American Sign Language as a Critique of Communication

From Ian Blumberg-Enge

You can also read this essay at A Beautiful Resistance.

“Language is a poor tool for communication.”

-John C. Lilly

“We could not reach the final object of knowledge without the dissolution of knowledge, which aims to reduce its object to the condition of subordinated and managed things.”

-George Bataille, The Accursed Share

Sign language is a subject that most people have the luxury of never thinking twice about, and so many of us don’t consider the potential insights ASL might lend us about communication in general. ASL was created at the American School for the Deaf of West Hartford, Connecticut, in the early 1800s. It’s what's called a ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’ language, meaning it evolved through repetition and use without conscious planning. In the absence of a standardized sign language, many families of deaf kids built their own vocabulary of signs. In much the same way, many communities developed their own ‘village sign languages’. One such example is ‘Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language’, used mainly in Chilmark, Massachusetts, a town with a high percentage of genetic deafness. Various local village and domestic signs came together with French Sign Language at the school in West Hartford, and ASL was born. Despite ASL’s age, it wasn’t standardized as part of deaf education until the 1960s.

It’s debated whether ASL is a mixed language or a creole, the difference being that in creole, one language is considered to be the base. It is sometimes argued that ASL is a creole of French sign language, but others think it has structural features inconsistent with creole languages. Almost 60% of ASL signs are inherited from Old French Sign Language, but that's quite a bit lower than the 80% threshold required for it to be considered a dialect.

ASL is the basis for many other sign languages around the world, with varying degrees of mutual comprehension. American Sign Language is often learned as a second language and used as a ‘lingua franca’, or common language used for communication between people who don’t share a native spoken language. Southerners are said to sign slower, as if with a drawl, while Californians and New Yorkers are said to sign much faster.

Official ASL is a ‘subject-verb-object’ language, but so varied are the exceptions to the rule that some people don’t believe it has an underlying basic sentence structure at all. ASL is mostly made up of signs that directly symbolize words. Then there is also finger spelling, where words are spelled out using a set of 26 signs known as the American Manual Alphabet. This finger spelling aspect allows ASL to integrate various languages and vocabularies seamlessly.

Facial expressions also make up a significant portion of ASL. This is mostly significantly illustrated in the eyebrows, signifying a question. Eyebrows-up turns a sign into a yes or no question, and eyebrows-down adds a contextual “WH” question (who, what, where, when etc.).

The first thing I noticed when studying ASL was the quiet. This might be stupidly obvious, but the experience of it is much heavier and touching than I had anticipated. Next is intimacy. In order to communicate with someone through sign, you have to look at them. This may also sound stupidly obvious but looking someone in the eye, acknowledging them, watching their body language and facial expressions immerses you fully in the moment of communication and sharing of ideas. The third thing is that it's extremely intuitive and user-friendly. A person could learn enough to get going in a day or two.

One of ASL’s many interesting aspects is the fact that it lacks ‘to be’ verbs entirely – verbs like ‘am’, ‘is’, ‘are’, and ‘be’. One of the main critiques of language that Alfred Korzybski pointed out was the ‘is of identity’, which allows for problematic statements like “all women ARE…”. “All blacks ARE…”, etc. This linguistic inaccuracy contributes to many of the prejudices at the heart of history’s most horrifying atrocities.

Erik Davis sums up General Semantics in his amazing book High Weirdness like this: “human beings constantly distort reality by laminating our experience with linguistic categories, whose distance from the embodied world of sensation we then forget.” The many models we make of our experience will always fail to fully describe their reality, from our everyday lives right down to the atomic nature of light.

In an attempt to fix these linguistic booby traps, a student of Korzybski named David Bourland proposed E-prime: English without the verb ‘to be’. E-prime remains controversial in the General Semantics community. Some believe it strengthens thinking capabilities, while others hold that it complicates instead of clarifies communications. Robert Anton Wilson’s Quantum Psychology was written entirely using E-prime. A simple example of E-prime, instead of saying that someone is tall, you would say that whoever appears tall to you. But what about languages without ‘to be’ verbs? They will certainly lend insight into thinking without these linguistic categories which laminate our experience.

