No More Learning

The
Public Work of Rhetoric
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication
Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
? ? ? The
Public Work of Rhetoric
Citizen-Scholars
and Civic Engagement
? ? ? ? edited by John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan foreword by Gerard A. Hauser
The University of South Carolina Press
? (C) 2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Paperback and ebook editions published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www. sc. edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
The public work of rhetoric : citizen-scholars and civic engagement / edited by John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan.
p. cm. -- (Studies in rhetoric/communication) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57003-931-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Rhetoric--Political aspects. 2. Language and languages--Political aspects. 3. Political oratory. I. Ackerman, John, 1934- II. Coogan, David.
P301. 5. P67P83 2010 320. 01'4--dc22
2010014494
ISBN: 978-1-61117-303-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-61117-304-8 (ebook)
Contents
List of Illustrations vii Foreword ix
Gerard A. Hauser
Series Editor's Preface xiii
Thomas W. Benson
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: The Space to Work in Public Life 1
David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
[ part 1 ] Rhetoric Revealed
Should We Name the Tools? Concealing and Revealing the Art of Rhetoric 19
Carolyn R. Miller
Power, Publics, and the Rhetorical Uses of Democracy 39 Candice Rai
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 56 M. Lane Bruner
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 76 John M. Ackerman
Democracy and Its Limitations 98 Ralph Cintron
[ part 2 ] Rhetorical Interventions
Rhetorical Engagements in the Scientist's Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 119
Celeste M. Condit
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 137 Linda Flower
Sophists for Social Change 157 David J. Coogan
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation: The Pedagogy of Engaging Publics in a Praxis of New Media 175
Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
vi Contents
On Being Useful: Rhetoric and the Work of Engagement 193
Jeffrey T. Grabill
[ part 3 ] Remaking Rhetoric in Universities and Publics Finding a Place for School in Rhetoric's Public Turn 211
David Fleming
Mediating Differences 229
Erik Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller
A Place for the Dissident Press in a Rhetorical Education: "Sending up a signal flare in the darkness" 247
Diana George and Paula Mathieu
The Community Literacy Advocacy Project: Civic Revival through Rhetorical Activity in Rural Arkansas 267
David A. Jolliffe
The Prospects for the Public Work of Rhetoric: A Coda on Codes 283 Susan C. Jarratt
Contributors 297 Index 301
Illustrations
Cartoon by Alex Gregory 22
Cartoon by Peter Steiner 30
City plans and artifacts 88
"Where I'm From to Where I'm Going" 168
The Allotment Era in Cherokee History, opening for Cherokee
Nation Web site 175
A community map of "Harbor" 198
Infrastructure supporting the writing of a document 202
Foreword
Gerard A. Hauser
This volume on the public work of rhetoric addresses a topic that transcends disciplinary interests. Its essays address the question of how we may bring the study of rhetoric into relationship with the lived practices of our students and ourselves as community members. Through lively and intelligent discussion, it challenges the orthodoxies that stereotype rhetoric and composition offer- ings as service courses necessary to meet the needs of students to write clear academic arguments. Of course they do that, but these essays point to local communites as places where we as citizen-scholars also encounter and address myriad issues that make life as a citizen and neighbor both challenging and rewarding. For these authors, rhetoric's public work is the constitution of pub- lic life as we know it in a democracy.
The content of this collection is timely in light of the mounting concern and sense of urgency that occurred within the U. S. academic community dur- ing the George W. Bush administration. Concern arose from the apparent success of a politics of fear; a growing disparity of wealth that resembles that of 1929; attention to cultural issues over those that impact the economic and social well-being of most citizens; prosecution of a war against terror that seems endless and unwinnable because its enemy is a technique; a political agenda geared to protect a base grounded in religious faith; a Supreme Court that is perilously close to an unbreakable conservative majority that may be in place for a decade or more and appears committed to the Bush doctrine of the unitary executive, which invests the president with the right to wage undeclared wars, establish military tribunals, authorize extraordinary rendi- tions, withhold evidence from the accused, conduct domestic surveillance, expand the use of presidential "signing statements" by which the president indicates how he will interpret the law he signs under his authority to inter- pret the law in question "in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch"; and a growing division of the nation into blue and red states reflected in extremism of elected repre- sentatives whose commitments to political orthodoxy have precluded com- promises of bipartisanship in favor of ideological victory that often results in gridlock.
The ignition switch for urgency was the evident dire consequences rapidly approaching if these concerns remain untended: climate change that appears
x Gerard A. Hauser
to leave less than a decade to reverse current trends in the use of fossil fuels before we pass the point of no return; a doctrine on war that discards the Powell doctrine--before the nation wages war it must have a massive force, a clear objective, and an exit strategy--and replaces it with the Petreus doctrine--political destabilization anywhere constitutes a threat to the United States that must be met with military force, which commits the United States to war anywhere all the time; political polarization bred from fear of the other, which has resulted in the loss of tolerance necessary for political dia- logue and branded those who disagree as unpatriotic and thus fair game for "official" witch hunts and misbegotten violence; a financial meltdown that has resulted in losses to every citizen in some way--loss of jobs, homes, retire- ment; the absence of viable arenas for ordinary citizens to participate in a dia- logue about their interests and influence public policy with more than their vote and of rhetorical skills to participate effectively were they available.
The academic community has responded with a call for a new politics that replaces the self-centered brand of "what's in it for me" with one more con- cerned about "what's best for us. " At the level of theory, political scientists have addressed these matters through a growing challenge to the prevailing model of rational choice--a model borrowed from economics based on how to maximize personal gain. This challenge is best reflected in the growing lit- erature on deliberative democracy. It is a voluminous and impressive body of work by some of the most distinguished political theorists of our age. Most of it finds its inspiration in the work of Ju? rgen Habermas, whose The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (trans. Fredrick Lawrence, 1962; repr. 1989) advanced a theory of communicative action as the foundation for the nor- mative ideal of a politics based on critical rational consensus. Although most of the deliberative democracy literature takes exception with Habermas's for- mulation of the bourgeois public sphere as prototypical for contemporary Western democracies, it remains committed to some formulation of rational consensus as the goal of deliberation. Moreover their accounts, for the most part, have remained theoretical explorations that have paid only lip service to democracy as it is lived.
