Abstract
In this essay, three recently published books are reviewed: Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, by Jonathan Sterne, Failure, by Neta Alexander and Arjun Appadurai, and In Case of Emergency, by Elizabeth Ellcessor. The essay argues that these three works contribute to the debate about media and disability by proposing a non ableist perspective – that is a perspective which doesn’t consider ability as a normative assumption – which affects both media theory and media practices. In this regard, the essay identifies three keywords which are potentially game changers in media studies: impairment, failure, emergency. Emphasizing the ‘normal’, ‘banal’ or ‘habitual’ character of these terms, the books here reviewed show how these keywords may enable us to go beyond the traditional idea of media as prostheses, and call for a different approach toward media and media studies: one which does not metaphorize disability but understands media as part of the sociocultural, political and economic context where a certain idea of ability and disability is both defined and materially enacted. An approach, therefore, that aims to deconstruct that idea.
In recent years an interesting contribution to media studies has emerged at the intersection between sound studies and disability studies. Two authors in particular have been able to theorize an original and productive meeting of these fields of studies: Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills. In the wake of their researches, several scholars are becoming interested in the relation between media and disability, offering new perspectives to media studies and media theory. In this essay, we review three recently published books which represent recent trends in media and disability studies: Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, by Jonathan Sterne, Failure, by Neta Alexander and Arjun Appadurai, and In Case of Emergency, by Elizabeth Ellcessor.
In order to better contextualize these publications, it is worth starting from previous works by Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills. Sterne is the author of the seminal books The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003), Mp3: The Meaning of a Format (2012a), and The Sound Studies Reader (2012b), in which he defines the intertwining of sound, media and disability as the result of socio-historical, cultural and epistemological factors. In a media-archeological perspective, Sterne’s way of approaching sound brings to light assumptions about hearing and deafness which are embedded in technologies and media, with regard to both their functioning and the discourses and representations of which they are the subject.
Mills is the author of essays on the history of science and technology. Through her research (Mills, 2021, 2012), she shows how the modern concepts of ‘impairment’ and ‘hearing loss’, as well as the contributions of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, were central to the development of telecommunication technologies and signal processing in the 20th century.
Together with Mills, Sterne wrote the Afterword to another seminal book for the meeting of media and disability: Disability Media Studies, curated by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick (2017). Here the two authors define ‘disability as a constituting dimension of media, and media as a constituting dimension of disability’ (Mills and Sterne, 2017: 236). They propose to call their approach ‘dismediation’. This approach is aimed to highlight and critique the ‘ableist’ (Siebers, 2008) assumptions on which not only media technologies but also media studies rely. Ableism has been defined as the normative assumption of non-disability, which results in prejudices toward disability and exclusion of disabled people from social and institutional life. This exclusion can be enacted through media as well, both because disabled have almost no voice in media narrations and because media apparatuses and technologies are often designed and built without keeping disabled people in mind. Beyond McLuhan’s (1964) media-as-prostheses account which has continued to inform media studies, the two authors propose dismediation as a theory that takes disability as a method, not simply as content for media studies. Dismediation theorizes media change and technical design from a disability studies perspective, acknowledging the centrality and significance of the experience of disability for media operations which are not necessarily addressed to disabled people or groups. In so doing, dismediation strikes some ableist assumptions such as the ‘epistemic authority’ of the programmers, the users, the analysts, as well as the assumption that media extend, augment, fix, re-able people and bodies. All those assumptions, in fact, rely on what Siebers (2008: 4) has defined an ‘ideology of ability’, that is the myth of an original and untouched condition of ability that constitutes the essence of the human, which is then corrupted by disability. A corollary to this way of thinking is the idea that the advancement of media technologies is addressed to catching and transmitting with greater ‘fidelity’ the true essence, the soul, the spirit, the intention of a person, something which is well represented by the technical attempt to transmit the message without noise and distortion (Krämer, 2008; Peters, 1999; Thompson, 2017). From this ‘dream of verisimilitude’ (Sterne, 2012a: 3), several ‘ableist’ topoi of media imaginary derive: the possibility to download humans into new hardware whenever their old hardware wears out (a classic of AI); the possibility to assess ability and disability according to metrics; the possibility to fix or cure disability through assistive technologies, as if it were a pathology, in order to restore a presumed original condition of ability.
