As members of the Seattle DeafBlind community became blind, the visual worlds they once knew buckled and eventually collapsed. Individual and collective attempts to re-build followed, some of which were deemed more successful than others. This chapter analyzes those attempts in order to understand how worlds collapse, how signs of collapse are detected, and what kinds of interventions are possible. As I discuss in Chapter 1, Paul Kockelman (2006a: 22) breaks the world, or what he calls “the residential whole,” into five constituents: affordances, instruments, actions, roles, and identities. The constituents are related to one another by way of incorporation and con- textualization. When the world is up and running, it contains instruments, which are grasped in terms of their affordances for performing actions. In performing actions routinely, a role is taken on, and in regularly taking on roles, one has an identity:

affordance → instrument → action → role → identity.
 
Identities contextualize and incorporate roles, roles contextualize and incorporate actions, actions contextualize and incorporate instruments, and instruments contextualize and incorporate affordances. Breakdown anywhere along that line is part of life, but collapse occurs when the relations between the constituents break down in such a way that you can no longer be who you are.
Collapse is always the culmination of some larger historical process, but, for the individual, there will be a discrete moment when the signs of collapse can no longer be ignored; when all of the equipment has broken down and there is nothing left to work with; when action feels terminally restricted, and you realize that existence itself is at stake. In a time of collapse, that moment of realization will repeat itself, and between repetitions there will be periods in which fantasies of ordinary life proliferate. You pretend that the world is still intact, and you recruit others to your fantasy. When pretending is no longer possible, there are sober or frantic attempts to put things back together. In this chapter, I analyze that process as it unfolds over the course of about 30 years of Seattle’s DeafBlind history. I argue that exiting cycles of collapse depend on the order in which the constituents of the residential whole are re-assembled. Starting with identities (the thing that depends on everything else), rather than affordances (the thing that everything depends on), will likely lead to subsequent cycles of collapse.

The people in this chapter were all actively involved in Deaf networks, organizations, and communities across the United States and had firmly established lives as sighted or partially sighted Deaf people before relocating to Seattle. At some point they were told that they would become blind. For many of them, this information was delivered in a crude way by medical professionals with no accompanying instructions for how to live as a blind person. The worlds they resided in at the time offered many roles and identities, but all of them required the ability to adhere to sighted norms and standards. When they were told they would be blind, they couldn’t imagine how life would go on at all. The problem was particularly acute for those who were informed of their impending blindness before the time of the internet and before interpreters in medical settings were a legally protected right.

Glen, for example, grew up in the Midwest. His family had a farm, which he and his siblings visited on weekends and over holiday breaks. Otherwise, he lived at the residential school for the Deaf. Although he noticed early on in his childhood that he had a harder time than other kids playing sports and communicating in the dark, he didn’t think it had anything to do with his eyes. It wasn’t until he was in his 20s, when he was driving at night and got into an accident, that he started to suspect he “might need glasses.” He visited an eye doctor and underwent an exam, but he did not receive glasses. Instead, he was referred to the Department of Services for the Blind, or “DSB.” This was prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which meant that there were no sign language interpreters and communication with the doctor was limited. Glen’s understanding was that DSB would be better equipped to provide glasses than the doctor he had already seen, and yet, an uneasy feeling set in. The following is his account of what happened next:
 
"I drove to DSB and parked my car far from the entrance so no one would think it was strange that I was driving. I went in and found Ann. My appointment was at 1:00. Ann came out and met me, pulling me by my forearm into her office. I thought, “what is this lady doing?” But she just went right on, smiling, and pulling me into her office. Finally, we sat down in her office. She brought out a Braille book, and some math cards. I had no idea what was going on. I couldn’t imagine why she was giving me all of this stuff for blind people. I wrote on a piece of paper that she must have misunderstood or something, that I only came to get glasses. I told her I had perfectly good vision. She wrote back: “You’re going to be blind in 15–20 years.”"
 
This was a common experience for the DeafBlind people I interviewed, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. After a series of confusing encounters with hearing medical professionals, a crude message was scrawled on a piece of paper. Glen was also not unusual in his response. He pretended like the whole thing had never happened. His reason was straightforward. He said:
 
"I felt that [if people found out], I would lose all of my freedom. I wouldn’t be able to drive, or go anywhere. I would just have to sit some place all day long, bored. I assumed there was nothing but an empty existence for blind people."
 
In that moment, Glen was forecasting what I call collapse. Once he lost his vision, he felt that he would have no role and no identity and he attributed this to the fact that action would be terminally restricted. He would “just have to sit some place all day long.” His analysis was linked explicitly to the equipment woven into daily life in his region. Glen lived in a place where people drive to get where they are going. Without a car, it would be impossible for him to do anything, and therefore be anyone. Affordances in the environment that might have enabled travel (and therefore action), without the use of vision, remained hidden in that place and time in Glen’s life.

Adrijana, who had also moved to Seattle from elsewhere, told me a similar story. She had just graduated with a degree in biology and was doing research she loved when her vision deteriorated and her life as a biologist fell apart. When I asked her why she couldn’t find another way to pursue her work, she said there was no way around the microscope. In general, whether it was cars or microscopes or some other instrument, that was how people read the signs of impending collapse: The equipment breaks down, and not just in ways that make life inconvenient. It breaks down in ways that make it impossible to continue being who you are.
However, there is another way to interpret those experiences. One could assume that the equipment isn’t the problem. The point is that people need to embrace a DeafBlind identity before they can move on. That was the way the Seattle DeafBlind community went in the 1970s and 1980s—they started with identity. Identity was such a hurdle that Glen and many others like him spent years in a holding pattern, disclosing their diagnosis to a select few, or no one at all. They went on with their lives as if nothing had happened, but as their vision deteriorated strategic compensation was required. They learned to linger in the back of the room where their tunnel vision would capture a wider swatch of activity. In conversations, they stood far away from the person they were talking to so they could see more of them. When that became impossible, they honed their skills of inference, and when that failed, they pretended to understand, drove as if they could see, and imagined that the people they were talking to were listening. Eventually, they limited themselves to one-on-one conversation. Slowly, their range of activity narrowed. They no longer stayed out past dark or went to parties. They didn’t meet friends in restaurants or bars with low lighting. They stopped driving and eventually they stopped taking public transit too. If that process continued for an extended period of time, people became withdrawn and isolated. It is easy, when you’ve been alone for too long, to forget how to behave in recognizable ways. When you finally do re-enter society, your strange behavior can drive people away. That cycle of isolation, gone unchecked, can hollow out a life.

