Abstract
This article ethnographically considers the experiences of Australian young people who were born deaf and who hear and listen through cochlear implants to explore the intersection between the sensory body, lived experience and technology. The article draws on phenomenology to examine how experiences of deafness are productive in analysing articulations of embodiment and the meanings embedded in a body that is valued as both deaf and hearing. Leaving aside binary conceptions of deaf versus hearing, and understandings of the cochlear implant as a remedy for sensory deficits, we instead make a case for nuanced understandings of the device and embodied experiences through technology. This analysis identifies how a cochlear implanted body navigates connections to the world and to others in turning on and off engagement. We contend that the device has an intrinsic value for recipients through enabling their access to hearing while not removing their experiences of deafness.
Introduction
Melanie was 18 years old and had received a cochlear implant when she was an infant. She sat in a park with the first author and talked about her everyday experiences of living with a cochlear implant and what it was like to be deaf yet also to hear through a surgically implanted biotechnological device. She said, I normally keep my implants off at night when I’m going to sleep; it’s peaceful and quiet and I don’t have to hear any noise. Sometimes I keep them on to feel secure and it’s nice to hear things while I’m going to sleep, my breathing or music. In the morning when I’m awake, I always put them on to hear the house. Once I can hear the world it’s like my radar – are people talking, moving around, making tea? The house is awake.
Melanie was attuned and perceptive to the sounds of her body and her house as she moved through her daily ritual of waking and sleeping and connecting and disconnecting; her cochlear implant enabled a sensory perception and navigation of the world as both deaf and hearing. Melanie’s cochlear implant is ‘her radar’ that discerns external activity beyond her bedroom: ‘the house is awake’.
In this article, we examine the intersection of the senses and technology to probe what counts as a lived body (Blackman, 2008, 2010). Drawing on phenomenology and theories of the senses, our analysis considers the way an implanted body perceives and navigates the world through a capacity for connection, to turn on and turn off sensory perception and engagement. We consider how intentionality shapes encounters with social and sensorial realities through time and space both within and without the home. Intentionally moving away from a more-than-human or cyborg lens (Chorost, 2005; Haraway, 1991; Mills, 2012; Valente, 2011), we explore articulations and enactments of bodily and sensory experience through cochlear implanted bodies that are in flux and open to processes and relational connections between the body, the senses, technologies and artefacts. We illustrate how these assemblages are perceived through bodies that are both deaf and hearing, which challenge binary and bounded categories in deafness and disability to unsettle a deaf-hearing dichotomy. Rather than seeing the implant as a means to eradicate deafness, this article illustrates the way everyday practices are transformed by cochlear implants to allow for a deep embracing of sensory experiences and connection with others.
In considering deaf people with cochlear implants, this study supports a call for ‘researchers to gather their stories’ (Friedner and Kusters, 2020; Mauldin, 2016: 171; Snell, 2015). We examine the significance of the implant in analysing narratives of young adults and consider the notion that ‘the body is not an object to be studied in relation to culture but is to be considered as the subject of culture’ (Csordas, 1990: 5). Lived experience through bodily or sensory engagement reveals the ‘perceived world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 6), and our senses provide a way to make sense of this world (Le Breton, 2017: 1). We perceive through an intentional consciousness and embodied perception, or to put it another way, ‘a body which embraces and constitutes the world’ (Le Breton, 2017: 10). We consider how daily life is experienced by a body that perceives and senses through implanted technology.
Sound and hearing are socially constructed (Howes, 1991, 2003, 2006), and we contend that for some deaf people with cochlear implants, understanding the world is through being deaf and through hearing. Furthermore, for participants in this study, the device held intrinsic value through enabling hearing while not removing deafness. Deafness is not eliminated, but rather emerges in different forms as part of human diversity. We show how deaf people’s lived experience and embodied sensorial engagement with the world is agential, complex and relational.
Background on deafness and the cochlear implant is presented before scholarly research about the ways the senses are experienced through technology, and a description of the research methods. Turning to the everyday sensorial practices of young people, empirical data are discussed in three sections: embracing and valuing technology and deafness, navigating connection and disconnection through switching on and off sensory engagement and finally, how the cochlear implant might allow or provoke agency and choice. In these discussions, we draw on ethnographic data from young adults and from parents of children with cochlear implants.
