This book is about the limits of language, life after collapse, and what it means to find new ways of being in the world. It distills nearly 20 years of anthropological engagement with DeafBlind people in the United States, many of whom acquired American Sign Language, or ASL, as their first language, attended Deaf schools, were involved in Deaf organizations, and had Deaf friends and partners. Due to a shared genetic condition called Usher Syndrome, they slowly became blind over the course of many years. As that process unfolded, the visual world they once knew collapsed, and for many it was not clear how life could continue. Starting in the late 1970s, this problem was addressed with increasing dependence on sighted interpreters. At first, as the process of becoming blind was just beginning, interpreters relayed messages via ASL. As time went on, more of the world needed to be relayed, until eventually descriptions of the world were expected to stand in for the world itself.

The main claim at the heart of this book is that the collapse of the world was not a result of becoming blind but rather the culmination of many years of substituting statements about the world for the world. Although we can be carried away into the world of a novel, or struck by the vividness of a friend’s story, it is not possible to live in a description when the description is all you have. In other words, there is a limit to what language can do when the world is falling apart and existence itself is at stake. I am not claiming that language, in some universal sense, is deficient or unimportant. The claim is that there are existential conditions that must be in place in order for language to be effective as a means of talking about, or representing, the world.

The book focuses on a particular historical moment in two DeafBlind com- munities (one in Seattle, Washington, and one in Washington, D.C.), where DeafBlind people were trying to find new ways of being in the world and as part of that process found themselves grappling with the limits of language. In the 1990s, two DeafBlind leaders in Seattle took a novel approach. They claimed that descriptions of the world, filtered through sighted interpreters, were largely unnecessary, since all human activity could be carried out through touch. With their community, they sought new tactile ways of com- municating, interacting, and navigating. This effort became the “protactile movement,” and it spread quickly across the country. Reporting on more than 30 months of fieldwork with DeafBlind political leaders, artists, educators, and community members, this book tells the story of what I learned about the limits of language as the DeafBlind people I knew were, as they said, “going tactile.”

1.1       How to Read This Book
How you read this book will depend on who you are. If you are DeafBlind, you may wonder what a hearing, sighted person such as myself can possibly offer. My answer is that DeafBlind communities, organizations, and indi- viduals will offer far more than I can. However, over the course of nearly 20 years of research, many of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have become DeafBlind, and I have listened to them carefully as they shared their experiences. I have also studied the history of the institutions that shaped those experiences and spent time observing, first hand, the emergence of radically new options for how a person could be DeafBlind. It is my hope that the analysis of those changes presented in this book will deter readers who are DeafBlind, their family, friends, and others in their communities from thinking about blindness itself as the cause of issues at work, communication breakdown, or problems in relationships. By the end, I hope these readers are convinced that these problems are not “in” any one individual but distributed across groups of people, institutions, infrastructure, and the environment as a whole.
What became known as the protactile movement did not begin as a set of established practices or rules to be learned. It started by finding protected places, where dominant sighted norms could be suspended and new and more tactile ways of being could be discovered. In those places, blame and frus- tration shifted from the individual, their biological development, and their psychological ability to cope to the social, historical, and political processes that obscured tactile affordances in the first place. Finding a way forward from there was a collective project, which sighted people have had little to contribute to. Unlike DeafBlind people in the past, you will now find organized political efforts led by and for DeafBlind people. As DeafBlind writer John Lee Clark says, “It’s an exciting time to be DeafBlind” (2014).

​For interpreters, teachers, family members, and friends, I hope this book will help you step back and consider the broader social and historical processes that have made the role you currently have available to you, and think about what function that role has within larger systems. When I was socialized into the Seattle DeafBlind community in the late 1990s, almost a decade before the inception of the protactile movement, sighted people had a much more central role. As an undergraduate student interested in language and communication, I moved to Seattle to start training to become an interpreter. Over the next four years, I became increasingly involved in the DeafBlind community. I was employed at a restaurant owned by a DeafBlind man and staffed by Deaf and DeafBlind employees; I regularly attended social and community events; I had DeafBlind friends and roommates; and I was tentatively trying out the role of interpreter. By the time I completed my undergraduate education, I was embedded in the community and had internalized many local standards and norms for interaction and communication. As students of interpreting, we were taught that DeafBlind people are at risk of social isolation, so when sighted people are around they should try to do all they can to provide useful and interesting information that can help maintain some connection to the world.

Shortly after I arrived in Seattle, a DeafBlind woman I call “Adrijana” joined the community and a couple of years later “Lee” arrived. As I neared graduation, I grew closer with each of them, and through casual intellectual exchange they began to undermine fundamental aspects of what I had inter- nalized in the years prior, calling into question the “need” for constant sighted intervention and expressing, on many occasions, genuine confusion about why such pervasive intervention was necessary. In 2001, I was on track to become a professional interpreter, but by the time I finished my training, I felt that my continued involvement in that capacity would cause more problems than it would solve. Still, I was fascinated by this world and felt there was much more for me to learn. So, in 2003, I left Seattle to start a program of graduate study in linguistics and anthropology. I returned on weekends and during summer and winter breaks and, in 2010, I conducted 12 months of doctoral research. I realized then that while I had been away Adrijana and Lee had turned their critical analyses into a full-scale social move- ment. Their premise was straightforward enough: Vision and hearing are not necessary for life.

In 2010, Lee and Adrijana organized a series of 20 protactile workshops for 11 DeafBlind participants in order to explore new ways of communicating and interacting through touch. I attended as a researcher, videorecording interactions and observing. I was instructed by the DeafBlind teachers leading the workshops not to interact with anyone while the group was actively involved in organized activities, and I was forbidden from acting as a source of visual information. I recorded the following in my field notes (lightly edited for typos and readability) after one of the workshop sessions:
 
"Each week, I bring some snacks and put them on the back table. Since the first week, I have been bringing seaweed. They come in little packages from Trader Joe’s, and I find them delicious. Charlotte tried them for the first time in the second class at Lee’s urging, and thought they were OK. Tonight, Eric found the seaweed. Each sheet is very thin and breakable. If you are rough with them, they crumble. He opened the package and couldn’t figure out what was in there, so he felt around a little, crumbling the pieces of seaweed on the floor. Then he grabbed some of what was left in the package and put it in his mouth. Then without a tactile addressee, he walked around very dramatically, making a choking sign, saying it was disgusting! And who brought those! Yuck!!!"

It was really hard for me to watch and not feel responsible. The crushing and crumbling, and the mess on the floor also made me feel uncomfortable. Partially because Lee and Adrijana and I agreed that I would be responsible for keeping the room clean, but also on some deeper level—I was weighing his actions against sighted frames of appropriateness. This made me re-think all of these ways we “support” DeafBlind people. Normally a sighted person would guide each Deaf- Blind person to the table and explain what food was there, and the DeafBlind person might even ask the sighted person to get their food for them, so as not to knock anything over or eat something unexpected. It occurred to me that all of this “support” we provide might really be about keeping ourselves from feeling uncomfortable, not about helping them do something they couldn’t do otherwise.
 
My perspective as a sighted person shifted as the community changed. At each moment in that process, my relationships with individuals, the profession of interpreting, and my habitual ways of engaging DeafBlind environments shifted as well. That process was not always easy. It is my hope that sighted family, friends, interpreters, and educators who work with, or encounter, DeafBlind people will read this book as one example of how your role can change and what is at stake in allowing, or encouraging, that change to take place.
Broadly construed, this book is about the relation between being in and representing the world. In representing our worlds, we achieve all sorts of aims. We fight for resources, recognition, and rights. We build consensus and articulate demands. We de-construct and re-frame. In examining the emergence of the protactile movement, this book dwells on the fact that we also struggle to exist, and there are forms of politics that operate within that struggle, day to day—not on the podium, in front of the cameras, or on
social media feeds but in mundane conversations, routine ways of moving through the environment, and common-sense expectations about how the world works. Over the course of reading this book, you will encounter many reports of things that barely rise to the status of an event: a description of the way a rug is positioned in someone’s house, a story about the kind of gum I chewed one day, a debate about whether a certain plant in a friend’s backyard is a flower or a weed, a description of the tile in the lobby of my old apartment building, and a story about how my friend and I walked across it one day. In each case, I am trying to tease out a subtle form of politics that does not try to replace one construct with another, change dominant standards that cannot be conformed to, or break into spaces that were designed to exclude but rather to create, maintain, and protect the possibility of existence. The interactions I document rarely thematize language, identity, or other common targets of political discourse. Rather, they involve things like talking about how to get from one place to another, pointing at objects, and talking about how best to describe them. I demonstrate that these interactions, perhaps because of their apparent simplicity and concreteness, are important for understanding the stakes of the protactile social movement and, more broadly, the existential foundations of language and life.

