Rhetorical Touch

Disability, Identification, Haptics

Shannon Walters

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781611173840
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Rhetorical Touch argues for an understanding of touch as a rhetorical art by approaching the sense of touch through the kinds of bodies and minds that rhetorical history and theory have tended to exclude. In resistance to a rhetorical tradition focused on shaping able bodies and neurotypical minds, Shannon Walters explores how people with various disabilities—psychological, cognitive, and physical—employ touch to establish themselves as communicators and to connect with disabled and nondisabled audiences. In doing so, she argues for a theory of rhetoric that understands and values touch as rhetorical.

Essential to her argument is a redefinition of key concepts and terms—the rhetorical situation, rhetorical identification, and the appeals of ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic or message). By connecting Empedoclean and sophistic theories to Aristotelian rhetoric and Burkean approaches, Walters's methods mobilize a wide range of key figures in rhetorical history and theory in response to the context of disability. Using Empedocles' tactile approach to logos, Walters shows how the iterative writing processes of people with psychological disabilities shape crucial spaces for identification based on touch in online and real life spaces. Mobilizing the touch-based properties of the rhetorical practice of m?tis, Walters demonstrates how rhetors with autism approach the crafting of ethos in generative and embodied ways. Rereading the rhetorical practice of kairos in relation to the proximity between bodies, Walters demonstrates how writers with physical disabilities move beyond approaches of pathos based on pity and inspiration. The volume also includes a classroom-based exploration of the discourses and assumptions regarding bodies in relation to haptic, or touch-based, technologies.

Because the sense of touch is the most persistent of the senses, Walters argues that in contexts of disability and in situations in which people with and without disabilities interact, touch can be a particularly vital instrument for creating meaning, connection, and partial identification. She contends that a rhetoric thus reshaped stretches contemporary rhetoric and composition studies to respond to the contributions of disabled rhetors and transforms the traditional rhetorical appeals and canons. Ultimately, Walters argues, a rhetoric of touch allows for a richer understanding of the communication processes of a wide range of rhetors who use embodied strategies.

1

Defining a Rhetoric of Touch

Bodies in Identification

In what has become one of the most poignant scenes of disability and literacy in the cultural imagination, Helen Keller describes how the sense of touch initiated her into the world of language. While Keller was walking with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, to a well nearby her house, Sullivan thrust her hand into the water. “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers, still, but barriers that could in time be swept away” (Keller The Story of My Life 35).

In this communication breakthrough, Keller, at the age of seven, finally connected to her world through language. Previously she had learned only to mimic the finger motions of her teacher in what she called a “monkey-like imitation” and understood little connection between objects and their names (The Story of My Life 35). After feeling the water, however, Keller understood the connection between “living” words and their names. Although Keller portrays the incident as a miraculous breakthrough, she had previously used a loose method of gestural language and finger spelling. As Georgina Kleege explains, “The pump moment was less a miraculous revelation than a shifting of gears, allowing [Keller] to accelerate, but on the same path [she had] already been traveling” (7). In other words, Keller’s instinctual stabs at the connection between language, touch, and her world became cemented in her mind after Sullivan’s use of the well water.

After the experience at the pump, touch became solidified as the primary way in which Keller learned the world. She writes, “I did nothing but explore with my hands and learn the name of every object that I touched; and the more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world” (The Story of My Life 37). Keller’s language acquisition progressed to a visceral form of handwriting—finger spelling transmitted hand to hand—as she and Sullivan spelled into each other’s hands for hours daily. This learning style shaped Keller’s way of thinking and being for the rest of her life. Keller reflects, “In all my experiences and thoughts I am conscious of a hand. Whatever moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark” (The World I Live In 10). Decades after Sullivan’s death, she wrote, “To this day I cannot ‘command the uses of my soul’ or stir my mind to action without the memory of the quasi-electric touch of Teacher’s fingers upon my palm” (Keller Teacher 51–52).

