Speech's Sanatorium

Abstract

In conversation with Debra Hawhee and Jenny Rice on the topic of sensation across a century of QJS research, in this essay I infer that a mid-century decline of interest in “feelings” is, at least in part, a reaction to the instrumental logics animating the “mental hygiene” or “speech hygiene” movements, the methods and techniques of which were either unconsciously or silently compared to those of Nazi “science.”

Keywords:

• Affect
• Dialectical Image
• Feeling
• Image of Thought
• Speech Pathology

The author thanks the QJS editorial team, David Beard, Courtney Byrd, Pat Gehrke, and Darrin Hicks for their feedback and advice.

The author thanks the QJS editorial team, David Beard, Courtney Byrd, Pat Gehrke, and Darrin Hicks for their feedback and advice.

Notes

[1] Elvis Costello, “Watching the Detectives.” My Aim is True. Hip-O Records (Universal), 2007 (1977).

[2] Don Felder, Don Henley, and Glen Frey, “Hotel California.” Perf. by the Eagles. Hotel California, Elecktra/Asylum, 1976.

[3] I reference Costello and the Eagles music from 1976 to 1977, in part, because it marks the period by which the so-called epistemic turn had cordoned off interest in sensorium in Hawhee's analysis (and in part because it marks the beginning our generation, the X-ers). Notably, 1977 also marks the emergence of both mythic criticism and fantasy theme analysis in the pages of the journal; both approaches to the study of rhetoric were peculiar in their treatment of feelings and were careful to elide the fact that the moorings of each approach were psychoanalytic in origin (see Joshua Gunn, “Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination and Its Decline in U.S. Rhetorical Studies.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 1 [2003]: 41–59). I also reference Hotel California here because the title song has been wrongly construed as a reference to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital.

[4] If not a time past or the way we used to write scholarship or the print journal or many of our gifted and beloved mentors, as I have argued elsewhere, most certainly “speech.” See Joshua Gunn, “Speech is Dead; Long Live Speech.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 340–61.

[5] See Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, eds., The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, Sponsored by the Speech Communication Association (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971).

[6] For an account of the conference and the agenda generated by its participants, see the third issue of the volume 34 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2004). For an interview with the conveners of the conference, Andrea Lunsford and Michel Leff, as well as additional details about the purpose and rationale of the meeting, participants and affiliated organizations, and a history of rhetorical studies, see “Interview with Professors Andrea Lunsford and Michael Leff about the Alliance for Rhetoric Society,” Kairos 8 (2003): available http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/8.2/binder.html?interviews/arsinterview/index.htm, accessed August 12, 2014.

[7] James Arnt Aune, “The Politics of Rhetorical Studies: A Piacular Rite.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 1 (2006): 69.

[8] A counterpart to Bork's more conservative Gomorrah; see Robert Bork, Slouching toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1996).

[9] Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume Four: 1938–1940, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2003 [1940]), 392.

[10] I jest, of course, but mean to reference a only a handful of the “post-” thinkers who were influencing rhetorical studies at the time of Aune's paper and which continue to do so over a decade later. We have made the posthuman turn in rhetorical theory and criticism.

[11] This is a point Hawhee culls about cinema from Ott; see Brian L. Ott, “The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 42.

[12] See Robert L. Scott, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” Central States Speech Journal 18, no. 1 (1967): 9–17.

[13] The essays published in QJS on Nazi rhetoric and propaganda and Hitler as a public speaker are numerous. For a representative analysis near the end of the war, see Walter B. Emery, “Verbal Warfare,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 30, no. 2 (1944): 154–57.

[14] Perhaps most obliquely, the Nazi–Speech connection is located in the tentacles of instrumental reasoning goading the “scientific” transformation of people into texts, and most directly, vis-à-vis the scientification of “rhetoric” in speech hygiene and is transmutation into “general semantics.” Respectively, see Carolyn Marvin, “The Body of the Text: Literacy's Corporeal Constant,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 2 (1994): 129–49; and Roy Schwartzman, “Scientism and General Semantics,” The Carolinas Speech Communication Annual 11 (1995): 44–60. The most direct connection is the work of Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor (Jones) at Iowa in respect to the 1939 “Monster” study, about which more below. See Nicoline Grianger Ambrose and Ehud Yairi, “The Tudor Study: Data and Ethics,” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 11 (2002): 190–203; and Franklin H. Silverman, “The ‘Monster’ Study,” Journal of Fluency Disorders 13 (1988): 225–31.

