Feeling your own (or someone else's) face: Writing signs from the expressive viewpoint

Highlights

• SignWriting (SW), a movement writing system, is typically written from the embodied viewpoint of the signer.

• TRather than focus on the receptive visual modality of signing, SW highlights the phenomenological experience of the signer.

• Writers often interpret or produce SW texts written from another signer’s embodied perspective.

• This article considers the ideological framings and effects of these practices.

Abstract

SignWriting (SW), a featural writing system that iconically represents the moving body, was originally written from the receptive viewpoint but is now typically written from the embodied viewpoint of a signer. Through this shift, SW was re-envisioned from a writing system that focused on the receptive visual modality of sign languages (what others see), to one that visually highlights the phenomenological experience of signing (what a signer feels). This article analyzes ideological framings of SW literacy events in which users interpret or produce SW texts reflecting another signer's embodied perspective. In so doing, many SignWriters consider whether and how the qualia that characterize the phenomenological experience of signing can be intersubjectively shared among differently positioned interactants.

Introduction

Small groups of signers in over thirty countries use a featural writing system called SignWriting (SW) to produce and circulate texts in their respective languages.¹ One of the unusual affordances of this system, derived from its iconically motivated representations of bodily articulators and its diagrammatic representations of the spatial relationships between them, is that it can encode signing practice from different visual origos, or “indexical centerpoints” (Silverstein, 2013: 89; Bühler, 1934, Haviland, 1996). It is possible to write signs from what SignWriters term the “receptive” viewpoint, the embodied perspective of someone observing another person signing (see Fig. 1). It is also possible to write from what they term the “expressive” viewpoint, the embodied perspective of a signer (see Fig. 2). In principle it is also possible to represent movement from a viewpoint oriented above a signer's head, from below, or from a signer's right or left.

SW was initially written primarily from the receptive perspective, due to the context in which SW developed from what had originally been a dance notation system called DanceWriting. Its inventor, ballet dancer Valerie Sutton, had been recruited by sign language researchers in Denmark to adapt her movement writing system for the purpose of transcribing data from video-recordings of Danish Sign Language (Dansk Tegnsprog or DTS). She was asked to sit in front of video-screens and notate what she saw, as if she was transcribing a dance from the perspective of the audience.

By the early 1980s, what had become SW had migrated out of research labs and was being developed into a daily writing system by Sutton and a group of d/Deaf² signers. In 1984, two of the early Deaf adopters, Lucinda O'Grady and Meriam Ina Schroeder, called for a meeting in which they announced that they would no longer write from the receptive perspective but would only write expressively. Their metapragmatic (Silverstein, 1976) framing, or reflexive construals of the reasons for and effects of this shift, focused on their having enregistered (Agha, 2003, Silverstein, 2003) receptive writing as a practice of self-objectification.³ Instead, O'Grady and Schroeder wanted their writing practices to frame them as subjects by representing their signing from their own perspective: “looking out of their own face” as they put it. Their claims persuaded other Deaf users and, accordingly, Sutton standardized all the SW instructional materials to reflect the expressive – rather than receptive – viewpoint as the default and unmarked visual origo for SW texts.

Given that SW is often used to represent facial expression, Sutton had initially objected that a shift to expressive writing meant that, as she put it, “We're going to be looking through the back of a person's head. You can't see your own face! You can only feel it.” O'Grady and Schroeder were unconcerned, O'Grady reportedly noting, “I see through my face, I feel my face.” Thus, while derived from users' insistence on being framed as subjects, the shift to expressive writing also highlighted the importance of their subjective, multi-modal experiences as signers. Indeed, while popular and scholarly discussions of signed languages often frame such languages as primarily visual, the sensory grounding of signing practices (like all language production) is more diverse, including the tactile, haptic, and proprioceptive (Edwards, 2012, Enfield, 2003, Enfield, 2009, Friedman and Helmreich, 2012, Gibson, 1966, Meier et al., 2002, Streeck et al., 2011, Vermeerbergen et al., 2007). Ultimately, the early d/Deaf adopters re-envisioned SW from a script that focused on the receptive visual modality of sign languages (what others see), to one that visually highlights the phenomenological experience of signing (what a signer feels) (see Fig. 3). Thus, SW was seen as capable of transducing – “transforming across modalities” (Keane, 2015: 10; Silverstein, 2003) invisible feelings into visible marks.

In framing their rationale for the shift to expressive writing, early d/Deaf users treated the moment in which a d/Deaf signer writes a text in their “own voice” as the archetypical literacy event. However, of course, other genres and participant frameworks (Goffman, 1981) have also come to characterize SW writing practices. For example, those reading a SW text written expressively must, in so doing, adopt the embodied viewpoint of the author and calibrate that perspective with their role as addressee; SignWriters also write texts in which they represent what is understood to be someone else's voice from the embodied viewpoint of the signer so represented; sometimes the embodied perspective represented in a text is that of a generic signer or combines multiple voices; etc. This article draws on nine years of participant observation on a SW focused listserv, as well as face-to-face ethnographic research in sites of SW use in the US and Malta, to explore such heteroglossic SW literacy events, in which participants must account for multiple spatialized points of view. How does use of the expressive viewpoint impact and how is it impacted by such genres and participant frameworks? How are these processes and effects metapragmatically framed?

For some SignWriters (particularly fluent d/Deaf signers whose daily face-to-face signing practices regularly involve the production and interpretation of the complex viewpoint rotations that can characterize the spatial grammar of signed languages) the processes of indexical recalibration involved in reading or writing from someone else's viewpoint are so transparent as to recede from conscious reflection. However, for other SignWriters the processes by which these deictic (re)arrangements can be produced and interpreted in SW texts can be more challenging and thus more subject to explicit reflection.

Because expressive SW has been enregistered as encoding a subjective “feeling of doing” language (Harkness, 2015: 574), the processes of writing from the spatial origo of another signer can be understood by such SignWriters as calling for or facilitating a sense of sharing experience; “seeing out of – and feeling” – another person's face. Consequently, discussion surrounding such writing processes often focuses on the qualia (“indexes “that materialize phenomenally in human activity as sensuous qualities” (Harkness, 2015: 574)) that characterize the processes of signing, reading, and writing - and on the question of whether and how such qualia are intersubjectively shared among differently positioned interactants.⁴

Below, after further outlining the development of SW and describing the ways in which its formal properties encode embodied viewpoint, I will discuss the ideological contexts that have mediated SignWriters' understandings of the pragmatics of writing expressively. Then, drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a linguistics research lab in Malta, I analyze the processes through which Maria Galea, a hearing researcher, worked to create expressively written SW transcriptions from receptively viewed video-recorded sign language data. Ultimately, I argue that the process of transcribing expressively impacted Galea's broader project to create a specific SW orthography for Maltese Sign Language (Lingwa Tas-Sinjali Maltija or LSM), leading her to propose textual conventions designed to reflect and reproduce particular kinds of “experience of experience” (Chumley, 2013: 182). I conclude by considering how these processes and effects resonate with the early d/Deaf SignWriters' efforts to resist the objectification of d/Deaf signers.