ABSTRACT
This essay recovers the communication pedagogy that the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) developed as part of their outreach to immigrant men in the industries in the early-20th-century U.S.A. It brings into focus how the YMCA's teaching techniques negotiated the relation between labor and labor power by configuring sound, speech, and class subjectivity in a way that put in motion a form of productive affect. From this material history, the essay prompts reflection on the ways that sound continues to configure ever-shifting modes of productivity and exploitation, inviting scholars to critically consider the role of communication pedagogy in the evolving contexts of capitalism.
A type of story could be heard whispered and shouted near and far at the turn of the 20th century:
А worker from a mill … was ordered by a foreman to pick up a crowbar and carry it to a building forward which the foreman pointed. The workman had gone about two hundred feet on his way when the foreman shouted to him to get out of the way of a “live” wire which had suddenly broken loose. The poor fellow did not understand a word of what the foreman shouted, did not see the wire, and in a moment was killed.Footnote1
While the YMCA was not alone in expressing worry about the state of ethnic and class relations in the booming industries and their spill into larger society, the organization's approach to teaching and outreach among immigrant men warrants attention for its distinctive theorization of the relation between sound, speech,Footnote4 and class subjectivity. Examining the Y's approach can bring nuance and historical perspective to the questions, “How does sound constitute pedagogical interaction?” and “How may an orientation to sound shape the material value of a communication pedagogy?” As Walter S. Gershon and Peter Appelbaum note, “sounds are theoretically and practically foundational to educational experiences.”Footnote5 The historical and cultural contingencies of sound and its attendant sensoriaFootnote6 matter, furthermore, because sound and the senses make the contours of forms of (dis)abilityFootnote7 that are also integral to modes of social and economic production and exchange. In turn, these are often shaped by pedagogies and commitments to forms of effectivity that occur in institutional spaces beyond the schools and the academy. To Ronald Walter Greene's point, therefore, it is imperative that “our critical practice should … be sensitive to how capitalism incorporates rhetorical communication into its regime of accumulation and its mode of regulation.”Footnote8
Hence, I offer a look back at the YMCA's speech pedagogy for immigrant men as an opportunity to explore how the value of communication, in a concrete material sense, emerged through the industrial modification and attunement of speech and sound. Specifically, I highlight how the Roberts method oriented communication education to the creation of what I term “productive affect”: a mode of assembling subjectivity through the alignment of sensorial inputs with communicative outputs, in this case auditory sensation and speech performance, in a labor relation. Efforts to put speech pedagogy to work in the industrial context as a form of affective management invite critical consideration. The Y's speech pedagogy not only raises critical questions about how the body and its sensorial capacities mediate, but also challenges current theorizations of affect and class subjectivity in critical communication pedagogy. Kent A. Ono is correct to point out that “class plays a significant role in social life … in over-determining in, at times, contradictory ways, the effects of social power.”Footnote9 Yet, class and its intersections with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or ability are never static or simple “effects” of power; rather, they are ever generative, situational, interactive, historical productions in which modes of communication play a significant role.Footnote10 It is this lingering indeterminateness and mobility of subjectivity, what Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg call the “‘yet-ness’ of a body's affectual doings and undoings,”Footnote11 that interests me as I explore how the YMCA's industrial sound pedagogy bears on the problematic that Matthew S. May has identified as “the connection between affect and class struggle.”Footnote12
The stakes for understanding this connection and the role of sound and speech pedagogy in it are significant. As Beverly Skeggs argues, cultural theory, especially when oriented to the problematic of communication, may have built consensus around the notion that “the cultural resources for self-making and the techniques for self-production are class processes and making the self makes class.”Footnote13 However, as Skeggs admits, the working-class experience remains persistently out of view. It might be the case, as Michael J. Thompson suggests, that across the disciplines, the cultural turn has become, well, too cultural. For him, “there can be no meaningful critical theory of society without a confrontation with the structural imperatives of administered capitalism and its power to shape mind, self, and culture.”Footnote14 Capitalism requires cooperation and cooperation entails communication; therefore, modes of communication are always and inevitably involved in some form of productivity. Karl Marx early on observed that “the productive power developed by the laborer when working in co-operation, is the productive power of capital.”Footnote15 As Ronald Walter Greene and Kristin Swenson demonstrate in their study of “soft skills” as a particular form of valorized communicative performance, “[w]orkplace skills are ways to express what the Marxist tradition describes as a relation between labor power and labor. Labor power is an abstraction that describes the capacity to produce, while labor describes particular forms of working.”Footnote16
How does communication education negotiate the relation between labor and labor power? Examining the YMCA's outreach to foreign-born workers in the context of early-20th-century industries, I argue that at the industrial work-site, speech pedagogy aimed to generate productive affect—a mode of attunementFootnote17 measured by workers’ responsiveness and cooperation—which crystallized the historical and material assemblage of sound, speech, and hearing in capitalism. In highlighting the Y pedagogy's orientation to the creation of productive affect, I begin with Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's definition of affect as a “free radical” that “attaches to and permanently intensifies the meaning of anything.”Footnote18 It is not the meaning but the doing of affect that interests me most, however.Footnote19 As Ben Anderson points out, the study of affect attends to the question, “How are bodies formed through relations that extend beyond them and how do bodily capacities express and become part of those relations?”Footnote20 This is a productive orientation, for it enables us to attend to the body—particularly the body on the assembly line—as a body in motion and in relation, and to view the social, as Bruno Latour invites us, less as a predetermined condition, and more as the product of processes of assembly.Footnote21 With this approach, the role of speech within labor, a core activity of modernity, can be interrogated for its contingency, historicity, economic value, and political valence.
