No More Learning

Janice Turner: Recently moved to Augusta, her husband's hometown, after he retired. An ordained minister, she runs "The J Spot," a Chris- tian book store, and is the new president of the Woodruff County Lit- eracy Council. Has been the principal and administrator of a private school.
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Danny Shields: The postmaster in Augusta. Wife and son teach in Augusta; daughter teaches in McCrory, ten miles to the east of Augusta.
Evelyn Coles: Farm owner, mother, and grandmother. Husband was on the School Board for many years. One son graduated from college and is in farming. Two other sons still in college.
Brenda Collins: Longtime resident of Augusta. Two children graduated from Augusta High School and two grandchildren still in the Augusta schools. Member of the city council and the Woodruff County Literacy Council.
Jimmy Rhodes: Lifetime resident of Augusta. Graduated from Augusta High School in 1992 and went to Arkansas State in Mountain Home for a degree in funeral science. As funeral director, he notes that "I'm bury- ing too many young people. " Serves on city council and plans to run for mayor.
Craig Meredith: Graduated from Augusta High School and joined the Navy, serving for four years, where he had the highest security clearance. Now working as a computer technician for White River Rural Health.
Regina Burkett: Community Development Coordinator for White River Rural Health and a licensed practical nurse.
Steven Collier: CEO of White River Rural Health Center. Graduated from Augusta High School. Went to Baylor University and took a degree in history. Got his medical degree from University of Arkansas for the Medical Sciences and did his residency in Pine Bluff. Was a practicing physician in central Arkansas for 20 years before "getting into the busi- ness side" and becoming CEO. White River Rural Health now has clin- ics in 17 towns in the area.
A thought occurred to me: seated around this table were representatives of all sorts of "constituencies" in this small town: education, health care, small business, government, religion, agriculture. Each was interested in helping to save Augusta. Each had bought into the notion that improving "education" could play a central role in the recovery initiative. Each was completely open to my argument that improving literacy--improving all citizens' abilities to read and write to the extent that they can live a rich, fulfilling personal life and participate in a changing economy--was the most vital aspect of the edu- cational improvement plan.
To make this plan work, I argued, we could not simply focus solely on the schools and hope that they "fix" the literacy problem. Without wanting to endorse any political candidate, I argued that "it takes a village" to raise the profile of reading and writing and to improve education. Consider, I asked them, all the organizations and entities in Augusta that might say, if asked, that they were interested in helping folks read and write more fully and effec- tively: not only the schools but also the churches, the library, the local literacy
274 David A. Jolliffe
council, the local economic development council, the health clinics. Why not launch, I asked them, a Community Literacy Advocacy Project that would have a person at its helm who would actively seek out individuals and groups in Augusta who wanted to read and write in fuller, richer ways than they had in the past and who would forge "literacy liaisons" between and among all the constituencies who wanted to raise the profile of literacy in Augusta but who had not known about one another or worked together in the past.
Thus was born the idea for the Community Literacy Advocacy Project. After a quick marshaling of resources by White River Rural Health and the Office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy, Collier identified the miraculous Joy Lynn Bowen, a former teacher in Augusta public schools who knows (and is trusted by) nearly every person in Augusta and placed her on the staff of White River as the community literacy advocate.
The Kickoff and the Initial Year
The Community Literacy Advocacy Project got off to a rousing start. A com- munity kickoff event on August 16, 2007, drew seventy-five citizens and featured introductions of the project by Collier, Bowen, and Jolliffe and testi- monials of support for the project by Carol Ann Dykes, a former Augusta resi- dent who now works on the faculty of the University of Central Florida, and by Otto Loewer, the former dean of the University of Arkansas College of Engineering who now runs an economic development institute focusing on rural Arkansas. Throughout, our message was consistent. We were going to "celebrate" reading and writing; we were going to bring students, parents, gov- ernment officials, church leaders, business owners, and not-for-profit workers together; we were going to emphasize the roles that reading and writing play in the twenty-first century. We were not going to berate students and citizens for having poor literacy abilities but instead do all we could to help them acquire those abilities.
Under Bowen's direction, the project sprung into action. Bowen set up or attended four meetings that involved what we came to call "literacy liaisons"-- connections between and among local, state, or regional government and not- for-profit organizations that were interested in improving literacy but had not worked together in the past. The project went to work immediately on deal- ing with a pressing issue in literacy--namely, helping young (often single) parents both to establish a productive literacy environment for the preschool children in their homes and to connect with educational and social-service providers, which would help them in many cases complete their GEDs and move into postsecondary educational and job-training settings. The high point of the young/single parents' initiative was a daylong workshop, "Preparing Your Child to Read and Write in School," led by Judy Fox, a curriculum spe- cialist for the Washington (Maryland) County Schools and attended by fifty- five parents and child-care and health-care workers.
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For the elementary school population, the project purchased copies of the elementary school principal's "book of the month" and distributed them in doctors' and dentists' offices throughout the town. In addition, the project helped to sponsor a pep rally to kick off the Augusta schools' "million-word challenge" at the beginning of the year and another rally, deemed "Pump It Up," to prepare students to take the state standardized test.
