Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the
Geography
of Anger.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
We are motivated by the embodied practices that we have cultivated in rela- tionship with people in our communities; by a rhetorical labor that we share with others, where the grain size of the discursive act relies upon the author- ity of individuals in "relevant social groups";24 acts that are conferred by the cultural economies of actual places.
For our purposes, there is anxiety in the world, but it is born from much more than discursive and cultural crises.
It resides in the communities we frequent and have compassion toward, and therefore cannot be adequately inferred from textual artifacts alone.
To dis- cover the coordinates of anxiety in its locally and globally material manifes- tations, rhetoric will have to reflexively imagine itself outside of fixations on the discursive supplement within the logos-sphere.
By doing so, by "going public," rhetoric need not limit its disciplinary identity and social relevance to the degree to which it contributes to science as ur-discipline; nor will rhet- oric endanger itself by entering into the political life of the street, not when the streets belong to us, and not when we are the people yelling outside the window.
As Carolyn Miller writes in her essay in this collection, "We have said that rhetoric is 'epistemic,' that it affects the conduct of inquiry and the substance of knowledge across the disciplines.
.
.
.
Rhetoric's imperialism has reached such a pitch recently that critical alarms have been sounded, urging 'attenuations' of its epistemic claims and challenging its ambitions as a 'uni- versalized,' 'promiscuous,' 'free-floating' 'interpretive meta-discourse.
'" Those attenuations include Gaonkar's critique of the rhetorical turn in the human sciences, but they must now include a different calibration of the rhetorical event.
Disciplinary reflexivity does not have to result in an infinite epistemo- logical regress when rhetoric accepts its supplementary role within the discur- sive regime but founds its claims on civic engagement in what Gerard Hauser describes as the "reticulate public sphere.
"25 Loi?
c Wacquant's exegesis of Pierre Bourdieu's theories of reflexive sociology concludes with a similar, recupera- tive (we would say rhetorical) point of view: "[Reflexivity] is neither egocen- tric, nor logocentric.
.
.
.
It fastens not upon the private person .
.
.
but on the
Introduction 7
8 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
concatenations of acts and operations she effectuates as part of her work and on the collective unconscious inscribed in them. . . . Epistemic reflexivity . . . informs a conception of the craft of research to strengthen its epistemologi- cal moorings. "26
Rhetoric may provide the moment, the acuity, and the discursive terrain for translations of discourses criss-crossing the university and public life, as proposed by Steve Mailloux,27 but when we hear the call to participate, we are hearing those "concatenations" comprised of participants, events, artifacts, and territories that over time and through practice aggregate (and then dis- aggregate) as meaningful concordances. If rhetoric occurs routinely in public life, as work, it is through routines that establish, in their aggregate, something like a postmodern paidiea. We are not all building the same things for the same reasons with the same tools in the same public. And yet we believe this shift toward a common labor with others outside of academe is, in fact, a major shift for rhetoricians who have long claimed to speak for "the public. " True, rhetoricians have already worked as policy analysts, critical ethnogra- phers, public teachers, rogue historians, advocates, and community organizers. But rhetoric has not, by and large, positioned these avocations as vocations for disciplinary renewal in English and in communication. As the story goes, throughout the twentieth century rhetoric has been "plagued by feelings of academic and intellectual inferiority and an almost perpetual identity cri- sis. "28 This collection presents an alternative narrative, a rhetoric of the "lost geographies" of public life that hold within them the political and ethical dimensions of real events and social relations that make our disciplinary identity newly possible. 29
Citizen-Scholars and Community Engagement
The "street" that the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conference participants invoked was a geographical marker for the political discourse rattling the windows of the university in 1970 and a figuration of what "shouts, obsceni- ties, sit-ins, and interruptions of lectures" portend for utility of political dis- course in society as a whole. 30 As topoi, these material sites were outside of rhetoric, but nonetheless painfully real: public protest had gotten very per- sonal, and it violated the sanctity and common areas of the university, repli- cating protest in the public streets of major cities. 31 The street as a figurative device, from Breton and Baudelaire to more recent scholarship, configures much more than an angry display of political unrest. The street materializes as it represents the prospects of a radically inclusive democracy of human expe- rience. For Henri Lefebvre, it was the location of the "inexorable rhythm" of everyday life32 and is its "almost total figuration. "33
And so in Paula Mathieu's aside, "the university and other institutions do not have strategic control over the streets," she too anticipates a scene for public discourse and community engagement in everyday life that is open to
the plentitude of rhetorical events and participants and without predetermi- nation of which boundaries matter more than others and of which public actions count as civility. 34 There is no shortage of such rhetorical geographies, no limit to their number or constellation. In this book, they include
City residents facing off over gentrification (Rai)
Public commemoration and planning in the context of tragic
events (Ackerman)
The reinvention of democracy in post-Cold War Kosova (Cintron) Geneticists and doctors arguing the value of race in medicine (Condit) Inner-city teens writing to resist the values of the "street" (Coogan) High school students with learning disabilities "going public" with