Background: Deafness and the Cochlear Implant
Controversy has surrounded cochlear implants from early surgeries with deaf people in the 1980s and more specifically in the 1990s when young children began to be implanted. The device is targeted at ‘profoundly’ deaf children who do not hear at 90 decibels (Blume, 2010; Clark, 2003; Mauldin, 2016). Globally, the largest consumers of the implant are hearing parents of deaf children (Blume, 2010; Friedner, 2018; Mauldin, 2016). A cochlear implant has a surgically inserted internal device and an external part, the ‘speech processor’ that is located behind the ear. A microphone in the speech processor picks up sound and sends it via a transmitter coil that connects magnetically to the head, through the skin and into the internal device that has been surgically implanted under the skin. Sound is transferred to the 22 electrodes that are threaded into the inner ear cochlea and sent as electrical stimulation to the auditory nerve within the brain. The electrodes bypass the damaged or missing hair cells in the inner ear that normally code and transfer sound to the auditory part of the brain (Grayden and Clark, 2006). The device allows children who are born deaf to have access to sound and opportunities to learn to hear and speak (Sarant and Naz, 2012).
Hearing parents in the developed world were among the first to take up the Australian developed multi-channel cochlear implant device when it became available in the early 1990s. There was much debate at that time about the risks and ethical concerns from within the medical community and from society more broadly including from deaf people who largely rejected the device (Blume, 2010; Friedner, 2018; Mauldin, 2016).
A substantial body of research considers the impacts of cochlear implants on language, identity, representations of deafness and the ethics of disability (Christiansen and Leigh, 2010; Friedner and Kusters, 2020; Sparrow, 2005, 2010; Valente, 2011). Assumptions about implants reproduce tensions around notions of deafness that draw on ethical discourses about children’s rights, the body and parental decision-making (Blume, 2010; Kermit, 2010; Mauldin, 2016; Solomon, 2010; Sparrow, 2010). Parents who embrace cochlear implants for their children are often cast as experiencing deafness through a medical prism drawing them into long-term rehabilitative labour to develop oral communication and erase or render invisible the ‘pathological’ deafness (Mauldin, 2016).
The cochlear implant has been the subject of intense debates: alternatively hailed as a ‘miracle cure’ and a ‘quick fix’ that effectively transforms the deaf into hearing people, it is also viewed as a means of ‘cyborgizing’ deaf children (Valente, 2011) and enabling a post-human cybernetic sensory future (Chorost, 2005; Friedner and Helmreich, 2012; Mills, 2012). Sign language has been predicted to die a rapid death due to the cochlear implant (Johnston, 2006; Solomon, 2012), and in the global take up of the device, an ‘ethnocide’ of Deaf Culture is predicted (Eckert, 2010; Edwards, 2012; Humphries and Humphries, 2011). Parents of deaf children are often given an either-or choice – the implant or sign language – in their early meetings with health professionals and this rhetoric frames deafness as a hearing or deaf, speech or sign binary.
Mauldin (2014) has argued that paediatric cochlear implantation changed deafness from a sensory loss to a neurological processing problem and: the cochlear implant (CI) has been recast as a device that merely provides access to the brain. The ‘real’ treatment emerges as long-term therapeutic endeavours focused on neurological training. This redefinition brings forth an ensuing responsibility to ‘train the brain’, subsequently displacing failure from the device onto the individual’s (or their parent’s) ability to train his or her brain. (Mauldin, 2014: 32)
Scientific discourses in neuroplasticity are harnessed in debates about early screening and testing for deafness, and deaf children’s language acquisition and cognitive development (Mauldin, 2016; Yoshinaga-Itano et al., 2017). There is a shift in understanding the body as suffering from sensory impairment to thinking of it as one that is enhanced by a technological device that requires ongoing maintenance and training. This article contributes to this literature through a perspective grounded in the sensorium of an implanted body.
Embodied Technology
Phenomenological understandings of human consciousness, including that perception is a bodily experience and that subjectivity is a ‘bodily being in the world’ (Jackson, 1996: 32), frame the body as the fundamental site through which our understanding and knowledge of the world is constituted. Perception cannot be separated from the body; hence, the ontology of the ‘flesh world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). The concept of a lived body in a continuous experiential state through the joining of consciousness with the physical or mechanical body refutes a Cartesian division of mind and body. Furthermore, the body is affective and affected by technology, the senses, time and space and other people: it is relational (Blackman, 2008: 55). This article explores the reciprocity between embodied experiences, meaning and technology. Ihde (2007) points out, in discussing his experience with hearing loss and hearing aids, when humans use technologies, we ‘undergo an embodying process – we invent our technologies, but in use, they “re-invent” us as well’ (p. 243). Sterne’s (2021) concept of phenomenology of impairment draws on his experience of thyroid cancer and consequent vocal impairments. His framing of impairment ‘as a productive distortion of an ability’ (p. 194) rather than a defect or malfunction is valuable in a discussion of deafness.
