Democracy in civic life, as a centrist ideal, regenerates itself through an inclusive, poly-vocal, and capricious poie^sis (that is, a bringing forth in craft and nature), in essence the polis as vita activa as Hannah Arendt describes it,6 capable of
populating
any corner of public life
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 77
with the rudiments of democratic action.
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 77
with the rudiments of democratic action.
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Holton, Robert. "Bourdieu and Common Sense. " Substance: A Review of Theory and Lit- erary Criticism 26 (September 1997): 38-52.
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Kant, Immanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? " In What Is Enlightenment? edited by James Schmidt, 58-64. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
------. "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkla? rung? ," Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784): 481-94.
------. Kant: Political Writings. Edited by Hans Reiss. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Klein, Noemi. No Logo. New York: Picador, 2002.
Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. New York: Verso, 2005.
------. "Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics. " Critical Inquiry
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May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Mayhew, Leon H. The New Public. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McConnell, Douglas, and Grant Gillett. "Lacan for the Philosophical Psychiatrist. " Phi-
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House of Bush. New York: Viking, 2004.
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Schaeffer, John D. Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham,
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Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
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? Rhetorical Engagement
in the Cultural Economies of Cities
John M. Ackerman
"The power of place--the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizen's public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory--remains untapped for most working people's neighborhoods in most American cities. "1
"Civic engagement," as a policy realm and educational scene, appears to accurately name the rhetorical investments of citizen-scholars in the public life of their cities. "Civic" is a keyword in rhetoric,2 as it is synonymous with "city" and thus recalls the venerable claim that rhetoric once had over pub- lic life in the polis, located physically and symbolically in the public space of the agora. As many have noted, throughout antiquity the achievement of civic virtue by the (exclusively male) citizenry was measured by the health and vitality of the polis,3 and the agora was the preeminent site for both policy and economic deliberation and, as such, a daily commemoration to the iden- tity and power of the city. The word "civic" also, and to this day, is synonymic with civility,4 indexing a cultural investment in consensual discourse, the rule of law and logic, and a "republican" political style that features open debate, oratory, agreement, and tolerance. 5 Civic engagement taken at its word(s) ges- tures to the endemic nature of rhetorical practice in the polis because citizens engage each other through words and actions to rewrite the symbolic terrain of public life, recorded in the material artifact of the city.
The word "engagement" connotes less of rhetoric's civic legacy, but its claim to keyword status is in its gesture to the indispensable role of the inter- locutor in public deliberation and the indispensable role of public delibera- tion in a participatory democracy.
Democracy in civic life, as a centrist ideal, regenerates itself through an inclusive, poly-vocal, and capricious poie^sis (that is, a bringing forth in craft and nature), in essence the polis as vita activa as Hannah Arendt describes it,6 capable of populating any corner of public life
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 77
with the rudiments of democratic action. Civic engagement, then, would appear to complement the sorts of rhetorical engagements presented in this collection, but the coin of the realm of "civic engagement"--as anyone em- ployed by a public or private university would know--far exceeds that of rhe- torical practice in civic life. Civic engagement (and not rhetoric) has achieved brand-name status through a burgeoning policy industry, amassing great cul- tural capital in interrelated fields of influence. It operates as a disciplinarily transcendent educational policy that presents engagement, service, and com- munity outreach as cornerstones of a liberal education in the twenty-first century and as pathways between institutions of higher learning and their public constituencies. As a result, civic engagement is now a centerpiece in strategic planning exercises at public and private colleges and universities. With gathering momentum through the latter moments of the twentieth cen- tury, the university has made its own public turn through civic engagement and as an educational policy. Civic engagement has joined innovation, en- trepreneurialism, and global economic competitiveness to guide university planning. Coincidental with this rise in institutional prominence, civic en- gagement linked with economic progressivism has become an instrument for partisan and postpartisan political policy debates. Civic engagement (and its variants) increasingly is featured in political arguments for economic sol- vency and geopolitical power in the United States and abroad in the twenty- first century.
This essay begins with a sketch of interrelated policy spheres aligned with civic engagement--in educational policy and in political and economic plat- forms--to show why civic engagement no longer simply identifies the motives and context of an isolated classroom or off-campus learning event. As soon as civic engagement jumps the track from experiential learning for the causes of progressive education to planning and political spheres, it is implicated in global economic policies. Because public policy is inherently economic in Western society, and because public life is determined by the marketplace more than the democratic ideal, our rhetorical engagements? as pure as we believe them to be of spirit and purpose--are fundamentally political and economic. When the logic of fast capitalism subsumes the logic of progres- sivism in the name of civic engagement, there is rhetorical work to be done to unravel this discourse and its material consequences and to rescue from purely political ambition the commonplace economies of the city--to re- claim, in Harry Boyte's words, "the interplay of distinctive, unique interests and perspectives to accomplish public purposes. "7 Rhetorical analysis and participation, attuned to the economic tableau of the polis, can point us toward the locations and locutions where economic equity has been denied through false promise or cultural misstep and where economic futures can be revitalized.
