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.
Showing posts with label public. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2016
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.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Nancy Fraser--"Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy"
Fraser points out that Habermas attempts to answer problematic questions for socialists, namely how a system that espouses control from the workers became synonymous with authoritarian dictatorships that enslave the worker. In addition, Habermas's public sphere, for feminists, becomes problematic as its definition of anything outside the familial sphere wongly conflates "the state, the official-economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse" (57). As such, addressing issues like housework and childcare are easily cast as domains of the private sphere, not to be infringed upon by the public.
"I am going to take as a basic premise for this essay that something like Habermas's idea of the public sphere is indispensable to critical social theory and to democratic political practice...I contend that his analysis of the public sphere needs to undergo some critical interrogation and reconstruction if it is to yield a category capable of theorizing the limits of actually existing democracy" (57).
THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES, COMPETING CONCEPTIONS
Fraser believes Habermas's public sphere is highly idealized. She looks to Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and Geoff Eley for alternative historiographies.
Landes: bourgeois public sphere excludes admission based on gender. Opposition to feminine salon culture gave rise to "many" republican discourse. As such, patriarchal constructs influenced the republican sphere.
Eley: Like Landes' critique of French salons, the bourgeois public sphere of England and Germany, the public sphere was a "training ground" for an ambitious class of bourgeois men who prepared to displace older aristocratic hegemony with their own.
These findings "suggest that the relationship between publicity and status is more complex than Habermas intimates, that declaring a deliberative arena to be a space where extant status distinctions are bracketed and neutralized is not sufficient to make it so" (60).
Habermas excludes competing public sphere, too. His omission might account for his idealizing of the public sphere.
Furthermore, the bourgeois public sphere marked a transition from authoritarianism to hegemony. "The important point is that this new mode of political domination, like the older one, secures the ability of one stratum of society to rule the rest" (62).
Revisionist historiographies of the bourgeois public sphere calls into question four assumptions:
It isn't enough to assert that the bourgeois public sphere was exclusive rather than its claim of inclusiveness. We should also examine the discourse within the public sphere to interrogate how effectively the participants were at bracketing their differences. Style and decorum highly influenced and signaled markers of social standing. Therefore, even after everyone is allowed to participate, the vestige of the masculine public sphere reverberates as male-dominated after its borders become opened.
Deliberation as a mask for domination. "such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates" (64).
Fraser also argues that the ineffectiveness of bracketing calls into question the cultural neutrality of the bourgeois public sphere. "In this public sphere, the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit. Consequently, subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the material means of equal participation. Thus, political economy enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally" (65).
Liberal political theorists like to imagine a political system free (liberated/liberty) of the influence socio-economic systems. "The problem for liberals, thus, is how to strengthen the barriers separating political institutions that are supposed to instantiate relations of equality from economic, cultural, an socio-sexual institutions that are premised on systemic relations of inequality" (65). Since differences cannot be bracketed from the systems that create them, "political democracy requires substantive social equality" (65).
EQUALITY, DIVERSITY, AND MULTIPLE PUBLICS
This section examines the relations within multiple, disparate publics. Fraser disagrees with Habermas that having one public is preferable and more democratic than multiple publics that represent a "departure form, rather than an advance toward, democracy" (66).
"In this section I shall assess the relative merits of single, comprehensive publics versus multiple publics in two kinds of modern societies--stratified societies and egalitarian multi-cultural societies" (66).
Subordinated groups cannot participate effectively in democracy within a comprehensive public sphere.
subaltern counterpublics--"parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate conterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (67). example:late 20th century feminist movement. They both act as a place of "withdrawal and regroupment" and "function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics" (67). This way they allow excluded members of a stratified society to proclaim their discourse to a wider public.
Stratified societies need multiple publics and counterpublics to increase parity and democratic efficacy.
Even egalitarian, multi-cultural societies must utilize multiple publics. It isn't the class division alone that necessitates multi-pubs, it's also culturally specific discourse. This doesn't preclude intra-public discourse.
Fraser has set up an interesting problem. By creating a hypothetical society, one devoid of class division but multi-cultural, she problematizes how multiple publics can effectively communicate with one another. "would participants in such debates share enough in the way of values, expressive norms, and, therefore, protocols of persuasion to lend their talk the quality of deliberations aimed at reaching agreement through giving reasons?" (69).
Fraser believes this is possible with multi-cultural literacy and the acknowledgement that multiple publics will overlap. "All told, then, there do not see to be any conceptual (as opposed to empirical) barriers to the possibility of a socially egalitarian, multi-cultural society that is also a participatory democracy. But this will necessarily be a society with many different publics, including at least one public in which participants can deliberate as peers across lines of difference about policy that concerns them all" (70).
PUBLIC SPHERES, COMMON CONCERNS, AND PRIVATE INTERESTS
"What counts as a public matter and what, in contrast, is private?"
In Habermas's public sphere, private individuals discuss public matters. But difference definitions of publicity determine what we mean by private and thereby public. She takes up the definition of publicity meaning "of concern to everyone." "Only participants can decide what is and what is not o common concern and thus a legitimate topic of public discourse" (71). Compare this to the feminist subaltern counterpublic that succeeded in showcasing domestic violence as a public concern.
Framed as a civic republican structure, participants must engage in discourse about the common good, speaking as a "we" in order to omit private interests. However, "this works against one of the principal aims of deliberation, namely, helping participants clarify their interests, even when those interests turn out to conflict" (72). If participants in civic republican debates must posture and position their arguments as benefiting "us," those who need to voice a minority view cannot find their voice. "Any consensus that purports to represent the common good in this social context should be regarded with suspicion, since this consensus will have been reached through deliberative processes tainted by the effects of dominance and subordination" (73).
Public and private are not easily demarcated spheres. "In political discourse, they are powerful terms that are frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views, and topics and to valorize others" (73).
Fraser then turns to the issues of "private property in a market economy" and "intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life" as definition of private, which then define public in negation.
"even after women and workers have been formally licensed to participate, their participation may be hedged by conceptions of economic privacy and domestic privacy that delimit the scope of debate" (73-74). The ability to classify certain things as economically private and sexually private and within the domain of only laws and institutions that deal with those matters sets limits on what is sanctioned as a public matter.
STRONG PUBLICS, WEAK PUBLICS: ON CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE STATE
This section pushes back against the argument that "a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation of civil society and the state" (74).
To argue this would support laissez-faire markets as a requirement for functionality, a claim rebutted by the inequality created by liberal market economics and its affect on an inclusive public sphere.
However, civil society could also mean a connection in nongovernmental associations. "The public sphere, in short, is not the state; it is rather the informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state" (75).
Fraser thinks this model creates "weak publics" that only form opinions instead of influence policy. "Moreover, the bourgeois conception seems to imply that an expansion of such publics' discursive authority to encompass decision-making as well as opinion-making would threaten the autonomy of public opinion--for then the public would effectively become the state, and the possibility of a critical discursive check on the state would be lost" (76). As such, weak publics' public opinion influences strong publics (parliaments), which act as a public sphere within the state.
"any conception of the public sphere that requires a sharp separation between (associational) civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of self-management, inter-public coordination, and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society...What is needed...is a post-bourgeois conception that can permit us to envision a greater role for..public spheres than mere autonomous opinion formation removed from authoritative decision-making" (76).
***Class Notes***
A
"I am going to take as a basic premise for this essay that something like Habermas's idea of the public sphere is indispensable to critical social theory and to democratic political practice...I contend that his analysis of the public sphere needs to undergo some critical interrogation and reconstruction if it is to yield a category capable of theorizing the limits of actually existing democracy" (57).
THE PUBLIC SPHERE: ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES, COMPETING CONCEPTIONS
Fraser believes Habermas's public sphere is highly idealized. She looks to Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and Geoff Eley for alternative historiographies.
