Elenore Long--"Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics" Ch. 1-4

Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

Going public and the public turn of rhetoric and composition foreground public engagement.

"The purpose of this book is to pull together alternative theoretical accounts of public engagement...Second, the promise of public engagement calls reader located in relative institutional privilege to speak wisely and persuasively for social change" (4).

The question how do we go public shifts the focus away from the academy and academy driven scholarship to the combined private-public world outside institutional space.

Where normal people "go public" are called local publics. 

Most of this chapter outlines the focus of the later chapters and sets the foundation for the book's thrust: how one goes public, what does it mean to turn to the public, what does that reveal, what problems come with the public turn, and why the book focuses on physical versus virtual public spaces.

Chapter 2—Definitions and Distinctions

The question how do we go public shifts the focus away from the academy and academy driven scholarship to the combined private-public world outside institutional space, so in public engagement  “ordinary people go public.” Wait! Who you callin’ ordinary?

·      ordinary: not political; not celebrities; people participating in a public sphere that their participation in creates

Community literacy undergirds the ability to “go public.”

·      community: NOT geographic; symbolic spatially and temporally constructed “shared exigencies.” synonymous with local publics.

Five Point Local Public Framework Heuristic (used to compare researchers’ going public and what stemmed from that)

1. Metaphor: How researchers conceptualized, structure, and define. The metaphors act as research heuristics, revealing in their connectivity ways of theorizing local publics.

2. Context: physical location and social/cultural characteristics that give meaning to local discourse.

·      Location: the politics of place; the term is rather plastic and can shift depending on what it modifies (attitude, knowledge, literacy, etc.)

3. Tenor of the Discourse: linguistic affectation that “encodes attitudes, relational cues, and power differentials” (21). Learning tenor can help “perform specific literacies in the tenor of a given local public” (21).

4. Literacies: “organize how people carry out their purposes for going public” (22).

5. Rhetorical Invention: “how a discourse permits people to respond to exigencies that arise within its discursive space” (22). So, what we write about when we write about a local public?

Chapter 3—Locating Community Literacy Studies

This chapter provides an overview of how literacy has changed and how that change affects the way people go public.

“the history of community literacy is tied up in efforts to define the local public as an object of inquiry and a site for rhetorical intervention” (25).

Different scholars use different verbiage to rationalize their aims, which “coalesced around the connection between vernacular literacies and public life” (26).

Historically, community literacy is quite young, emerging from Halloran in 1975 and gaining ground with Freire’s pedagogy and Pittsburgh’s Community Literacy Center. However new it is, CLS engages Aristotelian and sophistic rhetorics that utilize praxis and build on contingent judgment.

Though separate from literacy and public sphere disciplines, Long argues that community literacy borrows from both areas in its own distinctive space to study going public and intervention design.

The mid-20^th century worldwide literacy scare placed literacy in the public arena. However, scholars wrongly assumed literacy was generalizable, cross-cultural, trans-communal skill (autonomous model). People like Freire disagreed with the conformist take and argued instead for a literacy that allowed people to “participate in the transformation of their world” (30).

1980s—New Literacy studies movement: focus literacy studies anthropology and ethnography. Replaces UNESCO’s autonomous model.

1990s placed literacy in public domains, literacy and language shifted toward social, fluid, adaptable, and rhetorical.

In this shift, scholars wrote descriptively about literacy’s surface features (sociolinguistics) and how communities culled their literacies together to tackle pressing social issues. Features of situated public literacies help people go public: performance, collaboration, problem-posing lenses, institutional affiliation, and they contain non-affiliated alternative discourses.

Studying participatory democracy via community literacy, scholars like Fraser and Hauser pushed back against Habermas’s elitist, exclusive, and panoramic theories of democracy in favor of local publics that contain marginal discourses, which enrich and legitimate participatory democracy. Long provides a list of programs that engage vernacular literacies and local publics. They do so by helping local publics write for/about themselves, partner with communities to write with them, and/or create technes for public engagement.

Chapter 4—An Impromptu Theater: A Local Public That Turns Its Back on Formal Institutions

This chapter outlines Heath’s “analysis of community life in 1970s Trackton. Heath uses the metaphor of a stage where improvised, contingent performances take place within the local public.

The dramas that took place depended on the stage and the contexts of the moment (paycheck=treats; plaza=social hierarchy sorting).

Conditions of difference—geographic, social, economic, political, etc.—defined the borders between Trackton and its surroundings.

The stages also allowed children learning their community literacy ways to practice and negotiate power dynamics.

Performance in the plaza allowed Trackton residence a way to perpetuate their difference from similar ethnicities that displayed “snobbish” socio-economic characteristics. Though varied in their nature—aggressive play, girl talk, matriarchal stories—“Trackton’s residents used these literacies both to call into being and to access their local public” (60).

Heath’s conclusions about Trackton allow Long to draw four conclusions about local publics:

1. Local publics can be physically geographic and constrained within metaphysical space (shared ideology).

2. Local publics can be safe, familiar spaces for members who depend on its individual integrity.

3. The operative metaphor used in the research can be revealing but also constricting (e.g. Trackton as “closed community” elides race relation complications)

4. Performative practices are especially effective in creating publics.

****Class Notes from Jim Webber

Ideological model of literacy: Literacy isn't learned or defined in a vacuum. Community literacy doesn't transfer from one context to another.

Heath argues that Trackton is a public sphere. Their languages and performances are "world-making." Intentions were for inclusion of language (think Students' Rights to Their Own Languages). Think of Heath's work as a language response to Habermas.

Publics aren't just out there. They are called into being through performances.

Dewey's public (placed/defined) in the political sphere.
Long/Heath's public focus more on community life, culture, and the maintaining of standing to participate in a community.

Discourse (Burke): symbolic acts

Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples--"From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the 'Violence' of Seattle"

Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest. 2nd edition.