To the credit of feminist scholars, under the inspiration of Nancy Fraser, Habermas's assumptions have been challenged in both theory and praxis (see Fraser's "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 1992). Among its more problematic ones are: the exclusion- ary bias in Habermas's norm of rationality, since it assumed there was but one form; his model of the bourgeois public sphere, since it did not include mar- ginalized voices; and his purely theoretical account of democracy in need of rehabilitation through an account in tune with how it is actually lived, which must include the subaltern spheres of those without access to official spheres of power.
To the credit of rhetoricians, they have both rethought the formulations of Habermas in terms of the realities of lived democracy, which are reflected in and constituted by its rhetoric, and executed specific critical studies that have shown how the realities of democracy have been manifest in politics as it is actually lived. Rhetoricians adhering to the disciplinary vision reflected by the Rhetoric Society of America--a vision that is inclusive of rhetoric's multiple traditions found in communication, English, rhetoric, and compo- sition, and reflected in the work of rhetorically inclined scholars in anthro- pology, economics, law, mass media, the natural sciences, philosophy, political science, and sociology--have been the leading voices in developing a matur- ing theory of publics and public spheres as rhetorical all the way down. Rhet- oricians have been in the vanguard in theorizing publics and public spheres as constructed rather than given. They have developed the idea and shown through critical studies that publics are multiple and changing, that they are found in rhetorical performances more than opinion polls, and that they in- clude diverse voices, which makes them more than a demographic. Rhetori- cians have led the way in exploring the idea that there are a plurality of public spheres, that while some are official, mostly they are constituted rhetorically; that counterpublic spheres are a rich source for studying how marginalized groups constitute arenas of discourse in which they can address issues of iden- tity, establish action agendas, forge group solidarity, and challenge authority; and that public spheres are elastic in what and who they accommodate, that their borders have varying permeability, and their life spans are tied to con- tingencies of issues, publics, and adaptability to changing circumstances.
This being said, the concerns and urgency that mounted within U. S. aca- demic circles, among others, during the first decade of the twenty-first century found expression among the general citizenry in the presidential election of 2008. Barack Obama's victory expressed a desire for change and a politics of hope based in bipartisan deliberation. The problems of self-interest and pseudo-deliberation that have drawn the attention of academicians to the character of publics and public spheres and the voice of the people in choos- ing a president espousing a new politics echo the long-noted but not-so-effec- tively addressed need of capacitating citizens to address present discontents and become effective change agents in their communities. It is a common- place at least since Dewey in the contemporary American context, although it has been recognized in the Western tradition since the Sophists, that edu- cation is critical to the development of a well-functioning polity and that art- ful, skillful oratory, and later writing, is essential toward that end.
The public problems of facing citizens of democratic states require the participation and collaboration of citizens in making decisions about com- plex problems that often require technical knowledge. If ordinary citizens are to be included in this process, as a society we require rhetors who can negoti- ate and translate technical problems to intelligent but less technically trained
Foreword xi
xii Gerard A. Hauser
audiences. This need has received little attention. Public speaking is often absent from secondary school curricula in the United States, and not always required at the collegiate level. Required rhetoric courses in public speaking and writing are often the only exposure most students receive to those skills necessary for them to function as effective change agents. In these required courses, as well as in courses that emphasize writing within the discipline, the main attention usually is on the demands of academic writing over the needs of our communities, which need future civic leaders who are both informed and capable.
The essays in this collection report lively, inventive, intelligent, and en- gaged responses to the Republic's need for capacitated citizens. They offer impressive studies of how we enter into public problems in our communi- ties, how rhetoric has constituted counterpublics among the underclass, how rhetoric's performative power can serve liberatory ends, how the community can be an invaluable resource for the civic education of our students. It is the place where democracy comes alive in the rhetorical practices of the students and those outside the university whom they engage. The work reported in this volume is noble and important not only for rhetoric studies, not only for rhetoric and composition pedagogy, but as a vision of what higher education might aspire to that goes beyond preparing students to earn a living. They are models of how we might prepare them to make a difference.
Series Editor's Preface
Thomas W. Benson
In The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, editors John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan bring together rhetorical scholars from the fields of English and communication to explore how academic rhetoricians have extended their work into the public realm beyond the uni- versity and how they have reshaped their classrooms to bring a sense of pub- lic life into the school. The authors offer searching theoretical considerations of what is at stake in the study and practice of rhetoric in public life. These accounts are strongly couched in a discourse of responsibility and enthusiasm for progressive change, and yet they are severely reflective and self-critical-- the writers do not let themselves surrender to mere wishful thinking. The cur- rently fashionable term "civic engagement" is itself subjected to a searching rhetorical criticism.
For some of these authors, stepping into the material world outside the university is prompted by high idealism and a search for freedom, inclusion, and equality. Some of the other authors find their rhetorical ideals usefully chastened by the intractability of the public world, in which interests, ideas, and ambitions compete for dominance.
The Public Work of Rhetoric is rich with theoretical and historical consider- ations of academic rhetoric and the rhetoric of the public realm, and it pro- vides a series of reflexive case studies of rhetorical scholars doing public work in a variety of locations, including the street, the technical and professional world, and the Internet.
Acknowledgments
This book began in conversation at the Alliance for Rhetoric Societies meet- ing at Northwestern University in 2003, where the authors first met and the idea of a collaborative book on rhetorical engagement as public work took flight. Our subsequent collaboration over the years has extended and deep- ened that conversation, allowing each of us ample opportunity to talk and lis- ten, to lead and support, to work side by side as equals shouldering the load of building a book with so many moving parts. This book has two authors of equal standing as editors, contributors, and colleagues.
David wishes to thank the Department of English and the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University for funding travel to meetings of the Rhetoric Society of America and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. This was where this manuscript took shape--in panel presentations that grew into essays; in face-to-face meet- ings about those essays. He would especially like to thank Susan Jarratt for several critical readings of his essay.
