Marx is responding to Bauer's belief that there can't be political emancipation in a religious state (Germany was officially Christian)
Bauer believes emancipation comes from abolishing religion.
Marx, however, takes issues with Bauer's premise. Political emancipation doesn't come through a secular state. Disaffiliating the state with an official religion won't result in emancipation. Marx then begins interrogating what is at the heart of political emancipation. Bauer's questioning only attends to the religious state and emancipation, not the political state and emancipation. The state could be secular, Marx contends, and the people still religious. So, it isn't the state-emancipation from religion that will set the people free.
If man frees himself through the state, he must free himself through a medium, an intermediary, that provides the system from which one may become free. If freedom comes through the state, the man exists in partiality to the state itself.
Marx points out that edicts from the state (no private property ownership necessary to vote, free primary education, etc.) doesn't erode the natural boundaries of those systems. I think he's trying to show that freedom can't come from the political state. He's showing that the power of the state the change norms (de jure) didn't really change anything (de facto). The state can never abolish these conditions; "the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence."
Marx likens civic bodies, governments, to heavens (all powerful universalities of a species' perfection) and civil life (private, self-interested, imperfect species) to seculary (earthly) belonging. Only in civic, political life does the man become universal, "the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty...deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality." The "differences" of men in civil society are mere "sophistry," to Marx, wordplay that establishes false contradictions.
"The division of the human being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so."
The state exists in presupposition to private property, law, religion, etc. Any revolution that seeks abolition of such things requires a forever revolution. Its only counterpart results in the reestablishment of the presuppositions it requires to exist.
"The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance."
Having established the possibility of political emancipation without religious emancipation (both of which aren't synonymous with human emancipation), Marx turns to the Enlightenment notion of universal "rights of man."
The rights of man exist in community; "Their content is participation in the community, and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state."
The rights of man denote that rights are individually, and privately held. Therefore, civic law provides the conditions for civil universality.
The rights of man include "liberty," whose purview includes that which does not harm others, and harm is defined through law. The universal right of man is thus wrapped completely in the political state's definition of harm, liberty, etc.
Man's right to liberty is based on the disassociation of man. It's mans' right to be withdrawn into himself. Marx argues this is enmeshed with the right to private property; the right to property exists "without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest." As such, fellow men become barriers to liberty, not the conduit for it. If liberty comes from self-interest, then the citizenry are obstacles to liberty. Equality then is based on the liberty defined above. We are equal, then, in our liberty to pursue self-interest. Security is, then, the security of liberty.
The rights of man, then, are universal egoism. The irony is that the political body serves the interest of the withdrawn, separated man. In Marx's view, the state is a supreme species to the individual. It doesn't follow that the "communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being." Such a system sees the partial man as the "essential and true man." Marx's idea of human perfection rests within the state. The communal man stands above the isolated man.
The rights of man are paradoxical, however, as they cease to exist when they come "into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with its aim, with these rights of man." Here, Marz argues that the rights of the individual cannot supersede the collective rights of the individual. Freedom of the press ceases to exist when they threaten the system that secures the freedom of the individual. The practice of the rights of man stand in contrast to its theory. The political body provides the security of the rights of man, which means that liberty ceases to exist once those rights of man threaten the political body.
Man's political emancipation from feudalism was not human emancipation. "man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business."
Marx argues that the "political revolution" termed "natural" as rights the preconditions necessary for the basis of its existence. The political emancipation fragmented from into the real--fallen man--and the true--political idea man. The real man--egoist. The true man--citizen.
Only when man recognizes and reorganizes his "own powers as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power form himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished."
SECTION II
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Friday, February 26, 2016
Immanuel Kant--"What is Enlightenment?"
Enlightenment: "man's emergence from self-incurred immaturity"
If you're immature you depend on the guidance of others. Kant implies here that we're naturally mature and capable of rational, independent thought.
People aren't freed from immaturity because they're lazy or scared. Others gladly assume the mantle for the unthinking people.
Ignorance is blissful and profitable. People use fear to keep people from enlightenment, for they're more easy to control in this state.
Inflexible "dogmas and formulas," which are in and of themselves implements for rationality can also become the chains of ones own self-incurred immaturity.
Enlightenment can happen on a large, public scale, but never through revolution. Enlightenment is a SLOW process. In revolution, prejudice in one shape or form overtakes the masses. Though they might overthrow tyranny, they only replace one form of prejudice with another.
Enlightenment comes through freedom, which is the ability "to make public use of one's reason in all matters." This is not to say, however, that civility and rule of law impose on freedom. Kant believes the ability to disagree within the bounds of obedience is foundational for enlightenment's success.
Public use: a man addressing a reading public (Habermas)
Private: civil post or government office
Those holding office can argue as a citizen without "harming the affairs in which he is employed." Kant uses a tax paying analogy. While it's wrong for someone to withhold taxes, it's permissible for that person to pay taxes and argue vehemently against paying. It's right for a clergyman to lead his congregation in the doctrines and publish scholarship about his questioning those doctrines. Uphold the position and express freedom in thought.
Kant believes it is wrong and impossible to have a human commit to the veracity of one document, doctrine, belief, etc. throughout time. "A contract of this kind, concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind for ever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or to make progress whatsoever in enlightenment."
Laws, then, have legitimacy as long as the people will them.
"it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no-one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in man's upward progress, thus making it fruitless and even detrimental to subsequent generations."
"there is no danger even to his legislation if he allows his subjects to make public use of their own reason and to put before the public their thoughts on better ways of drawing up laws, even if this entails forthright criticism of the current legislation"
At the end, Kant recognizes a paradox in freedom as an intellectual right and freedom as denoting unfettered ability to do whatever. He writes: "A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent." In essence, There must exist mandated civility (rule of law) for intellectual freedom to occur and expand.
If you're immature you depend on the guidance of others. Kant implies here that we're naturally mature and capable of rational, independent thought.
People aren't freed from immaturity because they're lazy or scared. Others gladly assume the mantle for the unthinking people.
Ignorance is blissful and profitable. People use fear to keep people from enlightenment, for they're more easy to control in this state.
Inflexible "dogmas and formulas," which are in and of themselves implements for rationality can also become the chains of ones own self-incurred immaturity.
Enlightenment can happen on a large, public scale, but never through revolution. Enlightenment is a SLOW process. In revolution, prejudice in one shape or form overtakes the masses. Though they might overthrow tyranny, they only replace one form of prejudice with another.
Enlightenment comes through freedom, which is the ability "to make public use of one's reason in all matters." This is not to say, however, that civility and rule of law impose on freedom. Kant believes the ability to disagree within the bounds of obedience is foundational for enlightenment's success.
Public use: a man addressing a reading public (Habermas)
Private: civil post or government office
Those holding office can argue as a citizen without "harming the affairs in which he is employed." Kant uses a tax paying analogy. While it's wrong for someone to withhold taxes, it's permissible for that person to pay taxes and argue vehemently against paying. It's right for a clergyman to lead his congregation in the doctrines and publish scholarship about his questioning those doctrines. Uphold the position and express freedom in thought.
Kant believes it is wrong and impossible to have a human commit to the veracity of one document, doctrine, belief, etc. throughout time. "A contract of this kind, concluded with a view to preventing all further enlightenment of mankind for ever, is absolutely null and void, even if it is ratified by the supreme power, by Imperial Diets and the most solemn peace treaties. One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters, or to make progress whatsoever in enlightenment."
Laws, then, have legitimacy as long as the people will them.
"it is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no-one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in man's upward progress, thus making it fruitless and even detrimental to subsequent generations."
"there is no danger even to his legislation if he allows his subjects to make public use of their own reason and to put before the public their thoughts on better ways of drawing up laws, even if this entails forthright criticism of the current legislation"
At the end, Kant recognizes a paradox in freedom as an intellectual right and freedom as denoting unfettered ability to do whatever. He writes: "A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent." In essence, There must exist mandated civility (rule of law) for intellectual freedom to occur and expand.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
John M. Ackerman--"Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities"
He begins by dissecting "civic engagement"
"civic engagement no longer simply identifies the motives and context of an isolated classroom or off-campus learning event" (77). Its move beyond learning into political spheres embroils CE in globalization.
Policy and public life is economic, interpolated within the marketplace. Therefore, "our rhetorical engagements are fundamentally political and economic" (77).
The economic absorption and borrowed banner of CE means rhetoricians need to "rescue...the commonplace economies of the city" (77). Essentially, Ackerman is arguing that CE operates capitalistically, which blankets the community. Our engagement, then, should be to disentangle this network and be careful not to mimic its missteps.
He spends some time tracing the history of service learning and CE in American universities, citing Chaput along the way, whose argument reveals CE's complicity in providing cheap, free, and replaceable labor.
CE has also been absorbed into various partisan political mechanisms and NGOs for both progressive agendas and as a means of displacing governmental intervention into private life (republican). These groups and factions represent overlapping policy spheres.
Similar to how private spheres adopt the technical sphere's appearance to make ethical claims (Goodnight), policy spheres use digital media and high rhetorical velocity to limit political involvement.
Ackerman asks "where and how does the citizen scholar, through individual or collective action, enter into those policy spheres that influence the political and economic consequences of civic life [?]" If policy spheres reach from without the community and attempt to shape the community, "Rhetoric must reclaim its authority in public life...by locating our practice somewhere in the 'middling' range between everyday life in our communities and the regional economic policies that influence them" (81). We must in CE think from without and within; we must consider the policy sphere forces that create the local. I think he means that increasing globalization hasn't eroded the local as much as it has had a hand in creating the discourse of the local.
CE should then adopt economic justice and political inquiry.
Ackerman makes a strong case for exposing the sort of neo-liberal policies much CE engages in. Though they bill it as transnational progressivism, and a "new economy," such outsourcing of governmental roles since the 1980s can be seen in modern, university-led CE.
Essentially, Ackerman wants to "frame" CE economically.
To better work with our communities we should "return to the cities" because that's what determines the "discursive and material elements" of the community. Essentially, cities resemble the dialectic between globalization and the community.
"There are multiple economies that must be disentangled to disinter the cultural economy of a city or region" (83)
Culture has become interpolated within economy. Cultural economies are rhetorical because they must utilize their place in time (contingency). Therefore, we can "read," analyze, and interpret cultural economic landscapes in CE.
Ackerman uses Kent State University to exhibit rhetorical CE of the university town's cultural economy.
"Recent forecasts of the educational and economic futures of public research universities all claim that universities cannot ignore their urban and regional hosts, because growth depends on regional coexistence" (84).
