I thank Michelle Charette for the playful response to my playful text. The story painted by Charette of Prince’s dysfluency is so vivid I can’t help but imagine the canine exploits as an additional vignette within Cheap Talk.

But before getting to any moral of this vignette, I am struck by the differing versions the story of Prince can take. For Charette, Prince and company seem to suggest a drama of biologically mandated social psychology, where Prince’s somatic difference signals differentiation from the pack, which, through in-group favoritism, marks him as potentially dangerous and (by necessity?) results in group exclusion. Notably, in this telling, the concept of “nature” occupies a decisive role: “Prince’s new bark startles the pack. Some of the dogs dismiss Prince altogether—in their nature exists only two options: ‘bite Prince into submission or force him into exile.’ Do human beings share this stubbornness?” (emphases mine). The exclusion of dysfluent members of community gets underwritten by a natural, if regrettable, preference for fluency insofar as normative communication facilitates both group cohesion (signaling in-group belonging through aesthetic norms) and group survival (functional clarity of communication).

I agree that the exile of Prince is irreducible to politics. But I want to put another version of the story on the table, one that does not pit materiality against politics so fiercely. My reading is colored by a felt kinship with this sly animal coming into language on its own (often illegible yet immensely pleasurable) terms, but also by the fact that Prince is hardly a tragic figure. Indeed, exiled from community or not, Prince turns out to be, of the fifteen, the only happy dog to lose Apollo the bet.

My wager is that Prince can offer instruction about the political and existential inflections of animal play. Allow me a side-step as I turn to Brian Massumi for theoretical coordinates of this reading. In What Can Animals Teach Us About Politics?, Massumi notes that neo-Darwinian accounts of animal play make playful—”ludic”—gestures subservient to their instrumental function. For example, the play-fighting of dog pups exists to teach them future adaptive skills, in the same manner that human pups play at/in symbolic gestures in order to arrive at later communicative advantage. Massumi will instead suggest that play forms an autonomous domain of life irreducible to adaptive functions:

It is all in the gap between the bite and the nip, moving and gamboling, executing an action and dramatizing it. . . . A ludic gesture in a play fight is not content to be the same as its analogue in combat. It is not so much “like” a combat move as it is combatesque: like in combat, but with a little something different, a little something more. With a surplus: an excess of energy or spirit.1

Play is initiated in the subtle gap between dramatizing and executing an act. For Massumi, what distinguishes the nip from the bite is not just the strength of the bite, but the qualitative difference he calls style: “The ludic gesture is performed with a mischievous air, with an impish exaggeration or misdirection, or on the more nuanced end of the spectrum, a flourish.”2 If, at any point, the play-fighting loses this excess spirit that communicates (or metacommunicates) “this is not a bite,” the act collapses into its analogue function.

Two relevant implications follow. 1) Massumi insists that play necessarily belongs to an aesthetic domain. “The aesthetic yield is the qualitative excess of an act lived purely for its own sake, as a value in itself, over and against any function the act might also fulfill.”3 This is a metric of the “uselessness” of an act insofar as the ludic style holds the analogue (instrumental) function of the act in suspense.4 The aesthetic quality of life interrupts the analogue function of any gesture and thereby “opens the door to improvisation,” which makes play “the arena of activity dedicated to the improvisation of gestural forms, a veritable laboratory of forms of live action.”5

2) If play is an instinctive domain of life dedicated to experimentation with expressive variation (and the metacommunication that entails), it follows for Massumi that play is also an autonomous domain “that is fundamentally insubordinate to the logic of adaptation, even if it may be usefully captured by it under certain circumstances.”6 This makes fluency a mere subset of communication rather than the normative standard. Fluency is serious communication (straight talk aghast at deferred execution) that serves an important function, but is nevertheless prone to claim the entire house as its own.

What, then, if the vignette went something like this?

Drunk and bored one night, Apollo and Hermes make a wager on animal intelligence. Would non-human animals be happy7 if their powers were amplified and altered to match the form of human intelligence? The gods “gift” fifteen dogs these powers, but only the mutt named Prince awakes to symbolic language as a trickster. Prince finds joy in the aesthetic yield of language; puns, poetry, and sonorous amusement are his play; this (dare I say crip) pleasure in non-instrumentality produces the conditions for his demise, as a political order fearful of invention snaps close around a supposedly natural form of life subservient to functional adaptation. Prince is exiled but retains his playful spirit such that Apollo (like Satan in the Biblical tale of Job, when the plan springs a leak) launches a last-ditch effort: he disables Prince with blindness. And as with Satan, Apollo finds himself failed by the truism that happiness rides upon ableism. Play streaks Prince’s final thoughts:

But how wonderful that he—unexceptional though he had been—had been allowed to know [his language] as deeply as he had. He had not explored all of its depths, but he had seen them. And so it occurred to Prince that he had been given a great gift. More: it was a gift that could not be destroyed. Somewhere, within some other being, his beautiful language existed as a possibility, perhaps as a seed. It would flower again.8

A re-articulated relationship between play and functional adaptation can help unweave a fluent story of dysfluency. My reading of Fifteen Dogs that puts animal play at the vibrating center of language and life is hardly definite, but I believe it finds some textual support.

Hermes muses that though Prince was anything but a sure bet, his “wit, his playfulness, was a curious element within him, a glittering depth. It was this, in the end, that the god of thieves had chosen to protect. Prince’s spirit was a kind of quicksilver.”9 More than any disorder wrought in the functional operations of the pack, it is perhaps this playful excess of spirit that most threatens the ringleaders Frick and Frack:

Prince’s witticisms were not the worst of it. Previously, they, like all dogs, had made do with a simple vocabulary of fundamental sounds: bark, howl or snarl. These sounds were acceptable, as were useful innovations, like the word for “water” or the one for “human.” At Prince’s instigation, however, the pack now had words for countless things. (Did any dog really need a word for “dust”?) . . . [H]e had been playing. He had been pretending. He had been speaking for speaking’s sake. Could there be a more despicable use for words?10

If Frick and Frack had reflected upon the metacommunicative structure that play had already introduced into their “simple vocabulary of fundamental sounds,” they might have recognized their aesthetic judgment against Prince for what it was. It takes slavish obedience to the logic of functional adaptation—a form of obedience I would name political—to foment such hatred against acts lived for their own sake, like “speaking for speaking’s sake,” or stuttering for stuttering’s sake.