This offers a departure point from a canonised tradition of transcendental phenomenology premised on privileged, able bodies being in control of their own faculties. In this article, we draw on insights from Sterne’s political phenomenology of impairment that recognise individual agency and context and that seek to understand the ways impairment offers affordances and possibilities for experiences. We note that for the interlocutors in this research, born with what is termed profound hearing loss, deafness is their primary lived experience not an acquired impairment.
In analysing experiences of bodily modes of knowing through cochlear implants, we capture the ‘back and forth between sensing and sense-making . . . between sensation and signification, feeling and meaning’ (Le Breton, 2017: ix). We explore the ways that the sensorium is experienced through an implanted body to understand the significances of this sensory perception in the navigation of technology, sound and the social world. Dundon and Hemer (2016) argue, ‘the senses not only provide people with a means to experience the world, but also link people to place, most notably through the emotions’ (p. 10). Through everyday practices of people who have only known an implanted body, the nexus between sound and silence, space and emotion are productive in considering intersections of deafness and technology.
Anthropological understandings of the senses are founded on a fundamental premise that sensory perception is socially situated; sensory experiences and significations are as much cultural as they are a physical bodily phenomenon (Classen, 1997; Howes, 1991: 167). Hence, the relationship between sensing, sense-making, place and time is socio-culturally shaped. Research with people with cochlear implants illustrates the significance of lived experience of the sensorium (Ingold, 2000, 2011). Being deaf and hearing tested constrained categories of deaf, hearing, disabled and normal to offer a ‘new kinship imaginary’ (Ginsburg and Rapp, 2013: 57; Rapp and Ginsburg, 2011). Sensory perception is both a physical act and vested with cultural meaning and ways to ‘transmit cultural values’ (Classen, 1997: 401). Likewise, as Blackman (2010) expresses in relation to the permutations of bodily integrity, bodies are ‘extended and multiplied through their structural coupling with technologies, environments, and human and non-human others’ (p. 1).
Technology mediates sensory interactions in and through the world and structures the ways that we relate and communicate with each other (Howes, 2006; Le Breton, 2017). Literature on the human technology interface includes the use of digital health technologies in examining sensory ways of knowing the body (Lupton and Maslen, 2018: 191). Complex assemblages of human-device-data generate new meanings or sense-making through digital tracking technologies whereby we discover new information, insights and motivation about the body and its health (Lupton and Maslen, 2018; Maslen, 2015). Technologies as intermediaries between people to track other bodies show the ways this human technology interface may be rejected or viewed as less appealing or valuable in our interactions with each other. Digital sensors used by parents to track children are shown to disrupt parental observations and their feelings about their relationships with their child (Maslen, 2021). Biomedical implanted bodies include surgically implanted pacemakers regulating heart function, brain implants stimulating neuropathways, dental implants, breast implants, and nets, bands and staples that change and control bodies. Research on the hybrid brain–machine interface explores the ways a body might function through a machine, computer and brain interface (Nicolelis, 2001). Bodily implants provoke new ways to consider digital proximity and embodied sensorial experiences in order to challenge the concepts of natural and artificial and to consider how cochlear implant experiences offer a window into ‘nature’ becoming something with the ‘artificial’ (Lloyd and Bonventre, 2020: 312 emphasis in original).
This article explores the ways an implanted deaf and hearing body is enacted through daily practices combining artefacts, technologies and techniques of hearing through a cochlear implant. The externally worn ‘speech processor’, reliant on a daily regime of recharging and replacing batteries, is connected to the surgically implanted cochlear implant. The implant is paired through Bluetooth technology with several other devices including mobile phones, FM receiver and digital screens that provide shifting levels of proximity. Together these technologies enable active choices in when and how one might engage in social practices. A speech processor may be switched on, or taken off, depending on the situation or circumstance, thus providing ways to reflect on the nature of embodiment, sensory perception, and connection to sound and social life (Rice, 2013: 9). Connecting to silence is equally meaningful and understood here, drawing on Pagis (2010), not as the consequence of power or oppression ‘as part of a conspiracy of silencing’ (p. 311), but an introspective process or concentration on interior or embodied experiences that might also embrace shared social processes (p. 324). Connections and disconnections are enacted in a fluid and open body that can be different across time and place.
