1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  135. Petitto and Bellugi, 1988.

  The formal properties of Sign and speech are identical, and so too is their communicational intent. Yet are they, or can they be, in some way, deeply different?

  Chomsky reminds us that Humboldt ‘introduced a further distinction between the form of a language and what he calls its ‘character’…[this latter being] determined by the way in which language is used, and thus to be distinguished from its syntactic and semantic structure, which are matters of form, not use.’ There is indeed a certain danger (as Humboldt pointed out) that in examining more and more deeply the form of a language, one may actually forget that it has a meaning, character, a use. Language is not just a formal device (though it is, indeed, the most marvelous of formal devices), but the most exact expression of our thoughts, our aspirations, our view of the world. The ‘character’ of a language, as Humboldt speaks of it, is of an essentially creative and cultural nature, has a generic character, is its ‘spirit,’ not just its ‘style.’ English, in this sense, has a different character from German, and Shakespeare’s language a different character from Goethe’s. The cultural or personal identify is different. But Sign differs from speech more than any spoken language from another. Could there here be a radically different ‘organic’ identity?

  One has only to watch two people signing to see that signing has a playful quality, a style, quite different from that of speech. Signers tend to improvise, to play with signs, to bring all their humor, their imaginativeness, their personality, into their signing, so that signing is not just the manipulation of symbols according to grammatical rules, but, irreducibly, the voice of the signer—a voice given a special force, because it utters itself, so immediately, with the body. One can have or imagine disembodied speech, but one cannot have disembodied Sign. The body and soul of the signer, his unique human identity, are continually expressed in the act of signing.

  Sign perhaps has a different origin from speech, since it arises from gesture, spontaneous emotional-motor representation. 136

  136. We can, of course, only guess at the origins of language—speech or Sign or make hypotheses or inferences which cannot be directly proved or disproved. Speculation in the last century reached such peak proportions that the Paris Société de Linguistique, in 1866, finally banned the presentation of any further papers on the subject; but paleo-linguistics has become a science, and there is much evidence now that was not available a century ago—evidence which points to the pre-historical origin of language in signs. This, indeed, is the title of Stokoe’s 1974 paper, ‘Motor Signs as the First Form of Language’ (see also Hewes, 1974).

  There are intriguing direct observations of gestural communication between (hearing) mothers and infants prior to speech (see Tronick, Brazelton, and Als, 1978)—and if ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny, this provides a further suggestion that the earliest human language was gestural or motor.

  And though Sign is fully formalized and grammaticized, it is highly iconic, it retains many traces of its representational origins. Deaf people, write Klima and Bellugi, 137

  137. Klima and Bellugi, 1979, Introduction and Chapter 1.

  —are acutely aware of the undertones and overtones of iconicity in their vocabulary…In communicating among themselves, or in narrative, deaf signers often extend, enhance, or exaggerate mimetic properties. Manipulation of the iconic aspect of signs also occurs in special heightened uses of language (Sign poetry and art Sign)…Thus ASL remains a two-faceted language—formally structured and yet in significant respects mimetically free.

  While the formal properties, the deep structure, of Sign allow the most abstract concepts and propositions to be expressed, its iconic or mimetic aspect allows it to be extraordinarily concrete and evocative, in a way, perhaps, which no speech can be. Speech (and writing) have distanced themselves from the iconic—it is by association, not depiction, that we find speech-poetry evocative; it can elicit moods and images, but it cannot portray them (except through ‘accidental’ ideophones and onomatopoeia). Sign retains a direct power of portrayal that has no analogue in, cannot be translated into, the language of speech; on the other hand, it can ascend to any height of metaphor or trope.

  Sign still preserves, and emphasizes, both of its faces—the iconic and the abstract, equally, in complementarity—and thus, while it is able to ascend to the most abstract propositions, to the most generalized reflection of reality, it can also simultaneously evoke a concreteness, a vividness, a realness, an aliveness, that spoken languages, if they ever had, have long since abandoned. 138

  138. Levy-Bruhl, describing the mentality of ‘primitives’ (the term ‘primitive’ for him implies earlier or more primordial, never inferior or childish), speaks of ‘collective representations’ as central in their language, orientation, and perception. These are quite different from abstract concepts—they are ‘more complex states in which emotional or motor elements are integral parts of the representation.’ He speaks similarly of ‘image-concepts,’ which are both undecomposed and undecomposable. Such image—concepts are intensely visuo-spatial, tending to describe ‘the shape and contour, position, movement, way of acting, of objects in space—in a word, all that can be perceived and delineated.’ Levy-Bruhl describes the widespread development of sign language in the hearing—sign languages that are parallel to spoken languages, and essentially identical in structure: ‘the two languages, the signs of which differ so widely as gestures and articulate sounds, are affiliated by their structure and their method of interpreting objects, actions, conditions…Both have at their disposal a great number of fully formed visual-motor associations…which are called up in the mind the moment they are described.’ Levy-Bruhl speaks here of ‘manual concepts’—‘movements of the hands in which language and thought are inseparably united’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1910, reprinted 1966).