That is to say, Frick and Frack arguably express a reactionist commitment to a purity of language—natural and original—that binds a likewise pure community. “It wasn’t just that Prince was twisting their clear, noble language, it was that Prince had gone beyond the canine.”11 From here, violence becomes a necessary act: “No true dog could have uttered such tripe. Prince was not worthy of being one of them. In defense of their true nature, someone had to do something” (ibid; emphases mine). I suggest this is less a failure to “cultivate an agonistic sense of playfulness” (Charette)—which situates playfulness as an acquired skill—and more that Frick and Frack declare mutiny against the instinctual domain of play by demanding only clear language, turning life against itself to assert a hegemonic political order.

My hope in retelling this story is to renegotiate the relation between material and political forces that congeal in the formation and reformation of human sensoria. Charette takes the choice between either biting Prince into submission or forcing him into exile to be an expression of inflexible animal truths like “fixity and comfort are intuitive.” However, the choice confronting the pack was not quite so binary. That other dogs in the pack came to an alternative conclusion that Prince “had brought something unexpected and wonderful”12 to their language illuminates play (inventiveness, openness, and variation) as an instinctual and autonomous field that Frick and Frack seek to dominate rather than solicit. This is to say, I agree with Charette that “the form of the message may often be determined by normative and political agendas, [but] so too is it shaped by embodied, material conditions” but only with the amendment that neither field has an original nor exclusive purchase on the development of (human) animal sensoria. The bewildered yet delighted response of some dogs toward communicative variation was just as material, just as embodied as the resentment; and both were shot through with political expectation. The basic coordinates of the social habitus, and its constitutive texture, are established through a dense ecology of force (material and semiotic) that are thrown into relief by unruly bodyminds.

Let me step back. The worry for Charette (as I understand) is that human sensoria are governed by relatively inflexible biosocial realities. “We notice and act on the world in specific ways, not because of our politics, but because of our typical sensory encounters and the habits formed therein.” While we may wish that people would have more time and generosity for weird, dysfluent vocalizations, the field of listening is too rigid and too determined by the demands of material conditions to expect ableist collective listening habits to shift with anything but a long-term social project. If dysfluency studies has little to offer individuals in the interim, therapeutic technologies shore up this deficit with necessary short-term relief from suffering and pain. However, the equation changes when a) we acknowledge that perception can only arrive at conscious experience highly processed by a multitude of factors and also b) affirm that dysfluency studies indeed has much to offer imminently.

Pain is a sticking point. “Is the lived experience of suffering ever warrant[s] therapeutic intervention?” My answer is yes! Therapy is a right not a duty, and in agreement with Eli Clare, “we need neither a wholehearted acceptance nor an outright rejection of cure, but rather a broad-based grappling.”13 I live with chronic pain, sometimes aggravated by stuttering, and, like many crips, use pharmaceutical therapies. The more pressing question concerns the way in which our mode of engagement with such technologies either invests or divests in a curative imagination. I am compelled by Kelly Fritsch and Aimi Hamraie who suggest relating to accessibility technologies in a mode of friction:

While historically central to the fights for disability access, crip technoscience is nevertheless committed to pushing beyond liberal and assimilation based approaches to accessibility, which emphasize inclusion in mainstream society, to pursue access as friction, particularly paying attention to access-making as disabled peoples’ acts of non-compliance and protest.14

Articulated within a crip politic that is wary both of liberal promises of belonging through assimilation, and of technocratic promises of the cure “just around the corner,”15 frictive and non-compliant actions are simultaneously a “no” and “yes.” The refusal of straight speech is not just an interruption, “a sacred No;”16 it is more fully an invitation to inhabit other modes of being and prefigure another, more accessible, world. At the heart of Cheap Talk is an invitation to build worlds using crip materials, tools, and processes.

Much turns upon whether we can first imagine, let alone affirm, dysfluency as a positive modality of life that offers a generative and immanent critique. I hope fluent folk feel welcome to join us in these projects, but I should note that they are necessarily staged in the mud of crip linguistic gestures. The sticky mud with unexpected accidents is the laboratory where stuttering happens for its own sake, a milieu where we get to share in the pleasure of speaking and cultivate (among other things) new and empowering modes of relating to one another. As I noted near the end of Cheap Talk, it is likely that dysfluent communities will always need fluent allies to help advocate for us and navigate ableist terrain. Likewise, when possible, the strategic use of fluency by dysfluent folk is certainly a legitimate strategy to survive in an ableist society.

And yet, the risk of investing much hope or energy into fluency is significant: the erosion of the communicative soil with the capacity to support the “pluripotential” development of Crip forms of life and Crip worlds.17 The risk is that justice for dysfluent folk is still deferred “just around the corner” with an endless parade of reasons for the delay. “We must certainly examine our attachments to patterns of communication,” writes Charette, “and what (or who) they serve. But examining these attachments and changing them seem like two separate projects, the latter long-term. Refusal is not always appropriate. Maybe fluency can be emancipatory.” It is not clear to me why transforming individual and collective habits of communication can only be expected in the Other World when prefigurative politics enacts the future we want by how we live and experiment with it right now. Sure, social and governmental infrastructure would be helpful to shift ableist listening habits, but there’s no point waiting around. And though refusing the refusal of fluency is an available choice for some, many cannot help but be dysfluent (whether in writing or speaking or both). For many of us dysfluent folk, coming clean and getting straight with speech is never going to be an option.

