Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication

by Joshua St. Pierre

In Cheap Disability and the Politics of Communication , Joshua St. Pierre flips the script on communication disability, positioning the unruly, disabled speaker at the center of analysis to challenge the belief that more communication is unquestionably good. Working with Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion that “[w]e don’t suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we’ve nothing much to say,” St. Pierre brings together the unlikely trio of the dysfluent speaker, the talking head, and the troll to show how speech is made cheap—and produced and repaired within human bodies—to meet the inhuman needs of capital. The book explores how technologies, like social media and the field of speech-language pathology, create smooth sites of contact that are exclusionary for disabled speakers and looks to the political possibilities of disabled voices to “de-face” the power of speech now entwined with capital.

180 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2022

Reviews

[javor · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly interesting read given the relative nonexistence of what St. Pierre terms dysfluency studies. As a fellow disabled speaker, I found this book to be both very inspiring, in terms of not accepting typical narratives and discourses of disability and pathology, as well as powerful in confirming many of my suspicions around the supposedly apolitical and neutral sciences of linguistics and speech-language pathology. St. Pierre engages with an impressive range of thinkers ranging from Diogenes to Foucault, Lazzarato to Puar, and engages with critical disability studies, communication studies, queer theory, semiotics, posthumanism, Cynicism, speech-language pathology, and much more. Aside from simply forwarding an unapologetic minor politics of dysfluency, St. Pierre also situates the dysfluent speaker within the political nexus of race, gender, and class, and examines how language and communication themselves have become captured by capital in the neoliberal age of semiocapitalism, thus putting the speech of the dysfluent speaker in conversation with that of the troll and the talking head. This is overall an impressive work and is an exciting new venture into a virtually brand new field of study.

[Chris Nagel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The butler did it.

[Noah Christiansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read:
- Preface
- Introduction