public feelings in public address

Music: Jackson Browne, For Everyman (1973)

I've switched my writing gears from the textbook gear to the academic essay gear. I am much more comfortable in the higher gear. I've wanted for months to get back to writing my "On Speech and Public Release" essay. To better contextualize the piece, I thought it would be good to provide a background for where all this recent stuff in "affect" is coming from, but focused in particular on work that would interest public address scholars. That, seems to me, is stuff folks are working on that engages notions of publics and publicity. It also means I get to mention the reading group I joined last year, headed up by a very busy Ann Cvetkovich in the English department. Ann is an amazing scholar and a jet-setting rock star, so sometimes she's hard to get a hold of. (Ann, if you're reading, pretty please come talk to my class this fall?)

Nevertheless, here's a tease, a draft on the place of public feelings research in rhetorical studies (and more narrowly, public address as I understand it):

For almost two decades Lauren Berlant has enriched our understanding of the public sphere by arguing "it" has become intimate and multiple. That is, there is no one public sphere, but many public spheres (or as she would concede in later work, "publics") that are more or less made coherent and assumed to be singular over the binary of "public/private."[i] Historically, the "proper relation between public and private" was mapped over "spaces traditionally associated with the gendered division of labor," perhaps most familiar to rhetorical scholars in terms of the domestic, private world of women and the public domain of men that so characterized the cult of true womanhood.[ii] Although a gender binary continues to underwrite expressions of the public/private distinction-a point to which I shall return in respect to the human voice-the movement of women into new spaces, both imaginary and real, the consequently transformed divisions of labor, and the ever-multiplying technologies of communication driven by the motor of consumerism, have collectively contributed to a new sense of public belonging that seems to continuously publicize the putatively private.[iii] Berlant terms this new sense of public belonging "public intimacy." The conceptual locus of public intimacy is described as the "intimate public sphere" in earlier work, and as "intimate publics" in her more recent work.

According to Berlant in her landmark 1997 study, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, the intimate public sphere is the achievement of a conservative ideology born in the 1970s and that ripened into the "right-wing cultural agenda of the Reagan revolution."iv The gist of the earlier version of her argument focused at the level of the nation state; think, here, of the popular or cultural imaginary secured by television screens:

In the patriotically-permeated pseudopublic sphere of the present tense, national politics does not involve starting with a view of the nation as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual, and economic inequities . . . . Instead, the dominant idea marked by patriotic traditionalists is of a core nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate domains of the quotidian. It is in this sense that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. . . . the intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating and directed toward the family sphere. No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward public life, contemporary nationalist ideology recognizes a public good only in a particularly constrained nation of simultaneously lived private worlds.[v]

Berlant has in mind the turn to so-called cultural issues on the Right, such as the welfare of children, anti-abortion crusades, and the regulation of sodomy and same-sex marriage. For Berlant, conservatives have "transformed the scenes of privacy into the main public spheres of nationality . . . ."vi What one does in the bedroom has become, for example, a public issue even though it remains conceptually off-screen (in the ob-scene).[vii]

In addition to the privatization of citizenship in the national imaginary, in subsequent work Berlant has also focused on the "intimate publics" created by the culture industries, such as "women's culture":

An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people's particular core interests and desires. When this kind of 'culture of circulation' takes hold, participants in the intimate public feel as though it expresses what is common among them, a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history and their ongoing attachments and actions. Their participation seems to confirm the sense that even before there was a market addressed to them, there existed a world of strangers who would be emotionally literate in each other's experience of power, intimacy, desire, discontent, with all that entails . . . . "Women's culture" was the first such mass-marketed intimate public in the United States of significant scale.[viii]

Whereas Berlant describes the intimate public sphere as an (incomplete) implosion of the public and private at the level of the U.S. national political imaginary, she suggests an "intimate public" denotes a people brought into being through the consumerist circulation of personal or private experiences. These may very well overlap depending on one's focus (e.g., a politician appearing on a late night talk show, for which the viewing public brought into being is mostly young and male). The difference between the "intimate public sphere" and an "intimate public" is one of scale and politics, of national identification with the former and any number of interest groups or audiences with the latter. Berlant's project should be understood as a part of a larger scholarly push to grapple with how publics (and counterpublics) are fundamentally affective in character and, perhaps, "how affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures," as Ann Cvetkovich has suggested.[ix] Berlant and Cvetkovich's work on citizenship, publics, and intimacy, in turn, is partially a result of the agenda of small group of scholars in the humanities researching what Cvetkovich has dubbed "public feelings."[x] Historically, Cvetkovich explains that the loosely affiliated group's research trajectory was a result of the "collective meetings on the future of gender and sexuality and the question of how to give feminism greater impact in the public sphere."[xi] Gradually, however, a "Public Feelings group" emerged in "the shadow of September 11 and its ongoing consequences. Rather than analyzing the geopolitical underpinnings of these developments," says Cvetkovich, the Public Feelings group has "been more interested in their emotional dynamics."xii This focus on the emotional dynamics of public cultures can, in turn, be further contextualized as part of a still larger "affective turn" in the theoretical humanities, a turn that is receiving much attention recently in communication studies.[xiii]