78 John M. Ackerman
Civic Engagement across Education, Planning, and Political Spheres
For most academic readers, the "scholarship of engagement" is familiar in name and in practice, encompassing a growing set of academic policy initia- tives. Coined by Ernest Boyer, the term strives to connect "the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers, and to our cities. "8 In principle, it is woven into the fabric of campus life, often with direct ties to experiential and service learning, to Campus Compact, and to outreach programs offer- ing service, internships, and undergraduate research opportunities. Engaged scholarship is now ubiquitous in public and private schools, colleges, and universities, growing exponentially through the 1990s and into the twenty- first century. Nearly every major policy agency of higher education promotes and tracks it, and examples abound. The Association of American Universities (AAU) began in 1996 to compile a directory of community service and out- reach programs that now account for nearly 100 percent of AAU membership. 9 The Campus Compact began in 1985 and has grown to 1,100 colleges and universities. 10 The American Association of State Colleges and Universities, in partnership with the New York Times, hosts the American Democracy Project and the Civic Engagement in Action series with 229 member institutions. 11 The Association of American Colleges and Universities, representing 1,150 institutions, claims that civic engagement has become "an essential learning goal throughout higher education. "12 And the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association lists "Engagement and Service" as one of the five criteria guiding reaccreditation. 13 With so much information and interest in circulation, major clearinghouses have emerged such as the National Cen- ter for Public Policy and Higher Education. 14
Now that civic engagement and service are centrally part of innovation and review at the university, it is not surprising to find "engagement" written into the strategic vision of postsecondary institutions as a vehicle to strengthen the collegiate experience, to compete for the best students, and to ensure a university's economic future. As a Google search of "civic engagement strate- gic planning" reveals, civic engagement and global economic competitive- ness intertwine in the strategic plans of most colleges and universities. The Flagship 2030 strategic plan at the University of Colorado, my employer, seeks to redefine the "flagship university of the 21st century," as one that is
intellectually inspiring, a dynamic global force,
promoting cultural understanding, and civic and community engagement, moving the state of Colorado forward, an international crossroad,
with a sense of responsibility, a commitment to learning,
with the financial and operational models to its vision and mission. 15
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 79
Kathy Chaput charts how universities historically have remade themselves for the demands of capitalism. With the implosion of the nation-state and the explosion of digital communication, universities have had to compete for regional and national recognition by attracting the best students and by pro- viding increasingly "bite-size" portions of the university experience that imi- tate the outsourcing and downsizing of other consumer commodities. 16 With more and more university services delivered on-line, and as they temporally align themselves with consumer culture, universities are complicit in the growth market for more "casual" labor. Chaput's critique is that "ostensibly benign" university programs that deliver "service learning, peer instruction, and unpaid internships" contribute, however inadvertently, to a global econ- omy hungry for free or replaceable labor. This critique extends the horizon of rhetorical criticism whenever "self improvement and civic engagement" for global citizens are intoned along with global competitiveness and economic redevelopment. 17
As pervasive as civic engagement has become in educational and univer- sity policy, it has also risen in prominence in the discourse of U. S. political policy and economic reform. January 2009 marked the end of the George W. Bush presidency, an era when almost all domestic and foreign policy was shaped by an "age of terror" linked to the events of September 11, 2001. Ter- ror and national security, however, are now being usurped by a global eco- nomic crisis, and national service has been elevated to a presidential priority for the twenty-first century. On September 11, 2008, ServiceNation and Co- lumbia University hosted the first presidential forum on "service and civic engagement," following the Democratic and Republican conventions. "18 ServiceNation is affiliated with Be the Change, a nonprofit consortium of com- munity and financial leaders, many from the Boston area, which promotes "a bold and innovative policy agenda that is rooted in the practical experience of social entrepreneurs and civic leaders . . . [with] better public polices . . . active citizenship and citizen democracy. "19
ServiceNation seeks a coalition of "100-million Americans" to elevate community involvement in the public consciousness and policy on a scale never seen before and required, it claims, in the wake of failed "conventional strategies" to address "systematic problems" such as poverty, the environment, sickness, and a faulty economic system. ServiceNation espouses a service agenda with "meaningful opportunities for service at every key life stage, and for every socio-economic group" to address the failures of our national sys- tem and to share "American ideals and idealism with the rest of the world. "20
As the public face of Be the Change, ServiceNation is building a nonpar- tisan action group, and its Leadership Council lists members as politically diverse as Caroline Kennedy and Mike Huckabee. Many on the council are affiliated with the Democratic Party, however, and their civic and service agen- das are sympathetic to the platform of the Democratic Leadership Council
80 John M. Ackerman
(DLC), which in turn is affiliated with the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), whose membership and philosophy grew out of the Clinton presidency. The PPI proposes to "adapt progressive values to the new challenges of the infor- mation age. "21 The Hyde Park Declaration: A Statement of Principles and a Policy Agenda for the 21st Century is one of the DLC's charter documents, and it cap- tures the interlacing frames of influence I sketch here. It seeks a transcendent political identity for U. S. politics; it strives to replace partisan politics with a "third way" policy agenda that rests upon "three cornerstones: equal impor- tunity through government, shared responsibility, and an empowered citi- zenry. "22
Both the DLC and the PPI tie a revitalized democracy for the global citizen to civic engagement and to the tenets of what proponents of transnational capitalism and globalization refer to as the "new economy. " The new economy champions digital technology, affluence, centrism, and "a new social struc- ture" led by a new "learning class. " Global expansion, free enterprise, increased productivity, entrepreneurship, and fiscal discipline promise to "expand the winner's circle" through "economic security" and "lifelong learning for every- one. "23 Third-way politics are not limited to the Clinton wing of the Demo- cratic Party; they are based on the philosophies of Tony Blair and those who promoted the "'Clintonization' of European social democracy. "24 As a geopo- litical strategy, the third way erases nation- and class-based definitions of citi- zenship and harnesses civic life to transnational economies and free-market expansion. The third-way policies of the DLC and PPI can clearly be traced to the Clinton presidency, but these doctrines are not exclusive to the Demo- cratic Party in the United States. Republican and conservative policy groups consider the free-market system sacrosanct, and civic engagement is promul- gated to reduce the influence of government over the polis. 25 The church and the family are heralded as the social institutions most responsible for and receptive to civic life. 26 As the Obama presidency unfolds, we will see whether his experience with and investment in community organizing will influence the policy spheres related to civic engagement.
Toward a Political and Economic Reframing of Rhetorical Engagement
These spheres depict the depth and breadth of the overlapping policy areas of civic engagement. As Bennett and Entman discuss in Mediated Politics, pol- icy and public spheres are interdependent, with the former a "subset of [the] public sphere where ideas and feelings explicitly connect with--are commu- nicated to, from, or about--governmental officials, parties, or candidates for office who may decide the outcome of issues or conflicts facing society. "27 They point out that though policy spheres are overtly political and hierarchi- cal in nature--power continues to travel up to those who decide--these spheres tolerate and sometimes openly court local, civic activism. Those citizens who
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 81
are able to participate in a policy sphere may on balance achieve a higher degree of political influence when compared with participation in other areas of public life because policy debates tend to be less encumbered by public par- ticipation in the form of noisy protests or the quieter forms of representative government, such as voting. Policy spheres are constituted and enacted dif- ferently than either the idealized official or vernacular spheres articulated by Gerard Hauser28 because they tend to rely on digital media to spread their mes- sage, sometimes disguising their funding streams and political affiliations, and tend to invent through the velocity of their distributions new mecha- nisms for limiting local political involvement. They comprise "a relatively unregulated and highly commercialized media economy . . . aimed at con- taining the scope and setting the terms of public involvement. "29