Landes: bourgeois public sphere excludes admission based on gender. Opposition to feminine salon culture gave rise to "many" republican discourse. As such, patriarchal constructs influenced the republican sphere.
Eley: Like Landes' critique of French salons, the bourgeois public sphere of England and Germany, the public sphere was a "training ground" for an ambitious class of bourgeois men who prepared to displace older aristocratic hegemony with their own.
These findings "suggest that the relationship between publicity and status is more complex than Habermas intimates, that declaring a deliberative arena to be a space where extant status distinctions are bracketed and neutralized is not sufficient to make it so" (60).
Habermas excludes competing public sphere, too. His omission might account for his idealizing of the public sphere.
- Habermas excludes all-female public spheres engaged in philanthropic activity, participation in protests, and women's rights campaigns.
- Women were able, even without the vote, to access public arenas, showing that Habermas's public sphere is ideological.
- There were competing publics (gender, working class, etc.); THE PUBLIC was only THE PUBLIC as much as it laid claim to it.
Furthermore, the bourgeois public sphere marked a transition from authoritarianism to hegemony. "The important point is that this new mode of political domination, like the older one, secures the ability of one stratum of society to rule the rest" (62).
Revisionist historiographies of the bourgeois public sphere calls into question four assumptions:
- participants can truly bracket social inequality in participatory democracy, rendering equality unnecessary for political democracy
- a single large public sphere is "always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics"
- discourse in public spheres about private interests is categorically undesirable
- working public spheres must be separated from the private sphere and the state
It isn't enough to assert that the bourgeois public sphere was exclusive rather than its claim of inclusiveness. We should also examine the discourse within the public sphere to interrogate how effectively the participants were at bracketing their differences. Style and decorum highly influenced and signaled markers of social standing. Therefore, even after everyone is allowed to participate, the vestige of the masculine public sphere reverberates as male-dominated after its borders become opened.
Deliberation as a mask for domination. "such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates" (64).
Fraser also argues that the ineffectiveness of bracketing calls into question the cultural neutrality of the bourgeois public sphere. "In this public sphere, the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit. Consequently, subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the material means of equal participation. Thus, political economy enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally" (65).
Liberal political theorists like to imagine a political system free (liberated/liberty) of the influence socio-economic systems. "The problem for liberals, thus, is how to strengthen the barriers separating political institutions that are supposed to instantiate relations of equality from economic, cultural, an socio-sexual institutions that are premised on systemic relations of inequality" (65). Since differences cannot be bracketed from the systems that create them, "political democracy requires substantive social equality" (65).
EQUALITY, DIVERSITY, AND MULTIPLE PUBLICS
This section examines the relations within multiple, disparate publics. Fraser disagrees with Habermas that having one public is preferable and more democratic than multiple publics that represent a "departure form, rather than an advance toward, democracy" (66).
"In this section I shall assess the relative merits of single, comprehensive publics versus multiple publics in two kinds of modern societies--stratified societies and egalitarian multi-cultural societies" (66).
Subordinated groups cannot participate effectively in democracy within a comprehensive public sphere.
subaltern counterpublics--"parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate conterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (67). example:late 20th century feminist movement. They both act as a place of "withdrawal and regroupment" and "function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics" (67). This way they allow excluded members of a stratified society to proclaim their discourse to a wider public.
Stratified societies need multiple publics and counterpublics to increase parity and democratic efficacy.
Even egalitarian, multi-cultural societies must utilize multiple publics. It isn't the class division alone that necessitates multi-pubs, it's also culturally specific discourse. This doesn't preclude intra-public discourse.
Fraser has set up an interesting problem. By creating a hypothetical society, one devoid of class division but multi-cultural, she problematizes how multiple publics can effectively communicate with one another. "would participants in such debates share enough in the way of values, expressive norms, and, therefore, protocols of persuasion to lend their talk the quality of deliberations aimed at reaching agreement through giving reasons?" (69).
Fraser believes this is possible with multi-cultural literacy and the acknowledgement that multiple publics will overlap. "All told, then, there do not see to be any conceptual (as opposed to empirical) barriers to the possibility of a socially egalitarian, multi-cultural society that is also a participatory democracy. But this will necessarily be a society with many different publics, including at least one public in which participants can deliberate as peers across lines of difference about policy that concerns them all" (70).
PUBLIC SPHERES, COMMON CONCERNS, AND PRIVATE INTERESTS
"What counts as a public matter and what, in contrast, is private?"
In Habermas's public sphere, private individuals discuss public matters. But difference definitions of publicity determine what we mean by private and thereby public. She takes up the definition of publicity meaning "of concern to everyone." "Only participants can decide what is and what is not o common concern and thus a legitimate topic of public discourse" (71). Compare this to the feminist subaltern counterpublic that succeeded in showcasing domestic violence as a public concern.
Framed as a civic republican structure, participants must engage in discourse about the common good, speaking as a "we" in order to omit private interests. However, "this works against one of the principal aims of deliberation, namely, helping participants clarify their interests, even when those interests turn out to conflict" (72). If participants in civic republican debates must posture and position their arguments as benefiting "us," those who need to voice a minority view cannot find their voice. "Any consensus that purports to represent the common good in this social context should be regarded with suspicion, since this consensus will have been reached through deliberative processes tainted by the effects of dominance and subordination" (73).
Public and private are not easily demarcated spheres. "In political discourse, they are powerful terms that are frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views, and topics and to valorize others" (73).
Fraser then turns to the issues of "private property in a market economy" and "intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life" as definition of private, which then define public in negation.
"even after women and workers have been formally licensed to participate, their participation may be hedged by conceptions of economic privacy and domestic privacy that delimit the scope of debate" (73-74). The ability to classify certain things as economically private and sexually private and within the domain of only laws and institutions that deal with those matters sets limits on what is sanctioned as a public matter.
STRONG PUBLICS, WEAK PUBLICS: ON CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE STATE
This section pushes back against the argument that "a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation of civil society and the state" (74).
To argue this would support laissez-faire markets as a requirement for functionality, a claim rebutted by the inequality created by liberal market economics and its affect on an inclusive public sphere.
However, civil society could also mean a connection in nongovernmental associations. "The public sphere, in short, is not the state; it is rather the informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state" (75).
Fraser thinks this model creates "weak publics" that only form opinions instead of influence policy. "Moreover, the bourgeois conception seems to imply that an expansion of such publics' discursive authority to encompass decision-making as well as opinion-making would threaten the autonomy of public opinion--for then the public would effectively become the state, and the possibility of a critical discursive check on the state would be lost" (76). As such, weak publics' public opinion influences strong publics (parliaments), which act as a public sphere within the state.
"any conception of the public sphere that requires a sharp separation between (associational) civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of self-management, inter-public coordination, and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society...What is needed...is a post-bourgeois conception that can permit us to envision a greater role for..public spheres than mere autonomous opinion formation removed from authoritative decision-making" (76).
***Class Notes***
A
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Jurgen Habermas--The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Habermas begins with examining the various (mis)uses of the term public. (e.g. public opinion; informed public; public appeal).
"In the realm of mass media, of course, publicity has changed its meaning. Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion: public relations and efforts recently baptized "publicity work" are aimed at producing such publicity" (2).
Though the word public, and its reference to "civil society," emerged first in Germany, the idea of a public sphere extends back to Greece.
Claim: If we can understand how and why we conflate "publicity" with "public sphere," we can better understand our own society.
Societies in the Middle Ages, primarily German feudalism, didn't absorb Greek and Roman ideas about public and private spaces. Though they depended on feudalism and manors as central to the economy, no laws evinced the ability "in which private people could step forward into a public sphere (5).
"Sociologically, that is to say by reference to institutional criteria, a public sphere inthe sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages" (7).