The project established two connections with local business and industry councils, one of which resulted in a college-and-career-awareness day that seventy-five high school students attended in April, focusing in particular on the reading and writing demands that a college curriculum or a career would place on them. Bowen made contact with one of the largest churches in Augusta to solicit its members' help in working as tutors for students, young parents, and adults who might come to the Woodruff County Literacy Council. Working in collaboration with Jeannie Waller, a doctoral student in rhetoric, composition, and literacy at the University of Arkansas, the project worked with the Woodruff County Literacy Council to compile a book of per- sonal essays written by and about veterans of the armed forces in the region. The volume will be published as part of the unveiling of a new veterans' memorial statue on the courthouse lawn.
The most vibrant site of activity for the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Project was Augusta High School. The project set up a joint faculty- student task force, a ten-member group that offered perspectives on why rela- tively few students in the past had taken the ACT examination and gone to college, what students perceived the college environment to be like, and how the project could help them effect the transition from high school to college. The task force recommended that the project offer ACT-improvement work- shops, specifically focusing on the reading challenges the exam poses to test- takers; in response, the project offered three such workshops in 2007-8. To learn more fully about the level of intellectual pursuits in college, about fif- teen students, all juniors, from the high school participated with several other schools in the region in the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project, another proj- ect sponsored by the Office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy. In the Delta project, about sixty-five students from four schools worked in collabo- rative Web-based writing groups, each led by a University of Arkansas student mentor, to plan, complete, publish, and perform essays, stories, and scripts that grew out of oral history interviews they conducted in their towns. The Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Project helped these students find topics and interviewees and brought them to Helena, Arkansas, for the open- ing and closing events, and to Fayetteville in the middle of the term for a face-to-face working session with their groups. The project sponsored two cel- ebratory luncheons for the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project students, events that were repeated later in the year for any high school student earn- ing a 3. 2 grade average or higher and then for all graduates.
276 David A. Jolliffe
The project thus tried to embody an ethos dominated by three terms: chal- lenge, support, and celebration. Bowen and the growing group of citizens and civic leaders she recruited both tacitly and explicitly said to young parents, elementary school students, high school students, and adults who might want to learn to read and write more effectively, "We challenge you to improve your reading and writing; we will do all we can to support you if you take up this challenge; we will celebrate your success when you succeed. "
In general, the students and citizens of Augusta caught the buzz of the lit- eracy initiative and responded positively. At the high school level, for exam- ple, thirty-three students took the ACT examination, up from twenty-five in the previous year, and the average composite score for these students went up a half a point. Of the forty-seven graduates of Augusta High School in May 2008, eleven had been accepted into colleges or technical schools by the time of graduation, in contrast to six the previous year, and twenty-three had re- ceived some kind of scholarship that would help them pursue postsecondary education if they chose to. One graduating student wrote to Bowen: "I don't think I would have even thought I was capable of attending college without the support that has been given to me. Knowing that people outside of school are willing to provide assistance, encouragement, and connections helped me to believe I could dream dreams and achieve them. My plans are now to get a college education, become a teacher, and return to help others. "
Among the young, often single parents, the enthusiasm ran similarly strong. One soon-to-be mother, a high school senior herself, said the daylong early literacy workshop made her feel more confident about being a mother and helping her child have fun as they worked on reading together. One partici- pant in the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project described her weekend of work and campus culture at the University of Arkansas as "the best weekend of my life. "
Analyzing the Rhetorical Activity of the Community Literacy Advocacy Project
At its base, of course, the tacit aim of the Augusta Community Literacy Advo- cacy Project is persuasive: Bowen, Collier, the White River Rural Health Cen- ter, and the Office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy need to persuade the citizens of Augusta and Woodruff County that improving the "literacy cli- mate" is a necessary, if not sufficient, step to bring the town and region back to life. All three theoretical perspectives set out earlier in this essay can be used to analyze how this persuasion is being effected.
The municipality of Augusta has not, so far, reshaped its Web site to pro- claim itself as the town that reads and writes together, and so far no one has moved to hang banners around town like the ones from the Nicaraguan lit- eracy campaign of the 1960s: "Every home a classroom / Every table a school desk / Every Nicaraguan a teacher! "12 But the events and workshops sponsored
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by the Community Literacy Advocacy Project do embody texts of various kinds--verbal and material--that can be analyzed from an Aristotelian per- spective. For example, at the recent kickoff for year two of the project, held on August 12, 2008, the slogan printed on the program cover was "Shine a Light on Education," and at each seat, for each participant, was a small flash- light, courtesy of White River Rural Health Center. The sessions at the event both highlighted the project's successes in year one and announced the ini- tiatives for year two: continuing work with young parents and their families, now supported by an additional grant from the Dollar General Foundation; a new emphasis on school and family literacy activities designed for youths age seven through fourteen, particularly boys; a continuation of the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project at Augusta High School and a new focus on help- ing students improve their reading and writing abilities via independent proj- ects in their EAST (Environmental and Special Technology) lab course; an expansion of the project activities into all five major churches in Augusta, helping ministers see how they can build reading and writing activities into their services and outreach efforts; and a new initiative to develop commu- nity arts and literacy activities at the Woodruff County Library. If the claim in this Toulmin-model "enthymeme" is that Augusta needs to "shine a light on education" and the data comprise all the activities accomplished in year one and planned for year two, then the unspoken assumptions, the warrant, must be twofold: these activities constitute "the light" needed in the commu- nity, and there are still citizens of Augusta and Woodruff County who are in need of enlightenment.
