Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain interviews Joshua St. Pierre

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the seventh installment of Dialogues on Disability, a series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

My guest today is Joshua St. Pierre, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Alberta. Joshua has a wide range of interests within feminist philosophy, disability studies, posthumanism, eugenics, phenomenology, political theory, and communication studies. When Joshua is not writing, he edits a blog, takes trips to the off-leash park with his dog Scholar, reads graphic novels, or goes out for brunch.

 

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Joshua! Before I ask you to talk about your current research on political theory and communication, I’d like you to fill us in on your background and education.

Thanks so much for inviting me, Shelley! I was fortunate to earn my B.A. at Briercrest College, a small college in Saskatchewan that emphasized historical and interdisciplinary thinking. I moved to Edmonton, Alberta to do my M.A. in philosophy and stayed to do my Ph.D. In 2012, I got involved here in the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada project that just wound down this past summer. Living Archives is funded under the auspices of the Canadian government and is a community-university alliance research project organized around the feminist standpoint belief that if we want to understand the legacy of eugenics, we need to privilege and follow the knowledge of eugenics survivors. I had never considered disability—let alone my own disability—as an object of critical analyses; however, sharing time with survivors of eugenics and thinking alongside them was an extremely transformative experience for me. I love that I was able to develop a critical consciousness about disability within this context. It was also around this time that I discovered feminist philosophy, more generally, which turned my world upside down in additional ways. So, a lot of things converged at once. 

I recently started the third year of my Ph.D. program and I hope to finish my candidacy by the end of this term. I’m very fortunate to be working with Professor Cressida Heyes and to have wonderful feminist, queer, crip colleagues here at the University of Alberta. Although U of A does not have a disability studies program on paper, this is actually a really amazing place to work on the philosophy of disability. Perhaps the fact that U of A lacks a dedicated disability studies program and disability studies courses has forced those of us here who work on these issues to be collaborative and work across disciplinary boundaries in generative ways.

 

Let’s turn to your current research on ableist and naturalizing assumptions about speech and communication in contemporary political theory. Please describe the motivation and aims of this research.

The philosophy of disability is itself a new field, but research on speech and communication disabilities within the field really gained steam only a few years ago. There are, of course, historical reasons for this, but given the centrality of language and speech within the philosophical canon, especially in the twentieth century, the lack of critical research on speech within philosophy of disability and disability studies initially struck me as somewhat peculiar. My research on stuttering in my M.A. program began as a phenomenology—influenced by Iris Young and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—which explored the ways in which dysfluency as a social and material process is lived.

The politics of disabled speech and communication is different from the politics of many other forms of disability insofar as the former is oriented around temporality, much more than around spatiality, as the latter may be. The politics of disabled speech and communication demand an expansion of conceptions of what counts as accessibility. For dysfluent speakers—that is, speakers whose flow of speech is interrupted by repetitions, pauses or “blocks,” tics, strained pronunciations, word losses, and substitutions—accessibility requires flexible ways of organizing collective time, rather than ramps and working elevators. Dysfluent speakers often live and experience time unevenly. That the stutterer experiences time compressing and expanding through the act of speech is, in itself, simply phenomenological variation. This experience and variation become pathological when hegemonic communicative norms—norms that are not merely intersubjective, but rather are distributed within the machinery of our social, political, and economic systems—run roughshod over and attempt to level out these differences. Understanding how gendered, heterosexist, and ableist communicative norms inflect temporality can help us create more hospitable practices of communicating with and relating to one another.

Although I'm still interested in parsing disability from these theoretical angles, my research has been steadily creeping towards political theory. One reason for this shift in perspective is that I want to take seriously the notion—evident from Arendt to Foucault to Deleuze—that the political character of speech is prior to its linguistic character. Understanding that disabled speakers are oppressed and how to resist such oppression requires an awareness of how ableist norms of speech are embedded within, and constitutive of, our political structures and praxis. For example, how do Arendtian forms of political action and Habermasian norms of consensus—norms that are praised as components of deliberative democracy—render as apolitical certain forms of speech production? More to the point, how do norms of intelligibility embodied in the pairing of speech and reason produce and exclude people who do not speak “rationally” within political spaces? Such concerns have been broached by political theorist Stacy Clifford who renounces communicative competence in the public sphere, arguing instead for the embodied participation of disabled subjects. I want to push the issue further than Clifford does in order to argue that disabled speech should be considered as a type of communicative agonism wherein the communicative breaks and aporias that such disabled speech generates are themselves contestations of what, and of who, gets to count as political. Political action cannot help but be exclusionary when it takes the fluent subject and its process of speech production as its model.    