In conclusion, I want to circle back to a dangerous tendency that flows from neo-Darwinian accounts of the human speaking animal (which I argue both Alexis and Charette reproduce at various points in their arguments). The tendency is that of misplaced concreteness, of treating an emergent process (like rational human speech) as a preset and necessary thing. “The listener and the speaker, the doctor and her patient, Prince and his pack . . . might all these actors have a vested interest in becoming fluent with one another?” I take “becoming fluent” to be a stand-in for “communicating well,” and wonder what ethicopolitical constellations have been foreclosed in this elision that concedes so much territory to the all-too-serious power of clarity.

I will not even attempt a direct response to Roshaya Rodness’s commentary; instead, I want to honor queer/crip kinship and respond with wry circumlocution. The voice, after all, is butt stuff.

The narrative of the Prodigal Son is daily gruel in Christian fundamentalism and wears pathways deep in humans raised within its walls. The story, found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15, goes like this: A father distributed equal wealth to his two sons. The elder, dutiful, child stayed to tend the farm, but the young son squandered all his inheritance on “wild living”—sex workers and gambling in the city. Only when he was starved, mucking about with pigs, and begging for food did the Prodigal Son recognize his error and crawl straight home to a father waiting with open arms.

Embedded within this narrative arc is a theology of salvation (a “soteriology”) in which the disobedient human strays far from the house of God and must be “straightened out”—saved from their own depravity (through privation if necessary) and, now properly humbled, returned home by the straight and narrow. What was lost is now found; what was broken, regenerates; what was crooked, restored.

In the Confessions (arguably the defining model of Christian soteriology), Saint Augustine self-identifies with the disobedience of the Prodigal Child: “[I]nstead of preserving my strength for you, I went away from you into a far country to waste my substance.”1 Augustine also calls the country far from God “the country of death”2 that the sinner reaches by “crooked ways,”3 wayward trajectories of unholy desire forged when, Augustine writes in first person, “I wandered with a stiff neck on my path further and further away from you, loving my own ways and not yours.”4

And so, led astray by rebellious desire, Prodigal Augustine wastes his substance in a country far from God. From what I understand, “substance” (or substantia) connotes a full range of human capacities, as well as affordances like financial wealth.5 But Augustine’s not not talking about sexuality either. “Where was I, and how far was I banished from the delights of your house in that sixteenth year of my flesh,” he whimpers like an evangelical teen in their weekly accountability meeting to come clean about masturbation, “when the madness of lust . . . held complete sway over me.”6 Poor Augustine. Where is his substance to go? What is it even for? One can almost hear Lee Edelman taunting Augustine about anxiety-riddled attachments to reproductive futurism.

Part of the enduring power of the Prodigal Child comes from its connection to multiple wells of human meaning. The soteriological trappings of the story are religious, but always in play when the narrative is invoked (either textually or subtextually) are matters such as kinship, belonging, tradition, duty, growth, freedom, just dessert, reparation, individual shame, collective desire, and futurity. This is why being labeled a Prodigal Child cuts so deep, and also why the term casts a wide net—I have found much kinship in queer communities around the shared experience of exile from communities of care. When ascribed to human beings, the label of Prodigal Child is a living artifact, a sociocultural weapon that has been used generation upon generation to 1) diminish fellow humans who transgress a sociomoral code in hope they will straighten out, and 2) diffuse structural responsibility such that, whether the Prodigal Child returns or not, the ethico-onto-epistemological business in the Father’s household continues as usual.

Don’t worry, we’re getting to the butt—just taking our time.

Here’s an alternate version of the narrative of the Prodigal Child that has become familiar to me living amongst queer/Crip communities: Some humans are raised in cultures of fear and conditioned to believe that beyond the small glow of home, the world is bathed in death. But some (whether to explore, escape, or both) nevertheless leave the glow of home, then the preset trajectories, and have enough luck to find communities of life flourishing, growing wild where they were told to expect only dust. Wild living.

Fifteen years ago a priest acknowledged, soft-spoken, that I was in the wilderness and, in a very un-Augustinian pastoral moment, gave me permission to stay. The priest was a tender soul; I wonder if he had read José Esteban Muñoz: “We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. Queerness is illegible and therefore lost in relation to the straight minds’ mapping of space.”7 It is in the moment of finding oneself truly lost, the proverbial moment of hitting rock bottom, that the impulse for salvation rushes up. The invitation to come clean, to confess the sin of rebellion, and come home running long tugged at my gut. And yet, we know there is no going back. We know we are lost; not within ourselves, but in relation to dominant coordinates that map space and time (both social and metaphysical) in straight lines. I resonate with Muñoz’s insight that “To accept loss is to accept the way in which one’s queerness will always render one lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives.”8 Not without some amount of grieving do we accept that queer/crip beings will always be lost, rendered illegible and thus necessarily Prodigal within a system of compulsory heterosexuality/compulsory able-bodiedness that expects those of us living far beyond the Fathers’ house to affirm the unspoken question “Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be just like me?”9 with contrite confession, but instead respond “I’m good thanks.”

To paraphrase Eli Clare more than a little, the refusal to come clean is the beginning of wisdom. The “ideology of cure”10 and the narrative of the Prodigal Child are both theories of salvation structured around restoration. The ideology of cure, as with the narrative of the Prodigal Child, requires damage and “[locates] the harm entirely within individual human body-minds, as if each person were their own ecosystem.”11 Both soteriologies are nostalgic for a past unblemished by damage and thus, in a compulsory manner, both “[seek] to return what is damaged to that former state of being”12 that awaits with open arms. This project is not only violent but terribly misguided. How, Clare ponders, would one “restore” his trembling body-mind when it has always been so and shaped/shapes his becoming? Instead of pining for an original state of being impossible to imagine yet alone obtain through salvific intervention, Clare invites us into the quick of existence that is represented by the composition and growth of soil (which is to say, the historical composition and relational growth of the immanent conditions of life). The feel of the dirt is the beginning of wisdom.