Policy spheres in practice are not inherently evil, as they can be instru- mental for causes on the left, right, and center of political life. 30 They are, however, one of the factors in a radical reconfiguration of power in everyday life in the (so-called) knowledge economy and information age. In their digi- tal form, they are difficult to track, and participation in them can be limited by their constitutive bias. The question I raise is where and how does the citizen-scholar, through individual or collective action, enter into those policy spheres that influence the political and economic consequences of civic life? How might rhetorical practice alter the linguistic, deliberative, and material terrain that a policy sphere presumes to address, particularly in postindustrial cities? Policy studies, the subfield of political science open to this question, appears to be addressing this question by announcing an "argumentative turn. " Policy occurs fundamentally as persuasive action that aggregates and then disaggregates through discursive deliberation. 31 This argumentative turn has two benefits: more accurately than positivist models, it reveals where and how policies accumulate; in doing so, it potentially opens more doorways through discourse and rhetoric for wider participation. As in the many other instantiations of the rhetorical turn,32 rhetoric is granted the tertiary status of a complement and not a primary instrument in public life. The roles granted to rhetoric and public policy must be reversed. Rhetoric must reclaim its authority in public life by confecting its own "policy turn" aided certainly by the recognition that policies are ubiquitous, discursive, and thus potentially rhetorical but more centrally by locating our practice somewhere in the "mid- dling" range between everyday life in our communities and the regional eco- nomic policies that influence them. 33
To do so will require a reversal of analytical frames, a reversal of the sym- bolic figure and its economic grounding. It will require that the pursuit of civic engagement be infused with economic justice and political inquiry. We can no longer pretend, in Ronald Greene's words, "that rhetorical agency exists outside the domain of capitalist command. "34 Coincidentally, a similar call to reframe civic engagement away from active learning and toward civic renewal
82 John M. Ackerman
is coming from one of its strongest advocates. Harry Boyte reports that the overwhelming tendency in service programs, sponsored by the university, is to "neglect the dynamics of power and politics" in society obscuring both the ordinary "talent" in local communities and the "craft" nature of academic disciplines that has been diminished by technological specialization and bal- kanization. Though civic engagement has gained national status as a public policy, the movement has stalled, and it requires, according to Boyte, a rein- vention of "civic politics" as "public achievement" to produce "lasting civic goods, material or culture" in "free spaces" defined as public settings where groups gain confidence as "agents of constructive change. "35 This mode goes against the grain of higher education, mostly because it refuses "bite-size" increments of institution practice. It does so by embracing the constitutive nature of civic engagement through a robust model of the civic life construed as "public work" that "builds the power and political acumen of citizens. "36
Taking nothing away from those in academia or public life who volunteer, serve, or teach under the mantel of civic engagement,37 this enterprise has risen to prominence coincidental with the rise of transnational capitalism and its proselytizing discourses of globalization and the new economy. 38 The civic reality does not always match up with the civic rhetoric of the new econ- omy. Doug Henwood illustrates how the new economy has risen and fallen as a discursive phenomenon: whereas the usage of the terms "civic engage- ment" and "globalization" grew exponentially from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, actual economic prosperity declined during that time. 39 Henwood challenges both the qualitative and quantitative claims supporting the "scrip- ture" of the new economy, including a revisionist history of the 1990s as our contemporary golden age. Regarding the gross domestic product, he states that "the 3. 4% average of the 1990s is considerably lower [than the average between 1850 and 1914 of 3. 9%], little different from the growth rates . . . in the much- maligned 1970s and well below the 1960s. "40
For Richard Sennett, new capitalism masks the older social capitalism of the twentieth century, once engendered through education and special skills, with a "specter of uselessness" as a reduction in the need for labor in global mar- kets and a revision of the "moral prestige of work itself. "41 There is a grotesque contradiction between the civic progressivism of third-way, new-economic policies and such sobering and sometimes apocalyptic projections that are today being matched by economic reality. 42 For the rhetorical critic and citi- zen, what is truly grotesque is the imaginative distance that lies between new economic progressivism and the human costs borne by the planet and the "people" in unbridled, transnational capitalism and the erasure of precisely those stark contrasts in everyday life that could lead residents and critics to challenge the status quo. Chantal Mouffe insists that a disingenuously "radi- cal" centrism underlying the third-way political agenda promotes harmony through dialogue while it is "unable to grasp the systematic connections
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 83
existing between global market forces and the variety of problems--from exclusion to environmental risks--that it pretends to tackle. "43 Her charge is to reactivate political struggle to highlight the discursive and material terrain between the oxymoron of transnational progressivism found in third-way politics and the abject dissolution of pubic life in a global age. Civic and politi- cal forms of engagement in policy spheres (for example, service versus voting) are blurring, largely because more than twenty years of conservative political influence has led to federal and state governments "devolving" and outsourc- ing their powers and responsibilities to private and nonprofit sectors of soci- ety. 44 ServiceNation's goal of enlisting and organizing 100 million Americans to serve their communities may be a powerful corrective for the erasure of public life in a global democracy--or precisely the kind of systemic devolution for which neoliberal economic policies thirst.
To frame rhetorical engagement in economic terms, we must return to the city, because it opens our analysis and participation up to the discursive and material elements of the economic predicaments of our communities. The economies of the city precede and thus predetermine the success and sustain- ability of our engagements, reminding us that our communities are in con- stant dialectic with the global economy. If knowledge and information are the new currencies of the global economy, they are being remade each day in our neighborhood schools, offices, streets, and playgrounds as well as our mosques, synagogues, and churches--all of which are shaped by policy spheres. There is a uniquely powerful position for rhetorical agency as it sorts through the economic myth and reality of civic engagement in the polis. A cultural econ- omy is a critical antidote for the utopian excesses of the new economy, because it features the arts, creativity, social action, built space, and local culture, and by implication it includes rhetoric as a civic, urban, and deliberative art. There are multiple economies that must be disentangled to disinter the cultural economy of a city or region: the new economy, which is presumed to replace the orthodoxy of fading economy regimes and which is deeply tied to politi- cal interests; the cultural economy, which is an emerging analytical tool to dis- rupt both old and new economic models; and then the creative economy,45 which has attributes of both old, new, and cultural economies--offering a topoi to invent new policies for neighborhoods caught in the middle of eco- nomic decline, euphemistic policy, and the local need for civic and economic renewal.
As Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke summarize, culture and the economy have invaded each other's intellectual and policy terrain to the point that efforts to determine an actual economy for a people in an organization, city, or region will invariably lead us to critically determine not the economy so much as the "assemblage" of cultural agents, artifacts, policies, institutions, and beliefs that arguably constitute a visible, working economic system. 46 They point out that culture industries (film, art, media) are among the most
84 John M. Ackerman
profitable and adaptive, partly because they are fully equipped to participate in the information streams of a digital world. Du Gay and Pryke note that more static service and production-oriented industries have learned to brand their organizational ethos--their culture--leading them to higher efficiencies and profitability. A cultural economy is fundamentally rhetorical because it is fundamentally "contingent. " To capitalize on contingency, they advise us to reject all binaries of the culture and the economy, as we embrace both the attributes of a cultural analysis (for example, discursive systems, ideology) and the attributes of orthodox economies (for example, marketing, sales, accounting) for their persuasive power. The efficacy of a cultural economy, much akin to rhetoric, is determined by its relevance to the circumstance from which it was derived: "while one can profess a cultural or discursive view of economics and continue to make strong economic assertions, one cannot necessarily do economics in a way that follows from one's convictions con- cerning its cultural constitution. "47 I end this essay with a brief example of my collaborative efforts to divine the cultural economy of a city, under the mantel of civic engagement, which requires a rejection of cultural binaries to produce the best rhetorical effect.
The Cultural Economy of Kent/State
The orthodox economics of Kent, Ohio, are unavoidable to most residents and visitors, because the city does not exhibit the vibrancy of a generic col- lege town. It does not look or feel right in comparison with other university cities and in comparison with neighboring municipalities in what is becom- ing the exurban network of Cleveland and Akron. Too many storefronts are boarded up, too many businesses have changed hands, and the commercial district does not hum with the street life of a university community. The city is also silent about its past. Visitors remark on the difficulty of finding the commemorative site of the May 4, 1970, shooting on campus, and the down- town district offers little to no public record of the events that led to the city's iconic status in the public imagination. 48 In conversations with students, neighbors, and colleagues, I found a coincidence in the city's tragic past and the artifice of its economic plight, a coincidence and geography that led me to question the detachment of civic engagement as a university-sponsored learning event from the economic solvency of the city. Recent forecasts of the educational and economic futures of public research universities all claim that universities cannot ignore their urban and regional hosts, because growth de- pends on regional coexistence. 49 The publicized economic health of this city bears little witness to a cultural economy that would embrace a tragic past, as an embodied geography that one can experience in Kent by looking north- west to the city's central business district and then southeast to the grassy hill where National Guard troops shot dead four students and wounded nine others.
