public address as public release

Music: The Faint: Fasciinatiion (2008)

A public release on public address: this year the Eleventh Biennial Public Address Conference is being held at the site of its debut some twenty years ago at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I'm very excited to report I've been invited to participate, however, even if I wasn't I'd be going because the conference honoree is my "intellectual mother," as she is certainly for many: Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. How could I miss honoring her? One cannot, and should not, most especially because this group comprises the "home team." One of her many advisees, a bloggrolled and sometimes commenter here, John Murphy, will be delivering the keynote!

With the exception of my hiccup, the conference program is jam-packed with goodness, and this in an election year, of course. Although I admit that this will be my first conference, you don't have to be invited to attend, and apparently many do. I know this is tough for some folks who need to be on the program to get travel funds from their institutions (which is why I've yet to go until now, to be honest), but if you could swing it, the registration deadline is coming soon. Check the website for more details (and as someone noted to me in private, there is a cheaper, Friday-only registration possibility).

That release out of the way, I'm relieved to dispatch another: today I finished a draft of my talk. Since my work is not normally associated with "public address," I've agonized for some months how to address the audience. I think I have figured something out, hopefully something that will make connections between the center of public address practice and my own interests. Of course, I'm hammering away on what I trust will be a more or less welcome claim, that Communication Studies gave up the object of "speech" too soon. I'm also going to talk about the object of "uncontrolled speech" at some length.

I'll refrain from posting my talk because (a) it's not polished/in its fifteenth revision; and (b) I want to leave something for those who will be attending the conference. Maybe after the conference I can post the whole thing, or better, turn it into something worthy of publication. Well, my book-in-progress incorporates all the stuff I say anyway, but, you know, in "my field" the name of the game is still arrrrrrrticles. Anyhoo, here's a tease from the introduction:

The cry, the grunt, the scream, and the yawp: these vocal utterances are aligned with the sexual because they are not meant for public company, certainly not for public scrutiny. Of course, I would underscore the term "sexual" in its broadest sense here, not reducible to the genital, but rather consisting of a broad range of bodily stimulations that result in pleasure, pain---or both---from the visual enchantments of cinema to the uncomfortable bliss of endorphins on mile ten of that marathon you just ran yesterday. The cry, the grunt, the scream, and the yawp index the body in feeling. These also bespeak an absence of self-knowledge, a loss of control, even a tacit mindlessness frequently associated with extreme emotional states.

The cry, the grunt, the scream, and the yawp represent what we could simply term uncontrolled speech and today I want to suggest to you that uncontrolled speech plays a much larger role in public life than many have supposed. The trick is to understand involuntary or uncontrolled speech as that which measured speech always threatens to reveal---that every time we witnesses masterful eloquence, there lurks the possibility of a hiccup or belch waiting to rupture the ruse of public propriety. For just as the measured talk of two friends flirting in a diner portends the promise or threat of a coming scream, so does a president horrify and infuriate with an impending "duh" or the possibility of an unthinking, barbaric yawp. In this sense, I will argue that the unspoken-uncontrolled is the regulatory organ of eloquence.

In plainer language, my thesis today is that uncontrolled speech, represented by the cry, the grunt, the scream, and the yawp, is the normative constraint of public address, and that this constraint is sexual in character. As a corollary, I will suggest that the object of speech, and by extension, oratory, should remain central to the study of public address. Until the mid-twentieth century, the study of oratory included a robust understanding of speech that put argument and affect on equal footing. I want to suggest an attention to uncontrolled public speech not only helps us to recover that affective or pathetic dimension of rhetoric that has been repressed, but that such attention also helps us to make better sense of this contemporary implosion of public and private, of politics and entertainment, of prurience and propriety.

To this end my talk is organized into three parts. With reference to contemporary examples of uncontrolled speech, I first turn to a discussion of the sexual significance of speech as such. As a number of you are expecting, and perhaps some of you dreading, here I will draw on the insights of psychoanalytic theory in order to explain the ambivalence of speech as such (I promise to go gentle on the jargon if you agree to let yourself laugh—that is, if you let yourself go in public). Then, in the second part of my talk I bring an understanding of uncontrolled speech to bear on the polarizing oratory of presidential candidate, Barak Obama. Finally, I will discuss how the discipline formerly known as speech communication abandoned speech's affective dimension in pursuit of academic respectability, eventually abandoning the object of speech itself.