The events and workshops emanating from the project qualify as the types of "civic communions" that Procter describes. The two year-opening kickoff events, the midyear community rally for literacy--at which 600 people showed up for a charity basketball game with "pep talks" about literacy during half- time--and the "celebration" luncheons for the high school students are cer- tainly "significant moments of community interaction," directed toward the purported goal of civic improvement via literacy. 13 Congruent with Procter's analogy of civic and religious communions, the events, rallies, and work- shops in Augusta frequently had an air of returning to "the good old days" in Augusta when the town was economically vibrant and the high school, in particular, was the center of intellectual life. These invocations gave the lead- ers of the project, the town, and the churches the opportunity, as Procter puts it, to "recall important texts and parables" as well as "important historic texts, people, and events that ultimately serve to solidify community identity and offer guides to appropriate civic values and practices. "14
Finally, it is clear how the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Project functions rhetorically in the manner Long describes. In Long's model, the guiding metaphor for the project is embodied in the noun "advocacy" itself: the program as a whole is advocating for the town as it tries to revive its
278 David A. Jolliffe
economic base, and the components of the program are blatantly advocating for the clients being served. The various initiatives being developed for Augusta High School--its participation in the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project and the workshops targeted at reading comprehension and time management on the ACT examination--and for young parents and their children openly advo- cate for the high school students as potentially college-bound and for the parents as effective literacy sponsors and providers in their homes. In Long's model, the location of the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Project comprises the material conditions of Augusta and north-central Arkansas--a region marked by economic, employment, and population declines--as well as the institutional leadership of White River Rural Health Center and, in par- ticular, its CEO Collier, of efforts to revive the town and the region. The tenor of the discourse surrounding the Community Literacy Advocacy Project is marked by two adjectives: "supportive" and "nostalgic. " Virtually all the activ- ities sponsored by the Community Literacy Advocacy Project are imbued with a "can-do" and "we-can" rhetoric--the young parents' programs embody a "we can raise our children to succeed" rhetoric; the school programs are redo- lent of such terms as "celebration" and "opportunity"; the local literacy coun- cil representatives openly use phrases reflecting rebirth. At the same time, however, a great deal of the discourse surrounding the Community Literacy Advocacy Program has been blatantly nostalgic, reminiscent of the "good old days" when Augusta was prosperous, when students graduating from Augusta High School could find good jobs in the area, when teachers lived in the town and were part of its cultural fabric. The literacies being promoted by the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Program are primarily school-based. While some efforts are under way to elicit and support reflective writing among the adult citizenry, particularly in regard to the veterans' memorial story project, the bulk of the work so far has been dedicated to helping young parents build a literacy environment that will prepare their preschool chil- dren for academic literacy and for helping high school students develop the literacy abilities to master the ACT examination and get into college. What Long calls in her Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics the "rhetorical invention" of the program--which she expands to embrace "impli- cations" or "how rhetorical invention translates into choices, practices, and actions"--is highly instrumental: the program aims to get more high school students to apply for and attend college, to get more preschool children ready for school-based literacy, and to get more adults ready for the twenty-first- century workplace.
Public Rhetorical Activity as a Teaching Opportunity
For all its successes--young parents learning how to create environments conducive to reading in their homes, high school students thinking seriously about going to college, adults capturing stories about veterans--the Augusta
The Community Literacy Advocacy Project 279
Community Literacy Advocacy Project can be the source of intellectual anx- iety, particularly for scholars who study literacy theory and the history of lit- eracy movements in this century. As the director of an academic office, housed in the state's flagship university, dedicated to supporting the commu- nity literacy project, I could have reacted to this concern by squelching the plans of the project's leaders, by putting the brakes on until we sorted out the historical, theoretical, and ideological issues involved. I have not done that, choosing instead to use the ongoing project as an opportunity to teach the providers and clients in the program, as well as students at the University of Arkansas studying the history and theory of literacy, about how such issues become manifest in specific contexts like Augusta.
In the new argument being promoted about Augusta, literacy is a metonym, a single term into which a wide range of semantic and emotional associations are packed, and that metonymy is itself a source of tension. Like most ob- servers of the contemporary educational scene who want to do what they can to improve it, working with the general assumption that better education leads to a better life, the citizens of Augusta who support the project and the various clienteles who benefit from it tend to see literacy as a set of discrete skills, most of them school-based, that are disconnected from the nuances of local social, economic, and political circumstances. This view, of course, cor- responds to what Brian Street calls the "autonomous" model of literacy, one that embodies "the apparent neutrality of literacy practices" and one that Street maintains needs to be replaced with an "ideological model" that focuses on "the significance [of literacy practices] for the distribution of power in society and for authority relations. "15 As the project continues, therefore, one goal of its leaders must be to help both the service providers and the clientele to understand that the "literacy climate" they perceive in Augusta and Woodruff County did not simply emerge de novo. It is the outgrowth of a regional cul- ture that has a long history of social stratification, of an educational culture that has not always lived up to the goal of equal access and equal benefits for all students, of an agricultural economy that essentially took from the poor and gave to the rich as family farms gave way to agribusinesses.
