[the open secret is] a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.

— François (1999)

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Homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.

— de Villier (2012)

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Linking the stutter and the unspeakable are logics of subterfuge, to be sure, but I find that Sedgwick’s construction of the “open secret” more closely relates to the kind of secrets that animate stuttering. The open secret is a form of coded disclosure that Sedgwick links to the closet, and it mobilizes language around the secret in order to disclose only to those in the know and hide from those on the outside. Anne-Lise Francois describes it as “a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.” The open secret is that which everyone knows but cannot discuss. I select this construction for the stutter because, while some stutterers can and do pass as fluent and come out of the closet by a discursive disclosure like “I stutter,” more often, the stuttered voice betrays her before any such disclosure can be made, and knowledge of the stutter is created without being acted upon or acknowledged. The stutter’s unspeakability is subtended by its audibility and uncontrollability. Sedgwick’s example of the open secret actually comes from a text featuring a stutterer, Herman Melville’s short story, Billy Budd. However, it is not the eponymous character’s stutter that reveals the structure of the open secret for Sedgwick but rather the possibility of mutiny onboard the ship on which Billy is impressed.

Like queerness, certain forms of discrimination against stutterers or unwanted social interactions often express themselves through a desire to know, and to know it as a symptom. Nicholas de Villier in The Opacity of the Closet argues that it is important to pay attention to the ways that “homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.” Similarly, stutterers often encounter the diagnostic desires of others, the desire to know why and from whence. An example from my childhood: I was at summer camp and sitting in the camp nurse’s office for something mild. The nurse asked me questions about myself and I answered. Then we changed topics and I talked to her about my brother. She interrupted me and said, “did you know you only stuttered when you were talking about yourself, not your brother?” The nurse created her own interruption in my speech as if to master my stutter with her own impediment, and sought to psychologize the root of it as a symptom. This diagnostic desire is a practice of what Sedgwick calls, in a different work, paranoid reading, a kind of analytic reading that seeks to treat the text as a puzzle or stratagem to be untangled. Stuttering attracts this desire to know, in part, because it is an exemplary object of non-knowing. No one knows why people stutter. The stutter speaks to a great opacity within us, and that opacity might be productive of a different way of understanding the self and its relations to others.

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Society will not tolerate… that I should be… nothing, or, more precisely, that the something I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant.    

— Barthes (1981)

You have to see yourself in society to be a part of that society

Visual activism to confront and challenge societal preconceptions:

Look → Think → Act

Simi Linton (1998) in Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity quoted by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson:
 "We wield that white cane, or ride that wheelchair or limp that limp” … luxuriate in that stammer?

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The portrait invites us to stare, engrossed perhaps less with the “strangeness” of this woman’s disability and more with the strangeness of witnessing such dignity in a face that marks a life we have learned to imagine as unliveable and unworthy, as the kind of person we routinely detect in advance through medical technology and eliminate from our human community.

— Garland-Thomson (2009)

Flaunt the visible marks of disability. The relish with which disabled people can live their identity and present themselves to the starees.

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.
To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.
To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.

— Virilio (2007)

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Transmission and Social Acceleration

The most obvious, and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of intentional, goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production (2003, 6).

— Rosa (2003, p. 6)

The center of this idea of communication is the transmission of signals or messages for the purpose of control. It is a view of communication from one of the most ancient of human dreams: the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space.

— Carey (2009, p. 12)

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Functional Accidents and Distributed Agency

[an accident is] a failure in a subsystem, or the system as a whole, that damages more than one unit and in doing so disrupts the ongoing or future output of the system.

— Perrow (1999, p. 66)

[O]n June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company.

— Gleik (2012, p. 166)

Who or what is responsible?

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Untidy Systems

Philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled.

— James, (1996, p. 45)

[James takes seriously] a place for something like an element of chanciness or volatility within [the world’s] loose regularities and historical flows.

— Connolly (2005, p. 73)

In an untidy world, the actant is “a being or entity that makes a difference in the world without quite knowing what it is doing [emphasis added]” (Connolly, 2005, p. 72).

• Facilitating cultural competence and awareness
• Understanding the dynamics of stigma, self-stigma and masking and the psychological consequences of living with a concealable stigmatised identity
  
• Exploring the lived experience and feelings associated with stammering in an ableist world that privileges fluency
  
• Understanding minority stress and ableist trauma
  
• Supporting the development of new affirming narratives around stammering
  
• Finding own unique stammering aesthetic
  
• Disclosure and self-advocacy
  
• Community

• Public information and education programmes
• Reducing barriers – creating a stammer-friendly environment and culture
• Campaigning
• Lobbying
• Representation
• Cultural change
• Celebration of stammering and difference

This ‘still-here’ can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and not just verbally – ‘corresponding’ to something.

In other words: language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which, however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens.

This ‘still-here’ of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature.

This shows the poem yet more clearly as one person’s language become shape and, essentially, a presence in the present.

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.

Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?‍

I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find a… meridian.