John thanks Marlia Banning for her guidance and support throughout this project and for introducing the editors to Candice Rai. He thanks the Depart- ment of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder for a "Reap- ing and Sowing" grant. This generous subvention afforded the authors the editorial and critical skills of Katie Cruger, doctoral student par excellence. The department also provided an intranet site to post our drafts. John's writing and editing were inspired by numerous colleagues, most notably Larry Frey and Jerry Hauser, both of whom provided guidance in developing and editing this collection.
John also thanks the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Calderwood Family Foundation account for sponsoring David's trip to Boulder and John's trip to Richmond, Virginia, and Linda Nicita for expertly making the arrange- ments for these visits. The Kent State University (KSU) Research Council pro- vided initial funding for travel and research in fall, 2003. He thanks the city of Kent, Ohio; David Ruller, the Kent city manager; the May 4 Democracy Symposium; and the KSU May 4 Collection for assistance with the research supporting his essay.
Both authors want to thank the series editor for the University of South Carolina Press's Studies in Rhetoric/Communication, Thomas Benson; our acquisitions editor, Jim Denton; and the review board--all for having faith in this book.
xvi Acknowledgments
Foremost we wish to thank our contributors who have weathered the many cycles of this project. We hope that our readers come to know these people as we do--as friends, as collaborators, as sponsors, as scholars, and as public advocates. And, finally, no book of ours on publics and rhetoric would exist without our many friends and associates in public life who taught us the meaning of paideia.
? Introduction
The Space to Work in Public Life
David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
This collection illustrates how rhetoric is in the midst of discovering anew its usefulness. We live and work in times of economic confusion and injustice, of geopolitical strife and war, and of global environmental endangerment. We live and work, also, in times of renewed hope with emerging commit- ments in many quarters to democratic inclusion and to community engage- ment toward economic renewal. Our new president has asked all citizens to find ways to serve and thus to integrate our academic labor and our occasions for service into the fabric of our universities and communities, which them- selves are caught up in moments of innovation and reflection that respond to shifts in regional economics and global uncertainty. 1 The discourse of ser- vice and civic engagement is on the rise at our colleges and universities as policies and practices that identify service learning, the scholarship of engage- ment, community outreach, public consultancy, and public intellectualism as the work before us to do. Yet these locutions as material locations are relatively nascent in our own talk about our home discipline and its place in the world. The premise upon which this book rests is that these locations and practices are vital to rhetoric's ongoing efforts to renew itself and to demonstrate our relevance locally and for a changing world.
As the contributors to this volume illustrate, to study and practice rheto- ric "out there" is to embody the role of the rhetor by tapping into new streams of disciplinary life through an embodied practice that is guided by a critical reflexivity and community affiliation. To do rhetoric "out there" re- quires a shedding of academic adornments, a different professional disposi- tion, new participatory and analytic tools, and a more grounded conception of public need. The Public Work of Rhetoric, we argue, is not shaped in our treatises and classrooms alone but in the material and discursive histories of communities outside of academe. These communities can benefit from the in- creased attention of rhetoricians in pursuit of democratic ideals, but rhetoric
2 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
can also benefit from community partnerships premised on a negotiated search for the common good--from a collective labor to shape the future through rhetoric in ways that are mutually empowering and socially responsible.
Clearly there is work to be done both in rhetoric as it manifests in com- munication and in English if we are to rehabilitate the discipline for this civic role. Though "the public" remains a generative launching pad for scholarly studies in communication, for the general public doing rhetoric is akin to menacing our fellow citizens with lies and misdirection. In English, where rhetoric and composition are often paired, the public is often imagined as a landing pad for students, a literate place, where they can test what we have taught them with imaginary audiences. What this suggests to us is that our disciplinary achievements have not been earned through everyday contact with publics, but through a hard-earned insularity from them. We have grown strong in academe by becoming answerable to ourselves and to our institu- tions by putting publics, with their misunderstandings about manipulation and illiteracy, in their place. A closer look at our shared history with publics-- those moments that arguably precede a turn toward community engagement --suggests that we have been haunted by the prospect of uselessness. In 1978 Michael Leff described it as a nagging irony of "pure abstraction" in a litera- ture that "keeps insisting that rhetoric is a practical discipline. "2 And in 1997 Dilip Gaonkar noted, in a withering and wicked assessment, that "we place (somewhat frantically these days) things under the sign of rhetoric more to make rhetoric intelligible than the things subsumed under it. "3 Susan Miller questioned if an art form oriented to the great man speaking on a great sub- ject was even a suitable tradition to understand technologies of writing and the emergent subjectivity of the student writer. 4 These concerns with too much abstraction, with a globalized Big Rhetoric, or with the seemingly irrec- oncilable differences between speech and writing, rhetoric and literacy--these are just a few of the twists and turns in our collective story of disciplinary achievement and anxiety, as many have said before us.
The historical trajectory of these differences is well documented, and we do not mean to minimize differences in theoretical orientation, disciplinary history, or pedagogical priorities. Participatory democracy, however, tends not to care. While it remains true that most people, most of the time, in com- munities near and far, only know rhetoric through its most derogatory inflec- tions, the enactment of rhetoric in public life is nondenominational; all is forgiven when we seek answers to their questions before ours, whenever and wherever scholars of rhetoric "dirty their hands in actual controversy," as Wayne Booth proposed nearly forty years ago. 5
We offer this introduction as salutation to our readers and as thanks to our contributors. We were inspired by their labors, and in kind we offer a disci- plinary context in which this volume can be read. We begin by returning to rhetoric's pursuit of epistemic relevance but turn less inward toward academic
expertise and more outward to the phronesis of the street, as a physical and figurative placeholder for publicity. The public work of rhetoric, as we imagine and then conduct it in everyday life, brings us closer to the material results of globalization and to opportunities for social change.
Rhetoric's Epistemic Crisis
The signals and the steering corrections leading up to this moment can be read in our collective disciplinary history since the 1960s. What we find is a desire to make rhetoric answerable to something beyond itself. Naturally, that desire has manifested differently because composition claims student rhetors as its subject, while communication claims rhetors in a variety of publics. Still, we see more common ground than perhaps has been imagined in the way both fields have struggled to adjust the millennial tradition of rhetoric.