In the case of the Y's speech pedagogy, I suggest that the attunement of speech to industrial work allowed for two developments. First, folding speech into the production process delivered it to the impulses of optimization, normalization, and control in ways that echoed the scientific management aspirations of Taylorism, namely its tendency to optimize production by rationalizing the division of labor, the available modes of control over the performance of tasks, and the employment relationship.Footnote22 These experiences should offer critical contextualization for contemporary efforts to standardize and instrumentalize communication educational outcomes, often with a similar motive of ensuring students’ future productivity.Footnote23 Furthermore, I demonstrate how the interactional dynamics of the Y's speech pedagogy generated a form of sociality in which the emergent working class and managerial middle class would be defined in relation to distinct modes of speech practice and attunement. Hence, as I lay out the sensorial dimensions of the Roberts method and trace the transformation of the Y's speech pedagogy into a form of class politic, my aim is to trouble, productively, I hope, a commonplace assumption in our field that links communication education to human empowerment.
Producing speech, assembling workers
At the turn of the 20th century in the U.S.A., the cultural, intellectual, and industrial aptitude and commitments of new immigrants were increasingly cast into doubt, leading various civic, religious, and other organizations to launch a wide range of initiatives to try to (re)organize the fields of social, political, and industrial relations. Commonly referred to as forms of Americanization education despite their diverse motives and approaches, some of these activities proved helpful and innovative, others well intended but ineffectual, yet others openly hostile and intrusive to immigrants’ lives. At the level of their pedagogical techniques, such Americanization work was equally varied.Footnote24 The challenge seemed enormous: the needs were vast, the resources scarce, and appropriate pedagogical expertise even more rare.
A sense of urgency was felt, particularly in the industries where safety concerns were outweighed by commitments to efficiency and productivity, which demanded a specific kind of worker to come into being. The concern with safety was especially acute in the mining industry. Roberts reported that “thousands of foreign-born speaking men work in dangerous places in the mines and their prime need is to learn simple words and phrases descriptive of their daily vocation.”Footnote25 In response, in 1902 the National YMCA established an Industrial Department. As a unit reporting to the International Committee of the YMCA, the Industrial Department administered programs for workers in mining, railroads, steel production, textile milling, lumbering, and other industries. Even if in practice the primary focus of the organization was reaching out to foreign-born working men rather than their employers, the organization's vision would gradually evolve and go beyond concern for the circumstances of workers’ lives and work. As a 1916 report stated, “[t]he obligation of the Association is understood to be to change men, but primarily to change the existing social or industrial order.”Footnote26
By 1909, enough experience had been accumulated to begin fine-tuning the organization's approach and the decision was made to develop a speech pedagogy for immigrant workers in the industries. In that year, Roberts produced English for Coming Americans: A Rational System for Teaching English to Foreigners, a teachers’ primer that laid the foundation for the organization's pedagogical approach.Footnote27 The text and its auxiliary documents and materials articulated an overall philosophical approach to teaching speech in the industries and also spelled out specific guidelines for the Y's staff, Secretaries, and volunteers who would conduct the lessons. The Y's approach was distinctive from those of other organizations and institutionsFootnote28 for its insistence that language instruction be oriented to work settings, which in the case of the population of men served by the organization meant primarily the factory and less so the home. With its “Industrial Series” forming the core of the curriculum, the Roberts method was oriented to the specific circumstances and practices of several industries. The Industrial Series included some general topics such as going to work, beginning a day's work, shining shoes, a man quitting his work, a man looking for work, a man injured at work, etc. There were also more specialized series such as lessons for mine workers (going down the shaft, guarding against fire, cleaning and loading coal, etc.) and lessons for mill workers (the weaver going to work, changing the bobbin in the loom, etc.). The topics selection aimed to equip each student with a basic working vocabulary so that the foreigner would become “a better employee, and in this simple course a channel of communication will have been opened, through which American ideas and ideals will reach his soul.”Footnote29
However, its rendezvous with popular rhetorics of Americanization was not what made the Roberts method momentous. Rather, I would argue, its seamless incorporation into the industrial process gave it its edge. To begin with, the Y worked hard to get closer to industry. Their own internal analysis suggested that the Industrial Department would be “unable to accomplish the Association's objective” if it came “under the domination of capital and out of touch with the workers.”Footnote30 Still, the organization developed a robust system of outreach by cooperating with the management of industrial firms, such as the Ford Motor Company, which provided financial support and in some cases company land for YMCA buildings.Footnote31 The extent and impact of such cooperation has been properly met with suspicion by scholars and contemporaries.Footnote32 For example, Antonio Gramsci put a critical spotlight on the YMCA's role in helping to standardize and optimize production processes by regularizing the behavior of workers.Footnote33 Highlighting such structural ties to the industries, however, provides little insight as to how or why the Roberts method might have appealed to all involved or worked at the instructional level. Gaining such understanding requires closer attention to the more granular routines, techniques, and strategies of the Y's speech pedagogy, specifically their embodied and relational dimensions.