The work of Deborah Brandt is instructive in considering how to finesse these tensions. In her magisterial study of literacy in Americans' lives, Brandt makes two salient points about literacy sponsorship, the process by which "any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract . . . support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy. "16 First, she explains, literacy sponsorship can actually lead to social stratification, rather than diminish it. Those who grow up with material conditions and opportunities conducive to incorporating reading and writing in their daily lives tend to rise socially and economically more than those who do not. But this social stratification is exactly what the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Proj- ect has the power to reduce, if not eliminate. The providers and supporters of
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the project are openly facing the fact that young parents, students, and adult nonreaders in their town have generally lacked affirmative, supportive spon- sors of literacy, and the project has some power to provide such sponsorship. Second, Brandt asserts that the trope of "rising standards" for literacy that one hears in the media so regularly--those cries of "literacy crisis" that seem to emerge every five years or so--is actually just the opposite side of the liter- acy-sponsorship coin. We do not have literacy crises, Brandt would argue; instead, we have a gap, a lack of sufficient, appropriate, affirmative literacy sponsorship. Again, the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Project has the potential to make up at least part of this lack, this gap.
Above all else, as the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Project grows, its leaders must emphasize a veil of caution about the view that Harvey Graff in his eponymous 1979 book labeled "the literacy myth," the notion that lit- eracy is somehow concomitant with moral uprightness, is a necessary and sufficient condition for social and economic advancement, and has, by nature, the power to "liberate" individuals. 17 Expanding on this work, Robert Arnove and Harvey Graff, in the introduction to their 1987 edited collection, National Literacy Campaigns, maintain that "in the twentieth century . . . pro- nouncements about literacy deem it a process of critical consciousness raising and human liberation. Just as frequently, such declarations refer to literacy not as an end in itself, but as a means to other goals--to the ends of national development and to a social order that elites, both national and interna- tional, define. "18 Arnove and Graff explain further: "Literacy is invested with a special significance, but seldom in and of itself. Learning to read, possibly to write, involves the acquisition or conferral of a new status--membership in a religious community, citizenship in a nation-state. Literacy often carries tremendous symbolic weight, quite apart from any power and new capabili- ties it may bring. The attainment of literacy per se operates as a badge, a sign of initiation into a select group and/or a larger community. "19
In other words, Arnove and Graff argue, what gets occluded in campaigns to improve literacy are the individual goals and needs of the literacy learner. "Throughout history," they write, "the provision of literacy skills to reform either individuals or their societies rarely has been linked to notions of peo- ple using these skills to advance their own ends. "20 Everyone involved with the Augusta Community Literacy Advocacy Project, I believe, wants literacy learners to improve their reading and writing abilities so that the town and region can attract new businesses and industries, so that more high school students will go on to college (Arkansas now ranks fiftieth in the United States in the percentage of adults who hold a college degree), and so that adults can be more adequately prepared for a changing, literacy-demanding job market. But the people involved with the project, present company included, must recognize that the literacy learners' personal, individual goals--to read to their kids at home, to write their life stories, to read their Bibles and write for
The Community Literacy Advocacy Project 281 their church bulletins, and so on--must have the same priority as economic
growth and civic revitalization. We all have our work cut out for us.
Notes
1. Jolliffe, "On Reading. "
2. Toulmin, Uses of Argument. I am arguing that Toulmin's argument structure is essentially an enthymeme set on its side, with "data" representing the "minor premise" of the enthymeme, the "claim" representing its "conclusion," and the "warrants" rep- resenting the unspoken assumptions upon which the enthymeme is built.
3. Procter, Civic Communion, 5. 4. Ibid. , 7.
5. Ibid. , 8.
6. Ibid. , 10.
7. Ibid. , 14.
8. Long, Community Literacy, 15. 9. Ibid. , 16.
10. Demographic data come from the U. S. Census Bureau (http://www. factfinder . census. gov) and from Sperling's Best Places Report (http://www. bestplaces. net/City/ Augusta-OVERVIEW-5052740000. aspx).
11. Augusta Recovery Initiative Meeting Notes, December 9, 2005. 12. Arnove and Graff, "National Literacy Campaigns," 604.
13. Procter, Civic Communion, 10.
14. Ibid. , 14.
15. Street, "New Literacy," 430-31.
16. Brandt, "Sponsors of Literacy," 556.
17. Graff, Literacy Myth.
18. Arnove and Graff, "National Literacy Campaigns," 592. 19. Ibid. , 596.
20. Ibid.
Works Cited
Arnove, Robert, and Harvey Graff. "National Literacy Campaigns. " In Literacy: A Criti- cal Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, 591-615. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.
Augusta, Arkansas. "Sperling's Best Places Report. " http://www. bestplaces. net/City/ Augusta-OVERVIEW-5052740000. aspx (accessed August 31, 2008).
Brandt, Deborah. "Sponsors of Literacy.
" In Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, 555-71. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.
Graff, Harvey. The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City. New York: Academic, 1979.
Jolliffe, David A. "On Reading and Writing Analytically: Theory, Method, Crisis Action Plan. " In Reading and Writing Analytically, edited by David A. Jolliffe. New York: Col- lege Board, 2008.
Long, Eleanor. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. West Lafayette, Ind. : Parlor Press, 2008.