[15] See, for example, an elegant essay defending an attention to the mood of rhetoric and “the language of the emotions”: Everett Hunt, “The Rhetorical Mood of World War II,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 29, no. 1 (1943): 1–4.

[16] Herman Cohen, The History of Speech Communication: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1914–1945 (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1993); Pat J. Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech: Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009); and William M. Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).

[17] See J. A. Winans, “The Need for Research,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 17–23; and “Research in Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 24–32.

[18] Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.

[19] As both Hawhee and Ann Cvetkovich note, the influence of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi on the distinction between “affect” and “emotion” has become widely accepted in the theoretical humanities, and one is often implored to recognize the distinction in scholarship even when preferring different terminology. The distinction can be productively used when attempting to discuss knowledge or experience that prefigures the “translation” of one toward the other.

[20] See Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (2007): 459–68; and Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–14. Some of the members of this group of scholars are affiliated with the University of Texas, while a core of them are located in Chicago and originally dubbed themselves “Feel Tank Chicago.” Folks affiliated officially and unofficially (by way of citational habit) include Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Katheleen C. Stewart, as well as Lisa Duggan, Avery Gordon, Debbie Gould, Vanalyne Greene, Mary Patten, and many others.

[21] Cvetkovich, Depression, 4.

[22] See Joshua Gunn and Frank E.X. Dance, “The Silencing of Speech in the Late 20th Century,” The Unfinished Conversation: 100 Years of Communication Studies, eds. Pat Gehrke and William M. Keith (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 64–81.

[23] For more on the peculiar sense in which I mean—with reference to the elocutionists!—see Joshua Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 175–215.

[24] John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 58.

[25] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume Three: 1935–1938, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2002 [1936]), 121.

[26] Benjamin, “On the Concept,” 392.

[27] John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 249.

[28] To my knowledge, the best rumination of on the tonal qualities of the dialectical image is though sonority. See Mirko M. Hall, Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking Against the Grain, 1800–1980 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp. 53–80.

[29] Rajchman, Deleuze, 32. Also see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129–67.

[30] Deleuze, Difference, 131.

[31] Deleuze, Difference, 131.

[32] Deleuze, Difference, 131.

[33] Deleuze, Difference, xvi–xvii. For a sophisticated account of the shift, see Jonathan Dronsfield, “Deleuze and the Image of Thought,” Philosophy Today 56 (2012): 404–14.

[34] Rajchman, Deleuze, 37.

[35] Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” 13.

[36] Speaking of philosophy, Deleuze explains, “It is in terms of this [dogmatic] image that everybody knows and is presumed to know what it means to think. Thereafter it matters little whether philosophy begins with the object or the subject, with Beings or beings, as long as thought remains subject to this Image which already prejudges everything: the distribution of the object and the subject as well as that of Being and beings.” Difference, 131.

[37] Andreas Molt, “Adorno and the Myth of Subjectivity.” Contretemps 3 (2002): 116–17. I lean with Adorno and Lacan; see Theodor W. Adorno,”Subject and Object,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002), 497–511; and Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012). At the time of this writing, the current wave of the critique in rhetorical studies is stuck in “object oriented ontology”; see Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011).

[38] Ester Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 198.

[39] James Arnt Aune, “Rhetoric and Modernity,” The Blogora, September 30, 2009, http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/3150, accessed August 2011.

[40] Pat Gehrke, Ethics and Politics, 16.

[41] Joseph Berg Esenwein, How to Attract and Hold an Audience: A Practical Treatise on the Nature, Preparation, and Delivery of Public Discourse (New York, NY: Hinds, Noble, and Eldredge, 1902), 5. Also see Gehrke, Ethics, 16.

