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One hopes these initial ideas point toward a future critical project of exploring a grammatology of

Sign that recognizes Sign’s historical and metaphysical context while also documenting phonocentrism’s

political legacy. Such a project, however, would require a broader theoretical base than grammatology

itself off ers. If Sign criticism is to be an instrumental means of spreading the recognition of Sign litera-

ture and Deaf culture, it needs to articulate itself as an oppositional discourse alongside others which

oppose oppression in its various forms. For this reason, Sign criticism would benefi t from exploring

its relation with feminism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism, in addition to deconstruction.

Feminism/Postcolonialism/Multiculturalism and Sign Literature

Inviting feminism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism into a dialogue with deconstruction brings

together an uneasy alliance. It has become a critical cliche, for example, to accuse deconstruction

of decentering the human subject just as disempowered groups were gaining empowered subjec-

tivities. Despite important diff erences, however, deconstruction may fi nd its greatest alliance with

these oppositional discourses in its dismantling of phonocentrism and audism. Instead of exhuming

well-documented contentions, therefore, it seems more advantageous to draw together overlapping

concerns in order to form a broad textual, social, and political context for the emergence of Deaf/Sign

literature.

Forming such a coalition of ideas is based on Audre Lorde’s belief that sexism, homophobia, and

racism are “particular manifestations of the same disease” (137)—as are ethnocentrism, colonialism,

ableism, and audism. “Can any one here,” Lorde asks, “still aff ord to believe that the pursuit of libera-

tion can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or

sexuality, or class?” (140). Indeed, we cannot—nor can we continue to neglect the commonly elided

category of “ability” from this “pursuit of liberation.”

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359

Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body

In clearing a space to talk about Deaf culture and Sign literature, a number of questions arise in the

initial dialogue between Deaf studies and each area: feminism, postcolonialism, and multicultural-

ism; and from those questions, a few overlapping concerns may be identifi ed that will form ways of

talking about Sign literature in a political and cultural context. Th

is exchange will, one hopes, begin

to build for Deaf studies a strong sociopolitical foundation while Deaf studies, in turn, may expand

the “pursuit of liberation” to include ableism and audism which are frequently overlooked by an

overdetermination of racism and sexism.

e project of recognizing Deaf identity bears similarities to the feminist project of re-gaining a

“body of one’s own” through linguistic and literary practices. Sign, in a more graphic way, perhaps,

than l’écriture feminine is a “writing of/on the body.” Th

e relation between Sign and l’écriture feminine

raises questions that could have interesting implications for feminist performance. Does the antipho-

nocentric nature of Sign off er a means of averting the essentializing tendency of l’écriture feminine?

Does the four-dimensional space of performance off er ways of deconstructing phallogocentric linear

discourse? How does the gender of the signer infl uence the reading/viewing of the “text” itself? How

does the male gaze construct the female body/text? Can gender ever be bracketed out of a reading of

a Sign performance?

Many of these feminist issues anticipate those of postcolonial discourse. At fi rst glance, though, one

would not think of Deaf persons as being “colonized”—disciplined, yes, but colonized? However, as

Harlan Lane shows, audism is homologous with colonialism, including “the physical subjugation of a

disempowered people, the imposition of alien language and mores, and the regulation of education in

behalf of the colonizer’s goals” (32). How accurate is Lane’s position? Could one consider medicine’s

oft en brutal experimentation on the ears of Deaf children a form of physical subjugation? Could the

controversial surgical procedure used to restore hearing—the cochlear implant—be considered a form

of colonizing the Deaf body and eradicating a Deaf culture? Is the eff ort to impose English-only in

Deaf residential schools similar, say, to forcing Native Americans to adopt a nationalized language

and identity in residential schools? Is the fact that oral-based pedagogies exclude Deaf persons from

deaf education a means of securing hearing dominance over the Deaf community? How does a post-

colonial writer/signer resist the hegemony of dominant literature while working within the fi eld of

literature?