In contrast to these assumptions, dismediation argues that ‘not only do media produce disability through their textual representations of disability, they produce disability through their very operations, their institutional existences, and their policy and juridical dimensions’. (Mills and Sterne, 2017: 236). As a consequence, media studies informed by disability studies have to reverse the perspective: media do not fix disability; rather, disability is produced by media in the first place, as they are representational technologies that render abstract human qualities as measurable quantities, setting the very norms through which disability is assessed as such.
This consideration accepts and expands on the ‘social model’ of disability, according to which, unlike the medical approach, disability is not an individual defect but a social construct which produces the marginalization of certain people, ‘the product of social injustice, one that requires not the cure or elimination of the defective person but significant changes in the social and built environment’. (Siebers, 2008: 3). In the perspective of dismediation, disability is not only constructed through ideas and discourses, it is also built into material artifacts, technologies and organizational structures. As argued by Ellis and Kent (2011) and by Hamraie (2017), knowledge inscribed in the design of objects and media technologies (including social media interfaces, smartphones and telepresence platforms) can provide or deny access for certain people, thus becoming inextricably interwoven with operative power.
From these premises, this essay identifies three keywords which are potentially game changers in the direction of a non-ableist media theory: impairment, failure, emergency. Each keyword is related to one of the three books we review in the following sections.
Impairment
In his new book Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (2021), Jonathan Sterne starts from a problematization of the classic dualism promoted by disability studies: that between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’. In disability studies, the term ‘impairment’ is distinct from ‘disability’ as it refers to ‘lacking part or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body’ (Oliver, 1996: 22), while disability is rather the disadvantage or marginalization deriving from social organization which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments. Thus, for the social model of disability, impairment is not a problem in itself, since it only concerns the body.
Sterne notes that such a conception of impairment risks falling once more in a metaphysical idea of the ‘able’ subject, that is a subject who is not intrinsically connected and defined by the body, its mechanisms and its prostheses. In this regard, Sterne notes that the term impairment is used to describe both malfunctioning in singular parts of the individual body (as seen in Oliver’s definition) and malfunctioning of machines and instruments (or their parts). Hence his preference for this term over the word ‘disability’: impairment is theoretically productive since it does not assume the individual as a whole, as an abstract subjectivity, but rather focuses on the individual as an assemblage of bodily and technical parts. This concept states that there is a co-constitution between media and human faculties that is not only metaphorical: the ‘transmission impairments’ (Sterne, 2021: 31) which affect media and communication technologies become a material condition through which the individual experiences the world, the self and the other – as happens with hearing aids, or more generally with smartphones, AR glasses, voice amplifiers and so on. Such prostheses not only ‘compensate’ for the bodily impairment, but define new forms of techno-induced impairment through the bias, limits and errors specific to their way of functioning – their ‘nonhuman agencies’ (Ernst, 2016).
This way of understanding impairment clears the term of its traditional connotation of corruption, of ‘diminished faculty’ as the book’s title recites. Impairment becomes inherent not only to the subject but to the socio-material assemblage from which the subject emerges, and as such it escapes from the individual or medical dimension to become a socio-material phenomenon. As Sterne remarks: ‘They assume that impairment is not there. But technologies must be constantly maintained and repaired; people must constantly repeat themselves in conversations; letters are misdelivered; great dancers trip at inopportune times; the bus runs late; VoIP is still terrible even though it’s now ubiquitous in the Global North; people get sick; bodies break down; systems fuck up. The world is full of impairments’. (Sterne, 2021: 197) In this sense, impairment should not be considered a limit, but the condition for the articulation of the social, becoming a condition of possibility, provided we understand the sense of possibility in non-ableist terms. Sterne calls this condition ‘normal impairment’.
In our view, the concept of ‘normal impairment’ sets the baseline for a theoretical attitude which can inspire media studies. Normal impairment, in fact, is first of all a critique on the epistemic authority of the phenomenological subject. Indeed, it is exactly the perspective of impairment which, for Sterne, highlights phenomenology’s main limit, while at the same time offering the potential to overcome it. Phenomenology has traditionally assumed the point of view of a subject in command of their own faculties, a subject (who in practice corresponds to the author of each phenomenological treatise) imagined as being completely ‘able’. On the other hand, the author proposes a ‘political phenomenology of impairment’, which does not assume an ‘epistemic authority’ of the subject, but summons ‘a subject who is somewhere and someplace, unsure of itself; a subject that oscillates between self-assertion and self-abrogation, between agential audacity and claiming its radical dependency and situatedness’ (Sterne, 2021: 19).
This subject is, of course, the author himself. His autobiographical narrations of thyroid cancer treatments are affected by altered states of consciousness induced by surgery, drugs, pain, fatigue, while his apperception is unstable, insofar as it is being transformed by communication technologies and bodily prostheses.
