speech is dead; long live speech

Music: The Pixies: Bossanova (1990)

Just at the terminal again today, doing my job while escaping the heat. It is honestly a relief to be doing my job, and not worrying about a hole in the wall. Now it's almost time to do a little exercise and prepare for watching the new Harry Potter movie! Until I can post more, eat yer heart out Debbicilious!

Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xxv + 264. $25.95

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), viii + 216. $19.95.

Clifford Nass and Scott Brave, Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), xvii + 296. $17.95.

Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, reprint (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), + . $37.00

For the Latvian-born student of Carl Jung, Dr. Konstantin Raudive, "dead air" was not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps with the exception of local college and National Public Radio station broadcasts (respectively with their untrained "uh"-prone disk jockeys or those commonly cold, slow-speaking commentators), dead air is that unfortunate if not often startling moment when a radio or video broadcast falls unexpectedly silent, rupturing the charged "flow" of broadcast with an audible buzz of ambient hiss and/or a blank screen.[1] As one of the earliest pioneers and popularizers of capturing "electronic voice phenomenon" or "EVP," however, for Raudive dead air registered faint and often nonsensical messages from the deceased, ghostly voices discernable only with an ear finely tuned to rapid and rhythmic streams of multilingual speech.[2] Inspired by the spirit voices accidentally discovered in the 1950s bird-song tape recordings the Swiss artist Friedrich Jürgenson, Jeffrey Sconce reports that Raudive devised a series of experiments in the 1960s in which he used a microphone and tape recorder "to record the ambient sound in an apparently empty room. The experimenter then replayed the ten-to-fifteen-minute section of the tape several times, listening very closely for voices that emerged only with intense scrutiny and concentration."[3] Raudive eventually moved on to finding EVP in radio broadcasts, and published his findings in English as Break Through: Electronic Communication with the Dead May Be Possible in 1971, inspiring "psychic researchers around the world."[4]

Of course, many have dismissed EVP as the aural equivalent of the Rorschach inkblot test based on a human tendency to find patterns in otherwise nonsensical sensory stimuli. The same tendency to hear voices coming from one's coffee pot is also what led thousands of otherwise intelligent people to believe that rock bands, such as Judas Priest, Ozzy Osborne, and Led Zeppelin, were encoding subliminal messages on their 70s and 80s record albums that encouraged hormone-riddled teens toward drug use, Satanism, and suicide.[5] What should interest communication scholars about dead voices on air or demonic ones from the groove is not so much the possibility of life after death as much as our susceptibility to such beliefs, particularly in response to increasingly desolate views of subjectivity in the academy. "Even if their messages were often bleak," argues Sconce, "the Raudive voices did speak of an immortal essence that transcends the alienating modes of Darwin, Freud, Sartre, and all other demystifying assaults on the transcendental dimension of the human psyche."[6] As both John Durham Peters and Sconce have argued, the fantasy of communication as this transcendent unification with another in meaning or spirit, alive or dead, has paradoxically only intensified as communicative technologies advance and proliferate.[7]

In the spirit of the work of the late Walter J. Ong, in this review essay I extend this argument about the appeal of transcendence beyond the visual order to suggest that new communicative technologies have "stepped up the oral and aural" in pursuit of Ong's now famous thesis: "Voice, muted by script and print, has come newly alive."8 Although much labor has been devoted recently to theorizing the visual in rhetorical studies, by rehearsing Ong's major project in the recent reprint of The Presence of the Word, followed by a review of a series of books devoted to the relationship between voices and machines, I hope to resound the seldom-heeded call for studying speech as a complex, robust, persistent-and in our times, altogether haunting-object of culture and daily life.

Notes

1 Raymond Williams, "Television and Representation." In The Raymond Williams Reader, edited by John Higgins (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001): 179-187.
2 Konstantin Raudive, Break Through: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1971).
3 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 85.
4 Sconce, Haunted Media, 85.
5 See Joe Banks, "Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perpetual Creativity." Leonardo Music Journal 11 (2001): 77-83; and Michael Shermer, "Turn Me On, Dead Man." Scientific American Online (May 2005): available http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000EB977-12BE-1264-8F9683414B7FFE9F accessed 13 July 2007. For recordings of a coffee pot ghost, see http://www.coffeepotghost.com accessed 13 July 2007.
6 Sconce, Haunted Media, 90.
7 See John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), esp. 63-108.
8 Ong, Presence, 88.