Methods
This article is based on ethically approved, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2018 in an Australian city as previously reported (Harris et al., 2020, 2021). In summary, 16 months of participant observation was undertaken by the first author in clinical sites including four audiology clinics, two cochlear implant centres, and three early intervention services for families with deaf children. In total, 78 interlocutors were involved in the study, made up of 41 parents, 10 young adults and 27 health and education professionals. Ethics approval only included people aged over 18 years. Consequently, this article draws on data from a subset that includes 10 young adults who were born deaf and had received cochlear implants when young, and their parents. One young adult had chosen a cochlear implant as teenager after some years of hearing aid use, and another two chose a second cochlear implant for the ear that had not been implanted when the first surgery was undertaken. In addition, during fieldwork, one parent, aged in his early forties and born deaf, had a cochlear implant operation a few months before his infant received his implant.
Qualitative semi-structured, in-depth interviews and guided conversations (Csordas et al., 2010) were undertaken. Parents/carers and young people came from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Interviews generally took about 3 hours and occurred in libraries, homes, places of work, in parks and cafes. The first author accompanied interlocutors to cochlear implant clinics, social group programmes and was invited to 21st birthday parties. The methodological approach draws on a fundamental contribution of phenomenology that frames the body as central in constituting experience (Ram and Houston, 2015: 12). The intention was to explore with interlocutors their bodily experiences of being in the world. Ordinary, everyday moments of interactions within families or walking together in parklands offered ways of attending to living in a body that was often not experienced as diminished. Careful attention was given to young adults’ experiences of being in a body implanted with a cochlear implant and the ways this gave access to their immersion in their acoustic everyday world (Home-Cook and Ball, 2016). Interviews were guided by interlocutors’ everyday experiences of deafness and hearing. Sound and technology, and communication and second implant surgeries, were often the subject of conversations.
Interviews and observations of medical appointments were recorded on a smart phone and later written up verbatim. Transcripts were read and manually sorted prior to importing into NVivo. Initial coding led to the development of ideas and key concepts, which were thematically analysed. Detailed handwritten field notes provided contextual information, knowledge and practices about deafness in families with children with cochlear implants. Adopting elements of a grounded theory approach themes generated from analysis of field notes were cross-referenced with interview data, and relationships between themes were examined and refined (Charmaz, 2006). The lead author has a child who was born deaf and received an implant in the late 1990s. She has other family members who are deaf and for 20 years has lived with a child who hears through technology. All research participants and field sites have been given pseudonyms.
Young Adults with Cochlear Implants
During fieldwork, the first author met a group of deaf teenagers and young adults who had cochlear implants and who agreed to be involved in the research. Many knew each other through their membership of a youth social support group, which was established some years before by three young adults who were deaf. Each person self-identified as hearing and deaf or something more nuanced that relied not on a sensory or ability/disability categorisation. They identified as people first and often chose to not bring attention to either their deafness or cochlear implant because, as 18-year-old Mitch explained, ‘I don’t want it to define me’. While the cochlear implant was sought by their parents, some research participants chose second implants as they became available from about 2008 onwards. 1 Second surgeries and ensuing therapy evoked discussions about neuroplasticity, the brain’s response to auditory stimulation, binaural hearing and sound location and direction. Participants spoke about being deaf and the sense of hearing, of listening and hearing with the brain, and emphasised sound, silence and social interactions in their experiences.
For these young people, there was an active engagement between themselves and technology which led to discussions of the ways it enabled perception and connection to the world. This had several elements – connection to the ‘natural’ world with its elemental forces, social connections with family and connection to broader social networks. They often discussed their model of cochlear implant and its capabilities: did it connect via Bluetooth to screens, music devices, smart mobile phones or did they have an intermediary body worn connector, how often did batteries need recharging or changing, was it a device that could be worn in water while swimming, and did they listen to music while in the bath with their processor on? Despite an everyday familiarity with technology and connectivity, the notion of futuristic cyborg capability was either not discussed or rejected by participants. ‘I’m not a robot’, said Juno, ‘I’m a person’.
Some participants spoke of a sense of betwixt and between the hearing and deaf world. They felt a deep connection with their families. This connection came from bonds of kinship and an emphasis on communicating through spoken language, which many attributed to the cochlear implant and therapy with teachers of the deaf and their mothers. They felt connections with other people who had cochlear implants, and indeed, many of them had known each other since they were very young. Some participants were also connected to the Deaf Community through social groups and their use of Auslan (Australian sign language).