A step further, the Y's approach is notable for the way it integrated human and machinic sounds, bodies, and movements. The promise of generating a “working vocabulary” would gain a particular ring when speech was deployed alongside other sounds on the assembly line. The Y's insight was that words could literally do work. As Roberts argued,
[e]xperience proves that if we take the simple practices with which each foreigner is familiar; put these into simple English phrases, such as are of common use; then train these men in these new combinations of sound, they will rapidly and with interest attain knowledge of English that will greatly help them in the home, in the work and in business.Footnote34
[l]et not the pupil see a word before he first hears it from the teacher. He should not write a word before he can accurately reproduce it. Train the ear to hear and the tongue to talk before the eye and the hand are enlisted in the work of learning a language.Footnote36
The decision to deprioritize literacy and foreground orality is noteworthy. For starters, the Y's approach needs to be appreciated for its novelty. It was created at a time when most expertise with foreign language education had developed for the sake of teaching Latin and Greek in grammar schools. The methods for teaching such “dead” languages would center on the skills of reading, writing, and translation. The Y, in contrast, aimed to bring English-language instruction to life by situating it in the zone of human interaction. And in doing so, it anticipated Walter J. Ong's insight that “speech is more performance-oriented, more a way of doing something to someone.”Footnote37 Furthermore, speech was posited as a productive activity. It would develop “by training and practice,”Footnote38 just like learning to use any other tools or machinery. Regular use would help speech become routine, habitual, and seamlessly incorporated into the labor process. As Roberts instructed,
[g]ive all possible aids to the memory and when the strain upon it is reduced to a minimum, the student will be better able to concentrate his mind upon getting the correct sound of the new language and in reproducing what he has heard.Footnote39
Such learned mindlessness or automation would be handy within the overall functional design of the workplace. Just as the production line moved with the timed regularity and accuracy of a machine, so too would the foreigner's speech. The Roberts method provided sentence after sentence in “chronological order, thus making of the whole operation a logical chain of acts which can easily be remembered by a man of average intelligence.”Footnote40 For example, the first lesson from the Domestic Series of English for Coming Americans would cover the routine actions of getting up in the morning. Teachers were instructed to act out the target vocabulary in a sequence: “I awake from sleep. I open my eyes. I look for my watch. I find my watch. I see what time it is … ”Footnote41 Then, they would lead the class into enunciating the sequence: “Teacher: Give me the first sentence in our lesson. Pupil: I awake from sleep. Teacher: Good, and what is the second? Pupil: I open my eyes … ”Footnote42 The same approach was used in the Industrial Series. For example, in teaching the future tense to miners, the lesson plan sequenced the actions: “To-morrow, the miner will go underground. To-morrow, the miner will take a match. To-morrow, the miner will strike the match. To-morrow, the match will be lighted, etc.”Footnote43 Observing lessons from the Military Series performed at a cantonment in 1918, Fred H. Rindge Jr., the Secretary of the YMCA's Industrial Department, would marvel at the Roberts method's efficiency: “It is amazing how quickly men really understand and can repeat the lesson without the teacher's help.” He even quoted a young Italian man as saying, “Teacher, I want thank you … . Now I learn whole lot, I be better soldier.”Footnote44 In this framework, speech was regularized and Taylorized: like the actions on an assembly line, speech was broken down into small units that would be sequenced to efficiently achieve a specific purpose.
Furthermore, the insistence that both teacher and student disassociate from dependence on the letter is reminiscent of Friedrich A. Kittler's observation of how oralization of the alphabet “culminated in the description and prescription of a new body.”Footnote45 In the Roberts method, this new body was marked by a hierarchization of the senses, with the ears and mouth achieving primacy over the eyes and hands. Hearing and speaking were presented as mechanical processes. “We have already called attention to the importance to the students of the right adjustment of the lips, teeth and tongue in the execution of certain sounds,”Footnote46 Roberts admonished. As the Y's approach made the working body its focus, it also reconfigured the sensory organs from organs of reception to organs of (re)production. Just as factories were organized around different tasks, workers’ bodies—their organs and senses—were mapped and their functional value assessed. For students to utter useful sounds, they would have to train their mouths to coordinate with their ears.
