engastrimyth
Music: Colder: Again It's been another full day, teaching, then lunch with colleagues, then back home to write my ass off (gotta love deadlines). I was supposed to hie my butt to the Highland 12 to see The Da Vinci Code, but I was writing away and noticed I was almost an hour late for the movie . . . so I'll go tomorrow night. Not that I'm anxious to see it, really, it's just I'm going to write about Code frenzy with Captain Frenzy—or Capt. Frentz—sometime soon and I gots to see the damn movie.
Ok, so, I've finished a draft of the forum essay. It's tighter, but plays somewhat fast and loose with Derrida. All you deconstruction mavens need to tell me if I'm going to look like a fool. I don't think so (I'm already a fool), but . . . you know, I'm open to suggestions and objections. I was told to write a "provocation." Gee, I've done enough of that already, but I do think joining hands with Frank Dance should raise some eyebrows. I also worry if my "tone" is too snotty. I want to be provocative, but not a "little shit."
Here goes:
Joshua Gunn
University of Texas at Austin
[A]ttanâ zabiné pi ten té iche tarvini mabûré nubé téri zée atèv Astané ezi dabé fouminé ni ié ti takâ tubré ne bibé ti ze umêzè!
--Ramié the Martian, as channeled by Hélène Smith[1]
For many years the psychiatrist Theodore Flournoy endured the mystical, sometimes creepy, babble of Hélène Smith, a controversial Swiss medium who achieved fame in the nineteenth century by claiming she took astral trips to Mars.[2] During numerous séances Flournoy documented a number of Smith's "dramas," which frequently featured glossolalia or speaking in tongues after the psychic had fallen into a self-induced trance. Despite Smith's insistence that she was channeling the Martian speech of three übergalactic beings (Astané, Esenale, and Ramié), Flournoy concluded that the Martian language was "only an infantile travesty of French."[3] Following William James' speculations about the "automatisms" of prophecy,[4] Flournoy argued Smith's gifts of the tongue represented repressed, infantile desires and wishes that reside on the "subliminal strata" of the psyche, which "autohypnotization . . . puts in ebullition and causes to mount to the surface."[5] For the Swiss psychiatrist, speaking in tongues is that voice beyond word that originates in infantile emotions and memories. In short, glossolalia is the speech of the unconscious.[6]
After five years studying the Martian-channeling medium, Flournoy reported that "all things become wearisome at last, and the planet Mars is no exception to the rule. The subliminal imagination of Mlle. Smith, however, will probably never tire of its lofty flights in the society of Astané, Esenale, and their associates."[7] Analogously, one may be tempted to dismiss yet another forum discussion on disciplinary identity (this time in the guise of writing a history of Speech Communication) as so much wearisome, printed prattle and "radical reflection" on the not-so-lofty status of communication and rhetorical studies in the academic imaginary.[8] One would be tempted, I say, were it not for Gerry Philipsen's intriguing insights on the use of "speech" as a "substance term" that made the diverse practices in our "field" coherent for over fifty years.[9] Why did speech last as long as it did, and why does it continue to linger?[10] Although his history indicates that speech was chosen as the titular object for pragmatic reasons (e.g., explaining one's motley department of critics and social scientists to the dean), I would supplement Philipsen's history by suggesting that the concept was embraced because of a general human tendency to fetishize speech as a magical object.[11] More specifically, from a psychoanalytic vantage I argue that human speech as such seems to harbor an uncanny, seemingly magical quality that inspires "primitive" or infantile memories and feelings of fear and love. Reckoning with this quality of speech, something that I shall term the "voice abject," not only better helps to explain the appeal of "speech" to our disciplinary forbears, but also the reason why speech continues to haunt us despite repeated death knells. Like the seemingly involuntary, other-worldly twitter of Hélène Smith, we cannot help speaking about speech because there is something beyond the word, something discernable in the phonetic excess of nonsensical babble, that was used to ground our discipline for decades.