Before continuing any further, I must emphasize that this book is not about “deafblindness,” or even “DeafBlind people” in any general sense. It is a book about the inception of the protactile movement in Seattle, Washington, in a particular historical moment, and how the principles that emerged were re-interpreted by DeafBlind people in Washington, D.C., as the movement spread. In comparing these two communities, my aim is, precisely, to show that the process of becoming a protactile person is not universal but, rather, socially and historically contingent and therefore yields diverse practices, theories, and ways of being in different places and times. Only some small portion of these will be analyzed in this book and only from my perspective as a hearing, sighted anthropologist with particular relationships and experi- ences. This work should be read along with works by DeafBlind scholars and theorists John Lee Clark, aj granda, Najma Johnson, Sarah McMillen, Jasper Norman and Yashaira Romilus, and Jelica Nuccio among others (e.g. Clark 2015, 2017; McMillen 2015; granda and Nuccio 2018; Clark and Nuccio 2020; Johnson 2020); the growing, interdisciplinary body of research on interaction and language-use among DeafBlind people in and outside of the United States (review available in Willoughby et al. 2018); and a burgeoning body of work in anthropology on touch and proprioception in social and interactional contexts (Goodwin 2017; Goodwin and Cekaite 2018; Rutherford 2022).

1.1.1       Translation, Style, and Convention

This book contains no figures, tables, or footnotes. I chose to write this way because adding those things creates the need to provide “visual descriptions” of them, i.e. “provide acesss.” In his essay, Against Access, John Lee Clark (2021) argues against this.
 
"The question I am asked most frequently by hearing and sighted people is `How can I make my [website, gallery exhibit, film, performance, concert, whatever] accessible to you?' Companies, schools, nonprofits, and state and federal agencies approach me and other DeafBlind people all the time, demanding, `How do we make it more accessible?'
Such a frenzy around access is suffocating. I want to tell them, Listen, I don’t care about your whatever. But the desperation on their breath holds me dumbfounded. The arrogance is astounding. Why is it always about them? Why is it about their including or not including us? Why is it never about us and whether or not we include them?"
 
Including figures and tables would be an expedient way to create anti- tactile conditions, thereby putting myself in a position to provide access. It is my hope that by describing experiences, instances of language-use, and interaction in prose, I will prevent this. I try to make these descriptions clear for those who have and those who have not been in “contact space,” (Granda and Nuccio 2018) or the environments that protactile people live in and give shape to together. However, if you do not understand certain things, you can skip over them for now and look for opportunities to be invited into the protactile spaces that will make them more legible. I have excluded footnotes on esthetic grounds. Footnotes eat into the text, break up the flow, and ask the reader to digress repeatedly. This is true when the text reaches readers through visual channels, but it is especially true (I am told) when the text reaches readers through tactile channels, via Braille dis- play. For this reason, I have minimized this convention in academic writing and the information that comes with it in order to create a pleasant reading experience. If you are the type of reader who wants more citational detail, many relevant citations can be found in the journal articles I have published in the years surrounding the publication of this book and in my dissertation. Another potential source of confusion for people who have little expo- sure to protactile environments: I do not always flag the manner in which information was conveyed in a given setting. For example, Chapter 1 begins with a scene in which I am describing the setting to a DeafBlind woman.

That description was produced using ASL and received through touch. This means I was producing the description as I would for a sighted interlocutor. As I discuss below, a sighted interlocutor would have access to the visual backdrop of my face and torso, which is needed for important linguistic distinctions to be perceived. The DeafBlind receiver of my description did not have that backdrop available. Instead, their hands were placed on top of my hands, tracking their movements in empty “air space” (granda and Nuccio 2018). Tactile reception of a visual language does not make the language itself tactile. Just as English was meant to be heard, but can be partially perceived through vision (i.e. lipreading), ASL is meant to be seen, but can be partially perceived through touch. In both cases, the listener exhausts themselves trying to perceive and parse the input. It is a last resort. However, prior to the protactile movement it was the only option. If I am describing a setting in this book in which sighted people (including myself) are “providing access” to DeafBlind people, it is likely that tactile reception of ASL is the mode of communication. And again, on esthetic grounds, “tactile reception of visual American Sign Language” is an ungainly expression. My aim in sometimes omitting this information is to spare my readers an awkward and unpleasant reading experience, whether they are receiving the text via Braille or visually via print.

About names: This book is based on research that required approval from the “Institutional Review Board” at the universities where I have worked and was trained. As part of the approval process, I created consent forms that were read and discussed with every participant I write about. They consented to the process with the guarantee that I would not share their identities publicly. Therefore, I have assigned pseudonyms to participants and taken steps to obscure their identities, for example by changing the name of their home town or other information that might give away their identity. This is standard for ethnographic research and it can be considered unethical not to obscure the identity of participants. However, this framework is problematic, as many anthropologists before me have also noted (e.g. Weiss and McGranahan 2021). In this case, the use of pseudonyms comes with an assumption that there is a researcher who has the “theory” and the “method” and there are participants who do not. Many of my interlocutors are, like many “research participants,” theorists with methods of their own. There is a line, then, that is often obscured between acting in ways that will protect “research participants,” on the one hand, and failing to give credit where credit is due, on the other. John Lee Clark has also urged me (in personal communication) to think about the fact that the use of pseudonyms can work to withhold important historical information that may not be available elsewhere. In this book, I have decided that, unless I have been asked explicitly not to, I will uphold the agreement that was made in the consent process. This is, however, a temporary solution. I look forward to participating in conversations about this moving forward and plan to design consent processes to include more fine-grained options and alternatives in the future.

About “sign language”: In ASL, there are many words that capture different ways of expressing the idea of “sign language” or the activity of “signing,” and none of them describe what protactile people do. For this reason, protactile educators have insisted that people stop calling protactile language a “sign language” or a “tactile sign language.” “Tactile language” is preferred. Along with this, using the term “signer” to refer to people who produce tactile language has also been deemed unacceptable. “Speaker,” on the other hand, has been embraced by some (John Lee Clark and others) as a “higher-status” term, once reserved for spoken languages, which should be freely applied to producers of any language in any perceptual modality. For these reasons, where some might feel the term “signer” is appropriate, I use, instead, the term “speaker.” To make matters more complicated, in English, and in particular in semiotic theory or theories of meaning (broadly construed), the term “sign” has a maximally inclusive meaning. Some linguistic anthropologists refer to any communicative agent who produces meaning, human or not, as a “signer” (e.g. Kockelman 2010). I am counting on the reader to be attentive to the context in which I use one term or another and adjust accordingly. It is not possible to convey my intended meanings by locking myself into one rigid association between one term and one meaning.

About translation: Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. In my training as an interpreter, I learned that there are different degrees of distance one can take from the message. Translating one word at a time, or providing approximations of individual, meaningful units within words (i.e. a morpheme by morpheme gloss), might be the “closest,” while higher-level interpretation would take into account things like differences in background knowledge, the goals of the participants, and the projected effects of various choices in terms of how a message is packaged and conveyed. For example, in Chapter 5, I analyze several interactions where protactile linguistic expres- sions are used. The analysis focuses on these moments, and the details of how those expressions are produced and received are important. I therefore describe in detail how the message was conveyed (Section 5.4):
 
". . . Adrijana produced an expression foreign to ASL. Instead of extending a finger out into space along a visual trajectory, Adrijana took the DB participant’s hand and turned it over so the palm was facing up. She held it in place with her left hand from underneath. Then, with her right hand, she located herself and her interlocutor by pressing a finger into the upturned palm to mean “here.” Then, she touched her finger first to her interlocutor’s chest (meaning “you”) and touched her own chest to mean, “me.” This sequence can be glossed, “here, you, me,” and the translation would be, “You and I are here.”"
 
This is an example of a relatively “close” interpretation. In uttering those expressions, the speaker could be aiming to convey a range of interactional or interpersonal meanings. At this level of interpretation, however, it is not clear what those aims are. In Chapter 4, I quote Adrijana discussing some of the reasons DeafBlind people in her community were initially reluctant to meet with one another without interpreters present. Instead of describing in detail where her hands were moving or making contact, I describe at a higher level what I think she meant to convey:
 
"People already have their ways of doing things. Senior Citizens love to go to the monthly meetings [at DBSC] in order to talk to their [interpreters]! They love it because they get information from them. They don’t see DeafBlind people as a source of information. . . ."
 
In this passage, I translated from one code to another without including any details about how Adrijana produced individual words or phrases. I also added in terms from earlier discourse that the reader would not have access to (“DBSC” and “interpreters”). This is one example of how I generated a “higher-level” interpretation. In this book, I have chosen a higher-level interpretation if my main goal is to relay what was said or how it felt to observe or participate in the interaction I describe. When I am analyzing language structure or focusing on the form of what was said, I include a layer of translation that sticks closer to the original.