With you and Georg Büchner and the State of Hesse, I believe I have just touched it again.

— Celan (1960)

Rethinking covert stuttering (Constantino, Manning, Nordstrom, 2017)

• How do people who pass as fluent constitute themselves?
• Expected a straightforward study of ableism and repression.
• Got stories of resistance and agency.
• Participants did not see why stuttering was any more authentic than fluency.
• Passing is not repressed stuttering but a unique form of stuttering constituted by specific practices of self.
• Passing resists both how biology suggests a stutterer must talk and what privileges society says stutterers should have access to.

In our zeal to resist medical conceptions of stuttering do we just substitute one normalizing litmus test for another?

By rejecting fluency in and of itself or by asking whether forms of knowledge are consistent with our favorite model of disability, what ways of being do we disqualify?

I’m not comfortable telling another stutterer how to think/feel about their stuttering.

Stutterers are always already resisting how they are constituted.

How are they currently resisting societal demands for fluency?

How are they currently resisting their body’s demands for effortful speech?

Rather than see therapy as a means to liberate the self (be it fluent or stuttered) I suggest we see it as an exploration of the stutterer’s resistance and agency.

We explore how the stutterer has been constituted not to determine who they must be but to determine who they do not have to be.

We explore how they got here but leave where they’re going up to them.

In my clinical experience, most stutterers value both an increase in their ability to resist societal pressures to speak fluently and an increase in fluency, or at least easier stuttering.

Our starting-point is again ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living.’ Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have just seen, the garment was to the body itself—inert matter dumped down upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be produced as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the other. And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown the soul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. But that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena may be formulated as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OUR ATTENTION TO THE PHYSICAL IN A PERSON WHEN IT IS THE MORAL SIDE THAT IS CONCERNED.

— Bergson (1912)

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Bergson’s theory that laughter functions as social correction

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

— Bergson (1912)

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In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but then it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease to change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a like animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the complete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.

We begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.

The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.

— Bergson (1912)

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Alanka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008)

• Zupančič argues Bergson misunderstood the primary thrust of his theory that we laugh when we recognize the mechanical encrusted upon the living.
• The missed revelation of Bergson’s theory is comedy’s unceasing vacillations between the living and the mechanical.

• How the meaning/cultural currency of feelings/emotions change over time.
• Emotions as shaped by cultural/political forces‍
• Representation of emotions in literature/film as revealing of the power structures at work.
• ‘Affect’ is used in different ways in different fields (neuroscience, psychology and literary/cultural studies).
• Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai – critics for whom affects are crucially connected to structures of power (social/cultural/political); also interested in how affective states stretch our capacity to name them but haven’t cut loose from language and cognition.
• Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings), she’s interested in those feelings that are seen as unproductive/marginalised.

The Questions we need to ask

Who needs to change? What do they/we need to change?

Acknowledging the natural variation, the unique skills, experiences and traits of neurodivergent children.

— Constantino (2018)

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Client who stutters

What do they understand about stuttering? And their stuttering in particular?

Cons for the Client

• Exposure: "I stutter".
• Risk of failure.
• Lack of acceptance by self and others .

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The Speech and Language Therapist

What do we understand about stuttering? Turn the tables on the process of normalising judgement As therapists we need to enquire into what a person thinks of the judgement they have been assigned. What if stuttering was the norm? If stuttering was cool…

Cons for the Therapist

• Exposing beliefs contrary to the medical model.
• Perceived risk of ‘failure’.
• Lack of acceptance by peers, clients and client's families.

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Who needs to change?

How do we do this? Is this our responsibility alone?

• Ourselves as SLTs
• Families.
• Parents.
• Teachers.
• Employers.
• School systems.
• Health services.
• Shop keepers.

Committee for the Big Stutter Party

Self disclosure/stereotype threat:

• Children can develop a “growth mindset” through learning that success takes effort.
• mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow from.
• This mindset encourages children to seek out new challenges and fulfil their potential.

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Therapeutic practices must adapt to shifts in the conditions of people’s lives.

— Winslade (2013)

It is no longer enough to give people a relationship in which they are free from being judged. What they need is an opportunity to actively deconstruct the normalising judgements operating on them and to push back against the effects of these judgements.

— Winslade, p.8 (2013)

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We do not, as scholars from different disciplines, bring together our objects and practices to one another through a kind of free-trade agreement; rather we re-enter a long history of binding, tangling and cutting [across disciplines/practice] within which the current moves towards integration are much more weighted than they might first seem.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

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A ‘dynamic of entanglement’ rather than a push towards integration.

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We have tried to conjure a different palette of affective dispositions through which we might […] live in interdisciplinary spaces. Those dispositions (eddying around ambivalence, awkwardness, frustration, failure and so on) depart from the most common affective registers (critique, adulation, disinterested rigour) through which [many] have tended to approach the terrain of the medical, clinical or biomedical. We want resolutely to claim the stance of interestedness. But we also see interest as a stance that can be (indeed usually is) taken up without someone quite knowing the place at which they stand, or the entwinements through which they are always-already bound with/in others […]. So it is, to be entangled.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

“One of these days I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have to be read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues.