One of the overriding themes at the Wingspread Conference in 1970 was whether and how, under the aegis of a "new rhetoric," that scholarship would become more politically relevant. "At this moment in history, we are com- pelled to view with great foreboding the character of public communication regarding social and political issues. "6 These words from Douglass Ehninger introduced the committee report on the scope and place of rhetorical study in higher education, and they were consonant with a disciplinary "anxiety" expressed at the conference and through its proceedings. In Edwin Black's ret- rospective, this was a response to the threat of disciplinary dissolution: the politics of the street in 1970 had reached such a fevered pitch that the disci- pline was forced to face its complicity in national events--society was falling apart: students were dying on campuses, the Vietnam War was ever raging, cities were burning, communication was failing right and left, and rhetoric had to enlist.
Yet to enlist in public life, to enter into the fray of political unrest and pub- lic controversy, comes with a cost, as voiced by Black, who feared the "abro- gation of the conventional distinction between the personal, internal life of the individual and the public and political life of that individual. " If taken to its logical extreme of "homogeneous consciousness," the discipline would "cease to exist. "7 Then and now, the measure of rhetoric's responsibility to and involvement in public and political life has always been a question of dis- tance. How close do we get to political discourse when it is consumed with violence? How close do we get when solutions to social injustice transcend the limits of scholarly discourse and criticism? How close do we get when the interlocutor is our neighbor, and that neighbor is in trouble?
Not all saw the political and technological changes of the 1960s and 1970s as a challenge to create--or resuscitate--what Lloyd Bitzer, in 1978, described as the "wisdom characterizing a universal public," but there was grave con- cern in communication for civility, peace, understanding, and reason; for mak- ing rhetoric relevant to a generation that appeared to the field to be uncoupling
Introduction 3
4 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
itself from society's center. 8 Communication thus broadened its unit of analy- sis beyond "the speech"--beyond persuasion and the exalted status of famous orators--and headed into the wilds of political division, media proliferation, and social movements, all the while swimming upstream against the swelling behavioral science of communication studies.
The departure point in 1970 was the assertion that neo-Aristotlean meth- ods, as laid out by Wilchens, valorized persuasion and made exemplary the political speech within the historical context of the state. The scholars at Wingspread endeavored to make sense of that tradition in relation to the cultural and political upheavals of the era. Wallace argued that rhetoricians needed a new set of rules to prepare rhetors in such an environment and a reaffirmation of the liberal arts, which alone could create the copiousness and phronesis that young rhetors needed. Samuel Becker sought a much larger definition of the message, a de-centering of attention on the speech, and an interest in rhetorical functions beyond persuasion (ego-defense, knowledge making, values expression). 9
Both Wallace and Becker struggled to adjust the tradition--and themselves within it. There was in Becker's piece that "pressure cooker" of messages that he sought some sort of purchase on, personified in the figure of "this man" with "his wife telling him to mow the lawn" and "his children . . . pushing him to play" and the media telling him to "use deodorants and to wear a seat belt. "10 Becker then recounts his experience at the Central States Communi- cation Conference in Chicago two days after Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, where it is not the blur of messages about the subsequent rioting that stands out, but the context in which Becker receives those messages as a scholar on lock-down, wondering "whether it was safe to go out of the hotel for dinner. "11 The disciplinary dilemma framed at Wingspread, of course, is not limited by what Dilip Gaonkar later described in reference to the first passage as Becker's "sympathy for the besieged patriarchy in the fragmented space of late capitalism. "12 What made Becker uneasy--what makes all of us uneasy--were publics that could not be contained by (or easily explained by) the rhetorical tradition, either in substance, style, or medium.
Rhetoricians in composition saw the challenge of the 1960s and 1970s differently: to broaden beyond the old rhetorical treatises with their limited appeal to correctness and form, their authoritative sense of what collects us as a public. Against current-traditional rhetoric and its conduit theories of communication, rhetoricians in English rallied around the neglected canon of invention. 13 Linda Flower and John Hayes's early research into the cogni- tive process of composing took Lloyd Bitzer's theory of exigency as a point of departure. Writers, like the speakers in Bitzer's work, are seen here respond- ing with discourse to a need in the world. Flower and Hayes employed a tool from psychology--protocol analysis of writers composing-aloud--to theorize the formation of goals, the construction of a rhetorical situation, and the
translation to text: "making thought visible. "14 The public tended to function in writerly terms here, even when the civic was invoked. Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede's influential article, "Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked," con- stituted student writers in relation to audiences beyond the classroom, at one point, through the effort of one student writer, struggling to conjure like- minded citizens who would not protest the building of a mental health fa- cility in her community. 15 But the primary concern in Flower and Hayes's and Lunsford and Ede's work was not with the formation of publics deliber- ating about particular social issues but with students learning the heuristic of audience.
What is remarkable is not that English and communication would respond differently in a time of crisis, but that they would soon exhaust themselves in their respective efforts to adjust the rhetorical tradition. The individualism that emerged from the process revolution in English can be read as a turn away from the public that scholars in rhetoric and communication wanted to reconceive. But both efforts to generalize "the" public and "the" student writer--the twin forces of common good and agency--did not survive in- creased scrutiny.
In composition, this second crisis came in the form of questions, which in turn raised the problem of boundaries: Can an education in rhetoric during the first year of college enable rhetorical performance in disciplinary and pro- fessional work? If so, how?
Moreover their accounts, for the most part, have remained theoretical explorations that have paid only lip service to democracy as it is lived.
To the credit of feminist scholars, under the inspiration of Nancy Fraser, Habermas's assumptions have been challenged in both theory and praxis (see Fraser's "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 1992). Among its more problematic ones are: the exclusion- ary bias in Habermas's norm of rationality, since it assumed there was but one form; his model of the bourgeois public sphere, since it did not include mar- ginalized voices; and his purely theoretical account of democracy in need of rehabilitation through an account in tune with how it is actually lived, which must include the subaltern spheres of those without access to official spheres of power.