It is no coincidence that this book focuses on sound, in particular on speaking and hearing. Those faculties, in fact, have been traditionally considered by phenomenology as sites of ‘presence’ and self-affection: we need not summon Derrida (1967) to recall the metaphysical privilege attributed to voice as the expression of the inner self, and as such endowed with a value which is inseparable from hearing (i.e. hearing yourself speaking as original self-affection).
Through the use of impairment phenomenology, the author describes the almost complete loss of his voice following a vocal cord paralysis, and the technology adopted to amplify it, which he ironically calls Dork-O-Phone: a loudspeaker hanging from his chest that displaces the supposed origin of the voice. What happens to our perception of the self when our voice no longer emanates from our mouth? What kind of embodiment is produced by speaking through a loudspeaker hanging on one’s chest? Is this device close enough to the body to be considered part of it or its prosthesis? These experiences challenge any universalist or normative conception of ‘presence’, redefining the connection between body, voice and identity (Napolitano, 2020). This condition is well described by the words of Ingunn and John (2003: 491): ‘“Voices” do not exist in and of themselves. They do not reflect something that is pre-given. Rather they are constituted or “articulated” into being in material arrangements which include social, technological and corporeal relations’.
Normal impairment also addresses the almost paradoxical ways in which a society defines certain amounts of impairment as desirable while others undesirable, and it queries how those levels are measured. A little bit of hearing loss is in fact almost necessary in order to do certain jobs or to access certain social groups, while a more drastic change in hearing is considered an impairment. Of course media technologies play a role in the identification of those levels, while they also inscribe them in their functions, contributing to create certain standards of what is considered ‘normal’ hearing, which are eventually law enforced through policies of tolerable noise thresholds. ‘Normal impairment’ is thus a way to ‘denaturalize’ disability and accentuate the need for media studies to bring to light the intertwining of socio-material issues concerning the representations, technical operations, institutional policies, juridical dimensions, through which disability is defined in the first place.
Failure
The breakdown of machines is more and more an everyday situation. In their last book Failure (2020), Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander argue that machine breakdown is normalized and incorporated into lives, experiences and organization models. They define this condition ‘habitual failure’, which is both a new condition of contemporary society, an epistemology and an affective economy. Through this concept, they challenge the solutionist narrative about technology and its reliability, showing how failure is in fact necessary, desired and produced: it is apparently rejected, removed, postponed, while it is also sought after as an escape from norms and a strategic means of valorization. Focusing on Silicon Valley and Wall Street, they highlight how individual, technical and organizational failures are budgeted for and subsequently monetized by tech and financial giants. Planned obsolescence, the broken promise of derivative form, buffering or delays, are some of the failures experienced by users, investors and debtors on a daily basis.
Rather than the perceived infallibility of technology, the authors invite us to look at techno-failure not as an inherent quality or property of artifacts, but as the result of judgment negotiated according to places, times and interests. They show how certain protocols of judgment produce specific ‘regimes of failure’ (Appadurai and Alexander, 2020, p. 2) and how modern capitalism is capable of producing, naturalizing and commodifying failure. This dynamic is related to a specific epistemology of failure, which is aimed at forgetting about failures even though they are repeated over time, thus making it impossible for us to learn from them. Moreover, failure is interiorized in the form of guilt, somatization on the body, anxiety and depression rather than externalized on the infrastructures and technology itself. Here the techno-failure theory is presented as the other aspect of that business model focused on constant updating and obsolescence (p. 22) rather than maintenance and repair.
‘Habitual failure’ is therefore not simple malfunctioning, but the tension between a technical and economic necessity of failure and the narrative that promises ever-increasing fidelity inherent in scientific progress. In this regard, sound studies provide interesting insights to understand the question. As highlighted by Sterne (2003), ‘fidelity’, understood as the correspondence between the technical outcome and a supposed ‘original’ sound, has been culturally established in the framework of sound reproduction technologies. Although any technical mediation of sound implies the loss of information on the one hand and the addition of noise and interference on the other, the concept of fidelity assumes the possibility of eliminating both loss and additions, thus concealing the mediation itself. This cultural process has been ascribed by Dyson (2014: 79) to a metaphysical tendency to think of sound as a transcendent, immersive and immaterial space, in which the (technological) materiality of mediation disappears behind the presumed ontological equivalence between ‘reproduced sound’ and ‘original sound source’. This kind of idea is at the base of the dominance of oral speech in communication and media technologies, as orality is ideally not compromised by the materiality of the body, which, for metaphysics, is an interference, a noise in the purity of the message.
