1250 words

Music: Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians: Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars

Last Friday at dinner my guests inquired about the "life of the assistant professor in our department." I had to admit (in a roundabout way) that there wasn't much of a community among the junior faculty, and that I had an easier time socializing with my senior colleagues. I lamented that I didn't have any drinking pals to mull over research projects with, as I did in graduate school and, to a lesser extent, at my previous jobs. We discussed the general lack of thirty-something professors on campus in general and were trying to figure out why. The English department, for example, routinely hires thirty-somethings who then bail a year or two later.

Well, we never did come up with a satisfactory explanation, but I did report some of my "working out of ideas" has shifted from the pub to the blog. Earlier this year I was posting on a essay I was writing on sovereignty and the War of the Worlds remake, and received some very helpful suggestions from readers about Agamben's concept of "bare life." In any event, in retrospect I see the blog as serving the function of the coffee house discussion (besides, in coffee houses these days people are too busy blogging to talk to one another).

So, with that wind up, here's what I managed to work on today: part two of the glossolalia paper (somehow I have to squeeze all this verbiage into six pages; brevity, like subtlety, is not my signature):

THIS THING IN SPEECH THAT IS MORE THAN SPEECH

It is sometimes said that Herbert A. Wichelns' 1925 essay, "The Literary Criticism of Oratory," helped to advance an important rationale for the discipline of Speech Communication. In that essay Wichelns distinguishes the criticism of oratory from literary criticism: the former is concerned with the adaptation of speech to audiences, while the latter is concerned with artful expressions of, and reflections on, the human condition.[12] What is sometimes forgotten is the reasoning behind such a distinction: although Wichelns admits that "oratory is no longer the chief means of communicating ideas to the masses," there is nevertheless "no likelihood that face to face persuasion will cease to be a principle mode of exerting influence . . . ."[13] The "here-and-now personal presence" of orality, to borrow Ong's phrase, is advanced as the ground of the field.[14] A closely related touchstone text is Carroll C. Arnold's "Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature" (1968), which advances a rationale for the study of oratory on the presence-effects of speech. Although Arnold opposes treating oratory as literature, he grounds the study of speech in the "intimacy" and contingency of interpersonal encounter.[15] Furthermore, like speaking in tongues, Arnold stresses repeatedly that "orality . . . is itself meaningful" beyond signification, and that the spoken word always entails risk and "danger."[16] "The extensive commitments extracted by orality," argues Arnold, "superimpose special dimensions of risk upon every action consciously or unconsciously directed to the eye and ear of an other."[17] Arnold argues that the terms "speaking," "spoke" and "'speech' can, and often do, function for us as terms stipulating something more subtle than an acoustic transmission . . . ."[18] This subtle "something more" of speech, this voice beyond word that is linked to "here-and-now personal presence," danger, contingency, and risk, is that thing in speech more than speech.

So what is this "something more" in speech than speech? At this juncture one may be tempted to say it is an illusion and make a Derridian turn by celebrating the abandonment of speech as an outmoded vestige of "logocentrism" and the dreaded metaphysics of presence.[19] "The voice is heard (understood)-that undoubtedly is what is called conscience-closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier," argues Derrida, "pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from the outside of itself."[20] Arnold's discussion of speech may seem to suggest that this "something more" of speech is, in fact, the auto-affection and core narcissism of a delusional autonomy, the very same illusion of self-transparency that leads to the symbolic and real destruction of alterity, other others who are different.[21] Yet Arnold's constant recourse to the "risk" of speech situations, to the fact a speaker must "stare his failure in the eye" when he or she misspeaks, his attention to the tacit, "acoustic bond" and relationship created between self and other in sonorous encounter, all of these elements that characterize the charged and relational excitement of speech situations seem to suggest that, for Arnold, the specificity of this something more in speech than speech is not of self but of the Other-the unassimilatable voice beyond the word that keeps human evil in at bay.