Finally, a note about optimism: This book is ultimately about how Deaf- Blind people created autonomous spaces away from sighted norms and in those spaces brought an entire world into being. It is a hopeful story that I have been telling various pieces of since the completion of my dissertation in 2014. When the dissertation started circulating, I learned from several DeafBlind interlocutors that the optimistic narratives I was perpetuating had a down side. They impressed upon me the importance of recognizing grief and sadness and the fact of existential collapse. Some may read this book and feel that I am being ableist—making the process of becoming blind seem like some terrible thing, when it doesn’t have to be terrible at all. After many conversations and much thought, I have come to the conclusion that under the historical and social conditions that were in place for the people I write about, becoming blind was hard. Understanding why, and how they found a way forward together, is the most important thing this book does.
 
 
1.2       This Is a Jar Containing Strawberry Jam
In the winter of 2008 on a rainy day in Seattle, I met a DeafBlind woman, Charlotte, at a coffee shop for an interview. As we found our way to a table, I described the environment. I told her about the screeching of the espresso machine and how sometimes it stopped and the room went silent. I described the subtle sound of rain and the way the windows fogged up when the cafe was full. I described the old man sitting across from us, and the white band of fine, thinning hair around the perimeter of his head. I described how people walked, how they sat, and how they ate, and I told her that there were mugs and other coffee supplies for sale up by the register. Later, when we were discussing her experiences working with interpreters, Charlotte emphasized their importance in her life (despite the many problems they also caused). She used our interaction as an example and said that without that kind of environmental information, “all I have is a conversation with you, and this coffee. I’m not really here in this place.”

At that point in the history of the Seattle DeafBlind community, any sighted person, whether they were an interpreter, a friend, a colleague, a family member, or an ethnographer, probably would have found Charlotte’s statement about the value she placed on interpreters unsurprising. After all, how can a DeafBlind person have a sense of where they are unless a sighted person describes it to them? Looking back on my time with Charlotte, I wonder why she and I both assumed that she needed a sighted person to take in what was around her. If she had just reached out and touched things, wouldn’t she have eventually found her own tactile way of being in the cafe? What was needed, exactly, to be there?

For anyone who remembers or can imagine what it is like to be sighted in a cafe in Seattle on a rainy day, the description I produced might yield a sense of recognition. Your mind might skip across the surface of things, making connections I did not include. For example, the idea that fog is a sign of moisture, moisture is a sign of crowding or rain, and rain has a dampening effect on atmosphere or mood. For a person like Charlotte, who is slowly becoming blind, sequences like these will eventually fail to generate. When that happens, the limits of language will be felt.

You may wonder why Charlotte’s previous experiences as a partially sighted person did not provide enough context for her to feel as if she was there with me. In order to address that question, we must ask how this kind of sequence—taking fog as a sign of moisture, moisture as a sign of rain, and so on—relates to the description I provided. How does it constitute a “context” that can render my description effective?
The relationship between language and context is a long-standing source of debate for linguists, anthropologists, and philosophers. For these scholars, the problem often begins with the indeterminate, elliptical, or fragmentary nature of “propositions,” where propositions are understood as statements or “predicates” that characterize a subject or theme. For example, in the sentence, “Coats are warm,” are warm is a predicate, which characterizes coats. However, in everyday contexts of language-use, you might get something more like this (Shopen 1973: 65):
 
"Hey Mike.
What?
Ann’s Coat. O.K."
 
From a linguistic perspective, “Ann’s coat” is functioning like an argument of a predicate but there is no predicate. This is an example of what linguist Timothy Shopen calls “functional ellipsis,” which he argues is common and is easily understood by participants. The reverse can also take place, where a predicate, or phrase that asserts something about its subject, is expressed without all of its arguments. For example (Shopen 1973: 65):
 
"Hello Henry. What happened? Bobby refused.
What will we do now?"
 
Here, “Bobby refused” is missing the constituent in the sentence that would convey what it is Bobby refused to do. This is known as “constituent ellip- sis,” and this, too, is rampant in everyday events of language-use. In both cases, language functions as a powerful means of communication and cre- ative expression, despite its frequent incompleteness. This fact can some- times be accounted for via grammatical operations that involve things like “movement” or “deletion” of underlying linguistic structures (e.g. Merchant 2004) or by expanding grammatical principles beyond the sentence into larger units of discourse (e.g. Kehler 2000). However, there are cases that do not seem to draw missing propositional content from language at all, whether it is prior discourse, patterns in how discourse is constructed, or in underlying grammatical operations. Instead, the missing content is supplied by the extra- linguistic context (Shopen 1973: 66):
 
"Consider a jar with a label saying “Strawberry Jam.” The predication is partly extra- linguistic: a predicate nominal is pasted onto its referential subject! It would create a humorous effect of overkill to have instead, “This jar contains strawberry jam.”"
 
In other words, “strawberry jam” is functioning like a constituent of the verb “contains,” but the verb itself is not present. This, then, is a case of functional ellipsis, where the missing propositional content is given by the extra-linguistic context, i.e. the jar itself and its contents.

There are a couple of assumptions implicit in this analysis and the overall approach to language and context it implies. First, there is an assumption that the meaning of the jar of jam and the meaning of the label attached to it are both products of the same kind of interpretive or “semiotic” process. This is not the case. While we tend to associate the idea of “meaning” with language, the jam jar becomes meaningful in its own way as it is incorporated into an activity, such as making toast with jam. The jar can be opened, the opening accommodates a knife, and the jam inside is just the right texture for spreading. The label “Strawberry Jam,” in contrast, means what it does, in part, because there is a conventional association in English between that two- word phrase and the concept of strawberry jam, which takes on additional meaning when inserted into a sentence. The jar itself and the words on the label are part of distinct semiotic processes. The jar itself does not work to characterize any theme or subject, while the label attached to it does. In other words, the “meaning” or semiotic process associated with the jar is “non- propositional,” while the meaning or semiotic process associated with the label is “propositional.” There is a tendency, in the analysis provided above and elsewhere, to conflate these distinct forms of semiosis. When we go about our everyday routines, walking, sitting, eating, and so on, we are not talking about the world, but rather living in it. Nevertheless, our engagements with the environment are meaningful. Understanding the difference between the kind of meaning generated by a propositional statement about the world and the kind of meaning generated by being in the world is essential for understanding the protactile movement, its consequences, and the conditions that gave rise to it.

A second and related assumption in Shopen’s approach to language and context and others like it is that these two kinds of semiotic processes are interchangeable. If the jam jar weren’t there, the phrase, “This jar contains . . .” could substitute for it and vice versa. To some extent this must be true. Entities in the world can stand in for propositional content in events of language-use. It happens so frequently, in fact, that Shopen and others who have studied elliptical speech have argued that knowing how to enact those substitutions is an important part of what it means to know a language. Propositional content can also stand in for things in the environment. If this were not the case, we would not be able to be transported into the world of a novel. However, there is a tendency for the two sides of this equation to be unequally weighted. In order to account for propositional semiosis in situated interaction (where it can appear strikingly incomplete), non-propositional semiosis is appealed to; and yet, it is not understood in its own terms, but rather, in terms of the work it would do if it were propositional. Whether or not functional equivalences like these will be effective for participants in interaction, however, depends on shared expectations among participants about how non-propositional semiosis works, and what its effects will be, such that it can be taken for granted by all involved. In other words, the approach to language in context discussed above requires us to accept that the jam jar will complete the proposition partially expressed by the label attached to it, regardless of who is involved or how their environment is structured.

These assumptions also seemed to be at play in my interaction with Charlotte, and in many interactions like it, prior to the protactile movement. From my perspective, Charlotte and I were drinking coffee and having a conversation in a place with a particular atmosphere. For Charlotte, we were just drinking coffee and having a conversation. This asymmetry meant that non-propositional semiosis could not be taken for granted. One symptom of this was that elliptical speech was ineffective. For example, imagine that upon entering, I say to Charlotte, “This OK?,” meaning, “Would it be OK with you if we sat at this table?” This two-word utterance would have been difficult for Charlotte to interpret for many reasons. First, she may not know what “this” referred to. Second, without knowing what “this” referred to, the range of possible predicates would have been difficult to narrow: OK for what? Sitting at? Drinking out of? Having a conversation in?
Training to become an interpreter, I learned that these kinds of ambiguities could be avoided by adding propositional content to the interaction. This led to the production of many utterances, which, given a shared environment, would have come off as redundant or absurd. For example, standing in front of a table, I might say, “There is a table here.” Waiting in line to order coffee, I might say, “We’re waiting in line to order coffee.” This strategy is based on the assumption that, just as propositional content can be supplemented with, or substituted for, things in the extra-linguistic context, things in the extra- linguistic context can be supplemented with, or substituted for, propositional content.

