Translated
by Myra Bergman Ramos.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
Speakers expand their reach with broader interpretive moves that respond to conflict, claims, or questions with new claims, rivals, or contributions that justify, qualify, or conditionalize our understanding.
And finally, speakers may rise to what I have argued is the most powerful form of rhetorical agency in community literacy--a fully dialogic, knowledge-building engagement with the understanding of others.
In acts of complexity and so- phistication, we see these speakers reinterpret the image of another speaker, rival or compare their own points, plan a response, or actively adapt to others.
This supported performance also helps us name three aspects of going public in the face of a disabling discourse. One is the way a structured discur- sive space, such as the Think Tank, can not only enfranchise speakers but also scaffold their rhetorical work--encouraging them to construct rivals and op- tions in response to others. Another is the way these two students use the occasion to grow and achieve in their own ways. Brandon, who had a history of denying he had a learning disability even within the SOS program, is look- ing publicly and reflectively at his own decision. In this public forum, he has found a way to affirm a "valid social identity" that embraces his learning dif- ficulties. But in other ways, it was Don's participation, speaking up in this public room that astounded his teachers. Don does not talk much; he strug- gles with academic tasks more than most students in the program. Yet here he is, to everyone's surprise and delight, volunteering his story and interven- ing in the discussion with the authority of a person with something to con- tribute.
Finally, in Brandon and other students we are seeing evidence of a distinc- tive form of rhetorical agency. The moves made in this Think Tank dialogue demonstrate a thinker who is entering into a public deliberation, choosing to engage with complex problems. Brandon is not only expressing himself (tell- ing his story or opinion) but also entering this event as an interpreter of prob- lems and as a dialogic meaning maker. In doing so, in going public as a rhetorical agent, he is, in his own way, transforming the discourse of disability. That may seem like a big claim, but in casting his bread on the water, throw- ing his words into circulation, he is helping shape a more public dialogic deliberation about a common good, and in joining that public (created in
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 153
Warner's sense) we too are in turn implicated in the life success of students with learning disabilities. As collaborative-critical activists (as teachers, researchers, and college students) the public work of rhetoric need not be about our own voice, but can rest on our ability to help call local publics into being, to nur- ture the rhetorical agency of marginalized speakers, and to use the power of rhetoric to document agency and expertise in a way that challenges and per- haps even transforms the discourses it enters.
Notes
1. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 119.
2. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 76.
3. For examples of the range of literacy practices, see Coogan, "Community Liter-
acy"; Cushman, "Toward a Praxis"; Higgins, Long, and Flower, "Community Literacy"; Hull and Katz, "Crafting"; Rousculp, "When the Community. " For synthetic, critical overviews, see Deans, Writing Partnerships; Long, Community Literacy. The specific prac- tice of community literacy referred to here supports public engagement through in- tercultural inquiry. Developed at the Community Literacy Center, grounded in the prophetic pragmatism of John Dewey and Cornel West, it supports rhetorical problem solving through community-university partnerships. See Flower, Community Literacy, for a study of this literate practice and a textual archive in the CLC "Snapshot History" at http://English. cmu. edu/research/inquiry/two. html (accessed July 12, 2008).
4. Brueggemann et al. , "Becoming Visible," 371. The authors' excellent multifaceted overview of the meaning of disability for composition studies highlights the difficulty of "becoming visible," while I focus here on the hazards of recognition. The problem in both cases is being represented in the language and categories to which you have contributed, to bring about, as they put it, "nothing about us without us. " Ibid. , 391.
5. Although "claiming disability [is a] a move that will necessarily 'disrupt the social order,' as disabled people come out," that is not a necessary or immediate effect. Ibid. , 373.
6. Andrea Lowenstein treats identity-making as a personal narrative of discovery, understanding, and accommodation. Lowenstein, "My Learning Disability. " Self-repre- sentation shapes many arguments in LD OnLine www. ldonline. org; in Mel Levine's "All Kinds of Minds," www. allkindsofminds. org; and the powerful Mooney and Cole, Learn- ing Outside the Lines.
7. Brueggemann et al. , "Becoming Visible," 391.
8. Director Stacie Dojonovic's SOS program, which offers support for the transition from school to work for students with learning disabilities, has been recognized as a model by the National Organization on Disability. Most of the SOS students in this Think Tank team had already been scholars in my Decision Makers community literacy program at CMU (Carnegie Mellon).
9. An outgrowth of the Community Literacy Center, the Carnegie Mellon Community Think Tank had already addressed a series of workplace/worklife problems, bringing marginalized employees into problem-solving dialogues with administrative and policy people. Its methods and findings are at www. cmu. edu/thinktank (accessed July 12, 2008).
10. Kantrowitz and Underwood, "Dyslexia. " 11. White, "Learning Disability," 727.
12. Ibid. , 720.
154 Linda Flower
13. See Haller, Dorrier, and Rahn's description of the partly successful campaign to "replace holistic designations, such as 'the mentally disabled' . . . (that reduce a human to his or her impairment), with modified terms, i. e. , 'people with a learning disability. '" Haller, Dorrier, and Rahn, "Media Labeling. " See also Morse, Introduction.
14. Hull et al. , "Remediation. "
15. Ibid. , 311.
16. Ibid. , 312.
17. Silver, Misunderstood Child, 38-55. 18. White, "Learning Disability," 709. 19. Ibid. , 717.
20. Mooney and Cole, Learning Outside the Lines.
21. All the speakers in this sequence, identified by pseudonyms, are high school stu-
dents, except for Trista, a University of Massachusetts student, and myself. 22. Mehan, "Beneath the Skin. "
23. McDermott, "Acquisition," 272.
24. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 373.
25. Swain and Cameron, "Unless Otherwise Stated," 69. 26. Ibid. , 79.
27. See Corker and French, Disability Discourse.
28. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 373.