In addition, if Sign literature is to be considered as an “ethnic” literature, it should inquire into

its relation to other minority literatures and their ethnic origins. Th

e very claim that Deaf identity is

cultural rather than pathological provokes an interrogation of our assumed “natural” categories of

cultural identity. How can Deaf persons share a cultural identity if they do not have a common religion,

nationality, race, or ethnicity? Do predominantly “Deaf spaces,” such as Deaf residential schools and

Deaf clubs, constitute a type of national “homeland”? How does Deaf identity intersect with other

simultaneous subject positions—gender, race, nationality, class? Would a Deaf American feel more

“at home” with, say, a Deaf Japanese than a hearing American from around the block? Is it possible to

acknowledge the strength of Deaf identity but not fall into the trap of hierarchizing identities? Is Deaf

culture, as it crosses national, racial, and economic borders, an emblematic postmodern culture? And

fi nally, how does a postmodern theory of Deaf culture infl uence a theory of Sign literature?

is initial meeting of Deaf studies, Sign literature, and cultural studies helps to identify a few

underlying concepts—anti-essentialism, hybridity, and border consciousness—that will be helpful in

providing a political context for discussing Sign literature. Because of the relay between logocentrism,

phonocentrism, and audism, any critical practice of Sign literature needs to move beyond logocentric

ways of looking at identity—that is, basing one’s identity on essentialized defi nitions such as “speech

is an essential human trait” or “whites are essentially more intelligent than other races.” Instead, we

need to recognize identities as constantly being constructed within a complex network of social,

political, and linguistic infl uences. Such anti-essentialist thinking is important, for, as Edward Said

comments, “essentialisms have the power to turn human beings against one another” by allowing us to

slide into “an unthinking acceptance of stereotypes, myths, animosities, and traditions encouraged by

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360

imperialism” (229). If audism is itself a form of essentialist thinking, then Deaf resistance to it should

not be a reinscription of it. We need to recognize, then, that a person cannot be purely Deaf apart

from the confl uence of multiple subject positions—nationality, race, gender, class, disability, sexual

preference—just as one cannot be purely Female, Mexican, or Asian. Avoiding an essentialist view

of Deaf identity would be the equivalent of avoiding what Frantz Fanon calls “the pitfalls of national

consciousness” that reinscribes the oppressive essentialism of colonialism.

As opposed to an essentialized “national” or “audist” consciousness, Sign literature might be more

eff ectively approached through a “border consciousness” that recognizes the uniqueness of Deaf cul-

ture and Sign literature, but that also acknowledges their social construction. Indeed, the institutional

patterns of Deaf cultural transmission off er a particularly postmodern example of the constructed

rather than essential nature of identity. Over ninety percent of Deaf persons do not form their cultural

identity through their family but through social organizations and institutions. As Carol Padden and

Tom Humphries explain, one learns to be Deaf, not through an essential “presence of a common

physical condition,” but by gaining “access to a certain cultural history, the culture of Deaf people in

America” (25). To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement about female identity: one is

not born but rather becomes Deaf. Such a perspective of Deaf identity has bearing on the ways we

discuss Sign literature; for, as Edward Said reminds us, we need to recognize that all “cultural forms

are hybrid, mixed, impure, and the time has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their analysis with

their actuality” (14).

In fact, the notion of “Sign literature” is itself a product of hearing/Deaf borderlands. As the term

“literature” derives from the Latin litere, or “letter,” “Sign literature” is oxymoronic in the same sense

as “oral literature.” Because of the inaccuracy of the label, Heidi Rose has proposed that creative use of

American Sign Language be known as “ASL ART” which “should be studied as a distinct phenomenon,

not as some sort of hybrid between the written and oral form” (“Critical Methodology,” 15). Rose’s

re-defi nition raises interesting ontological questions regarding the defi nition of Sign literature. Yet,

rather than establishing a wholesale re-defi nition, it may be wise to let the question of ASL “literature”

remain just that, a question. Th

e desire to defi ne whether creative use of ASL is or is not “literature,” I

feel, unnecessarily limits the discussion to an essentialized either/or opposition. Th

e issues involved in

making such a distinction are far too complex and important to both hearing and Deaf communities

to be reduced to such a dichotomy. Rather than off ering a totalizing answer, it may be wise to tolerate

the ambiguity that ASL “art” both is and is not “literature,” that it is akin to hearing literary practices,

but also cannot be contained by those practices.

Th

ere are too many political and analytical benefi ts of discussing creative Sign as literature to banish

it from the curricular domain of literature. Th

ese benefi ts have been demonstrated best, perhaps, by

Clayton Valli who has defi ned such techniques as “lines” and “rhymes” in Sign poetry. In his essay,

“Th

e Nature of a Line in ASL Poetry,” Valli explains how an ASL poet creates signed “lines” through

visual rhyme patterns. A signed rhyme is made through a repetition of particular handshapes, move-

ment paths, sign locations, or nonmanual markers such as facial expressions or body postures. For

example, in his poem, “Snowfl ake,” Valli employs visual rhyme by repeating the same “fi ve” handshape

(palm open, all fi ngers extended) to sign TREE, then to draw the outline of the leaves on the tree,

and then to show the leaves falling to the ground. In addition, Valli and others accept the same genre

distinctions for Sign as for hearing literature. Identifying such hearing-centered literary analogues

demonstrates that Sign can be explored creatively to produce as linguistically complex “texts” as can

speech and writing. Th

at Sign can partake in the literary traditions of the West is an indispensable

argument in convincing universities to recognize Sign literature, a move which would continue to

depathologize Deaf identity in the minds of hearing persons.