THIS SOMETHING MORE IN SPEECH 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 Walter Ong's phrase, is featured throughout the essay as the unique purchase of the new discipline.[14] A closely related and widely read touchstone text is Carroll C. Arnold's "Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature" (1968), which extended parts of Wichelns' argument but updated and abandoned others. Although Arnold opposes treating oratory as literature, like Wichelns he grounds the study of speech in the "intimacy" and contingency of interpersonal encounter.[15] Arnold's primary disagreement with Wichelns seems to be that even nonsensical speech, like speaking in tongues, can be meaningful and moving: "orality . . . is itself meaningful" beyond signification, he argues.[16] Perhaps what is most interesting about Arnold's argument, however, is the apocalyptic tone in which he characterizes the suasive dimensions of the interpersonal speech situation: he repeatedly stresses that the spoken word always entails "risk" and "danger."[17] For example, "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."[18] The instability and "risk" of interpersonal encounter in speaking situations is, of course, obvious to almost every student in a public speaking classroom. But what is the cause of speaking anxiety, and what is the source of speech's danger? Arnold answers somewhat obliquely: the terms "'speaking,' 'spoke' or 'speech' can, and often do, function for us as terms stipulating something more subtle than an acoustic transmission . . . ."[19] This subtle "something more" of speech, this voice beyond word that is linked but not reducible to "here-and-now personal presence," danger, contingency, and risk, is what we might term the "something more" in speech than speech. It is this ever-elusive "something more" that I suggest at least partially motivated the embrace and subsequent rejection of speech as central, disciplinary object.[20]
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.[21] Derrida's critique of the Platonic assumption that speech presences the thought of the speaker is well known: "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, as a "pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from the outside of itself."[22] Arnold's discussion of speech and danger seems to suggest that this "something more" of speech is, in fact, that narcissistic core of a delusional autonomy, the very same illusion of self-transparency that Derrida has shown can lead to the symbolic and real destruction of alterity, often by alienating or killing others who are different.[23] Yet, Arnold's constant recourse to the dialogical "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, seem to suggest that the specificity of this something more in speech may not be of Self but from the Other. In other words, the implicit "something more" of Arnold's concept of speech is an ambivalent voice, one of danger and one of love, or in Kenneth Burke's terms, one that betokens both the recognition of identification and the rejection of division.[24]
How might we reckon with this ideation of an ambivalent voice? A psychoanalytic approach to human speech suggests at least a tentative answer, and that answer begins by admitting (as does Derrida, but not decidedly) the necessity of some modicum of auto-affection and self-consciousness rooted in the sound of the human voice. 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."[25] The "something more" in speech than speech, then, cannot be understood as one's "self." That "something more" in speech is something that comes from beyond self, and, of course, that which is beyond the Self is the province of the Other. One can easily identify the primary encounter with the Other as an infant's encounter with its mother, and not coincidentally, the primary vehicle of that encounter--at least to the degree such an encounter is consciously that--is the mother's voice.
Whence, then, the risk and danger of the something more of speech, if that something more is originally associated with that person loved most unconditionally by the infant, the mother? The answer has something to do with the Self-side of speech: human infants are born helpless and require the stranger other (mother) to interpret the meaning of its cries in order to have its needs met.[26] As an infant who cries but does not signify, the Other is responsible assigning meaning; the voice of the Other is consequently sign of dependency and helplessness as much as it is of coming comfort. Furthermore, the mother's voice is not always loving (e.g., scolding), and worse, her voice is sometimes painfully absent. The ambivalence of the mother's voice is compounded by the infant's identification with its own voice as "bad" as well: it cries out for food but the breast does not miraculously appear, and soon its own cry becomes associated with the horrible, self-frightening event of hunger. The babe's speech can become estranged and foreign, just as the surprising, stranger-voice that emits from our own mouths in adult moments of trauma or orgasmic release. In other words, the voice is not singular, but multiple, a complex of hearing one's voice and the Other's voice that can become confused. In one's own voice there are traces of the voice of the Other, the "bad voice," a voice that is uncontrollable, unpredictable, and does not necessarily come from "outside."[27] Dolar explains:
. . . 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.[28]
Perhaps what is most uncanny about self-speech is that we can become startled to the "stranger" within it, as "something more" in our own speech than "our" speech.[29] It is in this respect that Flournoy characterized Smith's glossolalia as "infantile." Not only was he dismissing her tongues as the product of some primal brand of auto-affection (an infantile fantasy of Martian omnipotence), but also to stress that it is the adult counterpart to the cries of an infant, that glossolalia simultaneously registers the anxiety and joy of an infantile dependency on the Other.
The uncontrollable and threatening voice of the Other, be it of one's god or one's mother, is thus not simply a voice object, but also a voice abject: meaningful speech that does not signify, glossolalia, "the voice beyond logos, the lawless voice."[30] That the voice abject is lawless gets at the underside of the "risk" that Arnold discusses as the hallmark of speech as such: speaking to another risks missing "the private mood" of one's "correspondent," as well as the failure to persuade or communicate.[31] Yet speech also risks the violation of norms, tempting lawlessness, as in the sublime speech discussed by Longinus, or in an address that violates generic constraints, or by screaming at a rock concert in that transgressive, underwear-throwing ecstasy of abandon, or by preaching that incites a worshipful, charismatic riot.
