Culture

Capital / Culture / Signed language — Comments Off
21
Jul 11

The Thought Experiment

My brain

When most of us imagine an experiment, we imagine people dressed in white coats with subjects succumbing to their will. In reality, these tests are done under careful scrutiny and has a lengthy ethical review process. But there is a different type of experiment that doesn’t require subjects, it is a thought experiment.

One of the most famous thought experiments is Schrödinger’s Cat. It described a cat locked inside a metal box attached to a decaying atom. If the atom decayed, it would trigger a canister of hydrochloric acid to be released inside the box and the fumes would kill the cat. Because the decaying of the atom has a 50:50 chance that it could decay, or not; the state of atomic flux would also place the cat in the same flux. Hence, inside the box, the cat was both alive and dead at the same time. This is a scientific definition of a paradox.

If you get the experiment, great, but if you don’t, not to worry. The point is that the concept of paradox can be defined. A thought experiment creates an undeniable proof that does not need to be put into practice. Nobody wants to force a cat inside a metal box, neither should it happen. So, it stays as a thought experiment.

In my thought experiment, I want to give a group of people 100 gold coins. This group is going shopping. They can not buy anything, they can only purchase items from a given list that I have supplied. The only rule is that each person must be genuine and buy something that they will want/use.

The group must be a mixture of deaf and hearing people. In fact, the diversity of the group will come under four categories:

  • A hearing person who only uses English.
  • A deaf person who only uses English.
  • A deaf person who only uses BSL.
  • A deaf person fluent in both BSL and English.
So each person will have 100 gold coins to buy as much of the following they wish. Every item they invest in is worth 10 gold coins each. There are two lists to choose from:
  • The entire works of Shakespeare.
  • The music of Beethoven on CDs.
  • Tickets to see the Swan Lake ballet.
  • A guided tour around a national museum.
  • A visit to the opera:  Mozart’s last concerto.
  • An invitation to the national Monarch or President’s meet and greet event.
And this list as well:
  • Tickets for the Deaf cruise, sailing through the Caribbean with 2000 Deaf people on the ship.
  • Full video collection of sign language poems, such as Clayton Valli or Dot Miles.
  • Entry to an event hosted by Signmark, a Deaf rapper.
  • A day in the Deaf historical archives.
  • A night out in the International Deaf Club.
  • A Volunteer OverSeas trip to build a school for Deaf children.

You may have guessed that the former list represents what is known as culture with a capital ‘C’, or otherwise known as ‘higher culture’. The latter represents that cultural activities that would be of value to members of the Deaf community. One would assume that all items on the list are accessible to all people, therefore interpreter and captioning services would be available; the question is whether these four people would be interested to invest money in them.

The results could look something like this:

  • A hearing person who only uses English. [100 gold coins spent]
  • A deaf person who only uses English. [30 gold coins spent]
  • A deaf person who only uses BSL. [70 gold coins spent]
  • A deaf person fluent in both BSL and English. [100 gold coins spent]

The more one spends on the two lists, the more they are able to operate within the cultural norms of the worlds we live in (Deaf or non-deaf). The higher access and interest in these cultural items results with a person who has a higher level of cultural capital. Hence, a more culturally competent individual would be more successful financially and be more connected.

Bilingual Deaf people and a non-deaf person will always be able to spend the most, they will be the most culturally adept. At the other end of the scale, the deaf person who uses English as their only means of communication has so little cultural resources available to them. They feel on the ‘rim’ of both communities, or both worlds. Hence, they are least likely to be culturally mobilised, less socially connected and with lower economic power. The move to ‘normalise’ deaf people by offering resources to use their residual hearing as a route to equality is essentially flawed. It leaves a person who is not able to function in either Deaf or non-deaf worlds because they do not have the cultural resources available to them.

