What does it mean to invent fluent communication?
James Carey – communication at this time meant both the movement of material things as well as the movement of immaterial ideasIn this model, “successful” communication is marked by a correspondence between the intentional idea of the sender encoded in the message and the idea reproduced in the mind of the receiver. This makes the process of communication brittle and prone to error, for the dream of imperial control it offers rests ultimately upon speeding the message, while protecting it from damage along the voyage.
Who or what is responsible? Where was the "message damaged"?? Systems theory can get us a little further than common sense understandings by attending to distributed agency. I agree with Perrow (1999) that individual failings cannot sufficiently explain “damage” to “symbols, communication patterns, legitimacy, or a number of factors that are not, strictly speaking, people or objects” (p. 64). But leave system theory insofar as deviations in functional systems must be errors, damage defined against system output.
Before going to ritual. so many actants crowd the stage that “it’s never clear who and what is acting” (Latour, 2007, p. 46). This gets at two senses of communicating by accident. For instance, I might say a good class is one in which I communicate a concept well. Yet the passive voice is far more honest. Can lead to resentment. Resentment against an untidy world I, I think, is a central component of disablist feelings against stutterers.
- Carey, J. (2009). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Routledge.
- Gleik, J. (2012). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. Pantheon Books.
- James, W. (1996). A pluralistic universe. University of Nebraska Press. Connolly, W. (2005). Pluralism. Duke University Press.
- Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
- Perrow, C. (1999). Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies. Princeton UniversityPress.
- Rosa, H. (2003). Social acceleration: Ethical and political consequences of a desynchronized high-speed society. Constellations, 10(1), 3-33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00309
- Virilio, P. (2007). The original accident (J. Rose, Trans.). Polity.
Self portrait stuttering. Oil on board 23 x 31cm. Painting by Paul Aston.
I have a stutter that has helped to shape my life in several ways. Recently I have started to accept my stutter as an integral part of what makes me who I am and feel really happy about it . I've been trying to find positive portraits of stuttering in art history and have drawn a blank so far so I thought I'd make my own. The inspiration came from Giovanni Bellini's 'St. Francis in the Desert' in the Frick collection. In this painting the saints head is thrown back while he receives the stigmata. It has a strangely familiar quality to me - that temporary loss of control over your body which looks similar to the experience of stuttering. I've attempted to create the atmosphere of this temporary loss of control in this piece.