Ackerman reads the rhetorical development of Kent, OH through its collective memory of the May 4, 1970 massacre. The city struggled to deal with orthodox economic changes, and its inability to utilize the university as an economic engine reaches back to its inability to deal with its polarizing history in the massacre.
Ackerman reads the rhetoric of urban design and its historical roots as a means for understanding the community in which one engages. For example, Kent State and the city of Kent were bisected around the time of the shooting. Though the bisecting was not the result of the city, the urban geographical landscape it created exacerbated the bifurcation and separated the city from the economic potential of the school.
The urban design "shows how ordinary urban landscapes...reveal much more than mere cycles of urban renewal. They exhume a city's cultural economy from its artifice to remind us that culture can never be explained through orthodox economic accounts alone or by virtue of a city's monumental structures of public record" (89).
CE is wrapped in urban economies and we must "learn how the past calcifies and how our futures can be renewed"(90).
"there are clients in urban communities who are open to rhetorical analyses of cultural economies and who fully comprehend the relationship among orthodox, new, cultural, and creative economies as the coin of the realm for public policy" (91).
"the artifice of the city is an archive for both epideictic and deliberative discourse" (91)
Thesis: Rhetorical analyses of cultural economies reveals culture "as both a commodity and critique, leading the rhetorician to surprising partnerships and objects of analysis" (91).
A
- Civic: Reaches back to the polis; historically values civilized debate and rational subjects engaged in dialog
- Engagement:the bedrock of democratic action; deliberation between subjects
"civic engagement no longer simply identifies the motives and context of an isolated classroom or off-campus learning event" (77). Its move beyond learning into political spheres embroils CE in globalization.
Policy and public life is economic, interpolated within the marketplace. Therefore, "our rhetorical engagements are fundamentally political and economic" (77).
The economic absorption and borrowed banner of CE means rhetoricians need to "rescue...the commonplace economies of the city" (77). Essentially, Ackerman is arguing that CE operates capitalistically, which blankets the community. Our engagement, then, should be to disentangle this network and be careful not to mimic its missteps.
He spends some time tracing the history of service learning and CE in American universities, citing Chaput along the way, whose argument reveals CE's complicity in providing cheap, free, and replaceable labor.
CE has also been absorbed into various partisan political mechanisms and NGOs for both progressive agendas and as a means of displacing governmental intervention into private life (republican). These groups and factions represent overlapping policy spheres.
Similar to how private spheres adopt the technical sphere's appearance to make ethical claims (Goodnight), policy spheres use digital media and high rhetorical velocity to limit political involvement.
Ackerman asks "where and how does the citizen scholar, through individual or collective action, enter into those policy spheres that influence the political and economic consequences of civic life [?]" If policy spheres reach from without the community and attempt to shape the community, "Rhetoric must reclaim its authority in public life...by locating our practice somewhere in the 'middling' range between everyday life in our communities and the regional economic policies that influence them" (81). We must in CE think from without and within; we must consider the policy sphere forces that create the local. I think he means that increasing globalization hasn't eroded the local as much as it has had a hand in creating the discourse of the local.
CE should then adopt economic justice and political inquiry.
Ackerman makes a strong case for exposing the sort of neo-liberal policies much CE engages in. Though they bill it as transnational progressivism, and a "new economy," such outsourcing of governmental roles since the 1980s can be seen in modern, university-led CE.
Essentially, Ackerman wants to "frame" CE economically.
To better work with our communities we should "return to the cities" because that's what determines the "discursive and material elements" of the community. Essentially, cities resemble the dialectic between globalization and the community.
"There are multiple economies that must be disentangled to disinter the cultural economy of a city or region" (83)
- new economy: replacing the old, orthodox economy
- cultural economy: analytical heuristic to "disrupt" old and new economic models
- creative economy: combines old, new, and cultural economies
Culture has become interpolated within economy. Cultural economies are rhetorical because they must utilize their place in time (contingency). Therefore, we can "read," analyze, and interpret cultural economic landscapes in CE.
Ackerman uses Kent State University to exhibit rhetorical CE of the university town's cultural economy.
"Recent forecasts of the educational and economic futures of public research universities all claim that universities cannot ignore their urban and regional hosts, because growth depends on regional coexistence" (84).
Ackerman reads the rhetorical development of Kent, OH through its collective memory of the May 4, 1970 massacre. The city struggled to deal with orthodox economic changes, and its inability to utilize the university as an economic engine reaches back to its inability to deal with its polarizing history in the massacre.
Ackerman reads the rhetoric of urban design and its historical roots as a means for understanding the community in which one engages. For example, Kent State and the city of Kent were bisected around the time of the shooting. Though the bisecting was not the result of the city, the urban geographical landscape it created exacerbated the bifurcation and separated the city from the economic potential of the school.
The urban design "shows how ordinary urban landscapes...reveal much more than mere cycles of urban renewal. They exhume a city's cultural economy from its artifice to remind us that culture can never be explained through orthodox economic accounts alone or by virtue of a city's monumental structures of public record" (89).
CE is wrapped in urban economies and we must "learn how the past calcifies and how our futures can be renewed"(90).
"there are clients in urban communities who are open to rhetorical analyses of cultural economies and who fully comprehend the relationship among orthodox, new, cultural, and creative economies as the coin of the realm for public policy" (91).
"the artifice of the city is an archive for both epideictic and deliberative discourse" (91)
Thesis: Rhetorical analyses of cultural economies reveals culture "as both a commodity and critique, leading the rhetorician to surprising partnerships and objects of analysis" (91).
Implications
·
CE must recognize its place within
economic policy and transnational capital exchange.
·
CE can use Ackerman’s framing—orthodox,
new, and cultural economies—in their efforts.
·
Cultural economies are discursive,
material, and symbolic (community literacy).
·
Rhetorical engagements in CE erode
institutional boundaries.
Rhetorical analyses of cultural economies reveals culture
"as both a commodity and critique, leading the rhetorician to surprising
partnerships and objects of analysis" (91).
A
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Jenny Rice--Distant Publics
Terms:
exceptional public figure (5-6)
ecocomposition (12)
public subjectivities (13)
public approach to place (14)
publics (18-20)
ecology (28)
non-place (31)
public subjects (40)
subjectivity (41-42)
injury claims (72)
memory claims (chapter four)
Inquiry (168)
Actor-Network Theory (169)
Network Tracing (171-173)
INTRODUCTION
Rice is interested in the rhetoric of development and its negative effects. How can we promote sustainability and care for everyday spaces? What is the discourse surrounding development?
She answers this question with an imagined exceptional public subject, who lies between publicness and private and imagines that they are part of a public through feeling. "If we want to encourage development talk that creates sustainable futures, then we will need to cultivate a different kind of public subjectivity altogether. We must create a new rhetorical vista from which we may stand and view ourselves in relation to the current landscape" (5).
Rice is concerned not that we connect to public through feeling, but that such a connection has fallout. Habits of public discourse result in disengagement.
"I am more interested in questioning and changing the modes of production where public subjects are concerned. My goal is to find strategies for reorienting a publicness that is not based in feeling as a starting point" (6). Such an investigation can reveal, and allow for intervention into, how subjects see themselves as belonging.
Rice acknowledges that she's not the first by far to talk about space and place in rhetoric. However, she differentiates her approach as one that focuses first on the subject that perceives and experiences the place to spur action.
Rice then moves to controversy in Austin around development and tree removal, linking historical documents of protest to Gerard Hauser's vernacular rhetoric. In addition, she links development to rhetoric by examining how the composition of a space/place exhibits the values and debates of a time in space similar to how texts are constructed. Places are given and help create meaning.
Rice believes much of rhet/comp is focused on its disciplinary standing, and that we're too busy validating our place instead of investigating the role of place in rhetoric and composition (ecocomposition).
Rice's conception of publics and discourse is very much embedded in physical space. As such, Rice examines the subjectivities of people and their relationships to place, public subjectivities.
Rice practices a "publics approach to place, which reads discourses of place both as symptoms and as catalysts of public subjectivities. Such an approach investigates the discourse itself in order to understand how people imagine themselves in relation to the publics that populate, change, and undergo this physical space" (14).
Rice sees her critical approach as deliberative and concerned with intervening in unhealthy public discourse. "My goal in this book is to imagine how we can improve discourse in order to repair damaged places and promote long-term sustainable futures...I examine how public discourse cultivates subjectivities that tend to encourage or discourage intervention in the crises of place" (14).
Methods: "A publics approach looks to common patterns of everyday talk in order to uncover the ways people read themselves into these rhetorical acts" (15).
"a publics approach...simply interrogates place-based exchanges for the kinds of public subjectivities that are being cultivated and drawn upon" (15).
Rice focuses solely on discourse and how its "patterns help to cultivate both productive and unproductive public subjects" (17).
"A focus on discourses about place can prompt us to rethink public subjectivity, or the way people are encouraged (through exchanges of everyday talk) to imagine themselves in the public sphere" (18).
Publics, for Rice, are "active manifestations of talk" (19).
CHAPTER ONE: RHETORIC'S DEVELOPMENT CRISIS
Suburban sprawl, urban development, gentrification, etc. all signify crises that rhetoricians must contend with. Urban areas are ecologies of overlapping exigencies and ongoing change.
Much of our contemporary development attaches our sense of place, our connection to the land, commercially. Whereas localities and the vernacular once founded the culture, we are now reoriented to the land through familiar, ubiquitous development.
The beginning of this chapter borrows heavily from other disciplines in an effort to found the connections between place, geography, development, etc. In effect, such grounding connects human experience and identity to place. I assume this foregrounds her investigation of how place writes us and what development means for who we are as a connection to place.
Since over development fragments our sense of self with place, we are left with non-places, "familiar spaces of development, such as retail stores, chain restaurants, apartment complexes, office parks, and even new housing developments...[which] lack the specificity of history, and they intentionally elide fixed relations among people" (31). "Nonplaces are temporary gathering sites, and only for the people you have previously agreed to meet in that space...What have replaced places are attempts at constructing instant experiences of being in-place" (32).
Development of physical spaces erodes public engagement. Public areas are privatized and partitioned.
"we need to help cultivate and support public subjects who can make ethical interventions into our endangered places...we need rhetors who can make changes at the level of individual crises...[and] rhetorical agents who can work toward sustainability in a larger sense" (40).
sustainability: concerned with conducting "our lives in some way that preserves ecological health and endurance" (41). From Owns: "as a metaphor, a design problem, a cultural imperative, and a social and ecological necessity--will become on of the new paradigms shaping much of our work" (41).
Composition should be heavily invested in sustainability because we know "how to utilize the human cpacity for language to understand better and reflect upon technologized conditions of our own making but not necessarily to our liking" From Tarla Rai.