29. Goodley, "Supporting People," 441.
30. Swain and Cameron, "Unless Otherwise Stated," 76.
31. Davies, "Discursive Production," 239, quoted in Priestley, "Transforming Disabil- ity," 97.
32. Priestley, "Transforming Disability," 97.
33. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27.
34. See Nancy Fraser's influential critique of the Habermas ideal. Fraser, "Rethinking
the Public Sphere. "
35. See Hauser's coherent framing of this new view in his discussion of what he calls
the "vernacular voices" of the "reticulate" and "rhetorical" public sphere. Hauser, Ver- nacular Voices, 44-64.
36. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114.
37. For Gloria Anzaldua, a mestiza (mixed) voice is one that embraces rather than avoids conflict and contradiction: "I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue--my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. " Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 81.
38. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 367-79.
39. For an overview of "The Decision Makers Assessment: A Web-based Assessment Tool for Reflective Decision Making Based on Writer's Planning and Self-reflection" (2006), visit http://English. cmu. edu/research/inquiry/decisionmakers/index. html (accessed June 21, 2009).
40. For an extended discussion of this notion of rhetorical agency and the collabora- tive, meaning-making processes of urban rhetors, see Flower, Community Literacy.
41. For an overview of the rhetorical structure of the Community Think Tank, see Flower, "Intercultural Knowledge Building. "
42. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition.
43. For Habermas, "strategic" is a manipulative alternative to "communicative" action; in my perspective from classical and cognitive rhetoric, the art of inquiry is itself
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 155 a heuristic and strategically self-conscious process. Habermas, Theory, 258. Freire, Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed.
Works Cited
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vin- tage Books, 1989.
Alzaldua. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Barton, Ellen. "Discourses of Disability in the Digest. " JAC 21 (2001): 555-81.
Belenky, Mary Field, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock. A Tradition That Has
No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families, and Communities. New York:
Basic Books, 1997.
Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, Linda Feldmeier White, Patricia A Dunn, Barbara A. Heifferon,
and Johnson Cheu. "Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability. " College Composition and
Communication 52 (2001): 368-98.
Coogan, David. "Community Literacy as Civic Dialogue. " Community Literacy 1, no. 1
(2006): 95-108.
Corker, Mairian, and Sally French, eds. Disability Discourse. Philadelphia: Open Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Cushman, Ellen. "Toward a Praxis of New Media. " Reflections 5, nos. 1-2 (2006): 111-32. Davies, B. "The Discursive Production of the Male/Female Dualism in School Settings. "
Oxford Review of Education 15 (1989): 229-41.
Deans, Thomas. Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition. Urbana, Ill. : National
Council of Teachers of English, 2000.
Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.
------. "Intercultural Knowledge Building: The Literate Action of a Community Think
Tank. " In Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives, edited by Charles Bazerman and David Russell, 239-79. Fort Collins, Colo. : WAC Clearing- house and Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2002.
Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actu- ally Existing Democracy. " Social Text 25/26 (1990): 58-60.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1985.
Goodley, Dan. "Locating Self-Advocacy in Models of Disability: Understanding Disabil- ity in the Support of Self-Advocates with Learning Difficulties. " Disability & Society 12 (1997): 367-79.
------. "Supporting People with Learning Difficulties in Self-Advocacy Groups and Models of Disability. " Health and Social Care in the Community 6 (1998): 438-46.
Habermas, Ju? rgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cate- gory of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence. Cam- bridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1989.
------. A Theory of Communication Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Vol. 1. Boston: Beacon, 1984.
Haller, Beth, Bruce Dorrier, and Jessica Rahn. "Media Labeling versus the Us Disability Community Identity: A Study of Shifting Cultural Language. " Disability & Society 21 (2006): 61-75.
Hauser, Gerard. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
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Higgins, Lorraine, Elenore Long, and Linda Flower. "Community Literacy: A Rhetorical Model of Personal and Public Inquiry. " Community Literacy 1, no. 1 (2006): 9-43. Hull, Glynda, and Mira-Lisa Katz. "Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Sto-
rytelling. " Research in Teaching of English 41, no. 1 (2006): 43-82.
Hull, Glynda, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano. "Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse. " College Composi-
tion and Communication 42 (1991): 299-329.
Kantrowitz, Barbara, and Anne Underwood. "Dyslexia and the New Science of Reading. "
Newsweek, November 22, 1999, 72-78.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail. " In The Essential Writings and
Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. , 289-302. Edited by James Washington. San Fran-
cisco: Harper, 1986.
Long, Elenore. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. West LaFayette, Ind. :
Parlor Press, 2008.
Lowenstein, Andrea Freud. "My Learning Disability: A (Digressive) Essay. " College English
66 (2004): 585-602.
McDermott, R. P. "The Acquisition of a Child by a Learning Disability. " In Understand-
ing Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, edited by Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave,
269-305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Mehan, Hugh. "Beneath the Skin and between the Ears: A Case Study in the Politics of
Representation. " In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, edited by Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, 241-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Mooney, Jonathan, and David Cole. Learning Outside the Lines. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Morse, Tracy Ann. "Introduction to Symposium: Representing Disability Rhetorically. " Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 154-56.
Priestley, Mark. "Transforming Disability Identity through Critical Literacy and the Cul- tural Politics of Language. " In Disability Discourse, edited by Mairian Corker and Sally French, 92-102. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999.
Rousculp, Tiffany. "When the Community Writes: Re-Envisioning the SLCC DiverseCity Writing Series. " Reflections 5, nos. 1-2 (2006): 67-88.
Silver, Larry. The Misunderstood Child. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1984.
Swain, John, and Colin Cameron. "Unless Otherwise Stated: Discourses of Labeling and Identity in Coming Out. " In Disability Discourse, edited by Mairian Corker and Sally
French, 68-78. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005.