To the credit of rhetoricians, they have both rethought the formulations of Habermas in terms of the realities of lived democracy, which are reflected in and constituted by its rhetoric, and executed specific critical studies that have shown how the realities of democracy have been manifest in politics as it is actually lived. Rhetoricians adhering to the disciplinary vision reflected by the Rhetoric Society of America--a vision that is inclusive of rhetoric's multiple traditions found in communication, English, rhetoric, and compo- sition, and reflected in the work of rhetorically inclined scholars in anthro- pology, economics, law, mass media, the natural sciences, philosophy, political science, and sociology--have been the leading voices in developing a matur- ing theory of publics and public spheres as rhetorical all the way down. Rhet- oricians have been in the vanguard in theorizing publics and public spheres as constructed rather than given. They have developed the idea and shown through critical studies that publics are multiple and changing, that they are found in rhetorical performances more than opinion polls, and that they in- clude diverse voices, which makes them more than a demographic. Rhetori- cians have led the way in exploring the idea that there are a plurality of public spheres, that while some are official, mostly they are constituted rhetorically; that counterpublic spheres are a rich source for studying how marginalized groups constitute arenas of discourse in which they can address issues of iden- tity, establish action agendas, forge group solidarity, and challenge authority; and that public spheres are elastic in what and who they accommodate, that their borders have varying permeability, and their life spans are tied to con- tingencies of issues, publics, and adaptability to changing circumstances.
This being said, the concerns and urgency that mounted within U. S. aca- demic circles, among others, during the first decade of the twenty-first century found expression among the general citizenry in the presidential election of 2008. Barack Obama's victory expressed a desire for change and a politics of hope based in bipartisan deliberation. The problems of self-interest and pseudo-deliberation that have drawn the attention of academicians to the character of publics and public spheres and the voice of the people in choos- ing a president espousing a new politics echo the long-noted but not-so-effec- tively addressed need of capacitating citizens to address present discontents and become effective change agents in their communities. It is a common- place at least since Dewey in the contemporary American context, although it has been recognized in the Western tradition since the Sophists, that edu- cation is critical to the development of a well-functioning polity and that art- ful, skillful oratory, and later writing, is essential toward that end.
The public problems of facing citizens of democratic states require the participation and collaboration of citizens in making decisions about com- plex problems that often require technical knowledge. If ordinary citizens are to be included in this process, as a society we require rhetors who can negoti- ate and translate technical problems to intelligent but less technically trained
Foreword xi
xii Gerard A. Hauser
audiences. This need has received little attention. Public speaking is often absent from secondary school curricula in the United States, and not always required at the collegiate level. Required rhetoric courses in public speaking and writing are often the only exposure most students receive to those skills necessary for them to function as effective change agents. In these required courses, as well as in courses that emphasize writing within the discipline, the main attention usually is on the demands of academic writing over the needs of our communities, which need future civic leaders who are both informed and capable.
The essays in this collection report lively, inventive, intelligent, and en- gaged responses to the Republic's need for capacitated citizens. They offer impressive studies of how we enter into public problems in our communi- ties, how rhetoric has constituted counterpublics among the underclass, how rhetoric's performative power can serve liberatory ends, how the community can be an invaluable resource for the civic education of our students. It is the place where democracy comes alive in the rhetorical practices of the students and those outside the university whom they engage. The work reported in this volume is noble and important not only for rhetoric studies, not only for rhetoric and composition pedagogy, but as a vision of what higher education might aspire to that goes beyond preparing students to earn a living. They are models of how we might prepare them to make a difference.
Series Editor's Preface
Thomas W. Benson
In The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, editors John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan bring together rhetorical scholars from the fields of English and communication to explore how academic rhetoricians have extended their work into the public realm beyond the uni- versity and how they have reshaped their classrooms to bring a sense of pub- lic life into the school. The authors offer searching theoretical considerations of what is at stake in the study and practice of rhetoric in public life. These accounts are strongly couched in a discourse of responsibility and enthusiasm for progressive change, and yet they are severely reflective and self-critical-- the writers do not let themselves surrender to mere wishful thinking. The cur- rently fashionable term "civic engagement" is itself subjected to a searching rhetorical criticism.
For some of these authors, stepping into the material world outside the university is prompted by high idealism and a search for freedom, inclusion, and equality. Some of the other authors find their rhetorical ideals usefully chastened by the intractability of the public world, in which interests, ideas, and ambitions compete for dominance.
The Public Work of Rhetoric is rich with theoretical and historical consider- ations of academic rhetoric and the rhetoric of the public realm, and it pro- vides a series of reflexive case studies of rhetorical scholars doing public work in a variety of locations, including the street, the technical and professional world, and the Internet.
Acknowledgments
This book began in conversation at the Alliance for Rhetoric Societies meet- ing at Northwestern University in 2003, where the authors first met and the idea of a collaborative book on rhetorical engagement as public work took flight. Our subsequent collaboration over the years has extended and deep- ened that conversation, allowing each of us ample opportunity to talk and lis- ten, to lead and support, to work side by side as equals shouldering the load of building a book with so many moving parts. This book has two authors of equal standing as editors, contributors, and colleagues.
David wishes to thank the Department of English and the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University for funding travel to meetings of the Rhetoric Society of America and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. This was where this manuscript took shape--in panel presentations that grew into essays; in face-to-face meet- ings about those essays. He would especially like to thank Susan Jarratt for several critical readings of his essay.
John thanks Marlia Banning for her guidance and support throughout this project and for introducing the editors to Candice Rai. He thanks the Depart- ment of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder for a "Reap- ing and Sowing" grant. This generous subvention afforded the authors the editorial and critical skills of Katie Cruger, doctoral student par excellence. The department also provided an intranet site to post our drafts. John's writing and editing were inspired by numerous colleagues, most notably Larry Frey and Jerry Hauser, both of whom provided guidance in developing and editing this collection.