One of the main claims of this book is that when access to the extra- linguistic context is excessively constrained across a group of speakers for extended periods of time, or when that context is lacking order, the capacity of propositional content to substitute for it will slowly diminish, ultimately approaching what I am calling the limits of language. Beyond this limit, ordinary words and phrases will fail to elicit the expected response, or may fail to elicit any response at all, which may affect one’s ability to do things like characterize states of affairs, deny that claims are true, question whether people are sincere, and suspect that things are not as they seem.These problems tend to accrue to individuals. People living at the limits of language may appear quirky, impaired, confused, or lacking common sense. The evidence presented in this book should convince you, however, that analyzing such problems at the level of the individual, without an understand- ing of broader socio-historical processes and the semiotic mechanisms that facilitate them, is a mistake.

In the Seattle DeafBlind community, access to the extra-linguistic context was constrained by sighted social norms that restricted touch, not by any limitation or impairment of the individual. As a sighted person in a cafe in Seattle, there were no social norms that prevented me from taking fog as a sign. Looking across the room at the window was an appropriate and expected thing to do. Charlotte could not look across the room, but there are many signs of moisture and not all of them are visual. If Charlotte ran her hand across the window, she would encounter a lack of friction and her finger pads would slip quickly over the cold, wet surface. In order to touch the window, though, she would have to reach over a table where people were seated, and it would have been neither appropriate nor expected for her to do so in that context. She also could have gotten a sense of the atmosphere by going around the room, touching the people she encountered. She could have put her hand on their jaws to feel how quickly or slowly they were eating. She could have leaned her head in to feel the steam rise from their cups or take in the smell to see what they were having, yet none of this would have been appropriate. I explained the fog on the windows to Charlotte because from where we were sitting, given the relevant social constraints, there was no way for the concept of “fog” to co-occur with the phenomenon of fog in the speech situation, for her. I described the fog in the cafe because for me, fog is a sign of moisture, moisture is a sign of rain, and rain has a dampening effect on atmosphere or mood. I therefore had the sense that telling Charlotte about the fog would convey something about what it felt like to be there. My experience with fog and the kinds of things that can incorporate and contextualize it made my description effective for me. These same connections, however, could not be assumed for Charlotte.

This raises a fundamental question about language and context: How far can the world recede before descriptions of it become meaningless? Does the jam jar exist because we call it a jam jar? Does it exist because it has taken on meaning as it has been repeatedly incorporated into, and contextu- alized by, routine activities like making toast with jam? How do descriptions and actions, as semiotic processes, interact? Linguistic anthropologist Paul Kockelman (2006a, 2006b) offers two theoretical constructs for addressing these questions: “residence in the world” and “representations of the world.” These constructs are not meant to capture some kind of “pure” or “unmedi- ated” experience, on the one hand, and “language,” “discourse,” or “meaning,” on the other. Nor do they imply that we cannot understand things we have not experienced “directly.” In applying them here, I am claiming that there is a complex, dynamic balance that must be maintained between residence and representation, and in order to understand those dynamics, we must start from the premise that just “being here” is already a semiotic problem before any propositional content has been introduced.
 
1.3       Residence in the World
Residing in the world begins by cashing in on affordances in the environment for the purpose of performing actions. For humans, effectively cashing in on the affordances of instruments in our environment, such as the floor or a chair, allows us to perform certain actions, such as walking or sitting. In performing those actions appropriately and effectively, we take on roles. For example, sitting with an interlocutor in an appropriate and effective way might cast you as a romantic partner, a friend, or a business associate. Occupying such roles habitually can shape who you are, or your identity. These concepts, affordances, instruments, actions, roles, and identities, are for Kockelman (2006a) the constituents of the “residential whole." Each constituent is related to the next by way of incorporation and con- textualization. Affordances do not exist on their own, as abstract “features” or “properties,” such as the property of “warmth,” which might characterize a “coat.” Rather they are aspects of the environment that are uncovered or cashed in on, as they are incorporated in and contextualized by instruments and actions. For example, if I use a fork to comb my hair (because I’ve gone camping and have forgotten my hair brush), the fork has been interpreted as an instrument with affordances for combing. If some other action were performed, such as eating, we would know that the affordances of the fork were interpreted differently. Actions are further incorporated in and contex- tualized by roles, such as “resourceful camper” or “polite eater,” and roles are incorporated in and contextualized by “identities,” or ways of being in the world.

When affordances are obscured, it is difficult to perform actions in socially recognizable ways, and this makes it difficult, in turn, to take on normative social roles and identities. This can lead to perceptions of “impairment,” “eccentricity,” and so on in the individual for whom affordances are obscured. This is an existential problem that can crop up whether or not it is identified, described, framed, re-framed, or otherwise represented.
 
1.3.1       Affordances
 
When James J. Gibson, the ecological psychologist, introduced the idea of affordances, he was concerned with all organisms (including humans) and how their environments become meaningful to them for purposes of locomotion, finding food, finding shelter, and otherwise residing in the world. For example, the surface of a lake is “walk-on-able” for a water bug, but not for a human. Likewise, chairs are only sit-on-able for an animal with knees that bend at chair height. If we had no knees, or if they were at ankle- height instead, chairs as they are generally constructed, would not be what they are. An organism going around living is interpreting affordances in their environment. However, that process of interpretation is only effective against a backdrop of organism-environment complementarity.

In Charlotte’s case, we saw that complementarity was latent in the envi- ronment, but could not be presupposed in our interaction. If Charlotte had leaned up against the sighted people seated near the windows and reached her arms out over their heads, she could have encountered their crunchy Gore- Tex coats, the scratchy feeling of wool, a warm cheek, some steam rising from a coffee cup, and finally, the damp, cold feeling of the glass. The contrast between the cold of the window and the warmth of being near others may have generated a sense of being there that corresponded to my sighted sense of being there, but, due to sighted social constraints, all of this was out of reach.

In addition to the fog and the Gore-Tex, the coffee shop Charlotte and I were in was populated by particular kinds of people. I described in detail how those people interacted with their environment because I thought it would convey something about the kind of place we were in. I could have done a superficial demographic analysis based on what I could infer from appearance, or I could have counted the number of people present. These were strategies that were frequently used by sighted interpreters at the time, and in some cases, generated important information. In opting instead for a lower-level descrip- tion of how people were cashing in on the affordances of their environment to perform routine actions, I was, in theory, making room for Charlotte to interpret, for herself, what kinds of people these were and, by extension, what kind of place we were in. I was trying to maximize the capacity of language to supplement the extra-linguistic context. The implicit assumption behind these efforts was that supplementation might increase indefinitely, until Charlotte was residing entirely within a description of the environment. Around the time of my encounter with Charlotte, Adrijana and Lee were starting to push back on this and related assumptions. They argued that it is not possible to live in a description of the world, and that trying to do so will inevitably lead to the kinds of problems they observed in their community: DeafBlind people were too dependent on sighted people. There was a widespread sense of loneliness and isolation, no matter how many community events there were to go to or how many people there were around. Employment opportunities were restricted. Personal relationships were suffering. Interviewing DeafBlind people in Seattle about their lives, I learned that much of this was attributed to blindness itself, and this was due in part to the fact that becoming blind was often framed by medical professionals, such as doctors and psychologists, as an individual process involving emotions like loss, grief, and denial. As I discuss in Chapter 3, and elsewhere, becoming blind can and does lead to sadness and grief and sometimes even full-scale existential crisis. However, what was apparently never made clear to people on the precipice of that transformation was that there are non-visual ways to exist; that becoming blind is not only a loss, or reduction, of access to an objective world but also a discovery that objectivity itself is a living thing that can be created by interacting in and responding to the environment in new ways with others (Duranti 2010).

When Helen was losing the last of her vision, for example, she stopped responding to descriptions of events as if they could stand in for the events themselves. One day, her husband told her that their dog had a dead mouse and was eating it on their living room carpet. He started describing the scene. She interrupted him saying, “I’m sorry dear, but your wife is blind as a bat.”

Then she crawled onto the floor, opened up the dog’s mouth and smelled inside. She sniffed around the scene, and felt the dog’s mouth, where there was blood. She noted that blood does not have a distinctive smell, and her curiosity was satisfied. Helen was no longer satisfied with descriptions of someone else’s world. She wanted a world of her own. In the years leading up to the protactile movement, anyone could have made the choice Helen made, but once they did they would be alone. Collective norms reinforced sighted standards of appropriateness and politeness, guaranteeing that the shared world would remain at arm’s length.
 
1.3.2       Direct Perception

The stakes of the protactile movement are captured in part by Gibson’s notion of “direct perception.” In introducing this phrase here, I do not mean to suggest that experience is somehow unmediated. Rather, there is, as Gibson says, a difference between “what one gets from seeing Niagra Falls” versus what one gets by “seeing a picture of it” (2015 [1977]: 139). While Gibson is focused on vision, the idea of direct perception is useful for thinking about residence and representation in any perceptual modality. Gibson explains that in a visual context:
 
"direct perception is the activity of getting information from the ambient array of light. I call this a process of information pickup that involves the exploratory activity of looking around, getting around, and looking at things."
 