White, Linda Feldmeier. "Learning Disability, Pedagogies, and Public Discourse. " College
Composition and Communication 53 (2002): 705-38.
? Sophists for Social Change
David J. Coogan
It began almost casually, on a warm summer evening in Church Hill, Virginia, as a conversation among friends looking for something to do. "Do you want to rob somebody? " asked one boy, according to police. "All right," answered another. It ended, Richmond police say, with four teenagers--ages fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen--stripping, raping, and sodomizing an eighteen- year-old Chesterfield woman at gunpoint on a picnic table in Libby Hill Ter- race Park, while the woman's boyfriend was forced to sit helplessly at the table throughout the August 4 ordeal. 1
I found out about the gang rape the day after it happened. I was walking through the park with a visiting relative when I asked the television reporters what they were doing, and they asked if they could interview me. That night at 11:00 I saw myself walking and heard myself saying that the park was well used; that the neighborhood itself had slowly transformed over the last decade, with rising property rates and dropping crime rates; and that yes, I was shocked by what had happened, but no, I had no plans to stay out of the park.
Along with the video footage of fountains and vistas and cutaway shots of nearby row homes, my words helped the journalists articulate commonplaces about progress and community. But when I later read about the rape in the city's major daily, the Richmond Times Dispatch (RTD), I grew a little uneasy. It was clear that the rape shocked the reporters not simply because it was a rape, but because it took place in a "desirable" place with "restored" homes that have "panoramic views" of the James River. 2 The fear of border crossing was hard to miss. Jim Nolan reported that before the incident, "the teens met at a playground near the park," a place that loosely marks the invisible bor- der between the white, gentrified part of the neighborhood and the predomi- nantly poor, black part to the north. The teens then walked three blocks to the "popular stargazing spot" overlooking the James River and found their
158 David J. Coogan
target. "'I don't know, man, white people,' Travon Garnet said at the time, according to his statement to police. "3 Garnet seemed conscious of the diffi- culty here, crossing some sort of invisible line. Nolan seemed conscious of it, too, when he later wrote that "the brutal rape and robbery" had "shattered the tranquility in this historic Church Hill neighborhood. "4 Alan Cooper, a colleague of Nolan's at the RTD, extended that imagery to the boys them- selves: "Only Travon Garnet had anything close to normal intelligence. The others were said to have street savvy, but Kelvin Lightfoot reads at a second- grade level, and Rashard Garnet at a first-grade level. "5 To conclude, then: the teens brought the "brutality" and the illiteracy of the black community into the "tranquility" and prosperity of the white community.
Only the victim, in an interview with Nolan, attempted something broader. She said she felt sorry for the teens for "messing up their lives. " In fact, as Cooper later reported, the teens were tried as adults and received prisons sen- tences of roughly thirty years all together. "I don't know what made them do such an act," the woman wondered aloud. Nolan, however, dismissed this per- ception: "Their reasoning didn't matter to the young woman's mother. 'They belong in jail for a long time,' she said. 'They had choices. And they chose to do what they did. You can't feel sorry for someone who chooses to hurt you. '"6 The next week I returned to the park and, by chance, met my councilwoman, Delores McQuinn7 and Jennie Dotts, the executive director of a local advocacy group, the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods (ACORN). 8 McQuinn and Dotts were campaigning for McQuinn's reelection to city coun- cil. McQuinn's district not only includes the gentrified area where the rape took place but a much larger, predominantly African American community, which has several public housing developments. We talked about the rape, what the police were doing, and what the two women wanted to do to get to the root of the problem. They suggested that a teen center might improve public safety by compensating for the lack of teen-oriented services and insti- tutions in the neighborhood. ACORN and the city of Richmond, in a joint private-public venture, had bought a campus of three old buildings, made plans for renovations, established a board of directors, earmarked some of the city budget, and surveyed the teens about their interests and needs. 9
After some conversation where I could affirm these values and share sto- ries of addressing similar problems with students and community organizers in a poor, black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, a place not unlike the east end of Richmond, they asked if I would be willing to help spread the word. 10 I agreed to help advertise the teen center, but I also sug- gested that we enlist the teens in the process of advertising by running a writ- ing workshop over the summer and then publishing their writings in a book that we could circulate around the city. What I saw was an opportunity to position the teens as rhetors in a public more accustomed to news stories in which they appeared as rapists and criminals. McQuinn and Dotts agreed
to this plan. And in that moment, the park I knew had become what Susan Jarratt, in Rereading the Sophists, calls a middle space. And I had become a sophist, in search of social change. A "middle space," writes Jarratt, is a space where diverse stakeholders can reformulate "human 'truths' in historically and geographically specific contexts. "11 In her reading of social history in antiquity, middle spaces were both concrete places and cerebral places where rhetors articulated the "codes" to evaluate conduct, entertain political possi- bilities, and in other ways arrange their affairs.
Though we generally think of democracy as a sixth- and fifth-century B. C. phenomenon, there is evidence that for centuries before this, villagers, each holding under a feudal arrangement a section of land called a damos, met in common space perhaps for the purpose of deciding on questions of agricul- tural practice or on the nature of requests to be delivered to the king and his council. 12
Middle spaces are productive places to question the commonplaces or ideo- logical statements that, as Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee explain in their decidedly sophistic textbook, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, are "literally 'taken for granted,'" but which can "be subjected to invention. "13 That Jarratt finds evidence of a "contemporary sophistic" in liberatory educa- tors such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks suggests some precedent for what will follow here. The community organizing framework that I present differs from critical pedagogies, though--at least those that allow classroom theorizing about social change to take the place of community action. 14 Just as the early Sophists, those first teachers of rhetoric, rejected philosophical debate about "transcendent truths and eternal values" in order to attend to pressing "social exigencies" in the community,15 sophists seeking social change resist "un- masking" power for others, as Raymie McKerrow and others seem to recom- mend in their programs for critical rhetoric. 16 Nor is a sophist seeking social change likely to find it in traditional forums for public debate, such as neigh- borhood associations or city council meetings, which can exclude people sty- listically or substantively, even while professing not to. 17 Coming into the middle also regards issue-oriented advocacy with skepticism, as it tends to suc- ceed not by forming middle spaces for dialogue but by sharpening the strug- gle between "us" and "them. " The heart of what I am proposing, then, if I can borrow a bit from Paula Mathieu, is not a strategic orientation to the public work of rhetoric, but a tactical one. 18 Making a middle space is not generating and then disseminating ideal strategies for rhetorical intervention but gener- ating publics capable of addressing their own social problems.
