Hypnotic eyes

After thanking Tony Benn earlier today for his lifetime contribution to my career, I was not intending to post anything more about him for quite a while.

But, having invited comments about the yesterday’s video clip on Twitter, replies came in from a number of people who had noticed something about his eyes and/or eye movements (for which, thanks to Olivia Mitchell, Marion Chapsal and Martin Shovel).

I was fascinated by this, because I’d originally thought of adding a note about his eyes to my comments on yesterday's video clip - pointing out that, in the parts of it where we can actually see his eyes, he doesn’t blink at all.

I didn’t mention it because I thought the post was already quite long enough. But the reason it had crossed my mind was because of of something else I’d written about Mr Benn 25 years ago.

Mad staring eyes?

‘… his more vindictive critics sometimes claim he has ‘mad staring eyes’, a point he has occasionally even joked about in some of his own speeches. In fact his eyes are rather large, and this may actually be a much more important communicative asset than he or his critics realize. It presumably means that more people will be able to track more of his eye movements over a greater distance than is possible in the case of speakers with less prominent eyes. The rate at which Mr Benn blinks his eyes while making a speech is much lower than is the case with most other orators, and this may further contribute to visibility of his eyes … which has probably contributed to his gaze being described as ‘staring’ ('Our Masters’ Voices', pp. 91-92).

Spellbound?

Some years after that, I met someone whose wife worked as a nurse in a mental hospital, where there was a locked ward for severely disturbed patients. Bolted into the ceiling was a TV set that was kept switched on more or less continuously, even though it seldom attracted much attention from residents who spent much of their time wandering around the room in different directions.

According to the nurse, there had only ever been one occasion when she’d seen all of them gather together as a group and gaze up at the the TV on the ceiling at the same time. It was during a live broadcast from a Labour Party conference, where there was one, and only one, speaker who seemed to hold them ‘spellbound’ for quite long periods and in a way that nothing else on television ever did.

By now, of course, you'll obviously know exactly who it was. But at the time, I remember being totally amazed, flabbergasted and almost a little stunned to hear that even this audience was held in thrall by the power of Tony Benn's oratory.

The enormity of my debt to Tony Benn - without whom ...

Writing the last two posts on Tony Benn has reminded me of the enormity of my debt to him, and I think it's time I went public on recording my thanks to him.

I'm not just talking about the rich source of videotaped data his speeches supplied for the research on which my first book on public speaking (Our Masters' Voices) was based, grateful though I am to him for that.

But he played a much more direct part, albeit unwittingly, in changing my life for good - many years before I ever got interested in public speaking.

My first proper academic job

First of all, he was responsible for providing me with two whole years of gainful employment at a crucial and formative stage in my career.

Harold Wilson had appointed Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, as he was still known in the mid 1960s, to be Postmaster General, a job that included responsibility for the country's publicly owned telephone system.

The Labour government was under pressure to supply free and/or subsidised telephones to the elderly - but then as now, research is always cheaper than action because it provides an 'respectable' way of postponing hugely expensive demands on the public purse. So Postmaster General Benn decided set up a two year project to look into the problem.

Conveniently for him, one of his friends and neighbours at the time was a leading expert on old age and poverty, Professor Peter Townsend, who'd recently been appointed to the first chair in sociology at the new University of Essex - where, conveniently for me, I'd just started research for a PhD on the sociology of suicide.

So a two-year Post Office research fellowship was set up at Essex to investigate 'communication and isolation in old age' and, if I hadn't been lucky enough to get the job, it's unlikely I'd have ever have got anywhere near to completing the doctorate, let alone embarking on an academic career.

My first encounter with conversation analysis

But it wasn't just the two years of salary that came my way thanks to Mr Benn, but the initial work on the project led to a discovery that would have a much more profound impact on my life's work. Dorothy Smith had just moved to Essex from Berkeley, where she'd come across a young graduate student called Harvey Sacks, who'd recently finished a PhD based on tape-recorded telephone conversations on a helpline at a suicide prevention agency in California.

This held out the prospect of being able to kill both my research birds (into telephones and suicide) with a single stone. The only trouble was that, insofar as anyone in British sociology had heard of Sacks in 1968, his work was already being written off as far too methodologically innovative, daring, eccentric and controversial to be acceptable by the mainstream of the discipline.

Fascinated though I was by it, I didn't have the guts to try to sell the idea of doing something similar to my Post Office sponsors or to my senior colleagues at Essex - so I ended up playing safe and did a thoroughly boring, though worthy enough, survey of a national random sample over 65 year-olds.

Meanwhile, Harvey Sacks, along with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson were beginning to attract wider recognition as founders of the new field of conversation analysis. So, by the time I eventually finished my PhD thesis, the gist of the final chapter concluded with the modest proposal that all hitherto existing sociology, from Durkheim's Le Suicide onwards, was methodologically flawed and that the future lay with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

At the time, I didn't have much of a clue as to how you would actually get to such a promised land, let alone what the results would look like if ever you got there. But it eventually took me into research aimed at applying the methodology of conversation analysis to more formal settings like court rooms and, eventually political speeches and public speaking more generally.

And all because of Tony Benn

If Tony Benn had never been Postmaster General and if he hadn't known Peter Townsend, none of this would ever have happened - which is why I'm so thankful to him for his hidden, but nonetheless profound and far-reaching, impact on my life and work.

An example of rhetorical virtuosity from rhetoric denier Tony Benn

Readers from outside the UK have probably never heard of Tony Benn, and quite a few here will be too young to remember just how effective an orator he was. So, having looked at his 'rhetorical denial' in the previous post I thought it might be useful to show a video illustrating his rhetorical virtuosity in action.

This particular clip comes from a Labour Party conference in the early 1980s, when he was at the height of his powers and a prime mover in his party's electorally disastrous lurch to the left after Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 (on which, see also HERE).

It shows how he was so in tune with the way the audience was reacting that a slight response to his news about that day's record stock market fall was enough to prompt him to break off from what he was going to say and launch into an impressively constructed contrast, each part of which ends with the phrase ‘the wealth of the nation’:

BENN: For a moment between debates the stock market had its biggest fall was it within living memory 30 points – and uhh that is an indication that indeed it was rather appropriate that ITN was swinging
[A] from the stock market where they’re gambling with the wealth of the nation
[B] to Brighton where we represent the people who create the wealth of the nation.

ICONIC GESTURES
The sequence also provides more examples of the way 'iconic gestures' come before the word(s) to which they relate, as discussed in earlier posts (HERE and HERE): Benn's swinging hand movements get under way quite a while before the word ‘swinging’ comes out of his mouth – whereupon his hands start moving to his left just before the words ‘stock market’ and to his right just before he say’s the word ‘Brighton’.

Then the slightest pause after ‘create’ followed by the coordinated downward movements of his head and hands are reminiscent of the precision with which an orchestral conductor brings in the whole of the chorus on time – and the audience starts applauding just before he's finished repeating ‘the wealth of the nation’.

SURFING APPLAUSE
But, as was typical of Benn, he didn’t stop there but carried on trying to ‘surf’ the applause - not that he says anything more important than "and that is also-" and "now uhh-") while the applause is still preventing his words from being heard - for more on which, see HERE andHERE).

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
One point of interest is that, as the applause gets under way, the camera switches away the from the audience to focus on Benn's former Labour cabinet colleague and arch-enemy of the day, Denis Healey, who had just narrowly defeated Mr Benn in an election for the party's deputy-leadership - but who seems to be thoroughly enjoying this particular line.

Another is the fact that a stock market fall as pitifully small as 30 points was treated as such dramatic news in those days!