I really get excited about the part of my project that examines how political action bleeds into post-Fordist economies and the ways in which post-Fordist economies of knowledge, semiotics, and subjectivity—so-called semiocapitalism—put into operation and thus proliferate fluent and intelligible speech. Many disabled people who could not work under Fordist conditions have benefitted from the fact that communication has become immanent to the production process. For example, although manual labour may be impossible for certain people with mobility issues, working in a call center may be feasible for these people. I want to argue that such changes, while empowering for some, shift the socioeconomic terrain in threatening ways for others. What emergent forms of able-bodiedness are generated by so-called communicative labour? How is semiocapitalism reliant upon fluent subjects and how does it actively produce fluent subjects? To return to the issue of political action, how can disabled speakers reclaim agency when communication and subjectivity have themselves been thoroughly co-opted by capital? Perhaps one reason that these questions have not yet been asked is that “docile” communicative faculties—that is, communicative capacities that have been managed, have become manageable, and thus interface with streamlined communicative networks—are the historical condition of possibility of semiocapitalism and thus have been thoroughly naturalized and taken for granted.

The semiotic play and excessive meanings that constitute “crip” communication do not reduce to the logic of semiocapitalism; thus, this play and excess are conceived as threats to the production of a fluent world. Alternatively, the active production of a fluent world is troubling for the many subjects—the many dysfluent subjects—who are an obstacle to its smooth operation. I believe that efforts to straighten, assimilate, and erase dysfluent subjects should be understood as forms of eugenics intrinsic to the operation of neoliberalism and globalized semiocapitalism. These two interlocking systems, that is, neoliberalism and globalized semiocapitalism, are predicated on a frictionless operation whereby “clear” and “intelligible” communication have acquired a compulsory, hegemonic logic—that is, a eugenic logic: a continued belief that the world would be better off without disability. Why wouldn’t everyone desire to be fluent? Why would anyone object to the eradication of dysfluency? These sorts of questions gain their power by equating fluency (considered broadly) with communication and thus with understanding, sociality, surplus value, and other signifiers of development and well-being. This logic promotes non-consensual childhood therapy, rehabilitative medicine, and, potentially, gene therapy. While the eliminative nature of this logic, much like early twentieth-century forms of eugenics, is cause for concern in itself, there are things lost through these practices that are not taken into account at all, including subaltern modes of meaning, of being, and of relating to one another.

It may be slightly cheesy, but above my desk, scrawled on curled Post-it notes, is a reminder to “Create a world that stutters more.” My wife and I came up with this phrase after I read Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s beautiful 2012 article “The Case for Conserving Disability” in which disability is conceived as a generative resource that needs to be preserved in the face of eugenic logic. For Garland-Thomson, part of the counter-eugenic work of disability is to sever the present from the future and thus frustrate the modern attempt to control the latter. Cultivating dysfluency—creating, in Deleuzian terms, vacoules of noncommunication—is a potentially important counter-eugenic strategy. The point is not simply to cultivate more dysflueny within the world—though this is important—but, rather, to make worlds themselves—that is, their systems and horizons of meaning—stutter and gap. Even within radical communities, neither “clear communication” nor “understanding” can mend our problems and help us live together.