In this setup, the ear appeared of chief interest. Roberts insisted that teachers should “trust the ear as the receptive organ of language,”Footnote47 as the ear captured “atmospheric vibration conveying to us certain ideas.”Footnote48 Notably, for Roberts, the ear's recording capacity was different from that of the “talking machine,”Footnote49 because the ear somehow naturally separated voices from sounds and sounds from noise. Thus, the ear was not just an organ that captured sound vibrations, but it was an organ that sorted and directed the flow of auditory input. This was a perspective that granted significant agency to the ear as a medium. It turned the medium into an agent, just as the living and the machinic body blended into one productive apparatus meant to turn input into output.
Granting such agency to the ear would translate into a form of labor power only in a particular sense. As Gilbert L. Skillman has made evident, the labor–labor power distinction is “best understood as a corollary of the physical inalienability of labor from the consciousness of the laborer.”Footnote50 Hearing treads the line between sensation and interpretation, embodied activity and consciousness. To begin with, hearing, as much as speech, is a dynamic, social, and historically contingent capacity of the body that operates at the intersection of, and sometimes in competition with, other competencies. When it comes to the historical relation between audition and interpretation, for example, Jonathan Sterne has noted how with the emergence of the visual representation of sound, “frequencies and waves took primacy over any particular meaning that they might have in human life.”Footnote51 In a similar vein, Justin Eckstein has pointed out that “a sound's meaning is not intrinsic to vibrate air molecules, but is a learned process of audition that separates signal from noise and ascribes its significance.”Footnote52 Could workers be trusted to interpret what they heard? The Y seemed aware that interpretations mattered in the industrial relation, and that such interpretations could be of material consequence. It was not just a matter of workers mis-understanding the orders of foremen, the whistles preceding the acceleration of the assembly line, or the sound of the Y Secretary's voice modeling proper conduct. As Charles R. Towson, then Secretary of the Industrial Department, wrote in a 1908 confidential report that set off the Y's outreach efforts,
the disposition to criticize employers and especially the government for existing living and working conditions is very much in evidence among Italians … when really the padrone, the labor-boss or the contractor is the cause of much of their trouble. Ignorance of true conditions leads them into a socialistic and even anarchistic spirit.Footnote53
Interestingly enough, at least in the industrial setting, the Y's speech education strategy for interrupting the conditions for such (mis)interpretations did not entail a rhetorical response, an overt effort at ideological indoctrination. Rather, the Roberts method made the functionality of speech, not its hermeneutic potentialities, its focus. At the YMCA, workers were primarily trained to register speech and to respond appropriately. The pedagogy's hierarchization of the senses suggested that it was important for the foreigner foremost to hear before he could speak back, to grasp only sufficiently what he heard in order to respond in a useful way. Such responsiveness was of a particular value. It certainly attuned workers to their environment, thus enhancing their cooperativeness and productivity. But it also encouraged them to tune out those signals for which the Y had not modeled a suitable response. As Roberts insisted, “by training their ears so that they will understand the new channel for the new communication … [the foreigner] will enrich his life and [he] will enter the larger and higher life of America.”Footnote54 Thus speech training was organized like its own type of factory, with its own logics of rationalization and optimization that entailed workers’ affective attunement to the labor process. The output of the educational experience would be a productive and responsive foreigner “clothed anew in an English garment.”Footnote55
Producing affect, assembling class
The way the Y's speech pedagogy linked sound and affect in the social, relational setting of the classroom accounts for its social consequences. For Roberts, the classroom was “a microcosm” that would prepare the pupils to “be better able to play their part in the macrocosm wherein they move and act.”Footnote56 Hence, the Roberts method required that the foreigner be in contact with a native speaker of English who would assume the role of a loving parent. Greene points to the Y Secretary as a prime illustration of the way pastoral power was modernized for the industrial age.Footnote57 The YMCA Secretary or volunteer's task was to provide the foreigner's ear with the voice of parental love, thus eliciting a response of affection. As Roberts instructed,
[t]he coming of thousands of foreign-speaking men and women to our country each year affords us opportunity to perform this miracle in thousands of instances if we trust the ear and speak to these men in accents of sympathy and affection.Footnote58
Building such character would take methodical affective work, and it relied on carefully orchestrating students' and teachers’ speech and interactions. The Roberts method relied on mimetic learning. Students were supposed to take the teacher's speech and actions as good models for life outside the classroom. The teacher was figured as a guide, a parental figure, and a role model whose task was to “quicken the imagination of the foreigner”Footnote60 when the latter was unable to visualize the practices associated with the lesson. Given that each lesson in the series was designed to deal with “concrete realities,”Footnote61 the teacher's enactments of the lessons were supposed to model proper speech and behavior for work and daily life. Being the relation who provided the foreign-born worker with the power of speech, the English-speaking Y Secretary came to stand and speak as a proper representative of the American way.