The "public sphere" during this time then "was something like a status attribute" (7). In this sense, a public person like a lord, represents (not in the same sense a lawyer or senator represents) the people which legitimate his authority. He isn't a representative of their needs; he is a representative of their presence, which lends authority to his public nature.
"Only after national and territorial power states had arisen on the basis of the early capitalist commercial economy and shattered the feudal foundations of power could this court nobility develop the framework of a sociability--highly individuated, in spite of its comprehensive etiquette--into that peculiarly free-floating but clearly demarcated sphere of 'good society' in the eighteenth century...Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense" (10-11).
Private, as a word, emerges during the 16th century to denote someone not holding a public office.
On the Genesis of the Bourgeois Public Sphere
The rise of capitalism in the Middle Ages, which the systems at hand absorbed initially, transformed the social order. As the trade in commodities expanded, so too did the exchange of news from foreign places in the medium of letters utilized by those in trade. Since the new market system depended on the expansion and opening of new markets, the state emerged as an institution that taxed in order to expand. During this time, "public" "was synonymous with 'state-related'" concerns; "the attribute no longer referred to the representative 'court' of a person endowed with authority but instead of the functioning of an apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction and endowed with a monopoly over the legitimate use of coercion" (18). Those being policed formed the public.
Whereas the home was once the economic center of "private life," homes were forced to define their private qualities in relation to the existence of markets that affected the whole of the public. "The economic activity that had become private had to be oriented toward a commodity market that had expanded under public direction and supervision; the economic conditions under which this activity now took place lay outside the confines of the single household; for the first time they were of general interest" (19).
News emerged as a commodity alongside the commodities that gave it prominence. Though the press was used to disseminate information about trade, storms, governments, wars, etc., authorities also utilized the trade in news, thereby making those receivers of the news "the public." The news trade democratized the access to information for an emerging bourgeois class of professionals. Whereas the public once constituted the absolute ruler as the state, the existence of a new bourgeois public--which displaced the once powerful members of trade guilds--"led...to a tension between 'town' and 'court' (23).
The bureaucratic regulations of mercantilism blurred the distinction between public and private, creating tension within the "public sphere." During this time, publications also become regulated as published private thought became regulated as public consumption. The publications signified a shift where private individuals came together as a public to call for public judgments of public authority. At the end of the 17th century, people began to refer to "public" instead of readers or mankind, and "public opinion" instead of "general opinion."
Chapter 2: Social Structures of the Public Sphere
The bourgeois didn't rail against people in power as much as they used reason to revisit the "principle on which existing rule was based" (28).
As the emerging middle-class learned rational debate from the courtly public, they broke off and engaged larger issues in town meeting places: salons, coffee houses, and table societies. These meetings "built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere" (30).
INSTITUTIONS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The movement of France's "center" from Versailles to Paris signaled a transformation in the public sphere. Similarly, in Britain the Glorious Revolution marked a shift from the Court as the public to the town. "The predominance of the 'town' was strengthened by new institutions that, for all their variety, in Great Britain and France took over the same social functions: the coffee houses...and the salons.
"In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; 'opinion' became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence" (33-34). I find this notion odd. Isn't economic dependence and determinism what created the "public sphere" and allowed these nouveau riche to come together? Howe can they possibly bracket self-interest? Is it really possible to disengage with out identity when so much of our identity is wrapped up in economy?
German table societies were fewer in number and different in nature, but "their public was recruited from private people engaged in productive work" (34). The table societies sought to equalize the commonalities between humans despite social standing. However, the meetings were held in private and were exclusive. This was done to protect the individuals and reason from the threat of absolutist powers. Isn't this what we try to replicate in our classrooms?
All of these publics, however, are exclusive, which makes me wonder how something exclusive, something centrifugal, can be considered a public.
Commonalities between salons, coffee houses, and table societies:
The public nature of art gave way to art criticism, which also emanated from the salons. In addition, coffee houses enacted journals to keep track of the arguments and discussion put forward.
When those same people entered a salon within a conjugal family's home, it didn't represent the formation of a society because of the way they entered into it. The family resembled closely the economic forces that gave rise to it. "Thus it was a private autonomy denying its economic origins that provided the bourgeois family with its consciousness of itself. It seemed to be established voluntarily and by free individuals and to be maintained without coercion" (46). Essentially, the market economies that resulted in this family structure hid itself in pure and common humanity.
This time also saw the rise in interest of the subjectivity of the self and self-expression in letter writing/diaries. "The relations between author, work, and public changed. They became intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically interested in what was 'human,' in self-knowledge, and in empathy" (50). The reality as illusion became FICTION.
"They formed the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself" (51). So...the family mimicked a public?
"the theme of the modern public sphere shifted from the properly political tasks of a citizenry acting in common to the more properly civic tasks of a society engaged in critical public debate...it challenged the established authority of the monarch" (52).
Based on the objectivity of rule of law, the public sphere utilized public opinion as a legitimate form of rationality and justice.
"As soon as privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings ceased to communicate merely about their subjectivity but rather in their capacity as property-owners desired to influence public power in their common interest, the humanity of the literary public sphere served to increase the effectiveness of the public sphere in the political realm (56).
Chapter 3: Political Functions of the Public Sphere
Public spheres that worked their way into the political sphere first appeared in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century. This was brought on by the development of a stock market, end of censorship, and the invention of Parliament. During this time, coffee houses were seen as anti-establishment and dangerous. The press (ca. 1726) established itself as the fourth estate, able to influence public opinion against the government.
As the power of the Parliament expanded, so too did the public's interest in the operations of Parliament. As such, members of Parliament formed factions and used the Fourth Estate to petition its position. This signaled a change in how disagreements at the national level moved from violence to debate. The minority members of Parliament were especially adept at presenting their cause as one of the people, and by extension of disinterested reason. As such, members of Parliament began giving speeches appealing to "public opinion."
MEANWHILE IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
The French public sphere couldn't criticize effectively until after the revolution. Though they held massive amounts of capital, they weren't united enough to "affect the fate of the nation" (67).
Habermas's term for officers of the public (Dewey) is the "public sphere of the political realm," aka representative democracy. The French nobility was forced to suppress the public sphere in the political realm because it "could not be put out of commission" (69).
The French Revolution brought what took 100 years in Great Britain: representation, free press, and constitutional law. However, many of these rights were exterminated with the ascension of Napoleon.
Habermas overtly argues that the entrance of the bourgeois public sphere into the political realm was the result of capitalist mercantilism. The term "private" "emerged precisely in reference to the concept of free power of control over property that functioned in capitalist fashion" (74). So, the pubi sphere consisted of private individuals who exercised reason free of state, church, and family to influence the political realm who stopped being the symbol of public power and instead assumed the role of a public authority expected to protect encourage what was private.
The private persons in the public sphere operated on equal standing relationships who acted as legally private individuals engaging in contractual market exchange.
During this time (1800), laws changed to reflect the role of the market in the nations. Civil law (private law) changed to "free competition that governed the market of goods, real estate, labor, and even capital itself" (78). Whereas previous years maintained wage laws, apprenticeship standards, etc., new laws protected contracts and business interests.
Habermas explains Britain's rolling back of gov regulation in the markets and defines its globalized trade system as a shining and ephemeral moment of liberal free-market capitalism. He concludes, "only during this phase was civil society as the private sphere emancipated from the directives of public authority to such an extent that at that time the political public sphere could attain its full developments in the bourgeois constitutional state" (79).
The free market encouraged disinterested/rational governments that made decisions free of influence. (Contrast with Dewey's stance on whether or not a private individual can free himself from his own interests as a public official)
"The constitutional state as a bourgeois state established the public sphere in the political realm as an organ of the state so as to ensure institutionally the connection between law and public opinion" (81).