However, uncritically adopting the signifi er of “literature” dismisses the fact that “literature has

been formed within exclusive practices of spoken and written languages. As the linear model is the

structural embodiment of hearing forms of literature, Valli’s concept of the “line” places Sign literature

directly within a phonocentric/audist tradition. Why even concern ourselves with the discussions of

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361

Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body

“lines” and “rhymes”? What sort of political, historical, and metaphysical baggage do those terms carry?

How well can the terms of an aural/temporal art be applied to a visual-spatial art? In order to discuss

Sign as literature, then, one must proceed through the lexicon of hearing criticism and interrogate the

terms for their imbedded audist ideologies and their critical accuracy. In some instances, terminology

can take on new dimensions when it crosses the inter-semiotic gap to visual/spatial language—or old

dimensions, as with “rhythm” which originated, not in the musical arts, but in dance.

Within Sign

criticism, the concept of rhythm may be restored to its original connection with the movements of

the body in time and space.

In fact, there is no reason to confi ne a lexicon for Sign literature to the literary arts. As a visual

performance art, Sign literature may bear more similarity to painting, dance, drama, fi lm, and video

than to poetry or fi ction. A “line” in Sign poetry, for example, might be more accurately modeled aft er

the concept of the “line” in painting or a choreographed “phrase” in dance. Instead of moving from

left to right, the Sign poet draws lines through space in all directions. In addition, given the cinematic

nature of ASL,

the Sign lexicon must be expanded to include such concepts as “editing,” “montage,”

“panning,” “close-up,” and “slow-motion.” Indeed, why not go so far as to invent a new vocabulary in

Sign and then translate that lexicon into written glosses for ASL signs?

is “border theory” asks us to consider ways to avert a reductive either/or response to Sign lit-

erature; it asks us how we may refer to it in such a way that always already implies resistance to being

called “literature”; it asks us to see Sign literature as a hybrid creation, at once unique to Deaf cultural

experience, but also crossing over a multitude of national, economic, racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual,

linguistic, artistic, and textual borders. Identifying the borders that a particular poem, narrative, or

performer crosses over, invites critical dialogue about the relations between minority and dominant

literatures, between Deaf and hearing worlds, and between Deaf identity and Sign literature.

One hopes that, as Trinh Minh-ha writes, “this shuttling in-between frontiers is a working out of

and an appeal to another sensibility, another consciousness of the condition of marginality: that in

which marginality is the condition of the center” (216). Th

e ultimate scope of this project, then, is to

recognize the previously marginalized body of Sign literature, and in so doing to expose the false dual-

ism of speech and writing that has helped to structure the hearing “center” of Western civilization.

Toward a “Poetics of Space”: From Semiotics to Phenomenology

If Sign literature off ers a rare opportunity to reconsider what literature is, then Sign criticism needs

to amass the critical breadth for such an undertaking. Th

e fi rst step is to move beyond Sign criticism’s

preoccupation with formalist linguistic analysis. Th

e writings of Clayton Valli, Edward Klima, and

Ursula Bellugi off er a useful vocabulary for describing a Sign’s physical and linguistic characteristics,

but they are unable to explore the wider metaphysical, sociopolitical, and phenomenological dimen-

sions of Sign literature. As linguists, these writers are more concerned with demonstrating ASL’s depth

and fl exibility than with exploring a fundamental rethinking of the way that literature is produced

and perceived.