In interviews, DeafBlind people who had since moved to Seattle recalled the end of their lives in the places they came from. They described spending weeks on end doing nothing; being worried about how they would get food; how they would know when their baby was crying; how they would pay their bills. They talked about how ordinary objects hid themselves, and how eventually all of the people disappeared too. They associated those experiences with the demise of what they would later would refer to as the “old world,” the “Deaf world,” or the “visual world.” Then, in the mid-1980s, something hopeful started to happen in Seattle and word got out. As I noted in Chapter 2, 48 DeafBlind people moved to Seattle between the years of 1984 and 1987. Those who were part of that influx reported a sense of relief, and in some cases elation, when they arrived. They had accepted that they were DeafBlind and had moved to Seattle. Through interpreters, guides, and other specialized professionals, action of all kinds was restored.

Seattle was a place where crucial services were available and for many, it became a badly needed alternative to existential crisis. However, certain vul- nerabilities were built in as the community grew. Recall that the constituents of the residential whole contextualize and incorporate one another. There are dependencies between them and those dependencies are not bi-directional. Identity is the thing that depends on everything else and everything else depends on affordances:

affordance → instrument → action → role → identity.
 
For the first thirty years of Seattle’s DeafBlind history (from the 1970s to the beginning of the 2000s), the reconstruction of the residential whole began with identity, not with affordances. The procedure was as follows: A person accepts that they are DeafBlind (identity), which reinstates their capacity to be a professional, a friend, or a community member (role). This, in turn, makes it possible for them to go about their business in the world (action). However, as we will discover in what follows, those benefits were temporary and led ultimately to subsequent cycles of collapse. My claim is that this approach failed because things were proceeding backward through the constituents of the residential whole.

In what follows, I draw on interviews and ethnographic observations to elaborate on each of the stages in that process. First (as we have already learned), the equipment breaks down—not just in ways that are inconvenient, but in ways that make it impossible to be who you are. To cope with the situation, you find yourself taking on an identity, which will make accom- modations available to you (Section 3.1). However, “accommodation” tends to reinforce what is appropriate for them, not what is effective for you (Section 3.2). As that situation wears on, there are signs of “strain”: You are doing things that are appropriate but not effective, effective but not appropriate, or neither appropriate nor effective (Kockelman 2006a: 39). Strain is a part of life, but when you find yourself adhering to someone else’s standards and norms to such an extent that effective action is foreclosed entirely for you, the ordinary struggles of life can give way to existential strain (Section 3.3). This is where the signs of collapse become impossible to ignore.
Under the weight of existential strain, it is impossible to commit, or to internalize, and therefore be able to anticipate, the meaning or effect of your actions (Kockelman 2006a: 61). Commitment is inherently problematic, but when it is rendered impossible; when misconstrual of your actions is all there is; when your intentions are, as a rule, twisted, diverted, or replaced, this is a serious warning sign: The world you are in is teetering on the brink of collapse (Section 3.4). At some point you find that in place of your former life, you now spend most of your time trying to keep things life-like. You throw up a replica or sketch a memory in your mind, but as time passes, your experiences begin to feel like types or examples of experiences. Lacking stimulation, your thoughts drift over the past so many times that your memories lose their structure and texture and begin to feel homogeneous or blank (Section 3.5). Understanding this process helps contextualize the protactile movement (Chapter 4) and the language it is giving rise to (Edwards and Brentari 2020). The framework developed in this chapter should also be relevant for anyone anywhere who has ever wondered, or is currently wondering: Is this the beginning of the end? If you are one of those people, this chapter might make you nervous, but it should also offer hope. It is true that when the constituents of the residential whole are re-assembled in the wrong order, collapse ensues. However, when they are re-assembled in the required order (affordance-first!), undiscovered worlds are revealed, and new modes of existence become possible.

3.1       Embracing DeafBlind Identity
In the 1980s, as the Seattle DeafBlind community grew, the collapse of the world became a collective problem, rather than an individual problem, and pressure was exerted on local infrastructure to adapt. Claims to public transit, telecommunications, and public education were formulated on behalf of a new political group (i.e. neither “Deaf” nor “Blind” but “DeafBlind”). As part of that process, a set of DeafBlind identities crystalized, which were legible within the larger socio-political system (Chapter 5).
Embracing one of the available DeafBlind identities led to significant improvements in the lives of those I interviewed in 2006, who had moved to Seattle 10–20 years prior. When I asked people if they were ever tempted to go back to their home towns, the answer was, without exception,“No.” The most common reason given for this was the availability of services, funded by the state of Washington and supported by a strong, institutionally embedded network of service providers, such as specially trained interpreters, guides, and legal advocates. Going back home would mean relinquishing those services, which would restrict action to such an extent that it would be impossible, as Janet explained, to “have a life”:
 
"Seattle is my home for sure. I’m not leaving. I miss my family in Nebraska, but there are no services there for DeafBlind people, so many of them are isolated, not at all interacting with society. They’re very behind there. There is not a lot of education or awareness. DeafBlind people there mostly just stay at home alone, not doing much. I was very lucky to come to Seattle where things are much further along for DeafBlind people."
 
Janet, like many others, felt fortunate. Being in a place with services meant that action was less restricted, and life was, once again, possible. The first step toward experiencing those benefits, Janet explained, was getting past a state of “denial” and embracing a DeafBlind identity. When I asked her what might have happened if she had stayed in Nebraska, she said:

"If I had stayed in Nebraska, I would be in denial. I wouldn’t have learned Braille, I wouldn’t have learned how to use a cane, I would have probably had less and less friends as the years went on […]. It would have been a lot more work on my part to live there, and ultimately, I think I would have been extremely lonely. I’m really happy I moved to Seattle where I could grow, and learn new things. I came to be a confident person here who has accepted my identity, and who has a community, and a life."
 
In another interview, a Deaf sighted employee of the DeafBlind program at the Lighthouse in the early 1980s also identified “denial” as a root problem, which prevented people from embracing their DeafBlind identity. He explained that as the community began to grow:
 
"some were very resistant to the idea that they were blind. They were always saying that they were only “a little bit blind,” and they insisted that they were Deaf. They wanted to keep communicating the way they did when they were sighted, which was fine, but as soon as they were put in a position to communicate directly with another DeafBlind person, they didn’t want anything to do with it. They just really had a lot of resistance to changing the way they communicated."
 
Denial was framed by both sighted and DeafBlind people as a kind of psychological resistance to reality, which was usually tied to trauma, fear, stigma, or all three. Kathryn, for example, said that DeafBlind people in her Deaf school were picked on and even beaten up, and this caused lasting damage, which made it more difficult for her to embrace a DeafBlind identity:
 
"When I was a senior at the Deaf school, I was on the volleyball team. I was a star player. I was chosen by the school to join the team. I was very involved, and things were going along OK. Then one game, we were playing against another Deaf school, and it was a really close game. We were neck and neck—they would gain the lead, then we would come back, and toward the end of the game, it was a tie. The ball came over the net, and somehow, my mind couldn’t understand what I was seeing and it went right over my head. Their team won. So I was disappointed, but I had to accept that we had lost. Then, once we were off the court, a player from our team came up to me and said she didn’t like to lose, and then she beat me up. She did it because I couldn’t see the ball, and so I contributed to our team losing. That was a terrible day that I will never forget."
 