What do rhetorical scholars have to offer for understanding public feelings and intimate publics? And why should we be thinking about public intimacy at all? Answering the second question makes it easier to approach the first. If it is the case that both the public sphere and publics have become "intimate" in the past century, fusing the private, the political, and profit-making into public zones of intimacy, then the character of public address must have also changed in ways that recommend increased attention toward public affect. With this transformation taken as a given, I think a characteristically rhetorical contribution to the larger, theoretical engagement with public affect asks scholars to reconsider the object of criticism. For their critical work, Public Feelings scholars have tended to focus on spectacles of one sort or another for evidentiary support: readings of films, performance art, monuments, literature, and other scenic objects have carried the weight of critical observation. For example, in her widely read An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich focuses on performance art because it is "emblematic of the public cultures that intrigue me," but also because it "creates publics by bringing together live bodies in space . . . ."xiv Berlant has examined objects of "mass-mediated popular culture," such as novels and films, because these objects help to foment "a sense of focused belonging to an evolving world."xv If we begin with the assumption that there are many publics, as well as numerous circulating objects that call them into being, what would be the object of a public feelings approach in public address?

The overdetermined answer is plain: the object is "address," which is traditionally understood as a formal speech. And even though formal speeches no longer center all modes of public address, there remains at the very least a condition of address that has persisted for millennia. As Herbert A. Wichelns once wrote, "human nature being what it is, there is no likelihood that face to face persuasion will cease to be a principle mode of exerting influence . . . ."[xvi] In 1925, of course, Wichelns could not have foreseen television, cell phones, the Internet, and video teleconferencing, but the spirit of his observation continues to haunt: the intimacy of human vocalization, of speech, influences people because the default context for speech remains everyday interpersonal encounter.xvii Furthermore, even in a world dominated by screens and speakers, the human voice continues to convey and evoke human emotion, formally and informally. I submit that the experience of human speech, mediated or not, is the most direct route to feelings and intimacy in publics and, consequently, that a focus on speech as such should center work on public feelings and affect from a rhetorical perspective. Rhetorical scholars have at their disposal centuries of theories about the human voice and its relationship to human feelings, and thus are uniquely primed to address public affect via the object of speech. To make this case, I will demonstrate how human speech is intimately associated, both symbolically and physiologically, with the most intimate and "private" of human feelings, and then show how these feelings are rhetorically managed and manipulated in publics.

Notes
i For more on the concept of "publics," see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
ii Berlant, "Intimacy," 3. Cite Karlyn here;
iii The ideology of publicity is also at work here. See Jodi Dean, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Joshua Gunn, "Death By Publicity: U.S. Freemasonry and the Public Drama of Secrecy." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 243-278.
iv Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 7.
v Berlant, Queen, 5.
vi Berlant, Queen, 177.
vii For more on this paradoxical dynamic, see Davin A. Grindstaff, Rhetorical Secrets: Mapping Gay Identity and Queer Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006).
viii Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 5.
ix Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.
x Ann Cvetkovich, "Public Feelings," South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (2007): 459-468.
xi Cvetkovich, "Public Feelings," 459. Some of the members are located in Austin, Texas and affiliated with the University of Austin (including the author), while a good core of them are located in Chicago and originally dubbed themselves the "Feel Tank Chicago." Scholars associated with the group-officialy and unofficially by way of citation-include Berlant and Cvetkovich, as well Lisa Duggan, Avery Gordon, Debbie Gould, Vanalyne Greene, Mary Patten, Rebecca Zorach and many others.
xii Cvetkovich, "Public Feelings," 460.
xiii See Patrica Tincineto Clough and Jean Halley, Eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Duham: Duke University Press, 2007). For notable engagements with the affective turn in communication studies, see Barbara A. Biesecker's edited discussion forum on affect in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 193-219.
xiv Cvetkovich, An Archive, 9.
xv Berlant, Female Complaint, 13.
xvi Wichelns, "Literary Criticism," 4.
xvii See Frank E.X. Dance, "A Speech Theory of Human Communication: Implications and Applications," Journal of Applied Communication Research 10 (1982): 1-8. Of course, the view that quotidian face-to-face communication is the default has been contested; for an overview of the interpersonal vis-à-vis mediation literature, see Leah A. Lievrouw, "New Media, Mediation, and Communication Study," Information, Communication & Society 12 (2009): 303-325.