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363

Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body

must somehow cease to be a way of designating things or thoughts, and become the presence of that

thought in the phenomenal world, and, moreover, not its clothing, but its token or its body. . . . [W]e

fi nd there, beneath the conceptual meaning of the words, an existential meaning which is not only

rendered by them, but which inhabits them.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 182)

In taking on a phenomenal, embodied presence of its own, language is not condemned to the perpetual

task of mimesis and referentiality; language is itself the body, fl esh, and bone of meaning. When audi-

ences watch Clayton Valli’s poem, “Dew on Spiderweb,” for example, they may witness the linguistic

spinning of a spiderweb as real as any spiderweb seen before. Of course, this is an image of a spider-

web, but as Gaston Bachelard asks, “why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those

of perception?” (158). Valli’s image does not so much iconically refer to a spiderweb “out-there,” but

rather brings what Merleau-Ponty has called “a diagram of the life of the actual” (“Eye and Mind,” 126)

into being. As witnesses of this poetic incarnation, we inhabit the poem’s four-dimensional topography

and fi nd ourselves in the intimate physical and phenomenal presence of image-things.

Such an experience cannot be measured. We do not so much see the text as an object “out there”

as we “see according to, or with it” (Merleau-Ponty, 126). We do not so much see a stable volume of

linguistic space, but rather a much more volatile volume of poetic space. For “everything, even size,

is a human value,” Bachelard writes. Just as “miniature can accumulate size . . . [and become] vast in

its own way,” “the dialectics of inside and outside can no longer be taken in their simple reciprocity”

(216). In the poetics of space, the “duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceas-

ingly active in its inversions” (xv). Indeed, it would even be diffi

cult to say exactly where any given

image is; in the “text-as-event,” the borders between viewer and text, subject and object, inside and

outside, become porous.

We now enter into a whole new fi eld of questions about the nature of perception, body, space, time,

Sign, and literature. A few beginning questions must be asked, even if there is not time to answer

them: How is (or isn’t) “poetic space” diff erent from “everyday” space? How is spatial perception in

Sign diff erent from that of speech and writing? Does Sign structure the world diff erently? What are

the poetic and cultural implications of this diff erent ‘structure’? How would a phenomenology of Sign

change the ways we talk about relations between the viewer and the text, the subject and the object?

In order to demonstrate briefl y how the poetics of space may help us to approach Sign poetry, I

return to the notion of the poetic “line.” As Valli chooses the rhymed line break as the exclusive model

for the signed line, this analogy precludes ASL from more contemporary types of line breaks, such as

those of free verse. One wonders why Sign criticism would want to coerce ASL’s most unique qual-

ity—its four dimensions—into the one-dimensional model of the line. Not only is this an inaccurate

analogy, it also places ASL literature as a derivative form of poetry.

Instead of forcing the linear model of oral and written poetics on Sign, it may be more benefi cial

to inquire into the phenomenological reception of a “line.” A viewer does not actually perceive line

division rhyme as such—for it is a linguistic analogy. What the viewer sees, rather, is a complex as-

semblage of lines drawn through space by fi ngers, hand movements, arm movements, or whole body

movements. If the aft erimage of all the lines were recorded on video throughout the course of a poem,

the visual eff ect would be more like that of a Susan Howe poem than a sonnet.

Take, for example, the opening of Flying Word Project’s “Poetry,” where performer Peter Cook

gestures shooting a gun. He begins the “line” by tracing the direction of the bullet with the index

fi nger. Cook repeats the motion quickly, conveying the speed of the bullet. Th

is line drawn through

space then extends and curves as it transforms into signifying a moon circling a planet.

is radical transformation from human to cosmic scale, from straight to circular, threaded to-

gether through the same handshape, moves the reader through vastly diff erent experiences of space.

From the intimacy of a mid-range shot to the immensity of the distance shot of a whole planet, the

producer/viewer’s body not only shift s perspectives, but in so doing, inhabits a new kind of space. Th

perceived “line,” in other words, cannot be measured as a constant volume, but only in its ability to

generate poetic volume.

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364

Seeing the line within the full space and time of the body leads Sign literature away from the pho-

nocentric literary model, and toward concepts more akin to the visual and performative arts. Indeed,

at the hands of Sign poets, the poetic line may resemble a Klee more than a Keats; and like the lines

in a Klee, Sign is “a matter of freeing the line, of revivifying its constituting power” (Merleau-Ponty,

“Eye and Mind,” 143). Such a liberation of the prosaic line may provide an example of the margin

freeing the center from its own constraints.

Further phenomenological study of Sign poetry will, one hopes, explore other literary concepts

in their visual-spatial quality, as opposed to their linguistic quantity. Th

is approach will keep Sign

criticism close to the original site of poetic creation: the meeting of body, time, space, and language.

In the end, we may arrive at a viewing practice in which Sign poems are not so much “read” or “seen”

as they are lived in from the inside.