Events like this continued to happen until Kathryn’s parents decided she should see an eye doctor. She describes, like many others, the crude way in which she was informed of her impending blindness by the doctor, and the effect it had on her:
 
"I went in for all day testing. I didn’t like it at all. No interpreter was provided. The ADA hadn’t been established yet at that time, in 1977. […] There was no law that said you had to provide an interpreter. So I spent the whole time tapping people on the shoulder and asking them, “What did you say? What did you say?” My parents and the doctors were all standing there discussing the situation. My parents said they would tell me later. I had very limited knowledge about Usher Syndrome. The doctor said, “You. One day you will be blind.” I was shocked. I didn’t understand why he thought I would become blind when I was older. I thought to myself, “I can’t accept blindness.” I had already grown up sighted for 19 years, experiencing the world that way. So when I found out I had Ushers, I just couldn’t accept it. And the way the doctor told me in no uncertain terms, “You will be blind one day.” […] If only that doctor had described these things to me properly. […] Before I met with that doctor, I was talkative, social, but after that, I became very reserved."
 
When Kathryn moved to Seattle, she started to face her fear of tactile communication. Nevertheless, there was an important line that she still would not cross. Although she learned to communicate with people who received ASL signs through touch, or “tactile people,” actually becoming a tactile person remained unimaginable:
 
"I had to accept touch. I had to learn how to interact, and communicate with tactile people, but it was all one-way. They would use tactile reception, but I wouldn’t. I hadn’t practiced, so I didn’t know how. Really that doctor [ . . . ] ruined it for me. That experience was so traumatic that even after 33 years, it’s still hard to get over it."
 
Kathryn summed up her fear of going tactile, even after she had moved to Seattle, as a sign of her denial. She found the thought of going blind so terrifying that she never accepted that it was happening. Moving to Seattle was a sort of compromise. The systems that were in place, on the one hand, required her to be “DeafBlind,” On the other hand, being DeafBlind within those systems meant compensating for vision, thereby maintaining a fundamentally visual orientation to the world rather than transitioning to a more tactile way of life:
 
"After I moved here, I wouldn’t say I made wonderful progress. You really have to understand yourself. I needed to know who I really was as a DeafBlind person. I had to accept that. So between then and now, I’ve been doing better, but there are still some things that I haven’t faced. For instance, I should be using a cane all the time, every day, but I don’t. When I look outside, and notice that it is a bright day, I think, “I don’t need a cane! I’ll be fine!” Tactile reception is another example. I don’t need tactile reception. I can still see what people are saying when they sign through my tunnel of vision. So that’s what I mean by “denial.”"
 
Denial was often framed like this—as an unwillingness to accept a self-evident truth. However, as we will learn in the next chapter, overcoming denial and embracing identity may have obscured more than it revealed. Ultimately, this was not how cycles of collapse ended in the Seattle DeafBlind community.
 
3.2       What Identity Obscures
In the immediate aftermath of collapse (if all goes well), there will be two main choices: Take on a new identity, to which resources are tethered, or cope more directly with your environment, now deformed, disordered, or replaced by something wholly unfamiliar. Select the first choice, and there will be planning and paperwork, followed by silence. Select the second choice, and there will be a junk yard, which may contain (some of) the contents of your former life. Wandering around, hoping to find something (anything!) you can work with, is what it means to start with affordances.
Recall from Chapter 1 that the idea of “affordances” was introduced by the ecological psychologist, James J. Gibson (2015 [1977]: 119–136). According to Gibson, organisms interacting with their environment learn to recognize objects not by discriminating properties such as size, shape, or texture, but by perceiving affordances. A surface can be climbed on insofar as it is “climb-on- able.” It can be walked on insofar as it is “walk-on-able.” So while the surface of a lake has certain abstract properties like flatness, extension, and non-rigidity, it has very different affordances for a human and a water bug (Gibson 2015 [1977]: 127).

Under routine circumstances, affordances appear to the organism as fea- tures of the things themselves, which call forth action in particular ways. As Gibson puts it: “The postbox ‘invites’ the mailing of a letter, the handle ‘wants to be grasped,’ and things ‘tell us what to do with them” (Gibson 2015 [1977]: 138). Insofar as the equipment is up and running, you go about your business, barely paying attention to the fact that the environment is throwing out messages, which you can perceive and are equipped to act on. When the world collapses, things go silent—nothing tells you what to do with it. In cases like this, where the organism-environment relation is disrupted, Gibson points out that new sets of affordances, or “niches,” can be discovered (121):
 
"The natural environment offers many ways of life, and different animals have different ways of life. The niche implies a kind of animal, and the animal implies a kind of niche. Note the complementarity of the two. But note also that the environment as a whole with its unlimited possibilities existed prior to animals."
 
In other words, there is an excess of possibilities in the environment. If one collection of affordances fails the organism, another can be uncovered: “[T]here may be many offerings of the environment that have not been taken advantage of, that is, niches not yet occupied” (121). However, this abundance of possibilities is not readily accessible to individuals, moment to moment, since the interpretation of affordances on any one occasion (particularly for humans) is influenced by how affordances have been interpreted in the past, e.g. in a given social group, locality, or historical period. The fact that affordances are not only perceived but also learned means that there is some circularity and a tendency toward homogenization. The environment is organized by patterns of perception and interaction, and also reinforces and shapes those patterns (Lynch 1960; Bourdieu 1970; Simmel 1971; Panofsky 1973; Hanks 1990; Benjamin 1999; Hull 2012; Keane 2014; Throop 2016). For example, Gibson discusses the meaning of a “seat” (120):
 
"The human species in some cultures has the habit of sitting as distinguished from kneeling or squatting. If a surface of support [is] knee-high above the ground, it affords sitting on. We call it a seat. . . ."
 
A sitting culture values seats—stumps, ledges, benches, and of course chairs. Chairs are manufactured in great number. The mass production of chairs, and their placement all across the landscape, reinforces a culture of sitting (as opposed to kneeling or squatting). Over time, certain seating arrangements become conventional within rooms, certain layouts of rooms within houses become common in certain places and periods of time; There are patterns in terms of how houses within neighborhoods are arranged, and so on. Each of these arrangements is a “collection of affordances.” They are part of a niche, which is not discovered anew each time an individual stumbles upon it. People in sitting cultures are socialized from an early age to sit in seats and to do so in particular ways. As processes like this transpire, an abundance of affordances in the environment are narrowed to some limited sub-set.