This is not a denial of interpretation, mediation, or meaning. For Gibson, it is much more specifically an alternative to traditional psychological theories of visual perception that rely on “depth perception.” The idea of depth percep- tion presumes that the external world is three-dimensional, but we perceive that world visually through a two-dimensional retinal image. “Depth” is then added back into the image according to “cues.” To understand this, imagine yourself standing on the side of the road, with corn fields on both sides. The corn is high and thick. Your eye goes to the open road, the power lines on either side of it, and the place where the road meets the horizon, beyond which all of this is hidden from view. According to traditional theories of visual perception, a flat image of this scene would be imprinted on the retina. The relative size of the telephone poles growing smaller as they reach the horizon would be a “cue” that tells the mind to reconstitute the scene in three dimensions. However, Gibson argues that the third dimension is not lost in the retinal image, since it was never in the environment to begin with. We do not perceive the road that stretches out before us in terms of measurements of height, width, and depth but in terms of affordances for action. Beyond vision, for any perceptual modality, there is a lesson here: We do not live in Cartesian space. We live in a meaningful environment, which interacts with representations of all kinds but is not re-constituted in them.

From the perspective of linguistic anthropology, “direct perception” is a special kind of mediation that is non-propositional and non-inferential (Kockelman 2006a: 22). We do not infer the world: we exist within it. For the protactile movement, there is much at stake in this distinction. For example, I interviewed a DeafBlind man, Elliot, about two years after he went tactile. I asked him what had changed for him during that time. He explained that in visual environments, being blind was not something he experienced or was aware of. “It’s not like I see black areas in my visual field or something,” he said. “I don’t see that area at all and I am not aware of it.” However, he explained that when he would run into people or trip over things, he “inferred” his own blindness. He responded by taking cues and instructions from the people around him, which functioned like the “cues” of the telephone poles as they decreased in size, approaching the horizon. He was trying to re-constitute the environment in real time, as he moved through it. The problem with living that way, he said, is that your perceptual hold on reality is undermined. You don’t trust yourself to interpret even the most concrete facts.

From a political perspective, an absence of direct perception across the collective meant that sighted people were the ones in a position to generate knowledge about the world, characterize the situations they encountered, and otherwise stake claims to reality. Elliot, and many others like him, just had to take their word for it. The protactile movement foregrounds the fact that even and especially at the most mundane, unremarkable level a “direct” relationship with the environment, in Gibson’s sense, is a necessary basis for obtaining resources, making decisions, and building futures. If this is the case, then the first step in addressing Elliot’s problems is to find a place where people are working to uncover new affordances in the environment. If, instead, Elliot tripping or falling down is interpreted as his individual problem, then the solution might be to engage in a form of politics aimed at obtaining resources to pay for interpreters or other forms of accommodation, such as assistive technologies.

Kirk, a DeafBlind man who worked for a local organization training DeafBlind people in the use of new assistive technologies, told me about a project he was working on at the time. He was testing out a GPS device that was paired with a cell phone and a Braille reader. He explained that it was a live orientation device that tells you names of streets and measurements from a present location to those streets. He said that his students had trouble using it at first—not because they couldn’t understand what the device was telling them but because they couldn’t understand how to apply the instructions. Many assumed that estimating the number of feet between two locations was a visual skill, and one that they had lost. Kirk said he couldn’t understand why it was so hard for DeafBlind students to turn their attention to the information they could glean as their feet came in contact with the ground. In moments like these, the difference between propositions, which provide coordinates in Cartesisan space, such as “Walk 23 feet, then turn right,” and the non-propositional process of interpreting affordances is foregrounded. The people attempting to use the assistive technology were not yet part of a collective effort to read affordances in the environment for routine action in corresponding ways. This meant that the instructions given by the device presupposed an extra-linguistic context that was, in effect, not there. This is what I mean by “the limits of language.” Language can be used to direct attention within the world, describe, depict, and refer to the world, but it cannot substitute for it, in its entirety. In order for a language to remain operable, the world in which it operates must be meaningful to its speakers in corresponding ways, prior to any characterization of it.
 
1.4       Representations of the World
Representations of the world depend on residence in the world. It is also true, however, that corresponding interpretations of environments come about, in part, through conflict, negotiation, and contestation, all of which rely heavily on representational processes. Arguing about how to characterize a state of affairs, denying that a claim is true, questioning whether a sentiment is sincere, hoping for a better future, and suspecting that something is the case are all ways that interpretations of the environment can come to be aligned, dis-aligned, or otherwise related. These dynamics play out as social, political, interpersonal, psychological, linguistic, and developmental processes and have demonstrable effects on the worlds in which we reside. In other words, the relation between residence and representation is not unidirectional or static. It is dynamic and can be a crucial site for understanding the stakes of social and political action. This nexus will appear particularly important in contexts where political interventions are tied not so much to imagined communities, or constructed social realities, but to the existential conditions of those for whom social change is necessary and urgent.

Analytically, understanding how residence and representation come together requires the ability to first distinguish between them. Only then can breakdowns, correspondences, and dynamic interactions be grasped. Two characteristics that can work as diagnostics are intentionality and inference (Kockelman 2006b). Representational semiosis tends to be intentional and inferential, while residential semiosis does not. Here I am using the term “intention” in a way that diverges from ordinary English usage. Philosophers use this term to describe a range of “mental states.” Intention, as in meaning to do something, is just one of many intentional mental states. Broadly, a mental state is traditionally taken to be intentional insofar as it is directed toward an object or state of affairs (Searle 1983: 1–37). Other intentional states include, for example, belief, love, elation, anxiety, irritation, and remorse (Searle 1983: 4). Intentional states correspond in many ways to “speech acts,” or the things we do in speaking. Speakers can request that their interlocutor leave the room in much the same way as they can believe, fear, or hope they will leave the room (Searle 1983: 5–6). Correspondences between speech acts and mental states are established under certain conditions, for example conditions of “sincerity.” If I say, “It’s sunny out,” I have produced an assertion (speech act), which corresponds to the belief (intentional state) that it is sunny out. If I believe it is sunny out when I assert that it is sunny out, I have satisfied the sincerity condition.

Anthropologists have shown, however, that the conditions under whichspeech acts and intentional states correspond are culturally and historically specific, they presuppose certain notions of personhood, and they can be more or less attenuated in different communicative contexts (e.g. Silverstein 1976; Rosaldo 1982; Duranti 1984; Ochs 1984; DuBois 1987; Hanks, 1990). For these reasons, Kockelman (2006b: 75) replaces the notion of “mental state” with “intentional status,” which he defines as “a set of commitments and entitlements to signify and interpret in particular ways: normative ways of speaking and acting attendant upon being a certain sort of person—a believer that the earth is flat, a lover of dogs, one who intends to become a card shark, and so forth.” Being a protactile person involves being in the world in a particular way and also subscribing to a set of commitments and entitlements to signify and interpret in particular ways.

One day in the summer of 2023, after the protactile movement had taken root and spread, I spent the afternoon with Adrijana and Sam, a hearing, sighted person who lives near Adrijana and is a frequent visitor to her home. I recorded the following in my field notes afterwards:
 
"A couple of days ago, we were all at Adrijana’s house, and Sam said, “There are beautiful white flowers all over your back yard.” And Adrijana said, “They’re weeds.” And Sam said, “Come on.” and the three of us walked together to the back yard. We padded across the porch, which was hot, down the steps, and into the dry, cool grass. The yard was filled with white flowers. Sam and Adrijana pulled one of the flowers out of the ground, and it came with a whole complicated root system. Adrijana felt the roots and said “Weed.” Sam directed Adrijana’s attention to the flower—the part that had been visible to her from above. The flower was silky soft and cone-shaped. Inside, there was a delicate, yellow stamen. Adrijana felt the flower. Then she cupped Sam’s jaw loosely in her palms, fingers angled out, forming a cone. She tilted the cone, with Sam’s head inside, toward the sun, and said as if she were the flower, “I’m innocent.”"
 
Adrijana’s argument was clear: Our eyes had led us astray. These flowers looked innocent, but their roots were taking over. In expressing her argument this way, Adrijana was not just producing a speech act, which corresponds to a mental state. She was enacting a set of commitments and entitlements to signify and interpret in a way that has arisen from, and is grounded in, a protactile way of being.

Imagine the feeling of afternoon sun on the side of your body and face. Now imagine the feeling of palms cupping your jaw and turning your face slowly toward the sun. Imagine that you feel, in that moment, like a disingenuous flower. Given this form of proprioceptive depiction (Dudis 2004), you can feel for yourself the truth of Adrijana’s claim. At this point, you have been drawn into an intentional status consistent with a protactile way of being. It is in moments like these that residence and representation are joined. This is not a process that occurs once and for all. Residence and representation are permeated by and separated from one another, as part of routine interaction, and it is in that dynamic that the fabric of daily life coheres, threatens to come apart, or becomes a place where we struggle just to exist.

