Analysis
Emotional Interactions and Embodied Claims: The Shift in Scholarship When "Voice" Isn't a Metaphor
How does it affect others' reception of our ideas when the “voice” in which we communicate our scholarship isn't just metaphorical? What’s the difference when the “performance” of that scholarship is not in journals but in conference rooms, where other scholars form a live audience? Or when that scholarship reaches listeners through audio recordings of those performances distributed via the internet, as in this archive? This analysis offers a few brief thoughts on these questions.
When we’re talking alphabetic literacy, about reading and writing, then voice is a figure for our personalities on the page. In Gravyland, Steve Parks plumbs a debate between Bartholomae and Elbow about writers' voices, understood in that sense. Where does the personal begin and the collective end? In what ways does “voice” help us to understand how writers get heard in communities that include both college campuses and the cities in which they're situated?
This audio archive brought to the fore for me different aspects of voice, aspects unique to “rhetoric” in the sense of vocalized speech: timbre and pitch. By incorporating sound, the website asks us to reconcile rhet-comp’s roots in antiquity, in which in-person delivery of speech was paramount, with today’s communications technology, which offers scholars and students (along with billions of others worldwide) the chance to record and rebroadcast their voices.
Rhet-comp’s recent investigation of emotion brings to the fore an important set of concerns as we think through what might be gained by this oral delivery. A key text in this inquiry is Laura Micciche’s Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, in which Micciche suggests, “we can sharpen students' reading, writing, and thinking skills by enacting emotion in the classroom” (emphasis hers). Such emotioned enactments bring unique opportunities for engagement between scholars and their audiences, and with them new vulnerabilities to judgment.
For example: At the 13:30 mark in Managing Lives: The Mental and Emotional Labor of WPA Work , Kelli Prejean manages a moment of vulnerable engagement even as she presents a text on that topic. Using bell hooks, Prejean argues that vulnerability can be an administrative practice, even an ethic, one that strengthens writing instructors’ relationships with WPAs and thereby supports their teaching. As Prejean makes this argument, she enacts the ethic she advocates, admitting to the scholars assembled in that room in Indianapolis that she kept a notebook in the first year of her teaching in which she wrote, “I hate my students. I hate my students.” The archive allows listeners to hear both the emotional rhetoric at work in this admission and the effect of that rhetoric with the audience. Kelli begins laughing when she hits the first “hate” and carries it through the second. We in the audience laugh too, and Kelli talks over us in what sounds like an improvised correction: “I didn’t really hate my students,” Kelli says. “I was just sort of drowning in . . . all of the possibility and frustration. But I share that experience with new teachers to say, ‘Even the best plans you have just may not work out and it’s OK. And you can write you hate your students in private, not on Facebook.’” At which point we laugh again, after which Kelli turns serious.
There’s clearly emotion here. Often you can see it in the waveforms. They jump up. She is—we are—louder as we laugh. But how to read that laughter? I urge readers of this analysis to listen for themselves. My read is that Prejean is releasing her own tension, taking ironic distance from her situation, admitting that this “hate” violates the norm and admitting the requisite embarrassment for violating that norm. We must, always, love our students, even when we hate them. Or we must at least say we do. I would guess that the vulnerability Prejean showed to both her teachers and her CCCC audience in admitting that she did not feel as she was meant to was a way of "being real." This is an emotional ideal that many teachers hold in competition with expectations for professional control and decorum (see Rosemary Sutton's work in the bibliography for discussion of teachers' emotional ideals). And I'd hazard that Prejean's admission promoted about the same reaction from the instructors she managed as it did from the audience members in that room in Indianapolis: laughter, and with it relaxation, reciprocal vulnerability, a chance to open up about the challenges we face in the workplace and the difficulty we have in responding to them in appropriate ways. Put another way, as we discover common problems, common emotional labor to our teaching of writing and our management of writing teachers, our laughter cements something like the Burkean identification that Candice Rai discusses in her talk. As Burke puts it, identification signals that people "have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (emphasis his).
To speak of emotions is to show moments when we don’t know what we’re doing. When one is talking about teaching, which is premised on relationality and student discovery, on finding out, I agree with Prejean and Whitney Douglas, her co-presenter, that vulnerability is a virtue to be cultivated, despite the problems it presents (well documented in their talk). In their case, Prejean and Douglas argue convincingly that their vulnerability as WPAs opened the door to faculty members who came to them with serious dilemmas, including how to deal with racism in the writing classroom.