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 85
In orthodox economic terms, the city's economic future by 2005 was not bright. 50 The consumer price index had increased at a rate of 3. 3 percent, while the city's average increase in income tax receipts was 1. 5 percent. The 2005 Financial Report for Kent decries the loss of the "buying power" of the city and its residents. Adjusted and actual revenues were drifting farther and farther apart, due in part to the nation's "jobless economic recovery. " Kent is a postindustrial city, and like many others in Ohio, it has struggled to adapt to the new competitive environments of a global economy. In a town with few economic engines, Kent State University, and the innovation and entre- preneurialism located there, appeared to many to be the best financial solution if new investors could not be found. Private-sector income tax contributions dropped significantly from 1989 to 2005, while the university's share grew from 31 percent to 35 percent, by far the largest contributor. Manufacturing's contributions were cut in half.
The city's economic past was also troubled. The price of oil quadrupled in the early 1970s, and real wages, fueling economic expansion, were usurped by inflation after World War II and the consumer price index. 51 Kent, once a thriving river town, from World War II forward, had to adjust to the demise of the railroad and the invention of a highway system that helped some com- munities but hindered Kent with no easy passage to Akron or Cleveland. Local businesses faced more and more competition, while corporations ex- tended their influence through commodity pricing. Local economies in small towns sometimes turn on a few cataclysmic events, and so it was for Kent. The Commerce Building burned down in 1972, displacing numerous busi- nesses in the downtown district. Davey Tree Service, now a national corpora- tion and one of the most lucrative businesses in the community, along with the U. S. Postal Service, moved away from the downtown district. Haymaker Parkway, conceived in the early 1970s, cut a new pathway through the down- town and between the city and the university. Even the university's decision to become a full-service campus offering financial services, food, recreation, learning, and medical aid further isolated the university community from the city. Alcohol was always an incentive to go downtown, and that, too, dimin- ished when the drinking age was raised to twenty-one. To gauge the impact of these times, I turned to the Kent State University Archives and the Portage County Planning Commission. Using 1970 as my benchmark, it took seven- teen years for the number of students and twenty years for the city's popula- tion to return to the 1970 levels. In Portage County, Kent ranks highest in individual poverty and is one of the highest in poverty among the elderly and families with children. The median income in Kent was nearly $15,000 below the county median of $44,000, which was well below the state and national averages.
If a cultural economy has the capacity to subvert orthodox and new economies by authorizing a prognosis based on the economic attributes of
86 John M. Ackerman
local culture, then the rhetorical analysis of those attributes must be critically multimodal. We must look beyond the symbolic to determine the material attributes of a cultural economy because symbolicity naturalizes an affinity between the aesthetic object and its representation. Walter Benjamin, much earlier in the twentieth century, foresaw this problem, whenever the cultural economy of the city is confused with an aesthetic object that renders symbolic its lived appreciation or critique. 52 Recent studies of the symbolic economies of cities still suffer from the interpretive habit that subsumes culture under the domain of symbolic representation. A symbolic economy may include a wide range of abstract and concrete properties from information and culture to the "spaces in which they are created and consumed," but John Allen insists that we go further to break apart all logics that assign either symbol or space to a specific sphere, for example, as "food, fashion, music, or tourism. "53 The critic must search for novel "registers" that result from productive "entangle- ments" of aesthetic, material, representational, and discursive elements in a site's cultural economy. Yet critical entanglements do not give license to post- modern confusion. To the contrary, critical entanglements search for a mean- ingful dissonance in the cultural milieu that defeats the bias of textuality over materiality or the bias of the aesthetic over the quotidian.
The cultural economy of Kent resides most poignantly in the legacy of the public tragedy of May 4, 1970. Cultural memory as an economic attribute dif- ferentiates across individual, social, collective, and public memories. 54 As I have written elsewhere, this differentiation allows for vibrant forms of civic reflec- tion, dialogue, and planning if a stage is provided by the city. People not only remember the events of May 4 differently, but their ability to recall those times depends upon the way they revisit the terrain of commemoration. It matters deeply that residents of Kent and employees of the university experience the city differently according to their exposure to the geography of the protests in the streets of the downtown district in 1970 and the eventual location of the May 4 memorial, some twenty years later, on the university campus. Stu- dents and newcomers to Kent rely on different degrees of collective and pub- lic memory, the memory troves that transcend direct experience and social (community) awareness. Local residents draw upon individual and social memory and at times resent the ideologies sustained by collective and public memory, the memory troves that bind Kent State to a collective conscious- ness (if you were alive in 1970) and the public imagination. The city is a latent interlocutor in this dissonant, mostly silent, deliberation. There are no com- memorative sites or events in the downtown district. The geography and kairos of commemoration are overwhelmed by a tragic cataclysm that has been re- stricted to a few days on the Kent Campus in early May and to an inconspic- uous memorial site on campus.
My contention that memory is material and that memory reinscribes a dis- sonant cultural geography in the economy of the city rests on the assumption
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 87
that memory and place are intertwined, an assumption fully explored by Edward Casey and many others. 55 "What is contained in place is well on its way to being well remembered," with the reverse equally true that what is con- tained in memory is well on its way to emplacement. 56 Not only do people recall differently the events of May 4, they assign praise and blame differently according to their ideological bias and geographical wherewithal. This bias-- for example, many living residents still blame the students for the actions of the National Guard--corresponds with different explanations of the economic plight of the city. Some recall the broken windows downtown and assign eco- nomic decline to political unrest, and others do not, explaining the economic predicament through economic orthodoxy. Everyone, therefore, reads the arti- fice of the city differently.
Memory reinscribes the city, and the artifice of the city reinscribes mem- ory. Working from that premise, a juxtaposition of orthodox and cultural economies in Kent would suggest that we study the territorial boundaries and proximities of different social institutions. The space between the city of Kent's downtown business district and the west and north sides of the uni- versity is bisected by the Main Street Bridge and Haymaker Parkway, a con- struction project conceived long before the May 4 shootings but completed just shortly thereafter. The bridge and parkway comprise the epicenter of the cultural economy of Kent for several reasons. Haymaker Parkway in its cur- rent form inscribes the territorial boundaries of both the city and the univer- sity. Haymaker was designed to bring new economic life to the downtown business district, but in my analysis the coincidence of the parkway with the shootings and unrest in 1970, and with what one resident called a "violation of the 50-year commitment to the university as a cultural anchor," meant that the city built a wall in the form of a boulevard. In doing so, it slowed the reconciliation of dissonant points of view on a public tragedy by ensuring that the artifice of the city, owned by all residents and employees, was broken in two.