What was taken for granted as commonplace in the reporters' associations between race, class, illiteracy, and violence was subjected to invention by me, Dotts, and McQuinn. Building a teen center to reduce violence seemed to me a reasonable conjecture--not to mention good campaign rhetoric--and something I would now characterize as a sophistic approach to public life. 19
Sophists for Social Change 159
160 David J. Coogan
It persuaded not by dispensing "facts" but by projecting shared values, which we might loosely collate here under a liberal interpretation of equal opportu- nity: the idea that every American has a right to pursue knowledge for self- development and that collective action is needed to ensure that this happens for people who have traditionally faced barriers to that development. When we proceed this way, with conjectures about what we share, we proceed not from the university but, as Eli Goldblatt puts it, "from the activist's ground . . . learning before we act, developing relationships and commitments before we organize classes and set up research projects," and only later, once we have helped community partners "identify problems and transform these problems into issues" that can actually be addressed, do we consider "how students in courses fit in and what university resources could be helpful in addressing the issues. "20 What my community partners wanted, at this point, were handbills, banners, and posters announcing the East End Teen Center. They needed relationships with people who could make this kind of public.
The next week in the park, I saw my neighbor John Malinoski, a graphic designer who works with me at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and who happened to be teaching a service-learning course that links graphic design students with community-based organizations. Malinoski knew about the rape and quickly agreed to a meeting with the teen center advisory board and his students. At that meeting, we learned from the teens' representative-- the project manager for the East End Teen Center--that the teens, in a collab- orative brainstorming session some months earlier, had renamed the East End Teen Center "Teen City. " Malinoski and his students, seeking clues about their collaborators and their audience, perked up.
What the teens were telling us with Teen City was they were not clients in need of specialized services in the East End. They saw their teen center as a place to redefine themselves in relation to fellow citizens. The city, they seemed to be saying, belonged to them. Too often, writes McKnight in his cri- tique of social service providers, there is a "failure of integration. " This failure "clearly limits . . . the lives of the labeled people themselves. But the exclu- sion also limits the experience of local citizens. " What is needed in situations like this one, McKnight argues, are not more community services but more "community guides" who can "bring the individual into life as a citizen by incorporating him into relationships where his capacities can be expressed; where he is not defined by his 'deficiencies. '"21 Now I do not want to ascribe firm motives to either the teens or the woman who interviewed them. Teen City was not elaborated as an argument. And the woman who related it did not claim to be a community guide. Yet the phrase was publicly addressed: the teens were asked to name their organization, and it circulated from the "counterpublic" of the neighborhood to this emerging public of college stu- dents, politicians, activists, and professors. As Richard Marback explains, the act of naming a place--"placemaking" is his term--is "a material act of building
and maintaining spaces that is at the same time an ideological act of fashion- ing places where we feel we belong. "22
Placemaking and community-guiding are especially potent in counter- publics. Those who may be identified with counterpublics, Michael Warner elaborates, are "counter" not because they share essential traits or can be lo- cated physically in a particular place but because they are aware of their sub- ordinate status to the dominant. For these groups, "it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely"; that the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of their rhetoric will "transform" public assumptions. 23 If the twenty-five teens who were surveyed can be safely char- acterized as a counterpublic, then we might go on to see Teen City not only as placemaking but as "poetic world making. " In Warner's terms: an attempt to transform the way the dominant construed them (as truants, criminals, clients), not only through proposition but through style. And so far as I can tell it worked. The phrase enabled us to reflect upon who the teens imagined themselves to be, which, according to Warner, is what makes public discourse public:
Public discourse says not only "Let a public exist" but "Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way. " It then goes
in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success--success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Put on a show and see who shows up. 24
Teen City was "confirmed," as Warner might say, when the students chose to advertise the center by designing a mural. During that brainstorming meet- ing, I began by reading from the East End Teen Center mission statement-- "to create a non-faith based sanctuary where young people will have an opportunity to grow, develop, and acquire life and job skills in a nurturing, safe, and secure environment"--and the word that stood out to the group was "sanctuary. " They wanted to paint that word on the building. Months later they did along with half a dozen teens in the neighborhood.
From the point of view of a sophist, the question that the mural raises is not whether it is "true" that this place will become a sanctuary but who believes it and why. To look at this mural (see the dust jacket of this book) is to ask how it happened, what it means, or even if you are implicated in its vision. Anyone can do that. The stakes are rather low, because, as Warner points out, a public can be "constituted through mere attention. "25 It is worth noting as well that this mural was not made through a timely process of rational delib- eration, but through a diffused process of cultural interpretation, linking the reported speech of the teens to the materials about the East End Teen Center provided by McQuinn and Dots and then to the painted brick. To Warner, of course, this diffuse, textualized process merely reflects the underlying reality
Sophists for Social Change 161
162 David J. Coogan
that a public is a "space of discourse organized by discourse. " It is misleading "to think of a discourse public as a people and therefore as a really existing set of potentially numerable human beings" who meet and then decide. 26 To conceive of publics this way, as deliberating bodies or parliamentary debaters who have the power to alter reality, is to limit the style and substance of publics and in some ways miss counterpublics all together. What is liberating about public life, Warner argues, is not its accessibility to outsiders--its capacity to integrate newcomers neatly and share power equitably--but its anonymity.