Procter, David E. Civic Communion: The Rhetoric of Community Building. Lanham, Md. : Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
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Street, Brian. "The New Literacy Studies. " In Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, 430-42. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.
Toulmin, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. U. S. Census Bureau, "American Fact Finder. " http://www. factfinder. census. gov (accessed
August 31, 2008).
? The Prospects for the Public Work of Rhetoric
A Coda on Codes
Susan C. Jarratt
The stimulating essays in this book display rhetorics for our times: publics variously concrete and elusive, interventions at times tentative, of mixed suc- cess, but full of energy. Even the most vividly present settings become publics differently according to the rhetorical order, tasks, and understanding brought to bear on them (Coogan). For guidance, the authors reach back into the eighteenth-century public as Habermas envisioned it--"a collaborative search for the common good"--but also look forward, beyond the hesitations of the Wingspread participants, into a newly realized array of millennial publics. The "public workers" of this volume find a polis, as Hannah Arendt predicted: in "the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking to- gether . . . its true space [lying] between people living together for this pur- pose, no matter where they happen to be. "1 A final word in response to these essays must work against finality in an effort to keep alive their activity, their fraught yet hopeful qualities: to the manifold and variegated qualities of the public works they record. Although there are oppositions and advocacies here, the dominant themes are qualification, principled hesitation, a stepping back from the reassuring rhetorics of pro, con, and happy compromise.
Like the participants in the Wingspread Conference of the 1960s, twenty- first-century public rhetoricians are made somewhat uneasy by the rhetorics of our times. Ackerman and Coogan identify this phenomenon as a problem of history: "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. " Traditions must be made anew, and new histories--"lost geographies"--are called forth by contempo- rary problems. 2 Urging readers to envision a postmodern paideia, the editors invite rhetoric's history in, not as an obligatory grounding or an answer to a dilemma but as a resource. Rather than clarifying through a general enlight- enment, postmodern rhetorical history might resort to refraction: to gather
284 Susan C. Jarratt
diffuse sources from the present and angle them through the lens of the "prior" with the hope of sparking the imaginations of public rhetoric workers in the field, in the way that Coogan makes sophistic rhetoric over into a counter- public practice for Richmond teens. What are the rhetorical arts needful in this time, one in which "free-speech" and rational argument--or at least the abil- ity to speak across ideological and political divides--seem to some to have lost force? Is there something other, or something more to be learned from pre- modern rhetorics? To shift the figure, might some newer historical narratives serve not as a stash but a font?
According to Bruner, "one way we can do the public work of rhetoric is by mapping the distance between history and memory, understanding how far those imaginaries are from historical fact, and with what consequence. " Bruner refers to large-scale public memories of war, but we might apply his recommendation to rhetoric's histories and to ancient political history more generally. Changes in our own geopolitical realities may make it less and less possible to overlook (or to treat with a bland acceptance) the fact that the dominant ancient rhetorical cultures, even during the democracy and the republic, operated through the power of empire.
Empire
"What word but 'empire,'" writes Michael Ignatieff in a New York Times Maga- zine article of January 2003, "describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? "--this on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. 3 With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the growth of multinational corporations, positive uses of this term begin to appear in middle-of-the-road political science journals and media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Harvard Review, and the Wall Street Journal. 4 More pointed comparisons with Pax Romana, the Roman peace, can be found in political strategy statements produced by the Defense Department under George H. W. Bush and in the report of The Project for the New American Cen- tury, a nonprofit educational organization, used as a basis for Condoleezza Rice's 2001 National Security Strategy statement. The project's report, titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," overtly argues that the United States, as the "world's most preeminent power," should resolve to "shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests. " Despite the long-standing priorities of containment and deterrence, these documents openly employ a rhetoric of empire, referring to a global Pax Americana and "American peace" without irony 5
In those years, we lived in a Pax Americana run by a government taking its cues from classical scholars in shaping its foreign policy. Daniel Mendel- sohn, in his brilliant New Yorker reviews of new publications in ancient Greek history and literature, points out, for example, the "tendentious" angles of vision in a new history of the Peloponnesian war by Donald Kagan, coauthor of the strategy statement mentioned above, and in Victor Davis Hanson's works
The Prospects for the Public Work of Rhetoric 285
on Greek military strategy, recommended by Vice President Cheney to his staff during the 2001 war in Afghanistan. 6 These are the intellectuals who have guided the world's newest empire through the first, devastating decade of the new millennium. Some rhetors here are working very locally, in the geogra- phies of community or neighborhood, but sometimes with a reach into the geographies of empire (for example, Cushman with the victims of nineteenth- century U. S. internal imperialism against American Indians; Grabill against the pressures driving international shipping). Many of the rhetors in this vol- ume choose to work for and with disenfranchised groups, helping them to find and hone words that will give them power, working across class and pro- fessional space to put rhetorical expertise to work. The strength of the volume lies in its insistence on a dialogue among history (C. Miller), theory, analysis, and practical community work. Yet another direction we might take with a postmodern paideia would turn toward those in power, asking what are the networks of affiliation, the rhetorics of space, and rhetorical strategies that will enable us to move the emperors of our own era? 7
This is not an easy task. What can be done rhetorically in our times, diffi- cult times for rhetoric, when an Enlightenment dream of democracy is no longer recognizable, let alone sustainable (Cintron): a "twilight of democ- racy"? 8 What can be done rhetorically when the forces of "conspiracy" (Ack- erman and Coogan) do not listen to reason? "Democracy is a beautiful thing," says George W. Bush in February 2003, as millions of protesters worldwide urged caution on the eve of the attack of Iraq. 9 The beauty lies in the freedom to demonstrate, but the obligation of those in power to listen, engage, and respond has fallen into disuse. The range of opinions reaching into and influ- encing the world's most powerful ruler has narrowed dramatically, and the multitude of ethics violations charged against legislators brings home the "inartistic" force brought to bear by corporations and heavily underwritten interest groups. 10 And yet as Ackerman and Coogan insist, scholars in The Public Work of Rhetoric "reject the idea that public life is dead, that it has been stripped of agitation, assembly, and deliberation. " They create and call upon poie^sis for the production of thick publics (Bruner), recognize rhetorical agency as protean and promiscuous (Campbell), and in so doing, call forth a newly imagined rhetorical history to underwrite them. If Bush calls democracy "beautiful," rhetoricians have the option to take him at his word, returning to beauty, wonder, and fantasy as weapons, not of mass distraction, but of a new political imagination.