I am increasingly convinced that communication has become one of the master’s tools. We need something far less clean. Dysfluency offers a way to interrupt linguistic, discursive, institutional, and material processes that are too fluid, too pure, and too convenient. By interrupting these processes, dysfluency both creates and attends to what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing would call “patterns of unintentional coordination” that develop across multiple temporal rhythms and scales. (I can’t stop thinking about Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World.) Crip speech balks at the notion of communication as the act of a self-contained individual agent. Crip speech is a collaborative act that grows and snags between bodies—human and not human—and, furthermore, crip speech cannot be accounted for in terms of “intentionality.” Crip speech cultivates gaps, splintered voices, and misunderstandings that combine to form thick collective meanings. Communicating is a material and ecological event, as my colleague Zach Richter argues. In its unruliness, dysfluency calls for dynamic responsiveness, rather than for understanding.

To sum up my long answer to your question, I think disability studies is only starting to critically respond to communicative disability and its increasing centrality within contemporary society; meanwhile, contemporary political theory (such as post-workerist Marxism) has not yet come to terms with its ableist and naturalizing assumptions about speech and communication. My project thus aims to be a double intervention: an intervention into both political theory and disability studies. I think that if we, as a disability studies/disability rights community, want to understand our present and to move forward together, it is important that we unearth ableist imperatives around communication.

 

To what extent is this research based upon insights about biases that you have confronted with respect to your own speech and habits of communication?

For most of my life so far, I never considered my stutter to be anything other than a source of deep shame and embarrassment. Stuttering, because it has been so late to the disability studies/rights party, remains undertheorized and highly medicalized. The thought that awkward and disjointed communicative encounters were not my own fault had never crossed my mind. In the past, the only options that seemed to be available to me were more therapy or thin practices of “self-acceptance.” These alternatives re-entrenched my internalized ableism.

It was only in the summer of 2012, when I started to work with the Living Archives project and read disability theory for the first time (I think it was Tanya Titchkosky’s Disability, Self, and Society) that I developed what one could call a critical consciousness. I worked for the city of Edmonton that summer. One afternoon a guy named Mike and I were waiting out a bout of rain in the truck. Near the end of my somewhat elongated sentence, Mike snapped to attention with a simple “Huh?” I painstakingly repeated myself, trying not to stutter, and the reaction from Mike was “What?” This happened several times. I noticed that although I had worked intensely to speak and be understood, Mike had put no effort at all into listening, hadn't even bothered to try. This sort of experience wasn’t an uncommon one for me, of course; but, in that moment, I suddenly became aware of the dialogical nature of communication and that responsibility for “breakdown” of communication and for the production of meaning is unevenly distributed. For the first time, instead of feeling shame for my stutter, I realized that I was angry that I’d been ignored and excluded. Although this fact about the dialogical nature of communication seems obvious to me now, the recognition of it was, at the time, a significant shift in my thinking. Ableism has many ways to obscure itself.  

My research is, in a variety of ways, an unfolding of Butler’s lovely suggestion that critique emerges from “the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web.” While I have experienced my share of biases and oppression as a disabled person, the lack of critical response to disabled speech has seemed more surprising to me. Given that a radical disability justice perspective can be—and, in my own experience, has been—so transformative and empowering, why has stuttering been so late to the party? I’m not in any way pointing fingers at anyone. I’m sure that there are many other disabilities and practices that still do not get the attention that they deserve. That said, serious reflection on our communicative practices and the ways in which ableist, sexist, and racist assumptions structure who gets to be heard and who doesn’t get to participate is very much needed.   

 

Some job postings for positions in North American philosophy departments specify that candidates must possess “fluent English.” What are the ramifications of such a requirement for philosophers who stutter?

Disability scholars Jay Dolmage and Stephanie Kershbaum have written about the worrisome trend for academic job postings to include detailed lists of “essential functions.” Such requirements discourage disabled applicants from applying for academic positions or disclosing their disability to potential or actual employers. These requirements can only be regarded as ableist. In addition, many of these “essential functions” demand a flexibility and adaptability that is coextensive with the neoliberal subject that the precarious neoliberal university in particular and system in general require to reproduce and sustain themselves. This job requirement—that is, the requirement of “essential functions”—individualizes and depoliticizes access, which is great for institutions, but not for disabled applicants and employees.