(2002)

"These protests illustrate contemporary public acts of global citizenry that suggest new conditions for the possibility of participatory democracy in a corporate-controlled mass-mediated world" (244-245).

"This essay will introduce the 'public screen' as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene" (246).

"Viewing contemporary public discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of the emergence of new forms of participatory democracy" (246).

The authors cite Habermass's critique of the declining public space, which he argues was a place that "mediates between civil society and the state, with the expression of public opinion working to both legitimate and check the power of the state." In turn, the public space was capitalized and turned into a mass media spectacle,which Habermass saw as a "refeudalization of the public sphere" (247).

However, they find flaws with Habermass's view of the public sphere, as he privileged "dialogue and fetishization," which is too idealistic and "shuns much of the richness and turbulence of the sense-making process" (247).

Essentially, DeLuca and Peeples see a public sphere as one that seeks first consensus is one that "silences dissent and condemns resistance" (247).

The authors want to add the public screen to the public sphere, something Habermass thought was a public sphere in only appearance (247).

DeLuca and Peeples trace the history of the public sphere back to the agora and the Pynx, but problematize the narrow conception that these comparisons lead us to through their privileging of "embodied voices." We, they argue, continue this notion of the public sphere/ public place. It is, they say, "a deep impulse and a beautiful dream and it is endemic to our version of the public sphere, of democracy, of even communication itself" (248).

Even postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard--known for his ideas about simulation--privilege the "immediacy" of speech as the authentic medium of the public space (248).

"Yet the dream of the public sphere as the engagement of embodied voices, democracy via dialogue, cloisters us, for perforce [used to express necessity or inevitability] its vision compels us to see the contemporary landscape of mass communication as a nightmare" (248).

DeLuca and Peeples look to Derrida to deconstruct our reliance on language and voice as the ideal means for reality and being. In addition with John Peters, the authors look to dissemination to prove that, especially in the era of mass communication, communication may not every be received. "In counterpoint to a public sphere underwritten by consensus through communication or communication via conversation, dissemination reminds us that all forms of communication are founded on the risk of not communicating" (248).

"Communication as characterized by dissemination is the endless proliferation and scattering of emissions without the guarantee of productive exchanges" (249).

"In short, although an historically and culturally understandable desire, the fondness for bodily presence and face-to-face conversations ignores the social and technological transformations of the 20th century that have constructed an altogether different cultural context, a techno-epistemic break...as a normative ideal, the public sphere promotes as unquestioned universal goods several deeply problematic notions: consensus, openness, dialogue, rationality, and civility/decorum. As a supplement, we want to introduce the public screen as a metaphor for thinking about the places of politics and the possibilities of citizenship in our present moment" (249).

The authors argue that we have moved toward a visual rhetoric, a hypermediacy that doesn't present reality but creates it.

"If embodied gatherings of culturally homogenous, equal citizens engaged in rational dialogue with the goal of consensus is no longer a dominant mode of political activity, what constitutes politics today?" (252).

The authors argue that the new public sphere can be used by corporations, governments, and citizens to "critique through spectacle" (252). Since we have become a visual culture, visual rhetorics an employ images and spectacle via the public screen.

The authors look to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kracauer and their view on the proportional rise of distraction and technology. Technology breeds distraction, which "annihilates contemplation." The authors use this to suggest that our current visual, image-driven, and technologically addicted public sphere is one not-conducive to the old conception of the public space as a place for civil, concentrated, face-to-face discourse. "We suggest that they be read not morally but analytically as signs of the emergence of a new space for discourse, the public screen, that entails different forms of intelligence and knowledge (254). (rhetorical velocity perhaps?)

"Citizens who want to appear on the public screen, who want to act on the stage of participatory democracy, face three major conditions that both constrain and enable their actions: 1) private ownership/monopoly of the public screen, 2) Infortainment conventions that filter what counts as news, and 3) the need to communicate in the discourse of images" (254).

"In comparison to the rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility of the public sphere, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, spectacular publicity, cacophony, distraction, and dissent" (262).

Joel Penney and Caroline Dadas--"(Re)Tweeting in the service of protest: Digital composition and circulation in the Occupy Wall Street movement"

new media & society 2014, Vol. 16(1) 74–90 © The Author(s) 2013 

"The OWS case study demonstrates how the rapid digital circulation of texts allows protestors to quickly build a geographically dispersed, networked counterpublic that can articulate a critique of power outside of the parameters of mainstream media...

By including these forwarding activities in their online efforts, these Twitter users worked to expand the circulation of information building and sustaining an OWS counterpublic. However, dependence on this external platform leaves protestors vulnerable to restrictions on their ability to communicate, as well as to unwanted surveillance from potentially hostile authorities"

 

"In a collectively written declaration posted on their website, the OWS protesters in New York City outlined their grievances, explaining that they 'gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice' regarding the way in which 'corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. With the slogan 'We are the 99%' serving as a rallying cry, the OWS movement has continued to employ direct action (such as encampments, marches, and demonstrations) as well as non-traditional media outreach to publicize a broad-based critique of corporate power and its influence on the political process" (75).

The OWS movement created the #occupywallstreet hashtag and "Twitter served a variety of purposes, as users attempted to coordinate their activities and publicize their critiques of contemporary capitalism in ways that bypassed the mainstream media" (75).

The authors cite Jenkins Convergence Culture, writing that "those silences by corporate media have been among the first to transform their computer into a printing press."

"The ends to which users...incorporate Twitter into their protest activities represent the focus of this article...we present a typology of Twitter users, focusing on how both tweeting and retweeting functions have been utilized in conjunction with face-to-face protests...Thus, we seek to present a portrayal of technology use in the material/historical context of a broad-based social movement" (75).