The Y thought hard about ways to attract and sustain the interest of potential students. Roberts was concerned with devising a system that would be not only efficient, but also appealing. It appeared that if speech was taught orally rather than through writing or reading, the students would keep coming, enjoy their classes, and put themselves to work on the tasks of the lessons. Roberts advised the teachers to pace the lessons so that students would have good opportunities to connect the different elements they had been learning. This strategy highlights the industrial design of the Roberts method. Students would be able to recognize the operation of conjoining words as productive since it would remind them of the process in which parts were joined on the production line to become whole products. Such homology between the classroom and the workroom, Roberts argued, would make the students “enjoy the exercise and heartily participate in the recital.”Footnote62
Furthermore, affect was figured as an extension of industrial values. The foreigner's “joy” in the work would increase, Roberts believed, “as he recognizes, under new relations, words and phrases with which he wrestled in former lessons.”Footnote63 Roberts bragged that by the end of the 30 lessons students would have command of more than 700 words, a number he imagined to be larger than the stock most men in common walks of life used.Footnote64 In other words, students would keep practicing if they could see their knowledge increase the way inventory accumulated in a stockpile, signaling potential profit. The lessons would be “a pleasure,” Roberts argued, and they would make “the progress” of the student rapid as “he will be conscious that each time he comes to the classroom he is getting something he can immediately apply in the affairs of daily life.”Footnote65 The sheer accumulation of words and phrases would build appreciation.
The double meaning of appreciation as growth and as gratitude here is significant. For starters, it is important to note that what counted as growth for the working men was an increase in their productivity, not their opportunities or class status. As the Y's outreach manual suggested,
the great need felt by the employer is for increased efficiency in production. The greatest factor in production is the human factor, and the greatest element in the human factor is the spirit … . Sustained efficiency is impossible without a character basis.Footnote66
What was the scope of that larger life? As Towson observed in his 1908 report, immigrant men got “very little idea of what America is except through the ‘boss.’”Footnote70 In response, the Y's English-language classroom was established as a place where a foreign-born working man would have a point of contact with someone outside of his class who would provide an uplifting model. Consequently, the teachers were not recruited among English-speaking fellow workers or immigrants but among local-born YMCA secretarial staff, college men, and engineering students. As Mayer N. Zald and Patricia Dentin describe, the run-of-the-mill “ideal-type secretary” was
a Protestant from a medium-size town, of a lower middle-class background. He has attended a small, often denominational, college and may have considered becoming a teacher or minister. It is likely that he was a member of the YMCA during his adolescence, and he may have gone either to a YMCA or to some other religiously oriented camp, an experience of meaning to him. He is a good churchman, but not especially articulate in theological discussion. He prefers physically active programs to more passive and verbal programs, both by personal preference and professional necessity.Footnote71
the foreigners are moving and living in the common walks of life, they want the language of daily life and, in the fullest sense, they can appreciate this new world only when they can use and understand the expressions daily used by men with whom they associate.Footnote73
Notably, even as the YMCA frequently proclaimed it was preparing immigrant men for “their future place in America,”Footnote74 the Y's speech education did not necessarily enable class mobility. Two aspects of the program delimited its potential. One was the affective economy of the classroom. The other was how the structure of the lessons revalorized the labor relation. By learning English from the Y, the foreign-born working men were not being aided in becoming clerks, managers, or entrepreneurs. Instead the Y's speech pedagogy worked to reaffirm the workers’ position within the industrial relation. And class would be wrapped in sound. Through the acquisition of simple functional vocabulary (words for action), workers would only be aided in their labor. In contrast, with their complex vocabulary (words for thought), the Y Secretaries and college men would be made to sound as knowers, as transmitters of what was good and true about America.Footnote75 Thomas Winter has noted the gradual processes by which Y Secretaries became middle-class subjects through the intersection of emergent norms of masculinity, religious discourses, and modes of professionalization.Footnote76 My study adds the observation that the Y's sound platform had a particular role in this development. It is through their performance of speech in the English-language classrooms and their scripted interactions with the immigrant workers that the Y Secretaries themselves achieved class mobility. A managerial class emerged with a manner of speaking that was defined through this distinct contrast to the mechanical, routinized speech patterns afforded to immigrant workers.