For yet another example of the voice abject that is closely related to glossolalia, take the controversial case of the "gruntometer," a device invented by a British tabloid to measure the vocal outbursts of tennis star Maria Sharapova.[32] The tabloid's device measured Sharapova's top grunt at 101.2 decibels (about twice as loud as a police siren), and this number became a much discussed curiosity for the British in the summer of 2005. Although in the U.S. we expect tennis stars like Venus and Serena Williams to mindlessly grunt on court, apparently tennis fans in the U.K. are not so forgiving. Some theorized that the grunting is part of a deliberate strategy to startle opponents, thereby encouraging more offensive counter-grunts and risking a deafening, cacophonous orgy of gruntlicious groundstrokes and grandslams. In her defense, Sharapova has denied any grunting strategy, insisting that her traumatic speech is the natural consequence of energy exploding forth as the ball is whacked with all the force she can muster. Regardless of the explanation, what is of interest here is that in a number of British newspapers and television shows, "the grunt" has been granted an agency of its own and linked to issues of (self) control: are these grunting athletes in control of their grunting, or is the offensive speech involuntary, like speaking in tongues? It seems that many individuals (one is tempted to say the British en toto) are much more comfortable with the idea that the grunts are strategic and under control, that the grunts do not have an agency of their own, that these voices are ultimately pseudo-abject. Perhaps, then, speech has been abandoned as a substance term for "our field" because it is ambivalent, because of this "risk" and "danger" that Arnold insists is inherent to it? Perhaps we have abandoned speech, not because it betokens the illusion of presence, not because it promotes auto-affection, but because it threatens to undermine precisely those things? Perhaps we have abandoned speech because, understood as an ambivalent thing both infantile and mature, speech as such forever denies we are in control and "all grown up."
THAT MOURNFUL APHONIA
Contrary to the singularity of voice in Derrida's critique of logocentrism, 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."[33] In this brief essay I have argued that this history concerns the voice abject of speech that finds its origin in the voice of the Other, and that while not necessarily consciously so, this "something more" in speech than speech was this elusive, fetishized, seemingly magical, and dangerous element that Wichelns and Arnold were attempting to articulate as the grounding substance of our studies. Understanding the voice abject as the "stranger" element of orality as such, at least part of the appeal of speech as a concept for disciplinary coherence is, appropriately, infantile (but in a non-judgmental, psychoanalytic sense). We love our speech. But, we fear it too, for although the disciplinary embrace of speech participated in the illusion of self-presence, there is also this alien voice, this element that speaks through us, this reminder of our fallibility, dependence, and limits, that informs the disciplinary rationales of our forbears.[34] Although the seeming magic of the interpersonal speech encounter seems to have found a new life in rhetorical studies in the guise of historical and contextual contingency-therein one finds a Benjaminian notion of contingent "danger" and possibility, that rhetoric cements what could have been otherwise-the dialogical ethic and hospitality encouraged by a confrontation with the speech of the unconscious seems to be eroding.35 I worry that the abandonment of speech as the central object has caused us to lose sight of an ethic of responsibility tied neither to meaning nor to law, but to the "acoustic bond" of interpersonal encounter that forces risk and tempts danger. "Over the years," argues Professor Dance, "there has been an erosion of the understanding and acceptance of the centrality of speech. I believe the decision was a betrayal of tradition and an abandonment of our disciplinary core."36 If Professor Dance is right, then we have erred on the side of text.
1 The Martian language is translated thus: "Hidden world, very near to ours, coarse language, curious like the beings.-Astané, my powerful master and all powerful, alone is capable of doing it." Theodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Sonambulism with Glossolalia (New Hyde Park, NJ: University Books, 1963), 235.
2 Hélène Smith is a pseudonym. Catherine Elise Muller was the medium's real name. See Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1991), s.v. "Hélène Smith." 3 Flournoy, From India, 241.
4 See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor/Penguin, 1958), esp. 204-206; and 394-400. 5 Flournoy, From India, 259-260.
6 See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 31-106; and Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 26-37.
7 Flournoy, From India, 261.
8 Robert Hariman, "Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory." Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 38; also see Michael Burgoon. "A Kinder, Gentler Discipline: Feeling Good About Being Mediocre." Communication Yearbook 18 (1995): 464-479.
