Appearing in Public

Abstract

Damaschke (1912) opened his treatise on the ‘Popular Art of Public Speaking’ in a somewhat counter-intuitive fashion, by putting forward the now familiar argument that the spoken word lost its aura with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. This is the stuff of a narrative that later gained popularity, principally through the works of Marshall McLuhan (1962) and Walter Ong (1958, 1967, 1982), both of whom sought to explore and criticise aspects of the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, a term that McLuhan coined to encompass the constellation of changes in communication between humans experienced in European society in the wake of the introduction of the movable type. Damaschke’s work, of course, predates these accounts and does not share their emphasis on history. He was writing in direct response to a fundamental shift in oral culture in the late nineteenth century, which is described persuasively in Gert Ueding and Bernd Steinbrink’s overview of the history of rhetoric in the German-speaking countries as a narrative of both decline and durability through change (1994: 134–56).

Public speaking reveals its secrets in all that it communicates through the realm of the visual […] and through the imponderables of the speaker himself.

Simmel (1908)