The legacy of the city's efforts to reimagine and build a positive economic future is cataloged in cycles of urban planning. Figure 1 compresses the mate- rial history of the city and its need to cross the Cuyahoga River to promote commerce. The image displayed on the following page illustrates the city's fixation from 1970 to the present on Haymaker and the downtown business district and the desire to correct what it has wrought. Excerpts from planning documents show how the city's artifice inscribed over time has left an indeli- ble geography of the city and university's epicenter. The full history of eco- nomic development, the artifice of the city, and an interweaving of public tragedy goes well beyond this essay, but this illustration shows how ordinary urban landscapes, as Deloris Hayden states in the quotation that opens this essay, reveal much more than mere cycles of urban renewal. They exhume a city's cultural economy from its artifice to remind us that culture can never be
? City plans and artifacts.
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? Rhetorical Engagement
in the Cultural Economies of Cities
John M. Ackerman
"The power of place--the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizen's public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory--remains untapped for most working people's neighborhoods in most American cities. "1
"Civic engagement," as a policy realm and educational scene, appears to accurately name the rhetorical investments of citizen-scholars in the public life of their cities. "Civic" is a keyword in rhetoric,2 as it is synonymous with "city" and thus recalls the venerable claim that rhetoric once had over pub- lic life in the polis, located physically and symbolically in the public space of the agora. As many have noted, throughout antiquity the achievement of civic virtue by the (exclusively male) citizenry was measured by the health and vitality of the polis,3 and the agora was the preeminent site for both policy and economic deliberation and, as such, a daily commemoration to the iden- tity and power of the city. The word "civic" also, and to this day, is synonymic with civility,4 indexing a cultural investment in consensual discourse, the rule of law and logic, and a "republican" political style that features open debate, oratory, agreement, and tolerance. 5 Civic engagement taken at its word(s) ges- tures to the endemic nature of rhetorical practice in the polis because citizens engage each other through words and actions to rewrite the symbolic terrain of public life, recorded in the material artifact of the city.
The word "engagement" connotes less of rhetoric's civic legacy, but its claim to keyword status is in its gesture to the indispensable role of the inter- locutor in public deliberation and the indispensable role of public delibera- tion in a participatory democracy.
Democracy in civic life, as a centrist ideal, regenerates itself through an inclusive, poly-vocal, and capricious poie^sis (that is, a bringing forth in craft and nature), in essence the polis as vita activa as Hannah Arendt describes it,6 capable of populating any corner of public life
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 77
with the rudiments of democratic action. Civic engagement, then, would appear to complement the sorts of rhetorical engagements presented in this collection, but the coin of the realm of "civic engagement"--as anyone em- ployed by a public or private university would know--far exceeds that of rhe- torical practice in civic life. Civic engagement (and not rhetoric) has achieved brand-name status through a burgeoning policy industry, amassing great cul- tural capital in interrelated fields of influence. It operates as a disciplinarily transcendent educational policy that presents engagement, service, and com- munity outreach as cornerstones of a liberal education in the twenty-first century and as pathways between institutions of higher learning and their public constituencies. As a result, civic engagement is now a centerpiece in strategic planning exercises at public and private colleges and universities. With gathering momentum through the latter moments of the twentieth cen- tury, the university has made its own public turn through civic engagement and as an educational policy. Civic engagement has joined innovation, en- trepreneurialism, and global economic competitiveness to guide university planning. Coincidental with this rise in institutional prominence, civic en- gagement linked with economic progressivism has become an instrument for partisan and postpartisan political policy debates. Civic engagement (and its variants) increasingly is featured in political arguments for economic sol- vency and geopolitical power in the United States and abroad in the twenty- first century.
This essay begins with a sketch of interrelated policy spheres aligned with civic engagement--in educational policy and in political and economic plat- forms--to show why civic engagement no longer simply identifies the motives and context of an isolated classroom or off-campus learning event. As soon as civic engagement jumps the track from experiential learning for the causes of progressive education to planning and political spheres, it is implicated in global economic policies. Because public policy is inherently economic in Western society, and because public life is determined by the marketplace more than the democratic ideal, our rhetorical engagements? as pure as we believe them to be of spirit and purpose--are fundamentally political and economic. When the logic of fast capitalism subsumes the logic of progres- sivism in the name of civic engagement, there is rhetorical work to be done to unravel this discourse and its material consequences and to rescue from purely political ambition the commonplace economies of the city--to re- claim, in Harry Boyte's words, "the interplay of distinctive, unique interests and perspectives to accomplish public purposes. "7 Rhetorical analysis and participation, attuned to the economic tableau of the polis, can point us toward the locations and locutions where economic equity has been denied through false promise or cultural misstep and where economic futures can be revitalized.
78 John M. Ackerman
Civic Engagement across Education, Planning, and Political Spheres
For most academic readers, the "scholarship of engagement" is familiar in name and in practice, encompassing a growing set of academic policy initia- tives. Coined by Ernest Boyer, the term strives to connect "the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers, and to our cities. "8 In principle, it is woven into the fabric of campus life, often with direct ties to experiential and service learning, to Campus Compact, and to outreach programs offer- ing service, internships, and undergraduate research opportunities. Engaged scholarship is now ubiquitous in public and private schools, colleges, and universities, growing exponentially through the 1990s and into the twenty- first century. Nearly every major policy agency of higher education promotes and tracks it, and examples abound. The Association of American Universities (AAU) began in 1996 to compile a directory of community service and out- reach programs that now account for nearly 100 percent of AAU membership. 9 The Campus Compact began in 1985 and has grown to 1,100 colleges and universities. 10 The American Association of State Colleges and Universities, in partnership with the New York Times, hosts the American Democracy Project and the Civic Engagement in Action series with 229 member institutions. 11 The Association of American Colleges and Universities, representing 1,150 institutions, claims that civic engagement has become "an essential learning goal throughout higher education. "12 And the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association lists "Engagement and Service" as one of the five criteria guiding reaccreditation. 13 With so much information and interest in circulation, major clearinghouses have emerged such as the National Cen- ter for Public Policy and Higher Education. 14
Now that civic engagement and service are centrally part of innovation and review at the university, it is not surprising to find "engagement" written into the strategic vision of postsecondary institutions as a vehicle to strengthen the collegiate experience, to compete for the best students, and to ensure a university's economic future. As a Google search of "civic engagement strate- gic planning" reveals, civic engagement and global economic competitive- ness intertwine in the strategic plans of most colleges and universities. The Flagship 2030 strategic plan at the University of Colorado, my employer, seeks to redefine the "flagship university of the 21st century," as one that is
intellectually inspiring, a dynamic global force,
promoting cultural understanding, and civic and community engagement, moving the state of Colorado forward, an international crossroad,
with a sense of responsibility, a commitment to learning,
with the financial and operational models to its vision and mission. 15
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 79