To actually make a sanctuary for at-risk teens, of course, you need much more than a public.
This supported performance also helps us name three aspects of going public in the face of a disabling discourse. One is the way a structured discur- sive space, such as the Think Tank, can not only enfranchise speakers but also scaffold their rhetorical work--encouraging them to construct rivals and op- tions in response to others. Another is the way these two students use the occasion to grow and achieve in their own ways. Brandon, who had a history of denying he had a learning disability even within the SOS program, is look- ing publicly and reflectively at his own decision. In this public forum, he has found a way to affirm a "valid social identity" that embraces his learning dif- ficulties. But in other ways, it was Don's participation, speaking up in this public room that astounded his teachers. Don does not talk much; he strug- gles with academic tasks more than most students in the program. Yet here he is, to everyone's surprise and delight, volunteering his story and interven- ing in the discussion with the authority of a person with something to con- tribute.
Finally, in Brandon and other students we are seeing evidence of a distinc- tive form of rhetorical agency. The moves made in this Think Tank dialogue demonstrate a thinker who is entering into a public deliberation, choosing to engage with complex problems. Brandon is not only expressing himself (tell- ing his story or opinion) but also entering this event as an interpreter of prob- lems and as a dialogic meaning maker. In doing so, in going public as a rhetorical agent, he is, in his own way, transforming the discourse of disability. That may seem like a big claim, but in casting his bread on the water, throw- ing his words into circulation, he is helping shape a more public dialogic deliberation about a common good, and in joining that public (created in
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 153
Warner's sense) we too are in turn implicated in the life success of students with learning disabilities. As collaborative-critical activists (as teachers, researchers, and college students) the public work of rhetoric need not be about our own voice, but can rest on our ability to help call local publics into being, to nur- ture the rhetorical agency of marginalized speakers, and to use the power of rhetoric to document agency and expertise in a way that challenges and per- haps even transforms the discourses it enters.
Notes
1. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 119.
2. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 76.
3. For examples of the range of literacy practices, see Coogan, "Community Liter-
acy"; Cushman, "Toward a Praxis"; Higgins, Long, and Flower, "Community Literacy"; Hull and Katz, "Crafting"; Rousculp, "When the Community. " For synthetic, critical overviews, see Deans, Writing Partnerships; Long, Community Literacy. The specific prac- tice of community literacy referred to here supports public engagement through in- tercultural inquiry. Developed at the Community Literacy Center, grounded in the prophetic pragmatism of John Dewey and Cornel West, it supports rhetorical problem solving through community-university partnerships. See Flower, Community Literacy, for a study of this literate practice and a textual archive in the CLC "Snapshot History" at http://English. cmu. edu/research/inquiry/two. html (accessed July 12, 2008).
4. Brueggemann et al. , "Becoming Visible," 371. The authors' excellent multifaceted overview of the meaning of disability for composition studies highlights the difficulty of "becoming visible," while I focus here on the hazards of recognition. The problem in both cases is being represented in the language and categories to which you have contributed, to bring about, as they put it, "nothing about us without us. " Ibid. , 391.
5. Although "claiming disability [is a] a move that will necessarily 'disrupt the social order,' as disabled people come out," that is not a necessary or immediate effect. Ibid. , 373.
6. Andrea Lowenstein treats identity-making as a personal narrative of discovery, understanding, and accommodation. Lowenstein, "My Learning Disability. " Self-repre- sentation shapes many arguments in LD OnLine www. ldonline. org; in Mel Levine's "All Kinds of Minds," www. allkindsofminds. org; and the powerful Mooney and Cole, Learn- ing Outside the Lines.
7. Brueggemann et al. , "Becoming Visible," 391.
8. Director Stacie Dojonovic's SOS program, which offers support for the transition from school to work for students with learning disabilities, has been recognized as a model by the National Organization on Disability. Most of the SOS students in this Think Tank team had already been scholars in my Decision Makers community literacy program at CMU (Carnegie Mellon).
9. An outgrowth of the Community Literacy Center, the Carnegie Mellon Community Think Tank had already addressed a series of workplace/worklife problems, bringing marginalized employees into problem-solving dialogues with administrative and policy people. Its methods and findings are at www. cmu. edu/thinktank (accessed July 12, 2008).
10. Kantrowitz and Underwood, "Dyslexia. " 11. White, "Learning Disability," 727.
12. Ibid. , 720.
154 Linda Flower
13. See Haller, Dorrier, and Rahn's description of the partly successful campaign to "replace holistic designations, such as 'the mentally disabled' . . . (that reduce a human to his or her impairment), with modified terms, i. e. , 'people with a learning disability. '" Haller, Dorrier, and Rahn, "Media Labeling. " See also Morse, Introduction.
14. Hull et al. , "Remediation. "
15. Ibid. , 311.
16. Ibid. , 312.
17. Silver, Misunderstood Child, 38-55. 18. White, "Learning Disability," 709. 19. Ibid. , 717.
20. Mooney and Cole, Learning Outside the Lines.
21. All the speakers in this sequence, identified by pseudonyms, are high school stu-
dents, except for Trista, a University of Massachusetts student, and myself. 22. Mehan, "Beneath the Skin. "
23. McDermott, "Acquisition," 272.
24. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 373.
25. Swain and Cameron, "Unless Otherwise Stated," 69. 26. Ibid. , 79.
27. See Corker and French, Disability Discourse.
28. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 373.
29. Goodley, "Supporting People," 441.
30. Swain and Cameron, "Unless Otherwise Stated," 76.
31. Davies, "Discursive Production," 239, quoted in Priestley, "Transforming Disabil- ity," 97.
32. Priestley, "Transforming Disability," 97.
33. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27.
