Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest. 2nd edition.
(2002)
"These protests illustrate contemporary public acts of global citizenry that suggest new conditions for the possibility of participatory democracy in a corporate-controlled mass-mediated world" (244-245).
"This essay will introduce the 'public screen' as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene" (246).
"Viewing contemporary public discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of the emergence of new forms of participatory democracy" (246).
The authors cite Habermass's critique of the declining public space, which he argues was a place that "mediates between civil society and the state, with the expression of public opinion working to both legitimate and check the power of the state." In turn, the public space was capitalized and turned into a mass media spectacle,which Habermass saw as a "refeudalization of the public sphere" (247).
However, they find flaws with Habermass's view of the public sphere, as he privileged "dialogue and fetishization," which is too idealistic and "shuns much of the richness and turbulence of the sense-making process" (247).
Essentially, DeLuca and Peeples see a public sphere as one that seeks first consensus is one that "silences dissent and condemns resistance" (247).
The authors want to add the public screen to the public sphere, something Habermass thought was a public sphere in only appearance (247).
DeLuca and Peeples trace the history of the public sphere back to the agora and the Pynx, but problematize the narrow conception that these comparisons lead us to through their privileging of "embodied voices." We, they argue, continue this notion of the public sphere/ public place. It is, they say, "a deep impulse and a beautiful dream and it is endemic to our version of the public sphere, of democracy, of even communication itself" (248).
Even postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard--known for his ideas about simulation--privilege the "immediacy" of speech as the authentic medium of the public space (248).
"Yet the dream of the public sphere as the engagement of embodied voices, democracy via dialogue, cloisters us, for perforce [used to express necessity or inevitability] its vision compels us to see the contemporary landscape of mass communication as a nightmare" (248).
DeLuca and Peeples look to Derrida to deconstruct our reliance on language and voice as the ideal means for reality and being. In addition with John Peters, the authors look to dissemination to prove that, especially in the era of mass communication, communication may not every be received. "In counterpoint to a public sphere underwritten by consensus through communication or communication via conversation, dissemination reminds us that all forms of communication are founded on the risk of not communicating" (248).
"Communication as characterized by dissemination is the endless proliferation and scattering of emissions without the guarantee of productive exchanges" (249).
"In short, although an historically and culturally understandable desire, the fondness for bodily presence and face-to-face conversations ignores the social and technological transformations of the 20th century that have constructed an altogether different cultural context, a techno-epistemic break...as a normative ideal, the public sphere promotes as unquestioned universal goods several deeply problematic notions: consensus, openness, dialogue, rationality, and civility/decorum. As a supplement, we want to introduce the public screen as a metaphor for thinking about the places of politics and the possibilities of citizenship in our present moment" (249).
The authors argue that we have moved toward a visual rhetoric, a hypermediacy that doesn't present reality but creates it.
"If embodied gatherings of culturally homogenous, equal citizens engaged in rational dialogue with the goal of consensus is no longer a dominant mode of political activity, what constitutes politics today?" (252).
The authors argue that the new public sphere can be used by corporations, governments, and citizens to "critique through spectacle" (252). Since we have become a visual culture, visual rhetorics an employ images and spectacle via the public screen.
The authors look to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kracauer and their view on the proportional rise of distraction and technology. Technology breeds distraction, which "annihilates contemplation." The authors use this to suggest that our current visual, image-driven, and technologically addicted public sphere is one not-conducive to the old conception of the public space as a place for civil, concentrated, face-to-face discourse. "We suggest that they be read not morally but analytically as signs of the emergence of a new space for discourse, the public screen, that entails different forms of intelligence and knowledge (254). (rhetorical velocity perhaps?)
"Citizens who want to appear on the public screen, who want to act on the stage of participatory democracy, face three major conditions that both constrain and enable their actions: 1) private ownership/monopoly of the public screen, 2) Infortainment conventions that filter what counts as news, and 3) the need to communicate in the discourse of images" (254).
"In comparison to the rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility of the public sphere, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, spectacular publicity, cacophony, distraction, and dissent" (262).
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