Nevertheless, on the engineering level, noise has always been considered unavoidable. As argued by Thompson (2017), noise should not be considered as just synonymous with undesirable sound or malfunctioning. In Shannon and Weaver, for example, the concept of noise was introduced not only as a disturbance, but above all as a part of information that could be eliminated for the purpose of streamlining the transmission of messages. Noise, in fact, does not decrease but increases the information, at the cost of making signal transmissions less efficient. Thus, the presence of noise is an essential and non-accidental aspect from which it is possible to understand how technical, economic and socio-cultural aspects intertwine in the definition of a theory of communication. While suppression of noise is pursued for technical and economic purposes of bandwidth broadening, the ideal of perfect communication as ‘communication without noise’ is a moralistic effect of the socio-cultural context within which the theory of communication has developed.
Similarly, the suppression of failure in the form of ‘habitual failure’, which no longer no longer ‘makes a difference’ (p. 9), can be seen as the moral judgment behind which regimes of value extraction supported by technology are reinforced. A view of failure as a judgment rather than an inherent property of our artifacts, shifts the responsibility for failures onto consumers-debtors, while technology remains blameless.
This recalls also Natale’s (2021) concept of ‘banal deception’. His core thesis is that deception is not just a side effect or a possible malicious use of AI, but a constitutive element of modern media. AI, in fact, is first of all a range of technologies that provide an illusion of intelligence, relying on the possibility to exploit humans’ liability to be deceived. From this point of view, deception becomes ‘banal’, in the sense that it is embedded in media technologies and contributes to their integration into everyday life. In a scenario where AI technologies are increasingly employed in every aspect of our lives, from entertainment to information, from economy to governance and decision making, banal deception contributes to perceiving media as reliable and nonthreatening, while also concealing the operations of data extraction and algorithmic control that happen behind the interface level and fuel ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019).
In this regard, Appadurai and Alexander invite us to look at the entanglements that lend authority to the stories of certain failures rather than others, with a watchful eye on the technological component with which the actions inherent in those stories connect and stabilize among themselves.
For media studies, this means moving from regarding media as something that can fail to looking for the ways media are designed to fail while narrated as pursuing infallibility. Failure, in fact, can be assessed only from an ableist position that defines in advance what is the right and what is the wrong position. Habitual failure, instead, shows how the very definition of failure, and of disability with it, is constructed and enacted through media, narratives and institutions.
Emergency
Emergency is one of the most commonly used words in recent years. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, emergency had already been recognized as a new form of governance and a new paradigm to read contemporary politics and narratives (Agamben, 2003; Hardt and Negri, 2004; Klein, 2007). In today’s world we jump from one emergency to the next: military engagements, climate crisis, environmental and sanitary crises, humanitarian crises, all may determine the agenda of politics and civil society. Media play a crucial part in this agenda setting: they communicate, narrate, represent emergency, but they also contribute to ‘producing’ it. This is the thesis of Elizabeth Ellcessor in her new book In Case of Emergency (Ellcessor, 2022). Ellcessor is a scholar active in the field of disability studies and media studies. In her previous book Restricted Access: Media, Disability and the Politics of Participation (Ellcessor, 2016), she underlined how digital media affordances can produce both inclusion and exclusion, especially as their use does not fit with certain bodies. In her view, while hailed for their participative potential, digital media restrict access to certain impaired people on a daily basis, in this way producing disability and reinforcing marginalization. When this dynamic is related to emergency, the capacity of media to produce exclusion reaches radical consequences since, in the case of an emergency, access to media affordances may even determine whether first aid and survival can be obtained.
In early 2022, Apple launched the new Apple Watch 7 through an advertising campaign based on the specific function of the watch to generate an alarm that warns families in case of an accident to the person wearing the watch. In the advertising, the emergency is mediated by the Apple watch that promptly sends a message informing of the critical event, providing time-space coordinates through an automatic phone call and a synthetic voice. This is a very meaningful representation of the relation between media and emergency: those who have access to media can have their life saved. Nevertheless, as Ellcessor argues, if access to media is restricted to privileged people (those who can afford them, or those who are able-bodied), media embed the decision of which lives are considered valuable and which unworthy of care.