"We believe that by drawing from the rich body of work established by both fields [rhetoric/composition and communication], we can come to a better understanding of complex rhetorical situations such as Occupy Wall Street, discovering how people are using language to construct new social and political realities, and how they are incorporating social media technologies into that process" (75).

--Digitally networked technologies, protest movements, and counterpublics

 "The emerging scholarship on this phenomenon [social media and protests] has highlighted a number of key functions that the social web may serve in protest movements" (76). The various social media platforms allow protesters to organize before ever meeting face-to-face and document via citizen journalism."However, since digital networked technologies and their applications are developing so rapidly in the contemporary context...it is important for scholars to continue to chart how protest movements are utilizing various new online tools for a range of purposes" (76).

"Specifically, the OWS movement has been noted for adopting a leaderless, horizontal structure which has been characterized by Hardy and Negri (2011) as the 'multitude form.'...As Hardy and Negri suggest, this focus on non-hierarchical organization may account for the movement's widespread use of social media platforms which operate in a horizontal, peer-to-peer fashion and encourage diffuse popular participation" (76).

 The use of Twitter to update and quickly disseminate information and collect feedback supports the horizontal organization.  Warner notes in Publics and Counterpublics that a counterpublic "enables a horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power." Publics, according to Warner shift with the "circulation of discourse. 

"we are interested here in how Twitter is used as a privileged tool for building horizontal, 'multitude'-like networks of exchange that facilitate, supplement and extend face-to-face protest movements" (77).

According to N. Fraser, counterpublics widen the audience. She claims that the counterpublics' strength "rests in its ability 'to disseminate one's discourse into ever widening arena's'" (77).

"The use of networked digital technologies in contemporary protest movements has greatly intensified this dialectic between internal and external publics, as messages shared via online platforms have the potential to find worldwide audiences" (77).

Many authors use the term "rhetorical circulation" to define the quick delivery style of Twitter messages, which requires that its users be rhetorically savvy about how to disseminate message effective with only 140 characters. ***This may overlap with "rhetorical velocity." Since composers know that the tweet will be brief and widely circulated very quickly, the nature of twitter influence the composition of the message itself. "Circulation and composition are inextricably linked, demonstrating how the rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, and delivery all inform each other within a composing situation. Thus, we call attention to circulation as a major consideration in how users capitalize on the affordances of Twitter, how the OWS movement has become so dispersed and has grown so quickly, and how the OWS network on Twitter functions as a counterpublic" (77).

--Methods

"This small purposive sample is not intended to be representative of Twitter-using OWS activists as a whole, and therefore there are limitations to the study's generalizability. We believe that the rich first-hand data gained from this small-scale qualitative interview study has a useful role to play in theory-building" (78).

--Using Twitter in OWS: seven overlapping roles

The study revealed seven main ways in which respondents use Twitter in conjunction with OWS: "facilitating face-to-face protests via advertisements and donation solicitation; forwarding news via links and retweets; expressing personal opinions regarding the movement; engaging in discussion about the movement; making personal connection with fellow activists; and facilitating online-based actions...Together, this typology of roles helps to elucidate the complex and interconnected ways in which OWS activists use Twitter in the service of the movement" (79).

e-mobilization

these are "situations in which 'the web is used to facilitate the sharing of information in the service of an offline protest action.' Emobilization focuses specifically on how online communication tools are used to essentially mimic more traditional forms of protest mobilization--in particular, formal advertisements announcing time and date information. Here, Twitter essentially extends and magnifies the reach of earlier print-based promotional tools such as leaflets, fliers, and posters, getting word out about upcoming events rapidly and to a potentially broader audience" (79).

Twitter was also used to increase attendance and organize/propel events in progress. The protestors were able to communicate needs in real time. "This point draws attention to the increasing hybridity between online and offline spaces of protest engendered by mobile social media, and suggests how Earl and Kimport's (2011) concept of e-mobilization can be refined in order to account for recent technological and social developments" (80).

Live reporting from face-to-face protests (citizen journalism)

"smartphones allow attendees to become peer-to-peer citizen journalists, sharing updates, photos, and video of protests with worldwide audiences in real time...reports from in-progress actions served as an informal means of promoting attendance...live updates also could serve a practical function, particularly when documenting altercations with police...Because the Twitter infrastructure contains low barriers to accessing other people's online activity...new OWS participants and supporters may learn about the movement (and may even be compelled to join) by seeing a tweet such as Richard's: that is, one draws attention to the ongoing tension between protestors and the police" (80).

Live tweeting also helped to extend the meetings to people who weren't there. "Thus, the protesters' ability to use smartphones to document the movement's one-the-ground activities in real time contributed to an expanding role for citizen journalism, as live-tweeters could bridge the gap between online and offline spaces of engagement--as well as internal and external publics--in multiple ways" (81).

Retweeting information and incorporating links (second-hand circulation)

OWS protestors used retweeting to share news stories. "In many cases, respondents prefaced these links to mainstream news stories with introductory text in order to place the story in the context of OWS discourse. By writing new headlines, activists could not only help their followers quickly understand and easily index the articles, but also reframe the material in their own terms" (81).

The protestors also used retweeting to create alternative forms of new media. Reposts and retweets help to boost the movements notoriety. "The utility of this Twitter-enabled alternative news network to supplement or counter-act problematic mainstream press coverage was stressed by numerous respondents...By simply forwarding news about the protests and related issues in a peer-to-peer fashion, these Twitter users actively contributed to the growth of an OWS counter-public, expanding it beyond the boundaries of any one physical locale" (82).

Expressing personal views about the movement (editorial commentary)

Protestors used Twitter to both make recommendations to the movements and voice their concerns about what the movement was fighting against.