But I can’t help but question who is more vulnerable during such emotional exchange. Particularly, how might this vulnerability coincide with gender? Let's think of Howard Dean’s disastrous “yee-ow!” in the 2004 Democratic primary. He was condemned as too excited, too crazy, not presidential material. But in a country that has yet to elect a female head of state, wasn’t it also that the shriek was read as feminine? And whereas one's sex isn't readily apparent on the page, it is so in vocal delivery and in the audio recordings that capture it. My college friend, a heterosexual woman, told me that her favorite a-Capella singers were men. They made her swoon; the testosterone! As scholars listening to other scholars discuss emotional rhetoric, we're unlikely to condemn or swoon so readily. But surely our reaction to the speakers we hear is influenced by our reading of not just their sex, but also their age, race, ethnicity, even sexuality. These are qualities that listeners work to discern--whether rightly or wrongly, purposefully or intuitively--in an instant. As scholars are called upon to speak as well as write to distant publics, I wonder how these old categories of discrimination will affect who gets air time, who becomes “the leading voice in the field."
When I asked for permission to publish the recordings, one of the speakers attached a note to the release form: “I remember why I didn’t become a newscaster. I hate my voice.” Did any of these categories play a role in this feeling? Or was it something else, something as simple as nervousness or uncertainty, qualities that we might better mask in print than in person? Listening to our voices in these recordings (and you can hear mine opening the first track), I wondered how the other speakers felt about their voices. I was hearing us as sometimes uncertain amidst the “uh”s and “um”s which I, as an audio editor, labored to delete; I suspected that others would make that same judgment. I wondered what our literal voices said about our authority as speakers, what distributing our work through audio recordings rather than print would do to that authority. Was it Derrida who reminded us that voice is more permanent than print because, once launched, a statement can only be corrected with further speech, never erased?
Surely there are reams of scholarship on these questions. But from even this small sampling it becomes clear that in meetings, at conferences, in lecture halls, and--increasingly I would argue--online, what matters is not just tenure but timbre. Both have the capacity to bring some to the center of our field and excise others from the record. As barriers to entry for distributing audiovisual recordings become lower (cf. Youtube, TEDx), I wager that we as scholars will be called upon, as Micciche suggests our students might be, not just to inscribe but also to enact our claims. Surely our skill at oral delivery will continue to impact who wins and who loses in the economy of attention, and likely such skill will become increasingly important. Perhaps we'll soon be getting voice coaches, or trained actors to read our works. I’m sure some have already.
When we’re talking alphabetic literacy, about reading and writing, then voice is a figure for our personalities on the page. In Gravyland, Steve Parks plumbs a debate between Bartholomae and Elbow about writers' voices, understood in that sense. Where does the personal begin and the collective end? In what ways does “voice” help us to understand how writers get heard in communities that include both college campuses and the cities in which they're situated?
This audio archive brought to the fore for me different aspects of voice, aspects unique to “rhetoric” in the sense of vocalized speech: timbre and pitch. By incorporating sound, the website asks us to reconcile rhet-comp’s roots in antiquity, in which in-person delivery of speech was paramount, with today’s communications technology, which offers scholars and students (along with billions of others worldwide) the chance to record and rebroadcast their voices.
Rhet-comp’s recent investigation of emotion brings to the fore an important set of concerns as we think through what might be gained by this oral delivery. A key text in this inquiry is Laura Micciche’s Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, in which Micciche suggests, “we can sharpen students' reading, writing, and thinking skills by enacting emotion in the classroom” (emphasis hers). Such emotioned enactments bring unique opportunities for engagement between scholars and their audiences, and with them new vulnerabilities to judgment.
For example: At the 13:30 mark in Managing Lives: The Mental and Emotional Labor of WPA Work , Kelli Prejean manages a moment of vulnerable engagement even as she presents a text on that topic. Using bell hooks, Prejean argues that vulnerability can be an administrative practice, even an ethic, one that strengthens writing instructors’ relationships with WPAs and thereby supports their teaching. As Prejean makes this argument, she enacts the ethic she advocates, admitting to the scholars assembled in that room in Indianapolis that she kept a notebook in the first year of her teaching in which she wrote, “I hate my students. I hate my students.” The archive allows listeners to hear both the emotional rhetoric at work in this admission and the effect of that rhetoric with the audience. Kelli begins laughing when she hits the first “hate” and carries it through the second. We in the audience laugh too, and Kelli talks over us in what sounds like an improvised correction: “I didn’t really hate my students,” Kelli says. “I was just sort of drowning in . . . all of the possibility and frustration. But I share that experience with new teachers to say, ‘Even the best plans you have just may not work out and it’s OK. And you can write you hate your students in private, not on Facebook.’” At which point we laugh again, after which Kelli turns serious.