Touch became Keller’s way of writing about the world, but not without ambivalence. Keller exhibited discomfort and even shame regarding her dependency on touch, especially when she learned new ways to communicate, first through speech and then via specific writing technologies. Writing about herself in the third person, she describes the guilty pleasure of finger spelling: “Helen sinned … by spelling constantly to herself with her fingers, even after she had learned to speak with her mouth” (Teacher 50).¹ Vacillating between the first person and the third person, she continues, “I determined to stop spelling to myself before it became a habit I could not break, and so I asked her to tie my fingers up in paper. … For many hours, day and night, I ached to form the words that kept me in touch with others, but the experiment succeeded except that even now, in moments of excitement or when I wake from sleep, I occasionally catch myself spelling with my fingers” (50). Even after she learned to use a typewriter and other information technologies, Keller continued to feel the energy she gained from finger spelling with Sullivan, experiencing the ambivalent stimuli of pain and joy from the memory of communicating exclusively via hand-to-hand touch.

For Keller, touch blurred the boundaries between self and world, often in problematic ways. As Jim Swan describes, Keller’s “lifelong experience of touching the world in order to ‘see’ it makes it difficult for her to sustain a sense of boundaries routinely respected by people with hearing and sight” (“Touching Words” 323). Keller especially struggled to understand where her body ended and her teacher’s began.² In recounting the story of her life with Sullivan, she states, “I feel that her being is inseparable from my own” (The Story of My Life 47).

This inseparability surfaces especially in Keller’s writing, posing challenges to her own writing process and to her collaboration with Sullivan. Keller, struggling to write Midstream, a reflection on her “later life,” characterizes her own writing process as disorganized and incoherent. Describing the fragmented typescripts she produced, she relates, “Into the tray of one’s consciousness are tumbled thousands of scraps of experience. That tray holds you dismembered, so to speak. Your problem is to synthesize yourself and the world you also live in … into something like a coherent whole … I put together my pieces this way and that; but they will not dovetail properly” (Midstream 3). Sullivan and another collaborator assisted by sorting through the fragments, literally cutting them with scissors and pasting them together “into proper linear narrative, a narrative for consumption by readers from the seeing world” (Werner 973). This narrative was spelled into Keller’s hands for her approval, but the spirit of the work remained dual-authored. As Marta Werner explains, “Despite the insistent use of the first-person narrator, Midstream is … a text written by two people though only one ‘I’ appears throughout” (982). Keller’s “I,” situated so intimately in touch, is never singular.

Touch in Question: Then and Now

Keller’s audience also grappled with questions of her authorship, often exhibiting skepticism about her authenticity as a writer. She was first accused of plagiarism at the age of eleven, when she wrote a story, The Frost King, that was reprinted in the school’s alumni magazine and then in a weekly publication for deaf and blind people, the Goodson Gazette. As the story gained wider readership, striking similarities emerged to a children’s book by Margaret T. Canby. The editor published the matching phrasing and paragraphs, and an investigatory panel questioned Keller without Sullivan present. It was determined that Canby’s story had been read to Keller years earlier, as she was just acquiring language, and she unintentionally reproduced elements of it. She was officially cleared of plagiarism but was traumatized by the events and subjected to skepticism of her abilities for decades. Kleege, dramatizing the events in a series of letters addressed to Helen Keller, calls the event an example of “consciousness on trial” and locates it as the “precise moment” when doubt entered Keller’s mind regarding her own abilities (34). This trial, Kleege relates, questioned the basic elements of Keller’s personhood. In Blind Rage she writes, “Face it, Helen. They may not say it out loud, but somewhere down deep they believe we are not quite human. Every time they repeated the question, ‘How do you know what you know and remember what you remember?’ they shoved you away from themselves. They drew a line in the sand and said, ‘You don’t belong to the same species. Being human means seeing and hearing.’ … While they can imagine something they have never actually seen, they do not believe we can” (34–35).

As Kleege suggests, the charges of plagiarism and the general attitude of skepticism and disbelief concerning Keller’s abilities are distancing tactics. By doubting and disbelieving Keller and her rhetorical productions, audiences separate themselves from her, drawing “a line in the sand” that prevents rhetorical identification between audience and rhetor. Kim Nielsen, in a biography of Sullivan, points out that not only was Keller’s “capacity to generate original thought” on trial, but so was “Sullivan’s legitimacy as a teacher” (117). If Keller and Sullivan’s student-teacher relationship was based on lies, fraud, and manipulation—the reasoning went—then why should anybody believe that Keller was a rhetor with whom powerful rhetorical connections and identifications could be made?