John also thanks the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Calderwood Family Foundation account for sponsoring David's trip to Boulder and John's trip to Richmond, Virginia, and Linda Nicita for expertly making the arrange- ments for these visits. The Kent State University (KSU) Research Council pro- vided initial funding for travel and research in fall, 2003. He thanks the city of Kent, Ohio; David Ruller, the Kent city manager; the May 4 Democracy Symposium; and the KSU May 4 Collection for assistance with the research supporting his essay.
Both authors want to thank the series editor for the University of South Carolina Press's Studies in Rhetoric/Communication, Thomas Benson; our acquisitions editor, Jim Denton; and the review board--all for having faith in this book.
xvi Acknowledgments
Foremost we wish to thank our contributors who have weathered the many cycles of this project. We hope that our readers come to know these people as we do--as friends, as collaborators, as sponsors, as scholars, and as public advocates. And, finally, no book of ours on publics and rhetoric would exist without our many friends and associates in public life who taught us the meaning of paideia.
? Introduction
The Space to Work in Public Life
David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
This collection illustrates how rhetoric is in the midst of discovering anew its usefulness. We live and work in times of economic confusion and injustice, of geopolitical strife and war, and of global environmental endangerment. We live and work, also, in times of renewed hope with emerging commit- ments in many quarters to democratic inclusion and to community engage- ment toward economic renewal. Our new president has asked all citizens to find ways to serve and thus to integrate our academic labor and our occasions for service into the fabric of our universities and communities, which them- selves are caught up in moments of innovation and reflection that respond to shifts in regional economics and global uncertainty. 1 The discourse of ser- vice and civic engagement is on the rise at our colleges and universities as policies and practices that identify service learning, the scholarship of engage- ment, community outreach, public consultancy, and public intellectualism as the work before us to do. Yet these locutions as material locations are relatively nascent in our own talk about our home discipline and its place in the world. The premise upon which this book rests is that these locations and practices are vital to rhetoric's ongoing efforts to renew itself and to demonstrate our relevance locally and for a changing world.
As the contributors to this volume illustrate, to study and practice rheto- ric "out there" is to embody the role of the rhetor by tapping into new streams of disciplinary life through an embodied practice that is guided by a critical reflexivity and community affiliation. To do rhetoric "out there" re- quires a shedding of academic adornments, a different professional disposi- tion, new participatory and analytic tools, and a more grounded conception of public need. The Public Work of Rhetoric, we argue, is not shaped in our treatises and classrooms alone but in the material and discursive histories of communities outside of academe. These communities can benefit from the in- creased attention of rhetoricians in pursuit of democratic ideals, but rhetoric
2 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
can also benefit from community partnerships premised on a negotiated search for the common good--from a collective labor to shape the future through rhetoric in ways that are mutually empowering and socially responsible.
Clearly there is work to be done both in rhetoric as it manifests in com- munication and in English if we are to rehabilitate the discipline for this civic role. Though "the public" remains a generative launching pad for scholarly studies in communication, for the general public doing rhetoric is akin to menacing our fellow citizens with lies and misdirection. In English, where rhetoric and composition are often paired, the public is often imagined as a landing pad for students, a literate place, where they can test what we have taught them with imaginary audiences. What this suggests to us is that our disciplinary achievements have not been earned through everyday contact with publics, but through a hard-earned insularity from them. We have grown strong in academe by becoming answerable to ourselves and to our institu- tions by putting publics, with their misunderstandings about manipulation and illiteracy, in their place. A closer look at our shared history with publics-- those moments that arguably precede a turn toward community engagement --suggests that we have been haunted by the prospect of uselessness. In 1978 Michael Leff described it as a nagging irony of "pure abstraction" in a litera- ture that "keeps insisting that rhetoric is a practical discipline. "2 And in 1997 Dilip Gaonkar noted, in a withering and wicked assessment, that "we place (somewhat frantically these days) things under the sign of rhetoric more to make rhetoric intelligible than the things subsumed under it. "3 Susan Miller questioned if an art form oriented to the great man speaking on a great sub- ject was even a suitable tradition to understand technologies of writing and the emergent subjectivity of the student writer. 4 These concerns with too much abstraction, with a globalized Big Rhetoric, or with the seemingly irrec- oncilable differences between speech and writing, rhetoric and literacy--these are just a few of the twists and turns in our collective story of disciplinary achievement and anxiety, as many have said before us.
The historical trajectory of these differences is well documented, and we do not mean to minimize differences in theoretical orientation, disciplinary history, or pedagogical priorities. Participatory democracy, however, tends not to care. While it remains true that most people, most of the time, in com- munities near and far, only know rhetoric through its most derogatory inflec- tions, the enactment of rhetoric in public life is nondenominational; all is forgiven when we seek answers to their questions before ours, whenever and wherever scholars of rhetoric "dirty their hands in actual controversy," as Wayne Booth proposed nearly forty years ago. 5
We offer this introduction as salutation to our readers and as thanks to our contributors. We were inspired by their labors, and in kind we offer a disci- plinary context in which this volume can be read. We begin by returning to rhetoric's pursuit of epistemic relevance but turn less inward toward academic
expertise and more outward to the phronesis of the street, as a physical and figurative placeholder for publicity. The public work of rhetoric, as we imagine and then conduct it in everyday life, brings us closer to the material results of globalization and to opportunities for social change.
Rhetoric's Epistemic Crisis
The signals and the steering corrections leading up to this moment can be read in our collective disciplinary history since the 1960s. What we find is a desire to make rhetoric answerable to something beyond itself. Naturally, that desire has manifested differently because composition claims student rhetors as its subject, while communication claims rhetors in a variety of publics. Still, we see more common ground than perhaps has been imagined in the way both fields have struggled to adjust the millennial tradition of rhetoric.
One of the overriding themes at the Wingspread Conference in 1970 was whether and how, under the aegis of a "new rhetoric," that scholarship would become more politically relevant. "At this moment in history, we are com- pelled to view with great foreboding the character of public communication regarding social and political issues. "6 These words from Douglass Ehninger introduced the committee report on the scope and place of rhetorical study in higher education, and they were consonant with a disciplinary "anxiety" expressed at the conference and through its proceedings. In Edwin Black's ret- rospective, this was a response to the threat of disciplinary dissolution: the politics of the street in 1970 had reached such a fevered pitch that the disci- pline was forced to face its complicity in national events--society was falling apart: students were dying on campuses, the Vietnam War was ever raging, cities were burning, communication was failing right and left, and rhetoric had to enlist.