There’s clearly emotion here. Often you can see it in the waveforms. They jump up. She is—we are—louder as we laugh. But how to read that laughter? I urge readers of this analysis to listen for themselves. My read is that Prejean is releasing her own tension, taking ironic distance from her situation, admitting that this “hate” violates the norm and admitting the requisite embarrassment for violating that norm. We must, always, love our students, even when we hate them. Or we must at least say we do. I would guess that the vulnerability Prejean showed to both her teachers and her CCCC audience in admitting that she did not feel as she was meant to was a way of "being real." This is an emotional ideal that many teachers hold in competition with expectations for professional control and decorum (see Rosemary Sutton's work in the bibliography for discussion of teachers' emotional ideals). And I'd hazard that Prejean's admission promoted about the same reaction from the instructors she managed as it did from the audience members in that room in Indianapolis: laughter, and with it relaxation, reciprocal vulnerability, a chance to open up about the challenges we face in the workplace and the difficulty we have in responding to them in appropriate ways. Put another way, as we discover common problems, common emotional labor to our teaching of writing and our management of writing teachers, our laughter cements something like the Burkean identification that Candice Rai discusses in her talk. As Burke puts it, identification signals that people "have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (emphasis his).
To speak of emotions is to show moments when we don’t know what we’re doing. When one is talking about teaching, which is premised on relationality and student discovery, on finding out, I agree with Prejean and Whitney Douglas, her co-presenter, that vulnerability is a virtue to be cultivated, despite the problems it presents (well documented in their talk). In their case, Prejean and Douglas argue convincingly that their vulnerability as WPAs opened the door to faculty members who came to them with serious dilemmas, including how to deal with racism in the writing classroom.
But I can’t help but question who is more vulnerable during such emotional exchange. Particularly, how might this vulnerability coincide with gender? Let's think of Howard Dean’s disastrous “yee-ow!” in the 2004 Democratic primary. He was condemned as too excited, too crazy, not presidential material. But in a country that has yet to elect a female head of state, wasn’t it also that the shriek was read as feminine? And whereas one's sex isn't readily apparent on the page, it is so in vocal delivery and in the audio recordings that capture it. My college friend, a heterosexual woman, told me that her favorite a-Capella singers were men. They made her swoon; the testosterone! As scholars listening to other scholars discuss emotional rhetoric, we're unlikely to condemn or swoon so readily. But surely our reaction to the speakers we hear is influenced by our reading of not just their sex, but also their age, race, ethnicity, even sexuality. These are qualities that listeners work to discern--whether rightly or wrongly, purposefully or intuitively--in an instant. As scholars are called upon to speak as well as write to distant publics, I wonder how these old categories of discrimination will affect who gets air time, who becomes “the leading voice in the field."
When I asked for permission to publish the recordings, one of the speakers attached a note to the release form: “I remember why I didn’t become a newscaster. I hate my voice.” Did any of these categories play a role in this feeling? Or was it something else, something as simple as nervousness or uncertainty, qualities that we might better mask in print than in person? Listening to our voices in these recordings (and you can hear mine opening the first track), I wondered how the other speakers felt about their voices. I was hearing us as sometimes uncertain amidst the “uh”s and “um”s which I, as an audio editor, labored to delete; I suspected that others would make that same judgment. I wondered what our literal voices said about our authority as speakers, what distributing our work through audio recordings rather than print would do to that authority. Was it Derrida who reminded us that voice is more permanent than print because, once launched, a statement can only be corrected with further speech, never erased?
Surely there are reams of scholarship on these questions. But from even this small sampling it becomes clear that in meetings, at conferences, in lecture halls, and--increasingly I would argue--online, what matters is not just tenure but timbre. Both have the capacity to bring some to the center of our field and excise others from the record. As barriers to entry for distributing audiovisual recordings become lower (cf. Youtube, TEDx), I wager that we as scholars will be called upon, as Micciche suggests our students might be, not just to inscribe but also to enact our claims. Surely our skill at oral delivery will continue to impact who wins and who loses in the economy of attention, and likely such skill will become increasingly important. Perhaps we'll soon be getting voice coaches, or trained actors to read our works. I’m sure some have already.
LL. Revised July 10th, 2014.