However, feelings of belonging and acceptance in the broader community were often contingent on how they experienced communication. These experiences were sources of tension for some participants; wishing for greater inclusivity was identified as a theme in data analysis. Connection and acceptance in broader society were perceived as being tied to communication and in particular speech intelligibility. While several participants both signed and spoke, some expressed a desire to ‘improve my speech’. Normative ideas about fitting in through ‘better speech’ were expressed through perceived concerns about communicative practices, access to mainstream culture and employment. Nearly all participants had experienced social exclusion and bullying at school and the politics that exists in deafness. Interlocutors talked about criticism directed at them, from deaf people via online social media platforms, about the choices their parents had made with the implication that choosing a cochlear implant for a child was a mistake. Despite this, an overriding theme emphasised during fieldwork was the need for inclusivity, shared humanity and of young people valuing opportunities for employment and social connections that they linked with their cochlear implants.
Deaf and Hearing – Embracing, Valuing and Debating Technology
Eighteen-year-old Juno was visiting his audiologist. His cochlear implant was being upgraded to a newer robust model that had greater Bluetooth connectivity. The implant was being ‘Mapped’ – a process of connecting the externally worn part of the device to a computer to adjust or fine-tune the comfort and threshold levels of the 22 electrodes that were surgically inserted into Juno’s snail shaped cochlear inside his inner ear. When the Mapping was finished, he went ‘live’ with two new programmes. Later, as we sat in the car, a piece of classical music came on the radio. He listened intently. The first author asked him if it sounded different. He said, Yeah, there’s more colour. It feels like it’s gone from black and white to colour, it’s more three dimensional – amazing.
Juno perceived the music as a three-dimensional, embodied phenomenon, but it was not metaphorical; rather a feeling associated with his perception of sound and music, which became richer with the new technology. This would indicate a subtle and nuanced experience and the significance of sound. Juno articulates a perception of sound as a bodily process (Merleau-Ponty, 2004). Like Melanie, Juno received his implant as an infant and was the only one in his family who was deaf. The first author asked him what that was like, did he feel different being deaf in a hearing family? He smiled and said, ‘No I’m just a normal human being’. He was quiet, thinking, and continued with, ‘actually I’m just a human being, no one is normal’. While Juno had many neurodiverse friends and the cochlear implant was a normalised part of his existence, he explained that ‘humans are all different’ in our own ways.
Juno had a marked interest in sound and technology. It had spurred the purchase of a series of small speakers that had been positioned on three of his bedroom walls and a sub-woofer that sat at the base of his television. The minutiae of a film or game’s sound drew him in. He had a fascination with sounds from the natural world: rain, wind in trees or birds, and especially after his processors had been ‘mapped’ and adjusted for sound. He said, ‘my senses make me feel connected to the world. I like the wind in the trees’. In conversation with the first author, he said, A cochlear implant is not like a subwoofer on my head. I don’t feel the vibration in my head. I hear the sound and my brain processes it. When I was in a two-seater plane, I felt the vibrations in my body but the sound doesn’t produce vibrations in my head.
Sound was experienced as a bodily vibration only when it was above 90 decibels. As Juno explained, he felt some vibration through his body when he was next to a speaker at a concert or near a low flying jet engine.
Bodily or felt experiences of sound were clearly articulated by a late implanted woman who had been born deaf. When the device was first switched on, she said, lifting off the seat of her chair, ‘I feel it, I feel it in the brain’. These feelings in the brain would continue in the early days and weeks of living with a device that sent electrically stimulated sound through her cochlear and into the brain’s auditory nerve. For the first few days, she ‘felt it in the back of my brain and then it moved forwards to the front of my brain’. These feelings suggesting a moving through, as though the brain was being stimulated by a physical touch or vibrotactile experience, are different to Juno, who felt no vibration or sensation in his head. David, discussed later, who decided to have surgery in his early forties spoke in a similar way about feeling sounds moving through his brain, confirming the diversity of sensory experiences for people living with cochlear implants as discussed by Lloyd and Bonventre (2020).
Juno was tuned into sound and engaged in ways that offered countless opportunities for sensory experience. He acknowledged his brain in his experiences of hearing and listening to sound and vibration as an embodied experience. He said, ‘the brain is involved with all my senses, not just hearing’. He told me, with his new speakers, one of the best films he had recently seen was Bird Box, a film that employed sound and the senses as a means of developing the key theme in this post-apocalyptic, psychological thriller, and that the soundtrack of the film heightened the drama and the action of the film. ‘Senses are skills employed to interpret the world’ (Ingold, 2000), and this is productive in thinking about the biotechnic device that allows a deaf person to hear and perceive the auditory world.