"Lost Geographies" of Public Life
The editors of this volume, citing Neil Smith and Setha Low, cast the problem of publics into a wider space than any preexisting agora or ekklesia. 11 Histories of rhetoric are replete with lost geographies, and not only those pockets of populations excluded from public life whose words, in whatever forms they
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could take, are waiting to be retrieved. The culturally Greek intelligentsia from the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire inhabited one of those geogra- phies. Until recently encased within a narrative of decline into "literariness," scholars have begun to reconsider this period in the last decade or so, arriv- ing at a dramatic counterstatement to centuries-old historiography: that pub- lic rhetoric did not die out in the era of the Roman Empire. Opportunities for imagining, performing, and arguing for collective good for subjects of empire did not disappear but persisted--coded within an array of unfamiliar genres. 12
The intersections of geography, language, and cultural practices for these "Greeks" differs decidedly from the famous autochthony of classical Athens. Tied neither to birthplace nor ancestry--that is, in the view of most critics, not to be understood as an "ethnicity"--Greek identity was a cultural acqui- sition on the part of a select group of elite men, often Roman citizens, closely identified with their provincial cities in the Near East. Overlooked or de- emphasized in most treatments of these rhetors is a recognition that their performances enabled them to take on the responsibilities of the public in- tellectual on behalf of imperial subjects in extremely complex, multilayered speaking situations. Adopting the stance of Greek rhetor usually signaled an alienation from Roman power but not exactly subjection; it was a claim for prominence in a stratified and competitive social world as well as a position from which to act as critic and adviser to the indigenous power brokers of a province, as well as to the Roman governor and, on occasion, emperor. Among the remnants they mined resided the memory of discourses of democratic deliberation with its attendant critique of tyranny.
Free Speech: Practice, Politics, Posture?
To speak openly and truthfully to those in power or to cloak your ideas and opinions in artful allusions: these were the terms of a rhetorical debate during a period when arbitrary violence, in the city itself as well as in the provinces and even against members of the elite classes, was a constant possibility. 13 As Peter Brown puts it, "a tide of horror lapped close to the feet of all educated persons. "14 From the conquest of Philip of Macedon over Greece at the end of democracy, to the imperial sweep of Alexander, to the rise of Rome as a conquering power in the third and second centuries B. C. E. , and finally to the declaration of empire by Augustus in 27 C. E. , public exchange took place in "in the suspicious atmosphere of a court society, where people tend to assume a demeanour conformable to the pleasure of the ruler. "15 Yet the textual tradition in Greek from the very beginning records examples of characters risking violent retribution to break through the censorious barrier to speak uncomfortable truths. Parrhe^sia originated in the classical period, and the recently published 1983 Berkeley lectures by Michel Foucault on its origins and history lay out its distinctive parameters as a rhetorical practice: the free- speaker "make[s] it manifestly clear and obvious that what he says is his own
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opinion . . . us[ing] the most direct words and forms of expression he can find. "16 Moreover, this "free-speaker" takes a risk, puts himself or herself in danger, by addressing someone in a position of power. The relationship to the interlocutor is a game, but with risk to only one party: it is a game but also a duty.
The "free-speaker"--parrhe^siastes--was assigned certain attributes in these discourses, a rhetorical posture that translated easily to republican Rome, with its legend and history of heroic challenge to tyranny, and became coded in a fusion of masculinity and national identity: "Rhetorical education was de- signed to instill in Roman boys habits that would make their masculinity lit- erally visible to the world: along with constructing logical arguments, handling narration and interrogation, and creative ways to use words, they learned to stand up straight, look others straight in the eye, gesticulate with grace and authority. "17 As incomplete as a description of Roman rhetorical practice and unsustainable as this posture was, it nonetheless constituted one of the layers of (always multiply mediated) cultural assumption under which Greek rhetors in the provincial East had to work.