Rice sees subjects as having networked agency that exists in future, present, and contingent places. Thus our sustainable thinking should work within these networks.
I wonder if there are any readings of Hauser's reticulate public into this...
"Sustainable features demand a strong ability to think about ourselves as beings who exist in such multiple and asymmetrical networks. Intervention must also happen within networks. Public subects are never single" (43).
Rice argues that rhetorical intervention must consider the many networks of action. Acting against BP after Deepwater Horizon fails to consider the many networks that contribute to drilling and the production of gasoline and oil pollution. Some would call for more deliberation, but Rice argues that we cannot intervene until we fix the debilitated public subject.
CHAPTER TWO: THE PUBLIC SUBJECT OF FEELING (WITH EXCEPTIONS)
subjectivity: how subjects shift and transform based on their roles and outside influences. "the roles we inhabit when we speak and act about matters that put us into relation with others" (45).
Subjectivities affect how we encounter and interact with others (Asen).
Subject roles emerge in reaction to claims circulating in public.
Subjects do not predate discourse; they are products of discourse (Foucault)
Interpelation: an individual locates himself in ideological, circulating boundaries (46-47).
Here, Rice is interested in determining how people locate themselves as a communicating subject.
"I am interested in how familiar patterns of public discourse serve as a productive technology for crafting public subjects...They are lodged in the form of cultural commonplaces, and they are given shelter...in material places (47).
Rice argues that rhetorical technologies (ways of becoming and acting as a subject--commonplaces, vernacular discourse) produce koine subjects (those interested in the common or public and idios (those who lack engagement in public matters). She's skeptical that these two subjectivities are different at all. We are then, often times, trapped in a public-private dilemma ("limbo").
Subjects can take both forms because they identify with a common act, just like the shepherd and butcher are both associated with the act of raising and consuming livestock (Burke on identification).
***"Public subjects are not only defined by the fact that they act in relation to a constellation of discourses, but they are often shaped by the particular feelings they have about that relation...we must understand that this public subject is a feeling public subject" (49). Because the shepherd and the butcher feel differently about their shared act they feel a "qualitative difference in their subject positions" (49).
Rice uses an example of an eminent domain lawsuit to exemplify how narratives about feeling make purchases on whether or not a subject is publicly concerned or not. "feeling about public issues is what legitimates subjects as public subjects...public orientation is measured and warranted by the experience of feeling about public crises and debates" (55).
Rice takes some time to clean up the feeling subject in relation to non-feeling. Just because someone is apathetic or bored doesn't mean that they are a disengaged subject. She argues that's just a kind of emotion mediating their subjectivity.
"affective states [feelings] puts us in a mood and attitude in relation to places. These attitudinal lenses become another mediating apparatus about how we come to 'know' the world around us" (57). So feeling doesn't only affect our public subjectivities, it's not only a criterion for koine, it's also a way of interpreting our subjectivities within place.
"I am persuaded that feeling has become a measurement of our publicness...feeling has become a primary means of orienting oneself to the world...I am interested in certain modes of encountering and interacting with others" (59).
Rice isn't really interested in debating whether or not we are thinking more than we are feeling or vice versa. She is more concerned about why feeling is a measure of public validity and ethos and to suggest that this is not the only way to encounter other subjects.
Though feeling is a strong catalyst for action, the relationship is rather weak and depends on an "aboutness." The person or thing becomes the object of feeling, so once the feeling changes, the relationship to that thing changes. Feeling happy can stop the action that feeling sad created because the act of feeling happy, and the object receiving the happiness I feel, means that I feel good about the feeling I feel.
In effect, people can attack someone's feeling as false, a guise, thereby eroding the legitimacy of their truth claim. "Feeling angry is not a prelude to action; it is the action itself" (60).
Is the call for tolerance, then, emblematic of this feeling is action paradigm?
The feeling criterion for publicness negatively affects and creates legitimacy for the disinterested citizen. In short, if someone doesn't feel it, if it doesn't feel like it affects them, they don't care and their withdrawal or distance is legitimated (62). Therefore, the feeling and non-feeling subject exist in relation to claims about public crisis.
Cui bono? the establishment and those who produce the feelings we get to choose from (epistemic elites--Hauser)
In combining her call for public rhetoricians to create sustainable interventions with the feeling public paradigm, Rice argues that the two aren't compatible because "today's key public subjectivity creates a space of exclusion that allows subjects to remain 'publicly oriented' while also being distanced from the kind of rhetoric gestures necessary for sustainable interventions" (62).
The feeling subject can criticize disengaged citizens and be a disengaged citizen at the same time because their feelings of outrage legitimate their publicness.
So, considering Hauser's publics as being situated in their publicness (their rhetorical act), is Rice saying that feeling is a rhetorical act?
In one example, a student cannot respond or comment on the legacy of racism because she's not a racist and her family never owned slaves. This feeling subject uses a lack of culpability as a rhetorical gesture toward solidarity.
Rice spends some time to validate apathy as, not a lack of emotion, but as a reaction to the available public feelings or ways-of-being in the world. It's also a way of interfacing. "apathy is a kind of response to the political possibilities that seem to exist in the public sphere. It is, therefore, its own kind of political position" (66).
Such apathy creates "sovereignty" in that those subjects are both outside and inside the order. They are an exception. Like a posted sign that proclaims the rule "Don't post signs," the exceptional subject exists inside and outside the rule. "It is not opposed to the rule, but is related to the rule by virtue of being outside of it" (67). This is not a binaristic distinction. It's like an easement, both in and out.
"what has replaced a shared world is an intimate public sphere comprising innumerable private lives on display for mass consumption. The intimate public sphere turns citizenship into a collection of simultaneous private worlds. Public discourse has been displaced by idiocy" (68).
Public engagement cannot go forth without rethinking "what public subjectivity is and how it has been created...By understanding the exceptional public subject, we may be able to understand how today's key public subjectivity allows us to remain actively and productively distanced from intervention, while never being outside its discourse" (69).
CHAPTER THREE: VULTURES AND KOOKS: THE RHETORIC OF INJURY CLAIMS
This chapter discusses the commonplace of "injury claims," which positions rhetors as injured by anyone who challenges their position" (72).
"My goal is to uncover how the dialectical work of injury claims and counterclaims help to cultivate a space of exception where public subjects are concerned" (72).
"Injury claims typically presume that something precious is being encroached upon" (76).
Much of this chapter analyzes the rhetorical injury claims made surrounding development of Circle C Ranch in Austin, TX.
Injury claims are often accompanied by feelings and rhetorical gestures toward irreparability.
"Injury claims can also be described as a topos insofar as they have the ability to generate multiple, and even conflicting, discourses...Participants may be so divided on the matter that no conclusion or resolution is possible. Nevertheless, they are linked together by the fact that this topos focuses the bulk of their attention" (79).
"Injury claims collaborate together in order to dialectically produce a site of discourse. Understanding the collaborative dialectic as a single site of discourse is important, since this also helps us better understand why and how subjects can be distanced from public discourse without being outside of such discourse. That is, what gets mutually produced by injury claims is the 'space of exception,' perhaps more appropriately renamed a 'site of exception,' that cultivates the exceptional subject" (81).
Essentially, a shared topoi (site), forms a dialectical space that works in concert with the exceptional subject but is turned into a site of exception.
Injury claims make subjects victims that wrap their identity in the wound.The wound becomes the source of rhetorical invention, but is also maintains this discourse as located within the injury.
"Injury claims actually produce a collaborative site that guides our orientation to other people and to the world" (83). They form a site (topos) for debate (64).
"In short, the site of debate becomes the main topos for talking about development...By making the site of injurty a primary topos (or place holder), the work of public talkis removed from a space of alternative inquiry" (84).
Injury claims, in their limiting of intervention space, damage the network of ways we can interface with the world.
Injury claims are also harmful because they force interfacing with a problem emotionally, relationally, and through feeling. This creates distance from the problem People can simultaneously be engaged in the public and not engage in discourse because they don't feel. If it doesn't affect them, then their non-feeling is their orientation to the issue. They exist in a suspended (non)participatory state. Like a rhetorical Schrodinger's cat.
This has major implications for who, then, belongs to a public, and how publics are formed. Whereas Dewey claims that publics arise around shared interests and only come to being to tackle a problem, and while Hauser claims that publics act rhetorically across reticulate networks, Rice argues that publics do arise around a problem, they do engage in vernacular discourse, they are networks, BUT their rhetorical modes of engagement create the conditions necessary for a suspended, exceptional public feeling member. This member is a part of the issue but the rule of how one relates to the issue (e.g. injury claim) creates a nexus of feeling, which prohibits the member for joining the discourse.
For a summary of this chapter's argument read 94-98.
Understanding how topoi create subjectivities and spaces of entry for crises complicate the way we teach engagement in our classes. If we ask students to "pick a side," we might be reinforcing an injury claim that doesn't yield productive conversation or change. Such pedagogy might only support the rhetorical technologies that produce injury claim dialog, discourses of feeling that promote towardness, awayness, or distance.
The idea is not for teachers and rhetoricians to reconfigure the affect of discourse, that which governs discursive action. We can't make changes at the level of feeling. "we can transform how certain discursive commonplaces are used topologically...we can encourage new kinds of vernacular discursive habits that help to shape a different kind of public subject...new discursive habits may encourage public subjects who orient differently to the world and to others" (98).
Public subjectivities are feeling subjectivities. Feeling, as a commonplace/topoi, create the conditions of interface, allowing towardness, awayness, and distance. In effect, apathy becomes a way to be situated within a crisis. It is the product of a limiting topoi. Such a dialectic limits intervention. Rice, at the end of this chapter, turns away from defining what the problem is and begins to talk about its implication with the rhetoric and comp classroom. We shouldn't try to reprogram students. We should encourage different ways of situating oneself to a problem.
CHAPTER FOUR: LOST PLACES AND MEMORY CLAIMS
This chapter is about public memory and the narratives it creates and how those narratives "helps to cultivate and encourage a certain kind of public subject" (101). Rice acknowledges that memory claims aren't necessarily claims on empirical truth. However, they offer a felt sense, a way to determine "how this discourse develops in response to ongoing development" (102).
They are epideictic. They publicly memorialize for deliberative purposes. It is didactic in its instruction to emulate the thing being praised.
Like the exceptional feeling subject within injury claims, memory claims allow subjects to "write themselves out of public debate. Memory claims create both possibilities for engagement, as well spacesof exceptionality and non-participation" (103).
