Recently I saw this video about people with deafness in Sub-Saharan Africa. While I found the interviewer and camera person to be extremely rude to the young Patrick, the contents of the video were fascinating.
As Derrida discusses language as a system of signs unable to accurately interact with reality, the concept of lifetime deafness is intriguing.
Did the eighty-year-old student in the class even know there were others who couldn't understand the movement of lips? Did she even realize the concept of sound? If her whole life was spent making minimal gestures, and let's say she never learned to read, what were her mental concepts for "trees," "sky," "grass?" Did she even categorize the world around her in those ways?
If she had never learned to read, her sign for tree would not include a word, a sound, a system of "language" to describe it. Perhaps the concept of "tree" was merely a mental picture of a wooden thing with leaves. Perhaps she classified all similar things--trees, bushes, etc--as that same mental picture.
How did she classify her emotions? Did she have a classification to differentiate between anger, jealousy, loathing? Or did she classify emotions that we do not even consider?
How did she interact with her reality?
Watch the video here:
Patrick Speaks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f31_UbCPq4
The other question is, how did she conceive of things?
ReplyDeleteThis is really interesting to think about. To me it recalls Doug's point in class that the idea of deconstruction itself is very Western because there is at least some connection between the sign and the signifier in some other cultures.
ReplyDeleteNot only is it Western oriented but what would Derrida say about sign language? Is it problematic to deconstruction too?