Varenne, 1996, pp. 111–112). Derrida was keenly aware of these assumptions. Born in 1930, his Sephardic family was part of the community of “Juifs d’Algérie” that had (unlike Arabic and Berber peoples in colonial Algeria) received French citizenship in 1870. However, his family, like other Jewish people in Algeria, lost their citizenship in 1940 during the Vichy regime and were exiled following Algerian independence in 1962 (Salmon, 2020). As such, Derrida was caught between nations, identities, and languages. Of the French language he wrote, “I love it as a foreigner that has been welcomed, and who has appropriated this language for himself as the only possible language for him” (quoted in Salmon, 2020, p. 25).

For a different example of assumptions regarding the relationship between language and identity, previous understandings of deaf people’s group identity and shared membership in sign language communities and deaf cultures (Kusters et al., 2015) have been supplanted by recognition of the superdiversity among deaf people. This is in part due to an increasing awareness of categories of migrants (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Vertovec, 2007). Deaf migrants may not always have had access to traditional Western sites of sign language learning and enculturation, such as deaf schools (Sivunen, 2019). Deaf people’s group identity as sign language users marked a radical shift from dominant conceptions of deaf people as deficient individuals in need of a cure. However, in demonstrating the linguistic validity of sign languages and the potentiality of bilingual education for deaf learners, deaf studies also produced a normative ideal of deaf people as fluent signers who are enculturated and identified principally through relationships with, and relationships with people who have attended, deaf schools and Gallaudet University as the world’s only university for deaf people. Prior to the enactment of provincial funding cuts and policy barriers, significant numbers of deaf Canadians used to attend Gallaudet but no longer do so (Canadian Hearing Society, 2014); thus, a new and unstable norm of deaf personhood that is less tethered to institutions is emerging in Canada.

The relationship between institutions such as a deaf school or Gallaudet and access to semiotic resources such as ASL as a national sign language also influences how affordances are interpreted. For example, there may be what are perceived as more and less legitimate and illegitimate uses and users of language and semiotic resources, such as writing, which is often thought of as a resource to which deaf people may have less access. This is due to deaf people being perceived as having less access to spoken language, which writing is often thought to represent, but as the examples and arguments cited earlier in this article highlight, these assumptions, based on representationalism and structuralism, can be problematic. It cannot be said that writing is parasitic on or follows after speech (Derrida, 2016). This point also illustrates how we are socialized into certain uses and nonuses of language, including writing where other deaf people may see some deaf people as interlopers. Both normative deaf ideals and deficiency models of deaf people aspire toward a communicative norm of either a fluent sign language or a fluent spoken language user. However, as Canagarajah (2021) notes, an individual’s repertoire may not correspond to that of a named community even if the individual participates in that community to a greater or lesser extent. Rather, individuals often have variable and fragmentary grasps of diverse styles, registers, and genres that are acquired and may be lost during the individual’s life trajectory (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011). An ethics of non-normative communication recognizes that people “draw on any kinds of resources useful and accessible to them, with varying degrees of fluency determining the scope of such resources” (De Meulder et al., 2019; Kusters et al., 2017, p. 4). Negotiation of repertoires is an ethical activity as semiotic repertoires are valued differentially and index power differentials (Canagarajah, 2021).

For various reasons, individuals may reject, or be compelled to reject, alignment with social groups in terms of linguistic socialization. Instead of communicating with and orienting to other people through touch, deafblind people who grew up sighted may feel compelled by their prior sociality, and the sociality of sighted others, to maintain communicative conventions that are rooted in distantism, or the norms of sighted deaf people (Edwards, 2014). Similarly, autistic people’s communicative competence is often evaluated in terms of how well individuals are viewed as passing for neurotypical (McCracken, 2021). Conversely, through the protactile movement, deafblind people construct a tactile habitus and assume new and agentive social positions (Edwards, 2014), and this is also true of autistic people who employ typing or augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to communicate. However, such social positions for people with sensory asymmetries may not be stable, nor are normative constraints on communication always pushed aside easily.

For example, in April 2021, the university department where I teach and where I am the only deaf and ASL-using person held a large meeting via Zoom. There were two sign language interpreters booked because we anticipated a longer meeting, but I did not turn on my video camera when I logged onto Zoom. Over the past year of virtual meetings, I have learned to ask that participants turn off their cameras in order not to have a large gallery of faces taking up screen space, although this often means that the person everyone looks at is the interpreter.