Engaging in discussion regarding the movement (online deliberation)

Participants noted that Twitter isn't a good platform for discussing the movement with detractors. "Scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition and elsewhere have addressed the limits of online deliberative dialogue, pointing out that characteristics such as anonymity and low barriers to entry/exit make dialogue between disagreeing parties challenging. The data from out study suggest that the same patterns often hold true for Twitter, although users continue to seek out this platform as a space for engaging in deliberative dialogue, despite frequent frustration" (83).

Making connections with fellow activists (strengthening ties)

Twitter helped strengthen the bonds between members of the movement. "By interacting informally with other like-minded activists, some respondents noted gaining a sense of community, solidarity, and group identity" (83).

"such building of social ties has long been recognized as an integral aspect of building social movements...reinforcing the activists' commitment to their own participation" (83)

"their experiences draw attention to how social media platforms blur the boundaries between the social and the political, contributing to community and solidarity-building which may serve as a pretext for more direct participation in protests. Thus, the important role of informal tie-building...should be included in our understanding of the multiple and complex ways in which digital platforms like Twitter are used in the service of protest movements" (84).

Facilitating online-based actions

Some used Twitter to protest, petition, and lobby politicians online. "Rather than existing in isolation, the multiple ways in which this social media tool was utilized in the service of the movement thus appeared to reinforce each other in a number of important respects" (84).

The overlapping nature of activist roles on Twitter

Protestors often mixed the aforementioned genres. They aren't mutually exclusive.

"tweets in the OWS counterpublic always serve multiple audiences and multiple purposes" (85).

"Finally, an important point to emphasize is the large degree of fluidity between composing original tweets and forwarding those written by others. For many respondents, their relay of pre-existing material appeared to be just as meaningful a form of participation as drafting original tweets...By including these forwarding activities as part of their online participation, these Twitter users worked to expand the circulation of information, building and sustaining the OWS counterpublic" (85).

Communicating in the horizontal crowd: the 140 character limit

"The centrality of circulating information in a peer-to-peer horizontal structure appeared to shape the composition of original messages to a large extent" (86). Users knew during composition that they needed to be succinct and that their messages should readily catch the attention fo the audience.

"The ability to have a tweet reposted by someone else means that rhetorically savvy users often compose with this potentiality in mind. In other words, users who utilize Twitter often compose with 'rhetorical velocity'...As Sheridan et al. explains, 'Thinking about rhetorical velocity includes...rhetorical concerns about what might motivate a third party to redistribute and/or recompose the text, or what might give the text future velocity'...they had to pay attention to how they could work within the constraints of the platform to enable future distribution" (85).

Most activist saw the 140 word limit as beneficial instead of constraining. "here Twitter was conceptualized as only one part of a much larger digital ecosystem that offered activists many different ways to communicate" (86). If people wanted a more expansive outlet, they would blog and then tweet a link to their blog. "Twitter should be understood as one part of a broader digital media effort of OWS which served a particular role" (86).

Within a horizontally organized movement, the "quick-moving, attention-grabbing, byte-sized communication" was beneficial. "With thousands of members needing to share information without a hierarchical communication structure...messages must be crafted for easy circulation and indexing. This privileges brevity over length, timeliness over reflectiveness, and an overall focus on piquancy in the service of grabbing the attention of a decentralized network. Thus, the concept of 'rhetorical velocity' helps to account for how horizontal protest movements like OWS capitalize on the affordances of Twitter to foster circulation and quickly build new counterpublics" (86). 

Concerns about Twitter as a platform for protest: restrictions and surveillance

Most protestors like Twitter but they also expressed concerns about "relying on an external, coporate-owned social media platform as the basis for these activities" (86-87). They also worried that its open-ended nature allowed law enforcement to keep tabs on the group. "the fact that they do not control the platform means that this freedom does indeed come with constraints" (87).

Twitter also seemed to tightly regulate what they would allow to trend as a hashtag.

Interestingly, Twitter acted as a platform to voice anger about censorship, which worked to help reduce censorship.

"a more pressing concern was how using Twitter made OWS activists vulnerable to government and police surveillance...Twitter can be forced by the courts to turn over records of tweets if they contain information pertinent to legal proceedings" (87).

"they perceived the potential solution to lie not in the avoidance of social media technologies but rather in their more careful and clever use" (88).

Conclusion

 "For protest movements such as OWS that adopt a non-hierarchical, horizontal structure as a matter of political and philosophical principle, Twitter's participatory and networked structure of circulation seems to hold particular importance, as its very form resonates with these broader organizational dynamics. This suggests that Twitter will continue to be embraced by such horizontal protest movements as a central locus of promotion, information-sharing, organizing, and community building in years to come" (89).

"Dependence on external platforms leaves protesters vulnerable to restrictions on their ability to communicate (including the possibility of politically motivated censorship), as well as to unwanted surveillance from authorities who have notably exercised the legal right to access digital records...the widespread reliance on commercial platforms such as Twitter means that such tensions will continure to be of concern for contemporary protest movements" (89).

"the opportunities to build widespread counterpublics across geographic boundaries presented by popular social media platforms also come with significant attending risk. When utilizing a digital architecture that they do not control, movements like OWS must continually navigate around the incursions of those who do in fact hold this control and may be potentially hostile to the goals of the movement. Indeed, the ongoing struggles between protesters and entities like Twitter over the right to freely compose and circulate texts on their own terms will likely shape the future development of online participation in protest movements to a large degree" (89).


 







A

Herbert W. Simons--"Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements"

Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed.

(1970)

"As any number of currently unemployed college presidents can attest, it is frequently impossible to separate detractors from supporters of a social movement, let alone to discern rhetorical intentions, to distinguish between rhetorical acts and coercive acts, or to estimate the effects of messages on the many audiences to which they must inevitably be addressed. Actions that may succeed with one audience...may alienate others. For similar reasons, actions that may seem productive over the short run may fail over the long run (the reverse is also true)" (35).