Kathy Chaput charts how universities historically have remade themselves for the demands of capitalism. With the implosion of the nation-state and the explosion of digital communication, universities have had to compete for regional and national recognition by attracting the best students and by pro- viding increasingly "bite-size" portions of the university experience that imi- tate the outsourcing and downsizing of other consumer commodities. 16 With more and more university services delivered on-line, and as they temporally align themselves with consumer culture, universities are complicit in the growth market for more "casual" labor. Chaput's critique is that "ostensibly benign" university programs that deliver "service learning, peer instruction, and unpaid internships" contribute, however inadvertently, to a global econ- omy hungry for free or replaceable labor. This critique extends the horizon of rhetorical criticism whenever "self improvement and civic engagement" for global citizens are intoned along with global competitiveness and economic redevelopment. 17
As pervasive as civic engagement has become in educational and univer- sity policy, it has also risen in prominence in the discourse of U. S. political policy and economic reform. January 2009 marked the end of the George W. Bush presidency, an era when almost all domestic and foreign policy was shaped by an "age of terror" linked to the events of September 11, 2001. Ter- ror and national security, however, are now being usurped by a global eco- nomic crisis, and national service has been elevated to a presidential priority for the twenty-first century. On September 11, 2008, ServiceNation and Co- lumbia University hosted the first presidential forum on "service and civic engagement," following the Democratic and Republican conventions. "18 ServiceNation is affiliated with Be the Change, a nonprofit consortium of com- munity and financial leaders, many from the Boston area, which promotes "a bold and innovative policy agenda that is rooted in the practical experience of social entrepreneurs and civic leaders . . . [with] better public polices . . . active citizenship and citizen democracy. "19
ServiceNation seeks a coalition of "100-million Americans" to elevate community involvement in the public consciousness and policy on a scale never seen before and required, it claims, in the wake of failed "conventional strategies" to address "systematic problems" such as poverty, the environment, sickness, and a faulty economic system. ServiceNation espouses a service agenda with "meaningful opportunities for service at every key life stage, and for every socio-economic group" to address the failures of our national sys- tem and to share "American ideals and idealism with the rest of the world. "20
As the public face of Be the Change, ServiceNation is building a nonpar- tisan action group, and its Leadership Council lists members as politically diverse as Caroline Kennedy and Mike Huckabee. Many on the council are affiliated with the Democratic Party, however, and their civic and service agen- das are sympathetic to the platform of the Democratic Leadership Council
80 John M. Ackerman
(DLC), which in turn is affiliated with the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), whose membership and philosophy grew out of the Clinton presidency. The PPI proposes to "adapt progressive values to the new challenges of the infor- mation age. "21 The Hyde Park Declaration: A Statement of Principles and a Policy Agenda for the 21st Century is one of the DLC's charter documents, and it cap- tures the interlacing frames of influence I sketch here. It seeks a transcendent political identity for U. S. politics; it strives to replace partisan politics with a "third way" policy agenda that rests upon "three cornerstones: equal impor- tunity through government, shared responsibility, and an empowered citi- zenry. "22
Both the DLC and the PPI tie a revitalized democracy for the global citizen to civic engagement and to the tenets of what proponents of transnational capitalism and globalization refer to as the "new economy. " The new economy champions digital technology, affluence, centrism, and "a new social struc- ture" led by a new "learning class. " Global expansion, free enterprise, increased productivity, entrepreneurship, and fiscal discipline promise to "expand the winner's circle" through "economic security" and "lifelong learning for every- one. "23 Third-way politics are not limited to the Clinton wing of the Demo- cratic Party; they are based on the philosophies of Tony Blair and those who promoted the "'Clintonization' of European social democracy. "24 As a geopo- litical strategy, the third way erases nation- and class-based definitions of citi- zenship and harnesses civic life to transnational economies and free-market expansion. The third-way policies of the DLC and PPI can clearly be traced to the Clinton presidency, but these doctrines are not exclusive to the Demo- cratic Party in the United States. Republican and conservative policy groups consider the free-market system sacrosanct, and civic engagement is promul- gated to reduce the influence of government over the polis. 25 The church and the family are heralded as the social institutions most responsible for and receptive to civic life. 26 As the Obama presidency unfolds, we will see whether his experience with and investment in community organizing will influence the policy spheres related to civic engagement.
Toward a Political and Economic Reframing of Rhetorical Engagement
These spheres depict the depth and breadth of the overlapping policy areas of civic engagement. As Bennett and Entman discuss in Mediated Politics, pol- icy and public spheres are interdependent, with the former a "subset of [the] public sphere where ideas and feelings explicitly connect with--are commu- nicated to, from, or about--governmental officials, parties, or candidates for office who may decide the outcome of issues or conflicts facing society. "27 They point out that though policy spheres are overtly political and hierarchi- cal in nature--power continues to travel up to those who decide--these spheres tolerate and sometimes openly court local, civic activism. Those citizens who
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 81
are able to participate in a policy sphere may on balance achieve a higher degree of political influence when compared with participation in other areas of public life because policy debates tend to be less encumbered by public par- ticipation in the form of noisy protests or the quieter forms of representative government, such as voting. Policy spheres are constituted and enacted dif- ferently than either the idealized official or vernacular spheres articulated by Gerard Hauser28 because they tend to rely on digital media to spread their mes- sage, sometimes disguising their funding streams and political affiliations, and tend to invent through the velocity of their distributions new mecha- nisms for limiting local political involvement. They comprise "a relatively unregulated and highly commercialized media economy . . . aimed at con- taining the scope and setting the terms of public involvement. "29
Policy spheres in practice are not inherently evil, as they can be instru- mental for causes on the left, right, and center of political life. 30 They are, however, one of the factors in a radical reconfiguration of power in everyday life in the (so-called) knowledge economy and information age. In their digi- tal form, they are difficult to track, and participation in them can be limited by their constitutive bias. The question I raise is where and how does the citizen-scholar, through individual or collective action, enter into those policy spheres that influence the political and economic consequences of civic life? How might rhetorical practice alter the linguistic, deliberative, and material terrain that a policy sphere presumes to address, particularly in postindustrial cities? Policy studies, the subfield of political science open to this question, appears to be addressing this question by announcing an "argumentative turn. " Policy occurs fundamentally as persuasive action that aggregates and then disaggregates through discursive deliberation. 31 This argumentative turn has two benefits: more accurately than positivist models, it reveals where and how policies accumulate; in doing so, it potentially opens more doorways through discourse and rhetoric for wider participation. As in the many other instantiations of the rhetorical turn,32 rhetoric is granted the tertiary status of a complement and not a primary instrument in public life. The roles granted to rhetoric and public policy must be reversed. Rhetoric must reclaim its authority in public life by confecting its own "policy turn" aided certainly by the recognition that policies are ubiquitous, discursive, and thus potentially rhetorical but more centrally by locating our practice somewhere in the "mid- dling" range between everyday life in our communities and the regional eco- nomic policies that influence them. 33
To do so will require a reversal of analytical frames, a reversal of the sym- bolic figure and its economic grounding. It will require that the pursuit of civic engagement be infused with economic justice and political inquiry. We can no longer pretend, in Ronald Greene's words, "that rhetorical agency exists outside the domain of capitalist command. "34 Coincidentally, a similar call to reframe civic engagement away from active learning and toward civic renewal
82 John M. Ackerman