At the beginning of the meeting, attendees were asked to individually type our names in Zoom chat for the benefit of the minutes-taker. I was relieved because I thought this would take care of the introductions that hearing-speaking people seem to insist on at the beginning of every large Zoom meeting and also the chat function enables me to communicate directly with my peers through writing. However, after this, the faculty member chairing the meeting started to ask individual attendees to one by one turn on their video cameras and introduce themselves by name and title. I could not bring myself to turn on my camera to again “introduce” myself (i.e., move my hands for the nonsigning audience and have the interpreter speak while everyone else watched), and instead, I typed in the chat that I had already introduced myself. I knew, however, that in my momentary failure to perform normative sociality and enact my social identity as a deaf person whose communication with hearing colleagues must be mediated by an interpreter, I had violated a fundamental convention of department Zoom meetings that had emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic and made myself appear rude and uncooperative. I felt shaken and worried. I could not sleep that night. I felt as if I had disturbed a certain “ceremonial order” of politeness that rests on putting hearing-speaking-seeing people at ease but not the reverse (Edwards, 2021a).

Others who may resist or stumble during the performed approximation of the norms of hearing-speaking-seeing-in-person communication include not only deaf and neurodiverse people and people who stutter (Dumas, 2010) but also racialized people who may not seamlessly pass in terms of normative white sociality. For example, Canagarajah (2018) describes the communicative practices of international STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math) scholars at a midwestern American university. These scholars are perceived as being difficult to understand when spoken English is the only means for communication, but as masterful teachers and communicators when their drawing, gestures, and writing on the classroom chalkboard and orientation toward students are taken into account (Canagarajah, 2018). These data challenge structuralist and developmentalist views of language proficiencies as the achievement of communicative norms and illustrate the distributed nature of language competence (Canagarajah, 2018). This issue also reveals the ways in which the utterances of people who speak, or who are regarded as speaking, what are deemed to be non-native varieties of English are policed by normative standards (Ro, 2021).

For another example, autistic people may reject making eye contact and engaging in active and reciprocal communication according to normative communication standards (Friedner & Block, 2017). By these standards, autistic people who do not speak and who make use of alternate ways of communicating and social engagement, such as typing and participation through writing in online groups, are stigmatized and viewed as inferior (Friedner & Block, 2017; Nolan & McBride, 2015). Autistic people are expected to embrace “disembodied and non-intuitive notions of feeling, sensing, communicating, and relating” based on neurotypical and normative communication standards (Nolan & McBride, 2015, p. 1071). This expectation illustrates how cultures “actively organize ways for persons to be disabled” (McDermott & Varenne, 1996, p. 109). As Nolan and McBride (2015) argue, a named language is the medium for enculturation into normative sociality and alienation from autistic people’s own knowledge of the world.

Like deaf children, autistic people are claimed to lack theory of mind, or the notion that other people have their own mental states, feelings, and desires (Schick et al., 2007; Yergeau, 2018). As Yergeau (2018) argues, such claims negate the humanity and intentionality of autistic people. Furthermore, these claims are based on the normative assumption that neurotypical hearing-speaking individuals can know and understand other people (Pennycook, 2018). Rather, both autistic and nonautistic people share a mutual lack of comprehension of the other’s cognitive processes and cultural practices (McCracken, 2021). Instead, according to Duranti, an intersubjectivity based on reciprocal empathy enables understanding and communication (Edwards, 2021b). However, a named and bounded language is not necessary for intersubjectivity (Edwards, 2021b).

Mediated Communication and Understanding

In April 2021, a sign language interpreter posted in Facebook about a preamble to a YouTube video in ASL with a deaf presenter that included a voiceover relayed by hearing interpreters (Cyr, 2021). The interpreter posted an image of the preamble, which contained the following text:

The interpretation provided for this presentation is live and unrehearsed. Interpreter(s) assigned may or may not have had materials in advance for preparation. Inaccuracies related to the content of the material may be due to imperfections in the interpreting process. This interpretation has not been reviewed by the presenter. (Cyr, 2021)

Accompanying this image, the interpreter posted an ASL video of themselves explaining the context for the preamble and asking whether it is important for a hearing audience to know in advance that sign language interpreters may make errors when relaying a deaf person’s ASL presentation into spoken English. In the comments below the post, the same interpreter remarked on video interviews with deaf people that highlight the presence of an interpreter onscreen, and interviews with deaf people in print media that emphasize the reported communication took place through an interpreter. What is the discursive function of foregrounding both the presence of mediated communication and its fallibility?

