Amanda Melissa Baggs, also known as Mel Baggs, died on 11 April 2020. This essay was originally published in print in Another Gaze 04 (March, 2020).
r4t3rgebp9hirstkl;egrtw4rlgahoditegrt4oiwhrag’sdihogrtawy430qrsd is the written translation of what my hands feel like when they move freely across the keyboard, the weight of my palms relaxed, and my fingers and knuckles pressing keys, any keys, reacting to the difference between the warm plastic that gives in and the aluminium that doesn’t. The even distribution of movement between the two creates a distinct sound, in which the usual production-oriented pitter patter of keys transforms to a low and constant rumble. It is a sound which, from now on, I will associate with a keyboard being released from the modular, compartmentalised grip of language. I move my hands in this way right after watching nonverbal autistic artist, activist and poet Amanda Melissa Baggs’s ‘In My Language’, a YouTube video they uploaded in 2007. If you are unfamiliar with their work, at this point you can either stop reading this essay and go and watch it online, or you can put into practice some of its lessons by closing the magazine you are holding and then using your thumb to flick rapidly through the pages from cover to cover, feeling the breeze tickle your nose, cheeks, eyelids. Next you could re-open Another Gaze and rub your face against the magazine spread, letting your breath condense in the central fold, while the smell of ink fills your nostrils and the pages curl around your ears. These words will be too close and blurry for you to read, but that would be okay. It would also be okay if you’d rather just keep on reading as long as, quoting Baggs, it doesn’t “make yourself feel superior or something”.1
Part video essay and part manifesto, ‘In My Language’ is by far Baggs’s most popular upload, with over 1.5 million views to date. It is divided into two sections: the first is a sequence of shots that illustrate Baggs’s relationship to objects and how they interact with them, while the second translates their nonverbal interactions with the world into ‘our’ language. The cast includes household goods such as computer keyboards, necklaces, cooking grills, door knobs, pieces of paper and natural elements such as water and wind. In most shots, the camera is first-person and we only get glimpses of Baggs’s hands or forearms moving in and out of the frame. In their work the camera rarely has an objective, impassive gaze: it becomes an extension of the hand, its closeness to things almost tactile; objects come in and out of frame while a tentative, incessant curiosity leads the lens into focus. In other shots, the camera is stationary and Baggs works themself into the frame, their face rubbing against a magazine spread, or they ‘stand still’ in their characteristically to-and-fro way, their hands fluttering into it.
After watching and thinking with ‘In My Language’ for so long, I cannot use seemingly innocuous expressions like ‘standing still’ without being suspicious; particularly of the way they encourage fixed images of how bodies should behave under certain conditions, like being ‘calm’ or ‘reflective’. Our language is laden with normative assumptions that exclude other modes of being and experiencing the world: the second section of Baggs’s video – introduced, poignantly, as ‘A Translation’ – addresses how some of these expressions fail to account for thinking/being of differently-abled bodies, where moving and thinking are not necessarily distinct from one another:
Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me. Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as ‘being in a world of my own’. Whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings, people claim that I am ‘opening up to true interaction with the world.2
As a nonverbal person communicating through writing and text-to-speech software, translation is something Baggs contends with in relation to their condition. Their images emerge out of a necessity to call out the abuse, violence and condescension that peoples with different bodies and abilities must endure daily, making for a potent and tangible connection between the act of translation and institutionalised violence. The act of translating is inherently contentious: something is gained at the expense of something else being lost, and so the act is simultaneously a bridge and an erasure. While Baggs maintains this bridge for us because they have to they also point to another landscape, one which such a crossing necessarily makes invisible. This is a landscape we are not prepared to – or don’t want to – see. But much goes on in this hidden place. Other forms of seeing, thinking and feeling – other forms of personhood – are able to ferment.
As long as one moves within the accepted parameters of what actions like standing still, reading, touching, sniffing, tasting are supposed to look like then all is well. But when you sniff a magazine, or read water, or taste a pen, the issue is not so much that one is an anomaly but that one is illegible, opaque:
The way I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all, but it is a way of thinking in its own right.3
Taking this ‘way of thinking’ seriously involves thinking about Baggs’s work on a different scale. By seeing it as capable of amending some of the violence inherent to our language and thought, we can start to move towards a more open, malleable, inclusive approach. However, as with all types of thinking, we must first recognise it as such, then learn from it, emulate it, question and honour it. To do so we first need to acknowledge that it emerges out of oppression: an oppression in which translation plays a complicated part, as it both bridges Baggs’s thinking to a wider audience and undermines its claim for legitimacy. It is therefore significant that an alternative version of ‘In My Language’ exists and that this version, which consists only of the first section and lacks the translation part, has been viewed only 7,000 times versus the 1.5 million views of the translated version. Taking Baggs’s nonverbal thinking seriously should make us question whether we can imagine a reality where Baggs’s untranslated version might attract more views. Or, put differently: how can we learn to become an audience for works like these?