Conclusion

Drawing out all the possible connections, contradictions, and ambiguities between deconstruction,

cultural studies, semiotics, and phenomenology as they apply to Sign literature will be a major critical

task. To begin, a few key critical concepts may be isolated: while Sign literature is a minority cultural

practice, it nonetheless has profound implications for the dominant group’s understanding of language,

literature, and culture. Th

ese implications manifest at the metaphysical site (the breaking of the he-

gemony of speech-writing); the sociopolitical site (the emergence of a postmodern culture outside of

phonocentrism); the textual site (the practice of a postmodern bardic tradition recorded only through

video-text); and the phenomenological site (the performance of an alternative visual-spatial means of

being-in-the-world). Th

rough the performance of a signed text, all these sites operate simultaneously,

each within the other. Boundaries give way and become openings. “A narrow gate,” Bachelard writes,

“opens up an entire world” (185). One hopes the narrow gate of Sign literature and criticism will open

up the entire world of experience previously foreclosed by the dominance of speech and writing. If

the fi gure of the blind poet inhabits the origins of poetry, then we may look toward the Deaf poet to

explore the future of poetry as it becomes increasingly visual, spatial, and embodied.

Notes

1. Deaf persons, I believe, are fi rst and foremost members of a cultural and linguistic community, bearing more similarity,

say, to Hispanics than to persons with cerebral palsy. My publishing this article in a disability studies reader, however,

highlights what I feel may be a coalition formed between Deaf studies and disability studies. Th

is coalition must be aware

that Deaf persons form a unique linguistic and cultural group, but that both groups may strive in tandem to resist the

pathologization of the body by the abled body-politic. Deaf and disability studies, for example, could collaborate to resist

China’s present eugenics practice of sterilizing “disabled” persons. Only by joining forces and resources may the Deaf and

persons with disabilities gain a larger political voice to denounce China’s human rights violations as well as America’s

policy to China.

2. In keeping with conventions within Deaf studies, I use the capitalized Deaf to refer to the cultural group of ASL-users

while lower case deaf and deafness refer to the physical phenomena of not hearing.

3. I refer to sign languages collectively as “Sign.” Sign includes all native sign languages—British Sign Language, American

Sign Language, French Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, etc. but does not include manual versions of dominant

languages such as Signed Exact English. Th

e distinctions between manual versions of dominant languages and the native

languages of Deaf communities presents an interesting fi eld of study which may illuminate the constitutive nature of

vision in Sign grammar that is at odds with the logic of spoken languages.

4. Since the advent of video publications, a number of Deaf poets and storytellers have achieved national recognition within

the Deaf community: Ella Mae Lentz, Dorothy Miles, Bernard Bragg, Debbie Rennie, Patrick Graybill, Gilbert Eastman,

Ben Bahan, Sam Supalla and Flying Words Project (Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner). Th

e most accessible videos are pro-

duced by Dawn Sign Press which has published the Poetry in Motion series featuring Debbie Rennie, Patrick Graybill,

and Clayton Valli, the ASL Literature series featuring narratives by Ben Bahan and Sam Supalla, and more recently,

Clayton Valli’s Selected Works. In Motion Press has also published a collection of poems by Ella Mae Lentz entitled Th

Treasure.

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365

Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space, and the Body

5. See Dick Higgins’s Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature.

6. Indeed, some writers tread so close to the poetics of Sign, that it is only their inability to see through the label of dis-

ability (and the oppression of Sign in the early part of this century) that precluded recognition of Sign as a medium for

literature. Ernest Fenollosa’s Th

e Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry might have been more accurate had

he written about ASL rather than the Chinese ideogram. In addition, Artaud’s Th

e Th

eater and its Double praises sign

language without ever connecting the language of gesture to the Deaf community. No doubt, Artaud, Fenollosa, and Pound

would have been enthralled with the experimental poetics of avant-garde Deaf poets. More recently, only a scattering of

contemporary poets and critics have recognized Sign poetry. Jerome and Diane Rothenberg include an article on Sign

poetry by Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi in Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics;

in 1984, Allen Ginsberg visited the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York where he met with

Deaf poets (cf. Cohn’s “Visible Poetics” essay.); and in the MLA Newsletter, critic W.J.T. Mitchell wrote that “Th

e poetry

of the deaf stages for us in the most vivid possible form the basic shift in literary understanding that has been occurring

in the last decade: the movement from a “textual” model (based in the narrowly defi ned circuit of writing and speech)

to a “performance” model.” (14).

7. In the thirty years since the publication of De la Grammatologie, Derrida continued to overlook deafness and Sign. In

those years, Europe and the United States have witnessed the most important years in Deaf history. With the 1988 Gal-

laudet Revolution, Deaf culture has become recognized in the international media. And yet, Derrida continues to avoid

the questions raised by deafness even though he, along with Paul de Man has explored the metaphorics of blindness.