There is nothing paradoxical about this thought experiment but one can not escape that fact that the ‘normalisation agenda’ is a route to further segregation and exclusion; opposite to current thinking on ‘inclusion’. Like a cat in metal boxes sitting in a persistant state of flux: they are deaf-cum-hearing people but, at this point in time, neither of the two. The medical/educational agendas are creating social paradox, they are placing deaf people in a state of flux. This thought experiment has suddenly become very real.

A photograph of my brain from 3 angles.
Capital / Culture — 3 Comments
6
Jul 11

The Professionalisation of Deaf Cinema

Hand Solo

The recent awards ceremony at Clin d’Oeil has awarded the heroes of modern Deaf cinema and they are from the UK. They are Charlie Swinbourne, Bim Ajadi, William Mager, Louis Neethling and Ted Evans. These are the names you should remember and watch for years to come. They have taken the traditions of Deaf theatre from the Deaf club stage and brought it to the masses.

There is something about Deaf stories that can lighten and heavy any heart. Sign language has a comical twist where signs can be a visible pun but its metaphors can reverberate through the lives of many. The winning team have artistic, filming and authoring expertise that has become more polished from film to film. The Deaf film industry is growing up, they are professional and have potential to elbow some space in British cinema.

Deaf films would never have lifted off without the existence of BSL Broadcasting Trust, a small amount of money is commissioned to film makers that gives them the artistic freedom to push the boundaries. But this small investment has rewarded us ten-fold.

Hand Solo is a mockumentory of a Deaf porno star who gives atomic orgasms, or is it digitic? It is a story of unrequited love and betrayal disguised as a comic caper. What is impressive is the artistic amalgamation of superb acting, camera-work and special effects. The film looks polished and acute in its story telling, a story that anyone can understand. One does not have to be Deaf to appreciate the nuances of this film and laugh at the pixel fuzzing of the hyper-speed hand. There is a great comic duo developing between Matt Kirby and Ben Green that would inspire any script writer or director.

There are many others that are worthy of your attention, such as My Song and The End. Both have great story lines that challenges how we can talk about the Deaf community and bring real issues alive for all to see.

I feel a change in me after seeing these films. I can talk about Deaf films with great pride and place it on the list of great British cinema. I can grab the next stranger on the street and say, “have you seen our Deaf films?” Because, if you haven’t, you are certainly missing something.

Nb. To keep yourself up dated on Deaf cinema, go to BSLBT Zoom.

Capital / Culture / Sound — Comments Off
2
Jul 11

The Soundscape

Seaford cliffs

Today is a beautiful day. I lie on the cliff edge as the sun sits on the horizon, its rays bounce on the waves and ripples in my eyes. The heat still simmers but it is punctuated by a cool breeze emanating from the horizon. I feel at ease as my skin is cleansed from the heat of the day and awashed with the coolness of the night.

I close my eyes and feel the silence, it envelopes me peacefully. I have a smile on my face, because I am content. I think it’s catching because one by one, the stars are coming out fighting against the afternoon sun. Some metres along the cliff edge, there is a couple, who I have never met before, with the moodiest faces in the area. As I glance their lips, I caught their conversation:

“Why have we come here? You can’t hear yourself think.”

“The traffic will go, love.” He was trying to be bothered.

“And the bloody seagulls.”

Just at that moment, a nearby car alarm went off. It was the last straw. They just upped and walked as if they were running away from an invisible monster, looking over their shoulders for the next swipe of sound.

It’s true. It was the afternoon traffic along the seafront with tempered drivers trying to get home for the weekend. Seagulls are notorious along the south coast and very popular in Brighton, they are always on the look out of a stray chip.

You will have to excuse me because I actually felt sorry for this couple. I was here living this wonderful moment in this glorious landscape, and they just couldn’t appreciate it like I do. They were trapped in a soundscape that alters their reality. It can turn such beautiful things into something rather unpleasant.