Language, our language, does not only condition how we think about other bodies and their ‘abilities’ but also how we look at images. If we consider the first section of ‘In My Language’, what is immediately obvious is that one is compelled to read images as symbolic, located within a network of associations. I cannot help but see a hand running freely across a keyboard as a childlike gesture, or maybe as representing a dismissal of productivity. As Baggs suggests, such an action is likely to be perceived as dysfunctional, odd, out of place. But this is not at all the case, and the second section refutes such preconceptions. At the beginning of ‘A Translation’ we see Baggs’s hand moving under water running from a faucet. They tell us that, “In this part of the video, the water doesn’t symbolise anything. I am just interacting with the water as the water interacts with me.”4
Allowing the full implications of this deceptively simple statement to emerge is something that we as an audience (or as allies) of Baggs’s work can begin to do. Their language requires us to be open and available to the immediacy of things: the way water runs through fingers, or wind flows through fabric, or paper rustles and crinkles when shaken. The point I was hoping to make with the ‘reading exercise’ in the opening paragraph is that all of these materials are already here and available for us to use, right now, everywhere. The absence of hidden metaphors or symbolism in Baggs’s images encourages us to engage with the world on the same terms as they do, opening a space for radical availability. Once verbal language is out of the way, I can focus on the bodily memories and sensations that Baggs’s work triggers in me, one at a time or all at once. I can watch and listen, or just listen, or just watch. Baggs films the everyday things that most of us know. They present us with a cast of objects loaded with familiar sensations and memories, and make them available for us to tap back into. Learning how to be available for work like Baggs’s has important political implications: it suggests that as an audience we can move away from conventional narratives – with their dependence on linear time, certain body types, gestures and prescribed emotions – towards other types of storytelling that do not necessarily follow those conventions. Since storytelling is one of the main technologies we as humans have to make worlds, this opens us up to new, exciting possibilities: not just in how we think or how we decide what a person is or can do, but also in how we relate to objects and our natural environment.5
Baggs’s work points to an alternative where stories are not exclusively human, but belong to things and natural elements as well. In their videos, these are actors just as much as Baggs is, and their presence in the frame exerts just as much pull to the camera as a human face would; a stone, a kettle, a necklace or a door lock all appear to exist on an equal footing under their gaze. Within this setting, the imbalance of language, the asymmetry produced by naming things and turning them into objects, is levelled out: as Baggs changes things, things change them: water alters the hand as the hand alters water; stepping into the space of a kitchen with its myriad of appliances triggers all kinds of behaviours in the body; looking at a waving flag out the window has an effect on the motion of the arm and wrist inside. Here, non-humans don’t act as mirrors, as reflections of human-made concepts or symbols. Instead, they are de-anthropomorphised, dislodged from ‘normative language’ and met on common ground. That this radical availability appears to the normative gaze as a disability rather than an image indicative of a fairer world is part of Baggs’s claim for a less fixed, more open definition of what constitutes personhood. Shifting this definition can represent a kind of justice. Their work envisions a reality where equality between humans and non-humans can be, if not made possible, at least made story – a first, crucial step towards questioning our current state. The medium of cinema is essential to how Baggs tells their stories or conveys their language: camera placement, the layering of sounds, or the nuances of framing and editing become a material vocabulary that sidesteps the need for any kind of verbal explanation by allowing the viewer to become an active witness to the intimacy of Baggs’s interactions with things. If taking Baggs’s video works seriously means thinking and learning from them, first we must become a more receptive audience. A second step might mean getting involved into the exciting possibility of making other kinds of radical, less anthropocentric films.