"Designed for microscopic analysis of particular speeches, the standard tools of rhetorical criticism are ill-suited for unravelling the complexity of discourse in social movements or for capturing its grand flow" (35).

"By enumerating rhetorical requirements, theory identifies the ends in light of which rhetorical strategies and tactics may be evaluated. By suggesting parameters and directions to the rhetorical critic, theory places him in a better position to bring his own sensitivity and imagination to bear on analyses of particular movements" (36).

***"This paper is aimed...at providing a leader-centered conception of persuasion in social movements. Rooted in sociological theory, it assumes that the rhetoric of a movement must follow, in  a general way, from the very nature of social movements. Any movement, it is argued, must fulfill the same functional requirements as more formal collectivities. These imperatives constitute rhetorical requirements for the leadership of a movement. Conflicts among requirements create rhetorical problems which in turn affect decisions on rhetorical strategy. The primary rhetorical test of the leader--and, indirectly, of the strategies he employs--is his capacity to fulfill the requirements of his movement by resolving or reducing rhetorical problems" (36).

His essay and theory serve only as a tool for "reformist and revolutionary movements," and should not be used to analyze/evaluate "labor unions, government agencies, business organizations" or anythings that is seen as a fad or boom.

Simons declares that leaders of social movements must meet a number of rhetorical requirements:

1. They must attract, maintain, and mold workers (i.e. followers) into an efficiently organized unity. "A hierarchy and division of labor must be established in which members are persuaded to take orders, to perform menial tasks, and to forego social pleasures. Funds must be raised, literature printed and distributed, local chapters organized, etc."
2. They must secure adoption of their product by the larger structure (i.e. the external system, the established order).
3. They must react to resistance generated by the larger structure. "The established order may be 'too kind' to the movement or it may be too restrictive. It may steal the movement's thunder by anticipating its demands and acting on some of them, by appointing a commission to 'study the problem,' or by bribing or coopting personnel. On the other hand, it may threaten, harass, or socially ostracize the membership, refuse to recognize or negotiate with the movement, or deny it access to the mass media" (37)

"Shorn of the controls that characterize formal organizations, yet required to perform the same internal functions, harassed from without, yet obligated to adapt to the external system, the leader of a social movement must constantly balance inherently conflicting demands on his position and on the movement he represents" (37).

"the disintegration of a movements may be traced to its failure to meet one or more of the demands incumbent upon it" (38).

"The use of violence and other questionable means may be prompted further by restrictions on legitimate avenues of expression, imposed by the larger structure...A vicious cycle develops in which militant tactics invite further suppression, which spurs the movement on to more extreme methods" (38).

"The leader may also need to distort, conceal, exaggerate, etc., in addressing his own supporters...mass support is more apt to be secured when ideological statements are presented as 'generalized beliefs,' over-simplified conceptions of social problems, and magical, 'if-only' beliefs about solutions. Statements of ideology must provide definition of that which is ambiguous in the social situation, give structure to anxiety and a tangible target for hostility, foster in-group feelings, and articulate wish-fulfillment beliefs about the movements power to succeed. Hence the use of 'god words' and 'devil words' as well as 'stereotypes, smooth and graphic phrases and folk arguments (38).

"Yet morale cannot be secured through abdications of leadership...The problem is especially acute in movements that distrust authority and value participatory democracy" (39).

"The leader must appear to be what he cannot be...he must handle dilemmas with consummate manipulative skill" (39).

"The leader must adapt to several audiences simultaneously. In an age of mass media, rhetorical utterances addressed to one audience are likely to reach others" (39).

"Movements require a diversity of leadership types" (39).

"How he adapts strategies to demands constitutes a primary basis for evaluating his rhetorical output...from the sweet and reasonable to the violently revolutionary, one may identify moderate, intermediate, and militant types" (40).

Rhetorical Strategies

--moderates 

The moderate uses "the strategies of peaceful persuasion rhetoricians know best and characteristically prescribe...inveighs against social norms but always in the value language of the social order...In textbook terms, the moderate adapts to the listener's needs, wants, and values; speaks his language, adjusts to his frame of reference; reduces the psychological distance between his movement and the larger structure" (40).

--militants

"militants act on the assumption of a fundamental clash of interests...militants use rhetoric as an expression, an instrument, and an act of force...it strains the imagination to believe that both may work...the decisive changes wrought by militant rhetorics in recent years gives credence to the view that the traditionally prescribed pattern is not the only viable alternative...The core tactic of militant strategists is that they seek to change the actions of their primary targets as a precondition for changes in attitudes...Although the aim of pressure tactics may be to punish directly (e.g. strikes, boycotts), more frequently they are forms of 'body rhetoric,' designed to dramatize issues, enlist additional sympathizers, and delegitimatize the established order" (40).

"So the leader of a social movement may attempt to avoid or resolve the aforementioned dilemmas by employing 'intermediate' strategies, admittedly a catchall term for those efforts that combine militant and moderate patterns of influence" (42)

1. "Militant tactics confer visibility on a movement; moderate tactics gain entry into decision centers."
2. "militants and moderates must both be ambivalent about 'successes' and 'failures'
3. "Militant supporters are easily energized; moderate supporters are more easily controlled"
4. Militants are effective with 'power-vulnerables'; moderates are effective with 'power-invulnerables'; neither is effective with both
1. vulnerable-people who may be removed from power positions based on negative press or moods from the masses
2. invulnerable-"those who have little or nothing to lose by publicly voicing their prejudices and acting on their self-concerns"

"Truly the exemplar of oxymoronic postures, he may stand as a 'conservative radical' or a 'radical conservative,' espousing militant demands in the value language of the established order or militant slogans in behalf of moderate proposals

"Intermediacy can be a dangerous game. Calculated to energize supporters, win over neutrals, pressure power-vulnerables, and mollify the opposition, it may end up antagonizing everyone. The well-turned  phrase may easily appear as a devilish trick, the rationale as a rationalization, the tactful comment as an artless dodge. To the extent that strategies of intermediacy require studied ambiguity, insincerity, and even distortion, perhaps the leader's greatest danger is that others may find out what he really thinks" (42).