Ableist though it may be, the requirement of “fluent English” is hardly surprising given that the (higher) education apparatus has become an important site for reproducing the semiocapitalist mode of production. Semiocapitalism requires fluent subjects for its operation and this is painfully clear within the university. This creates problems at many levels. Paolo Virno, an Autonomous Marxist, writes that “nobody is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, . . . reduced to wage labor.” This lament takes on a slightly different tone when one appreciates that our relations to others can’t be reduced to operations of wage labor because they are also racialized, gendered, and shaped by ableism in ways that reproduce hegemonic and productive social structures. Universities, for example, regularly offer professional development to foster “communication skills,” which often amounts to “accent reduction” and the production of more “commanding” masculinized speaking habits. Every Fall, the Speech-Language Pathology institute on my campus sends out notices for “accent reduction” courses for instructors. Furthermore, I know someone who is repeatedly criticized for her gendered speech in the classroom.

Normalizing speech has become immanent to the functioning of the university. While “strong communication skills” are a high priority for semiocapitalism, there is nevertheless something peculiar about this demand. The requirement of “fluent English” is a demand not simply for the ability to convey information, but also that the information be conveyed in very specific and normalized ways. As an analogue, take the “essential function” that many job postings require: the ability to lift 10 lbs. Does this mean that one can lift the 10 lbs. with the help of others? Using assistive technology? In a timespan that is twice as long? Likely not. That one possess “strong communication skills” means not simply that one can convey information, but that one can do it in certain specific and normalized ways. Communication is always affective labor and one’s job as an educator under semiocapital is to establish a relationship via communicative practices that follows normalized lines: the relationship does as much work as the information conveyed. Put otherwise, the relationship itself becomes the productive medium and a communicative relationship governed by fluent and ableist norms conducts the types of meanings on which semiocapitalism survives.

Rawls stuttered. Habermas had a cleft palate that created unclear vocalization. Yet, within our contemporary conditions of precarity and semiotic optimization, these kinds of interruption of fluency are, apparently, risks that very few institutions will afford. On a personal level, I won’t lie: this is something that I worry about. I am not concerned about my ability to teach: more than ever, I think that we need creative pedagogy that engages students beyond the lecturer-audience model. Dysfluency has many generative pedagogical functions; and I actually believe my own dysfluency has helped me become a better instructor. Nevertheless, I do worry about discrimination. As I have noted, the hiring process is more than ever one of risk assessment. The indeterminate nature of my dysfluent speech is precisely a risk.   

 

You are a co-founder of the groundbreaking blog project Did I Stutter? which aims to dismantle and resist the sorts of discrimination that demands for “fluent and normal speech” produce. Please tell our readers and listeners about the project.

Sure! A couple years ago, Zach Richter, now a Ph.D. student in Communication Studies at UCSD, Erin Schick, an amazing poet currently living in Oregon, and I decided to do something about the lack of a critical activist community for people who stutter. After sitting on the idea for a year, we launched Did I Stutter? (DIS) in June 2014 and its correlating tumblr that Fall. At its heart, DIS is a blog, but we also publish poetry and short stories and are slowly becoming a resource centre for critical work on speech and disability.

We are a mix of academics and artists and our blog regularly features guest blogs from the community. Knowledge-translation is important for any academic discipline, but particularly so for disability studies. I am a firm believer that knowledge needs to be accessible and that if an idea can’t be explained to a general audience, then it probably isn’t a very good idea. So, even though we are not always completely successful, we try to straddle multiple communities and reach a wide audience through DIS. Having our tumblr really helps in this regard, as it attracts a younger demographic than our blog, a demographic more attuned to the discourse of social justice. Some of the most generative moments of community have occurred in this more informal social space, rather than on our blog where theoretical disputes are hashed out. 

