A rhizomatics of hearing: becoming deaf in the workplace and other affective spaces of hearing

Abstract

This paper stages a corporeal and affective trail through plateaus of ‘Becoming deaf’ in the workplace of academia. The paper aims to display the unfamiliarity of deafness in a profession whose ability to speak and hear the written word is all too commonsense. In this piece, Deleuze and Guattari's ‘rhizome’ acts as sensibility and motif as a body deafens. I make use of photography, poetry and poesis as multi-textual pedagogy for engaging with the disjuncture between advocacy and experience, and to draw attention to the dysphoria of theorising affect and the multidimensionality of experiential relations of affect. The paper argues that deafness/becoming deaf is always a form of hearing and the ‘strange label’ of disability is brought into question just as it increasingly opens presence, tension, texture, and interdependence.

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