"Free speech" lies at the heart of a rhetoric invented in classical Athens-- an ideology at least partially realized in practice--with its courts and delibera- tive assemblies. It is arguably the rhetoric that undergirds most contemporary educational rationales for courses in writing: the facility with language that enables public participation and assures the testing of ideas and policies in democratic forums. The persona most likely to deliver this speech is upright, honest, and straightforward, speaking earnestly in his or her own voice with nothing to hide. What Foucault suggests only briefly, but what Carolyn Miller discusses here for rhetoric more generally, and second sophistic rhetors ex- ploited creatively is "free speech" as itself a figure, a stance, oscillating in rela- tion to its other: "figured discourse. " Cloaking one's criticism in metaphors, or, even better, lodging it within allusions to Greek history, myth, and litera- ture, was not only a safer path for the Greek rhetor but sometimes more effec- tive because more impressive and artful. Frederick Ahl points out, "Blunt speech gives way to oblique speech in situations where the speaker is (or feels) threatened or unsure of his audience. Many ancient poets, and all ancient rhetorical theorists, lived when overt criticism of the ruling powers was dan- gerous. They sensed the need for obliqueness. But they also sensed the greater persuasiveness of oblique suggestion. " He goes on to observe that "rhetorical theorists wanted to train students not in how to achieve martyrdom, which requires no special education, but in how to deal successfully with the pow- erful and even shape and direct their power. "18 A successfully "figured" mes- sage gives the listener--a ruler, but also the others present--the pleasure of solving a mystery, of realizing the power of their common education: the paideia shared by Roman, Greek, and provincial elites alike. For Foucault, "the touchstone of the good ruler is his ability to play the parrhe^siatic game. "19
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Which "rulers"--power brokers--in our contemporary scene are willing to play such a game? In fact, the rhetorical, and thus political, success of George W. Bush in some part lay in his claim not to play the game of knowing, to be outside any paideia, to be the ignorant and thus innocent rustic operating through a kind of folk knowledge. A postmodern paideia demands the ability not only to take up stances on the part of public rhetors but to read the pos- tures of those in power and, most important, to engage them, or to play their games, or to play some other game that is recognizable across lines of power. That would be the definition of a paideia--a common cultural language that can be taken up by many. When progressive (or "left") journalism and schol- arship engages with the rhetorics of the powerful, the effect is most often a critique that marks difference. I have certainly engaged in such projects my- self. 20 We create thereby a standoff of parrhe^siastics, or worse, isolate ourselves like philosophers during the period of the Roman Empire: hermetic social critics who are not involved in or dirtied by these rhetorical/power games. Practicing rhetoric across the boundary of university and community, say Ackerman and Coogan, requires "a shedding of academic adornments, a dif- ferent professional disposition. " The public works rhetorician of the twenty- first century sheds the beard, robes, hermetic habits, and isolationist disdain of the philosopher of the imperial era, most often moving down the ladder of public legitimacy and enfranchisement. Is it possible to imagine moving in the other direction? One scene that comes to mind from the collection here is Grabill's conversation with the mayor at a party. Just imagine--
Dispositions
A fanciful anecdote recorded by Philostratus in his third-century Lives of the Sophists imagines the emperor Trajan seating the Sophist Dio (called Chrysos- tom, or Golden-Mouthed) by his side on the golden chariot in which he rides in triumphal processions, turning to him and saying, "I don't understand what you say but I love you as I love myself. "21 This scene, no doubt apocry- phal, dramatizes a relationship between rhetor and emperor organized around patronage and affiliation. Trajan, from a long-established Roman family that immigrated to Spain (a fully Romanized province) in his grandfather's time, came up through the army and was "adopted" by the emperor Nerva in 97 and chosen to succeed him without struggle in 98. Trajan stood as the first in a sequence of "good" emperors, following the violent and turbulent realms of Domitian and Nero before him. 22 He was a mild-tempered, generous, and judicious ruler who enacted a number of policies benefiting children and utilitarian building projects. He achieved more renown and popular goodwill, however, for his military conquest of Dacia and the elaborate gladiatorial games following thereon. He died in 117 returning from an attack on Parthi- ans in Armenia, an attempt to extend the eastern reach of the empire.
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Dio (40-110 or 120), a native of Prusa (now Bursa, on the Aegean coast of Turkey), chief city in the province of Bithynia, was born to wealthy parents who had been granted Roman citizenship. He was provided with a first-rate Greek education and, like many of the figures in this group, cultivated close relationships with powerful Romans, including the emperor Vespasian early in his career. Dio's free speaking, however, provoked the ire of Domitian, who exiled him from his native province and from Italy in 82. He was returned under Nerva in 96, and then formed a close relationship with Trajan, to whom he may have addressed his four discourses on kingship near the end of the century. 23
Why, in this made-up story, does the emperor say he does not understand what the Sophist says? 24 On one interpretation, we can note the importance of the Sophist's proximity that may override any particular position or piece of advice he may be offering; "love" or philia--manly friendship, is what mat- ters in the networks of power relations between rhetor and emperor. 25 On the level of rhetoric, the anecdote raises the question of how communication operated across cultural and power differences: not only what it was and was not possible to say, but how it was possible to be heard. In fact, local elites were essential to the management of the empire: "Everywhere it was the Roman policy to win over, and to enfranchise, the local leaders. "26 In the East, Roman rule maintained existing civic institutions and relied on the indigenous property-owners for crucial operations of the city.