"The great leaders (and the great movements) seem capable of combining these seemingly antithetical strategies without inconsistency by justifying their use with appeals to higher principles" (43).
A

Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith--"The Rhetoric of Confrontation"

Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed.

(1969)

"But primary to every confrontation in any setting, radical or moderate, is the impulse to confront. From what roots does that impulse spring" (28).

"Rather the 'have nots' picture themselves as radically divided form traditional society, questioning not simply the limitations of its benevolence but more fundamentally its purposes and modes of operation" (29).

"Those who rule and take the fruit of the system  as their due create an equation that identifies themselves with the force of good (order, civilization, progress) which struggles with evil (chaos, the primitive, retrogression). In such a circumstance, established authority often crusades to eliminate the vessels of evil by direct action; but often its leader work benignly and energetically to transform the others into worthy copies of themselves...during which time the mass of the others must be carefully held apart to keep them from contaminating the system...Reversing the equation will deny the justice of the system that has dehumanized them" (30).

"Michael Novak, a Standford University professor, pictures student disruption as a tactic to remove the mask of respectability worn by the establishment and kept in place both by the centralized control of communication processes and the traditional canons of free speech" (31).

"Finally, one should observe the possible use of confrontation as a tactic for achieving attention and an importance not readily attainable through decorum...Without doubt, for many the act of confrontation itself, the march, the sit-in, or altercation with the police is enough. It is consummatory. Through it the radical acts out his drama of self-assertion and writes in smeary, wordless language all over the establishment, 'we know you for what you are. And you know that we know'" (33).

The rhetoric of confrontation is"inherently symbolic" and "carries a message. It dissolves the lines between marches, sit-ins, demonstrations, acts of physical violence, and aggressive discourse. In this way it informs us of the essential nature of discourse itself as human action" (33). 

Confrontational rhetoric is at odds with the Aristotelian ideal of rhetoric "as an instrument of established society, presupposing the 'goods' of order, civility, reason, decorum, and civil or theocratic law...Even if the presuppositions of civility and rationality underlying the old rhetoric are sound, they can no longer be treated as self-evident. A rhetorical theory suitable to our age must take into account the charge that civility and decorum serve as masks for the preservation of injustice, that they condemn the dispossessed to non-being, and that as transmitted in a technological society they become the instrumentalities of power for those who 'have'" (33).

"Those who would confront have learned a brutal art, practiced sometimes awkwardly and sometimes skillfully, which demands response. But that art may provoke the response that confirms its presuppositions, gratifies the adherents of those presuppositions , and turns the power-enforced victory of the establishment into a symbolic victory for its opponents" (34).

Franklyn S. Haiman: "Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations"

Franklyn S. Haiman: "Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations" Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed.

(1967)

"But when one finds those who profess neutrality or friendship toward the goals of the dissenters also expressing doubt about the methods they employ, it is time to attempt a serious assessment of the situation...many objective observers of the contemporary 'rhetoric' of the streets do have misgivings about its propriety and even its legality" (14).

Haiman includes social protest within the bounds of rhetoric by applying Aristotle's view that rhetoric means "all the available means of persuasion."

Haiman notes that the "new" methods move away from picketing and mass rallies toward sit-ins, boycotts, marches in new areas (all white neighborhoods), going limp when being arrested, etc. They seem to be placed in time as new developments on voicing social unrest.

The following are challenges to the then new rhetoric of the streets: massive rallies, marches, sit-ins, going limp while being arrested, picketing specific targets, disrupting the peace, etc.

"The first line of criticism asserts that insofar as the contemporary rhetoric of the streets violates the law it produces a climate of anarchy from which, in the end, no one can gain" (15). This is equated to taking the law into one's own hands. Civil disobedience under this criticism is still not condoned because it circumvents the "legal channels" for grievance.

"A second category of criticism is directed at those aspects of the new rhetoric, admittedly legal and even appropriate under some circumstances, but alleged to violate the proposition that, in an orderly society, there must be prescribed times, places, and manners for protest...they argue that protest is not justified if it constitutes an invasion of the privacy of others" (15). Essentially, this criticism holds that demonstrations which disrupt the quiet of one's private space is unacceptable. It should not inconvenience others.

"The third category of criticism...is the proposition that the new rhetoric exceeds the bounds of rational discourse which teachers of rhetoric value so highly and are dedicated to promote; that the new rhetoric is 'persuasion' by a strategy of power and coercion rather than by reason and democratic decision-making" (16). Leland Griffin termed calls this type of rhetoric "body rhetoric," which denotes the weight of presence and force of weight to exact change. "To such critics the intention of the marchers seems not to be simply to communicate grievances, but to throw the city into such chaos that it will be forced to meet their demands" (16-17). Those who take-up this third criticism also believe the protests are too pathos driven.

------

The criticisms raise two questions: Is it legal under the 1st Amendment? If so, is it ethical?

Defense of new street rhetoric:

"one must concede that such activity does have an undermining effect on established authority and tends toward an anarchic social climate...if he breaks the law he should be punished...I would not some important qualifications often overlooked (17).

Practitioners of civil disobedience recognize the unlawfulness of the act, "but they are willing to pay whatever penalties the civil law may exact in order to obey what they regard as a higher law" (religion/conscience). (17-18).

"One can admire the courage and sympathize with the goals and still recognize, as they do, that thye must be punished for their actions" (18).

"Indeed, a riot is not civil disobedience at all, and rioters are usually an entirely different group of people from the kind who engage in conscientious disobedience" (18).