It has been incredibly exciting to be a part of the changes that are occurring within the stuttering community, for which a disability rights perspective is new. The reasons for why stuttering is still so medicalized and, correspondingly, depoliticized, are somewhat unclear. My hunch is that it is a dual movement. On the one hand, when the disability rights movement started in the late 60s, it was largely, though not entirely, organized around the inclusion of people with mobility and perceptual disabilities, that is, disabilities centrally related to the current mode of production. Communication disabilities, much like intellectual disability, were too “messy” to handle within the frameworks of disability rights produced at the time; in addition, communication itself wasn’t even on the table in the way that it is now. On the other hand, stuttering has always existed in an odd relation to the medical community. Since the inception of Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) in the 30s, its ranks have often been populated by stutterers. This overlap has frustrated the possibility of stuttering politics. For example, in the 1970s, the National Stuttering Association—at that time, called the National Stuttering Project—was founded and, from what I understand, was a fairly radical movement in line with disability rights. However, its political edge has been replaced with the discourse of “self-acceptance” that, I would argue, is bedfellows with the medical-industrial complex. 

Many people have not known what to make of DIS. We have to tell people, time and again, that we aren’t making this “disability rights thing” up and, in fact, stuttering is just really late to the party. Some SLPs have been enthusiastic, teaching our work in their courses and occasionally blogging for us. Other SLPs are cautiously interested, while still others are outright hostile. Outside of the medical community, however, our message is very well received. The idea of “stuttering pride” is, in essence, very simple and the notion that “there is nothing wrong with your speech” has already been tremendously empowering for many people.    

Involvement in this project has given us a somewhat rare opportunity to try and build intersectionality into our politic from the start. Jay Dolmage uses the architectural analogue of “retrofit” to describe the common practice of making conceptual space for disability within existing (academic, workplace, etc.) institutions after the fact. In architectural design, retrofitting amounts to crudely slapping on a ramp; in education policy, it means devising haphazard “accomodation” policies for the classroom and conference. A better way to proceed is to design spaces with disability in mind, spaces that expect and even hope for the participation of disabled people. In short, the better way to proceed uses the assumptions of universal design. Many feminist organizations born during the second-wave can be understood as “retrofitting” intersectionality. I am not claiming that DIS has got it right, or that it has opened up a complex, accessible, and intersectional space; but, one of the advantages of the fact that we have formed later in the disability rights movement is that we are already aware of some of the unique challenges and opportunities of fostering a community without throwing anyone under the bus.

The conversation is already starting to change around stuttering; and we are very excited to be a part of it. Transforming the ableist attitudes and structures about speech that permeate our culture and make our lives difficult is, nevertheless, going to take a very long time—we are in this for the long haul. Yet, if we want to “take back our speech,” we—dysfluent people, not so-called experts—must set the terms of the discussion. Setting the terms of this discussion is part of the work with which, we hope, DIS can help. 

 

It’s a fabulous project, Joshua. What other resources—such as books, videos, blogs, and so on—would you recommend to philosophers who want to learn more about the politics of stuttering?

Because the field is just a few years old, there are only a handful of resources available; however, I’m certain that in the next few years there will be a steady increase of work on stuttering. I have published a few articles that might be of interest: first, “Distending Straight-Masculine Time: A Phenomenology of the Disabled Speaking Body” was published earlier this year in Hypatia; second, “Cripping Communication: Speech, Disability, and Exclusion in Liberal Humanist and Posthumanist Discourse” appeared in Communication Theory; and third, “The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies” can either be accessed via the link at Canadian Journal of Disability Studies or in Chris Eagle’s anthology Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability: Talking Normal, where it was published in 2013.

I already mentioned Stacy Clifford’s piece “Making Disability Public in Deliberative Democracy” that both critiques the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy and argues for embodied participation. To this, I would add Barbara Arneil’s “Disability, Self Image, and Modern Political Theory,” which isn’t on communication disability per se, but does a lovely job of introducing the way in which political philosophy has consistently foiled the rational citizen with a disabled other. Returning to stuttering, there is an article in the Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, Volume 1 by Kevin Paterson entitled “It's About Time!: Understanding the Experience of Speech Impairment.” Paterson’s article explores communicative choreographies and temporality from a disability studies perspective. Expanding beyond the (fuzzy) borders of philosophy, Jay Dolmage has published an excellent book entitled Disability Rhetoric, the last chapter of which is a critical analysis of the Academy Award-winning film The King’s Speech and its cultural reception. Everyone should check out Caitlin Marshall’s article “Crippled Speech” that attends to vocal difference from a Foucauldian perspective. In addition to editing the anthology about dysfluency in literature, Chris Eagle has published a manuscript entitled Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature. A final book that has been really fun to think with is Brandon LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. A sound studies scholar, LaBelle offers a fabulous phenomenology of the play of language in our mouths. Emma Alpern, who has blogged for DIS, recently published two great articles: one on stuttering appeared in Vice and the other on stuttering and gender appeared in The Atlantic.

