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138 Deafness as Pathology closed-set word-recognition ability, and in a few cases, open-set wordrecognition ability. These benefits are only summary statements, however, as there is much variability across children. Some children gain no speech perception benefits from a multi-electrode cochlear implant, and some gain some open-set word-recognition ability with a single-electrode cochlear implant.... [S]ome believe that a cochlear implant will at the least provide an awareness of environmental sounds and that perception of these nonspeech sounds is a significant advantage[;] ... at the present time it is not possible to predict the expected benefits for an individual child with any certainty.62 (my emphasis) What is the sum ofall this "some"-ing? As I see it, two possible results coexist: there remains no proven pattern of success for performing the cochlear implant, and yet the will to speech haunts that operating room with a frightening power. Even in these passages we hear speech subliminally : the cochlear implant device serves best "as an aid to speechreading," and various successes have been measured principally in terms of the elements of speech-things like "gross cues of timing and voicing," "perception ofstress patterns" and the number ofsyllables, and perhaps even a little "open-setword-recognition ability" ifthe implantee is really, really lucky. It pains me to point out the obvious here, yet as these books seem to ignore it, I will: All these elements ofspeech are notlanguage. All the recognition of syllable boundaries in the world does not make one a communicator , does not qualify one as a capable language user. It is as if the already-quoted words of Prosper Meniere, resident physician of the Paris School for Deaf-Mutes in 1855, come floating forward, unchanged through the centuries, unaffected by any experiences in the intervening time: "But whatever they believe, deafness is an infirmity and we should repair it whether the person who has it is disturbed by it or not." A rhetorical analysis ofcochlear implants and the discourse surrounding them, as well as a consideration of the implanted body within the frame ofthe recent rage ofacademic and cultural critiques of"the cyborg," though deserving of attention, lies beyond the scope of this book.63 But the will to speech asserts itself so strongly-and the audiologist's authority in that initial diagnosis of deafness comes to matter so much-in the case of the cochlear implant that it demands mention here. The group of second-year audiologists-in-training that I interviewed ended their discussion with me, appropriately and without my prodding, Diagnosing Deafness 139 on the subject of cochlear implants. We had been discussing the particularly ethically fraught territory ofthe audiologist's authority in diagnosing deafness in children, when one young woman, Kate, remarked: "I just recently watched a cochlear implant surgery. I'm really glad I watched it because now I have a better understanding ofwhat a serious procedure that is. You can talk about it, but if you actually see it.... I have such a better awareness now of what a big deal it is ... how invasive it is ... and how many things can go wrong during it." Another student, providing what became the final word for that group interview, added: "Well, forget about the surgery, the thing that bugs me about them is that we don't know ifthey're actually . I mean, they're damaging what structure is there."64 What stunned me on reviewing this interview-what perked my ears up-were those unspoken words: "we don't know if they're actually ---." What goes in that blank? Speech, I think. What Kate wanted to say, I suspect, but couldn't-and it doesn't really matter if her reasons were deliberate or subconscious-was that we don't know if they are actually aiding speech, or, more important (and not the same thing), getting people to language. And if she did say that, what then would be the grounds ofher own authority? Ifthe will to speech were no longer the paradigm she practiced under, what might replace it? And where would she stand in that replacement? What would she deliver? How then would audiology-and for that matter rhetoric, too-be reinvented? NOTES 1. Juan Luis Vives, a fifteenth-century Spanish rhetorician, and Francis Bacon , a philosopher and founding father of the British Royal Society for scientists , both opined that "speech is reason." Elocutionary interests in gestures were fanned by the work of rhetoricians John Bulwer...

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