The ownership of words between Sullivan and Keller was never completely clear in Keller’s mind or in the minds of many in her audience. Keller felt that she and Sullivan were “pursued by misunderstandings” for the rest of their lives (Midstream 85). The editor of Keller’s first book and the husband of Sullivan, John Macy, called their collaboration an “unanalyzeable kinship” (391). More recently scholars attempting to understand the relationship and its effects on writing have called the kinship a type of “collaborative consciousness” (Cressman 110), an example of “mirrored selves” (Swan “Touching Words” 343), or a process of “writing otherwise” (Werner). Keller herself struggled to articulate the ways in which she read and wrote as solitary or proprietary acts. At the age of twenty-eight she was once again suspected of plagiarism and responded to the charge by explaining how friends and acquaintances often “read”—spelled into her hands—“interesting fragments … in a promiscuous manner” (Lash 342). She admits that “it is not easy to trace the fugitive sentences and paragraphs” that have been spelled into her hand (343). She continues, “Sometimes I think I ought to stop writing altogether, since I cannot tell surely which of my ideas are borrowed feathers, except those which I gather from books raised in print” (343). With Braille, Keller could trace the origin of her ideas, but when words were spelled into her hands, they became part of her body, impossible to trace back or separate from herself. Her uncertainty over the ownership of her own ideas, a question paramount in her audiences’ minds as well, caused her to consider ceasing to write altogether. Ending Midstream, she relates, regretfully, “I have written the last line of the last autobiography I shall write … I lift my tired hands from the typewriter. I am free” (Keller Midstream 342). With a sense of failure, she assesses, “My autobiography is not a great work” (343).

Even after more than a century following the charges of plagiarism concerning Keller, scholars continue to wrestle with the questions surrounding Keller and Sullivan’s specific partnership; more broadly, touch is still questioned in rhetorical productions made by people with disabilities today, especially those who use forms of facilitated or mediated communication. It is little wonder that Keller or other rhetors who use touch to communicate today continue to be doubted by themselves and by their audiences because few, if any, existing rhetorical models are available for touch. With the rise of collaborative writing models and writing practices situated in participatory media and new media contexts, the rhetor has been imagined as plural and writing is generally accepted as a social act that takes place in a context that is shared among many people.³ These challenges and revisions, however, do not fully account for the experience of disability in rhetorical production, especially when disabled rhetors depend on touch to communicate and work closely with a facilitator or someone else to construct a message. As Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford point out, “We are often more comfortable theorizing about subjectivity, agency, and authorship than we are attempting to enact alternatives to conventional assumptions and practices” (356). Since the publication of their collaboratively authored text in the mid-1980s, they assert, “we have been calling on scholars in rhetoric and composition, and in the humanities more generally, to enact contemporary critiques of the author and of the autonomous individual through a greater interest in and adoption of collaborative writing practices—and to do so not only in classrooms but in scholarly and professional work as well” (355–56). They remark that although there have been some efforts to respond to their call, “in general we would have to characterize these responses as limited” (356). In the context of disability, this response is particularly limited, especially in relation to ways in which collaborative writing and communication are enacted.

To this day disbelief continues to circulate when touch is used rhetorically, particularly in contexts of disability. The controversy over the technique of facilitated communication (FC), a method of communicative support for people with disabilities such as autism, demonstrates this continued suspicion of touch in rhetorical production most clearly. With FC, a facilitator provides hand, wrist, elbow, or arm support to a person with a communicative disability, so that he or she can point to letters on a letter or picture board or press keys on a keypad, computer, or other type of assistive communication device. As Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson explains, FC provokes anxiety in cultural conversation and disciplinary categories “because it clashes with the liberal model of a core, autonomous, and stable self and the tropes of validity and supervision that as Michael Warner argues, accompanied and comprised the construct of the universal and abstract citizen-subject that arose in the eighteenth century along with the epistemology of science” (“Rethinking Rhetoric” 160). In short, touch calls into question the assumptions of the liberal subject.

