[Hi ITM
readers: This posting also appears on the blog for “Reorienting Disability,” a seminar that Julie Orlemanski and I are
organizing for the New Chaucer Society Congress in Iceland in July 2014.
We invite anyone with interests in medieval disability to follow along and
join in on the conversations that unfold there, even if you aren't attending the conference!]
In
this posting, I’d like to respond to an increasingly complex story about the
“fake sign language interpreter” at a highly publicized memorial for Nelson
Mandela. As reported by the Associated Press:
[Thamsanqa] Jantjie told the AP last week he has schizophrenia and
hallucinated, seeing angels while gesturing incoherently just 3 feet away from
President Barack Obama and other world leaders during the Tuesday ceremony at a
Soweto stadium. Signing experts said his arm and hand movements were mere
gibberish. (16 Dec 2013)
Deaf
communities in South Africa and worldwide have justifiably perceived Jantje’s faux-signing
as an insult or affront (see HERE and HERE, for instance), but Slavoj Žižek
claims in his remarks in the Guardian (read
the whole piece HERE)
that hearing people can find the mere
bodily presence of the sign interpreter at an event like this in
self-congratulatory terms, regardless of whether the signing is meaningful or
not:
Now we can see why Jantjie's gesticulations generated such
an uncanny effect once it became clear that they were meaningless: what he
confronted us with was the truth about sign language translations for the deaf
– it doesn't really matter if there are any deaf people among the public who
need the translation; the translator is there to make us, who do not understand
sign language, feel good. (Guardian,
16 Dec 2013)
While
this overstated critique—which seems
to reflect more upon Žižek’s view of the
government than the issue at hand— is perceptive in some ways, this discourse
(however it is intended) still has the effect of speaking for a “‘public’
or ‘us’ [that] does not seem to include the deaf or disabled,” as Rick
Godden has stated (in the Facebook discussion that precipitated this blog posting).
Indeed, Žižek doesn’t use the term “disabled”
in this piece, as if to avoid directly invoking or including them as such (he
uses the terms “underprivileged and hindered” and later “marginalised and
handicapped”). Žižek—in order to score irony-laden
political points—rhetorically “[renders] deaf people unimaginable and
unencounterable”
(as Chris Piuma nicely pointed out). And the signifying force of the
interpreter is reduced, as Julie Orlemanski stated (again, via Facebook
conversation): “his interpretation dissolves the ‘signifier’ of deaf people to
get to the ‘signified’ of ‘poor, black South Africans’ as explosive ‘collective
political agent’ (i.e., the ‘aliens’).”
This
story is complex and a wider entanglement of other sociopolitical issues remain
to be explored where disability is concerned: what emerges here is that a story
seemingly “about” one kind of disability perceptible via outer actions
(deafness) is implicated in another: the much more difficult-to-discern
external manifestations of schizophrenia and mental illness. I should state
here that I align deafness and schizophrenia under the umbrella of “disability”
here only provisionally. There are
vigorous debates within the disability community about the implications of drawing
varied kinds of physical impairment and mental illness into the same
interpretive and political category. Does mental illness or a chronic condition
qualify as disability? Are the deaf even disabled or a linguistic minority
within a hearing majority?[1]
What
interests me is how such misperceptions
about the meaning of this “fake signing” arise. This is not about “hearing
vs. deaf communities” per se but a
dynamic relation between them: two simultaneous modes of perception and
meaning-making that only sometimes overlap with one another. An interpreter—in
order to be an interpreter—does not stand squarely in the world of the hearing
or the world of the deaf; she or he must necessarily inhabit both worlds
concurrently. Rather than embodied lingua
franca, two worlds (is it just two?) encounter a disconcerting lingua incognita and register a sequence
of alien signs in divergent ways. Deaf viewers perceive the gibberish as
mockery; hearing people (at least those unaccustomed to sign language) see the “exotic”
hand movements no differently than they see other signed languages—and project
whatever misconceptions or fantasies they might have upon it.
So
why am I writing about this on a medieval
studies blog? I am thinking about Žižek’s strange discourse
of miracle and wonder that emerges halfway through the piece: “What lurked
behind these concerns was the feeling that Thamsanqa Jantjie's appearance was a
kind of miracle—as if he had popped up from nowhere, or from another dimension
of reality.”