The establishment of rule by law was mean to secure freedom from domination. So great was the faith in this law, that law was thought to protect from absolutist domination as well as domination from the law.
There seems to be this dilemma (around page 82-83) concerning the fear of legislative power overshadowing the will of the people (public opinion). The power of public opinion resides in its ability to not seek or assume power to legislate but to "transform voluntas (self-interest) into a ratio (rational disinterestedness) that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all" (83). I wonder who the "all" in this public opinion are.
The state began to operate as a public entity, publicizing its actions, opening up parliament and court procedures to public scrutiny as a way to ensure the import of public opinion.
Habermas argues that the idea that constitutional governments with personal liberties masqueraded as governments of, by, and for the people. Since real control rested in the hands of comparatively few people, the constitutional state existed as an extension of their interests.
Even though the public sphere was exclusive, the public sphere, Habermas argues, could be seen as an entity that put forth constitutional law as a means to secure a place for all to enter into the bourgeois life. That is to say, the system wrought from exclusivity cannot be said to be exclusive simply because it arose from such conditions. If the bourgeois public sphere successfully bracketed difference to argue for freedom for all humans, the system that arose from exclusivity could act inclusively in as much as those who want to participate meet the criteria.
The ability of persons to enter into this public sphere required untrammeled free markets and only FREE markets.
This system seems to set up a convenient tautology. The creators of an "inclusive" system create exclusive criteria for entry--of which they already meet--and thereby protect their own interests by creating rules of entry that include them but also allow them to regulate entry as a means of self-interest. Habermas points out that the private man cannot divorce his private interest from his public role. Therefore, the system perpetuates its success for its current members. The rules of the game, based on a theoretical system, serve the current players.
Habermas seems to acknowledge the exclusivity and potential for corruption in this system, but he says publicity keeps the bourgeois from turning into a closed off ruling class. "as long as publicity existed as a sphere and functioned as a principle, what the public itself believed to be and to be doing was ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology...the dominant class nevertheless developed political institutions which credibly embodied as their objective meaning the idea of their own abolition...the idea of the dissolution of domination into that easygoing constraint that prevailed on no other ground than the compelling insight of a public opinion" (88).
Chapter 4: The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and Ideology
Much of the beginning of this chapter traces the history of public opinion as a marker or public reason and logic from the original meaning of opinion, which meant a judgment lacking proofs of truth. The shift rested on the role of the public sphere as a place to debate public matters.
In France, public opinion didn't have the same political and legislative purchase in did in England, not initially at least. In France, Rousseau's social contract assumed the ideal of legislative-shaping public opinion. Rousseau envisioned a democracy that guarded itself against the inevitable, self-serving powers that would crop up in debate. He desired government by public opinion, but he wanted the matters to be presented objectively, not through artful oratory, but as they were so the masses could let their opinion be known. This differed from other notions in pre-revolutionary France. Some wanted technocrats (bourgeois pros) to debate and rule and others wanted democratic public opinion free of debate and persuasion to rule.
PUBLICITY as the BRIDGING PRINCIPLE between POLITICS and MORALITY (Kant)
Public opinion sought to rationalize politics morally. Kant "conceived of 'the public sphere' at once as the principle of the legal order and as the method of enlightenment" (104). Kant viewed philosophers as the purveyors of pure reason who conducted their thinking independent of governments. They spoke out to the public, which needed Enlightenment. This is odd because the public represented an entity that needed tutelage but claimed to be mature. Since all could reason, the philosophers were the center flames of a fire. "The public sphere was realized not in the republic of scholars alone but in the public use of reason by all who were adept at it" (105).
Kant's idea of universal moral truths connected politics and laws, which resulted from the pure reason of the public with disinterested moral guidance, to morality. The problem persists, though, about how private individuals can perform disinterestedly in public affairs. His answer was to limit public sphere involvement to those whose vices in the public sphere (that of commodity exchange) would negatively affect them. This, he thought, would keep their actions in line. Hegel and Marx, however, thought a public sphere under these condition would break apart based on social labor conflicts.
ON the DIALECTIC of the PUBLIC SPHERE (Hegel and Marx)
For Hegel, the sciences fell outside the realm of public opinion because they were more than knowledge in mere appearance. "The public opinion of the private people assembled to form a public no longer retained a bases of unity and truth; it degenerated to the level of a subjective opining of the many" (119). The inability of the bourgeois public sphere to extend itself to the poor masses created upheavals that needed to be checked through control. "The public sphere served only to integrate subjective opinions into the objectivity assumed by the spirit in the form of the state" (120). Public opinion, under Hegel, was not opinion as a critical mass of reasoning individuals making their will known. It was reduced to opinion as unsubstantiated thought.
"Marx criticized the constitution based on neo-estates as propunded in the Hegelian philosophy of the state, using the criterion of the bourgeois constitutional state only to unmask the 'republic' before its own idea as the existing contradiction and, holding fast to the idea of the bourgeois public sphere, to confront as in a mirror with the social conditions for the possibility of its utterly unbourgeois realization" (124).
"Marx denounced public opinion as false consciousness: it hid before itself its own true character as a mask of bourgeois class interests" (124).
Because the bourgeois public sphere prevented entrance from below, it created the weapons of its own demise.
THE AMBIVALENT VIEW of the PUBLIC SPHERE in the THEORY of LIBERALISM (John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville)
In response to the socialist predictions about the expanse and exclusion of the public sphere, conservatives viewed the public sphere, not as an historical act of nature, but of something more attune to common sense.
As the public sphere expanded through press and propaganda it came to include those who desired to regulate the market. The bedrock principle that created the public sphere--liberal markets--was criticized.
Mid-19th century, Tocqueville and Mill decried the rule of public opinion as an act of conformity instead of one that used critical discourse. Whereas public opinion once marked the innate natural reason of the bourgeois, it now resembled a group think tidal wave. Tolerance now was preached to protect the minority belief from the masses instead of the masses from the absolutists.
Since the public sphere now contained mostly proles, "the political public sphere no longer stood for the idea of a dissolution of power; instead, it was to serve its division; public opinion became a mere limit on power" (136)
The uninformed and gullible masses scared Mill and Tocqueville into believing governments should run based on representational democracy, whereby an educated few run the state.
"In the hundred years following the heyday of liberalism during which capitalism gradually became 'organized,' the original relationship of public and private sphere in fact dissolved; the contours of the bourgeois public sphere eroded. But neither the liberal nor the socialist model were adequate for the diagnosis of a public sphere that remained peculiarly suspended between the two constellations abstractly represented in the models. Two tendencies dialectically related to each other indicated a breakdown of the public sphere. While it penetrated more spheres of society, it simultaneously lost its political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it had made public to the control of a critical public" (140).
Chapter 5: The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
The end of the 19th century brought the close of liberal market economies/politics. Liberal markets gave way to protectionism and oligopolies. As such, governments enacted anti-trust measures.
"laisser-faire capitalism...was actually a function not of the system as such, but of concrete historical circumstances...society was forced to relinquish the flimsiest pretense of being a sphere in which the influence of power was suspended...Contrary to these expectations, however, under conditions of imperfect competition and dependent prices social power became concentrated in private hands" (144).
As capitalism concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few, states saw it necessary to regulate and promote social welfare through services and market regulation.
Socialist critique of bourgeois law: its only as good as it is inclusive and open to upward mobility. However, the separation of the producer from the means of production subordinates the worker to the capitalist.
The power of the private world seeped into the public realm. As such, private law (contracts, property, inheritance) became regulated as a public matter (e.g. collective contracts, tenant laws, etc.)
In the 20th century public, private, and occupational spheres blended into grey. The public regulated the businesses, but workers' time at the job bled into their private lives, and their private lives were now supported by a welfare state. "As a result there arose the illusion of an intensified privacy in an interior domain whose scope had shrunk to comprise the conjugal family only insofar as it constituted a community of consumers" (156).