  By the same token, when there is, as Levy-Bruhl puts it, a ‘transition to higher mental types,’ this absolutely concrete language has to give way, its sensorially particular, vivid, precise ‘image-concepts’ being replaced by imageless (and, in a sense, flavorless) logical-abstract-general concepts. (It was similarly, Sicard tells us, necessary for Massieu to abandon his metaphors and turn to more abstract, generalized adjectives.)

  Vygotsky and Luria, in their youth, were deeply influenced by Levy-Bruhl and provide similar (but more exactly studied) examples of such a transition as ‘primitive’ agricultural cultures were ‘socialized’ and ‘sovietized’ in the 1920’s:

  This [concrete] mode of thought…undergoes a radical transformation once the conditions of people’s lives change…Words become the principal agents of abstraction and generalization. At this point people dispense with graphic thinking and codify ideas primarily through conceptual schemes…they overcome, in the course of time, their inclination to think in visual terms (Luria, 1976).

  One cannot avoid a certain feeling of discomfort reading descriptions such as those of Levy-Bruhl and the young Luria—descriptions that portray the concrete as ‘primitive,’ as something to be replaced in the ascent to the abstract (this indeed has been a very general tendency in neurology and psychology for the past century). There should not be any sense of the concrete and the abstract as mutually exclusive, of the one being abandoned as one progresses to the other. On the contrary, it is precisely the richness of the concrete that gives power to the abstract. This is clearer if one is careful about defining it, and defines it in terms of ‘super-ordinate’ and ‘subordinate.’

  This proper (as distinct from conventional) sense of ‘abstraction’ is central to Vygotsky’s vision of language and mind, his seeing their progress as the ability to impose super-ordinate structures that take in more and more of the subordinate, the concrete, by virtue of their inclusiveness, their broader perspective:

  The new higher concepts [in turn] transform the meaning of the lower. The child does not have to restructure all his earlier concepts…once a new structure has been incorporated into his think
ing…it gradually spreads to the older concepts as they are drawn into the intellectual operations of the higher type.

  A similar image is used by Einstein, with regard to theorizing: ‘Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, and gaining new and wider views.’

  In abstracting, or generalizing, or theorizing, as thus understood, the concrete is never lost—quite the reverse. As it is seen from a broader and broader viewpoint, so it is seen to have ever-richer and unexpected connections; it holds together, it makes sense, as never before. As one gains in generality, so one gains in concreteness; thus the vision of the older Luria that science is ‘the ascent to the concrete.’

  The beauty of language, and of Sign in particular, is like the beauty of theory in this way: that the concrete leads to the general, but it is through the general that one recaptures the concrete, intensified, transfigured. This regaining and renewal of the concrete, through the power of abstraction, is radiantly visible in a partly iconic language like Sign.

  A language’s ‘character,’ for Humboldt, is essentially cultural—it expresses (and perhaps partly determines) the way a whole people think and feel and aspire. In the case of Sign, the distinctiveness of the language, its ‘character,’ is biological as well, for it is rooted in gesture, in iconicity, in a radical visuality, which sets it apart from any spoken tongue. Language arises—biologically—from below, from the irrepressible need of the human individual to think and communicate. But it is also generated, and transmitted—culturally—from above, a living and urgent embodiment of the history, the world-views, the images and passions of a people. Sign for the deaf is a unique adaptation to another sensory mode; but it is also, and equally, an embodiment of their personal and cultural identity. For in the language of a people, Herder observes, ‘resides its whole thought domain, its tradition, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul.’ This is especially true of Sign, for it is not only biologically but culturally—and unsilenceably—the voice of the deaf.

  THREE

  Wednesday morning, March 9, 1988: ‘Strike at Gallaudet,’ ‘Deaf Strike for the Deaf,’ ‘Students Demand Deaf President’—the media are full of these happenings today; they started three days ago, have been steadily building, and are now on the front page of The New York Times. It looks like an amazing story. I have been to Gallaudet University a couple of times in the past year, and have been steadily getting to know the place. Gallaudet is the only liberal arts college for the deaf in the world and is, moreover, the core of the world’s deaf community—but, in all its 124 years, it has never had a deaf president. I flatten out the paper and read the whole story: the students have been actively campaigning for a deaf president ever since the resignation last year of Jerry Lee, a hearing person who had been president since 1984. Unrest, uncertainty, and hope have been brewing. By mid-February, the presidential search committee narrowed the search to six candidates—three hearing, three deaf. On March 1, three thousand people attended a rally at Gallaudet to make it clear to the board of trustees that the Gallaudet community was strongly insisting on the selection of a deaf president. On March 5, the night before the election, a candlelight vigil was held outside the board’s quarters. On Sunday, March 6, choosing between three finalists, one hearing, two deaf, the board chose Elisabeth Ann Zinser, Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro—the hearing candidate.

