Does a disfluent tongue impede a free utterance? Does fluent speech necessarily reflect the will of the speaker? Joshua St. Pierre, who holds a PhD in Philosophy and is currently Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta, asks this question in his book, Cheap Talk, Disability and the Politics of Communication. After seeking therapeutic relief from disfluency for most of his life, St. Pierre now “[refuses] to see stuttering as a state of diminished agency”. His book is about the pitfalls of fluent speech.
Talk and Truth
In Cheap Talk, St. Pierre identifies a modern-day crisis: a combination of political, technological and societal forces has commodified human speech, creating a “crisis of truth-telling” and reducing, rather than enhancing, individual freedoms, self-expression and political agency. While pointless talk has always existed, today’s technology allows for infinite production of such low-cost information, resulting in “a glut of cheap talk” dominating our communication channels — talk that ultimately serves the political ends of questionable actors. Our society’s “unshakeable faith in communication and connectivity” renders it unable to address the consequences of its excess. The effects of this phenomenon are complex and pervasive.
Serving Machines in a Control Society
It is maintained in many societies that freedom of speech is a human right, and to be “silenced” is a grave violation of that right. But what if people were controlled not by being silenced, but through incitement to engage in speech? And what if the conditions around that speech were continually maximized and accelerated, so that keeping up with the pace of it dissipated free will and intention?
During the Industrial Revolution, factory workers had to adapt flesh and blood physical work to the demands of machine-driven labour and the inhuman rhythms and exertions of machines. In Cheap Talk, St. Pierre describes how today’s “info-workers” are over-extended in the struggle to meet inhuman, “machinic” standards of speech, connectivity and immediacy. Fluent human speech is the raw material — the capital — powering machines and enabling capitalist goals of Neoliberalism — “liberalism,” in this case, applying to the unfettered application of market values to all areas of society.
The Universal Priesthood
Today’s information landscape, as St. Pierre describes it, is dominated by “Talking Heads”. The Talking Head is the news anchor, the expert guest, the podcaster, the YouTube channel host. They have “priestly” duties of creating connections and translating and spreading information. Everyone is invited to “join in the conversation” as part of the “universal priesthood,” yet there is catch. Participating in these communication channels is disguised as free expression, while serving as a mere substitute for political action. It is couched in the promise that “freedom will come through more and better speech”. Through infinite production of cheap information and continual maximization of its circulation and exposure, participation benefits the machine driven info-capitalist world rather than its participants.
The Unruly Tongue
So, what does stuttering have to do with it? Why does St Pierre claim that disabled, broken speech can “open systems of power” and help to “re-orient our political intuitions”? A dysfluent speaker negotiates physically with speech in a way that denies the “false sense of sovereign control” inherent in fluency. They know that to speak is to “enter into negotiations with multiple actants over which we are never sovereign,” in an act not governed by will, but by “proximate bodies coming together”. A man is not master of his tongue – an unruly muscle borrowed from eating to make meaning, bound up with the sense of taste, appetite and insatiability. But how does this tie into political power?
Democracy and “Free Speech”
Free speech in Classical Greece was not the right to say whatever one wants without consequence. Ruling members of the Greek Aristocracy admired risky speech that challenged conventional wisdom and authority, yet they were guided by a centuries-old philosophical tradition in which to engage in political debate came with a responsibility to speak with measured reason and reflection. The emergence of Democratic government, in which all male citizens could speak in the assembly, made it increasingly difficult to reach agreement, to establish norms of deliberation, to temper those who abused their privilege, to know what was true. The result was a “crisis of truth-telling” that, as St. Pierre points out, we still are experiencing today. When all speech is considered “under the banner of equality” the truth is just one perspective among many.
Fast forward to 399 B.C., a century into the Democratic experiment, when new schools of philosophy sprouted up after the death of Socrates. The best known is the Platonic school led by his former student, Plato. It drew students mainly from Greek aristocratic class and taught the practice of Socratic dialogue to uncover universal truths, gain self-knowledge and practice moral goodness, as well to study ideal forms of beauty and other concepts.
Platonism vs. Cynicism
Appearing on the scene was the unconventional philosopher Diogenes, who, upon arriving in Athens, lived on the street, never bathed, wore rags and ate garbage. During his lectures he was known to belch, fart, and sometimes defecate in front of his audience. People called him a dog, the Greek word for dog being “cynic”.
Despite his antics, Diogenes is a respected thinker. He mocked the Academy’s emphasis on oral argument and esoteric proclamations, claiming they ignored unpleasant truths and harsh realities in favour of flowery talk. For Diogenes, there was no value in seeking perfection or longing for a better world. People found personal freedom and meaning in life through facing things as they are, not dreaming about how they want them to be. This “cynical” philosophy challenged the ideals of Platonism, and to this day these two contrasting ways of approaching life are sometimes said to form the basis of all conflict.
Diogenes didn’t always live like a dog. Later in life he travelled widely and worked as a tutor for wealthy families along the Aegean. But as the Platonic school rose to prominence, he had found it necessary to demonstrate his displeasure with the Academy’s teachings. He took exception primarily with what he saw as their valorization of speech. In Diogenes’ thinking, one cannot rely on the tongue to speak all truths, because speech is corruptible. Not because men lie, obfuscate, blabber or flatter. Its corruptibility is of a deeper, more illusory nature; an inscrutable quality that leaves even a principled speaker vulnerable to control and exploitation.
Curb Cuts and Living with Barriers
Critical Disability Studies (CDS) questions the social construct of what is considered “normal”, and the “medical model” that casts disabled people as little more than a burden on society. While the field of CDS became a discipline in the 1980s, one could say it has its roots in 1970s Los Angeles. It was there that, in 1972, wheelchair bound folk got frustrated with years of petitioning the city to cut and grade street curbs for easier wheelchair use. In one of the most seminal acts of disability activism, one dark night a feisty group of wheelchair users rolled themselves to a Berkeley intersection with a bag of cement and made their own ramp. The audacious move had an impact —city planners started to cut curbs to be engineered to allow for the smooth use of wheelchairs. Then, a remarkable thing happened. It turned out the redesign proved useful for parents with strollers, people with luggage or pushcarts, and was safer for the elderly and small children. Today the graded “cut” curb is standard design everywhere, recognized as a feature that makes city streets more pedestrian friendly. We can thank the disabled, who navigate barriers abled people don’t always see.
Exiting Language
Despite the vast amount of speech and production in the information sphere, it seems feelings of impotence and rage dominate political platforms. The age of info-capitalism, in its need for an endless generation of content, creates a world that “renders ambiguity or slowness not only counterproductive but dangerous.” In the preface to his book, St. Pierre manages expectations with an acknowledgement that he doesn’t have any quick fixes or snappy answers to the crises he identifies; that political speech and machine-driven communication have robbed people of their political agency. St. Pierre positions the speech dysfluent subject as a kind of anti-hero in the whole affair, whose broken speech actually grants him a reprieve from the strident world that has so captured fluent tongues. It also situates him as a purveyor of an “honest voice” who, like Diogenes, might seek to “exit language” and find true political action and expression – “curb cutting” the electronic world.
Lisa Wilder lives in Toronto and is on the CSA Board of Directors. She works in Communications.