is coming from one of its strongest advocates. Harry Boyte reports that the overwhelming tendency in service programs, sponsored by the university, is to "neglect the dynamics of power and politics" in society obscuring both the ordinary "talent" in local communities and the "craft" nature of academic disciplines that has been diminished by technological specialization and bal- kanization. Though civic engagement has gained national status as a public policy, the movement has stalled, and it requires, according to Boyte, a rein- vention of "civic politics" as "public achievement" to produce "lasting civic goods, material or culture" in "free spaces" defined as public settings where groups gain confidence as "agents of constructive change. "35 This mode goes against the grain of higher education, mostly because it refuses "bite-size" increments of institution practice. It does so by embracing the constitutive nature of civic engagement through a robust model of the civic life construed as "public work" that "builds the power and political acumen of citizens. "36
Taking nothing away from those in academia or public life who volunteer, serve, or teach under the mantel of civic engagement,37 this enterprise has risen to prominence coincidental with the rise of transnational capitalism and its proselytizing discourses of globalization and the new economy. 38 The civic reality does not always match up with the civic rhetoric of the new econ- omy. Doug Henwood illustrates how the new economy has risen and fallen as a discursive phenomenon: whereas the usage of the terms "civic engage- ment" and "globalization" grew exponentially from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, actual economic prosperity declined during that time. 39 Henwood challenges both the qualitative and quantitative claims supporting the "scrip- ture" of the new economy, including a revisionist history of the 1990s as our contemporary golden age. Regarding the gross domestic product, he states that "the 3. 4% average of the 1990s is considerably lower [than the average between 1850 and 1914 of 3. 9%], little different from the growth rates . . . in the much- maligned 1970s and well below the 1960s. "40
For Richard Sennett, new capitalism masks the older social capitalism of the twentieth century, once engendered through education and special skills, with a "specter of uselessness" as a reduction in the need for labor in global mar- kets and a revision of the "moral prestige of work itself. "41 There is a grotesque contradiction between the civic progressivism of third-way, new-economic policies and such sobering and sometimes apocalyptic projections that are today being matched by economic reality. 42 For the rhetorical critic and citi- zen, what is truly grotesque is the imaginative distance that lies between new economic progressivism and the human costs borne by the planet and the "people" in unbridled, transnational capitalism and the erasure of precisely those stark contrasts in everyday life that could lead residents and critics to challenge the status quo. Chantal Mouffe insists that a disingenuously "radi- cal" centrism underlying the third-way political agenda promotes harmony through dialogue while it is "unable to grasp the systematic connections
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 83
existing between global market forces and the variety of problems--from exclusion to environmental risks--that it pretends to tackle. "43 Her charge is to reactivate political struggle to highlight the discursive and material terrain between the oxymoron of transnational progressivism found in third-way politics and the abject dissolution of pubic life in a global age. Civic and politi- cal forms of engagement in policy spheres (for example, service versus voting) are blurring, largely because more than twenty years of conservative political influence has led to federal and state governments "devolving" and outsourc- ing their powers and responsibilities to private and nonprofit sectors of soci- ety. 44 ServiceNation's goal of enlisting and organizing 100 million Americans to serve their communities may be a powerful corrective for the erasure of public life in a global democracy--or precisely the kind of systemic devolution for which neoliberal economic policies thirst.
To frame rhetorical engagement in economic terms, we must return to the city, because it opens our analysis and participation up to the discursive and material elements of the economic predicaments of our communities. The economies of the city precede and thus predetermine the success and sustain- ability of our engagements, reminding us that our communities are in con- stant dialectic with the global economy. If knowledge and information are the new currencies of the global economy, they are being remade each day in our neighborhood schools, offices, streets, and playgrounds as well as our mosques, synagogues, and churches--all of which are shaped by policy spheres. There is a uniquely powerful position for rhetorical agency as it sorts through the economic myth and reality of civic engagement in the polis. A cultural econ- omy is a critical antidote for the utopian excesses of the new economy, because it features the arts, creativity, social action, built space, and local culture, and by implication it includes rhetoric as a civic, urban, and deliberative art. There are multiple economies that must be disentangled to disinter the cultural economy of a city or region: the new economy, which is presumed to replace the orthodoxy of fading economy regimes and which is deeply tied to politi- cal interests; the cultural economy, which is an emerging analytical tool to dis- rupt both old and new economic models; and then the creative economy,45 which has attributes of both old, new, and cultural economies--offering a topoi to invent new policies for neighborhoods caught in the middle of eco- nomic decline, euphemistic policy, and the local need for civic and economic renewal.
As Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke summarize, culture and the economy have invaded each other's intellectual and policy terrain to the point that efforts to determine an actual economy for a people in an organization, city, or region will invariably lead us to critically determine not the economy so much as the "assemblage" of cultural agents, artifacts, policies, institutions, and beliefs that arguably constitute a visible, working economic system. 46 They point out that culture industries (film, art, media) are among the most
84 John M. Ackerman
profitable and adaptive, partly because they are fully equipped to participate in the information streams of a digital world. Du Gay and Pryke note that more static service and production-oriented industries have learned to brand their organizational ethos--their culture--leading them to higher efficiencies and profitability. A cultural economy is fundamentally rhetorical because it is fundamentally "contingent. " To capitalize on contingency, they advise us to reject all binaries of the culture and the economy, as we embrace both the attributes of a cultural analysis (for example, discursive systems, ideology) and the attributes of orthodox economies (for example, marketing, sales, accounting) for their persuasive power. The efficacy of a cultural economy, much akin to rhetoric, is determined by its relevance to the circumstance from which it was derived: "while one can profess a cultural or discursive view of economics and continue to make strong economic assertions, one cannot necessarily do economics in a way that follows from one's convictions con- cerning its cultural constitution. "47 I end this essay with a brief example of my collaborative efforts to divine the cultural economy of a city, under the mantel of civic engagement, which requires a rejection of cultural binaries to produce the best rhetorical effect.
The Cultural Economy of Kent/State
The orthodox economics of Kent, Ohio, are unavoidable to most residents and visitors, because the city does not exhibit the vibrancy of a generic col- lege town. It does not look or feel right in comparison with other university cities and in comparison with neighboring municipalities in what is becom- ing the exurban network of Cleveland and Akron. Too many storefronts are boarded up, too many businesses have changed hands, and the commercial district does not hum with the street life of a university community. The city is also silent about its past. Visitors remark on the difficulty of finding the commemorative site of the May 4, 1970, shooting on campus, and the down- town district offers little to no public record of the events that led to the city's iconic status in the public imagination. 48 In conversations with students, neighbors, and colleagues, I found a coincidence in the city's tragic past and the artifice of its economic plight, a coincidence and geography that led me to question the detachment of civic engagement as a university-sponsored learning event from the economic solvency of the city. Recent forecasts of the educational and economic futures of public research universities all claim that universities cannot ignore their urban and regional hosts, because growth de- pends on regional coexistence. 49 The publicized economic health of this city bears little witness to a cultural economy that would embrace a tragic past, as an embodied geography that one can experience in Kent by looking north- west to the city's central business district and then southeast to the grassy hill where National Guard troops shot dead four students and wounded nine others.
