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Part VI

Disability and Culture

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Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body

Sign Language and Literary Theory

H-Dirksen L. Bauman

Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another, should we not,

like the deaf . . . make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?

—Plato Th

e Cratylus (212)

An exchange between literary theory and sign languages is long overdue. Centuries overdue: for as

early as Plato’s Cratylus, Western “hearing” intellectuals have been aware of the manual languages of

Deaf

2

communities, but twenty-fi ve centuries since Plato, we remain largely ignorant that our concepts

of language and literature have evolved within a false dualism of speech and writing. Only as recently

as William Stokoe’s linguistic research in the 1960s, have we realized that Sign

is an “offi

cial” human

language with the capacity to generate a nearly infi nite number of propositions from a vast lexicon.

Yet, while linguists have been exploring this revolution in language, literary critics remain largely

unaware that Sign is a natural linguistic mode capable of producing a body of literature.

is body

of literature is, rather, a literature of the body that transforms the linear model of speech and writing

into an open linguistic fi eld of vision, time, space, and the body.

As Sign literature emerges in the late twentieth century, we can only wonder how its absence has

helped to shape our ideas about language, literature, and the world. We must wonder if Sign’s absence

has lead to hidden limits and desires in our relationship to language. One could, perhaps, argue that

speech and writing have been searching for their visual/spatial counterpart since Simonides of Keos’

formulation that “poetry is speaking painting” while “painting is mute poetry,” and extending through,

among others, Horace’s dictum ut pictura poesis, centuries of religious “pattern poetry,”

Blake’s illustra-

tions, Stein’s cubism, Pound’s ideograms, Olson’s hieroglyphics, concrete poetry, performance poetry,

ethnopoetics, video-texts, and virtual texts. Th

ese experiments have, in their various ways, sought to

imbue speech and writing with the visual and spatial dimensions of images and the body. Have these

experiments emerged out of a phantom-limb phenomenon where writers have sensed language’s

severed visual-spatial mode and went groping aft er it?

If the Deaf poet had been mythologized as

the blind poet has been, would literature have developed diff erently? Would the map which draws the

historical relation between visual and literary arts have to be redrawn? What sorts of genres would

have emerged? Would our metaphysical heritage have been diff erent if we were not only the speaking

but also the “signing animal”?

While these questions are beyond the scope of the present essay, they lead toward its general

purpose: to show that what many scholars would consider the marginal literary practices (if you can

even call them “literary”) of “disabled” persons is, on the contrary, of central importance to any one,

hearing or Deaf, who is interested in the relations of language and literature to culture, identity, and

being. In order to recognize Sign as a medium for literature, we must open an exchange between Sign

and theory by exploring ways that theory enhances our understanding of Sign and ways that Sign

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H-Dirksen L. Bauman

356

enhances—and challenges—our understanding of theory and literature. Th

is opening exchange will

ask numerous questions that will gesture toward a more in-depth study of Sign literature.

e following dialogue between Sign and theory is more like a conference call between Sign and

interconnected and contradictory areas of criticism: deconstruction, cultural studies (at the intersec-

tion of feminism/postcolonialism/multiculturalism), semiotics, and phenomenology. Rather than

applying a monolithic paradigm, I hope to assemble a collection of perspectives that will off er the

best vantage points from which to explore a nonwritten, spatial form of literature. Th

is eclectic ap-

proach is especially important as the small body of criticism of Sign literature remains rooted in

one-dimensional approaches. Th

e formalist analyses of Clayton Valli and Edward Klima and Ursula

Bellugi and the semiotic approaches of Jim Cohn and Heidi Rose are much needed contributions

to their fi eld, but are unable to place Sign literature in its proper historical, political, metaphysical

perspective—which is the goal of this present study. My intent, though, is ultimately not to feed Sign

poems through a convoluted critical machine to produce insightful “readings” or rather, “viewings”;

instead, one hopes these concepts and connections will eventually develop dialogically with Sign

poetic practices themselves.