Heidi Rose is one of the fi rst persons to break away from linguistic formalism to discuss Sign

literature in the context of a more contemporary criticism—semiotics. In her essay, “A Semiotic

Analysis of Artistic American Sign Language and a Performance of Poetry,” Rose makes a signifi cant

contribution toward a theory of Sign literature by applying C. S. Peirce’s semiotics to a reading of a

signed poem. According to Peirce, signs (not ASL “signs,” but rather anything that produces meaning)

can take three diff erent forms: icon (representation by likeness, e.g., portrait, onomatopoeia), index,

(representation by relation, e.g., smoke to fi re, temperature to fever) and symbol (representation by

arbitrary signifi ers, e.g., conventional words.) Unlike speech and writing, Sign is most oft en associ-

ated with iconic signifi cation. Rose agrees that Sign’s unique character is its iconicity, but only aft er

demonstrating that a Sign poem is more complex than a series of manual pictures in the air. During

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H-Dirksen L. Bauman

362

the course of a performance, Rose explains, the hands may sign on the iconic or symbolic levels while

the non-manual markers (i.e., facial expressions) tend to produce indexical meaning. In the end,

though, the noniconic elements of the poem “fl esh out the manual signs and complete the message

with the fi nal eff ect highlighting the iconic means of communication” (154). Th

e body signifi es dif-

ferently throughout the course of a poem, though its ultimate goal, according to Rose, is to embody

iconic images, to move closer to the thing-itself.

Underlying Rose’s analysis (and the existing body of Sign criticism), however, is the assumption that

iconicity is an inherent and constant element within the text, independent of the viewer’s relationship

to the poem. Th

is assumption is closely allied with another: that Peirce’s semiotic taxonomy is mutu-

ally exclusive and stable. Deaf critic Joseph Grigely, however, demonstrates that semiotics cannot, in

the end, produce the predictable science of language that it had hoped. “Peirce’s taxonomy of signs,”

Grigely writes, “is essentially an unstable ontology, and that the attribution of sign values—iconicity,

indexicality, and arbitrariness—is part of a dynamic process by which a reader circumscribes frames of

reference as part of the act of reading” (243). While Grigely discusses but does not focus on Sign poetry,

he helps Sign criticism to move beyond its preoccupation with iconicity to engage the larger process

of how iconicity is itself produced and received. In “Th

e Implosion of Iconicity,” Grigely writes:

Every time we claim to discover an iconic presence—be it an onomatope like “moo-cow” or in a visual

analogue like the ASL sign for TREE—our discovery is actually a hermeneutic act, an interpretation

of certain textual relations. . . . An interpretive model of iconicity does not require a factual similarity

between a sign and its referent, but merely an impression that similitude of some kind or form ex-

ists—whether or not it actually does. (246)

Iconicity, therefore, is less an element of the poem itself than a form of perception, less an absolute

value than, as Charles Morris has remarked, “a matter of degree” (quoted in Grigely, 246). Taking into

account the role of the reader or viewer in the production of meaning, Grigely moves away from the

formalized “text-as-object” toward the “text-as-an-event” that takes place somewhere between the

poet and the audience. Th

is move is liberating, especially to oral and sign poetics, for it recognizes

the inescapable performative nature of literature.

Once we expand our criticism to accommodate the viewer’s active role in creating the poem, we are

no longer limited to discussing poems as if they took place in objectifi able, linguistic space, for we do

not perceive that space. Such linguistic space is based on a Newtonian constancy of spatial relations.

e poetic space we perceive, however, is of a diff erent nature. Calculating and recording the positions

of the hands in relation to the body, for instance, may help to describe the physical properties of text,

but leaves us unable to explain our perceptions of embodied images that appear, dissolve, enlarge,

shrink, transform, as they shift from close-up to far-away, wide-angle, slow-motion, fast-forward,

and freeze-frame. While these spatio-temporal techniques have their basis in Sign’s unique linguistic

use of four-dimensions, their eff ect can only be articulated within a theory that remains rooted in

the perceptions of the body. For this reason any linguistic or semiotic analysis is incomplete without

considering viewer-oriented phenomenological criticism.

Phenomenology takes as its starting point Edmund Husserl’s questioning of the “natural attitude”

that objects exist independently from our consciousness of them. Human consciousness, according

to Husserl and other phenomenologists, is not formed through a passive reception of the ready-made

world, but through active constitution of that world. Phenomenological or “reader-response” criti-

cism, then, inquires into the ways that readers are themselves producers of literary texts. Any “viewer-

response” criticism of Sign poetry must begin by taking into account the embodied perception of

space, vision, and time, and then by considering these in relation to phenomenologies of language

and the literary imagination. Th

is confl uence of phenomenologies leads toward what may be called

the “poetics of space,” intentionally borrowing from Gaston Bachelard’s book by the same title.

A starting point for the understanding of the poetics of space is Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenol-

ogy of language which applies to Sign as well as to speaking and writing. “Th

e word and speech,”

Merleau-Ponty writes,

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