"In proportion as private life became public, the public sphere itself assumed forms of private closeness--in the neighborhood the pre-bourgeois extended family arose in a new guise...Discussion as a form of sociability gave way to the fetishism of community involvement as such" (like watching TV together) (158).
The resulting physical space that accompanies the loss of the private world, occludes the necessary coming together [like the salons and coffeehouses] for a public sphere. The occupational sphere has created a sense of internal, private leisure that now assumes and pretends to be the same private sphere that allowed the propertied masses to discuss.
The private world of letters became one of cultural consumption, a signal of its demise. Whereas the public of salons and letters weren't mere ideology, the rise of a leisure-private sphere replaced rational-critical debate with consumption, "and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated reception, however uniform in mode" (161).
The demise of the family as a sounding board for ideas and rational debate disappeared with culture consumption.
Habermas argues that we still have debates, discussions, round table panels, but these are commodified and marketed as products to be consumed. I wonder, though, if this is just a modern iteration of Mill's desire to have educated elites (philosophers) publicizing to the uneducated masses.
Habermas asserts that such monetized debates act as a tranquilizer that substitutes for action and "loses its publicist function" (164). Whereas the market gave rise to ideas, now the ideas become part of the market.
Habermas implicates paperback fiction and the mass distribution of newspapers as supplying the "psychological facilitation" of an engaged public. Instead of educating the masses in a way that would enable them to engage in critical discourse, mass consumption of culture presents spectacle and sensationalism as the bourgeois public sphere's equal.
Habermas also contends that it's false to assume an educated center is still convening in the way the 18th and 19th century bourgeois public sphere did based on the way people consume media.
"The sounding board of an educated stratum tutored in the public use of reason has been shattered; the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical. Consequently, it completely lacks the form of communication specific to a public" (175).
The public sphere becomes a medium of advertisement for economic and political propaganda rendering it "pseudo-privatized."
Habermas argues that Marx was incorrect in what the proles would do when they came to power. Instead of changing the public to an all-inclusive state, "the occupation of the political public sphere by the unpropertied masses led to an interlocking of state and society which removed from the public sphere its former basis without supplying a new one. For the integration of the public and private realms entailed a corresponding disorganization of the public sphere that once was the go-between linking state and society" (177).
Publicity in this eliding of the public and private sphere changes from a checks and balances to the "manipulation of the public as much as legitimation before it" (178).
Pertaining to the formation of law: Since law no longer represents the absolute truth of innate pure reason (Kant), law now must justify itself through publicity. In the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion and rational critical discourse blended morality and law as the will of the people. Now that the spheres have been blended, law must now utilize publicity to mandate itself.
Chapter 6: The Transformation of the Public Sphere's Political Function
The capitalization of the press helped commodify news as factional and sensational. Habermas acknowledges that the early producers of the press were also capitalist, but he continues to argue that they bracketed their own self-interest and profitability for the objectivity and truth of the product they produced. I wonder though how much of this had to do with their morality and how much had to do with their limits in technology and experience in commodifying culture. I don't think it's beyond the men who plundered Africa, India, and the Americas to imagine its morally corrupt to monetize information. Just like it didn't strike most shoe producers to market footwear to athletes until Nike came along, Habermas, in my opinion, romanticizes the capitalists of ages past who were only limited by their (in)experience in the thing they were selling.
The market systems Habermas extols for creating the conditions necessary for the bourgeois public sphere are the same principles that lionize competition to bring down prices, expand markets, monetize anything, and maximize product. I don't understand, then, how he can deride the expansion of those market principles into modernity. Just because older newspapers weren't vehicles for advertisements doesn't mean that the impulse to maximize profits didn't exist. It just had yet to realize its ability to grab larger market shares through a certain medium.
Interestingly, the success and growth of private industry and its stake in the media production of news encouraged governments to secure the means of news production (think BBC) in the form of public corporations to protect publicity from capitalist purposes.
The public sphere now constitutes a canvas for advertising. Advertising masquerades as a vehicle for the public to form informed opinions, veiling its private interests. "Public relations fuses both: advertisement must absolutely not be recognizable as the self-presentation of a private interest. It bestows on its object the authority of an object of public interest about which--this is the illusion to be created--the public of critically reflecting private people freely forms its opinion" (194).
Special interests can also exercise and manipulate public opinion for personal gain, causing the functions of government to form factions and govern, not through legislation and discourse, but through the exchanges of favors.
The use of publicity by special interests refeudalizes because it becomes the representation of public power rather than an invitation to rational debate.
As such, political parties are not representatives of the people; they are representatives of the people who control political parties.
"Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one cannot respond by arguing but only by identifying with them" )206).
To fix the system Habermas says we need to "permit an intrparty" democracy and publish the influence of private interests in the affairs of the state.
On the surface, modern political participation resembles the bourgeois public sphere. The wealthier males participate more readily. However, they do not often put forth their ideas as the subject of political debate. On the contrary, it's often "those who are most decisively predisposed to avoid a public opinion formed by discussion are the ones most likely to be influenced in their views–but this time by the staged or manipulatively manufactured public sphere of the election campaign" (214).
Chapter 7: On the Concept of Public Opinion
"without the substitution of public opinion as the origin of all authority for decisions binding the whole, modern democracy lacks the substance of its own truth" (238).
Although public opinion is now mostly a fiction, it continues to legitimize authority and laws necessary in a welfare state that promotes inclusion.
***Class Notes***
Habermas
Last key member of Frankfurt school. Trained by Adorno and Horkheimer. Frankfurt school seeks to engage a number of social sciences (Habermas trained in sociology). Use critical lens to engage and explore society; emerges between WWI and WWII.
Key Terms
A
"In the realm of mass media, of course, publicity has changed its meaning. Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion: public relations and efforts recently baptized "publicity work" are aimed at producing such publicity" (2).
Though the word public, and its reference to "civil society," emerged first in Germany, the idea of a public sphere extends back to Greece.
- The polis was common space for free citizens and separate from the oikos or private family life. And though much interaction took place in the agora, "The public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis), which could also assume the forms of consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as well as in common action (praxis).
- Since Greek citizens were free of productive labor (slaves), their economies were wrapped in the private sphere. "Status in the polic was therefore based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos: family, property, house.
Claim: If we can understand how and why we conflate "publicity" with "public sphere," we can better understand our own society.
Societies in the Middle Ages, primarily German feudalism, didn't absorb Greek and Roman ideas about public and private spaces. Though they depended on feudalism and manors as central to the economy, no laws evinced the ability "in which private people could step forward into a public sphere (5).
"Sociologically, that is to say by reference to institutional criteria, a public sphere inthe sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages" (7).
The "public sphere" during this time then "was something like a status attribute" (7). In this sense, a public person like a lord, represents (not in the same sense a lawyer or senator represents) the people which legitimate his authority. He isn't a representative of their needs; he is a representative of their presence, which lends authority to his public nature.
"Only after national and territorial power states had arisen on the basis of the early capitalist commercial economy and shattered the feudal foundations of power could this court nobility develop the framework of a sociability--highly individuated, in spite of its comprehensive etiquette--into that peculiarly free-floating but clearly demarcated sphere of 'good society' in the eighteenth century...Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense" (10-11).
Private, as a word, emerges during the 16th century to denote someone not holding a public office.
On the Genesis of the Bourgeois Public Sphere
The rise of capitalism in the Middle Ages, which the systems at hand absorbed initially, transformed the social order. As the trade in commodities expanded, so too did the exchange of news from foreign places in the medium of letters utilized by those in trade. Since the new market system depended on the expansion and opening of new markets, the state emerged as an institution that taxed in order to expand. During this time, "public" "was synonymous with 'state-related'" concerns; "the attribute no longer referred to the representative 'court' of a person endowed with authority but instead of the functioning of an apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction and endowed with a monopoly over the legitimate use of coercion" (18). Those being policed formed the public.