Inference is a kind of propositional reasoning. Recall that a proposition involves a subject or a theme, which is characterized by a predicate. For example, “These flowers are weeds.” In this case, flowers are being characterized as a weed. Sam saw beautiful white flowers covering Adrijana’s yard and told me and Adrijana about it. Adrijana contested the claim. She said that the plants Sam characterized as “flowers” were actually weeds. As I approached the plants in question, I initially thought that Sam was right because weeds are plants that people don’t like. People like beautiful flowers. Therefore, these flowers are not weeds. This string of related propositions is an example of inference, where a proposition about an object or state of affairs leads to, and justifies, another. Adrijana also appeared to build on the assumption that weeds are plants people don’t like. However, the flowers, which were the visually likable thing, were not what stood out to her. Instead, the expansive and invasive root system did. Maybe her string of propositions went something like this: Weeds are plants that people don’t like. I do not like this plant because it is going to take over and kill all of my grass. This plant is therefore a weed. Sam and I both found Adrijana’s characterization convincing. In the end, these two inferences—that the plants were weeds and that they were not—co-existed. Committing to one or the other, though, had implications for what kind of person each of us would be.

Recall Charlotte’s statement, in 2008 just before the protactile movement started gaining ground, that without a description of a place provided by a sighted interpreter, she wouldn’t really be in that place. By 2023, Adrijana had a firm grasp on her environment and when challenged she defended her position with eloquence and force. There are many transformations that had to take place between 2008 and 2023 to make this possible. Among the first of these was the emergence and spread of what John Lee Clark calls “metatactile knowledge’’ (2015).
 
1.4.1       Metatactile Knowledge
 
Clark explains that as a DeafBlind person who had grown up with a DeafBlind parent, he never thought to ask sighted people to describe his environment to him. It was self-evident. For others who did not grow up with DeafBlind parents, and prior to the protactile movement, that sense of self-evidence was often rigidly tied to vision. Clark recalls that every time he acted on his metatactile knowledge of the environment, people asked, “How do you know?” He wasn’t always sure how to answer that question. He explains that it was “natural”:
 
"So natural, in fact, that I didn’t have a name for it, this skill that goes beyond just feeling texture, heft, shape, and temperature. I’d like to call it metatactile knowledge. It involves feeling being felt, being able to read people like open Braille books, and seeing through our hands and the antennae of and within our bodies. It involves many senses, senses that we all have but which are almost never mentioned—the axial, locomotive, kinesthetic, vestibular   All “tactile” to some
extent, but going beyond “touch.”"
 
This sense of naturalness is attributed by Clark to his having a DeafBlind parent, suggesting that early in the process of socialization he acquired the knowledge that his own axial, locomotive, kinesthetic, and vestibular responses to the environment could be treated as signs around which an intuitive grasp of the world could form. For example, knowing that when a person touches you a certain way it can be a sign of attentiveness, or when the table in a restaurant is made of particular materials it can be a sign of how expensive the meal will be. Metatactile knowledge is the knowledge that you can reach out and touch things, and in doing so you will discover a meaningful environment that anticipates your existence, offering you clues about where you can go and what you can do.

I have noticed a transformation like this in my experiences as a hearing, sighted outsider trying to understand what can count as a sign in DeafBlind spaces. For example, just as the protactile movement was starting to take shape, I returned to Seattle to work on a project at the DeafBlind Service Center (DBSC) with several DeafBlind and sighted colleagues. The following is an excerpt from my field notes, recorded during that time:
 
"I chew gum. Lately, it has been blueberry, orange, and tropical fruit flavors, Trident with Xilotol. I chew two pieces at a time and do not close my mouth. Janet says that since my arrival, DBSC has become very fruity. This morning, Janet and I had a meeting with Jeff and it was important. I put on some pants that were not jeans and I chose the mint gum. When I walked into Janet’s office, she said she appreciated my professionalism. “What do you mean?” I said. She looked at me, a little confused, and said as if it were obvious, “The mint.” A couple of weeks ago, Janet and I went to a DeafBlind event and political tensions were thick. She was chewing orange Trident with Xilotol, and several DeafBlind people mentioned it. DBSC seemed to be more fruity than before. Of course there were also the recent scandals. Maybe DBSC wasn’t fruity, exactly."
 
In situations like these, olfactory phenomena took on new capacities for me as potential signs of social, psychological, or political objects as they were established and negotiated around me. Mint was a sign of professionalism (obviously!) and fruitiness felt misleading, in light of the politically fraught changes taking place at DBSC. For Charlotte, at the time I interviewed her, the potential meanings of olfactory and tactile phenomena were obscured. Even for those like Clark, the idea that touch or smell could be the basis of legitimate knowledge about the world was something that had to be protected, fought for, and insisted upon. Clark explains, for example, that when he started teaching Braille to other DeafBlind people, he was surprised to find that they didn’t already understand their environment. Instead, they would ask him for descriptions not unlike those I had provided to Charlotte. Clark links this tendency to anti-tactile socialization and a desire to adhere to sighted norms of behavior. He explains:
 
"This is one of the things the protactile revolution is addressing, this awful way we are conditioned to yield to visual culture at our expense. As much of my tactilehood I’ve enjoyed, I still catch myself holding back for something as stupid as appearance—appearance within a visual context entirely outside of my reach."
 
Acquiring metatactile knowledge involves perceptual, psychological, and interactional processes, constrained by tensions between protactile and sighted social norms. In environments where metatactile knowledge is being generated, one person can infer the meaning and consequences of another person’s behavior. “Feeling being felt” tells you something about what others are hoping for, what they think is the case, or what they really mean in saying something. It allows you to “read people like open Braille books. . .”. In other words, metatactile knowledge is the product of non-linguistic representational processes, which are embedded in and contextualized by tactile ways of being in the world.

Since the inception of the protactile movement, a new tactile language has been emerging (Edwards 2014; Edwards and Brentari 2020, 2021). However, metatactile knowledge is treated by protactile leaders and educators as prior to, and foundational for, the acquisition of this language. In the summer of 2023, I visited a protactile training center, run by Adrijana. In the years leading up to the trip, protactile language had grown and changed so much that I could no longer follow routine conversations about things like schedules, recent events, or gossip, so I traveled to Adrijana’s center for an extended stay in the hopes of getting caught up. When I arrived, I asked her for a vocabulary lesson. She told me to blindfold myself. This was a pattern. People would ask Adrijana, “How do you say . . .” and she would refrain from answering and encourage them to be more attentive to the environment.

The first time Adrijana told me to put on a blindfold, I didn’t know how to behave. I took hesitant little steps around the house with my arms extended straight out in front of me, worried that I would smash into a wall or trip on a step. Adrijana laughed, pushed my arms down, and said, “Zombie.” She told me to pay attention to my feet, which were separated from the floor only by my thin socks. She walked around the house with me describing, in protactile language, the different textures, drawing my attention to the information those textures conveyed. She explained that you only raise your hands when your feet tell you to. Standing on the kitchen floor with me, she turned my hand so the palm was facing down. From underneath, she slid her palm across mine slowly, creating a sensation that matched the smooth feeling on the bottom of our feet. As we moved into the living room, she did the same thing, this time mimicking the feeling of carpet by making a scratching movement on my flattened, down-turned palm. As we crossed over the threshold from one room to the other, she guided my hand to the door frame, and from there to the couch, where we sat down. After repeatedly being directed by Adrijana and others in this way, I started to understand that the signs that would tell me when to raise my arms up, when to continue forward, when to turn, and when to sit down would all come through the feet.

After three weeks with Adrijana and others, I found myself perceiving my environment, attending to events, and storing memories in new and more tactile ways, which seemed readily accessible for formulating narratives in protactile interactions. One day, for example, Adrijana and I had taken a long car trip on a winding road. Later, I reflected on the trip with Oliver. It didn’t even occur to me to share memories of the sunset or the swaying wheat fields. Instead, I focused on things I could feel. To describe the winding roads, I gripped Oliver’s shoulders and pulled his whole torso abruptly to the right and then the left. Another time, discussing the invasive nature of blackberries, which Sam and I had just passed by on a walk, I inched my fingers up Sam’s chest, as if they were vines, and slowly wrapped them around her neck. In both cases, my interlocutors responded with signs of engagement, attentiveness, and enjoyment. Adrijana refused to cede to my request for vocabulary. Instead, she insisted that I focus on metatactile knowledge. As a result, I started perceiving and remembering my environment in more tactile ways and developing a sense of what might count as a plausible or compelling representation of the world.
 