Memory claims create the exceptional subject in 3 ways:
1) they differentiate between old and new space; the old was public; the new is private
2) it creates the other, the new member as the agents of change without memory, while the old subject, with memory, is the object of change. Since they're the objects of change, they cannot react to change. It has happened to them, not from them.
3) If the entry point to public discourse is memory, then those who don't have it are prohibited entrance. Though they are barred entry, they can gaze at the horizon and measure their towardness. They're aware of its existence despite their memory of its origin.
Public memory, though ubiquitous, "does not necessarily mean more public intervention in the place of crisis" (104).
Using the development crisis in Austin as an example, Rice argues that lost memory claims often transform new development into private spaces where the old ones take on revisionist public form. This is often correlated by its sense of connection with the community. Newer developments are foreign, box store corporations that aren't tied to the community and overtly represent an outside private force. This bifurcation changes the way we argue and "alters the exigence altogether" (114). Such narratives displace any deliberation about how to develop and instead write the developments off as an unavoidable tidal wave, sad though it may be.
When rhetors blame outsiders for changes, they're improperly taking themselves out of networks. "This rhetoric resembles...a scapegoat device, which allows rhetors to project agency for unhappy events onto another body. By projecting agency, rhetors turn themselves into object who are being acted upon by another body" (121).
Public memories like a horizon provide a sense of place, a relief. Though focused on the past, they're really about the present.
Public memory prevents inquiry about shared spaces that goes beyond the horizon of the place as a point of origin.
CHAPTER FIVE: GENTRIFICATION AND EQUIVALENCE CLAIMS
"I am more interested in 'equivalence claims,' or claims that read the scene of gentrification as undecidable. These claims take the position that gentrification is both good and bad, a paradoxical position that effectively writes itself out of any interventionist role" (131).
Inability to decide becomes krisis, which "serve to cultivate subjects who retain a public orientation without writing themselves into the scene of public change...legitimating equivalence claims help to maintain a space of exception" (112).
"I will make a distinction between complex claims of equivalence and simple claims of equivalence. Both kinds of claims are quite widespread in public debates and deliberations over gentrification...Whereas complex claims of equivalence can help to place speakers or writers within a scene of rhetorical agency, simple claims of equivalence tend to cultivate a space of exception" (144).
Simple equivalence claims don't allow for reflection. They act as conclusions instead of entry points into real public talk.
Rice compares the simple equivalence claims to those frequently seen in student writing: it's good for some, bad for others. The cliches are emblematic of Bartholome's "Inventing the University" thesis, whereby students rely on commonplaces to negotiate new territory. Equivalence claims allow rhetors to weigh in on a subject without having to take a side. It is simultaneously an entrance and an exit (156).
Simple equivalence claims mirror debate technology, wherein there's arete in being able to argue both sides of an issue. However, the comparison breaks down as those making simple equivalence claims "legitimate subjects through the affective arrival of undecidability" (157).
"The experience of feeling torn is itself a mark of thoughtfulness that is worthy of attention, perhaps because it transcends mere partisanship. Mechanisms like these help to legitimate equivalence as a form of public orientation. Therefore, arriving at undecidability is not necessarily seen as a refusal of publicness. Quite the contrary: it can legitimate a public rhetorical stance" (158). Rice definitely agrees with Hauser's assertion that publics originate rhetorically/vernacularly in a networked/reticulate public sphere. However, she's adding to that conversation a critique of the rhetorical gestures (commonplaces) that create the feeling of publicness (Hauser's rhetorical public) that provides the illusion of involvement.
Rice maps Gorgias and Isocrates over the exceptional public subject. Though Gorgias "On Nature" appears to embrace the idea that one can never know for sure (synonymous with "everyone has their own opinions), he concludes that rhetoric (phronesis, krisis) allows for movement in an inevitably unknowable world. "Though we are lodged in a permanent state of undecidability, we must make present an ethical, humane, and sound course of action" (159).
CHAPTER SIX: INQUIRY AS SOCIAL ACTION
We must think through the networks that invariable run through our lives, locally, spatially, temporally, globally. "Thinking through these networks demands an ability to imagine the incongruent and asymmetrical networks within which our agency is lodged" (163).
Operating in the public sphere, one's stance in relation to the public, isn't a matter of joining counterpublics or publics (164). We're already networked. Therefore, we should consider those networks when acting publicly. "We must pursue inquiry as a mode of publicness...By transforming the kinds of subjects that public talk makes, we can transform the kinds of rhetorical actions those subjects make" (164).
To exemplify an inquiry approach, Rice highlights rhetorical and composition pedagogies as a way to get students to investigate relationships (networks) beyond equivalence claims.
Rice claims that foregrounding feeling, as a starting place for inquiry, promotes "the notion that feeling is the proper means of engaging in these topics" (167). The idea here is that foregrounding students feelings limits their perception of a networked subject. If they start with something they feel passionately about, then they fail to see the world in which they're enmeshed within. Rice proposes a classroom driven by inquiry. Inquiry is its telos.
"Inquiry is an endless survey of these networks within which a crisis is embedded" (168).
Inquiry is different than an epistemologically oriented pedagogy that looks for answers: who's right; is this good or bad...
"The inquiring subject seeks to uncover the composition of a given scene...the goal of inquiry is not always resolution" (169).
"Actor-network theory provides a model for understanding all kinds of networks...Actor-network theory helps sociologists to rethink sociality as a distributed network of connections rather than as a singular substance that coheres into a whole...actor-network theory is more about how we are within a process. While we may not be conscious of the networks we inhabit, we are aware of the networks through a kind of embodied knowledge that is reflected in our behavioral adjustment" (169).
ANT takes a holistic approach in assessing the relationship between humans and tools/objects. The situatedness of an object, whose place was determined, thereby determines our behavior.
Network Tracing: tracking the meaning making quality of networks.
Far from exposition, inquiry has the possibility to reveal new relations that can then be absorbed by social activists to create possibilities.
Rice's model of inquiry seeks not to persuade but tease out the networked threads. She likens this inquiry to doxa: public memories; beliefs; desires; and vernacular talk. This type of rhetoric has the "power to create a world of its own making and situate audiences as potential inhabitants of the world" (182). This inquiry into doxa will allow investigators to better place themselves within the world, realigning their rhetoric with inquiry instead of feeling.
exceptional public figure (5-6)
ecocomposition (12)
public subjectivities (13)
public approach to place (14)
publics (18-20)
ecology (28)
non-place (31)
public subjects (40)
subjectivity (41-42)
injury claims (72)
memory claims (chapter four)
Inquiry (168)
Actor-Network Theory (169)
Network Tracing (171-173)
INTRODUCTION
Rice is interested in the rhetoric of development and its negative effects. How can we promote sustainability and care for everyday spaces? What is the discourse surrounding development?
She answers this question with an imagined exceptional public subject, who lies between publicness and private and imagines that they are part of a public through feeling. "If we want to encourage development talk that creates sustainable futures, then we will need to cultivate a different kind of public subjectivity altogether. We must create a new rhetorical vista from which we may stand and view ourselves in relation to the current landscape" (5).
Rice is concerned not that we connect to public through feeling, but that such a connection has fallout. Habits of public discourse result in disengagement.
"I am more interested in questioning and changing the modes of production where public subjects are concerned. My goal is to find strategies for reorienting a publicness that is not based in feeling as a starting point" (6). Such an investigation can reveal, and allow for intervention into, how subjects see themselves as belonging.
Rice acknowledges that she's not the first by far to talk about space and place in rhetoric. However, she differentiates her approach as one that focuses first on the subject that perceives and experiences the place to spur action.
Rice then moves to controversy in Austin around development and tree removal, linking historical documents of protest to Gerard Hauser's vernacular rhetoric. In addition, she links development to rhetoric by examining how the composition of a space/place exhibits the values and debates of a time in space similar to how texts are constructed. Places are given and help create meaning.
Rice believes much of rhet/comp is focused on its disciplinary standing, and that we're too busy validating our place instead of investigating the role of place in rhetoric and composition (ecocomposition).
Rice's conception of publics and discourse is very much embedded in physical space. As such, Rice examines the subjectivities of people and their relationships to place, public subjectivities.
Rice practices a "publics approach to place, which reads discourses of place both as symptoms and as catalysts of public subjectivities. Such an approach investigates the discourse itself in order to understand how people imagine themselves in relation to the publics that populate, change, and undergo this physical space" (14).
Rice sees her critical approach as deliberative and concerned with intervening in unhealthy public discourse. "My goal in this book is to imagine how we can improve discourse in order to repair damaged places and promote long-term sustainable futures...I examine how public discourse cultivates subjectivities that tend to encourage or discourage intervention in the crises of place" (14).
Methods: "A publics approach looks to common patterns of everyday talk in order to uncover the ways people read themselves into these rhetorical acts" (15).
"a publics approach...simply interrogates place-based exchanges for the kinds of public subjectivities that are being cultivated and drawn upon" (15).
Rice focuses solely on discourse and how its "patterns help to cultivate both productive and unproductive public subjects" (17).
"A focus on discourses about place can prompt us to rethink public subjectivity, or the way people are encouraged (through exchanges of everyday talk) to imagine themselves in the public sphere" (18).
Publics, for Rice, are "active manifestations of talk" (19).
CHAPTER ONE: RHETORIC'S DEVELOPMENT CRISIS
Suburban sprawl, urban development, gentrification, etc. all signify crises that rhetoricians must contend with. Urban areas are ecologies of overlapping exigencies and ongoing change.
Much of our contemporary development attaches our sense of place, our connection to the land, commercially. Whereas localities and the vernacular once founded the culture, we are now reoriented to the land through familiar, ubiquitous development.
The beginning of this chapter borrows heavily from other disciplines in an effort to found the connections between place, geography, development, etc. In effect, such grounding connects human experience and identity to place. I assume this foregrounds her investigation of how place writes us and what development means for who we are as a connection to place.
Since over development fragments our sense of self with place, we are left with non-places, "familiar spaces of development, such as retail stores, chain restaurants, apartment complexes, office parks, and even new housing developments...[which] lack the specificity of history, and they intentionally elide fixed relations among people" (31). "Nonplaces are temporary gathering sites, and only for the people you have previously agreed to meet in that space...What have replaced places are attempts at constructing instant experiences of being in-place" (32).
Development of physical spaces erodes public engagement. Public areas are privatized and partitioned.
"we need to help cultivate and support public subjects who can make ethical interventions into our endangered places...we need rhetors who can make changes at the level of individual crises...[and] rhetorical agents who can work toward sustainability in a larger sense" (40).
sustainability: concerned with conducting "our lives in some way that preserves ecological health and endurance" (41). From Owns: "as a metaphor, a design problem, a cultural imperative, and a social and ecological necessity--will become on of the new paradigms shaping much of our work" (41).