In a recent masterclass, Lucrecia Martel made a comparison between the movie theatre and a swimming pool.6 She likened the experience of the audience inside the projection room to the experience of being immersed in water. They sit on the bottom of a pool and watch the light coming in from above. In a movie theatre the water is replaced by air, the medium through which the materials of cinema – light and sound, stories and emotions – travel. “We are a species submerged in air,” she continued; in the dim space of the movie theatre waves of light and sound crisscross and bounce off one another to create an invisible, fourth-dimensional lattice-work that emerges, changes, and, when the house lights turn back on and people start to leave, finally fades. Or does it? The image of rippling, intersecting waves is one that physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad uses to explain diffraction.7 Originally used in a theoretical sense by Donna Haraway to describe a methodology that would focus on differences instead of similarities, diffraction refers to the physical phenomenon found in the behaviour of waves – such as water, sound and light – defined as “the bending of waves around the corners of an obstacle or through an aperture”.8 In the context of a feminist critique towards science and technology studies, Haraway ‘thinks with’ diffraction, offering it as both a metaphor and methodology that can unsettle science from its patriarchal, anthropocentric structures of power:
Diffraction does not produce “the same” displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear.9
Think of the surface of a very still pond, a mirror-like surface that returns the exact image of what you put in front of it. Now, throw a rock, or better yet, two rocks, and what you see is an image ‘distorted’ by the ripples that emanate from the disturbed surface. Put in very simple terms, what a diffractive methodology argues is that this distortion can be understood as an alternative way of seeing and understanding phenomena, one that is based on differences instead of similarities.10 Science, Haraway argues, is (white, western) Man wanting Nature (or other cultures) to behave like a perfect, mirror-like pond. But the world actually behaves more like a rippling pond, where everything is constantly bouncing off everything else. Time ceases to be seen as linear and instead is seen as an entangled state where the present is constantly crisscrossed by events occurring millions of years ago and this exact second (think of the many time scales in the climate crisis, for example). There is no space left for the type of mechanistic thinking that takes you from A to B to C. If the present moment is like Martel’s movie theatre, one that for better or worse we can never truly leave, how do we keep watching responsibly?
Made around the time of ‘In My Language’, Baggs’s ‘How to Boil Water the EASY Way’ could be seen as an example of this methodology I am proposing as diffractive cinema. Here is a space (the kitchen) forged out of well-established, mechanistic cause-and-effect relationships, such as putting water in a kettle, turning the stove on and boiling water for tea. But Baggs does not experience the kitchen like this. Their radical availability to what they define as ‘cues’ – and the kitchen is plagued with cues to do things – works as an obstacle that prevents them from boiling water in a standard amount of time (it can take them up to five hours) and implicitly highlights how linear our understanding of space has become. As Baggs is activated by all these cues – opening the fridge, the microwave, taking the kettle into the living-room, returning, sitting on the floor in front of the stove, etc. – this perfectly timed deadpan comedy becomes (like all good comedy) a poignant criticism not only of how uninclusive domestic spaces are designed to be, but also of how conditioned our relationship to these spaces is. Such spaces obediently mirror a very restrictive reflection: a normative idea of what a person is and how they would move, as well as a fixed and pragmatic view of how we interact with all that is not human. This is an image that we pay very dearly to maintain. Thinking about cinema diffractively could lead us towards discarding this image in favour of new, other-than-human stories. In these, as in Baggs’s videos, objects and natural elements would be in active dialogue with us, not as anthropomorphic mirrors but as equals. Although I myself am currently in the process of trying to find out what these non-human stories could be or how they would appear, I am convinced that even thinking about the possibility of their existence could help us move towards a world in which justice would not only mean human rights but the rights of water, or an old mug, a burnt tire, the Earth’s crust, a breeze of air, or a story.
Julián Gatto is a visual artist and filmmaker from Buenos Aires currently researching how to tell stories in collaboration with non-humans. He is a PhD student at the University of California, Davis, and has recently finished shooting his first feature, EN UNA.
This essay first appeared in Another Gaze 04, which you can buy here. If you like what you read and want to help keeping Another Gaze going, you can donate here.
1. Amanda Baggs, ‘How to Boil Water the EASY Way’, YouTube, 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, London: Ignota Books, 2019. With an Introduction by Donna Haraway. See also: Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press, 2016. 6. Lucrecia Martel, ‘Masterclass #1’, IFFR, 2018. 7. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Duke University Press, 2007, chapters 2 & 4. 8. ‘Diffraction’, Wikipedia. 9. Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters’ in The Haraway Reader, London: Routledge, p.70. 10. For more on diffraction as a method please refer to: Karen Barad ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart’ in Parallax, Vol. 3, No. 3, 168-187, and Iris van der Tuin ‘Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-Epistemology: On Encountering Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation’ in Parallax, Vol. 3, No. 3, 231-2187. Along with Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin also published an illuminating interview with Karen Barad in New Materalism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012.