I would be remiss if I didn’t link to my DIS colleague Erin Schick’s slam poem “Honest Speech” that went viral last fall. There are generative overlaps between stuttering and other forms of disability like autism. So, I want to recommend Mel Bagg’s video “In My Language,” which is a great resource for thinking about alternative modes of communication and the work that language is doing.

Thanks again, Shelley, for inviting me to be a part of this important series!

 

Thank you, Joshua. You’ve certainly identified more than a handful of resources that readers and listeners of this interview can seek out. Thank you, more generally, for a fascinating interview and for the exciting work on stuttering, speech, and communication that you and your collaborators have initiated.

Readers/listeners of this interview are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Joshua St. Pierre’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments will be permitted.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, November 18^th at 8 a.m. EST for the eighth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.

Comments

[Shelley Tremain]

Joshua, I'd like it if you elaborated on your remarks about temporality and dysfluency with respect to accessibility. How should conference sessions be reconfigured to make them accessible to dysfluent speakers, such as philosophers who stutter? Many CFPs stipulate the number of words that submissions should be and some stipulate that submitted papers should be written for X no. of minutes reading-time. But the latter stipulation, especially, could and probably would work to the disadvantage of a philosopher who stutters. Should CFPs stipulate a word length and speakers be allowed the time it takes each one of them to read, say, 3000 words? That seems like a much more equitable arrangement. What do you think?

[Joshua]

That is a great question. I recognize that conference organizers work tirelessly to fit as many people as possible into a short window of time. There are logistical issues that come into play given the finite span of time that makes up a conference. Most people can read around 3000 words in 15-20 minutes; I can read just over 1000. If I were to read a 3000 word paper would 2 other papers need to be rejected? All of the conference organizers I have ever been in dialogue with regarding extra time and accessibility have been as helpful as possible. Sometimes this means putting me on a panel leading into a break to give me some leeway. Sometimes this means shifting me to a panel where someone has dropped out to afford extra time. I always appreciate these accommodations, but the very nature of "the conference" with its material constraints makes such accommodations stop-gap measures, or, as Jay Dolmage would say, retrofit.

I pare down my conference papers significantly, which of course disadvantages me. There is always so much that is left unsaid. At the same time, I am not convinced that more words equals a more developed argument in itself (think of all the filler we might throw into a conference paper as we hurriedly write it on the plane). I need to choose my words and phrases carefully, sparingly. There is something generative about this. Moreover, I could say alot more words (if that is what we are after) if I spoke more informally rather than reading straight from a paper which, especially in a conference setting, *really* slows me down. I guess this is all to say that I don't know what the answer is. I do think that these temporal considerations need to be made more explicit such that, for example, "extra time needed" is listed beside "wheelchair accessible hotel room" on conference applications. Feeling like a burden for asking for accommodations is a insidious way that ableism persists.

[Shelley Tremain]

Joshua,
thank you for your candid response to my query. I hope others will offer suggestions and ask questions about conference accessibility for dysfluent speakers.

In any case, I'd like to ask you another question. You have indicated that your thinking has been greatly influenced by feminist philosophy. You mentioned Young and Butler. I'm wondering who else and how. Have feminist philosophers of language influenced you? Feminist political philosophers?

[Stephanie Kerschbaum (via Shelley Tremain)]

[ST: I have posted this comment at Stephanie's request.]