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In orthodox economic terms, the city's economic future by 2005 was not bright. 50 The consumer price index had increased at a rate of 3. 3 percent, while the city's average increase in income tax receipts was 1. 5 percent. The 2005 Financial Report for Kent decries the loss of the "buying power" of the city and its residents. Adjusted and actual revenues were drifting farther and farther apart, due in part to the nation's "jobless economic recovery. " Kent is a postindustrial city, and like many others in Ohio, it has struggled to adapt to the new competitive environments of a global economy. In a town with few economic engines, Kent State University, and the innovation and entre- preneurialism located there, appeared to many to be the best financial solution if new investors could not be found. Private-sector income tax contributions dropped significantly from 1989 to 2005, while the university's share grew from 31 percent to 35 percent, by far the largest contributor. Manufacturing's contributions were cut in half.
The city's economic past was also troubled. The price of oil quadrupled in the early 1970s, and real wages, fueling economic expansion, were usurped by inflation after World War II and the consumer price index. 51 Kent, once a thriving river town, from World War II forward, had to adjust to the demise of the railroad and the invention of a highway system that helped some com- munities but hindered Kent with no easy passage to Akron or Cleveland. Local businesses faced more and more competition, while corporations ex- tended their influence through commodity pricing. Local economies in small towns sometimes turn on a few cataclysmic events, and so it was for Kent. The Commerce Building burned down in 1972, displacing numerous busi- nesses in the downtown district. Davey Tree Service, now a national corpora- tion and one of the most lucrative businesses in the community, along with the U. S. Postal Service, moved away from the downtown district. Haymaker Parkway, conceived in the early 1970s, cut a new pathway through the down- town and between the city and the university. Even the university's decision to become a full-service campus offering financial services, food, recreation, learning, and medical aid further isolated the university community from the city. Alcohol was always an incentive to go downtown, and that, too, dimin- ished when the drinking age was raised to twenty-one. To gauge the impact of these times, I turned to the Kent State University Archives and the Portage County Planning Commission. Using 1970 as my benchmark, it took seven- teen years for the number of students and twenty years for the city's popula- tion to return to the 1970 levels. In Portage County, Kent ranks highest in individual poverty and is one of the highest in poverty among the elderly and families with children. The median income in Kent was nearly $15,000 below the county median of $44,000, which was well below the state and national averages.
If a cultural economy has the capacity to subvert orthodox and new economies by authorizing a prognosis based on the economic attributes of
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local culture, then the rhetorical analysis of those attributes must be critically multimodal. We must look beyond the symbolic to determine the material attributes of a cultural economy because symbolicity naturalizes an affinity between the aesthetic object and its representation. Walter Benjamin, much earlier in the twentieth century, foresaw this problem, whenever the cultural economy of the city is confused with an aesthetic object that renders symbolic its lived appreciation or critique. 52 Recent studies of the symbolic economies of cities still suffer from the interpretive habit that subsumes culture under the domain of symbolic representation. A symbolic economy may include a wide range of abstract and concrete properties from information and culture to the "spaces in which they are created and consumed," but John Allen insists that we go further to break apart all logics that assign either symbol or space to a specific sphere, for example, as "food, fashion, music, or tourism. "53 The critic must search for novel "registers" that result from productive "entangle- ments" of aesthetic, material, representational, and discursive elements in a site's cultural economy. Yet critical entanglements do not give license to post- modern confusion. To the contrary, critical entanglements search for a mean- ingful dissonance in the cultural milieu that defeats the bias of textuality over materiality or the bias of the aesthetic over the quotidian.
The cultural economy of Kent resides most poignantly in the legacy of the public tragedy of May 4, 1970. Cultural memory as an economic attribute dif- ferentiates across individual, social, collective, and public memories. 54 As I have written elsewhere, this differentiation allows for vibrant forms of civic reflec- tion, dialogue, and planning if a stage is provided by the city. People not only remember the events of May 4 differently, but their ability to recall those times depends upon the way they revisit the terrain of commemoration. It matters deeply that residents of Kent and employees of the university experience the city differently according to their exposure to the geography of the protests in the streets of the downtown district in 1970 and the eventual location of the May 4 memorial, some twenty years later, on the university campus. Stu- dents and newcomers to Kent rely on different degrees of collective and pub- lic memory, the memory troves that transcend direct experience and social (community) awareness. Local residents draw upon individual and social memory and at times resent the ideologies sustained by collective and public memory, the memory troves that bind Kent State to a collective conscious- ness (if you were alive in 1970) and the public imagination. The city is a latent interlocutor in this dissonant, mostly silent, deliberation. There are no com- memorative sites or events in the downtown district. The geography and kairos of commemoration are overwhelmed by a tragic cataclysm that has been re- stricted to a few days on the Kent Campus in early May and to an inconspic- uous memorial site on campus.
My contention that memory is material and that memory reinscribes a dis- sonant cultural geography in the economy of the city rests on the assumption
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that memory and place are intertwined, an assumption fully explored by Edward Casey and many others. 55 "What is contained in place is well on its way to being well remembered," with the reverse equally true that what is con- tained in memory is well on its way to emplacement. 56 Not only do people recall differently the events of May 4, they assign praise and blame differently according to their ideological bias and geographical wherewithal. This bias-- for example, many living residents still blame the students for the actions of the National Guard--corresponds with different explanations of the economic plight of the city. Some recall the broken windows downtown and assign eco- nomic decline to political unrest, and others do not, explaining the economic predicament through economic orthodoxy. Everyone, therefore, reads the arti- fice of the city differently.
Memory reinscribes the city, and the artifice of the city reinscribes mem- ory. Working from that premise, a juxtaposition of orthodox and cultural economies in Kent would suggest that we study the territorial boundaries and proximities of different social institutions. The space between the city of Kent's downtown business district and the west and north sides of the uni- versity is bisected by the Main Street Bridge and Haymaker Parkway, a con- struction project conceived long before the May 4 shootings but completed just shortly thereafter. The bridge and parkway comprise the epicenter of the cultural economy of Kent for several reasons. Haymaker Parkway in its cur- rent form inscribes the territorial boundaries of both the city and the univer- sity. Haymaker was designed to bring new economic life to the downtown business district, but in my analysis the coincidence of the parkway with the shootings and unrest in 1970, and with what one resident called a "violation of the 50-year commitment to the university as a cultural anchor," meant that the city built a wall in the form of a boulevard. In doing so, it slowed the reconciliation of dissonant points of view on a public tragedy by ensuring that the artifice of the city, owned by all residents and employees, was broken in two.
The legacy of the city's efforts to reimagine and build a positive economic future is cataloged in cycles of urban planning. Figure 1 compresses the mate- rial history of the city and its need to cross the Cuyahoga River to promote commerce. The image displayed on the following page illustrates the city's fixation from 1970 to the present on Haymaker and the downtown business district and the desire to correct what it has wrought. Excerpts from planning documents show how the city's artifice inscribed over time has left an indeli- ble geography of the city and university's epicenter. The full history of eco- nomic development, the artifice of the city, and an interweaving of public tragedy goes well beyond this essay, but this illustration shows how ordinary urban landscapes, as Deloris Hayden states in the quotation that opens this essay, reveal much more than mere cycles of urban renewal. They exhume a city's cultural economy from its artifice to remind us that culture can never be
? City plans and artifacts.