34. See Nancy Fraser's influential critique of the Habermas ideal. Fraser, "Rethinking
the Public Sphere. "
35. See Hauser's coherent framing of this new view in his discussion of what he calls
the "vernacular voices" of the "reticulate" and "rhetorical" public sphere. Hauser, Ver- nacular Voices, 44-64.
36. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114.
37. For Gloria Anzaldua, a mestiza (mixed) voice is one that embraces rather than avoids conflict and contradiction: "I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue--my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. " Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 81.
38. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 367-79.
39. For an overview of "The Decision Makers Assessment: A Web-based Assessment Tool for Reflective Decision Making Based on Writer's Planning and Self-reflection" (2006), visit http://English. cmu. edu/research/inquiry/decisionmakers/index. html (accessed June 21, 2009).
40. For an extended discussion of this notion of rhetorical agency and the collabora- tive, meaning-making processes of urban rhetors, see Flower, Community Literacy.
41. For an overview of the rhetorical structure of the Community Think Tank, see Flower, "Intercultural Knowledge Building. "
42. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition.
43. For Habermas, "strategic" is a manipulative alternative to "communicative" action; in my perspective from classical and cognitive rhetoric, the art of inquiry is itself
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 155 a heuristic and strategically self-conscious process. Habermas, Theory, 258. Freire, Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed.
Works Cited
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Vin- tage Books, 1989.
Alzaldua. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Barton, Ellen. "Discourses of Disability in the Digest. " JAC 21 (2001): 555-81.
Belenky, Mary Field, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock. A Tradition That Has
No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families, and Communities. New York:
Basic Books, 1997.
Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, Linda Feldmeier White, Patricia A Dunn, Barbara A. Heifferon,
and Johnson Cheu. "Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability. " College Composition and
Communication 52 (2001): 368-98.
Coogan, David. "Community Literacy as Civic Dialogue. " Community Literacy 1, no. 1
(2006): 95-108.
Corker, Mairian, and Sally French, eds. Disability Discourse. Philadelphia: Open Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Cushman, Ellen. "Toward a Praxis of New Media. " Reflections 5, nos. 1-2 (2006): 111-32. Davies, B. "The Discursive Production of the Male/Female Dualism in School Settings. "
Oxford Review of Education 15 (1989): 229-41.
Deans, Thomas. Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition. Urbana, Ill. : National
Council of Teachers of English, 2000.
Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.
------. "Intercultural Knowledge Building: The Literate Action of a Community Think
Tank. " In Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives, edited by Charles Bazerman and David Russell, 239-79. Fort Collins, Colo. : WAC Clearing- house and Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2002.
Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actu- ally Existing Democracy. " Social Text 25/26 (1990): 58-60.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1985.
Goodley, Dan. "Locating Self-Advocacy in Models of Disability: Understanding Disabil- ity in the Support of Self-Advocates with Learning Difficulties. " Disability & Society 12 (1997): 367-79.
------. "Supporting People with Learning Difficulties in Self-Advocacy Groups and Models of Disability. " Health and Social Care in the Community 6 (1998): 438-46.
Habermas, Ju? rgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cate- gory of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence. Cam- bridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1989.
------. A Theory of Communication Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Vol. 1. Boston: Beacon, 1984.
Haller, Beth, Bruce Dorrier, and Jessica Rahn. "Media Labeling versus the Us Disability Community Identity: A Study of Shifting Cultural Language. " Disability & Society 21 (2006): 61-75.
Hauser, Gerard. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
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Higgins, Lorraine, Elenore Long, and Linda Flower. "Community Literacy: A Rhetorical Model of Personal and Public Inquiry. " Community Literacy 1, no. 1 (2006): 9-43. Hull, Glynda, and Mira-Lisa Katz. "Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Sto-
rytelling. " Research in Teaching of English 41, no. 1 (2006): 43-82.
Hull, Glynda, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano. "Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse. " College Composi-
tion and Communication 42 (1991): 299-329.
Kantrowitz, Barbara, and Anne Underwood. "Dyslexia and the New Science of Reading. "
Newsweek, November 22, 1999, 72-78.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail. " In The Essential Writings and
Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. , 289-302. Edited by James Washington. San Fran-
cisco: Harper, 1986.
Long, Elenore. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. West LaFayette, Ind. :
Parlor Press, 2008.
Lowenstein, Andrea Freud. "My Learning Disability: A (Digressive) Essay. " College English
66 (2004): 585-602.
McDermott, R. P. "The Acquisition of a Child by a Learning Disability. " In Understand-
ing Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, edited by Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave,
269-305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Mehan, Hugh. "Beneath the Skin and between the Ears: A Case Study in the Politics of
Representation. " In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, edited by Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, 241-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Mooney, Jonathan, and David Cole. Learning Outside the Lines. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Morse, Tracy Ann. "Introduction to Symposium: Representing Disability Rhetorically. " Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 154-56.
Priestley, Mark. "Transforming Disability Identity through Critical Literacy and the Cul- tural Politics of Language. " In Disability Discourse, edited by Mairian Corker and Sally French, 92-102. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999.
Rousculp, Tiffany. "When the Community Writes: Re-Envisioning the SLCC DiverseCity Writing Series. " Reflections 5, nos. 1-2 (2006): 67-88.
Silver, Larry. The Misunderstood Child. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1984.
Swain, John, and Colin Cameron. "Unless Otherwise Stated: Discourses of Labeling and Identity in Coming Out. " In Disability Discourse, edited by Mairian Corker and Sally
French, 68-78. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005.
White, Linda Feldmeier. "Learning Disability, Pedagogies, and Public Discourse. " College
Composition and Communication 53 (2002): 705-38.