You see, I remember. I used to wear hearing aids. I remember the sounds invading my head and tickling my ear drum somewhere on the threshold of tolerable and intolerable. The sounds have a dreadful tendency to cause headaches that felt like the morning after a bad night. Hearing aids make you drunk with sound. It can be addictive because the slowly dying batteries make you want to search your pockets, drawers or handbags for the stray replacement, or make the guilty rush to a chemist.

I am one of those people who have detoxed themselves from hearing aids. Sometimes I feel a twinge of longing to try a pair and hear a bit of noise, a tune or the final of X Factor. But I remind myself that guilty pleasures will only cause problems later on. The ear infections and tinnitus (ringing noises from the head) are the worst.

I look at hearing people who live in the soundscape from a very young age. I don’t think they realise just how much sound rules their lives. There are some unwanted sounds, such as unshakeable tunes, the annoying muzak and rumble from a projector. If one is trying to work, they would either put up with it moodily or angrily switch it off. There is nearly always emotional response to the offending sound.

Sound is also a social inhibitor. I noticed in one train carriage, 60% were listening to an iPod like device. Their eyes are open but they are not looking, all the senses are turned off as they escape into an alternative reality. Sometimes they share, one might offer an ear bud to another (not very hygienic) and bring someone into their reality.

People are quite hopeless at managing sound. In a meeting room with the air conditioning humming and pneumatic drill roaring outside; no one complains. When my interpreter finally says something about it, you can see the shame in my hearing colleagues’ eyes: “they know I was not listening.” One might feel the need to fill the silence with sound but they are not obliged to listen.

The social rules of sound are difficult to understand. Whenever I say something in a public place, there are always two reactions: ‘shush’ or ‘speak up’. It always happens in a restaurant and I never seem to get it right to a tee. When I find the right volume, I try to maintain level until everyone decide to leave the room without me knowing, and the trick of ‘shush’ and ‘speak up’ starts again. I look bewildered at the craziness of the soundscape, it is a game, surely.

Hearing people know these rules, they are not written down because they are culturally bound. It depends on your ethnicity, class or the environment. Bodily sounds such as burps, slurps and yums are particularly notorious – the reactions can depend on who you are with. The general advice is try to avoid it if you can. Yumming is particularly hard because you lose focus when you are enjoying your food. It is a cat and mouse game, when you are nearly always the mouse.

Beware of sounds that happen at night. If you happen to live with a hearing person, please do expect disturbed sleep or interrupted evenings. Hearing people tend to jump, walk about for no reason and start a ‘sound hunt’. It is done with a Homo Erectus level of ferocity. They don’t stop until they get their kill, the source of the sound.

Hearing people make very clever use of sound. They know how to butt into a conversation as they edge in with an ummm or an ahhh. They play with the pitch of their voices to make their contributions acceptable, low for seriousness and high for playfullness. Some hearing people are not very good at this game at all and it separates out the alphas from the betas.

I understand that hearing people want me to enter their world, they want me to hear. But what they don’t realise is that it is not hearing that is the point, they want me to enter the game; the soundscape. As a sign language user, I am out of the game and considered an anomaly but if I am in the game, they can decide where I am in the pecking order.

This experience makes me even more convinced that hearingness and deafness is not a medically constructed reality, it is a socially constructed one. One might give as much sound as one can but it doesn’t resolve the social complexity of how people reacts to, manages and plays with it. No machine, ingenious or otherwise, will achieve this level of complexity, because humanity is simply brilliant.

So I look at the arguing couple walk away from the cliff edge, and let them get on with it. I look at the gulls soaring through the sky like white tailed aeroplanes and the cars move gracefully along the road in a polite queue, and the twinkling flashes from the white stars to the orange car alarms. It is amazing how the natural and man-made mirror each other. It is just a shame how they sound.

Photo by imjustcreative
Capital / Culture / Education — 2 Comments
30
Jun 11

Requiem Mass

The road in the death valley

While the unfinished Requiem Mass by Mozart in D Major plays in the background, the telephone rings. My partner, Marco, picks up the phone. “Can I speak to Mr. Walker?” It was a forced jovial voice.

