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Rice then moves to controversy in Austin around development and tree removal, linking historical documents of protest to Gerard Hauser's vernacular rhetoric.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.