There is more to say about the Prodigal Child and the a-Prodigal Crip, but, thinking with Rodness, I pause here to consider dysfluent speech as Prodigal Speech. From the purview of the straight speaker—i.e. the pure vessel of Truth—Prodigal Speech would describe non-compliant speech locatable within a curative trajectory.13 The crooked paths forged by the dysfluent bodymind are tolerable if the prodigal speaker can accept their need for salvation and, at the very least, desire to get straight with logos and aim toward home. Yes, of course human speech ought to flow only through the mouth and yes, purely.

Nevertheless, dysfluency persists. “It’s hard not to shit-talk,” Rodness explains, because “[w]e never quite know where our voice comes from. . . . It veers off the straight line of the tongue and detours through other ports.” The anxious need to contain the voice in a pure vessel of Truth is one reaction to our collective state of vocal estrangement from an original source (the Father’s house) that results in the hypersurveillance, policing, and violent control of various bodily ports, but especially the tongue and the ass. Consider the apostle James, among the first in a long line of Christian authors fixated with the soteriological mastery of bodily ports:

Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check. . . . The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.14

A world of evil among the parts of the body. From the vantage of two millennia of Christian history that includes generation after generation of heterosexist oppression, we know, as Rodness references, that the tongue is not the only target; the anus is another semiotic port rendered impossible yet necessary to master along the path of salvation. Bad air! Bad air!

Enough—let us set the fluent purview aside. What gets lost on those who dwell too-comfortably in the glow of compulsory able-bodiedness, fluency, or heterosexuality is the very desirability of uncertain events like dysfluency or queerness; put again, what gets lost on those who cannot help but organize the world in terms of prodigal departure and return is the possibility of “desiring disability differently.”15 With Rodness I affirm that dysfluency is a promissory site (never given in advance) for “words or even pauses, blocks, and stutters for queer life that are not names, voices that want to do something stranger than be heard.” The queer, tangled, uncertain, yet promissory future that dysfluent voices can solicit in their desire to do something stranger than be heard resonates with the mode of queer sensation put forward by J. Logan Smilges, who “approach[es] queer not only as that which is impossible to predict but also as that which cannot always be understood right here and now.”16

But with Rodness, I also mourn that conservative talking heads/trolls are prone to fashion the queer illegibility that holds many of us in joyous connection into weapons that they mobilize, again-after-again, against queer communities. The promise of unspeakability mutates into fear and resentment of what the present cannot render understandable, which bubbles to the surface as moral panic formalized in bans on speech that make queer life unspeakable. As if these great Christians have heard God personally command them to “[b]eat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears,”17 they turn away from the becoming of the earth to find arms, they brush the dirt of the world from their feet and, with contempt, slam the saved within the house of the speakable God.

As I argue in Cheap Talk, talking heads that make crip/queer life more recognizable according to dominant grammars can play strategic functions toward collective justice, but the act of rendering the illegible legible also displaces the struggle over collective desire (which further marginalizes queer/crip populations who fringe the collective imaginary). I am reminded by Kelly Fritsch and Ann McGuire that “[a]s long as disability remains an untenable way of being, disability will not only continue to haunt us as an object of dread but will also be selectively weaponized against us to support the targeted debilitation of particular—and often already marginalized—populations.”18 If crip-queer speech is butt stuff that “sound[s] out an irregular grammar of defiance” (Rodness), what might stuttering parrhesia offer in this moment of crisis?

Rodness is right; I have no easy answers. Yes, any remedy to our parrhesiastic crisis begins with not speaking straight—but perhaps I can venture a little more. Voices that want something stranger than to be heard desire to desire differently, which is to say, to transform disability and queerness into tenable ways of being and, in the process, exorcize specters that oppress disability and queerness. Note that “tenable” refers to desirable and livable lives, not lives communicable by heterosexist/ableist/colonial imperatives.

What our strangeness thus desires to transform—where necessary, for survival and flourishing—is the machinery of Prodigalization itself, such that what stuttering parrhesia might offer changes whether we refer to communication within crip, queer, and other marginalized communities, or communication between crip/queer communities and (often heterosexist and ableist) organizations, local groups, government actors, or other groups. In either encounter, butt talk (scatologically honest and a-soteriological speech) expresses power that works upon lower registers of our beings—where ritual, habit, and gesture have more purchase than intellectualist argument. Put otherwise, in each case stuttering parrhesia puts far more at stake than the communication of information within and across social groups; to stutter through the anus is an embodied mode of “knowing-making”19 that McRuer et al. would call a “cripistemology.”20 This is the realm of the unspeakable.

Within counter-hegemonic communities, stuttering parrhesia improvises with / maintains individual and collective energies, the raw materials of any world-building. As David Serlin notes, “[e]xperiences of bodily difference and desire, in all of their variegated glories, are the most likely dimensions of subjective identity to be sacrificed for the privilege of social and political legibility.”21

Across the lines of social hegemony, “the bracing drip of an honest emission” (Rodness) again does weirder things than convey information. If communication is ritual,22 we should keep in mind that “[p]art of the meaning of a ritual is that collectivity is shown to be possible and that doubts and tensions are formally proscribed. The essence of a ritual is that a collectivity is postulated or affirmed which might otherwise only have an ambiguous social existence.”23 Stuttering parrhesia routes social realities through a cripistemology in order to affirm an ambiguous life and frustrate its translation into heterosexist / able-bodied imperatives.

I am not saying stuttering parrhesia offers sufficient conditions for political action in this moment of growing trans-panic when the unspeakable is a weapon turned against ambiguous social existence. My point is that stuttering parrhesia past the edges of the speakable expresses not only a refusal to speak straight, but a refusal to know straight that aligns with Jack Halberstam’s insistence that “[a]ny cripistemology worth its name should identify modes of not knowing, unknowing, and failing to know.”24 If world-knowing and world-making are projects intertwined, stuttering parrhesia invites an a-prodigalization of both.