Composition should be heavily invested in sustainability because we know "how to utilize the human cpacity for language to understand better and reflect upon technologized conditions of our own making but not necessarily to our liking" From Tarla Rai.
Rice sees subjects as having networked agency that exists in future, present, and contingent places. Thus our sustainable thinking should work within these networks.
I wonder if there are any readings of Hauser's reticulate public into this...
"Sustainable features demand a strong ability to think about ourselves as beings who exist in such multiple and asymmetrical networks. Intervention must also happen within networks. Public subects are never single" (43).
Rice argues that rhetorical intervention must consider the many networks of action. Acting against BP after Deepwater Horizon fails to consider the many networks that contribute to drilling and the production of gasoline and oil pollution. Some would call for more deliberation, but Rice argues that we cannot intervene until we fix the debilitated public subject.
CHAPTER TWO: THE PUBLIC SUBJECT OF FEELING (WITH EXCEPTIONS)
subjectivity: how subjects shift and transform based on their roles and outside influences. "the roles we inhabit when we speak and act about matters that put us into relation with others" (45).
Subjectivities affect how we encounter and interact with others (Asen).
Subject roles emerge in reaction to claims circulating in public.
Subjects do not predate discourse; they are products of discourse (Foucault)
Interpelation: an individual locates himself in ideological, circulating boundaries (46-47).
Here, Rice is interested in determining how people locate themselves as a communicating subject.
"I am interested in how familiar patterns of public discourse serve as a productive technology for crafting public subjects...They are lodged in the form of cultural commonplaces, and they are given shelter...in material places (47).
Rice argues that rhetorical technologies (ways of becoming and acting as a subject--commonplaces, vernacular discourse) produce koine subjects (those interested in the common or public and idios (those who lack engagement in public matters). She's skeptical that these two subjectivities are different at all. We are then, often times, trapped in a public-private dilemma ("limbo").
Subjects can take both forms because they identify with a common act, just like the shepherd and butcher are both associated with the act of raising and consuming livestock (Burke on identification).
***"Public subjects are not only defined by the fact that they act in relation to a constellation of discourses, but they are often shaped by the particular feelings they have about that relation...we must understand that this public subject is a feeling public subject" (49). Because the shepherd and the butcher feel differently about their shared act they feel a "qualitative difference in their subject positions" (49).
Rice uses an example of an eminent domain lawsuit to exemplify how narratives about feeling make purchases on whether or not a subject is publicly concerned or not. "feeling about public issues is what legitimates subjects as public subjects...public orientation is measured and warranted by the experience of feeling about public crises and debates" (55).
Rice takes some time to clean up the feeling subject in relation to non-feeling. Just because someone is apathetic or bored doesn't mean that they are a disengaged subject. She argues that's just a kind of emotion mediating their subjectivity.
"affective states [feelings] puts us in a mood and attitude in relation to places. These attitudinal lenses become another mediating apparatus about how we come to 'know' the world around us" (57). So feeling doesn't only affect our public subjectivities, it's not only a criterion for koine, it's also a way of interpreting our subjectivities within place.
"I am persuaded that feeling has become a measurement of our publicness...feeling has become a primary means of orienting oneself to the world...I am interested in certain modes of encountering and interacting with others" (59).
Rice isn't really interested in debating whether or not we are thinking more than we are feeling or vice versa. She is more concerned about why feeling is a measure of public validity and ethos and to suggest that this is not the only way to encounter other subjects.
Though feeling is a strong catalyst for action, the relationship is rather weak and depends on an "aboutness." The person or thing becomes the object of feeling, so once the feeling changes, the relationship to that thing changes. Feeling happy can stop the action that feeling sad created because the act of feeling happy, and the object receiving the happiness I feel, means that I feel good about the feeling I feel.
In effect, people can attack someone's feeling as false, a guise, thereby eroding the legitimacy of their truth claim. "Feeling angry is not a prelude to action; it is the action itself" (60).
Is the call for tolerance, then, emblematic of this feeling is action paradigm?
The feeling criterion for publicness negatively affects and creates legitimacy for the disinterested citizen. In short, if someone doesn't feel it, if it doesn't feel like it affects them, they don't care and their withdrawal or distance is legitimated (62). Therefore, the feeling and non-feeling subject exist in relation to claims about public crisis.
Cui bono? the establishment and those who produce the feelings we get to choose from (epistemic elites--Hauser)
In combining her call for public rhetoricians to create sustainable interventions with the feeling public paradigm, Rice argues that the two aren't compatible because "today's key public subjectivity creates a space of exclusion that allows subjects to remain 'publicly oriented' while also being distanced from the kind of rhetoric gestures necessary for sustainable interventions" (62).
The feeling subject can criticize disengaged citizens and be a disengaged citizen at the same time because their feelings of outrage legitimate their publicness.
So, considering Hauser's publics as being situated in their publicness (their rhetorical act), is Rice saying that feeling is a rhetorical act?
In one example, a student cannot respond or comment on the legacy of racism because she's not a racist and her family never owned slaves. This feeling subject uses a lack of culpability as a rhetorical gesture toward solidarity.
Rice spends some time to validate apathy as, not a lack of emotion, but as a reaction to the available public feelings or ways-of-being in the world. It's also a way of interfacing. "apathy is a kind of response to the political possibilities that seem to exist in the public sphere. It is, therefore, its own kind of political position" (66).
Such apathy creates "sovereignty" in that those subjects are both outside and inside the order. They are an exception. Like a posted sign that proclaims the rule "Don't post signs," the exceptional subject exists inside and outside the rule. "It is not opposed to the rule, but is related to the rule by virtue of being outside of it" (67). This is not a binaristic distinction. It's like an easement, both in and out.
"what has replaced a shared world is an intimate public sphere comprising innumerable private lives on display for mass consumption. The intimate public sphere turns citizenship into a collection of simultaneous private worlds. Public discourse has been displaced by idiocy" (68).
Public engagement cannot go forth without rethinking "what public subjectivity is and how it has been created...By understanding the exceptional public subject, we may be able to understand how today's key public subjectivity allows us to remain actively and productively distanced from intervention, while never being outside its discourse" (69).
CHAPTER THREE: VULTURES AND KOOKS: THE RHETORIC OF INJURY CLAIMS
This chapter discusses the commonplace of "injury claims," which positions rhetors as injured by anyone who challenges their position" (72).
"My goal is to uncover how the dialectical work of injury claims and counterclaims help to cultivate a space of exception where public subjects are concerned" (72).
"Injury claims typically presume that something precious is being encroached upon" (76).
Much of this chapter analyzes the rhetorical injury claims made surrounding development of Circle C Ranch in Austin, TX.
Injury claims are often accompanied by feelings and rhetorical gestures toward irreparability.
"Injury claims can also be described as a topos insofar as they have the ability to generate multiple, and even conflicting, discourses...Participants may be so divided on the matter that no conclusion or resolution is possible. Nevertheless, they are linked together by the fact that this topos focuses the bulk of their attention" (79).
"Injury claims collaborate together in order to dialectically produce a site of discourse. Understanding the collaborative dialectic as a single site of discourse is important, since this also helps us better understand why and how subjects can be distanced from public discourse without being outside of such discourse. That is, what gets mutually produced by injury claims is the 'space of exception,' perhaps more appropriately renamed a 'site of exception,' that cultivates the exceptional subject" (81).
Essentially, a shared topoi (site), forms a dialectical space that works in concert with the exceptional subject but is turned into a site of exception.
Injury claims make subjects victims that wrap their identity in the wound.The wound becomes the source of rhetorical invention, but is also maintains this discourse as located within the injury.
"Injury claims actually produce a collaborative site that guides our orientation to other people and to the world" (83). They form a site (topos) for debate (64).
"In short, the site of debate becomes the main topos for talking about development...By making the site of injurty a primary topos (or place holder), the work of public talkis removed from a space of alternative inquiry" (84).
Injury claims, in their limiting of intervention space, damage the network of ways we can interface with the world.
Injury claims are also harmful because they force interfacing with a problem emotionally, relationally, and through feeling. This creates distance from the problem People can simultaneously be engaged in the public and not engage in discourse because they don't feel. If it doesn't affect them, then their non-feeling is their orientation to the issue. They exist in a suspended (non)participatory state. Like a rhetorical Schrodinger's cat.
This has major implications for who, then, belongs to a public, and how publics are formed. Whereas Dewey claims that publics arise around shared interests and only come to being to tackle a problem, and while Hauser claims that publics act rhetorically across reticulate networks, Rice argues that publics do arise around a problem, they do engage in vernacular discourse, they are networks, BUT their rhetorical modes of engagement create the conditions necessary for a suspended, exceptional public feeling member. This member is a part of the issue but the rule of how one relates to the issue (e.g. injury claim) creates a nexus of feeling, which prohibits the member for joining the discourse.
For a summary of this chapter's argument read 94-98.
Understanding how topoi create subjectivities and spaces of entry for crises complicate the way we teach engagement in our classes. If we ask students to "pick a side," we might be reinforcing an injury claim that doesn't yield productive conversation or change. Such pedagogy might only support the rhetorical technologies that produce injury claim dialog, discourses of feeling that promote towardness, awayness, or distance.
The idea is not for teachers and rhetoricians to reconfigure the affect of discourse, that which governs discursive action. We can't make changes at the level of feeling. "we can transform how certain discursive commonplaces are used topologically...we can encourage new kinds of vernacular discursive habits that help to shape a different kind of public subject...new discursive habits may encourage public subjects who orient differently to the world and to others" (98).
Public subjectivities are feeling subjectivities. Feeling, as a commonplace/topoi, create the conditions of interface, allowing towardness, awayness, and distance. In effect, apathy becomes a way to be situated within a crisis. It is the product of a limiting topoi. Such a dialectic limits intervention. Rice, at the end of this chapter, turns away from defining what the problem is and begins to talk about its implication with the rhetoric and comp classroom. We shouldn't try to reprogram students. We should encourage different ways of situating oneself to a problem.
CHAPTER FOUR: LOST PLACES AND MEMORY CLAIMS
This chapter is about public memory and the narratives it creates and how those narratives "helps to cultivate and encourage a certain kind of public subject" (101). Rice acknowledges that memory claims aren't necessarily claims on empirical truth. However, they offer a felt sense, a way to determine "how this discourse develops in response to ongoing development" (102).
They are epideictic. They publicly memorialize for deliberative purposes. It is didactic in its instruction to emulate the thing being praised.
Like the exceptional feeling subject within injury claims, memory claims allow subjects to "write themselves out of public debate. Memory claims create both possibilities for engagement, as well spacesof exceptionality and non-participation" (103).