Derrida, however, is not the only deconstructionist to miss the metaphysical implications of deafness. In Th

e Telephone

Book, Avital Ronnell is an audist tourist in her brief foray into Deaf culture. In fact, she treats the audist, Alexander Graham

Bell, so sympathetically that she fails to see the strong arm of logocentrism reaching through Bell’s call for a eugenics

movement to eradicate “a deaf variety of the human race.” When discussing the work of Bell, Ronell writes, “We are still

talking art, and of the poetry diverting a child from the isolation of deafness, saving the child in language, bringing him

to the proximity of speech with his father. AGB did this—an act of genuine poiesis . . .” (329–30). Is this not, rather, an act

of coercing a deaf child into phonocentrism?; is it not a form of violence to deny a child a natural visual language when

he cannot hear speech? Would it not be more of an act of genuine poeisis to teach the Father to sign? Further, Ronell’s

worst kind of tourism is evident as she does not bother to understand basic cultural literacy of Deaf persons. She calls

the Abbé de l’Epée the “fi rst literate deaf-mute”; the Abbé, however, was a hearing man in his fi ft ies who stumbled upon

two deaf women in Paris and subsequently became interested in deaf education.

8. See Bernard Bragg’s Lessons in Laughter: Th

e Autobiography of a Deaf Actor as signed to Eugene Bergman. Bragg recounts

his childhood experiences being taught how to laugh like hearing persons because his teacher was annoyed that his pupils

sounded like animals when they laughed.

9. See Harlan Lane, Th

e Mask of Benevolence for further discussion, especially p. 212–16. Lane is the fi rst to use the work of

Michel Foucault as it applies to deafness. As with Derrida, Foucault’s work may be enormously benefi cial to Deaf Stud-

ies, even though he overlooks the question of Deaf Culture. In fact, the discursive “birth of deafness” is so closely allied

to the births of the asylum, the clinic and prisons, it is quite surprising to fi nd no mention of deafness in Foucault. Th

same years that witnessed the rise of Pinel’s asylums for the insane also witnessed Pinel’s methods of observation and

classifi cation deployed by his student, Jean-Marc Itard, within the newly founded “Asylums for the Deaf and the Dumb”;

when the medical gaze penetrated the surface of the body in the age of Bichat, otologists probed the workings of the ear;

when écoles normales produced disciplinary pedagogies, “oralist” teachers (some of whom were also teachers at écoles

normales) developed pedagogies to discipline the deaf body into normative language practices. In short, the Asylum for

the Deaf and Dumb served as a point of convergence of discourses which, as Foucault demonstrates, all work toward the

same goal: to separate the normal from the abnormal, the hearing from the deaf, in order to normalize the transgressive

Other, to eradicate all diff erences—while ironically exacerbating them, perpetuating the subjugation of the abnormal body.

10. Th

e inability to defi ne ASL literature is not unique to ASL; rather, I believe hearing literature itself cannot be defi ned

with any consistency and accuracy. Th

e term defi ne originates from the Latin defi nare, meaning to limit; I believe that it

is unwise to be overly concerned with limiting the boundaries of creative practices—whether Deaf or hearing.

11. As J. J. Pollitt notes, “[rhythmos] were originally the “positions” that the human body was to assume in the course of a

dance in other words the patterns or schemata that the body made. In the course of a dance certain obvious patterns or

positions, like the raising or lowering of a foot, were naturally repeated, thus marking intervals in the dance. Since music

and singing were synchronized with dancing, the recurrent positions taken by the dancer in the course of his movements

also marked distinct intervals in the music. . . . Th

is explains why the basic component of music and poetry was called

a . . . foot” (quoted in Mitchell 280–81).

12. Linguist William Stokoe describes the cinematic properties of ASL, a concept originally developed by Deaf artists Ber-

nard Bragg and Gil Eastman: “In a signed language . . . narrative is no longer linear and prosaic. Instead, the essence of

sign language is to cut from a normal view to a close-up to a distant shot to a close up again, and so on, even including

fl ashback and fl ash-forward scenes, exactly as a movie editor works. . . . Not only is signing itself arranged more like edited

fi lm than like written narration, but also each signer is placed very much as a camera: the fi eld of vision and angle of

view are directed but variable. Not only the signer signing but also the signer watching is aware at all times of the signer’s

visual orientation to what is being signed about” (quoted in Sacks, 90).

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13. While this phenomenology of language could lead toward a type of logocentric self-presence, Merleau-Ponty recognizes

the ambiguity of absence/presence which underlies all perception. “Th

e perceived thing exists only insofar as I perceive it,

and yet its being is never exhausted by the view I have of it. It is this simultaneous presence and absence that is required

for ‘something to be perceived at all’ ” (Logos and Eidos: Th

e Concept in Phenomenology, 10). For this reason, Merleau-

Ponty refers to the realm of language and the imaginary to be “quasi-present.”

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e Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

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is Earth’: Th

e Metaphorical Construction of Deafness in the Nineteenth Century.”

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Cohn, Jim. 1986. “Th

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e Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

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e Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights

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The Enfreakment of Photography

David Hevey

Before reading this chapter, I feel I must contextualise what lies ahead for the reader. In many ways,

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