9 Gerry Philipsen. "Notes and Queries on the Career of 'Speech' in Disciplinary Discourse: 1914-1928 and 1946-1954." Paper presented at the second preconference on the History of the Field at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association in Boston, Mass., November 2005.
10 Obviously, the title of this journal is evidence enough, but so are the departments of Speech and Speech Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Georgia in Athens, and at numerous, smaller colleges around the country. Frank Dance is the most vocal proponent of what we might term the "return to speech" campaign; see Frank E. X. Dance, "Speech and Thought: A Renewal." Communication Education 51 (2002): 355-359; Frank E.X. Dance, "Ong's Voice: 'I,' the Oral Intellect, You, and We." Text and Performance Quarterly 9 (1989): 185-198; and Frank E. X. Dance, "A Speech Theory of Communication." In Human Communication Theory: Comparative Essays, edited by Frank E. X. Dance (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 120-146.
11 "Speech is a powerful lord," argues Gorgias, "which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works." Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen." In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from the Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001), 45. Also see Jacqueline de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). The magic of speech continues today most especially in public address scholarship in regard to what Laura Sells terms the "miraculated text." See Laura Sells and Joshua Gunn, "Critical Public Address. Available: http://www.voxygen.net/soapbox/critpubad.htm accessed 12 June 2006.
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. The presence effects of speech in a particular, contingent moment is repeatedly mentioned as the ground of persuasion by many if not most of the essays anthologized as touchstones. For example, Wayland Maxfield Parrish argues that "one of the most important elements in persuasiveness is the impression made by the speaker's character and personality," and that "much of this impression is made, of course, by his appearance, voice, manner, and delivery, and cannot be recovered from study of the printed speech." Impressions are always representation of a fleeting but felt sense of presence in a speech situation. See Wayland Maxfield Parrish, "The Study of Speeches." In Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, edited by Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing Company, 1995), 34-46. 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. Like Hélène Smith, many charismatics who are gifted with tongues claim to be able to interpret their babble, or have religious leaders that claim to understand it.
17 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63.
18 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 66.
19 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 63.
20 In personal communication (14 June 2006), Professor Dance suggests the motive was also in part politically pragmatic (e.g., to make it easier to raise grant money), but also because of the "erosion of understanding and acceptance of the centrality of speech." To this I would also add the dogged drive for the "text" among some public address scholars, and the push to "textualize" everything under the sun as a part of that project--despite the explicit warnings of James Arnt Aune, Dilip Gaonkar, and others. Both the institutional-pragmatic and methodological motives are, finally, underwritten by the technological changes in mass communication explicitly discussed by Wichelns and better theorized by our colleagues in media ecology. Sadly, in the rush to examine all things new media and hypertext, we have forsaken Wichelns still sound argument that much suasive phenomena is interpersonal and takes place in a largely trans-discursive dimension of human encounter. See Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, edited Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), esp. Aune and Gaonkar's essays, 43-51; 255-275.
21 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.
22 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 20.
23 See Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. 63-82.
24 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 45-46.
25 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.
26 This process is described as the "subjects submission to the signifier" by Lacan, an elementary stage of the "graph of desire." See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 291-293.
27 My discussion of "good voice" and "bad voice" here draws on Steve Conner's intriguing reading of Melanie Klein's theory of identification, splitting, and the maternal breast in infancy. See Steve Conner, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-43.
28 Dolar, "Object Voice," 15.
29 Conner suggests one good example is hearing one's own recorded voice: many people are uncomfortable listening to their own recorded voices because it threatens the return of the repressed, that stranger within, those elements of Self we would rather keep repressed. See Conner, Dumbstruck, 7-9.
30 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). Space limits any well-supported argument, but one could argue another reason why "speech" as killed off has to do with its association with the "feminine" in an unquestionably phallogocentric, academic enterprise. See Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
31 Arnold, "Oral Rhetoric," 69.
32 Megan Lane, "Why Do Women Tennis Stars Grunt?" BBC News Online, 22 June 2005, available http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4118708.stm accessed 26 June 2005.
33 Dolar, "Object Voice," 16.
34 I would speculate this recognition led to, in one way or another, what some have termed a dialectical or dialogical ethic of communication. See Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery, Relating: Dialogues and Dialectics (New York: Guilford, 1996); Leslie A. Baxter, "Dialectical Contradictions in Relational Development," Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 7 (1990): 69-88 35 See Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," translated by Harry Zohn. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2003), 389-400.
36 Frank E. X. Dance, personal correspondence, 14 June 2006.