Within any cultural group, there is also variation. The narrowing and homogenization of human-environment relations therefore affects some more than others, and in different ways. Gibson notes, for example, that “[k]nee high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult, so the affordance is relative to the size of the individual” (120). Furthermore, we rarely sit merely to sit. We sit in order to engage in some other activity, such as conversation, playing cards, rest, or reading. Therefore, homogenization will affect groups differently, depending on how those activities are routinely structured across the group. Variation can also be observed in different geographical regions and historical periods. For example, Edward T. Hall argues that those who have been socialized in North America move through, and interact with, the world in ways that hide its tactile affordances. He asks us to “[t]hink for a moment how young children and infants reach, grasp, fondle, and mouth everything, and how many years are required to train children to subordinate the world of touch to the visual world.” This process, he argues, is amplified by our interactions with the manufactured environment. Cars, chairs, and other kinesthetically un-engaging vessels populating the North American landscape isolate us from thermal, olfactory, and tactile affordances in our environment.

Given this state of affairs, DeafBlind people in North America have two choices: Stick with the layout as it is or find new ways of interacting with the environment. If you choose to embrace an established, legible identity, the furniture stays where it is. You sit in the furniture like you were taught to, and if that arrangement is not effective for carrying on a conversation, accommodations can be requested on the basis of one’s identity. With accommodations, an approximation of the world can be thrown up any time it is needed. This was the approach taken by the Seattle DeafBlind community for the first 30 years of its history. If a DeafBlind member of the community couldn’t see what other people were saying, someone would tell them what was said. If they weren’t sure what kind of room they were in, someone would describe it. Identities are locked into a lot of structure. Choosing to start with affordances instead means letting structure fall away, and with it many things that have felt like, or promise to be, lifelines—all of the accommodations, services, and supports. Starting with affordances is a difficult move not only because it usually involves a significant departure from norms and standards, but also because hidden affordances are, by definition, unknown and difficult to imagine. Understandably, then, the Seattle DeafBlind community went further and further down the well-trodden path of identity, and as they did, the weight of existential strain was increasingly felt.
 
3.3       Existential Strain
Strain involves actions that may be effective, but not appropriate, appropriate but not effective, or neither appropriate nor effective (Kockelman 2006a: 39). Strain can occur when an instrument is not designed well (2006a: 44); when a group of people rejects standards of appropriateness and prioritizes efficacy, as when skateboarders redefine the functions of public architecture: “sidewalks, walls, ramps, curbs,” and so on (Kockelman 2006a: 41); and when a group of people adheres to the normative use of an instrument, despite the fact that it is not effective for them when used that way (Kockelman 2006a: 41). Strain is part of life, but if there is a general trend, where the human-environment relation is disrupted and norms and standards maintain their hold to the exclusion of efficacy, strain will likely turn to collapse. The boundary between strain and collapse is breached when action becomes so restricted by norms and standards, that it is no longer possible to be who you are. This is precisely what happened for members of the Seattle DeafBlind community when sighted standards of conduct were maintained to such an extent that for thirty years, a visual language was the primary mode of communication for a group of people who can’t see.

But why would anyone submit themselves to norms and standards that make communication, navigation, and ultimately existence itself impossible? Kathryn’s story suggests that one motivating factor is the powerful stigma that accrues to “blindness,” not as a positive identity, but as a condition that thwarts appropriate, Deaf conduct. Evading stigma involves either: (1) demonstrating that one can behave “appropriately,” despite blindness; or (2) stretching the boundaries around sighted notions of appropriateness to make slightly strange behavior more acceptable. The first option depends on sight to some degree. People who are fully blind can no longer act as if they are sighted, while people who are partially sighted might be able to. Asking sighted people to accommodate on a case-by-case basis, leads to idiosyncratic attempts to modify social norms according to individual “needs.” Lee, one of the leaders of the protactile movement, reflected on such attempts.
 
"A month ago, I was with [Janet], and I ended up interpreting what people were saying because I wasn’t lost, but she was totally lost and frustrated, and [she was] complaining that people weren’t following all of the many ridiculous rules that you have to follow to make visual communication with her possible. She put it in terms of “respect.” She said people weren’t respecting her. They shouldn’t walk quickly by—it’s confusing. They should stand at the right distance. They should sign slowly [. . .] . It is not reasonable to expect people to do that, and they don’t. So the result is that she’s left out, and is getting more and more frustrated as time goes by [. . .]."
 
Lee and her collaborators argued that these kinds of interventions cannot happen on an individual level. With the inception of the protactile movement, a third option was revealed: Give up on sighted notions of appropriateness altogether and find an effective way of being in the world that does not involve vision at all. Prior to the protactile movement, that option may have led somewhere wonderful, but once you got there, you would be alone. The limited options DeafBlind people had all involved embracing a DeafBlind identity, and yet embracing a DeafBlind identity turned out to be a temporary fix. Denial followed people to Seattle and caused problems long after their DeafBlind identities were established.

For example, Felicia had already been through an ordeal in Oregon before relocating to Seattle. When she arrived, she found that there were two main options for how she could be DeafBlind. She could be a “tactile person,” which at the time meant placing her hands on the hands of the signer as they produced signs in ASL (a visual language). The other viable option was being a “tunnel-vision person,” which involved asking others to sign in a smaller space, moving back to see more of what people were saying, working with interpreters to manage group communication settings, and so on. She realized right away that being a tunnel-vision person was preferable. They were the ones with more active social lives, better jobs, and overall, a higher quality of life. She therefore moved quickly to embrace her identity as a “tunnel-vision” person.
Some years later, though, people started telling Felicia she should “switch to tactile.” Her inability to do this, they said, was affecting her relationships, her effectiveness at work, her ability to be a mother, and nearly every other aspect of her life. It was then, she told me, that the life she had assembled upon her arrival in Seattle started falling apart all over again:
 
"My ex-husband told me that I was missing what he was saying. He would get angry and frustrated, saying that I didn’t understand what he was saying and he blamed it on me not being able to read his face. At work people started telling me that I was misunderstanding. People were very blunt with me. My boss at work started asking me all the time if I understood what she was saying. I had to take all of that in for a while, and then finally someone sat me down and said, “Your eyes are getting worse. You have to do something.” And I didn’t want to believe it. I told them it wasn’t true. I mean, I could see, but I missed so much. My vision couldn’t pick up facial expression, which was a major problem. For example, when I looked at my own baby, I thought she was laughing but really she was crying. My ex-husband would yell at me and say, “You thought the baby was laughing?? No! She was crying!” But I didn’t see the tears. I was really beside myself, but I held it all in. My marriage was a complete disaster. Communication was only one of the reasons. So communication started failing all the time, and I was in denial, which was a terrible combination. […] I have to admit, for a long time I pretended to understand what people were saying to me. It’s terrible, but I did. I’m not proud of that at all."
 