If something is always lost in translation, this does not mean that in ontological terms there is or ever was a pure original unmarked by translation. There is the “impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence” (Derrida, 2016, p. 72). In Derridean terms, the “translated deaf self” (Young et al., 2019) always already inhabits and is inhabited by the sign language interpreter as a condition of its being, “the absolute other in me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me” (Derrida, 2005, p. 68). In mediated communication, the interpreter is perceived as representing the deaf person who is perceived through the person of the interpreter, while it is rarely considered how the interpreter may also be perceived to represent a hearing person who does not sign (Young et al., 2019). This relationship often rests on fundamental power imbalances and lack of reciprocity between deaf and hearing people (Clark, 2021). In other words, there are “ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly define intelligibility” (Butler, 2004, p. 57) and define who is seen as intelligible (see Green, 2021). In mediated communication, there is a perceived absence of intersubjectivity between deaf and hearing individuals, and the presence of interpreters as a symbol of the deaf person’s access can paradoxically work to reinforce, rather than dismantle inequalities (Young et al., 2019). For this reason, the preamble posted in Facebook may well serve as a reminder that sign language interpreters “do not solve communication problems in any absolute sense” (De Meulder & Haualand, 2019; Young et al., 2019, p. 106).

This point also underscores how writing is less mediated than face-to-face communication as a situated speech event with an interpreter and nonsigning hearing colleagues. In these contexts, writing is a more reliable way for being understood. This is because my contributions to faculty meetings and my presentations to nonsigning audiences sometimes feel as if they have not been received due to an occasional lack of response and reciprocity. In contrast, in writing I can communicate directly with nondeaf peers; writing is a venue where I can be the author and authority of my own message. However, as seen above in the Zoom meeting incident and Twitter exchange, even in writing I can fail to convey a message or approximate the normative standards for communication that shadow that message. Scully (2018) refers to this as “epistemic injustice” whereby disabled people are constructed as incapable of possessing knowledge, often due to a failure of the constructor’s own epistemic resources.

In seeking to replicate the illusion of normative communication or pursue the notion of accuracy in translation, interpreters and interlocutors may often attempt to minimize attention to the presence of an interpreter or attempt to neutralize the interpreter’s role. Instead, however, we might openly discuss and acknowledge mediated communication as a relational and distributed practice and assemblage that is as much dependent on the presence, agency, and competence of a signing deaf or deafblind person as it is on an interpreter or a hearing-speaking interlocutor. Similarly, autistic people’s use of facilitated communication where they are encouraged to communicate by another person’s touch has been shown to function unevenly but offers potential for expression (Friedner & Block, 2017). Clark draws attention to the “aesthetics of fumbling” and criticizes the emphasis on “perfect delivery”; as he argues, “We should be doing a lot more fumbling, and expose to each other our various fumblings toward articulation, toward a message” (J.L. Clark, personal communication, March 30, 2021).

The unreliability of mediated communication for deaf people draws attention to the notion of mutual understanding and its achievability through language. Saussure saw language as encoding ideas that are passed as messages to another individual to decode, but this view of language, rooted in structuralism and representationalism, overlooks the contextualized and uncertain nature of all communication and uses of language that extend beyond communication (Pennycook, 2018). Derrida (1978) refers to the “fatal risk” of “the emancipation of meaning . . . from the natural predicament in which everything refers to the disposition of a contingent situation” (p. 12). Structuralist and representationalist views of language also overlook mutual misunderstanding as a communicative norm. Thus, misunderstanding of deaf people may be based less in linguistic difference than in the puzzle of working each other out. As Pennycook (2018) notes, “understanding is messy, incomplete, different, complicated and never entirely shared” (p. 107).

Conclusion

This article has been motivated by the existential primacy of writing “as a certain absolute freedom of speech” (Derrida, 1978, p. 12) for a deaf scholar. Using analytic autoethnography to report and analyze data from my own experience, this article has outlined several directions from which the primacy of writing may be asserted and normative communication and language ideologies may be challenged. In considering how language is manifested for people with diverse sensory asymmetries, affordances, and orientations, we can counter structuralist ideologies of language as an internalized grammatical system and writing as a representation of speech or language. Instead, language is seen to emerge from situated interactions across a variety of semiotic repertoires and resources, including in writing systems and communicative practices employed by deaf, deafblind, and autistic people. Instead of acting as a means for encoding knowledge, writing is where knowledge and meaning emerge. Semiotic resources emerge from and are shaped by our life trajectories and interactions with others. We can lose access to resources and, as in the case of writing and of protactile language, be made and make the world anew by the acquisition and puzzling out of new semiotic resources. Alternately, as in the case of diverse signing deaf people, we may position ourselves in relation to a communicative norm of fluent and enculturated language users, but not (fully) comply with that norm. We may reject neurotypical ways of engagement and communication to maintain our own knowledge of the world. Instead of seeking to replicate normative communication ideals, interlocutors can foreground the fumbling and anticipate the misunderstanding that takes place in mediated and unmediated communication as a relational and distributed practice.