Whereas the home was once the economic center of "private life," homes were forced to define their private qualities in relation to the existence of markets that affected the whole of the public. "The economic activity that had become private had to be oriented toward a commodity market that had expanded under public direction and supervision; the economic conditions under which this activity now took place lay outside the confines of the single household; for the first time they were of general interest" (19).
News emerged as a commodity alongside the commodities that gave it prominence. Though the press was used to disseminate information about trade, storms, governments, wars, etc., authorities also utilized the trade in news, thereby making those receivers of the news "the public." The news trade democratized the access to information for an emerging bourgeois class of professionals. Whereas the public once constituted the absolute ruler as the state, the existence of a new bourgeois public--which displaced the once powerful members of trade guilds--"led...to a tension between 'town' and 'court' (23).
The bureaucratic regulations of mercantilism blurred the distinction between public and private, creating tension within the "public sphere." During this time, publications also become regulated as published private thought became regulated as public consumption. The publications signified a shift where private individuals came together as a public to call for public judgments of public authority. At the end of the 17th century, people began to refer to "public" instead of readers or mankind, and "public opinion" instead of "general opinion."
Chapter 2: Social Structures of the Public Sphere
The bourgeois didn't rail against people in power as much as they used reason to revisit the "principle on which existing rule was based" (28).
As the emerging middle-class learned rational debate from the courtly public, they broke off and engaged larger issues in town meeting places: salons, coffee houses, and table societies. These meetings "built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere" (30).
INSTITUTIONS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The movement of France's "center" from Versailles to Paris signaled a transformation in the public sphere. Similarly, in Britain the Glorious Revolution marked a shift from the Court as the public to the town. "The predominance of the 'town' was strengthened by new institutions that, for all their variety, in Great Britain and France took over the same social functions: the coffee houses...and the salons.
"In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; 'opinion' became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence" (33-34). I find this notion odd. Isn't economic dependence and determinism what created the "public sphere" and allowed these nouveau riche to come together? Howe can they possibly bracket self-interest? Is it really possible to disengage with out identity when so much of our identity is wrapped up in economy?
German table societies were fewer in number and different in nature, but "their public was recruited from private people engaged in productive work" (34). The table societies sought to equalize the commonalities between humans despite social standing. However, the meetings were held in private and were exclusive. This was done to protect the individuals and reason from the threat of absolutist powers. Isn't this what we try to replicate in our classrooms?
All of these publics, however, are exclusive, which makes me wonder how something exclusive, something centrifugal, can be considered a public.
Commonalities between salons, coffee houses, and table societies:
- they preserved a kind of social intercourse that disregarded status altogether. They existed apart from the market and the state.
- "discussions within such a public presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned" (36).
- the public was inclusive despite its exclusiveness. They could never close themselves off from the shared world of other private citizens. It acted as the unrepresented public's mouthpiece.
The public nature of art gave way to art criticism, which also emanated from the salons. In addition, coffee houses enacted journals to keep track of the arguments and discussion put forward.
When those same people entered a salon within a conjugal family's home, it didn't represent the formation of a society because of the way they entered into it. The family resembled closely the economic forces that gave rise to it. "Thus it was a private autonomy denying its economic origins that provided the bourgeois family with its consciousness of itself. It seemed to be established voluntarily and by free individuals and to be maintained without coercion" (46). Essentially, the market economies that resulted in this family structure hid itself in pure and common humanity.
This time also saw the rise in interest of the subjectivity of the self and self-expression in letter writing/diaries. "The relations between author, work, and public changed. They became intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically interested in what was 'human,' in self-knowledge, and in empathy" (50). The reality as illusion became FICTION.
"They formed the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself" (51). So...the family mimicked a public?
"the theme of the modern public sphere shifted from the properly political tasks of a citizenry acting in common to the more properly civic tasks of a society engaged in critical public debate...it challenged the established authority of the monarch" (52).
Based on the objectivity of rule of law, the public sphere utilized public opinion as a legitimate form of rationality and justice.
"As soon as privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings ceased to communicate merely about their subjectivity but rather in their capacity as property-owners desired to influence public power in their common interest, the humanity of the literary public sphere served to increase the effectiveness of the public sphere in the political realm (56).
Chapter 3: Political Functions of the Public Sphere
Public spheres that worked their way into the political sphere first appeared in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century. This was brought on by the development of a stock market, end of censorship, and the invention of Parliament. During this time, coffee houses were seen as anti-establishment and dangerous. The press (ca. 1726) established itself as the fourth estate, able to influence public opinion against the government.
As the power of the Parliament expanded, so too did the public's interest in the operations of Parliament. As such, members of Parliament formed factions and used the Fourth Estate to petition its position. This signaled a change in how disagreements at the national level moved from violence to debate. The minority members of Parliament were especially adept at presenting their cause as one of the people, and by extension of disinterested reason. As such, members of Parliament began giving speeches appealing to "public opinion."
MEANWHILE IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
The French public sphere couldn't criticize effectively until after the revolution. Though they held massive amounts of capital, they weren't united enough to "affect the fate of the nation" (67).
Habermas's term for officers of the public (Dewey) is the "public sphere of the political realm," aka representative democracy. The French nobility was forced to suppress the public sphere in the political realm because it "could not be put out of commission" (69).
The French Revolution brought what took 100 years in Great Britain: representation, free press, and constitutional law. However, many of these rights were exterminated with the ascension of Napoleon.
Habermas overtly argues that the entrance of the bourgeois public sphere into the political realm was the result of capitalist mercantilism. The term "private" "emerged precisely in reference to the concept of free power of control over property that functioned in capitalist fashion" (74). So, the pubi sphere consisted of private individuals who exercised reason free of state, church, and family to influence the political realm who stopped being the symbol of public power and instead assumed the role of a public authority expected to protect encourage what was private.
The private persons in the public sphere operated on equal standing relationships who acted as legally private individuals engaging in contractual market exchange.
During this time (1800), laws changed to reflect the role of the market in the nations. Civil law (private law) changed to "free competition that governed the market of goods, real estate, labor, and even capital itself" (78). Whereas previous years maintained wage laws, apprenticeship standards, etc., new laws protected contracts and business interests.
Habermas explains Britain's rolling back of gov regulation in the markets and defines its globalized trade system as a shining and ephemeral moment of liberal free-market capitalism. He concludes, "only during this phase was civil society as the private sphere emancipated from the directives of public authority to such an extent that at that time the political public sphere could attain its full developments in the bourgeois constitutional state" (79).
The free market encouraged disinterested/rational governments that made decisions free of influence. (Contrast with Dewey's stance on whether or not a private individual can free himself from his own interests as a public official)
"The constitutional state as a bourgeois state established the public sphere in the political realm as an organ of the state so as to ensure institutionally the connection between law and public opinion" (81).
The establishment of rule by law was mean to secure freedom from domination. So great was the faith in this law, that law was thought to protect from absolutist domination as well as domination from the law.
There seems to be this dilemma (around page 82-83) concerning the fear of legislative power overshadowing the will of the people (public opinion). The power of public opinion resides in its ability to not seek or assume power to legislate but to "transform voluntas (self-interest) into a ratio (rational disinterestedness) that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all" (83). I wonder who the "all" in this public opinion are.
The state began to operate as a public entity, publicizing its actions, opening up parliament and court procedures to public scrutiny as a way to ensure the import of public opinion.
Habermas argues that the idea that constitutional governments with personal liberties masqueraded as governments of, by, and for the people. Since real control rested in the hands of comparatively few people, the constitutional state existed as an extension of their interests.