Felicia maintained her tunnel-vision DeafBlind identity as long as she could. Sighted norms and standards maintained their hold and eventually action became so restricted that it was no longer possible for her to be who she was. Being a DeafBlind person in a visual world depends on being able to take on roles in ways that are legible to sighted people. Felicia was, among other things, a professional at work and a wife and mother at home. As she slowly lost her sight, she must have adjusted along the way, but then all at once she found herself locked out of those roles. She told me, “My husband was very controlling. He thought I couldn’t be a mother.” Her boss was asking if she had understood after every exchange, which suggested to Felicia that she was no longer trusted to do her job. Her life was falling apart. You can blame Felicia for not switching to tactile sooner, but people who did fared no better.

For example, Adrijana started perceiving ASL through touch early, before she “needed” to. But when she moved to Seattle in 1997, she was struck by how dependent everyone was on interpreters. She thought that being a tactile person meant that she would experience the kind of immediacy she had enjoyed as a Deaf sighted person. But in Seattle, she said:
 
"There was no one to talk to! Everyone was busy chatting with their [interpreters]. I started to feel like, “Who am I? Why did I even move here to Seattle? I’m from a Deaf world where communication is direct and unmediated. Now everything seems wrong. Like I took a step backwards into a hearing environment.”"
 
Lee, who had moved to Seattle in 2001, shared Adrijana’s sense of disappointment. She noted that going tactile was very clearly:
 
"something negative that people gave into; something that would draw sympathy and looks of consoling understanding. It was not something people went into with positive aspirations or enthusiasm."

In many of the interviews I conducted, becoming a tactile person—an inevitability for everyone—was as Lee describes. For example, Susan said that one day she was at a staff meeting at the Lighthouse and she was watching an interpreter visually, just like she always did. At some point, someone said, “Susan? Are you going to answer?” And she realized that she had been missing what the person was saying. Before that, she thought she had been catching everything. To clarify, someone tried to communicate with her through touch and she pulled away, asking what the person was doing. By this time, she was certain everyone was watching and she was embarrassed. Tactile communication wasn’t helpful for her because she hadn’t developed the skill. She didn’t want to put her lack of skill on display and at the same time, she didn’t want to take that step toward becoming a tactile person. She was trapped between two DeafBlind identities, neither of which seemed to offer a feasible way forward.

Eventually, Susan learned how to receive ASL signs through touch, but this only led to new problems. She explained that often, DeafBlind people would say, “Susan? Is that you communicating through touch with me? Your eyes have gotten worse!” That kind of response was hard for her. Susan said that switching to tactile was a necessary change, but overall it was depressing. Right away she realized that she couldn’t participate in groups the same way. For example, at the Lighthouse for the Blind where she worked, there were two separate lunch groups. If you were still a tunnel-vision person, you could eat with the other tunnel-vision people. Once you went tactile, though, you had to either switch to the tactile group, or be left out of conversations. Susan’s friends were all still in the tunnel-vision group, but that was no longer a feasible communication situation for her so she saw less and less of them. She also described a process of increasing dependence on interpreters, where the quality of her day, or a meeting she attended, or her level of interest in a person she was communicating with depended on whether her interpreter was tired, whether they knew her preferences or not, and so on. She said, all in all, going from “tunnel vision” to “tactile” had been a negative experience for her.

​The idea of “denial” suggests that people like Susan are resistant to reality,but her story and many others like it suggest that putting off the transition from tunnel-vision to tactile reflected a perfectly solid grasp of reality in Seattle at that time. Tunnel-vision people had more access to resources, they were the first to learn of any new information circulating, they had better jobs, were invited to better parties. In general, they had better lives. People avoided tactility because it opened onto a path of social demotion, isolation, and increased dependence on sighted people.
 
Reflecting on this problem later, two key leaders of the protactile movement, Adrijana and Lee, argued that the problem was not tactility itself, but the fact that the community’s standards of conduct were sighted standards. Underneath “DeafBlind” identities like “tactile” and “tunnel vision,” were sighted roles, and the actions deemed appropriate and effective for taking on those roles. For example, as part of my fieldwork in 2010, I attended bi-weekly classes where groups of DeafBlind people gathered to exchange information and socialize and there were often presentations. In venues like these, DeafBlind people rarely communicated directly with one another. Instead, sighted ways of organizing communication were maintained and accommodations were provided.

For sighted people, a “presenter” is a person who stands on a stage and addresses many audience members at once. When this is the base assumption, the number and positioning of sighted relays becomes complicated very quickly. For example, on one occasion, a DeafBlind man was standing on a stage preparing to give a presentation. Each DeafBlind audience member listened to the presentation through an interpreter. A sighted person stood behind the DeafBlind presenter. Any time the presenter rotated his body so he wasn’t facing the audience, his orientation was adjusted by the sighted person, manually. If a person in the audience asked a question, the presenter used his small tunnel of vision to receive the question. However, he wouldn’t look at the person asking the question directly because he couldn’t find them efficiently. With a small tunnel of vision, searching for the signer takes time. Instead, the person asking the question would stand up so all of the interpreters in the room could see them. From there, an interpreter on stage would copy the question. Next, an interpreter seated at the base of the stage facing the presenter would copy the copy of the question, at which point, the presenter would have access to the audience-member’s question. All questions and comments from the audience were funneled through just that one person, which reduced the amount of time spent searching since the presenter would always know where to look.

Complex networks of mediation like this were established—not as a means of becoming tactile, but as a means of stretching the visual world as far as it could possibly go. The enemy was blindness, not the primacy of visuality or the “distantism” it engenders (Clark 2017). As more and more members of the community became blind, problems with this approach became apparent. Prior to the protactile movement, the response to vision loss was always an increase in mediation strategies aimed at maintaining as much access as possible to the visual world. However, performing an action in a way that is appropriate for taking up a sighted role, without being able to see how others perform those actions, makes it increasingly difficult to know an action will be interpreted as intended. The feedback loop is broken, and this leads to “commitment issues,” another sign that whatever order there is in the world might be resting on unstable ground.

3.4       Commitment Issues
To commit is to internalize, and therefore be able to anticipate, the meaning or effect of your actions (Kockelman 2006a: 61). This applies, for example, to the way an utterance represents some type of action (e.g. “Hi!” represents a “greeting”), and also the way an utterance causes some sort of affective response, or “interpretant,” such as an increase in metabolism, a blush, a feeling of pain, or a feeling of being off balance (Kockelman 2005: 274). Adjusting, clarifying, or repairing misconstruals of communicative intent is part of life. However, collapse may be on the horizon if, as a rule, the effects of your actions are misconstrued.

