![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
We have written this article as performative co-autoethnography in which we focus on a crisis of communication we experienced as deaf/nondeaf collaborators. We bring together Deleuze's concept of ‘becoming-other’ with Guattari's concept of ‘a-signifying semiotics’ to demonstrate how a focus on the affective dynamics of a-signification allows us to attend to the immanent nature of deaf/nondeaf communication. Situating the highlighted crisis within the larger context of Joseph Valente's work as the only deaf professor within a larger, audist university culture, we work to performatively demonstrate the rich necessity of keeping the dynamic, unknowable, intense, frightening, and exciting nature of negotiating communicative differences at the forefront of our research and our day-to-day collaboration.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For more description of Valente's experiences working in an audist university (see Boldt & Valente, Citation2016; Valente, Citation2014, Citation2019).
2 We are grateful to Reviewer #2 for pointing out that while ‘the representational has been in the centre of the 20th century mainstream linguistic research endeavour, immanence was also there as its B side in concepts like the one of “interaction” in Bakhtin works, in the ‘enunciation’ of Benveniste and in the ‘sociointeractional sociolinguistics’ of Gumperz and Hymes, among others, which had a concern with the material dimensions of language and semiotics.’