[42] See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 129–31.

[43] For example, compare the Judson–Rodden model of the “speaker audience relationship” Hawhee analyzes to the one advanced by speech pathologist Wendell Johnson in 1951, which resembles the Shannon model introduced around the same time but popularized as the Shannon–Weaver model in the 1960s; Wendell Johnson, “The Spoken Word and the Great Unsaid.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 37, no. 4 (1951): 419–29.

[44] C. H. Woolbert, “A Problem in Pragmatism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 2, no. 3 (1916): 264; 273. Also see Gehrke, Ethics, 15.

[45] Lee Edward Travis, “A Point of View in Speech Correction.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 22, no. 1 (1936): 57.

[46] Herman Cohen, The History of Speech, 119.

[47] See Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, trans. David Rappaport (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1958).

[48] Gehrke, Ethics, 21.

[49] For example, see John L. Hamilton, “The Psychodrama and Its Implications for Speech Adjustment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 29, no. 1 (1943): 61–69; Franklin H. Knower, “A Suggestive Study of Public Speaking Rating-Scale Values,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 15, no. 1 (1929): 30–42; Franklin H. Knower, “Psychological Tests in Public Speaking,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 15, no. 2 (1929): 216–23; Wayne L. Morse, “The Mental-Hygiene Approach in a Beginning Speech Course,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 14, no. 4 (1928): 543–54.

[50] For example, see Paul J. Moses, “Social Adjustment and the Voice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 27, no. 4 (1941): 532–37; Elwood Murray, “Speech Training as Mental Hygiene Method,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 20, no. 1 (1934): 37; and Travis, “A Point of View,” 57–61;

[51] Bryng Bryngelson, “Speech Hygiene,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 22, no. 4 (1936): 612–13.

[52] Bryng Bryngelson, “The Re-education of Speech Failures,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 19, no. 2 (1933): 231.

[53] Psychoanalytic theory informed many of the techniques of correction pioneered by early speech scientists and pathologists. A formative figure in the field, Smiley Blanton at the University of Wisconsin, was trained as a psychoanalyst and underwent analysis with Freud in 1929. See Smiley Blanton, Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud (New York, NY: Hawthorn Books, 1971); and Judy Duchan, “Smiley Blanton, 1882–1996,” A History of Speech-Language Pathology, http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/history_subpages/blanton.html, accessed August 15, 2014.

[54] H. Moskowitz, “Psychiatric Factors in Speech Correction,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 27, no. 4 (1941): 537.

[55] Gehrke, Ethics, 15.

[56] According to a limited survey published in 1933, less than thirty percent of colleges and universities provided clinical facilities for speech correction at that time; Charles H. Voelker, “A Survey of Speech Correction in Colleges and Universities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 19, no. 3 (1933): 403–8.

[57] Measured by the establishment of speech clinics, the cleave was in full swing across the discipline by the 1950s, although departmental separations would continue over the course the century (for example, here at the University of Texas pathology became a separate program with the establishment of the Speech and Hearing Clinic in 1941, but did not become its own department until 1998). The American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA), the credentialing equivalent of the National Communication Association, traces its origins to an “interest group” of the latter that formed in 1925 at the behest of one of its “founding fathers” at his home in Iowa City, Lee Edward Travis. Comprised of “25 charter members” from speech, psychology, English, and the already emergent “speech correction programs” at some universities (Travis had a clinic for stammering at Iowa, and Robert West and Smiley and Margaret Blanton at Wisconsin worked at the first U.S. speech clinic established there in 1914), the group would eventually help to establish the field on the basis of clinical and lab-based therapy and research. See Judith Felson Duchan, “What Do You Know About the History of Speech-Language Pathology?” ASHA Leader 7 (December 12, 2002): 4–29.

[58] Ambrose and Yairi, “The Tudor Study,” 191.

[59] Tudor's study, however, is deliberately not mentioned, about which more below. See Wendell Johnson, “The Indians Have No Word for It,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 30 (1944): 330–37; and Wendell Johnson, “The Indians Have No Word for It: II. Stuttering in Adults.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 30 (1944): 455–65.