When the world is up and running, actions are controlled and purposeful behaviors that result in the realization of an instrument, another action, incorporation by a role or identity, or an utterance that represents it (Kockelman 2006a: 44). For example, carpentry (action), could realize a table (instrument). Throwing a ball to another person (action) might lead that person to throw the ball back to you (another action), in which case, this second action contextualizes and incorporates the first action. Now you’re playing a “game of catch.” In the context of a game, this kind of action might be incorporated into a role, such as “catcher,” and if you take on such roles habitually, they might be incorporated into an identity, such as “athlete.” You can’t have a role if you never do anything, and you can’t have an identity if you never do anything habitually in ways that align with normative frames for interpreting whatever it is that you are doing.

Accounting more specifically for language-use, to “commit” is to internalize, and therefore be able to anticipate, the meaning or effect of your utterances from the perspective of the person to whom they are addressed, including not only representational effects (e.g. an utterance produced in response to your utterance), but also affective effects (e.g. a person registers your utterance through an increase in body temperature, visible as blood flow in the face). Calibrating one’s utterances to achieve purposeful effects requires that over many instances of communicating, these sorts of effects are perceptible to the speaker. The effects themselves, however, are not purposeful or controlled. They are not things we do, but things that happen to us. At most, we experience affective responses like these as something we must resist, or manage (Kockelman 2005: 274–275). In addition to representational and affective responses, there are “energetic” responses. These involve physical reactions like “flinching at the sound of a gun” or “tiptoeing on a creaky floor” (Kockelman 2005: 275). In contrast to affective responses, these are things we do (they don’t just happen to us), but unlike representational effects, we do not cause them in an entirely controlled or purposeful manner. It is crucial to note that the same kind of dependencies and inclusions obtain here: Representational effects depend on and include affective and energetic effects. You can’t guarantee that your utterance will be interpreted in the way you hoped it would, unless you have a sense of how all three effects interact across contexts. Over time, one develops a feeling for relations across domains, which gives rise to dispositions in how we speak, or act, more generally. In other words, dispositions to act in particular ways are guided and constrained by our internalized sense of how people will respond along representational, affective, and energetic lines (Kockelman 2005: 277–278).

We exert control, for example, when walking across a creaky floor at night, because we have internalized the “energetic” effect of that action on someone else: One wakes up, startled by the sound. We don’t think about it explicitly, and yet, in order to internalize those responses, they must be routinely available in the environment. DeafBlind people who have been spared the experience of living with hearing people slam doors and cupboards, walk confidently across a creaky floor at night, and let the tea kettle whistle for as long as they like. In contrast, DeafBlind people living with hearing people are put in a strange position: they can be expected to internalize energetic effects of their actions, which they, themselves, do not experience.

For example, Julie explained that before she came to Seattle and was still living in Utah she often had to internalize effects that she did not experience. The only language available to her was ASL. “Tactile sign language,” as she describes it below, meant tactile reception of ASL. “Beauty” referred to how someone looked not how they felt, and what counted as appropriate behavior presupposed sighted norms as well. When Julie started to lose her vision, she applied her intellect to the problem. She liked the unknown more than most and she figured there must be a way forward. So she started trying things— tactile things—with everyone she met. What she encountered was a highly restricted range of intelligibility for anything involving touch. Within those constraints, she explained, there were only a couple of possibilities:
 
"In Utah, I used tactile sign language, but only with men. Rarely were women comfortable with it. Most of them were concerned about being misconstrued as a lesbian, and so avoided touching other women in public. The husbands were more than happy to talk, but when it came time for the wives to join the conversation, they always seemed nervous and they always refused. So I generally ended up conversing with husbands and ignoring wives. It’s not that women and men saw the situation differently, but the men looked at it as something they could take advantage of and the women didn’t. In order for me to avoid social isolation, I had to be pretty all the time. That was how I could relate with men because wanting to touch someone, for them, had to do with how pretty that person was. For me it was a matter of basic communication. So my access to communication was based on a fundamental misunderstanding about touch. DeafBlind people in Utah who were not attractive stayed home. They were socially isolated. Focusing on my looks was something I regarded as pure survival. And it wasn’t just my appearance. I also wanted to make good money because I knew that being more materialistic, having nice things, would also attract people. And I was lucky that I had a brain. I took advantage of the fact that people were attracted to my mind."
 
This was not a way of being, exactly, but it wasn’t social isolation, either. Julie resigned herself to this limited way of interacting with others for the sake of survival. This time in her life, she told me, was frustrating. Any attempt at forward motion brought her back to where she had started. She knew what she had to do. She had to extend tactility into domains of life not normally associated with touch, such as routine communication. But communicating effectively required that she communicate “inappropriately,” and this made it impossible for her to commit (Kockelman 2006a: 61). The things she needed to do just to interact with others were interpreted in ways that she not only didn’t intend but that she actively resisted. Every time she tried to touch someone for purposes of routine communication, the interaction quickly narrowed to one of two predictable frames: Either the unintended appearance of “homosexual” flirtation or the unintended appearance of “heterosexual” flirtation (the former less appropriate to the people around her than the latter). Many DeafBlind people who moved to Seattle from elsewhere had parallel experiences. They describe the places they came from as lacking basic necessities; they couldn’t live there. Being unable to commit in basic communicative acts was a significant part of the problem.

Upon relocating to Seattle, it was possible to be intelligible as a DeafBlind
person and, even, as a specific kind of DeafBlind person. However, working with interpreters involved complex participant frames, even in relatively simple circumstances. When an entire room is filled with DeafBlind people, each of whom has been assigned an interpreter, participant frames grow excessively complex and commitment issues are encountered once again. An interpreter who had been involved in the community since the 1980s when group communication was new associated this with what she called a “turn- taking” problem. She explained in an interview that back then:
 
"[o]ne of the most memorable problems was turn-taking. DeafBlind people didn’t understand how to do it, and interpreters too. Interpreters were there for short periods of time [as students], then they moved away, or whatever, so people would learn, but then there were new people who didn’t know yet, and there were so many confusions. Someone would say something, and the person would be confused about why THAT person (the interpreter) would be saying that thing. And the interpreter would try to explain, “It’s not ME. It’s [Randy] saying that. I’m just interpreting what he’s saying,” and it was really a challenge."
 
Early on in Seattle’s history, this was a common problem. People would mistake the interpreter (animator) for the signer (author) of the utterance, and communication would go circular. In one situation:
 
"Ronald stood up in front of everyone, and signed “READY?” to his interpreter, Rose, and [Rose] said “READY?” in English. Then his interpreter signed what Rose said back to Ronald instead of saying “YES,” and it just went on like that in a potentially endless loop. Until finally Rose said, “DO NOT SIGN READY! SIGN YES!” [Laughs.] We could still be there if Rose hadn’t said something."
 