1.4.2       Language Emergence
 
Adrijana’s descriptions of the floors in her home and the flowers in her back yard are organized not only by a protactile way of residing in the world but also by grammatical constraints that have emerged in the linguistic system. Prior to the protactile movement, DeafBlind people in Seattle applied strategies that have been reported in DeafBlind communities in and beyond the United States. (Collins and Petronio 1998; Mesch 2001, 2013; Quinto- Pozos, 2002; Collins 2004; Petronio and Dively 2006; Mesch et al. 2015; Checchetto et al. 2018; Iwasaki et al. 2018, Willoughby et al. 2018). Due to the fact that sign languages, such as ASL, are difficult to receive via touch (Reed et al. 1995), these strategies usually include non-linguistic mechanisms or modifications of the visual language. For example, Iwasaki et al. (2018) describe how DeafBlind signers of Auslan manage turns at talk without the benefit of non-manual features such as eye gaze, eyebrow movements, and facial expressions that sighted Auslan signers depend on in performing corresponding communicative functions. In ASL, Quinto-Pozos (Quinto- Pozos 2002) reports an avoidance of, and restricted range of functions for, pointing signs. Petronio and Dively (Petronio and Dively 2006) report a higher frequency of the words “yes” and “no” in conversation, which they attribute to a lack of access to non-manual expressions that usually do that pragmatic work, such as head nods and eyebrow movements. In protactile communities, a more radical departure from ASL has transpired. To say that this change is motivated by sensory modality would be imprecise and uninformative since modifications of visual languages for tactile reception also involve a shift from visual to tactile channels.

The emergence of protactile language was not the result of explicit discus- sions about language, or “language planning.” In the early 2010s protactile people were not saying, “ASL isn’t working for us. Let’s invent a new language.” They were cultivating and exchanging metatactile knowledge as it applies broadly to interactions with people and the environment. One of the many effects of this was a radical restructuring of the language. As discussed in Edwards and Brentari (2020), ASL signs are produced with two articulators: the hands and arms of the signer. Protactile speakers, in contrast, have four potential articulators to work with: the hands and arms of Speaker 1, or the person conveying the message, and the hands and arms of Speaker 2, or the person receiving the message. The incorporation of the listener’s body into the articulatory process has many consequences for the internal structure of the language, beginning with a crucial observation by granda and Nuccio (2018) that in ASL signs are produced on, and in front of, the body of the signer, or in “air space.” In air space, the relative locations of signs are perceived against the backdrop of the signer’s body. Receiving ASL through touch, one has access to the hand of the signer, but not the visual backdrop that is necessary for making relevant distinctions. For example, spread out your hand into a number “5.” Now touch the tip of your thumb to the front of your chin. That is, roughly, the ASL word meaning “mother.” Now do the same thing on your forehead. That is the ASL word meaning “father.” The only difference between them is the location, and in order to distinguish one location from the other the listener needs to be able to see landmarks on the signer’s face, such as the chin and the eyes, which partition the face into linguistically relevant spaces.

As I explained earlier in this chapter, in 2010, Adrijana and Lee hosted a
series of 20 protactile workshops for 11 DeafBlind participants, which took place over the course of 10 weeks. The aim of the workshops was to establish new conventions for “DeafBlind to DeafBlind” communication, rather than relying on sighted interpreters to mediate. It was an experiment—no one knew exactly what the outcome would be. Videorecordings of the workshops generated 190 hours of data. In analyzing these data, a gradual shift away from what would later be called air space and toward what would later be called contact space was observed for purposes of linguistic expression (Edwards 2014). In 2015, Diane Brentari, a phonologist with special expertise in signed languages, traveled with me to Seattle and we collected a round of data which would give us a second time-point in our study of the emer- gence of protactile language. In Edwards and Brentari (2020), we report that protacile speakers were consistently establishing contrasts between words against the backdrop of the listener’s body. This dramatically expanded the capacity of the “tactile modality” by tapping into previously ignored channels generated by the sense of “proprioception,” as distinct from touch.

For our purposes, you can think of touch as contact with the outside of your body. Use your right hand to touch your left hand. That is touch. Proprioception, in contrast, is felt internally. For example, you are not submerged in water right now (I assume), and you don’t need to see or hear to know that. You know because you can feel the position and weight of your own body in a medium (i.e. air or water). That is possible thanks to the proprioceptive sense, which includes the axial, locomotive, kinesthetic, and vestibular channels that Clark mentions in defining metatactile knowledge. The move to contact space made all of those channels available. However, it also created a problem for the linguistic system, since the articulators of at least two people had to somehow be coordinated, and efficiently enough to keep up with the demands of language-use in real time. Edwards and Brentari (2020) argue that early in the emergence of protactile phonology, the language resolved this problem by establishing conventional ways of inviting Speaker 2 to contribute to the co-articulation of signs. I am not referring to the kinds of jointly produced meanings that occur in conversation. I am talking about a lower-level kind of coordination that involves the way that the mind must work with muscles and skeletal structures to produce the forms that carry meaningful content from one person to another.

Fairly quickly, mechanisms for achieving coordination of the articulators became conventionalized (Edwards and Brentari 2020). That process involved assigning specific linguistic tasks to each of the four articulators, in the same way that the two hands in visual languages are assigned consistent and distinct tasks (Battison 1978). In order to accomplish that, new linguistic units emerged, whose sole purpose is to organize articulators for linguistic functions. These units are not found in visual languages, and their introduction into the system triggered a cascade of additional changes, including the replacement of the basic units for building words in ASL with a new set of units, and the introduction of new rules for how those units can and cannot be combined. This marked the beginning of a new linguistic system, which was no longer a piecemeal modification of ASL but rather an autonomous system rooted in proprioception and touch. This process is ongoing and a broader range of grammatical sub-systems are being incorporated as it continues (Edwards and Brentari 2021).

In order to understand the difference between tactile reception of ASL and protactile language, consider the following example. In ASL, the greeting or question “how are you” is produced by the signer alone. The hands curled into nearly closed fists come together and touch in front of the signer’s torso. The wrists then rotate outward and the dominant hand completes the expression with the second-person pronoun, “you,” which looks like a pointing gesture, toward the addressee. To receive this expression via touch is difficult because the small rotation of the wrists is difficult to follow and also because the pointing action of the second person pronoun is produced against the backdrop of the signer’s body, which the DeafBlind person does not necessarily have access to. In PT, this same expression is derived from the action of taking someone’s pulse. The speaker touches the underside of the addressee’s wrist and squeezes, as if they were taking the addressee’s pulse. In one fluid motion, they then touch the back of the same hand to the chest of the addressee. The second-person pronoun in PT is produced by touching the tips of the fingers to the chest of the addressee. Touching the back of the fingers to the chest adds a question marker to the expression. The elements of the expression, then, are: PULSE, YOU, QUESTION, and together, this has become a routine way of performing a greeting, comparable to “How are you?” in English. This expression is constrained by grammatical rules (Edwards and Brentari 2020, 2021). The fact that these rules are applied to a representation of taking a pulse is also relevant, since the activity itself is rooted in proprioception.
While the focus of this book is not the linguistic structures themselves, the problem of sensory modality is addressed as it pertains to language (e.g. McNeill 2005; Sandler 2013; Levinson and Holler 2014; Perniss et al. 2015; Quinto-Pozos and Parill 2015). Among scholars of language and gesture, the term “affordances” is sometimes used when speaking of language modality. For example, a class of verbs, such as “directional verbs” in ASL, is possible thanks to the affordances of a channel, such as the “visual-gestural” channel (Meier 2002). A type of channel, such as “visual-gestural” or “oral-aural” has affordances for a form of expression, such as “imagistic” or “analytic” (McNeill 2005). However, these works are not aimed at analyzing the interpretation of affordances, in Gibson’s sense. The concept of affordances tends to operate instead as an external motivating factor that can explain why signed languages do not conform to theories based on spoken languages. One of the broad conclusions that can be drawn from this work is that the mind of the speaker does not require any specific channel. If one channel is lacking the necessary affordances for some group of language-users, it can be substituted for another channel (e.g. Klima and Bellugi 1979). However, there is little understanding of how that process of substitution works in historical and interactional time, what conceptual tools are needed to understand it, and what significance it has for the people who carry it out.

The evidence presented in this book should convince those interested in language modality that to speak of “affordances” is to speak about language in context. To provide an account of modality and its effects on language, we must therefore understand the affordances of a given language in relation to the environment, as it is grasped by its speakers. Only in a second analytic moment can we tease apart the contributions of linguistic and non-linguistic processes and dynamics to the linguistic system itself. Read in tandem with work on the emerging structure of protactile language, the chapters that follow offer some insight into those complex dynamics and therefore into the patterns that undergird language modality and language emergence.
 