[60] Silverman, “The ‘Monster’ Study,” 227.

[61] Mary Tudor, “An Experimental Study of the Effect of Evaluative Labeling on Speech Fluency (MA thesis, University of Iowa, 1939).

[62] Ambrose and Yairi, “Tudor Study,” 190; Jim Dyer, “Ethics and Orphans: The ‘Monster Study,’” San Jose Mercury News (June 10–11, 2001): A1; http://www.uiowa.edu/~cyberlaw/hsr/wj-sjmn/orphan061001.htm, accessed August 8, 2014.

[63] Dyer, “Ethics and Orphans,” para. 5.

[64] See Schwartzman, “Scientism and General Semantics,” 44–60. For an example of the shift, see Elwood Murray, “The Semantics of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 30, no. 1 (1944): 31–41; for a chilling account of the same logic in criminological contexts, see Pat Gehrke, “Deviant Subjects in Foucault and A Clockwork Orange: Congruent Critiques of Criminological Constructions of Subjectivity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 3 (2001): 270–84.

[65] In James A. Hijiya, “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144 (2000): 123. Oppenheimer said that he thought of this verse when watching the world's first atomic bomb explode, offered as evidence of his ambivalence and an emergent conscience, in a 1965 NBC television documentary titled, The Decision to Drop the Bomb.

[66] Cited in Nick Lolordo, “Multiplying Modernisms,” review of 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics by Marjorie Perloff and Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Lorenzo Thomas, Contemporary Literature 44 (2003): 162.

[67] Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Citizenship,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 100–126.

[68] Darrin Hicks, “The New Citizen.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 3 (2007): 358.

[69] Darrin Hicks and Ronald Walter Greene, “Speech and Biopolitics,” a paper delivered at the National Communication Association meeting in Chicago on a panel titled “Ad Bellum Purificandum: The Therapeutic Turn in Mid-century Rhetoric and Communication Theory,” Friday, November 13, 2009.

[70] Ronald Walter Greene, “Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 29. The concept of pastoral power is derived from Foucault, as is the quote. Space prevents any discussion, but it is worth noting a number of the field's pioneering pathologists considered theirs a spiritual mission; Travis was the founding dean of an institute of his name at the Fuller Theological Seminary and (Smiley) Blanton co-authored a book with Norman Vincent Peale before distancing himself from the minister after the publication of The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. See Smiley Blanton and Normal Vincent Peale, Faith is the Answer: A Psychiatrist and a Pastor Discuss Your Problems (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1940).

[71] Such a reading may also go a good way toward explaining the widely known antipathy toward psychoanalysis, a modernist perspective on affect and feeling if there ever was.

[72] For example, see Mical Raz, “Between the Ego and the Icepick: Psychosurgery, Psychoanalysis, and Psychiatric Discourse,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 2 (2008): 387–420.

[73] American Experience: The Lobotomist, documentary produced and directed by Barak Goodman and John Maggio (2008; Boston, MA: PBS, 2008), DVD.

[74] See Gretchen J. Diefenbach, Donald Diefenbach, Alan Baumeister, and Mark West, “Portrayal of the Lobotomy in the Popular Press: 1935–1960,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 8, no. 1 (1999): 60–69.

[75] See Marshall J. Getz, “The Ice Pick of Oblivion: Moniz, Freeman and the Development of Psychosurgery,” Trames 13, no. 2 (2009): 129–52.

[76] For a grizzly account, see Jack El-Hai, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007).

[77] See Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, John M. Allison, and Ronald J. Pelias, “A Critical History of the ‘Live’ Body in Performance within the National Communication Association,” in The Unfinished Conversation: 100 Years of Communication Studies, eds. Pat Gehrke and William M. Keith (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 187–206.

[78] See Barbara Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 4 (1992): 351–64; Barbara Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110–30; Carole Blair, review of Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, and Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression by Charles C. Lemert, Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 4 (1984): 100–103; and Carole Blair and Martha Cooper, “The Humanist Turn in Foucault's Rhetoric of Inquiry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 151–71.

[79] Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” 13.