Even though the public sphere was exclusive, the public sphere, Habermas argues, could be seen as an entity that put forth constitutional law as a means to secure a place for all to enter into the bourgeois life. That is to say, the system wrought from exclusivity cannot be said to be exclusive simply because it arose from such conditions. If the bourgeois public sphere successfully bracketed difference to argue for freedom for all humans, the system that arose from exclusivity could act inclusively in as much as those who want to participate meet the criteria.
The ability of persons to enter into this public sphere required untrammeled free markets and only FREE markets.
This system seems to set up a convenient tautology. The creators of an "inclusive" system create exclusive criteria for entry--of which they already meet--and thereby protect their own interests by creating rules of entry that include them but also allow them to regulate entry as a means of self-interest. Habermas points out that the private man cannot divorce his private interest from his public role. Therefore, the system perpetuates its success for its current members. The rules of the game, based on a theoretical system, serve the current players.
Habermas seems to acknowledge the exclusivity and potential for corruption in this system, but he says publicity keeps the bourgeois from turning into a closed off ruling class. "as long as publicity existed as a sphere and functioned as a principle, what the public itself believed to be and to be doing was ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology...the dominant class nevertheless developed political institutions which credibly embodied as their objective meaning the idea of their own abolition...the idea of the dissolution of domination into that easygoing constraint that prevailed on no other ground than the compelling insight of a public opinion" (88).
Chapter 4: The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and Ideology
Much of the beginning of this chapter traces the history of public opinion as a marker or public reason and logic from the original meaning of opinion, which meant a judgment lacking proofs of truth. The shift rested on the role of the public sphere as a place to debate public matters.
In France, public opinion didn't have the same political and legislative purchase in did in England, not initially at least. In France, Rousseau's social contract assumed the ideal of legislative-shaping public opinion. Rousseau envisioned a democracy that guarded itself against the inevitable, self-serving powers that would crop up in debate. He desired government by public opinion, but he wanted the matters to be presented objectively, not through artful oratory, but as they were so the masses could let their opinion be known. This differed from other notions in pre-revolutionary France. Some wanted technocrats (bourgeois pros) to debate and rule and others wanted democratic public opinion free of debate and persuasion to rule.
PUBLICITY as the BRIDGING PRINCIPLE between POLITICS and MORALITY (Kant)
Public opinion sought to rationalize politics morally. Kant "conceived of 'the public sphere' at once as the principle of the legal order and as the method of enlightenment" (104). Kant viewed philosophers as the purveyors of pure reason who conducted their thinking independent of governments. They spoke out to the public, which needed Enlightenment. This is odd because the public represented an entity that needed tutelage but claimed to be mature. Since all could reason, the philosophers were the center flames of a fire. "The public sphere was realized not in the republic of scholars alone but in the public use of reason by all who were adept at it" (105).
Kant's idea of universal moral truths connected politics and laws, which resulted from the pure reason of the public with disinterested moral guidance, to morality. The problem persists, though, about how private individuals can perform disinterestedly in public affairs. His answer was to limit public sphere involvement to those whose vices in the public sphere (that of commodity exchange) would negatively affect them. This, he thought, would keep their actions in line. Hegel and Marx, however, thought a public sphere under these condition would break apart based on social labor conflicts.
ON the DIALECTIC of the PUBLIC SPHERE (Hegel and Marx)
For Hegel, the sciences fell outside the realm of public opinion because they were more than knowledge in mere appearance. "The public opinion of the private people assembled to form a public no longer retained a bases of unity and truth; it degenerated to the level of a subjective opining of the many" (119). The inability of the bourgeois public sphere to extend itself to the poor masses created upheavals that needed to be checked through control. "The public sphere served only to integrate subjective opinions into the objectivity assumed by the spirit in the form of the state" (120). Public opinion, under Hegel, was not opinion as a critical mass of reasoning individuals making their will known. It was reduced to opinion as unsubstantiated thought.
"Marx criticized the constitution based on neo-estates as propunded in the Hegelian philosophy of the state, using the criterion of the bourgeois constitutional state only to unmask the 'republic' before its own idea as the existing contradiction and, holding fast to the idea of the bourgeois public sphere, to confront as in a mirror with the social conditions for the possibility of its utterly unbourgeois realization" (124).
"Marx denounced public opinion as false consciousness: it hid before itself its own true character as a mask of bourgeois class interests" (124).
Because the bourgeois public sphere prevented entrance from below, it created the weapons of its own demise.
THE AMBIVALENT VIEW of the PUBLIC SPHERE in the THEORY of LIBERALISM (John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville)
In response to the socialist predictions about the expanse and exclusion of the public sphere, conservatives viewed the public sphere, not as an historical act of nature, but of something more attune to common sense.
As the public sphere expanded through press and propaganda it came to include those who desired to regulate the market. The bedrock principle that created the public sphere--liberal markets--was criticized.
Mid-19th century, Tocqueville and Mill decried the rule of public opinion as an act of conformity instead of one that used critical discourse. Whereas public opinion once marked the innate natural reason of the bourgeois, it now resembled a group think tidal wave. Tolerance now was preached to protect the minority belief from the masses instead of the masses from the absolutists.
Since the public sphere now contained mostly proles, "the political public sphere no longer stood for the idea of a dissolution of power; instead, it was to serve its division; public opinion became a mere limit on power" (136)
The uninformed and gullible masses scared Mill and Tocqueville into believing governments should run based on representational democracy, whereby an educated few run the state.
"In the hundred years following the heyday of liberalism during which capitalism gradually became 'organized,' the original relationship of public and private sphere in fact dissolved; the contours of the bourgeois public sphere eroded. But neither the liberal nor the socialist model were adequate for the diagnosis of a public sphere that remained peculiarly suspended between the two constellations abstractly represented in the models. Two tendencies dialectically related to each other indicated a breakdown of the public sphere. While it penetrated more spheres of society, it simultaneously lost its political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it had made public to the control of a critical public" (140).
Chapter 5: The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
The end of the 19th century brought the close of liberal market economies/politics. Liberal markets gave way to protectionism and oligopolies. As such, governments enacted anti-trust measures.
"laisser-faire capitalism...was actually a function not of the system as such, but of concrete historical circumstances...society was forced to relinquish the flimsiest pretense of being a sphere in which the influence of power was suspended...Contrary to these expectations, however, under conditions of imperfect competition and dependent prices social power became concentrated in private hands" (144).
As capitalism concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few, states saw it necessary to regulate and promote social welfare through services and market regulation.
Socialist critique of bourgeois law: its only as good as it is inclusive and open to upward mobility. However, the separation of the producer from the means of production subordinates the worker to the capitalist.
The power of the private world seeped into the public realm. As such, private law (contracts, property, inheritance) became regulated as a public matter (e.g. collective contracts, tenant laws, etc.)
In the 20th century public, private, and occupational spheres blended into grey. The public regulated the businesses, but workers' time at the job bled into their private lives, and their private lives were now supported by a welfare state. "As a result there arose the illusion of an intensified privacy in an interior domain whose scope had shrunk to comprise the conjugal family only insofar as it constituted a community of consumers" (156).
"In proportion as private life became public, the public sphere itself assumed forms of private closeness--in the neighborhood the pre-bourgeois extended family arose in a new guise...Discussion as a form of sociability gave way to the fetishism of community involvement as such" (like watching TV together) (158).
The resulting physical space that accompanies the loss of the private world, occludes the necessary coming together [like the salons and coffeehouses] for a public sphere. The occupational sphere has created a sense of internal, private leisure that now assumes and pretends to be the same private sphere that allowed the propertied masses to discuss.
The private world of letters became one of cultural consumption, a signal of its demise. Whereas the public of salons and letters weren't mere ideology, the rise of a leisure-private sphere replaced rational-critical debate with consumption, "and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated reception, however uniform in mode" (161).