1.5       Life at the Limits of Language
This book is about a period of time, from the late 1970s to the early 2010s, when there were socially and politically organized efforts among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, to find new ways of being DeafBlind. Prior to the protactile movement, these efforts were aimed at gaining recognition from the state in order to obtain resources, which could be used to train sighted interpreters. Those sighted interpreters would then describe and depict the fading visual world in real time, as I did with Char- lotte. This led to widespread substitutions, through which representations of the world were meant to stand in for residence in the world. The problems that followed from this affected the lives of DeafBlind people and those around them. Throughout this book, and particularly in Chapters 2–4, I am attentive to those effects, and what they can tell us about the delicate balance between, and interaction of, residence and representation.

For example, in Chapter 3, I analyze a videorecorded interaction between a DeafBlind man I call Roman and a sighted interpreter. The interaction took place in 2006, prior to the inception of the protactile movement. In the recording, the interpreter is describing a large and famous sculpture of a hammering man to Roman. The action is powered by some kind of motor, which moves the man’s arm slowly up and down in a hammering motion. The interpreter depicts the hammering fist and its quality of movement in ASL. As a sighted person watching the recording, the description was perfectly legible, and yet, Roman seems confused by it. He holds his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun and looks around, searching for the sculpture. After a while, he gives up, and says, “I remember I saw that sculpture about ten years ago.” Language, in this and many cases like it, does not and cannot substitute for the actual sculpture, and the sense of recognition one gets from memories fades over time. Walking around a city with another person taking in the sights is a way of being in a place. Just like Charlotte wanted to be in the cafe, Roman wanted to be in Seattle. In both cases, language was supposed to enable that, and yet descriptions and depictions like these often fell short, exposing the limits of language. During the historical moment this book focuses on, Roman, Charlotte, and many others were living at this limit— pushing ASL beyond its capacities to substitute for the world it represents.

Protactile leaders and theorists, rather than focusing on the capacity of language to substitute for the world, were focused on the world itself and how it could be known without dependence on vision or hearing (McMillen 2015; Clark 2017; granda and Nuccio 2018). There was a sense that if a tactile world were uncovered, language-use would become feasible again and the structure of the language would be reconfigured as needed to make that happen. Eventually, all of this did transpire, but there were obstacles along the way. This was due, in part, to the fact that restructuring the environment required representations of the environment—everything from seemingly straightforward reference to immediate objects, such as talking about the placement of chairs, to interventions in large-scale urban devel- opment projects (Chapter 6). However, while protactile language was slowly emerging, there was no viable system for generating those representations. Therefore, throughout the 2010s, DeafBlind people continued to live their lives at the limits of language.

For example, in Chapter 6, I recall an interview I conducted with Phillip, a Deaf ASL signer involved in improving access for DeafBlind people at Gallaudet University—a Deaf university in Washington, D.C. On one occa- sion, he explained, he was trying to solicit advice about how to resolve a problem with curb-cuts and he reached out to a few DeafBlind people he knew of. Curb-cuts are places in the sidewalk where there is a break in the curb and the sidewalk slopes down and into the street. You may have encountered the “truncated domes,” or bumps, that sometimes line those sloping areas. Those bumps are there to warn blind people who are using a cane that they are leaving the sidewalk and entering the street. Where those bumps meet the smooth area surrounding them, a line is formed. That line can also be used to project a path into the crosswalk (as opposed to walking into the center of the intersection, which would be unsafe). Phillip’s office had received some feedback that the curb-cuts on Gallaudet’s campus were angled incorrectly. Phillip explained to me that the problem was understood. However, he said, “when we tried to get into the details of how it might be fixed, things deteriorated”:
 
"I was signing like I always did, and [the DeafBlind person I was talking to] had his hands on me (he was completely blind). I learned later that that was called “tactile reception of visual ASL.” I didn’t know that at the time. So I would say something and over and over again, the person would say, “OK, but where is that?” and then they would think for a while. Then they would say, “Where am I now?” I would point this way and then that way and we would walk toward the curb in question, and then the student would say, “Where am I now?.” Again, I would point and explain and again they would become confused. I knew he was intelligent and in general a very competent person. I also knew that he got around on campus on his own, so I couldn’t understand what was going so wrong. I realized that the way I framed a discussion about space was flawed from the start. I thought that because he was a good student, got around on his own, he was involved in organizations, he was smart, that he could have an in-depth conversation with me about design. But I didn’t realize that there was this huge gap between his experience and the way we were talking about it. Later, when I learned about protactile, it was a huge revelation."
 
The problem was not just one of language “modality” as that term is usually understood. The meanings of terms like “here” and “there,” “this” and “that,” and the sensitivity speakers must have to retrievable values in the immediate environment are all likely to break down for DeafBlind speakers (Edwards 2017; Edwards and Brentari 2021). Living with frequent breakdowns like these at “the limits of language” generates a gap between experience and the way experience is talked about.

Where the limits of language were felt, sighted and DeafBlind people alike often responded just like Phillip did. He asked what was wrong with the individual DeafBlind person. How else can you explain someone’s inability to interpret such seemingly simple questions? Once Phillip learned about protactile communication, he attributed these difficulties instead to himself and his lack of protactile knowledge. In this book, I argue that when analyzed in historical perspective, it is clear that the difficulties encountered in this particular interaction could not be pinned on any individual, including Phillip. This interaction took place during a time when DeafBlind people were giving up on ASL, but no viable alternative had fully emerged. In this case, the result is a breakdown in the most fundamental function of language to direct an interlocutor’s attention to objects in the speaker and the addressee’s immediate environment.

In all languages, spoken and not, there is a specialized set of terms, which perform this function—they are called “deictics,” which in Greek means “pointing.” In English, some examples of deictics are here, there, I, you, this, and that. These expressions are used to refer to aspects of the immediate environment. In the story recalled by Phillip, there were likely two main reasons why reference failed. First, pointing signs in ASL direct attention against the visible backdrop of the signer. As was discussed above, if the addressee does not have visual access to the backdrop of the signer’s body, ASL pointing signs are far more difficult to interpret. Second, as I discuss in Chapter 5, in order to refer to something it has to be there. When Phillip’s interlocutor asks, “Where am I now?” he is not asking for his longitude and latitude, whether he is facing east or west, or whether he is close, somewhat close, or far from the referent. He is asking how to relate Phillip’s utterances (which are only partially interpretable) to the environmental struc- tures in question and, more specifically, their affordances. To understand this, imagine that you are in your bed asleep. You wake up in the middle of the night thirsty. Without turning on a light, you maneuver from the bedroom to the kitchen, pour yourself a glass of water, drink it, and return to bed. On your way back, though, you get turned around. You say to yourself, “Where am I?” You feel around until you find the door knob attached to the door that leads to the bedroom. As you grasp and turn it, everything falls into place. Now imagine that instead of finding the door knob, someone is standing next to you, explaining that the door to the bedroom is “over there.” In the first case, knowing where you are begins with cashing in on the affordances of the door knob. In the second case, there is only a representational prompt to do so. While these two approaches often co-occur, the latter is a poor substitute for the former.

Think about the curb-cuts and the environment surrounding them. Phillip was not really asking about the curb-cuts themselves. He was asking about how the curb-cuts might speak more effectively to DeafBlind travelers. He wanted them to say things like: Careful, you’re leaving the sidewalk and entering the road now, or This way to the cross walk. But he couldn’t get that far because he did not have the protactile deictic system at his disposal, nor did he understand how to interpret the world in which it was operative. The tendency, as Phillip recognizes, is to attribute those breakdowns to the cognitive capacities of the individual DeafBlind person. In Chapters 5 and 6, I argue instead that these moments are part of living at the limits of language, a condition that arose in a historical moment when a new language was beginning to emerge but was not yet fully available.

​As the new protactile deictic system emerged and spread, DeafBlind people and their interlocutors could point out this, draw attention to that, and in doing so the environment took on certain contours. In a circular fashion, the linguistic system came to presuppose those contours—not only as meanings associated with linguistic forms and projected out into the world but as part of the world itself. All of this transpired in constant tension with sighted norms that dictated how people should interact with one another and their environments. In this context, each seemingly simple act of reference was simultaneously a political and existential feat, insofar as it created, reinforced, or amplified the connections between protactile ways of being in the world and protactile ways of representing the world.
 
1.6       Conclusion
In this chapter, I have provided the theoretical and ethnographic context needed to understand the main argument put forth in this book—that in times of crisis and collapse, people frame precipitating events, argue about causes, make their cases for recognition and resources, and otherwise repre- sent the world in ways that will benefit them and the groups to which they belong. They also must find a way to exist. Building on a rich tradition in linguistic anthropology concerned with the many ways people make mean- ing, I argue that political efforts that arise in the aftermath of collapse cannot be fully understood or accounted for without careful attention to residence and representation, understood as different kinds of semiotic processes which interact with, and depend on, one another in subtle and complex ways.