This sense of encountering alien embodiment as miracle makes me consider how
wonder in contemporary disability studies and premodern culture operates as an ethically
charged force. While Žižek is
attempting some sort of social
critique, I’m more sympathetic to criticism that more earnestly expresses its
investment in the lives of people with disabilities or whose bodes otherwise
read as unfathomable. In a foundational essay on ethical beholding,
feminist and disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson shifts attention
from the “starer” in any encounter to the “staree” who is perceived as
“different” in her embodiment. Garland-Thomson observes that the “stareable
body” can act not as a mere object (of wonder, marvel, or disgust) but as a
transformative agent, a catalyst for meaningful social change.[2]
This
notion of an ethical beholding of an extraordinary body yielding transformative
effects resonates so well with medieval hagiography and its host of angelic and
otherworldly messengers. In interviews Jantje reports hallucinating and
communicating with angels, and Žižek briefly
amplifies the effects of these statements to apparently dismiss them and move
on discuss other things. However perceptive his points might be (in general), I
can’t help but feel that Žižek risks
romanticizing lived schizophrenia—not to mention deafness—as a set of
mysteriously unknowable experiences that ultimately serve no other purpose than
to signify for “us” (the so-called “normative” majority). This still leads back
to wonder: the question of what—or how—disability signifies.
[Ruth
Evans posted this great response to this story on Facebook: Note that
the guy purported to be having a "schizophrenic" episode, which Zizek
does not follow up on (his purpose had nothing to do with Jantjie's mental
state), but there are interesting things to say about this. According to Darian
Leader (What is Madness?), the paranoiac often presents themselves as "the
sole interpreter" of a law or knowledge, but the schizophrenic wants to
communicate that "there has been a change,", so the choice of a
meaningless sign language seems especially apposite: Jantjie was not
interpreting a truth but registering change (his own; South Africa's) and
allowing himself, through this weird performance, to structure his world. To
see this as an affront to deaf people is to assume that he was there as an
official interpreter (was he?) and to ignore the need that schizophrenics have
to make sense of their world.]
I
realize this is more than an issue of linguistic
misperception and this story’s entanglement with mental illness is very
complex (various reports suggest he was institutionalized at some point and had
other gigs as sign interpreter)—but these unexamined discourses of wonder in Žižek’s
response strike me as requiring closer consideration.
I’ll
end here with some thoughts on what this whole story might say for those of us
interested in disability studies and/or scholarship on premodern culture and
theory. I might venture to say that medievalists and others working on
historically distant cultures try to cultivate a generous understanding of the
perceived alterity of minds and experiences in the distant past. As Julie
Orlemanski has stated in an article on leper-kissing in postmedieval, putting premodern culture and contemporary
theory in conversation enacts a complex “interface” between worldviews (see
HERE),
and Alison Hobgood and Houston Wood (in their intro to Recovering Disability in Early Modern England) urge a mode of
scholarship in which premodern culture and contemporary disability studies “generously
behold the other” (10) (see HERE).
If we actually restore deafness and schizophrenia into this discussion perhaps
a more ethically transformative understanding can emerge. This story serves as
a reminder to be attentive to the communicative and transformative potential of
all minds and embodied experiences—even if (or particularly if) they are
perceived as alien.
[CORRECTION: The original posting had the word "singing" a few times when "signing" was intended. I've since corrected the typo. A provocative transmodal typo, but a typo nonetheless!]
[CORRECTION: The original posting had the word "singing" a few times when "signing" was intended. I've since corrected the typo. A provocative transmodal typo, but a typo nonetheless!]
[1]
For instance these varied perspectives in the Disability Studies Reader, 4th Edn, ed. Lennard Davis (Routledge
2013): Margaret Price on defining mental disability, Bradley Lewis on the “Mad
Pride” movement, Catherine Prendergast on the “unexceptional schizophrenic,”
and Susan Wendell on chronic illness.
[2]
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How
We Look (Oxford UP, 2009), esp. 194.
