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.
No comments:
Post a Comment