the business sense of speech

Music: Seely: Winter Birds (2000) I've been reading the early issues of the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking for a short project I'm working on with Jenny Rice. This week I've also been discussing the corporitization of the university with colleagues and friends, and in particular, how my own college is making strong moves toward the business model. A prescient quote brought these streams together:

Certainly no teacher of public speaking will ever suffer from a surplus of knowledge. But unfortunately emphasis upon means often obscures a proper appreciation of ends. Too often when research work is conducted for its own sake, or to increase scholastic standing, the resulting separation from the interests of the world at large allows theory to become dogma, knowledge to become pedantry, and technique is elevated to the position of supremacy.

The source? Everett Lee Hunt, "The Scientific Spirit in Public Speaking," published on July 15th, 1915. The essay is a pretty "spicy" (to use a term from Winans' response) indictment of the "Midwestern" approach to Speech Communication that stresses the necessity of scientizing the field for academic respectability. We know who won this debate, and it weren't "us." Of course, since the word "grant" entered the scene in the 1980s, Hunt has spinning in his grave like a top.

That alliance of science and finance, Jenny and I are arguing, killed off creativity and an interest in feeling, emotions . . . love in the field formerly known as speech communication. Here's a teaser:

About Face

Joshua Gunn and Jenny Edbauer Rice

Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass; it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in a state of perpetual disequilibrium . . . .
---Gilles Deleuze, "He Stuttered"

Deleuze explains the genesis of great writing as the ability of a writer to "make the language system stutter," to stretch human expression to the limit, to "make language itself cry, to make it . . . mumble, or whisper." Just how one does this escapes precise description, but one is assured she feels it when she reads it (or as we would have it, when she hears it). Stuttering signifies the limits of language, but with feeling (so to speak). Although Deleuze's use of the metaphor of stuttering figures as "an affect of language instead of an affection of speech"—that is, as a poetics—there is a sense in which stuttering can signify creativity in any system, particularly if we widen our understanding of language to the symbolic as such, and "speech" to the meeting place of the symbolic and affect. For example, take discipline: in what sense does grappling with the object of affect represent a form of scholarly stuttering, an attempt to capture and understand states of being that are not sewed-up in advance, states that anticipate yet nevertheless elude the language of feelings, states that are beyond discipline?

In this brief provocation we answer affirmatively and advance the example of the field formerly known as "Speech Communication." We argue that the academic field of Speech Communication was founded in the early twentieth century on the meeting place of affect and the signifier, but that it stuttered in the face of science. Uncomfortable with the instability of its chosen object, and desirous of institutional approbation, the stuttering discipline muffled the voice of feeling, renaming itself "communication studies" and turning its back on the study of affect represented by the object of speech. Consequently, any discussion of an "affective turn" in communication studies is more properly described as (an) "about face."