There’s a physical force to the words we use. In part this derives from the act of speaking itself: using our mouth, tongue and larynx to produce sequences of phonemes which knit together into coherent wholes. These acts are always positioned in space and time, with the body having arrived at the point from which it speaks in the particular state it’s in through a history of movement specific to itself. Sometimes we’re tired, sometimes we’re energised. Sometimes the body is a languid confidence, sometimes anxiety grips the body in a striking stiffness. The timbre of the voice, the tempo of our speech and the tone of our communication varies intensely in ways that reflect this psychophysical substratum to anything we say. It follows from this that we can’t understand the meaning of our speech without accounting for the physicality of our speaking. As Bollas puts it on pg 162 of the Mystery of Things:
Wording determines the transformational power of a signifier in relation to the latent contents of the analysand’s ideas. Choose a word and you select a direction. Choose a word and you create force. A ‘colourless’ word is without force, perhaps weak, but in certain moments appropriate for considered thought engaged with emotionally powerful issues. Select a colourful word and its evocative effect contributes a meaning emerging from sprung affect and idea.
Our word choices carry a libidinal charge such that they, as Bollas puts it on pg 163, “shadow the character of libido”: the affectivity of our signifiers is a libidinal phenomenon. It’s easier to speak powerful words about objects we want in the broadest psychoanalytical sense of objects we want to get close to, to touch, to possess. But speaking powerful words means speaking powerfully and that’s a psychophysical event in which we make sounds in a certain way, our breath flows in a certain way, we inhabit space in a certain way. The objects about which we’re speaking can charge our speech but we have to be prepared to meet that charge because it ultimately comes from within us.
This is why public speaking can be such a powerful experience. Training yourself to speak powerfully, in the sense of slowly and clearly with force and rhythm, changes how you relate to your own libido and your own physicality. My experience is that trying to do this (e.g. returning to the breath, slowing the tempo, feeling the texture of the words you’re using) can be a tonic. I sometimes find that I can be in a terrible mood before teaching or speaking and come out feeling refreshed and recharged. But it can also sometimes be overwhelming, not out of anxiety or anything which feels obviously negative, but simply that fully inhabiting the experience overloads my very much neurodivergent brain with an excess of sensory stimulation.
There’s a richness to the experience of public speaking which I think a lot of instrumental advice fails to really grasp. It’s also much easier to do it if you’re speaking about things which really matter to you. Mark Johnson once observed to me that people can tell when someone is actually thinking about what they’re saying. I’ve often thought back to it when watching other people speak or reflecting on my own speaking. It feels different to share ideas in motion, as the philosopher Daniel Little puts it. There’s an energy to them which rewards attention, even if they’re inchoate. In contrast you can feel when someone is just going through the motions, even if they do it effectively. Most speaking falls between these two extremes.
(I’m suddenly struck that ‘ideas in motion’ conveys aliveness to me whereas ‘going through the motions’ conveys deadness. Is it that the former is internal liveliness whereas the latter is subsuming internal liveliness to the rhythms of external expectation?)
Mark Carrigan 