Cheap Talk was completed in 2020, two years before ChatGPT took home in the global village and thus, sadly, did not appear in the manuscript. Yet ChatGPT is here to stay, less a trinket than an inhuman kin that has entered our lives—like an endlessly loquacious uncle (recently retired) who can equally get to the point as he can bullshit for hours. His words may be cheap, but our new uncle is unquestionably fun.

“Hey Uncle, what’s your take on Cheap Talk?”

[Write a critique of the book Cheap Talk]

One notable strength lies in St. Pierre’s critique of how info-capitalism’s emphasis on speed and fluency can lead to the devaluation of meaningful communication. By tracing the impact of technological chatter on speech, St. Pierre highlights the erosion of transformative potential in relationality and creativity within communicative spaces.

However, the book’s generalization of info-capitalism as a monolithic force might oversimplify the diverse impacts of technology on communication. A more nuanced exploration acknowledging instances where technology fosters genuine connection and positive change could provide a more balanced perspective.

Moreover, the practical implementation of “crip politics” raises questions. While St. Pierre challenges the status quo, the book lacks a comprehensive discussion on how individuals or communities can navigate dysfluent communication effectively. Concrete strategies or case studies could enhance the book’s applicability.

What makes this Uncle so fun is not only that he speaks in paragraphs, spitting out prose like Charles Dickens, but also that he is a master ventriloquist, the ultimate devil’s advocate—able to add yet one more perspective (i.e. set of talking points) on a dime. “Hey Uncle, aren’t you well-connected in neoliberal communities? What would they say about Crip politics?” “You also dabble in fascism, what’s their hot take?” He will play this game as long as I indulge.

However, while the metaphor of ChatGPT-as-garrulous-uncle is illustrative, the externality of kinship structures detracts from the specific point of becoming other toward which Kim Hall draws our attention. Put otherwise, it makes the most sense to consider ChatGPT an inhuman kin when the self is itself considered a “family gathering,” an assemblage, multiplicity defined by regularity yet endlessly open to change. The entrance of this particular inhuman other into our subjective midst has brought ancient family feuds to the surface and is disturbing the humanist peace.

I argue in Cheap Talk that the unruly capacity to speak requires a vast biopolitical infrastructure to be rendered a Cheap Nature—docile and inexpensive to produce/maintain. Hall illustrates how the social production of cheap writing flows alongside that of cheap talk:

[M]ainstream anxieties about ChatGPT seem to be about whether it will promote or hinder (cheap) writing ability—a decontextualized and disembodied conception in which writing is reduced to efficiency and making the best use of one’s time, as well as the speed with which an idea moves from the brain to the keyboard or pen, the fluency of prose, and adherence to the rules of grammar. Good writing comes from the disembodied mind and, as such, is seamless and without friction of encounters with others. The labor, uncertainty, and messiness of writing has been removed.

Why educational institutions permit access to support like calculators but not tutors in a math exam often comes down to what technologies can flourish in the conditions of “the real world”—i.e. the marketplace of the world; the workplace as defined by neoliberal preoccupations. Technologies that promote and extend cheap writing likewise do so, as Hall indicates, by prefiguring the conditions of neoliberalism—i.e. removing the “friction of encounters with others” in order to cultivate disembodied, efficient, ordered, and self-sufficient minds. In this model, “external” supports like writing tutors and circumlocutionary writing exercises are useful scaffolds to develop writing ability that must, nevertheless, be torn down once construction of the mind is complete and put to work.

If the friction of encounter with “others” is what we must avoid, it is instructive which others count as others. Bringing a relative to work to edit and draft documents is unacceptable, but keeping my new inhuman uncle an alt-tab away is a slightly different story. Some technologies (better: vectors of subjectivity) can be welcomed into the ideal (fluent and cheap) info-worker, others can be tolerated if hidden, and still other technologies must be expelled from the self. What are the stakes of not recognizing ChatGPT as intrasubjective kin? Or perhaps better, what are the stakes of becoming-machine without a politic of dis/ability that supports linguistic uncertainty and messiness?

Hall names one prominent danger: fascism. To surrender our communicative capacities to market signals is to trust in cheap talk / writing, which is to abandon access to the very methods of shared deliberation (i.e. public reason). One of the prime dangers of cheap talk / writing is that pointlessness can be pointed in nearly any direction. Cheap talk can serve neoliberal fantasies one day, fascist securitization the next. The world is slippery without friction.

However, thinking with Hall, the danger of cheap writing that I want to focus on here is related yet attached to its own problematics—the danger of ChatGPT and disability access. On one hand, cheap writing is liberating for many Crip folk. My neurodiverse brain experiences a soul-crushing amount of stress from email (the executive functioning, Sisyphean task of drafting, endlessly, executable but otherwise meaningless responses to a hundred demands on my spoons). If ChatGPT, that bored retiree, is eager to help assist cheap writing—who am I to say no? Based on conversations with friends in various disability communities, my hunch is that ChatGPT has “stepped up” in similar ways for a lot of Crip folk.

Little surprise; Crips are very often early adopters of new technologies. We are communities of tinkerers1 who are quite adept at repurposing technologies for the needs and desires of our people. “Our collective experiences and histories,” Hamraie and Fritsch write, “have taught us that we are effective agents of world-building and -dismantling toward more socially just relations.”2 Assemblages of cheap writing like ChatGPT are indeed tools that can help reform the semiotic playing field, curb-cuts for information societies. Yet Hamraie and Fritsch proceed with a caveat. “The grounds for social justice and world-remaking, however, are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters.”3 ChatGPT is committed to absorbing the difference of disability, more users and thus data points on the road to universal communication, but it does not—cannot—commit to disability as a difference that matters (and thus invite this difference behind the curtain, into its design). As such, “cripistemological”4 desires for friction, inefficiency, uncertainty, and aporia fall away.

There are differences between an ableist interlocutor who interrupts a stuttering moment to try and complete the sentence (according to a normative grammar), and Uncle ChatGPT who not only finishes but begins whole paragraphs using the predictive patterning of normative grammars. But both, nevertheless, are technologies of fluency that, time and again, will favor the lowest common denominator of meaning.