? Sophists for Social Change
David J. Coogan
It began almost casually, on a warm summer evening in Church Hill, Virginia, as a conversation among friends looking for something to do. "Do you want to rob somebody? " asked one boy, according to police. "All right," answered another. It ended, Richmond police say, with four teenagers--ages fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen--stripping, raping, and sodomizing an eighteen- year-old Chesterfield woman at gunpoint on a picnic table in Libby Hill Ter- race Park, while the woman's boyfriend was forced to sit helplessly at the table throughout the August 4 ordeal. 1
I found out about the gang rape the day after it happened. I was walking through the park with a visiting relative when I asked the television reporters what they were doing, and they asked if they could interview me. That night at 11:00 I saw myself walking and heard myself saying that the park was well used; that the neighborhood itself had slowly transformed over the last decade, with rising property rates and dropping crime rates; and that yes, I was shocked by what had happened, but no, I had no plans to stay out of the park.
Along with the video footage of fountains and vistas and cutaway shots of nearby row homes, my words helped the journalists articulate commonplaces about progress and community. But when I later read about the rape in the city's major daily, the Richmond Times Dispatch (RTD), I grew a little uneasy. It was clear that the rape shocked the reporters not simply because it was a rape, but because it took place in a "desirable" place with "restored" homes that have "panoramic views" of the James River. 2 The fear of border crossing was hard to miss. Jim Nolan reported that before the incident, "the teens met at a playground near the park," a place that loosely marks the invisible bor- der between the white, gentrified part of the neighborhood and the predomi- nantly poor, black part to the north. The teens then walked three blocks to the "popular stargazing spot" overlooking the James River and found their
158 David J. Coogan
target. "'I don't know, man, white people,' Travon Garnet said at the time, according to his statement to police. "3 Garnet seemed conscious of the diffi- culty here, crossing some sort of invisible line. Nolan seemed conscious of it, too, when he later wrote that "the brutal rape and robbery" had "shattered the tranquility in this historic Church Hill neighborhood. "4 Alan Cooper, a colleague of Nolan's at the RTD, extended that imagery to the boys them- selves: "Only Travon Garnet had anything close to normal intelligence. The others were said to have street savvy, but Kelvin Lightfoot reads at a second- grade level, and Rashard Garnet at a first-grade level. "5 To conclude, then: the teens brought the "brutality" and the illiteracy of the black community into the "tranquility" and prosperity of the white community.
Only the victim, in an interview with Nolan, attempted something broader. She said she felt sorry for the teens for "messing up their lives. " In fact, as Cooper later reported, the teens were tried as adults and received prisons sen- tences of roughly thirty years all together. "I don't know what made them do such an act," the woman wondered aloud. Nolan, however, dismissed this per- ception: "Their reasoning didn't matter to the young woman's mother. 'They belong in jail for a long time,' she said. 'They had choices. And they chose to do what they did. You can't feel sorry for someone who chooses to hurt you. '"6 The next week I returned to the park and, by chance, met my councilwoman, Delores McQuinn7 and Jennie Dotts, the executive director of a local advocacy group, the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods (ACORN). 8 McQuinn and Dotts were campaigning for McQuinn's reelection to city coun- cil. McQuinn's district not only includes the gentrified area where the rape took place but a much larger, predominantly African American community, which has several public housing developments. We talked about the rape, what the police were doing, and what the two women wanted to do to get to the root of the problem. They suggested that a teen center might improve public safety by compensating for the lack of teen-oriented services and insti- tutions in the neighborhood. ACORN and the city of Richmond, in a joint private-public venture, had bought a campus of three old buildings, made plans for renovations, established a board of directors, earmarked some of the city budget, and surveyed the teens about their interests and needs. 9
After some conversation where I could affirm these values and share sto- ries of addressing similar problems with students and community organizers in a poor, black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, a place not unlike the east end of Richmond, they asked if I would be willing to help spread the word. 10 I agreed to help advertise the teen center, but I also sug- gested that we enlist the teens in the process of advertising by running a writ- ing workshop over the summer and then publishing their writings in a book that we could circulate around the city. What I saw was an opportunity to position the teens as rhetors in a public more accustomed to news stories in which they appeared as rapists and criminals. McQuinn and Dotts agreed
to this plan. And in that moment, the park I knew had become what Susan Jarratt, in Rereading the Sophists, calls a middle space. And I had become a sophist, in search of social change. A "middle space," writes Jarratt, is a space where diverse stakeholders can reformulate "human 'truths' in historically and geographically specific contexts. "11 In her reading of social history in antiquity, middle spaces were both concrete places and cerebral places where rhetors articulated the "codes" to evaluate conduct, entertain political possi- bilities, and in other ways arrange their affairs.
Though we generally think of democracy as a sixth- and fifth-century B. C. phenomenon, there is evidence that for centuries before this, villagers, each holding under a feudal arrangement a section of land called a damos, met in common space perhaps for the purpose of deciding on questions of agricul- tural practice or on the nature of requests to be delivered to the king and his council. 12
Middle spaces are productive places to question the commonplaces or ideo- logical statements that, as Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee explain in their decidedly sophistic textbook, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, are "literally 'taken for granted,'" but which can "be subjected to invention. "13 That Jarratt finds evidence of a "contemporary sophistic" in liberatory educa- tors such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks suggests some precedent for what will follow here. The community organizing framework that I present differs from critical pedagogies, though--at least those that allow classroom theorizing about social change to take the place of community action. 14 Just as the early Sophists, those first teachers of rhetoric, rejected philosophical debate about "transcendent truths and eternal values" in order to attend to pressing "social exigencies" in the community,15 sophists seeking social change resist "un- masking" power for others, as Raymie McKerrow and others seem to recom- mend in their programs for critical rhetoric. 16 Nor is a sophist seeking social change likely to find it in traditional forums for public debate, such as neigh- borhood associations or city council meetings, which can exclude people sty- listically or substantively, even while professing not to. 17 Coming into the middle also regards issue-oriented advocacy with skepticism, as it tends to suc- ceed not by forming middle spaces for dialogue but by sharpening the strug- gle between "us" and "them. " The heart of what I am proposing, then, if I can borrow a bit from Paula Mathieu, is not a strategic orientation to the public work of rhetoric, but a tactical one. 18 Making a middle space is not generating and then disseminating ideal strategies for rhetorical intervention but gener- ating publics capable of addressing their own social problems.