Yet to enlist in public life, to enter into the fray of political unrest and pub- lic controversy, comes with a cost, as voiced by Black, who feared the "abro- gation of the conventional distinction between the personal, internal life of the individual and the public and political life of that individual. " If taken to its logical extreme of "homogeneous consciousness," the discipline would "cease to exist. "7 Then and now, the measure of rhetoric's responsibility to and involvement in public and political life has always been a question of dis- tance. How close do we get to political discourse when it is consumed with violence? How close do we get when solutions to social injustice transcend the limits of scholarly discourse and criticism? How close do we get when the interlocutor is our neighbor, and that neighbor is in trouble?
Not all saw the political and technological changes of the 1960s and 1970s as a challenge to create--or resuscitate--what Lloyd Bitzer, in 1978, described as the "wisdom characterizing a universal public," but there was grave con- cern in communication for civility, peace, understanding, and reason; for mak- ing rhetoric relevant to a generation that appeared to the field to be uncoupling
Introduction 3
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itself from society's center. 8 Communication thus broadened its unit of analy- sis beyond "the speech"--beyond persuasion and the exalted status of famous orators--and headed into the wilds of political division, media proliferation, and social movements, all the while swimming upstream against the swelling behavioral science of communication studies.
The departure point in 1970 was the assertion that neo-Aristotlean meth- ods, as laid out by Wilchens, valorized persuasion and made exemplary the political speech within the historical context of the state. The scholars at Wingspread endeavored to make sense of that tradition in relation to the cultural and political upheavals of the era. Wallace argued that rhetoricians needed a new set of rules to prepare rhetors in such an environment and a reaffirmation of the liberal arts, which alone could create the copiousness and phronesis that young rhetors needed. Samuel Becker sought a much larger definition of the message, a de-centering of attention on the speech, and an interest in rhetorical functions beyond persuasion (ego-defense, knowledge making, values expression). 9
Both Wallace and Becker struggled to adjust the tradition--and themselves within it. There was in Becker's piece that "pressure cooker" of messages that he sought some sort of purchase on, personified in the figure of "this man" with "his wife telling him to mow the lawn" and "his children . . . pushing him to play" and the media telling him to "use deodorants and to wear a seat belt. "10 Becker then recounts his experience at the Central States Communi- cation Conference in Chicago two days after Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, where it is not the blur of messages about the subsequent rioting that stands out, but the context in which Becker receives those messages as a scholar on lock-down, wondering "whether it was safe to go out of the hotel for dinner. "11 The disciplinary dilemma framed at Wingspread, of course, is not limited by what Dilip Gaonkar later described in reference to the first passage as Becker's "sympathy for the besieged patriarchy in the fragmented space of late capitalism. "12 What made Becker uneasy--what makes all of us uneasy--were publics that could not be contained by (or easily explained by) the rhetorical tradition, either in substance, style, or medium.
Rhetoricians in composition saw the challenge of the 1960s and 1970s differently: to broaden beyond the old rhetorical treatises with their limited appeal to correctness and form, their authoritative sense of what collects us as a public. Against current-traditional rhetoric and its conduit theories of communication, rhetoricians in English rallied around the neglected canon of invention. 13 Linda Flower and John Hayes's early research into the cogni- tive process of composing took Lloyd Bitzer's theory of exigency as a point of departure. Writers, like the speakers in Bitzer's work, are seen here respond- ing with discourse to a need in the world. Flower and Hayes employed a tool from psychology--protocol analysis of writers composing-aloud--to theorize the formation of goals, the construction of a rhetorical situation, and the
translation to text: "making thought visible. "14 The public tended to function in writerly terms here, even when the civic was invoked. Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede's influential article, "Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked," con- stituted student writers in relation to audiences beyond the classroom, at one point, through the effort of one student writer, struggling to conjure like- minded citizens who would not protest the building of a mental health fa- cility in her community. 15 But the primary concern in Flower and Hayes's and Lunsford and Ede's work was not with the formation of publics deliber- ating about particular social issues but with students learning the heuristic of audience.
What is remarkable is not that English and communication would respond differently in a time of crisis, but that they would soon exhaust themselves in their respective efforts to adjust the rhetorical tradition. The individualism that emerged from the process revolution in English can be read as a turn away from the public that scholars in rhetoric and communication wanted to reconceive. But both efforts to generalize "the" public and "the" student writer--the twin forces of common good and agency--did not survive in- creased scrutiny.
In composition, this second crisis came in the form of questions, which in turn raised the problem of boundaries: Can an education in rhetoric during the first year of college enable rhetorical performance in disciplinary and pro- fessional work? If so, how? Kenneth Bruffee elaborated this as a social process of composing; of entering into the "conversation of mankind," which he based on his readings of Richard Rorty and Thomas Kuhn, among others. 16 If thought is internalized language, then writing is internalized language reex- ternalized. This later move globalized rhetoric, inserting it into the discipli- nary, workplace, and professional settings where genres, vocabularies, modes of reasoning, values, and knowledge differed, but where writers' needs and skills could be studied and taught. Though the epistemic turn did not take up publics per se, it arguably reconceived the writer's relation to them through the acquisition of professional status; that public role, say, of an architect. Within the orbit of the social constructivist turn, knowledge claims were con- testable, but in Kuhnian fashion, always ameliorating, accelerating toward or within a paradigm. The student's burden was to decode that process.