Deconstruction and Deafness: Phonocentrism, Audism, and Sign Language

e exchange between theory and Sign should open, appropriately, with Jacques Derrida, for it is he

who has brought the importance of nonphonetic linguistic modalities to the forefront of twentieth-

century thought by severing the “natural” connection between the voice and language. Th

e voice,

Derrida believes, is more than a means of communicating—it is the source for Western ideas of

truth, being, and presence. Th

e system of “hearing-oneself-speak,” Derrida contends, “has necessarily

dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the

world, the idea of world-origin” (8). Th

is constitutive role of the voice results from the self-presence

created by hearing-oneself-speak. One’s own voice is completely interior, fully present to the speaker;

it is the source of self-identity, of self-presence. Meaning constituted within this full-presence then

becomes the standard for notions of identity, precipitating a metaphysics based on the full-presence

of self, meaning, and identity. Th

e privileging of the voice, which Derrida calls “phonocentrism,” is

the linguistic phenomenon that leads toward “logocentrism,” the Western metaphysical orientation

which perceives meaning to be anchored by the self-presence of identity. Against this tradition, Der-

rida recognizes that the voice has no natural primacy over nonphonetic forms of language and that

the metaphysics of presence is infused with the free-play and undecidability of language. Seeking to

deconstruct phonocentric metaphysics, Derrida explores nonphonetic forms of language—hieroglyph-

ics, ideograms, algebraic notations, and nonlinear writing. His explorations lead beyond phonocentric

linguistics toward “grammatology,” a science of writing and textuality.

When seen through deconstructive lenses, Sign dilates its sphere of infl uence from the socio-

political site of the Deaf community to the entire history of Western “hearing” metaphysics. With

its deconstruction of the voice-centered tradition, grammatology, one might say, initiates a “Deaf

philosophy”—if it weren’t for the fact that Derrida fails to engage theoretical issues of deafness or

signing to any signifi cant degree. Th

e exchange between Sign and deconstruction, then, recognizes the

metaphysical implications of Sign while Sign, in turn, extends the project of deconstruction beyond

its own limitations drawn by the exclusion of Sign and Deaf history.

e theoretical signifi cance of “deafness,” in this sense, takes on new historical and metaphysical

importance that pathologized “deafness” cannot. If nonphonetic writing interrupts the primacy of

the voice, deafness signifi es the consummate moment of disruption. Deafness exiles the voice from

the body, from meaning, from being; it sabotages its interiority from within, corrupting the system

which has produced the “hearing” idea of the world. Deafness, then, occupies a consummate moment

in the deconstruction of Western ontology. Further, deafness does more than disrupt the system of

“hearing-oneself-speak”; it creates an embodied linguistic system which, unlike speech, is not fully

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357

Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body

present to itself. Signers, unless gazing into the mirror, do not fully see themselves signify. While they

may see their hands, they cannot see their own face perform much of Sign’s grammatical nuances.

e eye, unlike the ear in the system of “hearing-oneself-speak,” can only partially “see-oneself-sign.”

ere is always a trace of nonpresence in the system of signing.

One wonders, then, if Derrida had engaged the theoretical implications of deafness and Sign further,

might he have expanded the term “Sign” as he did “Writing” to signify diff erance, Derrida’s neologism

that cannot be spoken but only seen, signifying that phonetic writing is not simply a copy of speech. At

this point, we can only begin to conjecture what sort of diff erent philosophical resonance would occur

by re-reading deconstruction with regards to Sign in the place of—or in addition to—writing.

While Derrida does not engage the theoretical implications of deafness or Sign in any depth, he

does entertain Rousseau’s contradictory relation to the language of gesture, which Rousseau attributes

to Deaf persons on occasion. Early in the Essay on the Origin of Human Languages when Rousseau

imagines that a society could develop arts, commerce, government—all without recourse to speech.

Aft er all, Rousseau writes, “Th

e mutes of great nobles understand each other and understand every-

thing that is said to them by means of signs, just as well as one can understand anything said in dis-

course” (Essay 9). Th

is observation leads Rousseau to muse that “the art of communicating our ideas

depends less upon the organs we use in such communication than it does upon a power proper to

man, according to which he uses his organs in this way, and which, if he lacked these, would lead him

to use others to the same end” (10). Derrida seizes on this nonphonocentric moment in Rousseau to

destabilize the primacy of the voice in Western philosophy. “It is once again the power of substituting

one organ for another,” Derrida writes, “of articulating space and time, sign and voice, hand and spirit,

it is this faculty of supplementarity which is the true origin—or nonorigin—of languages” (241). As

the condition leading toward the supplement, deafness could be read, ironically, as that which makes

the origin of language possible. Deafness summonses up the visual-spatial dimension of language to

supplant the voice from within. It sets diff erance in motion.