Debates about FC, especially about the authenticity of the messages of FC users, are rooted in suspicion, fear, and doubt about how touch circulates rhetorically and about the dangers of touch for uncommunicative or semicommunicative users. As Ralph James Savarese explains, FC conversations in the early 1990s “became entangled in the sex abuse hysteria of the same period, with children typing allegations against their parents and caregivers, and in unsympathetic authentication procedures that revealed questionable authorship” (xxi). Some of the allegations of fraudulent communication were true, and charges of sexual abuse are always serious, but FC, which the neurologist Margaret Baumann says was “oversold in the beginning,” became like “the proverbial baby, ‘thrown out with the bath water’” (xxiv). In a Frontline documentary, the technique was compared to the Ouija board effect, whereby the facilitator, consciously or unconsciously, moves the user’s hands; allegations of hoaxing and quackery ensued. As Savarese explains, “It became too easy to suspect a method that often had, at least at the outset, a facilitator’s hand entwined in the Autist’s” and was “dismissed outright” (xxi). Even though proponents of FC such as Biklen have continued their research with successful results and some users of FC have achieved independent typing skills, proving in some cases beyond a doubt that they are the authors of their messages, FC continues to be doubted. Savarese identifies a “passion to disbelieve” in continuing discussions about FC, even as, possibly, the “tide is beginning to turn,” following attention recently paid to FC users such as Sue Rubin, Jamie Burke, and Sean Sokler (xxii–xxiii).

Similar to how Keller’s consciousness was on trial in the wake of plagiarism charges against her, the users of FC and other forms of assisted, tactile, or mediated communication face questions regarding their status as thinking, feeling, and expressive beings in the continuing debates regarding augmentative communication today. As Savarese suggests, FC troubled the “theory of mind” approach to classical autism predominant at the time, disrupting the dominant idea that people with autism or other disabilities cannot imagine other mental states. The controversy surrounding the messages of autistics who use FC is a symptom of a larger tendency to doubt and devalue the rhetorical productions of disabled rhetors. As G. Thomas Couser has explored in Vulnerable Subjects, collaborative life writing for people with a range of different disabilities is fraught with complex ethical and representational questions. At the heart of continuing questions regarding the communicative abilities and potentials of people with a wide range of disabilities are the entangled issues of belief, identification, and connection. When a nonnormative rhetor is dismissed as inhuman, unconscious, and unfeeling; doubted regarding her abilities; or accused of plagiarism, rhetorical identification is nearly impossible. When a facilitator or assistant is implicated in a scandal or accused of lying and fraud, the partnership between rhetor and facilitator becomes unbelievable and unworthy of study or understanding. Inquest panels, investigative reports, and court cases become the focus, when efforts to understand touch as rhetorical are most needed.

How is touch rhetorical? To begin to answer this question, in this chapter I track the relationship between ability and independence in the rhetorical tradition’s preference for a singular rhetor. Despite this assumption of independence, I identify opportunities for supporting rhetorical touch among interdependent rhetors by rereading Aristotle’s categorization of rhetoric as a dynamis, an art based on potential, that can be understood, based on Aristotle’s other definitions of art and sensory perception, to foster alternative forms of rhetoric among disabled rhetors. To prod this potential of rhetoric to accommodate multiple, interdependent rhetors and nondiscursive expressions such as touch, I employ Kenneth Burke’s concept of rhetorical identification, exploring it through his invocation of the philosopher Empedocles. I read Keller and Sullivan’s rhetoric through a model attentive to touch, contrasting it to the limits of existing rhetorical situations, and show how identification among multiple rhetors and audiences can be facilitated through an understanding of touch as rhetorical. Then I posit a new model of rhetoric that values touch as rhetorical by imbuing the traditional triads of rhetoric—ethos/pathos/logos and speaker-writer/audience/message—with redefinitions of three key terms—felt logos, mētis, and kairos—which I consider in-depth in successive chapters. In this model, touch is rhetorical in that it communicates a message, feeling, or connection among and between multiple bodies, responding to physical, situational, and rhetori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Defining a Rhetoric of Touch
• 2. Locating Touch
• 3. Feeling Logos
• 4. Habituating Ethos
• 5. Grasping Pathos
• 6. Teaching Touch, Touching Technology
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author