In communication, the anxiety over the public translated, however indi- rectly, into the rhetoric of inquiry, the rhetoric of the human sciences--into the "epistemic turn. " Instead of descending farther into the embodied realms of the political, it moved swiftly toward questions of epistemological rele- vance. The latter has coalesced around the writings of Dilip Gaonkar, who begins his oft-quoted and debated article, "Rhetoric and Its Double," with the essay's summation, "rhetoric cannot escape itself. "17 It cannot, as Alan Gross and William Keith restate, because once rhetoric enters through the doorway of literary "supplementation," it has left behind the limits of Aristotelian proof
Introduction 5
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for the uncharted waters of textual "globalization" through rhetoric's "exten- sion to every instance, text, artifact, or communication. "18 Rhetoricity ad infinitum will not completely erase rhetoric from discourse and communica- tion--it joins the class of logocentric, theoretical tropes that include limitless signification, interconnectivity in the heteroglot, and "literariness. "19 In doing so, rhetoric does not cease to exist, but it becomes awfully "thin" because rhetoric must percolate (within its resources) through every discursive utter- ance and act.
The internment of rhetoric within its own "mereness" is, for Gaonkar, a philosophically necessary and timely corrective to contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism that espouses a rhetorical turn in all disciplines, begin- ning first with science; and as science goes, the rest will follow. The globali- zation of rhetoric should result in a form of disciplinary composure and confidence, but, for Gaonkar, rhetoric is condemned to a form of epistemo- logical purgatory because the anxiety that breathes life into rhetorical con- sciousness is born out of someone else "The emergence of a rhetorical consciousness is directly related to a crisis within a special discourse. . . . The sheer possibility of a rhetorical consciousness, the possibility that rhetoric is a permanent though unrealized opening for man, does not by itself induce a crisis, but it is something always waiting to be exploited when the crisis comes. In short, rhetoric is the medium and not the ground of discursive and cultural crises. "20 For different reasons and from different vantage points, com- munication and composition took an epistemic turn, inserting rhetoric into the knowledge-making process, raising ethical questions about treating knowl- edge claims rhetorically.
But with great power comes great responsibility: If rhetoric is the medium and not the grounds of crisis, toward whose ends would rhetoric work? What responsibilities did critics and teachers take on when taking up this tool? As James Berlin argued, rhetoric is not a neutral techne but "a part of social and political structures" that articulate "the nature of the individual within those structures, and the distribution of power in society. "21 Rhetoric, in this con- text, does not simply help a student arrange an argument but appropriate a place within a contested, discursive framework. That such engagement was itself framed by classrooms and assignments--by the authority of teachers of rhetoric--did not escape Berlin and other proponents of critical pedagogy. Much the same dilemma emerged in communication among proponents of critical rhetoric. John Sloop, for example, argued that "it must be my task, and the task of critics in general, to increase the impact of criticism by find- ing outlets that increase its prominence as a cultural fragment. "22 But this link between our work as rhetoricians and social change remains vexed, writes J. Elspeth Stuckey, because "schools, like other social institutions, are designed to replicate, or at least not disturb, social division and class privilege," includ- ing those privileges that we enjoy (123). Criticism and change remains vexed,
as vexed as it is in critical pedagogy. Our universities, J. Elspeth Stuckey ex- plains, are "designed to replicate, or at least not disturb, social division and class privilege," including those privileges that we enjoy as critics and teach- ers. 23 If we have, in our ethnographic studies of literacy and our rhetorical criticism of publics, tended to propose linguistic solutions to social divisions that are more properly material or economic in nature, it is because we have, in English and communication, tended to see disciplinary prerogatives more easily than others.
One guiding principle that we have shared in compiling The Public Work of Rhetoric is that rhetoric should not deny itself: it will never dissolve into itself by entering into the fractious world of political action or by implicating itself in the discourse of others. Our motivations to act are not premised on a particular agenda, a set of social issues, or the settler's itch to unfurl our flag. We are motivated by the embodied practices that we have cultivated in rela- tionship with people in our communities; by a rhetorical labor that we share with others, where the grain size of the discursive act relies upon the author- ity of individuals in "relevant social groups";24 acts that are conferred by the cultural economies of actual places. For our purposes, there is anxiety in the world, but it is born from much more than discursive and cultural crises. It resides in the communities we frequent and have compassion toward, and therefore cannot be adequately inferred from textual artifacts alone. To dis- cover the coordinates of anxiety in its locally and globally material manifes- tations, rhetoric will have to reflexively imagine itself outside of fixations on the discursive supplement within the logos-sphere. By doing so, by "going public," rhetoric need not limit its disciplinary identity and social relevance to the degree to which it contributes to science as ur-discipline; nor will rhet- oric endanger itself by entering into the political life of the street, not when the streets belong to us, and not when we are the people yelling outside the window. As Carolyn Miller writes in her essay in this collection, "We have said that rhetoric is 'epistemic,' that it affects the conduct of inquiry and the substance of knowledge across the disciplines. . . . Rhetoric's imperialism has reached such a pitch recently that critical alarms have been sounded, urging 'attenuations' of its epistemic claims and challenging its ambitions as a 'uni- versalized,' 'promiscuous,' 'free-floating' 'interpretive meta-discourse. '" Those attenuations include Gaonkar's critique of the rhetorical turn in the human sciences, but they must now include a different calibration of the rhetorical event. Disciplinary reflexivity does not have to result in an infinite epistemo- logical regress when rhetoric accepts its supplementary role within the discur- sive regime but founds its claims on civic engagement in what Gerard Hauser describes as the "reticulate public sphere. "25 Loi? c Wacquant's exegesis of Pierre Bourdieu's theories of reflexive sociology concludes with a similar, recupera- tive (we would say rhetorical) point of view: "[Reflexivity] is neither egocen- tric, nor logocentric. . . . It fastens not upon the private person . . . but on the
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concatenations of acts and operations she effectuates as part of her work and on the collective unconscious inscribed in them. . . . Epistemic reflexivity . . . informs a conception of the craft of research to strengthen its epistemologi- cal moorings. "26
Rhetoric may provide the moment, the acuity, and the discursive terrain for translations of discourses criss-crossing the university and public life, as proposed by Steve Mailloux,27 but when we hear the call to participate, we are hearing those "concatenations" comprised of participants, events, artifacts, and territories that over time and through practice aggregate (and then dis- aggregate) as meaningful concordances. If rhetoric occurs routinely in public life, as work, it is through routines that establish, in their aggregate, something like a postmodern paidiea. We are not all building the same things for the same reasons with the same tools in the same public.