Conclusion: the value of unsound pedagogies
In the end, my goal is not to extend an overall claim about the quality of the YMCA's wider scope of activities for immigrants in the industries and elsewhere. I grant that through their impressive national and international footprint and numerous forms of outreach activities—social, physical, educational, religious, and others—the Y provided vital services to workers, migrants, and other men at a time when there were few alternate forms of relief. I want to highlight instead how amidst this complexity, the Roberts method worked as a technology of Americanization of a particular type. It was a pedagogy designed to cultivate a form of productive affect meant to enhance productivity and temper the antagonisms of the labor process. In the way it sounded speech, the Y's pedagogy delineated and affirmed markers of class affiliation. The primary task of the working class was to listen to the managerial class. To speak as workers authorized men to orient their speech and practical judgment to the daily and local demands of labor and life. In the context of industrial production, the speech of the working class was immanent—words did not stand for actions, they were actions. In contrast, the Y teachers performed a form of abstracted, nationalized middle-class subjectivity in which speech was a tool of moral transcendence, a pathway into a code of higher moral principle. In the Roberts method, workers made sounds; the Secretary (teacher, manager) had a voice.
Assessing the material consequences of the historical interaction between sound and speech can benefit from a rapprochement of sound studies and labor theories of value. With their attention to activity and the creation of subjectivity, prior definitions of labor as “an ensemble of practices … organized around the appropriation of nature”Footnote77 are consistent with sound studies scholars’ observations that “environments condition and transform bodies and subjectivities. Environments are ableing and disableing for hearing subjects—those qualities do not inhere in the subjects themselves, even if there are very real, material differences in hearing among people.”Footnote78 At the capitalist site of production, investing in a distinction between sound and speech made evident that the ability to hear is less a biological and more a social capacity. This social dimension of sensorial abilities highlights the contingent character of labor power and its valorization. With the Roberts method, the embodied and performative capacities for speech and hearing would be regularized and rendered interchangeable, thus delimiting workers’ bargaining power. In contrast, as an expression of consciousness, managerial speech would entail a different logic of value. The Y Secretary's speech produced a metaphysics of presence, asserting the realness of a normative national identity and attuning workers to the idea that it might pay to be a proper American. As a form of productive affect, such attunement would create the conditions for surplus value to appear so that the capitalist would be “able to extract more labor from the worker than that embodied in the value of labor power (the wage).”Footnote79 The Y's effort to enhance workers’ sensorial capacities would amount not only to actively de-skilling them and fostering growing inequality—in capacity, status, and means—between workers and management, thus maximizing industrial output and profit, but also to recruiting the workers into the cultural maintenance of wage differentiation. Put simply, the Roberts method demonstrates that a communication pedagogy can produce novel forms of exploitation.
Material sound and speech pedagogies such as the Roberts method are not a thing of the past. Often coded as “skills,” communication practices and pedagogies in the workplace are increasingly deployed to maintain various productive capacities and forms of ableist politics. For example, recent developments such as the codification of “sonic skills”Footnote80 across diverse work spaces from hospital wards to factories and laboratories have once again brought to life the idea that corporeal senses and attunements need to be harnessed for the sake of productivity. Furthermore, as Greene and Swenson report, some forms of communication skills may shift precarity from “a specific kind of labor to the precariousness of cooperation” itself.Footnote81 It is important, therefore, that the interface between sound, speech, and capitalism be continuously interrogated. However, I would caution against overdetermining it, even in the name of critical intervention.
The Y's experience is illustrative in that respect as well. For all their efforts to bring a semblance of order to the seeming cacophony of languages and ethnicities and the plentiful sources of squabble and distrust in the industries, the Y's approach might have succeeded by the way it failed. The English-language skills immigrant workers learned at the YMCA might have delivered them to employers and the nation as intended, but they also just about sufficed as a kind of lingua franca that allowed working men to connect with each other, develop codes of solidarity across ethnic and linguistic groups, and self-organize into unions, mutual benefit associations, and much else.Footnote82 They might have been brought to classrooms to listen to the Y Secretaries, but the workers also tuned into each other. Such developments are a reminder that communication always takes a line of flight; it leaks through and spills over even the most eager designs to produce effects and possibilities beyond those intended. Hence, this essay's recovery of the complex social and political outcomes of a prior pedagogical attempt to bring communication under control through a seemingly rational, deliberate, and benevolent method committed to progress and productivity should temper contemporary efforts to do the same. We would be remiss to delimit the notion of productive communication to an interplay of inputs and outputs that is disconnected from a critical theory of value and overlooks how productive affect mobilizes or disrupts class composition, including its gendered, racial, and ethnic forms.
Notes
1 “Something Worth Tackling,” 1910, Industrial and Immigration Pamphlets: Box 2, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
2 “Among Industrial Workers: A Handbook for Young Men's Christian's Associations in Industrial Fields,” 1919, 16, Industrial Department of the International Committee of the YMCA: Box 7, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
3 The YMCA Secretary was a professional employee who often functioned as a field agent and whose role evolved alongside the organization itself. As the focus of the YMCA had largely shifted from religious proselytization to character development by the turn of the 20th century, the Y Secretaries carried out tasks such as record keeping, organizing and delivering programing at various locations, and so on. Some would advance to various leadership positions in the organization, as Roberts did.