"Can anything be said in defense of Watts and of angry voices in the streets which sometimes seem to be calling for violence?...But should we not be somewhat troubled by the awareness that, despite the destruction to property, despite the loss of lives, despite the backlash of public opinion, these outbreaks have precipitated significant reforms that previously had been notably slow in coming? It would seem that even the 'rhetoric of the riot," mindless and indiscriminate  as it may be, has its positive function in contemporary America...if the channels for peaceful protest and reform become so clogged that they appear to be (and, in fact, may be) inaccessible to some segments of the population, then the Jeffersonian doctrine that 'the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants' may become more appropriate to the situation than more civilized rules of the game" (18-19).

"The real questions in this area are not questions about the correctness of the principle, but rather about the reasonableness and equity of its applications to particular conflict situations" (19).

"Innocent Bystander Theory"

"Thus it is arguable that on issues such as civil rights and the Vietnam war there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Every citizen who supports the status quo, either actively or by passive acquiescence, is a legitimate target for the communications of the dissenter" (19).

"Right to Privacy"

"The question, I think, is what price a society is willing to pay to insure that the messages of minority groups are not screened out of the consciences of those to whom they are addressed. For once the principle is invoked that listeners may be granted some immunity from messages they think they would rather not hear, or which cause them annoyance, a Pandora's box of circumstances is opened in which the right of free speech could be effectively nullified" (20).

"Closely related to the right-to-privacy and innocent-bystander arguments is the assertion that the contemporary rhetoric of the streets sometimes creates inconvenience for other persons" (20-21). Haiman goes on to compare the inconvenience caused by other parades, which happen without an innocent bystander argument, as a means of defending the "inconvenience" of protests" (21).

"The category of criticism of contemporary protest movements  which asserts that their rhetoric exceeds the bounds of rational discourse must, finally, be addressed. The first charge here was the the 'body rhetoric' employed is a physically coercive tactic which has little to do with the exercise of freedom of speech" (24).

"The change has been wrought by the hostile audience which, rather than contenting itself to stay at home and ignore the demonstrators, chooses to go out on the streets to confront them. There is nothing inherently coercive about one dissenter, or one hundred, or one thousand, walking peaceably down the street...their activity is endowed with coercive potential only if others go forth to do battle with them, or feel too guilty and fearful to leave them alone" (25).

In Cox vs. Louisiana the Supreme Court ruled that "conduct" and "pure speech" are different and therefore awarded different protections under the First Amendment.

This decision was met with much criticism: Justice John Harlan (1961) concerning his decision to overturn sit-in convictions (body rhetoric) "Such a demonstration in the circumstances...is as much a part of the free trade in ideas...as is verbal expression more commonly thought of as speech. It, like speech, appeals to good sense and to the power of reason as applied through public discussion...just as much as, if not more than, a public oration delivered from a soapbox at a street corner" (25-26).

Concerning "body rhetoric," "let me indicate an important qualification. One would have to be naive to believe that the leaders of contemporary protest groups are unaware of the power potential in their demonstrations (even if that power is conferred upon them by the fearful or hostile audience) or that they are unwilling to exploit such situations to their own advantage...Such tactics are certainly no part of rational discourse, although they may establish the preconditions for it" (26).

"Their only justification, in my view, is that the norms of the democratic process may be inapplicable to the situations in which these strategies are employed" (26). Essentially, he's arguing that when the balances of power are so one-sided, body rhetoric protest movements that shake the common idea of ethical and rational discourse serve as a means to renegotiate the balance of power. He quotes Dean C. Barnlund and his article The Dynamics of Discussion: "When one person or a few people in a group or society possess all the guns, muscles, or money, and the others are relatively weak and helpless, optimum conditions do not exist for discussion, mutual influence, and democracy. Discussion in such circumstances occurs only at the sufferance of the powerful; and generous as these persons may sometimes be, they are not likely voluntary to abdicate their power when vital interests are at stake...The most solid and enduring basis for democracy exists when the participants possess relative equality of power. Discussion is assured only when those desiring discussion--usually those who are dissatisfied with the present state of affairs--have sufficient power to make those in control of the situation listen to them" (26).

"Perhaps the best one can do is to avoid the blithe presumption that the channels of rational communication are open to any and all who wish to make use of them and attempt, instead, a careful assessment of the power structure of the situation. To whatever extent one finds an imbalance of power and a concomitant unwillingness on the part of the holders of power to engage in genuine dialogue, he may be less harsh in his judgment of those who seek to redress the balance through non-rational strategies of persuasion...we will not attain those conditions by closing out eyes to the realities of the world about us and condemning out of the hand the contemporary rhetoric of the streets" (27).




"

Nancy Welch--Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Post-Publicity Era

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Feb., 2005), pp. 470-492

"In this essay I argue that from twentieth-century working-class struggles in the U.S. we and our students can acquire the tools necessary to work against this latest wave of economic privatizations and concomitant suppression of public voice and rights. If we can resist the common academic assertion that we live today in a radically distinct postmodern, postindustrial society, we can return to capitalism's long history for examples of the creative and persistent ways in which ordinary people have organized to claim living room" (470).

Arresting Moments

"While postmodernism might train us to look askance at 'right discourse' as a sign of vestigial liberal humanism, the question of whether we have First and Fourth Amendment protections, especially in out increasingly privatized, 'quality-of-life'-zoned downtowns, is for from passe" (473).

"This essay chronicles my efforts, albeit not always successful and complete, to learn the history and name the tools that students in a public writing classroom need not only to imagine and build rhetorical space but also to anticipate and think through the discursive and extradiscursive obstacles they'll face in attempting to do so" (474).

"I want to address two interrelated silences in our current literature on public writing and public sphere theory. First is the silence regarding the steady conversion of public spaces and resources into private, for-profit property...that has only intensified under the guise of reinforcing 'national security'" (474).