So from the sophist's perspective, being heard and understood mattered a great deal, even though the historical distance and state of the archival record make linking any one sophistic discourse to a specific audience or outcome very difficult. 27 But, in an odd way, this circumstance provides a provocative mirror of the theoretical commitments in this volume in the adoption of a theory of "publics" over against "audience. " Public rhetors are concerned with the circulation of discourse--its call, its constituents, and the climate it cre- ates. These we can establish for the second sophistic, and they are, in many cases, powerfully oriented toward a vision of the polis as a sustaining form of human organization: the Greek concept and practice taken up--and blown up--by the Romans. Whether or not Trajan was influenced by Dio or by Pliny, a Roman of the same era who composed an extensive panegyric to the em- peror, at points arguing for the exercise of good government, the emperor could not have imagined or enacted his benevolent policies in the absence of a discourse outlining and supporting such actions. This idea could also be understood in terms of legitimation. The Greek rhetors played a role, literally, in keeping alive the imagination and value of democratic rule, on the one hand, and the condemnation of tyrannical imperial behavior, on the other. What Peter W. Rose identifies as the ideological work of Cicero's oratorical arguments is perhaps even more true of the epideictic discourses of the Greek
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rhetors: "An oration does more than propose a specific course of action: its persuasive function is aimed at constructing a vision of the real. . . . This vision of the real is the oration's enabling fiction. "28
Figured Discourse
It is difficult to show figured discourse at work because the hidden message is embedded in culture and allusion--a matter of historically informed specula- tion at such a distance. 29 What is communicated through figured discourse is, most often, a stance, attitude, or posture, rather than a full-fledged argument (although there are examples of these from the imperial period). In the cere- monial contexts where Greek rhetors made their appearances, figured discourse runs against the grain of smooth, showy oratorical performance: it is the grain of sand in the oyster, the residue left echoing in the minds of the auditors-- Roman, Greek, and all the others listening at such events--the uncomfort- able or enlivening, depending on one's position, sense that all is not well in the political order.
The most characteristic examples are drawn from references to classical Greek mythology and literature. The prick comes when the educated listener, who brings a deep familiarity with conventional impressions of characters and stories from Homer, the tragedians, and Greek mythology more gener- ally, hears a reference that subtly recasts the valences of the paideia. Consider the city encomium of Libanius (314-93), one of the imperial period's most prolific Greek rhetors: a native of Antioch, trained in Athens, called to serve in Constantinople by imperial command, and eventually allowed to return to his beloved city on the Orontes River as the official Sophist of the city. 30 The history of Libanius's relationship with imperial power is too complex to relate in detail here, but a few touch points will sketch a sense of the perilous balance between violence and coercion, on the one hand, and beneficence, on the other, within which Greek rhetors were held. When he was born in 314, Libanius's family was recovering from a disastrous punishment inflicted upon it a decade earlier "by the intemperate wrath" of the emperor Dioclet- ian. When he returned to Antioch in 354, the entire city council, including Libanius's uncle, had been arrested by the Roman prefect whose policies had provoked riots. This excessive prefect was soon replaced by a friendly and effec- tive one, and at the time of the composition of the "Antiochikos," Libanius was safe, respected, and soon to enjoy a brief period of stimulating exchange with the emperor Julian. 31 From these few details in a long and eventful life, the extreme vicissitudes of fortune, along with the actual impact, for good or ill, of public rhetoric at this time will become clearer.
What did empire mean to the Greek Sophists? Protection, employment, awe, threat, and the way things were. What was it possible for a Greek to say in the face of Roman imperial power? Libanius delivered this speech in 356 on the occasion of an Olympic games in the middle of a long career and at a
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hopeful moment in the course of his relations with emperors--on the eve of the accession of Julian to the highest office. Two-thirds of the way through a richly detailed description of the history and physical beauties of this thriv- ing metropolis, Libanius mentions the existence of Rome almost as an aside. When the "will of heaven" decreed that post-Alexandrian rulers of Antioch were to be replaced and the world was "girt with the golden chain of Rome" (? 129), the transfer of power occurred with no violence or rancor, Libanius claims, and Romans simply added their customs to existing ones. 32 To a con- temporary reader, Libanius sounds happily reconciled to the conditions of empire. If there are some constraints implied by the figure of a chain, mate- rial compensations, beauty, and technical artistry weigh against them, espe- cially coming from a Greek intellectual who appeared to be faring reasonably well under imperial rule. 33 But educated listeners would hear more. The Greek expression "chain of gold" from the Homeric dialect is rare, used by Zeus in Iliad, Book 8, in a violent threat to the other Olympian gods. Any who vio- lated Zeus's order would be snatched up, dangled by this golden cable, and then hurled "down to the murk of Tartarus" (l. 15). Zeus makes the threat to show "how far I tower over the gods, I tower over men" (ll. 20-31). 34 If the citizens of the lovely and prosperous Antioch were lulled through the first hun- dred paragraphs of Libanius's oration to feel that Rome was far away, they are wrenched back through this reference to a vision of a violent power struggle-- one that only the princeps, the first among them, will win. With the ferocious power of the empire, he can drag even its most privileged members, "and the earth .