Protactile Research Network
Chapter 7: Conclusions
In reflecting on two decades of anthropological engagement in DeafBlind communities at a time when the protactile movement was taking root, I have arrived again and again at the limits of language. Across six interrelated chapters, this book has worked toward a deeper understanding of those limits as a critical site for political intervention, social organization, and ultimately existence itself. I have not set out to establish a conceptual framework that can account for the limits of language once and for all but rather to offer an ethnographic account of what it meant for DeafBlind people in a particular place and time to live their everyday lives without the taken for granted sense that their language and their world would be integrated. One of the many consequences of this was to render fundamental functions of language, such as reference and description, inoperable.
Linguistic anthropology, as a field, grapples with the complex problems that arise at the boundaries of language, as it is analyzed in its complex contexts of use. Where the cut is made between “language” on the one hand and “context” on the other, how each is theorized, and how the relation between the two can be accounted for, is a productive source of debate. For example, some have argued that language is not a coherent object of analysis at all outside of the sequential structure of interaction (Rawls 2002: 11). Others start with a distinction between a “denotational text” (or what has been said in and by discourse) and an interactional text (or what has been done in and by discourse) (Silverstein 2019), where denotation is associated with language and interaction is associated with the effects of language-use. This and other contemporary distinctions have been built on earlier theories that distinguish between constructs like langue and parole (Saussure 1972 [1915]), or competence and performance (Chomsky 1988 [1965]). Each of these distinctions is a first step toward marking a limit beyond which something other than language must become the focus of analysis.
In this book, the primary distinction on which all analysis rests is between being in the world and talking about the world. Both are understood as semiotic processes, though the constituents involved and the relations between them differ (Kockelman 2006a: 22). The former involves non-propositional content and processes, such as cashing in on affordances in the environment in order to perform actions and in doing so taking on roles, while the latter involves propositional content and processes that are required for description, reference, and depiction (Kockelman 2006a: 22). Taking this distinction as my starting point in analyzing the protactile movement and its effects has led to a re-thinking of several questions of broader anthropological significance.
First, how does the study of meaning or semiotics inform our understandings of social and political action? Propositional statements about the world are a primary means of obtaining resources through established political processes. However, Chapters 2 and 4 foreground the fact that engaging in those processes presupposes and tends to reinforce ways of being in the world that are taken for granted by those in power who govern the political process and establish its parameters. The protactile movement broke from that cycle by turning attention inward to find space away from sighted people, their notions of politeness and appropriateness, and their political frameworks. In that reprieve, the goal was to uncover effective ways of being in the world together and let propositional claims about the world, reality, what is true, what is right and wrong, and what is needed emerge from those efforts (not the other way around). In order to understand that process, I had to start, analytically, with being in the world as well. This approach may be useful wherever things seem to be shifting beneath political action in ways that undermine the goals of those actions.
Related to this, how can the conceptual tools of linguistic anthropology help us understand historical moments of crisis, rupture, and collapse? In Chapter 3, this question arose as a problem of “representation.” As Deaf- Blind people became blind, and access to the visual world was increas- ingly constrained, sighted interpreters were there to substitute that world for descriptions of it. We learned that, despite the fact that descriptions of the world can and frequently do substitute for the world, there is a limit to what language, as a means of representation, can do under conditions of existential collapse. In this context, the limits of language emerged as a kind of existential breaking point, felt in circumstances where talk about the world is no longer a reliable way of gaining access to, intervening in, or otherwise affecting change in the world. While this book has focused on representation via language-use and, more specifically, description, reference, and depiction, one can imagine many other forms of representation that could be at issue across contexts. For example, anyone who spent most of their time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic may have encountered, at some point, a sense that digital representations of social life were extinguishing their own capacity to substitute for social life. In this book, I have argued that there is a careful balance that must be maintained between propositional claims about the world, on the one hand, and non-propositional modes of interpretation, which make those claims necessary, urgent, and meaningful, on the other hand. The conceptual framework elaborated in this book will be of use to anyone working or living in places where crisis, collapse, or rupture disturb that balance.