In order for DeafBlind people to communicate with one another at that point in the community’s history, and especially in groups, sighted interpreters were necessary (Chapter 5). However, the presence of interpreters introduced an additional layer of commitment issues. In this particular case, the pronominal systems of English and ASL were set to retrieve values from participant frameworks that only some participants had unrestricted access to. For Deaf- Blind people who were not relying on vision, the “person currently speaking,” for example, was their interpreter by default. In order to generate alternate retrievable values, proper names had to be rigidly associated with the speaker of every utterance—a habit that each new interpreter and DeafBlind member of the community had to learn and habituate to.
By the mid-1990s, when I entered the community as an undergraduate student studying interpreting, these issues had been worked out. Conventions were in place for smooth turn-taking, people understood how many different participant frameworks worked via interpreters, there were options for how DeafBlind people could participate, and they started to take intelligibility for granted. Only when people traveled outside of Seattle after living there for some time, did interpretations of actions once again become precarious, reminding them what they now had.

Helen, for example, had been in Seattle for years when she and I traveled to Arizona for a short weekend trip. On our first day there, we went out. It was a sunny summer day. She wanted a milkshake and I wanted coffee. Helen is older than I am and uses a cane. When we walk together, we touch each other to coordinate our movements and to converse. I wondered how people in Arizona might make sense of us. Would they recognize the cane and assume that a blind person was involved? When they noticed the “hand holding” would they consider the possibility that tactile communication was taking place? I was curious about the differences but Helen was anxious. Any time intelligibility was destabilized, a previous life was conjured in which the only roles available to her were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of her actions.
As we set out on our excursion in Arizona, things immediately went the wrong way. Helen and I had routine ways of interacting, which were effective and appropriate in Seattle. This was the case not only in DeafBlind community spaces but also in particular neighborhoods in Seattle, where people were used to seeing DeafBlind people. We wanted to maintain that sense of intelligibility and go about our business, committed to what we were doing. Maybe, if we projected confidence, people would see that we had a way to be, even if they weren’t sure what it was. But then at the ice cream place they made too much, so they gave Helen an extra cup. Now she had one hand for the cane, one for the milkshake, and no hands for the second cup, for communication, or for maintaining contact with me while walking. I tried to help. I carried the cane under one arm, and held the extra cup in my hand. Helen used one hand for keeping track of me and one hand for her milkshake. All of the possible cues were being obscured and tension was building.
Our plan was still in motion. We were on our way across the street to the coffee place, where we would soon be able to sit down, talk, and enjoy our beverages. While we were waiting at the crosswalk, I told Helen that I still wanted to go to the cafe across the street, but I wanted beer instead of coffee. She responded negatively to this idea, yelling, “Great! Now I’ll be your child!” In fact, it is not uncommon for DeafBlind people who are older than the sighted person they are with to be mistaken for the sighted person’s child, and the beverages one chooses can take on a decisive role in such readings. The stakes were too high. Any action might set off some unwieldy chain of interpretations, which had the potential to reduce existence, once again, to mere survival.
 
Standing on the corner, we reflected on the absurdity of the image we were inhabiting together, evacuated of any relevant roles or identities. We burst into laughter, the cane still wrenched up under my arm, sticking out almost into traffic. What could we possibly be in public? Maybe Helen was right. The closest possibility was an adult with the mental capacity of a child (which would be a reasonable explanation for the milk shake, the beer, and the “hand holding” while crossing the street). Over the course of our visit, we returned to that joke. It was a serious joke about the hazards of being hard to see. Those hazards, which multiply the further one gets from Seattle, lead to anxieties about doing what one must to exist.
Commitment is always problematic, hence the ubiquity of adjustment, clarification, re-framing, and repair in everyday interactions (e.g. Sidnell 2015: 180). However, when unintelligibility is the most or only predictable outcome, meaningful action will be reliably thwarted, roles will be out of reach, and existence will be undermined or terminally restricted.
 
3.5       Keeping Things Life-Like
In Seattle, people didn’t mistake your interpreter for your mother, nor did they mistake basic communicative touch for sexual interest. However, once people settled into their new DeafBlind identities, whether they were “tunnel- vision” or “tactile” people, the signs of collapse would eventually resurface and existence would, once again, feel fragile. During six months of fieldwork conducted in 2006 and 2008, I became keenly aware of the mounting pressure exerted on language. Descriptions of the world were expected to stand in for the world, but could not effectively do so. As a result, life was strained and it was hard to commit. Things were on the brink of collapse (again) and as people crept closer and closer to the unknown, it seemed that it would be up to language to keep things looking life-like.

In the spring of 2008, I spent a lot of time with Helen. One of the activities Helen and I enjoyed together was “people watching.” We would walk around in the city together, pausing for “snapshots” of what I saw. If I described something Helen was interested in, she would ask questions, and in the back and forth an image of the environment would form. I ended up doing things like tracing a stream of sunlight into the squinting eyes of a driver as his car moved slowly by or describing a pale-skinned woman draped in a thin, black dress, sulking on the giant billboard above. One time, Helen and I were sitting against the back wall at a public event. I found two people whom I could eavesdrop on and I started relaying their conversation to Helen. She stopped me and said she wasn’t interested in people’s conversations: she wanted to know how they were holding their heads, what they were doing with their feet and their eyes, if there were flashes of discomfort or amusement. She would say things like: “Describe all of the eyebrows you see.” Or: “Are the hands in this room pocketed?” Though her focus of attention was always shifting, one thing was consistent. She was not interested in my take on things. She wanted me to provide her with an excess of descriptive detail, which she could interpret and evaluate according to her own criteria. And she wasn’t interested in people per se. She was reading the ambient environment off of their responses to it, and to do that effectively what she needed from me were details—as specific and as numerous as possible.

Helen wasn’t the only one. At that point in the history of the community, sighted people were being treated as a portal to the present. That posed a challenge for interpreters, who were being asked to generate descriptions that were as concrete and indeterminate as reality. The technique for achieving that was similar to what Roland Barthes calls the “reality effect,” (1984: 141–154) which in literature involves writing in superfluous detail, drawing attention to things that are, as he says, “neither incongruous nor significant” (ibid.: 142). Barthes argues that such details, only when provided in great excess, can end up conveying something of the character or atmosphere of a place. Each thing is insignificant, but the cumulative effect of all of that insignificance is a sense that you are there. So in lieu of reality interpreters were being trained to generate a reality effect. This pushed language to some kind of limit. Interpreters were scrambling to generate realist portraits of reality in real time. In the end, though, the world was always going flat, despite every attempt to keep it looking life-like.

Recall that our dispositions to act are guided and constrained by our internalized sense of how people will respond—not only representational responses, such as an utterance, but also affective and energetic responses, such as blushing or walking with more controlled movements (Kockelman 2005: 277–278 and see Chapter 1). While sighted interpreters tended to focus on what people were saying to one another, Helen was more interested in affective and energetic effects, perhaps because in order to commit, she needed to know what responses were likely and possible. Since she couldn’t perceive responses of any kind directly, she asked me to describe them, but describing affective and energetic effects turns them into representa- tions. Representational effects include and depends on affective and energetic effects. When language was divorced from its effects for extended periods of time, things fell apart.
 