I just tried to go to the interview and got a 404 error. will try again! What I was going to jump in and say, after thinking about it last night, was to ask about the modality of conference presentation and the ways that that might be refigured/cripped -- for example, do conference presentations have to be live performances? can they be voiced by another person or a machine, can the live performance be reinforced with a script (as, for example, you mention, Josh, feeling disadvantaged by all presenters getting the same amount of time--the time frame enables some people to say more words in the same amount of time it would take you to say fewer words), or can the time of the presentation be unevenly divided, so that if the panel has 90 minutes, one presenter gets 30 min and the others get 10? (this works best if hte panel is a group of folks working together/collaborating/mutually building access, rather than something imposed by the conference organizers on a panel assembled of individual proposals). I'm also thinking about the ways that speaking / participating in social space occurs through different forms, and that if we as audiences could develop more comfort and fa miliarity with alternative modes of participating, that the onus would not always fall on the speaking with one's vocal chords subject. Even at SDS I think this is a huge struggle even as people recognize lots of ways of particiating/speaking/engaging/communicating, in the midst of a panel, in the midst of a hallway encounter, etc. those are not easy things to quickly convey, adapt, adjust, and negotiate to.

[Joshua]

Shelley, I apologize for the delayed response. I have been at CSWIP these past few days and only got back last night. In response to your question, I have been immensely influenced by feminist philosophy at both a general and specific level. That is, my methodology in a diffuse sense follows those theorists such as Sara Ahmed who start from the specificity of (gendered, classed, racialized, etc.) experience. At a more specific level, germane to this specific project, I am influenced by feminist political theorists such as Bonnie Honig, Silvia Federici, Adrianna Cavarero, and Wendy Brown. These feminists have helped me attend to the texture of contemporary political life, which is important, I think, for getting at the always emerging formation of ability within our discourses and practices.

[Shelley Tremain]

Hi Joshua, thanks for your response. I'd be interested to know what work of Brown's has influenced you. I have been influenced by her too and have used her claims (see, for instance, my On the Government of Disability), but some disability theorists have argued strongly against her claims (for instance, Siebers), as I'm sure you know.

[Julie Maybee]

What a terrific interview, Joshua and Shelley! Joshua, it was such a pleasure to meet you at the Pacific APA. I love the way your work interweaves so many different kinds of threads. I was quite surprised to hear about the "accent reduction" classes offered at your institution. At my institution in New York City, I'm thinking that notices like that would be considered, at best, very rude. I am also fascinated by the connection you draw between communication and the experience of time.

Your discussion of the role that a demand for fluent and intelligible speech plays in the current, supposedly information-based capitalist economy is also fantastic. I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to say more about how you would like both to cultivate more dysfluency in the world and well as make our worlds themselves more disfluent.

[Joshua]

I apologize for the delayed response(s)!

Stephanie: Thank you for such a thoughtful reply. I have thought a little about the “live performance” aspect of conference presentations and I think I must still be somewhat caught within the logocentric “myth of presence.” That is, it feels like I am not fully there in an agential sense when someone else reads my presentation (I have only had someone read one talk, quite a few years ago). This is backwards and something that I need to get over. One of the best presentations I have heard—or perhaps I should say participated in—was this spring at a eugenics conference. The presenter used text-to-speech assistive tech but the little computer speakers were far quieter than expected, so the entire room gathered around the presenter and her speakers. We all had to be incredibly attentive, and this collective act of listening and responding to the presenter (mediated through various technologies) created a very different and wonderfully crip dynamic. Yet reconfiguring academic spaces requires, as you point out, that the audience take a more active role which can be difficult to facilitate.

Shelley: I’m not sure I can give a satisfactory answer to your question about Brown in this short space. However, I think Brown offers really incisive insights into our contemporary politic. Her work on tolerance (Regulating Aversion) and neoliberalism (Undoing the Demos), for example, are in my opinion quite definitive. As you might guess, I lean quite heavily in the Foucauldian direction and thus find many of Brown’s conclusions generative for DS. At the same time, while “Wounded Attachments” has been a helpful concept for DS, but I am quite sympathetic to critiques that it can foster ressentiment etc. and inhibit radical politics.

Julie: I’m so glad you enjoyed the interview. I could be totally wrong, but I would be (pleasantly) surprised if your university didn’t offer some form of “communication improvement” as part of professional development. Practices of disciplining the voice can be coded in many ways. Or are these kinds of things more localized than I realize?