4 This essay may appear slippery in deploying terms such as “speech” and “communication.” However, as the material I am excavating here precedes disciplinary developments that would render these concepts distinct, I try to follow the uses that appear in situ within the archive itself. Even as I acknowledge the fortitude with which conceptual demarcations have since set in, I am persuaded by Joshua Gunn's argument that
the titular displacement of “speech” suggests only a displacement of scholarly attention in word, for if we listen more closely to conversations about communication technologies, we discover that the object of speech continues to haunt like a ghostly present, murmuring for theoretical engagement (“Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 [2008]: 343–44).
5 Walter S. Gershon and Peter Appelbaum, “Resounding Education: Sonic Instigations, Reverberating Foundations,” Educational Studies 54, no. 4 (2018): 357.
6 See Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.
7 For careful consideration of ways notions of (dis)ability haunt both the fields of critical communication pedagogy and critical intercultural communication, see Deanna L. Fassett and Dana L. Morella, “Remaking (the) Discipline: Marking the Performative Accomplishment of (Dis)Ability,” Text and Performance Quarterly 28, nos. 1–2 (2008): 139–56; Deanna L. Fassett, “Critical Reflections on a Pedagogy of Ability,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 461–71.
8 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 327. Greene identifies a larger repertoire of strategies for pursuing the entanglements of rhetoric and capitalism than what is represented in this essay.
9 Kent A. Ono, “Critical: A Finer Edge,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 95.
10 Judith N. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Communication as Raced,” in Communication as ... Perspectives on Theory, ed. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 75–83.
11 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
12 Matthew S. May, “Spinoza and Class Struggle,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 204.
13 Beverly Skeggs, “Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘The Self,’” The Sociological Review 52, no. 2 suppl. (2004): 75.
14 Michael J. Thompson, “Review: Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order,” Contemporary Political Theory 17, no. 4 (2019): 284–89.
15 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 232, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
16 Ronald Walter Greene and Kristin Swenson, “Precarious Cooperation: Soft Skills and the Governing of Labor Power,” in Precarious Rhetorics, ed. Wendy S. Hesford, Adela C. Licona, and Christa Teston (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2008), 234.
17 On the concept of attunement, see Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 445–53; Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015); Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Zornitsa Keremidchieva and Vera Sidlova, “Political Argument and the Affective Relations of Democracy: Recovering Vaclav Havel's Theory of Associated Living,” in Proceedings of the Eighth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, ed. Bart J. Garssen, David Godden, Gordon Mitchell, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans (Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 2015), 722–29. The concept of affective attunement is also well developed in fields such as musicology, psychology, social work, and disability studies.
18 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 62.
19 I appreciate Joshua Gunn, Greg Goodale, Mirko M. Hall, and Rosa A. Eberly's effort to put such concerns with meaning in perspective in the context of the emergent field of sound studies. Their essay is useful for demonstrating how “prima facie, the key difference between ‘rhetorical studies’ and ‘sound studies’ is that sound persists whether or not it has taken on meaning (i.e., whether or not the sonic has been delivered to, by, or with language)” (“Auscultating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 5 [2013]: 476). However, I would argue that the modes of sounding language still matter, thus we may need to press a little further to consider when and how speech becomes rhetorical.
20 Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 9.
21 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
22 Craig R. Littler, “Understanding Taylorism,” British Journal of Sociology 29, no. 2 (1978): 185–202.
23 For such trends more broadly, see Wayne Au, “Teaching under the New Taylorism: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of the 21st Century Curriculum,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 43, no. 1 (2011): 25–45.
24 See Leslie A. Hahner, To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017); Zornitsa Keremidchieva, “From International to National Engagement and Back: The YWCA's Communicative Techniques of Americanisation in the Aftermath of WWI,” Women's History Review 26, no. 2 (2017): 280–95.
25 Peter Roberts, English for Coming Americans: A Rational System for Teaching English to Foreigners, 1909, 20, New York: YMCA, Immigration Work: Box 9, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota.
26 Charles R. Towson. “Some Principles and Policies, Dangers, and Actual Conditions of the Association's Work in Industrial Fields,” Internal Report to the International Committee of the YMCA (ca. 1920), Program Records: Industrial Files on Immigration Work: Box 7, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota. This report marks a shift in Towson's assessment of the industrial problem. A few years earlier, he had suggested that industrial strife was due primarily to the immigrant workers’ ignorance of American principles. See Charles R. Towson, “Italians in an American Community: Personal and Confidential Report to Mr. I. B. Hodge,” 1908, 5, Immigration Work: Box 9, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
27 Roberts, English for Coming Americans.
28 At the time, the field of teaching English as a second language was still emergent and unregulated, thus resulting in a vast variety of approaches that can hardly be captured in the scope of this essay. See Steven G. Darian, English as a Foreign Language: History, Development, and Methods of Teaching (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); Tim William Machan, What Is English? And Why Should We Care? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Amy Dayton-Wood, “Teaching English for ‘A Better America,’” Rhetoric Review 27, no. 4 (2008): 397–414.
