grant grubbing, part III

Music: Violet Indiana: Casino (2002)

First, the Marvelous Dr. Mmmmm has announced that a new edition of Liminalities out, which features a modest piece by yours truly, "On Answering Machines and the Voice Abject." It's a souped-up version of a canned talk I've toured for a couple of years based on a still unfinsihed print essay that will double as both a conclusion to my book project as well as an essay I want to send to either Text and Performance Quarterly or Cultural Studies. What remains to be done is . . . well, reading Levinas (the auditor will understand why and, yes, James, I've not forgotten about the reading group . . . just need some time).

Second: today I have a guest speaker for my class (the Fabulous E! on Giambattista Vico) and so instead of prepping I'm working on the NEH grant stuff again. I think I've got a good draft of the "project narrative," which will look familiar to some of you. The focus, this time, is on the "Voices from the Days of Slavery" exhibit at the Library of Congress, all of which is available on-line. Here goes:

An NEH Fellowship is requested to support the completion of a book-length project in rhetorical, cultural, and performance studies that examines the way in which the recorded human voice performs a number of important, cultural functions, from mourning and remembering, to repressing and forgetting. Because many scholars, journalists, and public figures have described ours as the "age of the image" or spectacle (e.g., Guy Debord; Neil Postman), it is commonly believed that human speech has declined in centrality and influence over the past century. The proposed book project, tentatively titled "Haunting Voices: Mass Media, Speech, and Transcendence in Postmodernity" (hereafter "Haunting Voices"), will argue otherwise, suggesting that as U.S. public culture becomes increasingly saturated by the image, the more central the human voice is becoming as a token of human authenticity. To this end, the primary research goal of the fellowship period is an analysis of the recorded voices of former slaves housed at Library of Congress and collected in the American Folklife Center's "Voices from the Days of Slavery" archive.

Although the book is predominantly concerned with an analysis of the use and function of the recorded voice in contemporary U.S. public culture, it also addresses a current trend in my home field of Rhetorical Studies, which is a sub-field of Communication Studies. Over the past decade, rhetorical scholars have devoted much attention to "visual rhetoric" and studies of the image. Noting the ubiquity and centrality of the image--especially the screened image--to contemporary public discussion and debate, leading scholars such as Barbara Biesecker, Dana Cloud, Kevin DeLuca, Anne Demo, Robert Hariman, John Lucaites, and Daniel Schowalter have published a number of studies that center on image and imagery as the most important locus of influence in our time. This trend in scholarship is part of a larger, disciplinary shift away from the analysis of human speech and speech activities. Before my field changed its name from "Speech Communication" to "Communication Studies" in the 1980s, with the exception of singing and voice training, scholars in my field taught and researched the human voice: phonology, physiology, sound physics, vocalics and elocution, the psychology of meaning and thought, argumentation and debate, oral interpretation and expression, public speaking, and so on, were included. Although many of my colleagues would argue that "speech" no longer seems to represent the varied objects studied in our departments, some scholars have argued for a renewed interest in the object of speech. For example, Frank E.X. Dance has urged scholars not to abandon almost a century of scholarship on what remains a central form of human expression. My project participates in this ongoing discussion about what communication scholars in general, and rhetorical scholars in particular, should select as their objects of study. Although I agree that the project of "visual rhetoric" is valuable and helpful, "Haunting Voices" will advance an argument in favor of the centrality and persistence of the object of speech in our media-saturated environment. Speech is increasingly mediated in our culture, however, it remains ubiquitous and has taken on new modes that merit continued scrutiny.

"Haunting Voices" continues an approach I adopted in my first book, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). In Modern Occult Rhetoric I compare the tortuous and difficult jargon of mystics and magi, such as H.P. Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, to the contemporary argot of a number of communities and organizations. For example, I compare the function and motive of difficult prose in so-called postmodern theory in academic circles to the hermetic argot of alchemists. My approach to modern occult phenomena was to show how common occult rhetoric is to our everyday lives--how we are all, in one way or another, witches and warlocks using language to perform professional and social kinds of magic. Although my current book length project differs substantially, I nevertheless approach my object of study the same way: "Haunting Voices" attempts to demonstrate how ubiquitous the recorded human voice is in our daily lives and the ways in which our use and reliance on these voices are often forgotten or overlooked.