Your question about cultivating dysfluency is wonderful—thank you. I don’t really have a great response at this time. Part of the answer is noticing the dysfluency already operative in our worlds. There are so many gaps and breaks that are quickly covered up (a “virtual failure of compulsory able-bodiedness” as disability theorist Robert McRuer would say) because fluency is so necessary for sustaining dominant political orders. Perhaps we need to start owning up to the conceit of fluency. At the same time, the activist work in dysfluent communities (such as the stuttering community) is important. 1% of the population stutters, to say nothing of those who are autistic, have Tourette’s, cleft palates, selective aphasia, etc etc. These voices are systematically erased within political spaces and the media, but they represent a notable portion of the population. In addition, “creating a world that stutters more” requires that we resist the impulse to standardize voices at an early age through medical and/or therapeutic intervention. This is all to say that making our worlds stutter requires in one sense a recognition that these worlds are always, already constituted by dysfluency.

Cultivating dysfluency thus requires that we look for and expect it within, for example, our classrooms, rather than simply trying to fit it in after the fact. One contributor for the Did I Stutter blog is a teacher who writes about his experiences in the classroom. [link link] In general, I think that cultivating dysfluency is an aspect of a radical rather than liberal politic: I am not suggesting that norms of intelligibility need to be expanded to “include” the dysfluent. We rather need to look for and trace fault lines of dysfluency (minor languages, in Deleuzian terms) in an attempt to create pockets of habitable resistance. This not a very satisfactory answer—I am obviously still working through these issues. Part of my hesitancy in giving concrete answers is comes from the recognition that in our current (neoliberal) world, dysfluency and precarity so often go hand in hand.

[Joshua]

I quite clearly forgot to add the links from the Did I Stutter blog about stuttering in the classroom: http://www.didistutter.org/blog/back-to-school http://www.didistutter.org/blog/reflections-from-a-teacher-who-stutters

[Julie Maybee]

Thanks so much for your reply, Joshua. You might be right about there being some kind of “communication improvement” courses offered at my institution. I came here many years ago before there were even new faculty orientation sessions. Now there are compulsory new faculty orientation sessions, at which such courses might well be offered or advertised, I have no idea. I haven’t seen any notices about such classes in other emails that go around about faculty development, though.

I really like your suggestion about cultivating disfluency by noticing disfluency that’s already in our world. It reminded me of arguments in the disability studies literature that suggest that some of the attitudes toward disability and disabled people are rooted in a general refusal by our (current, European-dominated) culture to acknowledge human frailty—a view that does not seem to be held by all cultures (and may not even have been held by European culture in earlier times). African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu has argued, for instance, that people in Akan culture have a deep appreciation of the dependency of human beings, which, he argues, underpins a basic conception of human rights. So one way to cultivate disfluency would be, as you suggest, to uncover our culture’s refusal to acknowledge these—I would say—truths about human beings and our world, namely that we are always already frail and dependent, and that our world is always already disfluent. ("If you want to make God laugh," the old saying goes, "make plans"). I really like the term you use for the refusal to acknowledge this disfluency: “the conceit of fluency.”

I read the posts by Eli on the Did I Stutter blog that you recommended. I am persuaded by his argument that his disfluency has lead him to come up with creative learning activities that make him a better teacher, and that his disfluency as a traditional “lecturer” in class makes his students better listeners. I’m convinced that my fluency has no doubt made it possible for me to be a lazy teacher in the classroom. I suspect that cultivating disfluency in the class would also make me a more accessible teacher for students generally. I’m going to work on that . . .

Your hints about cultivating disfluency through “minor languages” and by creating “pockets of habitable resistance” are also provocative. I look forward to reading how you work these ideas out more fully in the future!

Thanks again for the terrific interview.

[Shelley Tremain]

Joshua, I wanted to note something else you talk about in your responses that doesn't get enough attention (if it does indeed get any) in any of the discussion about philosophy jobs in particular, job insecurity, and the precarity of academic jobs in general, namely, disability, risk aversion, and job requirements/qualifications. I thought your remarks about the relations between these elements were very insightful and provocative, indicating the urgent need for closer examination of these issues.