John M. Ackerman--"Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities"

He begins by dissecting "civic engagement"

• 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

However, civic engagement is not the addition of these two separated terms; it now has disciplinary purchase beyond the culled meanings.

"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

Cultural economies fit seamlessly within the new economy because they utilize the digital tools embraced by the new economy. Industries develop cultures that combines culture with economy. Discursive systems and ideology combine with marketing, sales, and accounting. Therefore, Ackerman contends, "one cannot do economics in a way that follows from one's convictions concerning its cultural constitution" (84).

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).

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