The foundation fell out from under representation, just like it fell out from under everything else because norms for DeafBlind interaction and communication were established by sighted people who perceived affordances in the environment in visual ways, including the affordances of language. The disposition to adhere to normative standards of appropriate conduct kept DeafBlind people from findings effective ways to interact with their environment. Therefore, even though vision was the one thing that was not shared across the group, a visual language—ASL—became the main instrument through which, the environment was perceived.
In 2006, I attended a workshop for sighted interpreters on “visual analysis,” which was a collection of methods meant to push language into the realm of visual perception, ultimately substituting for it. One such method, which was similar to the technique I had learned from Helen, was called “passive seeing.” Lee, the DeafBlind instructor, talked about this as a mode of attention, saying:
 
"The goal is more to evoke an image that the DeafBlind person can then interpret. Tap into the mood of the place, the passive aspects. Fill in the background, the texture of the scene, so the DeafBlind person can be free to make their own decisions about how to interact with their world. You can’t substitute your opinion for visual analysis and expect that to be informative."
 
Lee and the other DeafBlind instructor went on to perform a role-playing exercise that illustrated the difference between conveying an “opinion” such as, “That man over there is friendly,” and conducting “visual analysis,” where details of the scene are conveyed in such a way that more than just “looking- at” would become possible. The role-play in the workshop was set in a restaurant and the instructors were playing the role of patrons. They were interacting, but saying very little to one another. The students were instructed to ignore the dialog and attend to the “feeling” of the interaction, which they would be asked to report on later. There were also several DeafBlind people participating in the workshop who were watching the role-play via sighted interpreters. A few moments into the exercise, one of those interpreters interrupted the role-play to explain that without dialog or any notable events there was nothing to interpret. The instructors explained that the point of the workshop was to see that when nothing is being said, the real work begins. Some examples they gave were the direction and consistency of eye-gaze; details about clothing, shoes, and jewelry, including the way they move and are adjusted, and the rhythmic tapping of a foot. These are particularities of setting that rarely make their way into interpreters’ descriptions.
 
Adrijana and Lee were trying to recover these details via a special kind of evocative description. However, evocation presupposes a world and memories of it. DeafBlind people who acquire ASL as sighted or partially sighted children, make connections on a daily basis between the linguistic system and the visual world where it is used. However, if their vision deteriorates and their “tactile scope” (Clark 2015) does not grow, experiences in the world become more restricted over time, memories begin to fade, and language no longer calls anything to mind. In 2006, for example, I videorecorded dyads composed of one DeafBlind person and one sighted interpreter while they walked around downtown Seattle, exploring the city. I walked in front of them with a harness attached to my torso and a pole attached to the harness, which extended up and out. A camera was mounted at the top of the pole and rotated backward, facing the dyad behind me. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, one of those recorded interactions involved a sighted interpreter describing a sculpture in downtown Seattle to a DeafBlind man whom I call Roman. The sculpture is a man, about two stories high, whose arm and fist move up and down, hammering in slow-motion. The interpreter starts with a closed fist, which is a conventional handshape in ASL. The fist represents the head of the hammer. Roman places one hand on top of the interpreter’s fist as he moves it slowly toward his own palm, which Roman is also touching. The interpreter’s fist comes in contact with his own palm (like a hammer hitting a surface), and then moves slowly back up again. He repeats that motion several times. The interpreter then points to where the sculpture is to link the description of the referent to the referent.

This is a perfectly conventional way of describing a swinging hammer in ASL, and yet Roman seems confused by it. After a few seconds of searching for the referent and apparently failing to locate it, he says, “I remember I saw that sculpture about ten years ago.” Modes of access that allow the interpreter to link the description to the referent are tenuous for Roman. He is relying on faded, flat memories and cannot conjure the sculpture’s towering size, its immutable presence—black against a sharp, gray sky—or the striking temporal juxtaposition of the arm, slowly sliding back and forth, and the fast- paced activity in the city around it. The interpreter’s description can only be received by Roman as uprooted and abstract. He understands the “meaning” of the interpreter’s words, but he is alienated from the world to which the description articulates.

Adrijana and Lee were trying to prevent problems like this by teaching interpreters to capture particularities. At some point, though, the interpreter’s task became ludicrous. Filling in a missing word here or there became replication of entire utterances, which became copies of utterances and non-linguistic communicative cues, which became detailed descriptions of the crowd, the way light interacts with surfaces, the way styles among the youth keep changing. Interpreters were doing cross-sections of rooms, describing whatever they saw lying around: a bunched up purse on the floor, a shiny metal case of lipstick abandoned on the conference table, a fingerprinted leather wallet, a home-made hat. Needless to say, this ambitious program could not be maintained, and even if it could every DeafBlind person I have known eventually loses interest as their concerns and curiosities turn tactile. Representations of the world cannot substitute for the world. We do not infer the world, we exist in our relation to it. Last ditch attempts to prevent the collapse of the world by substituting propositional semiosis for non-propositional semiosis failed, and along the way, there were many signs that it would.
 
3.6       Signs of Collapse
Collapse is difficult to grasp in part because we do not perceive collapse itself: we perceive signs of collapse. In this chapter, I have asked how DeafBlind people in Seattle read the signs prior to the protactile movement. In analyzing this process, I have also extracted some steps, which might help us understand how worlds collapse more generally. First, the equipment breaks down in ways that make it impossible to go on being who you are. To cope with the situation, you take on a new identity, which unlocks some emergency resources. As you apply those resources, though, you find yourself continuing to do what is appropriate for them, not what is effective for you. The situation drags on, and soon things become strained. Strain is a part of life, but at some point you realize that continuing to adhere to these norms and standards will foreclose any possibility of effective action. At this point, the weight of existential strain is felt and commitment issues arise. Commitment is problematic under normal circumstances, but when misconstrual of your actions is all there is, you know that collapse is on the horizon. As a last-ditch effort you might give up on life and settle for just keeping things life-like, and when that fails you return to your memories, until, eventually, those fade too. In this chapter, I have shown that for many DeafBlind people in Seattle, responding to collapse involved gaining access, via sighted interpreters, to a receding visual world. The first step in that direction was identity. You identify in a certain way and you get resources on that basis. The protactile critique of that has to do with the importance of “direct access” to the world. However, looking closely at the structure of the world as it came apart, we see that the directness or immediacy involved is not, in a strict sense, immediate. It is actually a special kind of non-propositional mediation. In the next chapter, I focus on how, as part of the protactile movement, DeafBlind people began to reverse this process.