Side Shuffle: I am reminded of Mel Chen’s critique of “plain language.” As a reminder, plain language describes a form of clear and straightforward writing or speaking meant to include more folk in disability culture, “a way of writing or speaking so people understand you the first time they read or hear it.”5 With Chen,6 I appreciate the political impulse behind offering plain language interpretations of disability texts, since “the best way to make things accessible is [usually] to have lots of different ways of communicating.”7 But also with Chen, I worry that plain language enacts a performative contradiction: the expectation to be understood the first time—without friction, uncertainty, and aporia—is itself a condition of (white) able-bodied supremacy. “Plain language, to me, with its commonest goal,” Chen writes, “is kin to clarity, which has been weaponized against so many even as it has assisted others; the two groups it divides fall neatly into neither ‘non disabled’ and ‘disabled’ nor ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinated.'”8 In other words, the messy excess of meaning, identity, and materiality that makes crip writing crip9 is what plain language undercuts in the name of (accessible) communication. At this point, Chen draws attention to the whiteness of communication: “Standardized language—too clearly the source of plain language, even if they are not the same—has killed living languages, small and large, in cities, suburbs, and plains, at borders, minoritized or assaulted by colonization and domination.”10 In the name of the common, the uncommon enunciation must perish.

In their own ways, both Hall and Chen insist upon the “existential and political possibilities of writing, possibilities that are foreclosed by an emphasis on smooth, fast writing.” ChatGPT is capable of reducing complex texts to plain language, of smoothing out polysemy and uncertainty. Is this a brave new world? What will the Crips (be able to) say?

I am honored by the close reading that Martin offered Cheap Talk and, in response, want to consider the role of complaint within practices of Crip world-building. Like much (all?) of my work, Cheap Talk blends personal, critical, creative, and speculative writing about as much as I can get away with. I found some humor in Martin’s suggestion that the vignettes “read like little essays that should have been (but thankfully weren’t!) cut during the editorial process,” since the cutting room floor of this book was littered to the point of compost with quips, complaints and vignettes that were likely too personal or cheeky to hold critical tension—to say nothing of being publishable. Yet if playing and experimenting with such tension is the work of Crip authorship, I’m still curious what I can get away with.

This response is going to focus on the concept of Crip complaint. I am thankful for Martin’s observation that Cheap Talk is an exercise in complaint; while I had not considered it before, the methodology of complaint that trips through the book—as well as my other work—is now quite apparent. For example, I have complained earlier that:

Dysfluency offers an important perspective and critique of our fluent world. Why should people have to speak fluently to be taken seriously? Why does our modern world move at such a breakneck speed? Is there a different way to think about communication? Why shouldn’t we love the sound and unpredictability of our own voices? Dysfluency—a form of human variation; a different way of living in the world—is something we can genuinely desire.1

Perhaps complaint has never quite registered as a critical concept because of my Calvinist Protestant upbringing. The logic of Protestants is curious: endlessly protesting (it’s in the name, after all) but not complaining. At least in my corner of Christianity, grumbling and complaining were behavior expected from the faithless but risky for the faithful. To grumble and complain, to “kick against the goads,” was not only a useless exercise in light of divine reason and will, but also (for those who trust in the certainty of divine reason / providence), a moral failure and thus a potential precursor to divine punishment.

The slippage between protest, complaint, and grumbling requires skill to differentiate and inhabit well—including an awareness of one’s ethicopolitical sensibilities that interlock with unfolding practices of collective world-building. Is there a place in Crip world-building for the protest? Yes. The complaint? Yes. The grumble? Of course.2 All three are inflections of the register, to recite Berlant on complaint, “not merely of a stuckness but of the conditions of bargaining that allow people to maintain both their critical knowledge and their attachments to what disappoints.”3 But stuckness and attachment to what disappoints can assume a wide range of affective moods—without internal differentiation, all three collapse into a knot, each thread harder to name and access in the right moment, each tending toward its dangerous morphology.

All this to say, I omitted a personal vignette from Cheap Talk early in the writing process worth returning to:

Thirteen years ago, I, a wide-eyed first-year MA student, sat across the table from the patriarch, my biological father, with the new complaint of disability injustice on my tongue. Epistemological cracks were opening in my seamless (i.e. inevitable) experience of stuttering oppression and shame. The world, I had recently learned, privileges able-bodiedness and fluency! This arrangement is neither natural nor fixed—the world can always be otherwise! With newfound passion I thus embodied “both a rhetoric and an epistemology, the former often expressed through what ought to be, the latter through a depressive realism about how things actually are” (Martin’s response), and expected (I suppose) that the complaint would land as a contagion in my biological father and awaken a similar mood in him surrounding what is, and desire for what ought to be. But when I finished, he smiled—as if doing me a service—and responded with a complaint of his own: “It’s a nice idea Josh, but the world just can’t be changed. People need fluency and they can’t change their minds about stuttering.”

Is a complaint about the idea of (Crip) complaint a complaint? Is it more like a grumble? Perhaps a grievance? Complaint, as I understand from Martin, begins with the feeling of being stuck as well as a possibility beyond stuckness; for complaint to resonate it must thus enter an alterable world. My biological father held fast to reformed theologies of predetermination as well as reductionistically deterministic notions of human existence. Boys will be boys, politicians politicians, but God pulls even these strings. When the future is effectively closed—following rigid paths predetermined by teleological ends—half of the cavern in which critique resonates falls in; what remains for complaint is the dull rumble of depressive realism backed into a corner.

Responding to Crip critique by claiming “The world can’t be changed” is, in this way, a perspective that redoubles one’s attachment to what disappoints by clawing back the conditions of bargaining and alterability itself. It is critique collapsed, anti-critique, a grievance against the conditions of complaint and the agents of alterability.