is inversion of deafness—from linguistic isolation to the precondition of language itself—has

political implications for the Deaf community’s diffi

cult task of depathologizing Deaf identity within

the culture of academia. Aft er considering deafness in relation to deconstruction, one may begin to

see the Deaf community—not as a group defi ned by its pathological relation to language—but rather

as an example of a culture fl ourishing beyond the reaches of logocentrism. Th

e possibility of such a

community raises questions. Is resisting phonocentrism tantamount to resisting logocentrism? What

are the phenomenological diff erences between “being-in-the deaf-world” and “being-in-the-hearing-

world”? Are Deaf persons—over ninety percent of whom are born in hearing families—really out of

reach of logocentrism? By raising issues surrounding Sign to the metaphysical level, could the argument

for a Deaf cultural identity be expanded beyond the anthropological and socio-linguistic identifi ca-

tions of distinctly “Deaf ” cultural acts—such as Deaf folklore, jokes, attention getting strategies, and

social organizations—to encompass a deeper level: a level that Sign and “not-hearing-oneself-speak”

creates outside of hearing-dominated metaphysics?

Given the relevance of these questions to grammatology, it is surprising that Derrida never engages

signing and deafness as theoretically and historically signifi cant issues.

When he does mention deaf-

ness it is through the “voices” of others: Hegel, Leibniz, Rousseau, and Saussure. Making others speak

about deafness is a strange ventriloquism which demonstrates that Derrida is aware, obviously, of

Sign and Deaf communities. One may link this critical oversight as being symptomatic of not really

seeing Deaf people, of tacitly acknowledging their absence from being. If this is so, this audist oversight

reinscribes the very phonocentrism Derrida sets out to deconstruct. At the very least, one may accuse

Derrida’s grammatology of suff ering from an undertheorized sociopolitical site because he neglects

Deaf history. While he considers logocentrism to be “the most original and powerful ethnocentrism,”

(3) he does not follow this statement to its most severe sociopolitical manifestation: audism.

Audism is the most extreme deployment of phonocentrism ranging from incarcerating Deaf persons

in mental institutions, to eugenics movements (one sponsored by Alexander Graham Bell in America,

another currently practiced in China), to the oppression of sign language in the education of Deaf

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H-Dirksen L. Bauman

358

persons. Many Deaf adults today tell of their violent experiences growing up in oralist schools—their

hands slapped or tied behind their backs if they were caught signing.

Further, early Deaf schools of-

fered a collection of subjugated bodies on which doctors could develop the science of otology. Acids,

needles, and hammers all violated the ears and skulls of Deaf children so that they could be returned

to “normal.”

While he could have made many relevant connections between phonocentrism and oralist edu-

cational practices, Derrida instead labels the condemnation of Leibniz’s desire for a nonphonetic,

universal script as “the most energetic eighteenth-century reaction organizing the defense of pho-

nologism and of logocentric metaphysics” (99). I propose, instead, that the history of deaf education,

as it is marked by violent oppression of sign and the subjugation of Deaf persons, is a more “energetic

reaction” to phonocentrism. It is where phonocentrism meets social and educational policy. Indeed,

nowhere will one fi nd a more vehement declaration of voice-as-presence than by reading the words

of oralist educators. Consider, for example, the following declaration from the father of deaf educa-

tion in German-speaking lands:

e breath of life resides in the voice. . . . Th

e voice is a living emanation of that spirit that God breathed

into man when he created him a living soul . . . What stupidity we fi nd in most of these unfortunate

deaf . . . How little they diff er from animals. (Lane, 107)

is all too common association between Deaf persons and animals off ers arguably the most vivid

illustration of Derrida’s central connection between voice and human presence. As Douglas Baynton,

Harlan Lane, and others have shown, Deaf identity has been publicly constructed through metaphorics

of animality, darkness, imprisonment, and isolation, resulting in a relay of hierarchized binary opposi-

tions which divide along the axis of absence and presence: animal/human; prisoner/property owner;

foreigner/citizen; darkness/light; normality/pathology. Just as the Deaf voice is exiled from its own

body, Deaf persons have been exiled from the phonocentric body-politic.

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