“I am afraid John can’t come to the phone, although he is here. He is deaf. Would you like me to pass on a message for you, or I could relay the conversation between you and him?”

“Oh, I am so sorry for you news,” came the sympathetic tones.

“I said, deaf not dead. John can’t hear.”

“I am so very sorry.”

There must be a few companies out there who think I have passed away. Will I be waiting for someone to come round with a bunch of flowers or a card of sympathy? Or be stopped at the immigration desk asking if I am the real John Walker.

Yes, deaf and death are homophones to a lazy speaker who would pronounce ‘th’ with a ‘f.’ But this phonological analysis only scratches the surface, there is a cultural reality of how ‘deaf’ is perceived.

My Grandmother was at her deathbed. She lay in coma after a heart attack and two successive strokes; the doctor prepared us to expect her life to come to an end. She was 78 years old and lived a good life. She was the oldest of 7 siblings and was the family matriarch.

I was told by the doctor, as I sat beside her, that I should speak to her. Puzzled, I asked why. It is thought that hearing is the last sense to go, she might be able to hear our conversations and words of reassurance. When my parents left the room to get a cup of coffee, I stayed behind and spoke of the memories we had and the things we did as a family, only to clammer up when they returned; I felt embarrassed. You must remember that I was only 19 years old at the time and it was bizarre to talk to someone who couldn’t respond.

The idea of sound and hearing being the final frontier of human existence places a lot of emphasis on the relationship between hearingness, or the lack of it, and the impending death. The statistics are quite strong, 2/3 of over 75 year olds have a hearing loss. A large proportion of the 4 million deaf and hard of hearing people in the country are elderly. There are several conditions that give rise to hearing loss, such as osteoporosis; the weakening of the bones such as those in the middle ear that lose efficiency to transmit sounds to cochlear.

It does make me wonder why people refer to deafness as a ‘serious condition’. The loss of hearing, in mid life, coincides with the loss of family, work, social networks and relationships. This ongoing chain of consequences, when one’s life breaks down, leads to a sensation of a downward spiral closer to the ‘final conclusion’. It must be terrifying and haunting to have a hearing loss as the doorway to one’s mortality.

A friend who worked at M&S noticed a difference in the customers’ reactions. When she didn’t understand a customer, she says “Hi, I’m deaf, can you say that again?” The customer just ups and walks. Her strategy was to change what she says, “Hi, I can’t hear very well, can you say that again?” And the customer stays. Deaf doesn’t only mean dead but also dead end. There is a deep reference in society about how one reacts to the word. If the common reference to deaf-life is over the age of 65, is it not surprising?

Even some parents of newly born deaf children associate deafness with mortality. When the parents receive news from their child’s neonatal hearing test, they react with shock when they realise the child they had is not the child they have now. In a sense, the previous child ‘died’ and there is a different child in front of them. It takes time to get their head around the idea that they have a beautiful child with a promising future.

There is something important about bringing a child to life, there is a process of preparing that child for adulthood in order to set them free into society. Free to influence the world as they see fit. This is what happens to those children who seek opportunities, including opportunities in the Deaf community. They realise their social capital as bilingual/bicultural individuals who can function in both the Deaf and hearing worlds.

My previous thoughts about the insider and outsider dichotomy shows here too. Society considers deafness as a loss of capital, a loss of worth, whereas Deaf people see deafness as a capital gain, an increase of worthiness. This is where the conflict reigns. I, for one, am not prepared to live my life with my own mortality as a constant reference point, I am here to live just as I am.

I go to the radio playing the Requiem and give Marco a sharp look, I switch it off. “Another few more years before we get to this stage.”