Memory claims create the exceptional subject in 3 ways:
1) they differentiate between old and new space; the old was public; the new is private
2) it creates the other, the new member as the agents of change without memory, while the old subject, with memory, is the object of change. Since they're the objects of change, they cannot react to change. It has happened to them, not from them.
3) If the entry point to public discourse is memory, then those who don't have it are prohibited entrance. Though they are barred entry, they can gaze at the horizon and measure their towardness. They're aware of its existence despite their memory of its origin.
Public memory, though ubiquitous, "does not necessarily mean more public intervention in the place of crisis" (104).
Using the development crisis in Austin as an example, Rice argues that lost memory claims often transform new development into private spaces where the old ones take on revisionist public form. This is often correlated by its sense of connection with the community. Newer developments are foreign, box store corporations that aren't tied to the community and overtly represent an outside private force. This bifurcation changes the way we argue and "alters the exigence altogether" (114). Such narratives displace any deliberation about how to develop and instead write the developments off as an unavoidable tidal wave, sad though it may be.
When rhetors blame outsiders for changes, they're improperly taking themselves out of networks. "This rhetoric resembles...a scapegoat device, which allows rhetors to project agency for unhappy events onto another body. By projecting agency, rhetors turn themselves into object who are being acted upon by another body" (121).
Public memories like a horizon provide a sense of place, a relief. Though focused on the past, they're really about the present.
Public memory prevents inquiry about shared spaces that goes beyond the horizon of the place as a point of origin.
CHAPTER FIVE: GENTRIFICATION AND EQUIVALENCE CLAIMS
"I am more interested in 'equivalence claims,' or claims that read the scene of gentrification as undecidable. These claims take the position that gentrification is both good and bad, a paradoxical position that effectively writes itself out of any interventionist role" (131).
Inability to decide becomes krisis, which "serve to cultivate subjects who retain a public orientation without writing themselves into the scene of public change...legitimating equivalence claims help to maintain a space of exception" (112).
"I will make a distinction between complex claims of equivalence and simple claims of equivalence. Both kinds of claims are quite widespread in public debates and deliberations over gentrification...Whereas complex claims of equivalence can help to place speakers or writers within a scene of rhetorical agency, simple claims of equivalence tend to cultivate a space of exception" (144).
Simple equivalence claims don't allow for reflection. They act as conclusions instead of entry points into real public talk.
Rice compares the simple equivalence claims to those frequently seen in student writing: it's good for some, bad for others. The cliches are emblematic of Bartholome's "Inventing the University" thesis, whereby students rely on commonplaces to negotiate new territory. Equivalence claims allow rhetors to weigh in on a subject without having to take a side. It is simultaneously an entrance and an exit (156).
Simple equivalence claims mirror debate technology, wherein there's arete in being able to argue both sides of an issue. However, the comparison breaks down as those making simple equivalence claims "legitimate subjects through the affective arrival of undecidability" (157).
"The experience of feeling torn is itself a mark of thoughtfulness that is worthy of attention, perhaps because it transcends mere partisanship. Mechanisms like these help to legitimate equivalence as a form of public orientation. Therefore, arriving at undecidability is not necessarily seen as a refusal of publicness. Quite the contrary: it can legitimate a public rhetorical stance" (158). Rice definitely agrees with Hauser's assertion that publics originate rhetorically/vernacularly in a networked/reticulate public sphere. However, she's adding to that conversation a critique of the rhetorical gestures (commonplaces) that create the feeling of publicness (Hauser's rhetorical public) that provides the illusion of involvement.
Rice maps Gorgias and Isocrates over the exceptional public subject. Though Gorgias "On Nature" appears to embrace the idea that one can never know for sure (synonymous with "everyone has their own opinions), he concludes that rhetoric (phronesis, krisis) allows for movement in an inevitably unknowable world. "Though we are lodged in a permanent state of undecidability, we must make present an ethical, humane, and sound course of action" (159).
CHAPTER SIX: INQUIRY AS SOCIAL ACTION
We must think through the networks that invariable run through our lives, locally, spatially, temporally, globally. "Thinking through these networks demands an ability to imagine the incongruent and asymmetrical networks within which our agency is lodged" (163).
Operating in the public sphere, one's stance in relation to the public, isn't a matter of joining counterpublics or publics (164). We're already networked. Therefore, we should consider those networks when acting publicly. "We must pursue inquiry as a mode of publicness...By transforming the kinds of subjects that public talk makes, we can transform the kinds of rhetorical actions those subjects make" (164).
To exemplify an inquiry approach, Rice highlights rhetorical and composition pedagogies as a way to get students to investigate relationships (networks) beyond equivalence claims.
Rice claims that foregrounding feeling, as a starting place for inquiry, promotes "the notion that feeling is the proper means of engaging in these topics" (167). The idea here is that foregrounding students feelings limits their perception of a networked subject. If they start with something they feel passionately about, then they fail to see the world in which they're enmeshed within. Rice proposes a classroom driven by inquiry. Inquiry is its telos.
"Inquiry is an endless survey of these networks within which a crisis is embedded" (168).
Inquiry is different than an epistemologically oriented pedagogy that looks for answers: who's right; is this good or bad...
"The inquiring subject seeks to uncover the composition of a given scene...the goal of inquiry is not always resolution" (169).
"Actor-network theory provides a model for understanding all kinds of networks...Actor-network theory helps sociologists to rethink sociality as a distributed network of connections rather than as a singular substance that coheres into a whole...actor-network theory is more about how we are within a process. While we may not be conscious of the networks we inhabit, we are aware of the networks through a kind of embodied knowledge that is reflected in our behavioral adjustment" (169).
ANT takes a holistic approach in assessing the relationship between humans and tools/objects. The situatedness of an object, whose place was determined, thereby determines our behavior.
Network Tracing: tracking the meaning making quality of networks.
Far from exposition, inquiry has the possibility to reveal new relations that can then be absorbed by social activists to create possibilities.
Rice's model of inquiry seeks not to persuade but tease out the networked threads. She likens this inquiry to doxa: public memories; beliefs; desires; and vernacular talk. This type of rhetoric has the "power to create a world of its own making and situate audiences as potential inhabitants of the world" (182). This inquiry into doxa will allow investigators to better place themselves within the world, realigning their rhetoric with inquiry instead of feeling.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
G. Thomas Goodnight--"The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation"
Argumentation and Advocacy
48 (Spring 2012): 198-210
"This essay examines the extended threat to the political public sphere by cultures of expertise that substitute media spectacle for genuine deliberation"
Goodnight begins examining deliberation as a shaping force for future constructions. Goodnight sees deliberative rhetoric as an art that might have atrophied in recent years.
He believes current practices masquerade as deliberative rhetoric.
Creative resolution and the resolute creation of uncertainty makes arguments recognizable. Arguments, while not always controversial, are by nature uncertain in their ends.
Spheres: "branches of activity–the grounds upon which arguments are built and the authorities to which arguers appeal" (200).
Goodnight grounds the public, private, and technical spheres in Burke's notion of identification.
private: a person shows "consubstantiality"
public: a partisan act
technical: invoking career or vocation
Though the term sphere has been used to discriminate in the past, the sphere here represents a way of dealing with uncertainty. One can accept the traditional modes of argumentation or try to reshape the grounds upon which an argument is launched. The latter "expands one sphere of argument at the expense of another" (201).
"From a critics perspective, argument may be approached as a way of coming to understand the transformations of human activity through the variety of practices employed in making argument" (201). Goodnight demonstrates the danger of reverse engineering an argument at an airport bar as a way of extrapolating the general rules of argumentation. Instead of a general rule of argumentation, what would be preserved by a scholar would represent the lens of the scholar (technical sphere) in the preservation of the argument. As such, the criticism of the argument forms two camps: those who agree with the technical sphere interpretation and those that claim the community (argument) was misrepresented. The argument then becomes public and must fit within the parameters of public argument.
The analogy of how an argument at an airport bar can be taken up and disagreed with in a public sphere exemplifies the different kinds of arguments made in different arenas. "Transcending the personal and technical spheres is the public, a domain which, while not reducible to the argument practice of any group of social customs or professional communities, nevertheless may be influenced by them. But the public realm is discrete insofar as it provides forums with customs, traditions, and requirements for arguers in the recognition that the consequences of dispute extend beyond the personal and technical spheres" (202).
Goodnight then provides historical examples of how "grounds of argument may be altered" (203).
He's also concerned about the role of the common citizen in an increasingly technological world. What can the layman do in a technocracy? He pulls back from this though, believing that it's uncertain that governing our democracy has become the purvey of a technological elite.
To support this claim, Goodnight argues that the deliberation in the public sphere has been reduced to popularity contests as a means to get into office. However, it's hard to say if the public has disengaged from meaningful debate because such debates and decisions never come to the fore. So, if a decision making forum is never made public, it's hard to ascertain the liveliness of public knowledge.
In its place, the mass media has promulgated the semblance of a deliberative rhetoric.
Goodnight focuses on news reports and acknowledges that "The reports always presented the individual as a victim of social forces. Descionmaking bodies, apparently bereft of human emotion and lacking common sense, were to make decisions based upon inscrutable principles...The reports were crafted in such a way that no intelligent assessment could be made concerning the issues involved...the story simply did not invite action" (207). In short, Goodnight argues that the semblance of a public sphere operates to obscure causal factors. It produces information but fails to direct action at an origin. "What could be a way of sharing in the creation of a future is supplanted by a perpetual swirl of exciting stimuli. Thus is deliberation replaced by consumption" (207).
Goodnight calls for argumentation theorists to revitalize the lost art of deliberation by critiquing "those practices which replace deliberative rhetoric" (208).
48 (Spring 2012): 198-210
"This essay examines the extended threat to the political public sphere by cultures of expertise that substitute media spectacle for genuine deliberation"
Goodnight begins examining deliberation as a shaping force for future constructions. Goodnight sees deliberative rhetoric as an art that might have atrophied in recent years.
He believes current practices masquerade as deliberative rhetoric.
Creative resolution and the resolute creation of uncertainty makes arguments recognizable. Arguments, while not always controversial, are by nature uncertain in their ends.
Spheres: "branches of activity–the grounds upon which arguments are built and the authorities to which arguers appeal" (200).
Goodnight grounds the public, private, and technical spheres in Burke's notion of identification.
private: a person shows "consubstantiality"
public: a partisan act
technical: invoking career or vocation
Though the term sphere has been used to discriminate in the past, the sphere here represents a way of dealing with uncertainty. One can accept the traditional modes of argumentation or try to reshape the grounds upon which an argument is launched. The latter "expands one sphere of argument at the expense of another" (201).