— Sedaris (2000)

In the first short story of David Sedaris’s 2000 collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris recounts four months of his 4th grade year, in which he was removed from class once a week at 2:30 on Thursdays to meet with the acerbic school speech therapist he called “Agent Samson” to treat his lisp. Her clients were all lisping boys, he noticed, and none of them conventionally boyish, and he jokes that if there were a sign on her door it should not read “Speech Therapy Lab” but “Future Homosexuals of America.” At this young age Sedaris already has an inkling that speech impediment, in his case lisping, is related to sexuality, a personal affectation continuous with a dislike of sports or a love of making one’s own curtains. Sederis taps into a cultural trend that includes the identification “gay voice,” and that states that one can read sexuality off the voice, particularly the male voice, through how one speaks, what one says, or what one does not say.

With expressions like “stuttering pride” and “coming out of the stuttering closet,” activism by people who stutter explicitly ties its historical struggles and political goals to queer liberation, and queer theory has offered a verdant store of language and concepts for re-imagining dysfluent speaking as a kind of queer form of being in the world. Moreover, these intersections point towards the critical potential of the dysfluency itself as a kind of queer object, an object that presents a problem for sexual and gender norms, as well as conventional forms of reading, expression, and time. I am interested in how the experiences of being queer and a stutterer interpenetrate, and how each informs the other. In the few first-person accounts I read from queer people who stutter I often saw the authors comparing their social encounters as queers and as stutterers. One person notes that homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but that stuttering or “child-onset dysfluency disorder” remains. Another said that they were encouraged to embrace their queerness but to cure their stutter, and that speech therapy for them amounted to a form of conversion therapy. What I saw were not necessarily similarities but cases in which people embody two marginal positions, where one could have been treated like the other, and was not. How do queerness and stuttering misconnect with each other? Returning to Sedaris: of interest to us in Sedaris’s story is the detail that there was no sign on Agent Samson’s door, and that “Future Homosexuals of America” does not substitute for other language but for an absence of language. Agent Sampson’s is a door with no writing that suggests that as much as her door clearly opens for a certain kind of boy, it offers no clear language for that child, and the name of the certain type of boy who goes through it for a certain type of speech remains in some sense unspeakable. Sedaris is not cured of his lisp, but rather like many young stutterers develops an enormous vocabulary in order to avoid the sibilant s. The s is occulted in Sedaris’s speech, and this haunting, unspeakable s produces not a reduction in language but an excess of language in the form of the enormous vocabulary. How might we think of writers as people who work by suppressing language? This connection between the unspeakable and the excess of language conceptually ties dysfluency to the emergence of male homosexuality as a pathological category in the 19th century.

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I've had therapy to help deal with the way my parents reacted when I came out, but the therapist never insinuated that things would be easier if I was less gay. On the other hand, the speech therapy I've had as an adult focused very strongly on how things would be easier for me if I was more fluent.

— Elias K (2015)

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Sexuality between men had, throughout the Judaeo-Christian tradition, been famous among those who knew about it at all precisely for having no name – ‘unspeakable,’ ‘unmentionable,’ or ‘not to be named among Christian men’.

— Sedgwick (1985)

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The unspeakable transformed in the 20th century to what she calls a “byword” likely most familiar in Lord Alfred Douglas’s phrase, “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Like Sedaris forming his vocabulary around the absent s, the unspeakability of male homosexuality did not correspond to a dearth of language about it, but what Michel Foucault famously refers to in The History of Sexuality as “a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex… a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” For the Victorians male homosexuality may have been occulted in the language, but:

Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies… There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

— Foucault (1976)

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The Victorians implicitly made the connection between homosexuality and stuttering. James Malcom Rymer’s fictional autobiography The Unspeakable: or, the Life and Adventures of a Stammerer, explores this link. Riley McGuire’s research on this novel argues that attaining mature heterosexual masculinity is predicated on attaining a fluent voice.

Freud’s famous diagnosis of stuttering as anal-sadistic is comprised of a few brief remarks made in passing. His more substantive thoughts on stuttering actually come earlier in a case study about woman with adult-onset stuttering and various neuroses. But the psychoanalytic understanding of stuttering as the unresolved frustrations of the narcissistic tendencies of the anal stage has captured more minds. Stuttering, after all, is the most uncomfortable type of shit-talk. But the threat of stuttering to masculinity also appears to be explained by the impediment’s root in anality, with its association with sexual submission, women, and the end of gender. There is a productive queer reading to be made about the threat of stuttering and the moral panic around sexual submission in gay male culture. At the end of his famous essay Is the Rectum A Grave? Leo Bersani finds in fantasies about the rectum “the place where the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried”. Bersani offers a mythological location in which to reimagine the value of sexual submission. Besides being the “death” of male dominance, the anus is also the death of sexual difference, for we all have one.