"we must also examine the twentieth century's contradictory legacy: on the one hand, the free-speech battles and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that have liberalized out speech and assembly rights; on the other, the economic and social policies known as neoliberalism that have greatly reduced the locations in which we are able to exercise these rights...sum up our current moment as 'post-publicity'" (474-75).

Speaking on neoliberalism and the reduction of public spaces for discourse, Welch writes that "we can also see it as a return to pre-New Deal arrangements between bosses and workers, the welfare state returned to its former status of watchdog state, positioned to preserve and protect the interests of a propertied minority" (475).

"As we face heavily regulated, restricted-access public spaces, we need this history to give us clues about working with others to create rhetorical space while anticipating the resistance that comes...even from the slightest challenge" (474).

Class Actions

"I'd like us to consider that the difficulties, stakes, and tactics of public-sphere building are very much a matter of class location...Yet it's also because of the difficulty in going public that public writing advocates underscore remarkable rewards: the reward of 'animated, engaged, and at times feverishly pitched discussion about the ways that students use their discursive talents to make voices heard' the reward of student projects leading to substantive action beyond the classroom, action that returns to bolster a teacher's belief that one really can 'teach for change'" (474).

 "Class discussion needs also to focus...on the policed boundary between permitted and prohibited acts of speech and protest: A third classmate faced possible academic sanctions for her decision to go public by hoisting an antiwar flag on the campus green without first applying for a permit and also without seeking permission to remove the American flag that had been flying there....I'm disturbed by how frequently students felt...that going public means going it alone" (475-76).

"But what these moments from that semester also tell me is that rhetorical space--that is, public space with the potential to operate as a persuasive public sphere--is created not through well-intentioned civic planning or through the application of a few sound a reasonable rhetorical rules of conduct. Ordinary people make rhetorical rules of conduct. Ordinary people make rhetorical space through concerted, often protracted struggle for visibility, voice, and impact against powerful interests that seek to deny visibility, voice and impact. People take and make space in acts that are simultaneously verbal and physical...we rarely do so under conditions of our own choosing"  (476).

 "A discussion with students about delivery including naming the varying goals of a public argument, including the potential goal of deepening one's commitment to a position even if an immediate audience...isn't likely to be swayed" (476).

Welch writes about what happens when she brings in counter-rhetorics and narratives that exist below the mass consumption discourse. She says that doing so isn't about equity. Instead, she acknowledges how they "create palpable tension between individual and mass, legislative and extralegislative, and ruling class and working-class argumentative forums and forms. 'Ruling class' (to describe the group controlling the means of production plus the social apparatus needed to legitimize and reproduce control) and 'working class' (to describe the group that must sell its physical or mental labor power for a wage or salary on which to live) aren't words we're accustomed to uttering...The case needs to be made for understanding class as determined not by income or lifestyle but by one's available means for safeguarding terms and conditions of work, one's available means for shaping or contesting public policy" (478-79).

"Or, to put it another way, the twentieth century's major First Amendment findings have liberalized speech in both meanings of the word: they have codified the expansion of a sphere of personal liberty for thought, association, assembly, and expression; they have also, in the tradition of classical liberalism, reinforced the role of the state in protecting the rights of capital"

"When we introduce class location to our discussions and assessments of public-sphere creation and rhetorical performance, we not only make it possible for our students to consider the need for striking workers and civil rights-era activists to engage in such tactics as factory takeovers and luch-counter sit-ins; we also facilitate critical assessment of the view...that such strategies are disorderly and uncivil, 'inconsistent,' as the Taft Court put, 'with peaceable persuasion.' We also open up for needed questioning twentieth-century rhetorical principles--about cooperation and consensus, about bridge building and mediation--that we may otherwise uncritically advance" (489-81).

Who's Afraid of the Working Class?

"The Habermasian coffeehouse must likewise be situated in its historical context of a new capitalist class seeking to fortify its gains from the demands of increasingly urbanized and organized masses. Little discussed in out literature, however, is what is arguable most pervasive in U.S. society: the liberal conception of the public sphere that shudders at the though of even limited middle-class Habermasian contestation" (481).

"Civility and order are liberalism's godterms, and while civility and orderliness, even humane approaches to the potential chaos of public (and academic) life, these terms, taken as moral imperatives can eliminate contestation from public life altogether, and along with it, the means to take on a society's most pressing issues and glaring inequalities...Of concern to teachers and students of rhetoric, too, should be how liberalism operates to privatize social and economic injustice as an exercise of choice...in a realm deemed properly free from full public debate and democratic vote" (482).

"We face an additional impediment to recognizing working-class rhetorical action as well: the construction of critical theory (and increasingly rhetorical theory) as an autonomous field, as a history of ideas and debates--"conversations"--largely divorced both from the larger history shaping or urging a particular set of ideas and from contexts in which such ideas might be tests...The ennui...with which actual involvement is regarded has a spefic history...in...the defeat of the May-June 1968 revolution in France...that defeat appeared as confirmation that Marx had erred in positing the working class as capitalism's gravediggers--as, that is, not only the victims of history but also potentially its agents" (483).

"Today, this post-1968 disillusionment, minus its historical basis, is codified in critical theories that replace mass action and workers' power...with classless 'culture workers' as the instigators of, at most, local and contingent change...without considering that most people don't have the autonomy to choose alternative over capitalist arrangements and that the decisions impacting us most profoundly...are not locally made" (484).

"Yet I'm concerned that when, as Giroux puts it, 'agency gets reduced to making lifestyle decisions [and] wise consumer choices,' such attempts at public participation will quickly appear to these students as sadly inconsequential" (485).

"It's here too that we need to introduce the history--and the very concept--of working-class power, not as a theoretical construct...and not as a musty anachronism...but as something with here-and-now significance for us and for our students" (485).

Lesson Learned