The demise of the family as a sounding board for ideas and rational debate disappeared with culture consumption.
Habermas argues that we still have debates, discussions, round table panels, but these are commodified and marketed as products to be consumed. I wonder, though, if this is just a modern iteration of Mill's desire to have educated elites (philosophers) publicizing to the uneducated masses.
Habermas asserts that such monetized debates act as a tranquilizer that substitutes for action and "loses its publicist function" (164). Whereas the market gave rise to ideas, now the ideas become part of the market.
Habermas implicates paperback fiction and the mass distribution of newspapers as supplying the "psychological facilitation" of an engaged public. Instead of educating the masses in a way that would enable them to engage in critical discourse, mass consumption of culture presents spectacle and sensationalism as the bourgeois public sphere's equal.
Habermas also contends that it's false to assume an educated center is still convening in the way the 18th and 19th century bourgeois public sphere did based on the way people consume media.
"The sounding board of an educated stratum tutored in the public use of reason has been shattered; the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical. Consequently, it completely lacks the form of communication specific to a public" (175).
The public sphere becomes a medium of advertisement for economic and political propaganda rendering it "pseudo-privatized."
Habermas argues that Marx was incorrect in what the proles would do when they came to power. Instead of changing the public to an all-inclusive state, "the occupation of the political public sphere by the unpropertied masses led to an interlocking of state and society which removed from the public sphere its former basis without supplying a new one. For the integration of the public and private realms entailed a corresponding disorganization of the public sphere that once was the go-between linking state and society" (177).
Publicity in this eliding of the public and private sphere changes from a checks and balances to the "manipulation of the public as much as legitimation before it" (178).
Pertaining to the formation of law: Since law no longer represents the absolute truth of innate pure reason (Kant), law now must justify itself through publicity. In the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion and rational critical discourse blended morality and law as the will of the people. Now that the spheres have been blended, law must now utilize publicity to mandate itself.
Chapter 6: The Transformation of the Public Sphere's Political Function
The capitalization of the press helped commodify news as factional and sensational. Habermas acknowledges that the early producers of the press were also capitalist, but he continues to argue that they bracketed their own self-interest and profitability for the objectivity and truth of the product they produced. I wonder though how much of this had to do with their morality and how much had to do with their limits in technology and experience in commodifying culture. I don't think it's beyond the men who plundered Africa, India, and the Americas to imagine its morally corrupt to monetize information. Just like it didn't strike most shoe producers to market footwear to athletes until Nike came along, Habermas, in my opinion, romanticizes the capitalists of ages past who were only limited by their (in)experience in the thing they were selling.
The market systems Habermas extols for creating the conditions necessary for the bourgeois public sphere are the same principles that lionize competition to bring down prices, expand markets, monetize anything, and maximize product. I don't understand, then, how he can deride the expansion of those market principles into modernity. Just because older newspapers weren't vehicles for advertisements doesn't mean that the impulse to maximize profits didn't exist. It just had yet to realize its ability to grab larger market shares through a certain medium.
Interestingly, the success and growth of private industry and its stake in the media production of news encouraged governments to secure the means of news production (think BBC) in the form of public corporations to protect publicity from capitalist purposes.
The public sphere now constitutes a canvas for advertising. Advertising masquerades as a vehicle for the public to form informed opinions, veiling its private interests. "Public relations fuses both: advertisement must absolutely not be recognizable as the self-presentation of a private interest. It bestows on its object the authority of an object of public interest about which--this is the illusion to be created--the public of critically reflecting private people freely forms its opinion" (194).
Special interests can also exercise and manipulate public opinion for personal gain, causing the functions of government to form factions and govern, not through legislation and discourse, but through the exchanges of favors.
The use of publicity by special interests refeudalizes because it becomes the representation of public power rather than an invitation to rational debate.
As such, political parties are not representatives of the people; they are representatives of the people who control political parties.
"Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one cannot respond by arguing but only by identifying with them" )206).
To fix the system Habermas says we need to "permit an intrparty" democracy and publish the influence of private interests in the affairs of the state.
On the surface, modern political participation resembles the bourgeois public sphere. The wealthier males participate more readily. However, they do not often put forth their ideas as the subject of political debate. On the contrary, it's often "those who are most decisively predisposed to avoid a public opinion formed by discussion are the ones most likely to be influenced in their views–but this time by the staged or manipulatively manufactured public sphere of the election campaign" (214).
Chapter 7: On the Concept of Public Opinion
"without the substitution of public opinion as the origin of all authority for decisions binding the whole, modern democracy lacks the substance of its own truth" (238).
Although public opinion is now mostly a fiction, it continues to legitimize authority and laws necessary in a welfare state that promotes inclusion.
***Class Notes***
Habermas
Last key member of Frankfurt school. Trained by Adorno and Horkheimer. Frankfurt school seeks to engage a number of social sciences (Habermas trained in sociology). Use critical lens to engage and explore society; emerges between WWI and WWII.
- They believe society is changes. They engage with this idea using Marx and Freud.
- Marx brings critique of capitalism.
- However, they're suspicious of state communism/ state politics, which utilizes party platforms (not very Marx). They believe this doesn't incorporate the whole human being.
- Adorno: "The self is liquidated." The western push to dominate and rationalize kills the individual. We're so divorced from ourselves and critical capacities that we cannot have experiences.
- Habermas thought there's nothing left if we're incapable of having experiences. How can we change this? he wondered.
- The space he imagines capable of this change is the public sphere.
- He believes in rational critical debate can change society.
- He's criticized for being ideological. Wasn't a fan of post-modernism because it abandons rationality as a possibility.
- Capitalist democracy quite different from the polis.
- In polis there's a division between polis (public) and private (oikos). Economics weren't handled in the polis. Inclusion of citizens. What is fused in the bourgeois public spheres is separate in the polis.
- Renaissance: the public was intimate. Behaviors and standings were codified. The public was a display of power. Festivals and rituals were displays of power, authority, prestige. Representation of legitimacy. There's is a crucial performance of power so the public will buy into their ability to rule. Not just ostentation/ideology. A flexing of muscles. That's what they were publicizing. This helps understand refeudalization and the consumption of instituted power.
- Mercantilism bridges absolutism to capitalism. The state begins depending on people who do have money because they don't tax. Individuals begin financing things like war. Private interests become tethered to state interests. 13th-17th century.
- The changes in state/economic/private overlap helps him develop and draw spheres and how those spheres change with structural changes.
- Nation states: creation of laws and military.
- A separate bourgeois class emerges from reading and reading about culture.
- Newspapers carried information, but they also carried with them critical reasoning. The people consumed criticism in private, thought about it, and then came together in the public sphere to discuss the ideas, which seek legitimation from authority. It is a public sphere of a reading people.
- A series of things emerge that make literature's new function possible: the town is set up differently (the exchange of goods is different from the walling in of the king's castle). 1st private political sphere then the political. Nobles intermingle with bourgeois intellectuals interested in art. They come together to discuss art and literature. Not socially equal but they are equal within that space and within a topic.
- Critical judgments become cultivated in coffee houses and form public opinion, a normative judgment.
- Salons differed from coffee houses in that they were held in the structural home, which brought the public literally into the private house. In these salons people could bracket their domestic roles to engage in debate/discussion. (e.g. wives could engage in the salon because they were emancipated from their domestic role).
- THE FALL OF THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE
- The rise of the welfare state and mass consumer culture. Opinion polls create a means by way people determine what they think. The structural shift becomes a package of thinkable options. Our opinions are represented for us in mediums instead of emerging through critical, engaged participation. The welfare state removes you for rational decision making.
- How does the shift to a neo-liberal state and digital media market change his argument.
Key Terms
- Structures: Institutions that allow certain things to emerge in one way or another. What encourages engagement (e.g. Government; media; press; family; education) are structural.
A
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