"From a critics perspective, argument may be approached as a way of coming to understand the transformations of human activity through the variety of practices employed in making argument" (201). Goodnight demonstrates the danger of reverse engineering an argument at an airport bar as a way of extrapolating the general rules of argumentation. Instead of a general rule of argumentation, what would be preserved by a scholar would represent the lens of the scholar (technical sphere) in the preservation of the argument. As such, the criticism of the argument forms two camps: those who agree with the technical sphere interpretation and those that claim the community (argument) was misrepresented. The argument then becomes public and must fit within the parameters of public argument.
The analogy of how an argument at an airport bar can be taken up and disagreed with in a public sphere exemplifies the different kinds of arguments made in different arenas. "Transcending the personal and technical spheres is the public, a domain which, while not reducible to the argument practice of any group of social customs or professional communities, nevertheless may be influenced by them. But the public realm is discrete insofar as it provides forums with customs, traditions, and requirements for arguers in the recognition that the consequences of dispute extend beyond the personal and technical spheres" (202).
Goodnight then provides historical examples of how "grounds of argument may be altered" (203).
He's also concerned about the role of the common citizen in an increasingly technological world. What can the layman do in a technocracy? He pulls back from this though, believing that it's uncertain that governing our democracy has become the purvey of a technological elite.
To support this claim, Goodnight argues that the deliberation in the public sphere has been reduced to popularity contests as a means to get into office. However, it's hard to say if the public has disengaged from meaningful debate because such debates and decisions never come to the fore. So, if a decision making forum is never made public, it's hard to ascertain the liveliness of public knowledge.
In its place, the mass media has promulgated the semblance of a deliberative rhetoric.
Goodnight focuses on news reports and acknowledges that "The reports always presented the individual as a victim of social forces. Descionmaking bodies, apparently bereft of human emotion and lacking common sense, were to make decisions based upon inscrutable principles...The reports were crafted in such a way that no intelligent assessment could be made concerning the issues involved...the story simply did not invite action" (207). In short, Goodnight argues that the semblance of a public sphere operates to obscure causal factors. It produces information but fails to direct action at an origin. "What could be a way of sharing in the creation of a future is supplanted by a perpetual swirl of exciting stimuli. Thus is deliberation replaced by consumption" (207).
Goodnight calls for argumentation theorists to revitalize the lost art of deliberation by critiquing "those practices which replace deliberative rhetoric" (208).
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Gerard A. Hauser--Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spaces
CHAPTER ONE: THE PUBLIC VOICE OF VERNACULAR RHETORIC
We're devoting increased attention to discourse, a symbolic transaction that affects how people see the world.
"publics are emergences manifested through vernacular rhetoric" (14). Hauser, in tracing Greek publics/democracy, notes that civic life was literal and visceral, not an abstraction.
This chapter provides an overview and investigation of the connections between publics, democracy, public opinion, discourse, and rhetoric. Starting from Athenian civic life, Hauser traces the way public discourse shift within its containers (discourse in Rome versus discourse just within Hadrian's Wall) and how discourse can change the nature of the container itself a la Habermas. When he gets to the idea of public opinion in modernity, Hauser notes the Habermasian eclipse of the public and nods at opinions like those of Lippmann who believe in technocratic elites, but he doesn't conclude that the public is dead. Instead, he argues that we exist in a montage of publics. As such "we should seek them through actual discursive engagements on the issues raised in civil society as emergences of society's active members. To be engaged in a public, the members of the public must be rhetorically competent or be able to "participate in rhetorical experiences" (33). Rhetoric, then, pervades publics, their formation, and their actions. Since these discourses act most often outside of institutionalized, formal spaces, their discursive practices engage in vernacular rhetorics. "We cannot make sense of our collective selves without understanding how deeply discourse shapes us" (34).
a public: "the interdependent members of society who hold different opinions about a mutual problem and who seek to influence its resolution through discourse" (32).
CHAPTER TWO: DISCOURSE, RHETORICAL DISCOURSE, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The Habermasian public sphere elides the plurality of spheres and assumes a normative discourse that one must assume to engage in discursive public space. Hauser notes the danger in a monotone discourse that supposedly brackets difference; minority voices whose ethos and argument are wrapped up in difference aren't permitted entrance. Hauser points out six problems with Habermas's model:
1) The bourgeois public sphere erases individualism and "conceals the ways in which particular, often marginalized public arenas form and function" (46).
2) The bourgeois public sphere "neglects the lattice of actually existing public sphere" (48). Conversely, a rhetorical public sphere envisions an emergent public spheres like a "web of discursive arenas" (49).
3) disinterest excludes groups whose are decidedly interested. To suppose that bracketing self-interest is productive dismisses the productive qualities of vested interest in discussion.
4) The notion that the better argument wins privileges certain criteria that might not be shared among groups, thus restricting access to the public sphere. There is no a priori established criteria for arguments since arguments respond only to "the standards that particular publics are prepared to summon" (52).
5) Basing discourse on generalizable arguments neglects the particular nature of localized discourse.
6) Idealized speech neglects the necessity of diversity.
In this chapter Hauser argues for a rhetorical sphere that doesn't seek generalizable arguments, bracketing, unanimity, but instead embraces diversity, interests, and understanding without privileging agreement.
CHAPTER THREE: CIVIC CONVERSATION AND THE RETICULATE PUBLIC SPHERE
Hauser argues here for vernacular, rhetorical public spheres as ecological spaces that condition the public, the discourse, and the members of the public. Rhetorically modeled public spheres focus on the conditions of using symbols to make meaning. "publics do not exist as entities but as processes; their collective reasoning is not defined by abstract reflection but by practical judgment; their awareness of issues is not philosophical but eventful" (64). Use of the local "vernacular" of a public signifies one's belonging to a community. The OJ Trial reference/analogy is helpful in imagining the dialogical web. The issue became fodder for other sub-issues that became the meat of overlapping public spheres that communicated about the issue in different vernacular discourses. "A public is only possible to the degree that a communally sustained consciousness is available to its members" (69). Public spheres should have: permeable boundaries; active members; contextualized language that makes their experiences intelligible; believable appearance; tolerance of diverse membership.
CHAPTER FOUR: READING PUBLIC OPINION FROM VERNACULAR RHETORIC
In this chapter Hauser tackles the formation of public opinion. Opposed to top-down, outside-in objectivist formations of public opinion, Hauser posits a rhetorical web of publics that use the vernacular talk to create meaning. Instead of polling, which measures reactions to a singular event as it unfolds from a singular perspective, we should look at how discourse affects meaning as it unfolds in the tapestry of publics. Additionally, Hauser argues that public opinion and judgment emerge from practical discourse, which reaches back to Aristotle's view that rhetoric is practical wisdom, aiming to achieve the good life through phronesis. Since publics contain multiple voices with competing interests, they don't work toward consensus. Hauser believes "Social actors are able to construct shared social realities, even though they may not value them in like ways, because they share a language of common meaning and a common reference to the world" (109). To really understand public opinion, we should analyze vernacular discourse data that "provide collective expressions of shared sentiments" (110).
CHAPTER FIVE: NARRATIVE, CULTURAL MEMORY, AND THE APPROPRIATION OF HISTORICITY
This chapter focuses on the pontentialities and dangers of cultural narrative in shaping the actions of public spheres. Using Yugoslavia and Poland in the throws of USSR control and post-Cold War actions, Hauser traces how publics draw on historical narrative, which is often imbued with mythology and ideology, as a way to interpret the present and shape future action. When civil society has in place a way to absorb, mediate, and tolerate difference and disagreement, cultural narratives can form the common ground necessary to enter into productive discourse. However, when civil society lacks a way to mediate difference, cultural narratives can serve totalizing purposes.
CHAPTER SIX: RESHAPING PUBLICS AND PUBLIC SPHERES
Chapter six examines the failure of the Meese report on pornography outside of its envisioned public sphere. Though the report contained some objective work that sought to open a dialogue among reticulated publics, the composition of the panel became the subject of controversy as those not in the idealized public sphere--religious fundies and right wingers--saw the report as a politically motivated power play. The implications of this case study show that discursive action falters when the discourse fails to move across the bonds of those in other arenas (187). The study became the focus of national debate instead of pornography and obscenity, having the opposite of its proposed effect, thus suggesting "that without a common language to frame the problem, the public sphere parodies itself by appearing to address substantive issues that are removed from actual sources of public discontent" (188).
CHAPTER SEVEN: TECHNOLOGIZING PUBLIC OPINION: OPINION POLLS, THE IRANIAN HOSTAGES, AND THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
This chapter examines the Carter administration's attempts to use the Iranian hostage situation as visual rhetoric to form and manipulate public opinion in an election year to highlight how public spheres operate as reticulate formations. Hauser argues that public opinion polling, because it has the potential and purpose of manipulating the perception of public opinion and public thought itself, misrepresents how publics actually operate. Carter's use of public polling became a self-induced trap that initially gave the public what it wanted to see--which increased his primary poll numbers--but once the public caught on to the game, their latticed discourse revealed counter behaviors that the polls did not account for. "When this public was denied the necessary conditions of public discourse that could certify the meaning of the Americans held hostage, it also was denied the means of critical publicity that might have certified the wisdom of Carter's actions" (230). Therefore, Carter's projection of a public denied the actual publics the information and conditions necessary for real discursive action.
CHAPTER EIGHT: DEMOCRACY'S NARRATIVE: LIVING IN ROOSEVELT'S AMERICA
To exemplify vernacular rhetorics at work, Hauser examines the archival record of letters written to FDR between his second and third terms. The vernacular nuance in the letters suggests public opinion and democratic involvement can be more accurately gauged through discursive examination. Whereas polls and surveys seek a quantifiable epistemology that can be aggregated, digested, and disseminated, an examination of vernacular rhetorical spheres reveals overlooked publics and an opportunity for more civilized conversations about politics. "Each letter, then, contributes to a public opinion. The text that results from their composite story--a distinctly rhetorical expression--differs from the representation of public opinion one gets from survey research. Rather than inferences supported by statistical distributions of responses by a random sample to a poller's questions, it supports inferences on the basis of language and arguments chosen by its multiple authors to address their own concerns" (264).
