College Composition and Communication, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Feb., 2005), pp. 470-492
"In this essay I argue that from twentieth-century working-class struggles in the U.S. we and our students can acquire the tools necessary to work against this latest wave of economic privatizations and concomitant suppression of public voice and rights. If we can resist the common academic assertion that we live today in a radically distinct postmodern, postindustrial society, we can return to capitalism's long history for examples of the creative and persistent ways in which ordinary people have organized to claim living room" (470).
Arresting Moments
"While postmodernism might train us to look askance at 'right discourse' as a sign of vestigial liberal humanism, the question of whether we have First and Fourth Amendment protections, especially in out increasingly privatized, 'quality-of-life'-zoned downtowns, is for from passe" (473).
"This essay chronicles my efforts, albeit not always successful and complete, to learn the history and name the tools that students in a public writing classroom need not only to imagine and build rhetorical space but also to anticipate and think through the discursive and extradiscursive obstacles they'll face in attempting to do so" (474).
"I want to address two interrelated silences in our current literature on public writing and public sphere theory. First is the silence regarding the steady conversion of public spaces and resources into private, for-profit property...that has only intensified under the guise of reinforcing 'national security'" (474).
"we must also examine the twentieth century's contradictory legacy: on the one hand, the free-speech battles and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that have liberalized out speech and assembly rights; on the other, the economic and social policies known as neoliberalism that have greatly reduced the locations in which we are able to exercise these rights...sum up our current moment as 'post-publicity'" (474-75).
Speaking on neoliberalism and the reduction of public spaces for discourse, Welch writes that "we can also see it as a return to pre-New Deal arrangements between bosses and workers, the welfare state returned to its former status of watchdog state, positioned to preserve and protect the interests of a propertied minority" (475).
"As we face heavily regulated, restricted-access public spaces, we need this history to give us clues about working with others to create rhetorical space while anticipating the resistance that comes...even from the slightest challenge" (474).
Class Actions
"I'd like us to consider that the difficulties, stakes, and tactics of public-sphere building are very much a matter of class location...Yet it's also because of the difficulty in going public that public writing advocates underscore remarkable rewards: the reward of 'animated, engaged, and at times feverishly pitched discussion about the ways that students use their discursive talents to make voices heard' the reward of student projects leading to substantive action beyond the classroom, action that returns to bolster a teacher's belief that one really can 'teach for change'" (474).
"Class discussion needs also to focus...on the policed boundary between permitted and prohibited acts of speech and protest: A third classmate faced possible academic sanctions for her decision to go public by hoisting an antiwar flag on the campus green without first applying for a permit and also without seeking permission to remove the American flag that had been flying there....I'm disturbed by how frequently students felt...that going public means going it alone" (475-76).
"But what these moments from that semester also tell me is that rhetorical space--that is, public space with the potential to operate as a persuasive public sphere--is created not through well-intentioned civic planning or through the application of a few sound a reasonable rhetorical rules of conduct. Ordinary people make rhetorical rules of conduct. Ordinary people make rhetorical space through concerted, often protracted struggle for visibility, voice, and impact against powerful interests that seek to deny visibility, voice and impact. People take and make space in acts that are simultaneously verbal and physical...we rarely do so under conditions of our own choosing" (476).
"A discussion with students about delivery including naming the varying goals of a public argument, including the potential goal of deepening one's commitment to a position even if an immediate audience...isn't likely to be swayed" (476).
Welch writes about what happens when she brings in counter-rhetorics and narratives that exist below the mass consumption discourse. She says that doing so isn't about equity. Instead, she acknowledges how they "create palpable tension between individual and mass, legislative and extralegislative, and ruling class and working-class argumentative forums and forms. 'Ruling class' (to describe the group controlling the means of production plus the social apparatus needed to legitimize and reproduce control) and 'working class' (to describe the group that must sell its physical or mental labor power for a wage or salary on which to live) aren't words we're accustomed to uttering...The case needs to be made for understanding class as determined not by income or lifestyle but by one's available means for safeguarding terms and conditions of work, one's available means for shaping or contesting public policy" (478-79).
"Or, to put it another way, the twentieth century's major First Amendment findings have liberalized speech in both meanings of the word: they have codified the expansion of a sphere of personal liberty for thought, association, assembly, and expression; they have also, in the tradition of classical liberalism, reinforced the role of the state in protecting the rights of capital"
"When we introduce class location to our discussions and assessments of public-sphere creation and rhetorical performance, we not only make it possible for our students to consider the need for striking workers and civil rights-era activists to engage in such tactics as factory takeovers and luch-counter sit-ins; we also facilitate critical assessment of the view...that such strategies are disorderly and uncivil, 'inconsistent,' as the Taft Court put, 'with peaceable persuasion.' We also open up for needed questioning twentieth-century rhetorical principles--about cooperation and consensus, about bridge building and mediation--that we may otherwise uncritically advance" (489-81).
Who's Afraid of the Working Class?
"The Habermasian coffeehouse must likewise be situated in its historical context of a new capitalist class seeking to fortify its gains from the demands of increasingly urbanized and organized masses. Little discussed in out literature, however, is what is arguable most pervasive in U.S. society: the liberal conception of the public sphere that shudders at the though of even limited middle-class Habermasian contestation" (481).
"Civility and order are liberalism's godterms, and while civility and orderliness, even humane approaches to the potential chaos of public (and academic) life, these terms, taken as moral imperatives can eliminate contestation from public life altogether, and along with it, the means to take on a society's most pressing issues and glaring inequalities...Of concern to teachers and students of rhetoric, too, should be how liberalism operates to privatize social and economic injustice as an exercise of choice...in a realm deemed properly free from full public debate and democratic vote" (482).
"We face an additional impediment to recognizing working-class rhetorical action as well: the construction of critical theory (and increasingly rhetorical theory) as an autonomous field, as a history of ideas and debates--"conversations"--largely divorced both from the larger history shaping or urging a particular set of ideas and from contexts in which such ideas might be tests...The ennui...with which actual involvement is regarded has a spefic history...in...the defeat of the May-June 1968 revolution in France...that defeat appeared as confirmation that Marx had erred in positing the working class as capitalism's gravediggers--as, that is, not only the victims of history but also potentially its agents" (483).
"Today, this post-1968 disillusionment, minus its historical basis, is codified in critical theories that replace mass action and workers' power...with classless 'culture workers' as the instigators of, at most, local and contingent change...without considering that most people don't have the autonomy to choose alternative over capitalist arrangements and that the decisions impacting us most profoundly...are not locally made" (484).
"Yet I'm concerned that when, as Giroux puts it, 'agency gets reduced to making lifestyle decisions [and] wise consumer choices,' such attempts at public participation will quickly appear to these students as sadly inconsequential" (485).
"It's here too that we need to introduce the history--and the very concept--of working-class power, not as a theoretical construct...and not as a musty anachronism...but as something with here-and-now significance for us and for our students" (485).
Lesson Learned
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