Above all, it seems “the world can’t be changed” is a position that discards the project and tools of collective world-building, swept out to sea with the belief that humans are mere playthings of titanic forces far beyond our comprehension, let alone power. In one regard, this perspective is indeed onto something. As I discuss in Cheap Talk, “Brown’s Paradox”4 refers to “feel[ing] a greater political impotence than humans may have felt before, even as we occupy a global order more saturated by human power than ever before.”5 Accelerating the motion of the world and increasing its rate of change is akin to life on a spinning top—as impressive, connective, and exhilarating as it is unpredictable, unsettling, and precarious (pulled by forces we may have helped set into motion but cannot control). To switch the metaphor, the power to be liquid only materializes with privilege; for many, this power feels like being both precarious and stuck.

Brown’s Paradox can be resolved in different ways: neoliberals (and other progress-enthusiasts) pretend there is no paradox, only the refusal of individuals to surrender to the inevitable, uprooting surge of “market economies, scientific innovation, and individual entrepreneurship.”6 So-called reactionary movements, on the other hand, seek “aggressively [to] (re)secure the foundations of politics and society”7 by turning the clock either back to an imagined past or forward to an ideal (eschatological) future. In this regard, “the world can’t be changed” is a type of anthem, an imperative more than description, a stated desire for the fixity derived from teleology. I learned many such refrains in my church family; as I grew older it was me on stage with guitar and microphone, leading the church in anthems to an unchanging God who alone could re-secure the foundations of politics and society. “In this fragile world,” we would proclaim, “you are the only firm foundation. . . . Yesterday, today, and forever, you are the same, you never change.”8 All to Jesus we surrendered, most notably the tools needed to partner with change and act within a world of becoming.

Let me steer this back to Crip world-building. The goal for Glezos is to find ways to live with, rather than resolve, Brown’s Paradox: to clear a middle path between either fast or slow; between either lionizing or resenting the solvent of speed and the alterability it affords. This middle path:

would seek to embrace the power and opportunities which an accelerating world provides, using them to resist the exploitation and violence inherent in the contemporary world. However, at the same time as it sought some amount of security for individuals, it would be willing to accept that a certain amount of contingency and instability in the world is ineradicable. . . . Such a politics therefore would rigorously have to root out the sense of ressentiment against speed, and become comfortable with living, organizing, and acting, in an accelerating world of becoming.9

Although Glezos’s analysis does not engage Crip theory nor dysfluent complaints (nor did I open up discussion of this middle path in Cheap Talk), I think they all speak to each other in important ways. By necessity, Crip communities are adept at hacking social and technological change, experienced with living, acting, and organizing in the midst of contingency and uncertainty. Crip communities hold critical knowledge about livability, “stories of how to survive”10 in the present, yes, but also in a future that will be increasingly uncertain yet certainly more disabled. The modernist logic of world-building is based on addition and extraction (extracting from bodies of the earth to add more of the same) and eclipses how worlds are found, grown, and sustained.

Crip world-building incorporates a plurality of knowledges and practices that include “care webs,”11 “disability justice,”12 “desire for what disability disrupts,”13 “alterlivability,”14 a “politics of wonder,”15 “dysfluent clearings,”16 and the dysfluent “complaint.”17 In the space that remains, I trace just a few connections between these to situate complaint more squarely within the domain of Crip world-building.

I believe Crips can dwell in the Glezonian middle space because of our attention to the how of world-building, to its methods and methodologies.

To amend an earlier statement, Crips are agents not just of alterability but alterlivability. This is Aimi Hamraie’s phrase, which plays on and critiques neoliberal conceptions of “livability” that are enmeshed with Brown’s Paradox. Alterlivability draws from ecological principles of permaculture, and seeks to shift the meaning of “livable life” and to materialize livable worlds for the differences of disability:

Rather than take capitalism for granted as inevitable, alterlivability conjures visions of livability in spite of (what Anna Tsing calls) “capitalist ruins.” I frame alterlivability as a “material-discursive” phenomenon naming entangled ideologies, practices, and built environments. In so doing I urge urban planners to expand their notions of lives worth living, and push humanities scholars to theorize how livable worlds materialize through design.18

The practice of expanding and materializing livability within a world of uncertain becoming is not easy (especially because hegemonic aspects of the social and political world like neoliberal ableism are resistant to change) and thus must be supported by a network of other practices that include what Tanya Titchkosky calls a “politics of wonder,” a mode of political inquiry that aims to “do something other than produce more of the same.”19 A politics of wonder is not:

an endeavor that works from certainty, nor is it so much about action plans or planning for the control of others’ actions. Instead, a politics of wonder arises from the activity of making uncertainty out of what is certain. It is an attempt to engage current political organization, forms of social activity, and structures as spaces of questions.20

A politics of wonder breaks with “more of the same” by asking a different set of questions. The modern epistemological imagination is captured by the question of what—”what is disability?” “What is the problem of stuttering?” “What would it take to control this problem?”—and thus drives toward fixity, closure, certainty. Titchkosky, however, invites us to inhabit the question of how:

Bodies do show up in the shape of other questions. For example, consider Irving Zola’s [1982: 244] question—how has a society ‘been created and perpetuated which has excluded so many of its members’? But this alternative form of questioning requires that we orient to asking how disability has come to be understood as a problem in the first place.21

“How” is a world-building question that considers the conditions of possibility of livability or exclusion—and thus the possibility of enacting the future otherwise. How did we get here? How are dominant forms of social organization maintained over time? How might they be interrupted? Moreover, it is worth noting that Titchkosky links wonder with complaint—Zola’s questioning is clearly a complaint! A politics of wonder subtends Crip complaint in order to bargain with injustice and suffering while keeping clear of ressentiment of the conditions under which the world is given. Wonder is an antidote to the refrain that “the world can’t be changed;” wonder offers, to cite Martin, “a glimmer of hope that something might snap into action, awakening a dormant sector in the rhetoric of justice.”