Another question addressed in this book: What is the relationship between speaking a particular language and perceiving the world in a particular way? In Chapters 5 and 6, I address this question by analyzing moments when in order to express or interpret an utterance effectively the speaker had to be in the environment in a particular way. Linguistic anthropologists have picked up on aspects of this, building on ideas like Bourdieu’s (1972) notion of “habitus,” Goffman’s (1964) approach to situated interaction, Merleau- Ponty’s (2006 [1945]) understanding of embodiment, and the many works that have addressed the relation of language to identity. However, this case brings being and speaking, as distinct forms of semiosis, into stark relief— analyzing each in a separate moment, before the relation between them is examined. In routine circumstances, we keep them in balance, integrate them, and substitute them for one another. The analysis presented in this book shows, however, that this can’t always be taken for granted in a world prone to collapse.
In Chapter 6, I also return to the conceptual frameworks linguistic anthro- pologists have created for thinking about the roles we take up in inter- action, how they are structured, and what forms of meaning those structures generate. I recount a debate about whether the roles of “speaker” and “addressee” can be decomposed into a finite set of composite features that can be used to derive all possible participant roles found in interaction. Following Irvine (1996), I begin instead with the basic categories of “speaker” and “addressee” and ask how those categories are embedded in more specific, context-dependent role relations. Among DeafBlind people at Gallaudet University, I found that architectural structures were created explicitly to support specific participant roles. In order to account for that fact, I extended Goffman’s (1981) notion of “lamination” beyond interaction into the environments created to support interaction.
Finally, as I discussed in Chapter 1, there is a long tradition among anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers of thinking about language in terms of its capacity for making claims about the world which can, through a kind of propositional reasoning, be deemed true or false. This process coordinates beliefs, perceptions, and memories with normative ways of speaking and acting to yield certain tendencies in making and evaluating such claims. However, as others have pointed out before me, the particulars of those tendencies depend on who you are. There is no universal set of “rules” or “conditions” under which some proposition or another will always be true. This book has drawn attention to the fact that in times of rapid historical change, options for who you can be—the forms of personhood available to you—may be terminally restricted. Where this is the case, language can exhaust its own capacities as a tool for action in, and on, the world. When that happens, arguments for rights and resources will carry no weight. Statements will no longer be treated as “true” or “false.” Any attempt to spin things will only drive you deeper into the problems you are trying to escape. Eventually, you will realize that there is nothing more to say; no one out there is going to help you. And, yet, if there is one thing we learn from the protactile movement, it is this: In precisely this moment, when everything has fallen apart, and existence is at stake, we can turn toward one another, feel around for whatever has been left behind, and find a new way forward.
Linguistic anthropology, as a field, grapples with the complex problems that arise at the boundaries of language, as it is analyzed in its complex contexts of use. Where the cut is made between “language” on the one hand and “context” on the other, how each is theorized, and how the relation between the two can be accounted for, is a productive source of debate. For example, some have argued that language is not a coherent object of analysis at all outside of the sequential structure of interaction (Rawls 2002: 11). Others start with a distinction between a “denotational text” (or what has been said in and by discourse) and an interactional text (or what has been done in and by discourse) (Silverstein 2019), where denotation is associated with language and interaction is associated with the effects of language-use. This and other contemporary distinctions have been built on earlier theories that distinguish between constructs like langue and parole (Saussure 1972 [1915]), or competence and performance (Chomsky 1988 [1965]). Each of these distinctions is a first step toward marking a limit beyond which something other than language must become the focus of analysis.
In this book, the primary distinction on which all analysis rests is between being in the world and talking about the world. Both are understood as semiotic processes, though the constituents involved and the relations between them differ (Kockelman 2006a: 22). The former involves non-propositional content and processes, such as cashing in on affordances in the environment in order to perform actions and in doing so taking on roles, while the latter involves propositional content and processes that are required for description, reference, and depiction (Kockelman 2006a: 22). Taking this distinction as my starting point in analyzing the protactile movement and its effects has led to a re-thinking of several questions of broader anthropological significance.
First, how does the study of meaning or semiotics inform our understandings of social and political action? Propositional statements about the world are a primary means of obtaining resources through established political processes. However, Chapters 2 and 4 foreground the fact that engaging in those processes presupposes and tends to reinforce ways of being in the world that are taken for granted by those in power who govern the political process and establish its parameters. The protactile movement broke from that cycle by turning attention inward to find space away from sighted people, their notions of politeness and appropriateness, and their political frameworks. In that reprieve, the goal was to uncover effective ways of being in the world together and let propositional claims about the world, reality, what is true, what is right and wrong, and what is needed emerge from those efforts (not the other way around). In order to understand that process, I had to start, analytically, with being in the world as well. This approach may be useful wherever things seem to be shifting beneath political action in ways that undermine the goals of those actions.