CHAPTER NINE: THE RHETORIC OF PUBLICNESS: THEORY AND METHOD
This chapter reflects and validates the empirical method Hauser uses to locate the discursive, rhetorical public sphere. Since democratic governance are process oriented and contingent in nature, understanding how publics evolve, Hauser argues, rests on understanding the full rhetorical considerations that formed the discourse. This methodology is in line with Dewey's belief that political philosophy should be theorized inductively. As such, Hauser looks at the "actual social practices of discourse" (275). "To learn what a public thinks, we first must monitor the social conversation within a reticulate public sphere to ascertain who is speaking to whom about what...we must locate the categories of assertion and response used by engaged members of society...their narratives of common meaning, web of associations, and historicity each reveal the reference world of meaning they are coconstructing and provide the context for understanding their specific judgments" (279). Far from a forensic expedition, however, Hauser believes such methods and conceptualizations of a reticulate public sphere "can make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the fragile hopes and perilous dangers that flow from open possibilities" (281).
***Class Notes***
Examining public sphere from rhetorical standpoint changes what we see. Whereas Habermas looks at it historically/sociologically, Hauser looks at them rhetorically.
Rhetoric notes in broad brushstrokes:
We're devoting increased attention to discourse, a symbolic transaction that affects how people see the world.
"publics are emergences manifested through vernacular rhetoric" (14). Hauser, in tracing Greek publics/democracy, notes that civic life was literal and visceral, not an abstraction.
This chapter provides an overview and investigation of the connections between publics, democracy, public opinion, discourse, and rhetoric. Starting from Athenian civic life, Hauser traces the way public discourse shift within its containers (discourse in Rome versus discourse just within Hadrian's Wall) and how discourse can change the nature of the container itself a la Habermas. When he gets to the idea of public opinion in modernity, Hauser notes the Habermasian eclipse of the public and nods at opinions like those of Lippmann who believe in technocratic elites, but he doesn't conclude that the public is dead. Instead, he argues that we exist in a montage of publics. As such "we should seek them through actual discursive engagements on the issues raised in civil society as emergences of society's active members. To be engaged in a public, the members of the public must be rhetorically competent or be able to "participate in rhetorical experiences" (33). Rhetoric, then, pervades publics, their formation, and their actions. Since these discourses act most often outside of institutionalized, formal spaces, their discursive practices engage in vernacular rhetorics. "We cannot make sense of our collective selves without understanding how deeply discourse shapes us" (34).
a public: "the interdependent members of society who hold different opinions about a mutual problem and who seek to influence its resolution through discourse" (32).
CHAPTER TWO: DISCOURSE, RHETORICAL DISCOURSE, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The Habermasian public sphere elides the plurality of spheres and assumes a normative discourse that one must assume to engage in discursive public space. Hauser notes the danger in a monotone discourse that supposedly brackets difference; minority voices whose ethos and argument are wrapped up in difference aren't permitted entrance. Hauser points out six problems with Habermas's model:
1) The bourgeois public sphere erases individualism and "conceals the ways in which particular, often marginalized public arenas form and function" (46).
2) The bourgeois public sphere "neglects the lattice of actually existing public sphere" (48). Conversely, a rhetorical public sphere envisions an emergent public spheres like a "web of discursive arenas" (49).
3) disinterest excludes groups whose are decidedly interested. To suppose that bracketing self-interest is productive dismisses the productive qualities of vested interest in discussion.
4) The notion that the better argument wins privileges certain criteria that might not be shared among groups, thus restricting access to the public sphere. There is no a priori established criteria for arguments since arguments respond only to "the standards that particular publics are prepared to summon" (52).
5) Basing discourse on generalizable arguments neglects the particular nature of localized discourse.
6) Idealized speech neglects the necessity of diversity.
In this chapter Hauser argues for a rhetorical sphere that doesn't seek generalizable arguments, bracketing, unanimity, but instead embraces diversity, interests, and understanding without privileging agreement.
CHAPTER THREE: CIVIC CONVERSATION AND THE RETICULATE PUBLIC SPHERE
Hauser argues here for vernacular, rhetorical public spheres as ecological spaces that condition the public, the discourse, and the members of the public. Rhetorically modeled public spheres focus on the conditions of using symbols to make meaning. "publics do not exist as entities but as processes; their collective reasoning is not defined by abstract reflection but by practical judgment; their awareness of issues is not philosophical but eventful" (64). Use of the local "vernacular" of a public signifies one's belonging to a community. The OJ Trial reference/analogy is helpful in imagining the dialogical web. The issue became fodder for other sub-issues that became the meat of overlapping public spheres that communicated about the issue in different vernacular discourses. "A public is only possible to the degree that a communally sustained consciousness is available to its members" (69). Public spheres should have: permeable boundaries; active members; contextualized language that makes their experiences intelligible; believable appearance; tolerance of diverse membership.
CHAPTER FOUR: READING PUBLIC OPINION FROM VERNACULAR RHETORIC
In this chapter Hauser tackles the formation of public opinion. Opposed to top-down, outside-in objectivist formations of public opinion, Hauser posits a rhetorical web of publics that use the vernacular talk to create meaning. Instead of polling, which measures reactions to a singular event as it unfolds from a singular perspective, we should look at how discourse affects meaning as it unfolds in the tapestry of publics. Additionally, Hauser argues that public opinion and judgment emerge from practical discourse, which reaches back to Aristotle's view that rhetoric is practical wisdom, aiming to achieve the good life through phronesis. Since publics contain multiple voices with competing interests, they don't work toward consensus. Hauser believes "Social actors are able to construct shared social realities, even though they may not value them in like ways, because they share a language of common meaning and a common reference to the world" (109). To really understand public opinion, we should analyze vernacular discourse data that "provide collective expressions of shared sentiments" (110).
CHAPTER FIVE: NARRATIVE, CULTURAL MEMORY, AND THE APPROPRIATION OF HISTORICITY
This chapter focuses on the pontentialities and dangers of cultural narrative in shaping the actions of public spheres. Using Yugoslavia and Poland in the throws of USSR control and post-Cold War actions, Hauser traces how publics draw on historical narrative, which is often imbued with mythology and ideology, as a way to interpret the present and shape future action. When civil society has in place a way to absorb, mediate, and tolerate difference and disagreement, cultural narratives can form the common ground necessary to enter into productive discourse. However, when civil society lacks a way to mediate difference, cultural narratives can serve totalizing purposes.
CHAPTER SIX: RESHAPING PUBLICS AND PUBLIC SPHERES
Chapter six examines the failure of the Meese report on pornography outside of its envisioned public sphere. Though the report contained some objective work that sought to open a dialogue among reticulated publics, the composition of the panel became the subject of controversy as those not in the idealized public sphere--religious fundies and right wingers--saw the report as a politically motivated power play. The implications of this case study show that discursive action falters when the discourse fails to move across the bonds of those in other arenas (187). The study became the focus of national debate instead of pornography and obscenity, having the opposite of its proposed effect, thus suggesting "that without a common language to frame the problem, the public sphere parodies itself by appearing to address substantive issues that are removed from actual sources of public discontent" (188).
CHAPTER SEVEN: TECHNOLOGIZING PUBLIC OPINION: OPINION POLLS, THE IRANIAN HOSTAGES, AND THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
This chapter examines the Carter administration's attempts to use the Iranian hostage situation as visual rhetoric to form and manipulate public opinion in an election year to highlight how public spheres operate as reticulate formations. Hauser argues that public opinion polling, because it has the potential and purpose of manipulating the perception of public opinion and public thought itself, misrepresents how publics actually operate. Carter's use of public polling became a self-induced trap that initially gave the public what it wanted to see--which increased his primary poll numbers--but once the public caught on to the game, their latticed discourse revealed counter behaviors that the polls did not account for. "When this public was denied the necessary conditions of public discourse that could certify the meaning of the Americans held hostage, it also was denied the means of critical publicity that might have certified the wisdom of Carter's actions" (230). Therefore, Carter's projection of a public denied the actual publics the information and conditions necessary for real discursive action.
CHAPTER EIGHT: DEMOCRACY'S NARRATIVE: LIVING IN ROOSEVELT'S AMERICA
To exemplify vernacular rhetorics at work, Hauser examines the archival record of letters written to FDR between his second and third terms. The vernacular nuance in the letters suggests public opinion and democratic involvement can be more accurately gauged through discursive examination. Whereas polls and surveys seek a quantifiable epistemology that can be aggregated, digested, and disseminated, an examination of vernacular rhetorical spheres reveals overlooked publics and an opportunity for more civilized conversations about politics. "Each letter, then, contributes to a public opinion. The text that results from their composite story--a distinctly rhetorical expression--differs from the representation of public opinion one gets from survey research. Rather than inferences supported by statistical distributions of responses by a random sample to a poller's questions, it supports inferences on the basis of language and arguments chosen by its multiple authors to address their own concerns" (264).
CHAPTER NINE: THE RHETORIC OF PUBLICNESS: THEORY AND METHOD
This chapter reflects and validates the empirical method Hauser uses to locate the discursive, rhetorical public sphere. Since democratic governance are process oriented and contingent in nature, understanding how publics evolve, Hauser argues, rests on understanding the full rhetorical considerations that formed the discourse. This methodology is in line with Dewey's belief that political philosophy should be theorized inductively. As such, Hauser looks at the "actual social practices of discourse" (275). "To learn what a public thinks, we first must monitor the social conversation within a reticulate public sphere to ascertain who is speaking to whom about what...we must locate the categories of assertion and response used by engaged members of society...their narratives of common meaning, web of associations, and historicity each reveal the reference world of meaning they are coconstructing and provide the context for understanding their specific judgments" (279). Far from a forensic expedition, however, Hauser believes such methods and conceptualizations of a reticulate public sphere "can make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the fragile hopes and perilous dangers that flow from open possibilities" (281).
***Class Notes***
Examining public sphere from rhetorical standpoint changes what we see. Whereas Habermas looks at it historically/sociologically, Hauser looks at them rhetorically.
Rhetoric notes in broad brushstrokes:
- political tradition of rhetoric (not sophistic tradition); the proper use of speech and communication for the betterment of the state: promoting the good life. More aligned with Aristotle's Rhetoric.
- It's not transhistorical like philosophy. It's contingent on place and time. Must understand and utilize discourse to form future.
- Hauser comes out of political rhetorical tradition, not sophistic.
- People realized people were persuaded outside of institutional speech.
- Critical rhetoric: Foucault–uses hermaneutic strategies. Use analysis to understand how you're imposed upon and how you resist. Power is two-directional. It creates through dialectic. People tell the public what it is and the public responds back.
- Materialist rhetoric tradition: (McGee) Connect material information and intellectual criticism. This dialectic joins lived experience and theorizing about it. A materialist rhetoric should map something, build from scraps a new thing. Take fragments from the world and make something of it.
- publicness: the doing that makes it the thing. You are the thing in the extent that you perform the thing. Publics are publics as much as they have rhetorical character.
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