Relationships with technology and connectivity extended to sourcing devices that enabled Bluetooth connectivity across all platforms to the speech processor and cochlear implant. Direct connection and close proximity were created via Bluetooth technology with smart mobile phones, gaming computers, music streaming and television viewing. Juno, for example, switched between devices and connectivity but explained that when he walked with people, he always positioned them on his right-hand side because, ‘that ear has got more experience. My left ear is an old radio, and my right ear is an expensive hi-fi system’. His right ear was implanted when he was an infant; therefore, it ‘had more experience’ than his left ear that was implanted when he was a teenager. He could hear through both cochlear implants although his new ear was like a radio or ‘flat like techno music’. Senses, space and emotion are constitutive and shape experiences (Dundon and Hemer, 2016) and everyday experiences with two implants were significant because distance and direction or location of sound could be better detected, thus increasing a sense of agency in navigating time and place.
Connection and Disconnection: Switching On and Off Sensory Engagement
Vaughn articulated experiences of time and space through his implanted body that sometimes was deaf and sometimes hearing. Vaughn worked in an open plan office. He explained he was born ‘profoundly deaf’, which was diagnosed when he was 15 months old and although he had hearing aids to begin with, they ‘weren’t doing the job for a profoundly deaf person’. Vaughn was three and a half when he received a cochlear implant in the early 1990s. He said, Yes, I’m deaf but I live in the hearing world. I don’t know whether I’m glad to be deaf, it’s just the way I am but I am glad to have a cochlear implant. I also live in a world where I can hear and choose to not hear or have no sound.
Vaughn emphasised that deafness was ‘all he knew’; in addition, his cochlear implant was ‘all he knew’, and thus, he took for granted his capacity to hear and communicate with his family and to ‘switch off’. He explained that in the morning he put on his implant when he was getting ready to leave for work and that when he came home, while he initially conversed with his family, he then removed his speech processor to ‘relax and enjoy the calm of not hearing’. He explained that ‘with silence . . . I am in my own zone, and I can’t be taken out of it when I can’t hear’. Having agency over sensory experiences including when to be in ‘my zone for going to sleep with less distractions’ was valued. This zone was not always perceived as a safe or comforting place because if he was home alone or in a hotel, he sometimes worried about not hearing alarms at night in case of an emergency. The theme of safety was repeated by Max who said she sometimes preferred to sleep with her implants on because, ‘I get scared when sleeping at night, I can’t hear the doorbell, I have the flashing light doorbell but sometimes I sleep through it’. Her feelings of vulnerability were mitigated by maintaining connection to the cochlear implant.
Vaughn wore his speech processor when leaving his house and said, ‘I don’t know if there is a psychological element to this but once I leave the house, I’m part of the world and it stays on’. His cochlear implant was switched on when he was outside his home as he had ‘always known hearing’ and connected with other people and conversations. He spoke about going to work in a noisy, open plan office. Vaughn found being in noise and listening an exhausting experience, but he chose not to take his implant off in the workplace. This was not a time for being in his own zone, he explained, the people he worked with ‘think it’s a bit rude or they might be talking about me, I might miss out on a conversation’. In the space of work, he felt a need to keep the processor on as a way of maintaining his sense of connection with people and the social world.
A sense of self and ‘bodily modes of knowing’ (Howes, 1991: 3) are reflected in the ways Vaughn and other interlocutors chose to engage with sensory experience of hearing and listening. Vaughn had a sense of control or agency in experiences of time and space, which he could exercise in ‘his own zone’ or in the external world. He generally slept with the processor off: This is the best thing about being deaf and I really do feel that hearing people are missing out. I can’t imagine not sleeping in silence, so this is an absolute advantage. I couldn’t ever imagine listening to other people snore.
It was difficult for him to explain what silence was like, but it was highly valued. Without his implant on, he sometimes sensed vibrations in his body, but he heard ‘absolutely nothing’.