I could tie this discussion off by returning to Cheap Talk—the ostensible point of all this—but to be honest, to channel Bartleby, I’d prefer not to. I began Cheap Talk while a PhD student in what feels like a different world. There are worthwhile connections to consider about Crip complaint, Cynical parrhesia, and dysfluent shitting in the street. The Cynics still have much to teach us about Crip world-building within this present moment (including but not limited to alterlivability, the politics of wonder, complaint, and care webs). But here, I conclude with a different line of flight, one that I am still working through: thinking with Jjjjjerome Ellis about the world-building quality of “dysfluent clearings.”

As Martin indicates in his response, Ellis and I have approached the idea of clearing in different ways (and have recently engaged each other in public discussion on this topic).22 In Cheap Talk, I imagine the clearing to be a practice of fluency, of control over communicative milieus. Fluency is “produced within a clearing—of space, of time, of noise, of interrelation” (4) in a similar way that tacticians clear trees around a fortress to maximize visibility and power. The clearing, in this reading, is a space that tends toward inevitability, a sterile ground where nothing that obstructs control is permitted to grow. Ellis follows a different reading:

If fluent speech (and by extension fluent time) is a path through a forest, when I stutter I come into a clearing where the path temporarily disappears. The clearing opens the present moment. But when my interlocutor interrupts me while I’m stuttering, this expanded present is foreclosed.23

In contrast to the fluent and militaristic clearing that tends toward sterility, stability, and predictability, the dysfluent clearing is a site necessarily defined by assembly, contingency, and natality. One cannot know beforehand what will happen in a dysfluent clearing—it is an invitational and “pluripotential”24 space where fluent time is suspended. Many things might unfold, collaboratively, into being. The clearing, for Ellis, enables new modes of relationality, it affords “opportunities to renew our habits of assembly,”25 to experiment with wonder and alterlivability and thus materialize the world dysfluently. With Ellis, I am drawn to the sacredness of the clearing. The prophet, the prophetic voice, or better—the social, political, and ethical complaint of the prophet—is what splits open the sacred within the mundane. Perhaps we need to imagine and expand the role of the Crip prophet in direct response to the experts of communicative clearcutting, the priestly and decidedly fluent caste of info-capitalism.

The practice of expanding and materializing livability within a world of uncertain becoming is not easy (especially because hegemonic aspects of the social and political world like neoliberal ableism are resistant to change) and thus must be supported by a network of other practices that include what Tanya Titchkosky calls a “politics of wonder,” a mode of political inquiry that aims to “do something other than produce more of the same.”26 A politics of wonder is not:

an endeavor that works from certainty, nor is it so much about action plans or planning for the control of others’ actions. Instead, a politics of wonder arises from the activity of making uncertainty out of what is certain. It is an attempt to engage current political organization, forms of social activity, and structures as spaces of questions.27

A politics of wonder breaks with “more of the same” by asking a different set of questions. The modern epistemological imagination is captured by the question of what—”what is disability?” “What is the problem of stuttering?” “What would it take to control this problem?”—and thus drives toward fixity, closure, certainty. Titchkosky, however, invites us to inhabit the question of how:

Bodies do show up in the shape of other questions. For example, consider Irving Zola’s [1982: 244] question—how has a society ‘been created and perpetuated which has excluded so many of its members’? But this alternative form of questioning requires that we orient to asking how disability has come to be understood as a problem in the first place.28

“How” is a world-building question that considers the conditions of possibility of livability or exclusion—and thus the possibility of enacting the future otherwise. How did we get here? How are dominant forms of social organization maintained over time? How might they be interrupted? Moreover, it is worth noting that Titchkosky links wonder with complaint—Zola’s questioning is clearly a complaint! A politics of wonder subtends Crip complaint in order to bargain with injustice and suffering while keeping clear of ressentiment of the conditions under which the world is given. Wonder is an antidote to the refrain that “the world can’t be changed;” wonder offers, to cite Martin, “a glimmer of hope that something might snap into action, awakening a dormant sector in the rhetoric of justice.”

I could tie this discussion off by returning to Cheap Talk—the ostensible point of all this—but to be honest, to channel Bartleby, I’d prefer not to. I began Cheap Talk while a PhD student in what feels like a different world. There are worthwhile connections to consider about Crip complaint, Cynical parrhesia, and dysfluent shitting in the street. The Cynics still have much to teach us about Crip world-building within this present moment (including but not limited to alterlivability, the politics of wonder, complaint, and care webs). But here, I conclude with a different line of flight, one that I am still working through: thinking with Jjjjjerome Ellis about the world-building quality of “dysfluent clearings.”

As Martin indicates in his response, Ellis and I have approached the idea of clearing in different ways (and have recently engaged each other in public discussion on this topic).29 In Cheap Talk, I imagine the clearing to be a practice of fluency, of control over communicative milieus. Fluency is “produced within a clearing—of space, of time, of noise, of interrelation” (4) in a similar way that tacticians clear trees around a fortress to maximize visibility and power. The clearing, in this reading, is a space that tends toward inevitability, a sterile ground where nothing that obstructs control is permitted to grow. Ellis follows a different reading:

If fluent speech (and by extension fluent time) is a path through a forest, when I stutter I come into a clearing where the path temporarily disappears. The clearing opens the present moment. But when my interlocutor interrupts me while I’m stuttering, this expanded present is foreclosed.30

In contrast to the fluent and militaristic clearing that tends toward sterility, stability, and predictability, the dysfluent clearing is a site necessarily defined by assembly, contingency, and natality. One cannot know beforehand what will happen in a dysfluent clearing—it is an invitational and “pluripotential”31 space where fluent time is suspended. Many things might unfold, collaboratively, into being. The clearing, for Ellis, enables new modes of relationality, it affords “opportunities to renew our habits of assembly,”32 to experiment with wonder and alterlivability and thus materialize the world dysfluently. With Ellis, I am drawn to the sacredness of the clearing. The prophet, the prophetic voice, or better—the social, political, and ethical complaint of the prophet—is what splits open the sacred within the mundane. Perhaps we need to imagine and expand the role of the Crip prophet in direct response to the experts of communicative clearcutting, the priestly and decidedly fluent caste of info-capitalism.