Related to this, how can the conceptual tools of linguistic anthropology help us understand historical moments of crisis, rupture, and collapse? In Chapter 3, this question arose as a problem of “representation.” As Deaf- Blind people became blind, and access to the visual world was increas- ingly constrained, sighted interpreters were there to substitute that world for descriptions of it. We learned that, despite the fact that descriptions of the world can and frequently do substitute for the world, there is a limit to what language, as a means of representation, can do under conditions of existential collapse. In this context, the limits of language emerged as a kind of existential breaking point, felt in circumstances where talk about the world is no longer a reliable way of gaining access to, intervening in, or otherwise affecting change in the world. While this book has focused on representation via language-use and, more specifically, description, reference, and depiction, one can imagine many other forms of representation that could be at issue across contexts. For example, anyone who spent most of their time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic may have encountered, at some point, a sense that digital representations of social life were extinguishing their own capacity to substitute for social life. In this book, I have argued that there is a careful balance that must be maintained between propositional claims about the world, on the one hand, and non-propositional modes of interpretation, which make those claims necessary, urgent, and meaningful, on the other hand. The conceptual framework elaborated in this book will be of use to anyone working or living in places where crisis, collapse, or rupture disturb that balance.
Another question addressed in this book: What is the relationship between speaking a particular language and perceiving the world in a particular way? In Chapters 5 and 6, I address this question by analyzing moments when in order to express or interpret an utterance effectively the speaker had to be in the environment in a particular way. Linguistic anthropologists have picked up on aspects of this, building on ideas like Bourdieu’s (1972) notion of “habitus,” Goffman’s (1964) approach to situated interaction, Merleau- Ponty’s (2006 [1945]) understanding of embodiment, and the many works that have addressed the relation of language to identity. However, this case brings being and speaking, as distinct forms of semiosis, into stark relief— analyzing each in a separate moment, before the relation between them is examined. In routine circumstances, we keep them in balance, integrate them, and substitute them for one another. The analysis presented in this book shows, however, that this can’t always be taken for granted in a world prone to collapse.
In Chapter 6, I also return to the conceptual frameworks linguistic anthro- pologists have created for thinking about the roles we take up in inter- action, how they are structured, and what forms of meaning those structures generate. I recount a debate about whether the roles of “speaker” and “addressee” can be decomposed into a finite set of composite features that can be used to derive all possible participant roles found in interaction. Following Irvine (1996), I begin instead with the basic categories of “speaker” and “addressee” and ask how those categories are embedded in more specific, context-dependent role relations. Among DeafBlind people at Gallaudet University, I found that architectural structures were created explicitly to support specific participant roles. In order to account for that fact, I extended Goffman’s (1981) notion of “lamination” beyond interaction into the environments created to support interaction.
Finally, as I discussed in Chapter 1, there is a long tradition among anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers of thinking about language in terms of its capacity for making claims about the world which can, through a kind of propositional reasoning, be deemed true or false. This process coordinates beliefs, perceptions, and memories with normative ways of speaking and acting to yield certain tendencies in making and evaluating such claims. However, as others have pointed out before me, the particulars of those tendencies depend on who you are. There is no universal set of “rules” or “conditions” under which some proposition or another will always be true. This book has drawn attention to the fact that in times of rapid historical change, options for who you can be—the forms of personhood available to you—may be terminally restricted. Where this is the case, language can exhaust its own capacities as a tool for action in, and on, the world. When that happens, arguments for rights and resources will carry no weight. Statements will no longer be treated as “true” or “false.” Any attempt to spin things will only drive you deeper into the problems you are trying to escape. Eventually, you will realize that there is nothing more to say; no one out there is going to help you. And, yet, if there is one thing we learn from the protactile movement, it is this: In precisely this moment, when everything has fallen apart, and existence is at stake, we can turn toward one another, feel around for whatever has been left behind, and find a new way forward.
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