The concept of being in one’s own zone by actively choosing to be in the peace of a silent environment, or to nullify a distracting auditory world, has significance for people with cochlear implants. There was an acknowledgement in interviews that listening was often tiring, and at the end of the day, it was relaxing to hear no sounds and an embodied ‘letting go’ was experienced. There were other situations when participants would choose to remove their speech processors. Mitch said he could not stand the noise of crying babies, and if he met one, he would often take off his processor to cancel the auditory intrusion: a form of disconnection. The cochlear implant, deafness and hearing draw together in fluid sensory socialities. These experiences challenge the notion that ‘hearing is captive’ (Le Breton, 2017: 71) and a person is ‘defenceless against the intrusion of the external world’ (p. 71). 2 The sense of hearing is mediated; the cochlear implant trumps the best state of the art noise-cancelling headphones available to a ‘normal’ hearing person. While interlocutors chose to be hearing when they were outside the house which led to feeling ‘part of the world’ to quote Juno, and ‘secure’ in negotiating time and space, and other people or objects in the world, the device is also called on to annul auditory intrusion.
Unlike other participants who had lived with their implants from a time before they could remember, David, introduced earlier, received an implant as an adult although he was born profoundly deaf and wore hearing aids as a child. His process of accepting and discovering living with the cochlear implant was a curious experience of understanding sounds and senses with this new body part. When his implant was first ‘switched on’, it felt like a physical sensation moving through and in his head. He and the first author had been talking about neuroplasticity and the assumption that an implant enabled immediate hearing: the ‘miracle cure’. He said, First, I was feeling sounds in one side of my brain, and they went deeper into my brain as time went on. Then I was hearing the sounds, but they had no meaning. I’m learning what they mean – the sound of the kettle, the tap running, the indicator in the car. I didn’t have a database to connect the sounds to.
This process of identifying and locating sounds in space shifted his understanding and sensory experiences of himself, the world and other people. Hearing the sound of his own breathing through the cochlear implant was a revelatory and embodied phenomenon where the ‘ephemeral materialization of the air at the interface of body and world, engages with and alters the quality of both’ (Oxley and Russell, 2020: 3). Sensing the border between the interior and external body is experienced at yet another degree, the first author was told, by the recipients of a new cochlear implant where the device is entirely surgically implanted. These devices, at early development, gave an unintended visceral sense of hearing and feeling the internal workings of the ear and blood moving through the head.
For David, learning that he could ‘tune out the sounds in my brain that are not relevant’ was equally significant to hearing his breath. He experienced a dislocation between sounds ‘that I didn’t have a vocabulary for’ like the sound of rain on a tin roof and to what he knew about the world from reading books. Discovering a wall clock in his house made a repeated ticking noise ‘blew me away’. He said, ‘I had no idea that a clock without a secondhand would make a noise. I learnt things from books, and you learn that a clock with a secondhand ticks!’ Hearing sounds became an embodied sensation that involved locating the source, finding its meaning, which changed understandings and everyday experiences of living in the world as a deaf and hearing man. As each day progressed, he added new sounds to his internal database. Profound sensory experiences generated a dynamic and complex process of interpretation, perception and sense-making.
Making Active Choices
Making choices about when and how to engage with the auditory world was varied and situational. This was evidenced in the ways speech processors were used in everyday lives and by the choices to have second cochlear implants. With increasing recognition of bilateral implants offering access to sound direction and location and improved hearing in noisy backgrounds, many young people chose second surgeries. Outcomes varied and sometimes shifted over time as the brain adjusted to auditory input. Eighteen-year-old Mitch was disappointed with his second cochlear implant. When the first author met him, he could hear sounds but was not able to identify or discern what they were. He thought the sounds or understanding of the sounds was coming from the other side of his head and the sense-making was ‘mixing in my head’, which he demonstrated by waving his hand over the top of his head.
Amber, like Vaughn discussed above, often wanted to take off her speech processor to block out the noise at work. This capacity to remove oneself from a situation or to cut off external conversation or noise was considered in a recent Facebook discussion group for people with cochlear implants. People shared their experiences of taking their processors off to not hear arguments, excessive noise or pointless conversation. One woman recalled being asked why she was not ‘listening’, and she would say, ‘sorry I turned my ears off, nothing you were saying was worth my batteries’. A series of amusing posts from other CI recipients appeared, and there was a general endorsement of the phrase ‘are you worth my batteries?’
Parents in this project talked about living with children with cochlear implants, the ways they might tune in and out by switching off their processors, and the varieties of practices within a family. Mary had three young children with bilateral cochlear implants, which involved a precision management of overnight recharging batteries for six speech processors and three FM systems for use in the classroom. She said, Our everyday is that the kids will at least put on one processor in the morning. They don’t put them on right away. We are the ones that get at least one on in the morning as it’s much easier to help get ready. Frankie will usually be the last to get one on and sometimes not until just walking out the door for school. Maeve will want hers on – we still help her to put it on – when she wants to converse with someone or if she wants to hear the TV or iPad.