  The tone, as well as the content, of the board’s announcement caused outrage: it was here that the chairman of the board, Jane Bassett Spilman, made her comment that ‘the deaf are not yet ready to function in the hearing world.’ The next day, a thousand students marched to the hotel where the board was cloistered, then the six blocks to the White House, and on to the Capitol. The following day, March 8, the students closed the university and barricaded the campus.

  Wednesday afternoon: The faculty and staff have come out in support of the students and their four demands: (1) that a new, deaf president be named immediately; (2) that the chairman of the board, Jane Bassett Spilman, resign immediately;

  (3) that the board have a 51 percent majority of deaf members (at present it has seventeen hearing members and only four deaf); and (4) that there be no reprisals. At this point, I phone my friend Bob Johnson. Bob is head of the linguistics department at Gallaudet, where he has taught and done research for seven years. He has a deep knowledge of the deaf and their culture, is an excellent signer, and is married to a deaf woman. He is as close to the deaf community as a hearing person can be. 139

  139. One can be very close to (if not actually a member of) the deaf community without being deaf. The most important prerequisite besides a knowledge of and sympathy for deaf people is being a fluent user of Sign: perhaps the only hearing people who are ever considered full members of the deaf community are the hearing children of deaf parents for whom Sign is a native language. This is the case with Dr. Henry Klopping, the much-loved superintendent of the California School for the Deaf in Fremont. One of his former students, talking to me at Gallaudet, signed, ‘He is Deaf, even though he is hearing.’

  I want to know how he feels about the events at Gallaudet. ‘It’s the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen,’ he says. ‘If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have bet a million dollars this couldn’t happen in my lifetime. You’ve got to come down and see this for yourself.’

  When I had visited Gallaudet in 1986 and 1987, I found it an astonishing and moving experience. I had never before seen an entire community of the deaf, nor had I quite realized (even though I knew this theoretically) that Sign might indeed be a complete language—a language equally suitable for making love or speeches, for flirtation or mathematics. I had to see philosophy and chemistry classes in Sign; I had to see the absolutely silent mathematics department at work; to see deaf bards, Sign poetry, on the campus, and the range and depth of the Gallaudet theater; I had to see the wonderful social scene in the student bar, with hands flying in all directions as a hundred separate conversations proceeded—140—

  140. Different social conventions arise in the intercourse of signers, dictated in the first place by the differences of eye and ear. For vision is more specific than hearing—one can move one’s eyes, one can focus them, one can (literally or metaphorically) shut them, whereas one cannot move or focus or shut one’s ears. And signing, so to speak, is lasered in a narrow beam, to and fro, between signers, and does not diffuse in all directions, acoustically, like speaking. Thus one can have a dozen different people signing at a table, in six different conversations, each conversation clear and distinct, none of them necessarily disturbing the others. There is no ‘noise,’ no visual noise, in a room full of signers, because of the directionality of visual voices and of visual attention. By the same token (this was very clear at the huge student bar at Gallaudet, and I have seen it at large deaf banquets and conventions) one can easily sign to somebody at the other end of a large, crowded room; whereas yelling would be horrible and offensive.

  There are many other (some, to the hearing, rather strange) points of Sign etiquette. One must be very conscious of eye-lines and visual contact; and avoid inadvertently walking between people and interrupting this contact. One is free to tap on shoulders and to point—not done in hearing circles. And if one finds oneself overlooking a room full of signers, with three hundred Sign conversations clearly in view, one makes a point of not ‘overseeing’ or eavesdropping, of only seeing what one is meant to see.

  At NTID in Rochester, which was built in 1968 for deaf students, one can see an architectural corollary to this. The moment one enters, one can see that this is a building for visual beings—it is designed so that signing can be seen at great distances, and sometimes between floors. One would not shout from one floor to another, but it is perfectly natural to sign from one to another.

  —I had to see all this for myself before I could be moved from my pre
vious ‘medical’ view of deafness (as a condition, a deficit, that had to be ‘treated’) to a ‘cultural’ view of the deaf as forming a community with a complete language and culture of its own. I had felt there was something very joyful, even Arcadian about Gallaudet—and I was not surprised to hear that some of the students were occasionally reluctant to leave its warmth and seclusion and protectiveness, the cosiness of a small but complete and self-sufficient world, for the unkind and uncomprehending big world outside. 141

  141. The deaf world, like all subcultures, is formed partly by exclusion (from the hearing world), and partly by the formation of a community and a world around a different center—its own center. To the extent that the deaf feel excluded, they may feel isolated, set apart, discriminated against. To the extent that they form a deaf world, voluntarily, for themselves, they are at home in it, enjoy it, see it as a haven and a buffer. In this aspect the deaf world feels self-sufficient, not isolated—it has no wish to assimilate or be assimilated; on the contrary, it cherishes its own language and images, and wishes to protect them.