Using ASL as scaffolding for learning new languages, as well as a lingua franca and second language, could address many of the critiques of language without discarding symbolic communication altogether. ASL could serve as a universal language without having to give up the rich history, insight, art and song of indigenous languages and regional dialects. It could even give languages on the edge of extinction a second life by removing the pressure to assimilate and lose one's native language in favor of adopting the dominant one.

During Korzybski’s youth in Poland, kids were taught in Russian in an attempt to wipe out the Polish language. Under Franco, it was illegal to speak Catalan. Welsh and Gaelic have more or less been functionally extinct by the purposeful force of empire. Sign, used to translate from dominant to minority languages, could preserve the linguistic diversity and poetry of these languages between generations. Though not quite a bulletproof protection against cultural genocide, it could be a lifeline. Unlike a universal language like Esperanto, sign would work alongside spoken languages, enhancing diversity instead of hindering it.

Though it’s hard to find good resources on the subject, prisoners use sign language to conduct private business and communicate when talking isn’t possible, allowed, or ideal. Prisons don’t want prisoners talking as they move throughout the facility, and they are often barred from speaking during meals. Prison sign language varies from place to place, and it basically consists of spelling things out with the ASL alphabet, structured like texting, including a sign for spaces between words, lots of slang, shorthand and abbreviations.

This points to another bit of radical potential for sign language – clandestine communication. It is easy to eavesdrop, but sign language can be obscured by simply turning one’s back to the eavesdropper. The structural adaptation is also interesting, making things much more approachable for a newcomer. Assuming you can spell, all you need to do is learn the ASL alphabet and a few structural elements, and then you can get by. While this isn’t how ASL technically works, it’s flexible enough that someone fluent in traditional ASL could understand and communicate with someone using prison signing.

I think it is also worth mentioning that chimps and gorillas can both learn to understand and use sign language, facilitating communication not just among speakers of different languages but between species as well. The now-famous Koko could use 1,000 sings and understand 2,000. She could use eight-sign phrases with proper and consistent sentence structure.

ASL also lacks gender-specific pronouns, in effect referring to the person as the specific individual they are without defining them using any socially constructed baggage. If a person or object is in your presence or pictured near you, you don't even have to name them or it. You can simply point, in effect, referring to that person or thing entirely at that moment and not the web of influence that their symbolic reference carries.

Anarchist philosopher Stephen Pearl Andrews advocated the utopian potential of universal language, even going as far as to invent his own, Alwato, in 1871. American Plains Indians had a sign language that acted pretty much in this way. PISL was used from western Canada to the central US and northern Mexico to tell stories, facilitate trade and elevate ceremonies. And, of course, it was used by the deaf, and across at least 37 different spoken languages. Part of its range is probably due to these populations traveling with the seasons.

Other Native populations had sign languages, but none of them were quite as widely used. It is estimated that in the 1800s, there were over tens of thousands of Plains Indian Sign Language speakers. Currently, the confirmed number of people who are fluent is under a dozen. Due to the lack of written history in about Plains Indian Sign Language, its age is unknown, but we know it was fully formed and commonly used when Europeans first contacted its speakers in the 1500s.

This leaves open the possibility that parts of this sign language may have carried over from a time before we communicated with the spoken word. It’s also possible that this indigenous population's first conception of symbolic communication was much more creative and descriptive than our modern version. Terrence Mckenna imagined a new communication, which he likened to the color changes of an octopus. Its form is one step closer to union and true communication, or as he would often say in his lectures, “You would literally see what I mean.”

ASL, adopted as a lingua franca, wouldn’t have to do away with spoken language. Instead, it could augment its expression and facilitate a full-body multilingual, multimedia communication. It could also facilitate a Joycean level of multilingual punning and poetry in everyday life. Could that one step outside of verbal language open new vistas of thought and uncover new connections? What insight into our models and their limits might we gain from being able to describe any space-time event in multiple languages and gestures and endless combinations. They say when you study a language long enough, you start dreaming in that language. What new symbolic dimensions might be unlocked by multi-model-multi-media (visual and auditory) dreams?

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Ian Blumberg-Enge

Ian Blumberg-Enge is a model agnostic anarchist, writer, and utopian kook. His work is focused on the intersection of mysticism and anarchism. He is co-author, with Peter J. Carrol, of Interview with a Wizard, published by Mandrake of Oxford.