29 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 29.
30 Towson, “Some Principles and Policies, Dangers, and Actual Conditions of the Association's Work in Industrial Fields.”
31 C. Howard Hopkins, History of the YMCA in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951).
32 See Gerd Korman, “Americanization at the Factory Gate,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 18, no. 3 (1965): 396–419.
33 Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg with Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 169.
34 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 13.
35 Ibid., 74.
36 Ibid., 12.
37 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1991), 177.
38 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 8.
39 Ibid., 17.
40 Ibid., 24.
41 Ibid., 33.
42 Ibid., 39.
43 Ibid., 63.
44 Fred H. Rindge Jr., “Uncle Sam's Adopted Nephews,” Harper's Magazine 137, no. 818 (July 1918): 281–89.
45 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Curtis Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 33.
46 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 67.
47 Ibid., 18.
48 Ibid., 10.
49 The YMCA had experience using the phonograph during various forms of outreach work.
50 Gilbert L. Skillman, “Marxian Value Theory and the Labor–Labor Power Distinction,” Science & Society 60, no. 4 (1996/1997): 447.
51 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 43.
52 Justin Eckstein, “The Acoustics of Argumentation and Advocacy,” Argumentation and Advocacy 54, no. 4 (2018): 355.
53 Towson, “Italians in an American Community,” 4.
54 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 14.
55 Ibid., 14.
56 Ibid., 25.
57 Ronald Walter Greene, “Lessons from the YMCA: The Material Rhetoric of Criticism, Rhetorical Interpretation, and Pastoral Power,” in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, ed. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Croftswiler (London: Routledge, 2012), 219–30; “Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 20–36.
58 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 11.
59 Ibid., 10.
60 Ibid., 24.
61 Ibid., 25.
62 Ibid., 26.
63 Ibid., 5.
64 Ibid., 29.
65 Ibid., 18.
66 “Among Industrial Workers: A Handbook for Young Men's Christian's Associations in Industrial Fields,” 1919, 15, Industrial Department of the International Committee of the YMCA: Box 7, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
67 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 22.
68 Ibid., 6.
69 Ibid., 29.
70 Towson, “Italians in an American Community,” 10.
71 Mayer N. Zald and Patricia Denton, “From Evangelism to General Service: The Transformation of the YMCA,” Administrative Science Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1963): 225.
72 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 22.
73 Ibid., 13.
74 Rindge, “Uncle Sam's Adopted Nephews,” 9.
75 Scholars of visual culture have pointed to similar mechanisms by which various pedagogies would cultivate modes of seeing some images as transcendent. See Brenton J. Malin, “Looking White and Middle-Class: Stereoscopic Imagery and Technology in the Early Twentieth-Century United States,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (2007): 403–24; Nathan Stormer, “Addressing the Sublime: Space, Mass Representation, and the Unpresentable,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 21, no. 3 (2004): 212–40. In the context of the Americanization campaigns, Leslie A. Hahner draws attention to how various rhetorical tropes organized the ways immigrants could see and be seen (To Become an American).
76 Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
77 Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles, “Structure and Practice in the Labor Theory of Value,” The Review of Radical Political Economics 12, no. 4 (1981): 4.
78 Jonathan Sterne, “Hearing,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 74.
79 Herbert Gintis, “The Nature of Labor Exchange and the Theory of Capitalist Production,” The Review of Radical Political Economics 8, no. 2 (1976): 37.
80 Karin Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Anna Harris and Melissa Van Drie, “Sharing Sound: Teaching, Learning, and Researching Sonic Skills,” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 91–117.
81 Greene and Swenson, “Precarious Cooperation,” 236.
82 Labor economists have long recognized that wage structures exceed the logics of commodity exchange, their valuation emerging though complex sociocultural processes. Along with others, U.S. labor historians have offered a wealth of fine-grained evidence in that vein, including with regard to the (im)mobilities of social identities at the turn of the 20th century. Especially relevant to this study is prior attention to how English-language skills served as barriers or facilitators of worker organizing such as in Thomas Mackaman, New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor, 1914–1924 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). See also Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” The American Historical Review 78, no. 3 (1973): 531–88; James R. Barrett, “Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago's South Side, 1900–1922,” Journal of Social History 18, no. 1 (1984): 37–55; Neil Betten, “Polish American Steelworkers: Americanization through Industry and Labor,” Polish American Studies 33, no. 2 (1976): 31–42; Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Immigrant Left in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Peter Rachleff, “The Dynamics of ‘Americanization’: The Croatian Fraternal Union between the Wars, 1920s–30s,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience, ed. Eric Arnesen, Julie Green, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 340–62.