Insofar as hearing oneself speak-or as an infant, hearing oneself cry-"can be seen as an elementary formula of narcissism that is needed to produce a minimal form of self," subjectivity to requires the illusion of self-transparency.[22] Aside from the obvious romanticism of contingency, Arnold's stress on risk and failure suggests that this "something more" in speech than speech is the voice of an alien other, an unconscious reminder that one must listen as much as one must speak, that at a fundamental level we must depend on others to survive. For example, human infants are born helpless and require the stranger other to interpret the meaning of our cries in order to have our biological needs met. As an infant who cries but does not signify, the Other is responsible for our meaning. It is in this respect that Flournoy characterized Smith's glossolalia as "infantile," not only to dismiss her tongues as the product of some primal brand of auto-affection, but also to stress that it is the adult counterpart to the cries of an infant: speaking in tongues is often associated with prophecy because it is an uncontrollable voice of the Other, both the cries of dependency and need as well as the nonsensical screams of the stranger within.

Because the dialectic of our own cries and the voice of our mother (or whoever is the primary caregiver) combine to form first object of identification as speech, the human voice takes on the status of a "partial object" that represents something more than itself, something that betokens both the promise of love and its absence.[23] Speech, in other words, is inherently ambivalent as an object of love, for it can inspire fear as well. Mladen Dolar explains that

. . . for psychoanalysis, the auto-affective voice of self-presence and self-mastery was constantly opposed by its reverse side, the intractable voice of the Other, the voice that one could not control. But both have to be thought together: one could say that at the very core of narcissism there lies an alien kernel that . . . continually threatens to undermine it from the inside.[24]

In other words, the developing infant internalizes both good voices and bad voices as objects of identification in the process of becoming self-conscious: the mother scolds as well as comforts; the infant coos in pleasure as well as yawps from pangs of hunger.[25] Contrary to the singularity of voice in Derrida, Dolar suggests that psychoanalysis posits "a different metaphysical history of voice" alongside the metaphysics of presence, where at least one meaningful element of human speech "is considered dangerous, threatening, and possibly ruinous."[26] The uncontrollable and threatening voice of the Other, be it of one's god or one's mother, is not simply a voice object but also a voice abject: meaningful speech that does not signify, glossolalia, "the voice beyond logos, the lawless voice."[27] Notes

[12] Herbert A. Wichelns. "The Literary Criticism of Oratory." In Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 3-28. [13] Wichelns, "Literary Criticism," 4. [14] Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 113. [15] Carroll C. Arnold. "Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature." Some Edited Collection I Know Nothing About, edited by Some Dude and perhaps another Dude (Some city: Some Press, 19XX), 60-73. [16] Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63. [17] Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 66. [18] Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63. [19] Such a turn is a mistake, for Derrida notes "this illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so easily." It is the precondition of self-consciousness. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 20. [20] Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20. [21] See Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. 63-82. [22] Mladen Dolar, "The Object Voice." In SIC 1: Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 13. [23] Word limits prevent a thorough discussion, but the proper name of this object is what Lacan termed the objet [petit] a, the causal stimulus of desire. [24] Dolar, "Object Voice," 15. [25] For an intriguing theory of how infants negotiate and internalize the "good voice" and "bad voice," see Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-43. [26] Dolar, "Object Voice," 16. [27] Dolar, "Object Voice," 18. By "voice abject" I mean to refer to the jouissance or unsymbolizable enjoyment of the terrible voice, as well as that tacit, creepy element of human speech that often escapes notice but is made more discernable in recordings of the disembodied voice, especially recordings of the speech of the deceased. I also mean to reference Kristeva's work on abjection, which she argues (persuasively I think) is associated with the maternal body. Insofar as the power to signify is associated with phallogocentrism in Western culture, it makes sense that woman is associated with phonetic excess (e.g., babble, gossip, speaking in tongues). See Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).