Any cursory review of news media segments on the events of Nine-eleven reveals that the recorded voices of emergency personnel are frequently used to "anchor" an image as "real." As Steven Conner has argued, because humans tend to forget speech in favor of image, each re-encounter with a victim's pained voice in a Nine-eleven media event becomes a haunting experience of a human "presence" that shocks hearers to reckon with mortality. Similarly, the canned-laughter or "laff track" on television situation comedies haunts viewers as a token of audience presence when, in fact, the laughing voices are just recordings. Canned laugher can be said to mourn the disappearance of the studio audience during the taping of television shows, and its continued use as a generic component of the "sitcom" can be described as an attempt to make the show not only seem funnier, but somehow more humanly authentic. Another example of the use of the recorded voice as a token of authenticity is the "Voices from the Days of Slavery" audio collection, which features 23 voice recordings of former slaves and victims of discrimination speaking about their experiences. Leonard Kniffel reports that the recordings, many of which were made by journalists for the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, are "amazing" and "stunning": the director of the collection, for example, "points out that a written transcript cannot convey the anguish in a man's voice as he explains to his 10-year-old grandson what it was like to fight for his country in World War II only to be denied, upon his return, admission to an American movie theater because he was black." Whether or not it is true, the belief that the recorded human voice is more "real" than pictures is widespread in U.S. culture, and its use is most conspicuous in moments of cultural remembrance and memorialization. My project will not only document this belief as well as the ubiquity of the recorded human voice in the mass media, but also attempts to explain why the recorded human voice has functioned as a mark of authenticity from a psychoanalytic and rhetorical perspective.

The book project begins with a survey of thought on the human voice, including a detailed review of the work of Walter Ong, a review and response to the work of Jacques Derrida on "logocentrism" and the illusion of presence, and an analysis and description of Jacques Lacan's views on human speech. Portions of this theoretical survey have already appeared in two publications, "Mourning Speech: Haunting and the Spectral Voices of Nine-Eleven," which appeared in the interdisciplinary journal, Text and Performance Quarterly (2004); and "Mourning Humanism, or, the Idiom of Haunting," which appeared in the flagship journal of rhetorical studies, the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2006). Following this review, I will advance a concept that I term "the voice abject," which explains the ambivalent response we have to recorded voices---delight, horror, or both depending on the context---in terms of the infantile experience of the primary caregiver's voice (the "acoustic mirror"). Parts of this chapter have also been published in an invited essay titled, "Gimme Some Tongue (On Recovering Speech)," which is forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2007).

The largely theoretical exploration and framing of the first third of "Haunting Voices" is followed by a series of case studies, in chapter form, that will explicate how the "voice abject" is present in different, mediated contexts: (1) in the ventriloqual performance of psychics and mediums "channeling" the voices of the dead; (2) in the new media use of the recorded voices of Nine-eleven victims (over two chapters); (3) in the canned laughter of television comedy shows; (4) in the "backwards masking" or reverse speech on rock music albums in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the rumor panic rhetoric concerning Satanism and teen suicide articulated to this recording practice; (5) in the slavery narratives of the "Voices from the Days of Slavery" collection at the Library of Congress; and (6) in the common, cultural practice of saving answering machine messages and voice mail recordings of loved ones, particularly those that have passed away. A version of the chapter on psychics has already appeared in print as "Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2004), and an audio essay version of the final chapter on answering machine has been published in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (2007).

For the six-month NEH fellowship period (preferably January-June 2008), I propose to meet two goals. The first and most important, labor-intensive goal is to research and write about the racial dynamics and complexities of the "Voices from the Days of Slavery" collection at the Library of Congress, which is available freely on-line as a series of Internet web pages. This chapter has two foci. First, I will conduct an analysis of a sample set of recordings using a hybrid methodology drawn from psychoanalytic theory, conversation analysis, and rhetorical criticism in order to describe what rhetoricians term the "authority-" and "emotional appeals" of the recorded voices. Such a task will require listening to seven hours of archived audio and may involve some transcription. The second focus of the chapter is the assembly and presentation of the exhibit itself vis-à-vis the content of the recordings: how did the curators rhetorically frame the recordings? Are there discrepancies between the recordings and what is said about them? Insofar as these voices are "raced" as African American, what does the curators' presentation tell us about contemporary racial anxieties, and how is the recorded human voice used to negotiate these anxieties? Answering these and related questions will require a week-long visit to the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C. to interview individuals involved with the maintenance and promotion of the collection. I have secured a fellowship for the summer of 2007 to complete the partially written voices of Nine-eleven case study and to pursue a book contract. Consequently, the completion of the "Voices from the Days of Slavery" chapter will also mark the completion or near-completion of a draft of the book. Hence, the second goal for the fellowship period is to revise those chapters or potions of chapters that have been previously published in scholarly journals elsewhere for continuity of focus and tone. The second goal, in other words, is to revise the entire draft of "Haunting Voices" in preparation for publication.

"Haunting Voices" is an interdisciplinary book project, of which the essay on the recorded voices of former slaves will form a substantive part, which contributes to scholarly discussions on collective memory, mourning, and memorialization. The book will appeal to scholars in the fields of rhetorical, cultural, and performance studies, as well as scholars interested in collective memory, cultural mourning, and media ecology. From a disciplinary vantage, the project also intervenes in an ongoing debate regarding the proper objects of study in the field of rhetorical studies, which I argue should include actual speech. Finally, as the case studies of the recorded voices of former slaves and Nine-eleven victims suggest, the book contributes to a larger, cultural reckoning with tragic events in the history of the United States. "Haunting Voices" is not only a scholarly study, but also a personal project of mourning that I hope will contribute to our larger, collective attempt to reckon with the traumatic events of our past.

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Ok, that's it. Is it clear? Focused? Fundable?