Photo by s.alt
Capital / Culture — Comments Off
22
Jun 11

The capital ‘C’ culture

The Antar Sea of Hands

It is not a term I have coined. The big ‘C’ culture is something that came about at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The journey started with Enlightenment – the time when ideas were made reality. Kant described it as “mankind’s final coming of age.” It consolidated our thinking in the arts, religion, tradition, language, and culture. In the UK, we called it the Victorian Age. Until there was a response, called Modernism; it scream out, “out with the old, in with the new.”

Let me start at the beginning. Western society was stratified, complex and in troubling times up to the mid 19th century. Cities, such as Paris, were up to their armpits in filth and disease was rife. They suffered at the hand of the aristocracy, until they got rid of them in the French Revolution (1789-99). In Paris, Napoleon III ordered a complete renovation of the city, in 1852, and introduced clean water, sewage and clear transport lines for every home. Even the centre was designed to give the military more control by creating wide roads that would expose any rebellion. This accomplishment took some 20 years to achieve.

In 1900, the Paris Expo saw their biggest achievement reach for the sky; the Eiffel Tower. The structure superseded any other building in the capital and its lines were so clean; it was like a spaceship had landed. It wasn’t a typical building of exuberant grandeur that one sees in Paris or Vienna; it was modern, cold and harsh. It was avant-garde. This new period was known as Modernism.

But they didn’t stop there. The changes in cityscape gave way to a change in how people use the space. It affected ‘culture’. There was more aestheticism, self-consciousness, and surrealism while conservative traditions were rejected for the ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound). The traditional values were reduced to clear and specific lines: a country with defined borders, a nation with one language, and a population with one unified identity. This was the birth of a Modernist culture.

There were obvious benefits to Modernism, primarily capitalist benefits. A workforce who all share the same behaviours, work ethics and language were more economically viable. The market forces in Europe did not only trade nationally but also internationally between well-defined nations. The wars in the earlier half of the 20th century not only set the boundaries but also ideology that transpire across nations; it was Modernism on a global scale with Communism in the East and Capitalism in the West.

Nearly forgot, big ‘C’ culture. The lines were drawn between the culture of a group of people and the refined, sophisticated Culture adopted by society. The winners of big ‘C’ culture included the works of Shakespeare, a ballet of Swan Lake, poetry by Keats, dining etiquette (how you use your knives and forks), the institution of engagement and marriage, and other populist traditions. The losers included the Pearly Kings and Queens, the Irish jig, Welsh poetry, and having a knees up in the pub.

Richard Eckert (2010) wrote a useful article on the view of Deaf people as an ethnic group based on the Ancient Greek concept of ‘ethnos’. There are four sub-definitions,  ethnos: by language, by custom, by blood and by religion. It separates out the Deaf community from simply a community of interest (a club) to a community by territory (a village). There are no physical examples of a Deaf ethnic village in the UK but there is an imagined one, in the same way that Jewish people imagined Eretz Israel before WW2.

So lets examine this imagined town of 70k Deaf people in the UK who all share the same culture and language. What would be the big ‘C’ culture of the Deaf town? What is the refined, sophisticated Culture adopted by the Deaf community?

If you will allow me, let me create a ‘top ten’, a bit like music charts, of the most influential Cultural ideas in the Deaf community based on two factors: 1. the sophistication and relevancy of the idea; and 2. the buying power of the idea. Please do not take this as law, it should be debated and it should change from year to year – but a group of people, intrinsic holders of the Deaf Cultural crown, needs to review the big 10. So, here goes nothing:

1. The poetry of Dorothy Miles

2. The Deaf club

3. The Deaf Studies curriculum from Frank Barnes School

4. The life of Arthur Dimmock MBE

5. The research archives at the Centres for Deaf Studies (for example, Bristol)

6. The British Deaf History Society

7. The research of Dr. Mary Brennan

8. The fingerspelling chart

9. The sign language class

10. The sign language dictionary

Photo by Priscilla Brice-Weller