What was taken for granted as commonplace in the reporters' associations between race, class, illiteracy, and violence was subjected to invention by me, Dotts, and McQuinn. Building a teen center to reduce violence seemed to me a reasonable conjecture--not to mention good campaign rhetoric--and something I would now characterize as a sophistic approach to public life. 19
Sophists for Social Change 159
160 David J. Coogan
It persuaded not by dispensing "facts" but by projecting shared values, which we might loosely collate here under a liberal interpretation of equal opportu- nity: the idea that every American has a right to pursue knowledge for self- development and that collective action is needed to ensure that this happens for people who have traditionally faced barriers to that development. When we proceed this way, with conjectures about what we share, we proceed not from the university but, as Eli Goldblatt puts it, "from the activist's ground . . . learning before we act, developing relationships and commitments before we organize classes and set up research projects," and only later, once we have helped community partners "identify problems and transform these problems into issues" that can actually be addressed, do we consider "how students in courses fit in and what university resources could be helpful in addressing the issues. "20 What my community partners wanted, at this point, were handbills, banners, and posters announcing the East End Teen Center. They needed relationships with people who could make this kind of public.
The next week in the park, I saw my neighbor John Malinoski, a graphic designer who works with me at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and who happened to be teaching a service-learning course that links graphic design students with community-based organizations. Malinoski knew about the rape and quickly agreed to a meeting with the teen center advisory board and his students. At that meeting, we learned from the teens' representative-- the project manager for the East End Teen Center--that the teens, in a collab- orative brainstorming session some months earlier, had renamed the East End Teen Center "Teen City. " Malinoski and his students, seeking clues about their collaborators and their audience, perked up.
What the teens were telling us with Teen City was they were not clients in need of specialized services in the East End. They saw their teen center as a place to redefine themselves in relation to fellow citizens. The city, they seemed to be saying, belonged to them. Too often, writes McKnight in his cri- tique of social service providers, there is a "failure of integration. " This failure "clearly limits . . . the lives of the labeled people themselves. But the exclu- sion also limits the experience of local citizens. " What is needed in situations like this one, McKnight argues, are not more community services but more "community guides" who can "bring the individual into life as a citizen by incorporating him into relationships where his capacities can be expressed; where he is not defined by his 'deficiencies. '"21 Now I do not want to ascribe firm motives to either the teens or the woman who interviewed them. Teen City was not elaborated as an argument. And the woman who related it did not claim to be a community guide. Yet the phrase was publicly addressed: the teens were asked to name their organization, and it circulated from the "counterpublic" of the neighborhood to this emerging public of college stu- dents, politicians, activists, and professors. As Richard Marback explains, the act of naming a place--"placemaking" is his term--is "a material act of building
and maintaining spaces that is at the same time an ideological act of fashion- ing places where we feel we belong. "22
Placemaking and community-guiding are especially potent in counter- publics. Those who may be identified with counterpublics, Michael Warner elaborates, are "counter" not because they share essential traits or can be lo- cated physically in a particular place but because they are aware of their sub- ordinate status to the dominant. For these groups, "it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely"; that the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of their rhetoric will "transform" public assumptions. 23 If the twenty-five teens who were surveyed can be safely char- acterized as a counterpublic, then we might go on to see Teen City not only as placemaking but as "poetic world making. " In Warner's terms: an attempt to transform the way the dominant construed them (as truants, criminals, clients), not only through proposition but through style. And so far as I can tell it worked. The phrase enabled us to reflect upon who the teens imagined themselves to be, which, according to Warner, is what makes public discourse public:
Public discourse says not only "Let a public exist" but "Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way. " It then goes
in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success--success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Put on a show and see who shows up. 24
Teen City was "confirmed," as Warner might say, when the students chose to advertise the center by designing a mural. During that brainstorming meet- ing, I began by reading from the East End Teen Center mission statement-- "to create a non-faith based sanctuary where young people will have an opportunity to grow, develop, and acquire life and job skills in a nurturing, safe, and secure environment"--and the word that stood out to the group was "sanctuary. " They wanted to paint that word on the building. Months later they did along with half a dozen teens in the neighborhood.
From the point of view of a sophist, the question that the mural raises is not whether it is "true" that this place will become a sanctuary but who believes it and why. To look at this mural (see the dust jacket of this book) is to ask how it happened, what it means, or even if you are implicated in its vision. Anyone can do that. The stakes are rather low, because, as Warner points out, a public can be "constituted through mere attention. "25 It is worth noting as well that this mural was not made through a timely process of rational delib- eration, but through a diffused process of cultural interpretation, linking the reported speech of the teens to the materials about the East End Teen Center provided by McQuinn and Dots and then to the painted brick. To Warner, of course, this diffuse, textualized process merely reflects the underlying reality
Sophists for Social Change 161
162 David J. Coogan
that a public is a "space of discourse organized by discourse. " It is misleading "to think of a discourse public as a people and therefore as a really existing set of potentially numerable human beings" who meet and then decide. 26 To conceive of publics this way, as deliberating bodies or parliamentary debaters who have the power to alter reality, is to limit the style and substance of publics and in some ways miss counterpublics all together. What is liberating about public life, Warner argues, is not its accessibility to outsiders--its capacity to integrate newcomers neatly and share power equitably--but its anonymity.
To actually make a sanctuary for at-risk teens, of course, you need much more than a public.