While Mary’s children tune into a sensory perception of hearing, they choose the point or time of entry. Only one child used the FM system for both processors and only one child used the aqua accessory so that he could wear his speech processor and hear while swimming. The other two children were ‘happy to not have them on’, preferring an embodied sensory experience of quiet immersion in water.
Conclusion
Through attending to participants’ experiences of engagement with their worlds through their technologically implanted bodies, this article contributes both a challenge to the studies of deaf experience and offers new perspectives on the human technology interface.
We have drawn on a phenomenological lens to show how experiences of deafness and implanted technology offer a productive diversion away from a medical model. Young adults’ narratives contest the persuasive framing of people with implants through a medical lens. Diverse sensory socialities and nuanced ways of being deaf are illustrated through a relational sensory perception and technological capacity to switch on and switch off; to reconfigure sense-making, which challenge framing the cochlear implant as a technology ‘that seeks to remediate deafness itself . . .’ (Friedner and Kusters, 2020: 40).
Deaf experiences and understandings of the term are highly relational and socially situated (Berger, 2010; Friedner and Kusters, 2020; Ginsburg and Rapp, 2013; Ladd and Lane, 2013; Lane, 2005). As communities aligned through common experiences and beliefs, Lane (2005) argues for a ‘Deaf-World’ (p. 91) and this ‘twenty-first-century view rests on a history of struggle against widespread discrimination’ (Ginsburg and Rapp, 2013: 8). In a similar binary vein, it is the notion that parents of deaf children, of whom over 90% are hearing, want to re-make their children to be like them, as hearing individuals, and so seek medical and rehabilitative interventions to develop auditory neural pathways (Mauldin, 2016; Sparrow, 2010). In contrast, we have shown how these experiences represent a unique sensorial engagement with the world through implanted bodies that is not at all like that of hearing parents.
Furthermore, deafness exists in an ambiguous zone of disability and ‘not disability’ (Park et al., 2015), and there are many ways to be deaf as contemporary contributions to deaf anthropology demonstrate (Friedner and Kusters, 2020; Monaghan et al., 2003): Disability is a profoundly relational category, always created as a distinction from cultural ideas of normality . . . not simply lodged in the body but created by the social and material conditions that ‘dis-able’ the full participation of a variety of minds and bodies. (Ginsburg and Rapp, 2013: 54)
Interlocutors in this study, who were among the first generation of infants implanted in the 1990s, and are now young adults, challenge notions of disability and, we argue, offer unique deaf ontologies through their everyday practices of living with bodies embedded with technology. As Sterne (2022) states, ‘impairment is a type of orientation toward the world. It can be inefficient or indirect, but it can also forge new and powerful paths’ (p.194). Interlocutors in this study reveal the ways that they harness technology to negotiate social relations, power and positioning through a body that might choose when to be deaf and when to hear. The choice of silence is not alienating, as noted by Pagis (2010). Considering sensory connections and disconnections through technology is not to construe silence as alienating, but rather to understand silence as meaningful and as a ‘constitutive mechanism that allows for certain experiences to surface’ (p. 313).
Embodied sensory experiences of hearing and deafness, as augmented by technology, embrace a human diversity or alterity that cuts across binary notions of normality versus what it is to be deaf. This technological capability is intimately interconnected with sensory and bodily experiences, to ways of knowing and ways of being. Complex, distinct and insightful meanings are embedded in everyday practices of always knowing and living in a body that has included a biotechnological surgically implanted device. Bodily articulations where sense-making boundaries permeate between body and brain, hearing and listening, silence and sound, and can be switched on or off, reveal rich signification and offer new deaf epistemologies and ontologies. We argue, furthermore, that the device has an intrinsic value through enabling hearing while not removing deafness. It is a conduit to communication and relationships in the world, which is valued in being deaf within a hearing family, while at the same time, the sensory experience of deafness is also held as significant.
Our ethnography also presents an experiential account of a specific case of the human technology interface. Rather than the cochlear implant being seen as artificial or perhaps disrupting relations between bodies or between people and their own bodies (Lloyd and Bonventre, 2020; Maslen, 2021), here implants become body parts, and intimately connected participants to their families and the world. Their everyday practices of living with a cochlear implant provide a window into varied sensory and social experiences including moments of silence ‘when we are alone and together at the same time’ (Pagis, 2010: 324). Interlocutors simultaneously acknowledged their cochlear implants as integral to who they were and to their ways of engaging with the senses, with sounds, with communication and with socialisation.
