St. Pierre - Cripping Communication: Speech, Disability, and Exclusion in Liberal Humanist and Posthumanist Discourse
What is the problem with disability and liberal humanism?
What is "Liberal humanism"?
What is the problem disability shows with posthumanism(s)?
"At its center, liberal humanism is a marriage between the long humanist tradition and liberal ideals: a dual commitment to 'man' and 'freedom.' (331) -- "liberal" speaks to a particular investment in Enlightenment hierarchies and boyd/mind dualism
"However, in its effort to secure 'man' as a completely autonomous being, liberal humanism must transcend group differences and generalize attributes of humanity in a movement of essentialization" (331-2) -- the violence of making
Speech is one of the mechanisms for liberal humanist to universalize and essentialize: "Toeing the party line, Dance and Larson have maintained that speech communication" (332); "For Carr, Dance, and Larson, then, speech is an extension of rationality, belonging not to the body, but to the articulation and formation of reason" (332). the problems of severing speech acts from physical experience and environment
"However, inasmuch as speech and reason are tightly correlated through the linguistic function of the voice, performing the voice in any way that strays beyond codified vocalic boundaries and unsettles the effortless production of meaning calls into question the rationality of the performer 'behind' the voice" (334). Think Baggs and the suspicion create d
the problem of reifying a "universal speaker"
recentering lived experience exposes fictions of liberal humanism: interdependence, bodies shaped by environments, reminds external impacts on bodyminds (336),
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Posthumanisms:
transhumanism
posthumanism and communication: "
critical posthumanism as 'the radical decentering of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolvig with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple" (338). We are shaped and shape our environment as entities immersed in communicative informational networks.
this seems to be invested in a project of hypercapacity and reifying perfting our bodies through tech: "a technological extension of the dream of perfectibility that sees bodily limitations as a hurdle to transcend" (338)
posthumanist arguments around text-based versus speech acts (see Harraway critique on 340).
"Posthumanism radically alters the membership qualification without question [...]. However, travesring the discourse of poshumanism even in its ciritical modality are tacit ableist" (342) Creates the same mistake in a new system: we're leaving bodies behind
Way out/value: "We must be attuned by/to subaltern voices, receptive to uncertainty, no longer willing to gatekeep Reason and human boundaries. Cutting against the tired logocentrism of the universal speaker, impure voices powerfully remind us of the embodied mediation of 'the human': risky, always partial, ever somewhat wobbly, and necessarily contingent.. Communication studies accordingly have an important role to play here, recasting speech in ways that place the margins at the center" (343)
mycellium structures (mushroom talk)
insect communication and dancing
Noise! (344-5)