Media not only work in emergency situations, they also produce emergency through their way of processing events. When media systems construct some moments as emergencies, they render other moments ordinary and undeserving of attention, assistance, or critique. Accordingly, resources and assistance are cut off, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Ellcessor defines ‘emergency media’ the set of technologies, bodies and power that mediate emergency through meanings, operations and symbols, in this way giving it a sense. ‘What is – or is not – an emergency is a matter of technological specificity, of interpretation, of perspective, and of politics, and mediation is central to these determinations’. (p. 4) Technologies mediate experience in order to produce or react to emergency and they do it through their functions. The quantity, variety, and ubiquity of media now available to be used by individuals to prevent, make others aware of, or respond to an emergency are staggering: telephone calls and text messages to first aid numbers; localized emergency systems such as arena loudspeakers and tornado sirens; home, car, and other security alarms; baby monitors for the young and fall monitors for the elderly; television, radio, and text messages conveying public alerts about weather conditions; dedicated safety apps and wearables; and social media that allow one to signal oneself as being ‘safe’ on Facebook or use Twitter to communicate from the sites of natural disasters.
Mediation – via audio, text, video, signal, telephone call, or other means – is key to how emergency is or is not recognized, communicated, felt, and acted upon. As Ellcessor argues, the core ideological work of emergency, reinforced through its constant mediation, is to uphold the existence of a ‘normal’ state of affairs and to offer a path to restore such normalcy. While emergency is traditionally considered as a state of exception from what is normal, it is ever more evident how emergency measures become permanent, casting us into a ‘new normal’. In this sense, it is the normalcy that is defined by the emergency. As happens with disability, media define what is normal through metrics which emerge from the ubiquitous monitoring of people’s actions and bodily functions, for example using sensors implanted on smartphones or directly on the individual’s body that monitor health conditions and transmit data to cloud servers, or directly warn families, as with the Apple watch. The prevention and answer to emergencies which may concern people’s health due to accidents and diseases (as experienced with the tracing apps used during the Covid-19 pandemic) relies on the potential of media technologies to gather and process data about people. Those data are not only used in emergencies but also produce metrics that are both statistical definitions of normalcy and performative tools that reproduce normalcy through the marginalization of those who do not comply with the standards they set (Alexander, 2019). For example, it is ever more popular to use algorithm-driven hiring tools which rely on medical data to automatically assess candidates’ profiles (Brown et al., 2020), with the risk of bias and prejudice especially for disabled people. Those very people, in fact, are most subject to this risk, both because they rely more than others on medical apps – and so are monitored to a greater degree – and because they often do not comply with the standards used to assess people’s suitability for a job.
Alerts are another tool through which media produce emergency in everyday life, turning communication activities into attention baits. People’s increasing habit of receiving notifications in order to obtain information about different activities (shipping notification, message, bank transfer. . .) produces a condition of ‘habitual emergency’. Also in this case, sound studies may have something to say about the auditory dimension of alerts, sirens and other sonic signals through which emergency is represented and enacted (Bull, 2020).
If social norms are built into technical objects (Czarniawska, 2014), emergency media inscribe ways to perceive and interpret what has to be considered normal and what exceptional, and accordingly to manage the lives of able-bodied and disabled people.
Conclusion
The three keywords here identified through book reviews challenge mainstream narratives of media, introducing some features which are usually associated to negative values. Nevertheless, the books here reviewed do not consider those terms as defects, but highlight the ‘normal’, ‘banal’ or ‘habitual’ character of impairment, failure, malfunctioning, deception, emergency. In this way they highlight the constitutive and socio-material dimension of these aspects rather than considering them as inherent to the individual or as expressions of the ‘corruption’ of an ideal uncorrupted (and as such ‘able’) nature. We consider that as a step toward a non-normative and non-ableist theory of media.
Starting from McLuhan’s idea of media as prostheses, disability has very often been employed in media studies ‘as a metaphor in the service of another’s cause’ (Alper, 2017: 2): although it refers to disability as emblematic of the human experience, it does not directly address the real conditions of those with disabilities and the system of organizations, institutions and technologies which marginalize, reduce to silence, and therefore disable those people on a daily basis. Media are considered or dreamed of as enhancers of communication (Turkle, 2015), assuming that communication’s archetype is the natural ‘ability’ to speak – something Sterne (2011) has already noticed in the work of Walter Ong, another master of the Canadian school. The three keywords here identified call for a different approach toward media and media studies: one which does not metaphorize disability, but which understands media as part of the sociocultural, political and economic context where a certain idea of ability and disability is both defined and materially enacted. An approach, therefore, that aims to deconstruct that idea.