their labels (Flower)
The Cherokee Nation and the university conjuring a counternarrative
(Cushman and Green)
Communities organizing to protect public health (Grabill) Dissident journalists advocating for homeless persons (George
and Mathieu)
Rural residents using literacy to reverse economic decline (Jolliffe)
The disciplinary "anxiety" of rhetoric within the academy pales in com- parison to the anxieties in these scenes from public life, as well as the specific "crises" that would lead us to enter and to engage. The geography of the rhetorical event depends very little on the intellectual home for rhetorical scholarship, and the scenes tend to gather their "social energy," as Ralph Cin- tron calls it, partly through their close proximity to the wealth and influence of the university and other social and jurisprudential institutions or their comparative lack. Our scenes gather their energy from cultural and economic forces that have worked for decades if not centuries to trouble the bonds of wealth, health, progress, and community. These scenes exist without us; they are rhetorical without our say-so; but we join them in a "third space," a space that is open, hybrid, resistant, and marginal. 35
Thus the rhetorical exigencies in these public scenes do not gather force solely through the affinity of like-minded audiences, working deliberatively as discourse communities. We find instead a powerful desire for public assem- bly that gains its legitimacy well beyond the comfortable imaginations and accoutrements of academic life. Though we enter into these scenes as citizen- scholars, and in fact we often use our academic training sometimes as a moral compass and discursive divining rod, in most of our narratives we discover a preexisting conspiracy against the common good in public life that cannot be determined through the intellectual prism of the hermeneutic interpretation. At Pheasant Run in 1970, Lloyd Bitzer proclaimed that our age was a "rhetori- cal age" because of the pressure of new media upon civic life and new de- mands on rhetoric to diminish the atrocities of war, hunger, urban decline,
Introduction 9
10 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
and environmental squander. The practical mission for rhetoric is to pursue the "great aspirations of the human community. "36 The scenes that we fea- ture in The Public Work of Rhetoric, and the labor that drives our engagement, require in many cases both a return to the street, as the location and figura- tion of public life, and an awareness of the conspiracies against democracy that coalesce there.
Globalization is fabricating a new category of "the people" as resident and citizen, transcendent of national boundaries and identities, and we are caught up in the drama of how civic life unfolds in these times. For a rhetoric of pub- lic works, there can be no safe difference between us and them; as Arjun Appadurai points out, "where the lines between us and them have always, in human history, been blurred at the boundaries and unclear across large spaces and big numbers, globalization exacerbates these uncertainties. "37 One rea- son to locate rhetorical practice in local communities, and to use these com- munities as a theoretical frame, is because these "uncertainties" now escape no one. The reason why we present rhetorical practice as "work" in our essays is because, as Ronald Greene has argued, it is fundamentally naive to presume that "rhetorical agency exists outside the domain of capitalist command" and therefore outside the reach of globalization. 38 If the question is genuine as to how rhetoric can best respond to the great aspirations of the human com- munity, then the effects of globalization will be one of our most profound measures of the kinds of labor required to enter into public life for the rhetori- cal good.
In Global Dreams, Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh dispose of the belief that academics as citizens are protected somehow from "a stark reality: A huge and increasing proportion of human beings are not needed and will never be needed to make goods or to provide services because too many peo- ple in the world are too poor to buy them. "39 This dire conclusion was drawn nearly fifteen years ago, and it reminds us that there are pressures upon fami- lies, communities, and institutions that accumulate faster than books can be written about them. Yet the counterpart to globalization is "the pull of local- ism in all its forms. " As Barnet and Cavanagh continue, "place and rooted- ness are as important as ever," and the communities where we live and to whom we serve "cannot conceive of living anywhere else, for they are depen- dent on a piece of ground for their livelihood and on a particular culture and language for their sense of well being. "40
Thus The Public Work of Rhetoric must reject the idea that public life is dead, that it has been stripped of agitation, assembly, and deliberation, and that it is devoid of political discourse beyond shouts of anger. The polis is not "miss- ing" as Andrew King declares, so much as rhetoric, in the intellectual prac- tices it has acquired, reveals a learned hesitation to engage. 41 For King, civic discourse cannot now exist because the city and the nation are in disarray, and he is half right. Numerous authorities on urban life, offering histories of urban
sprawl and studies of urban networks, make the same observation--without our extrapolation into public discourse. 42 They offer us a history of the mate- riality of urban life culminating in newly global distributions of transportation, housing, information, energy, and jurisprudential power. Our neighborhoods are becoming autopoietic, making rhetorical practice all the more relevant in comprehending how this moment came to pass and how the resident best responds.
As Kathryn Hales points out, the circuitry of daily living in a global com- munity may evolve in ways that appear to make it more self-regulating and homogeneous, and require a "a new and startling account of how we know the world. " We have a choice to make as critics: we can limit our analyses to the attributes of the circumstance before us, or we can learn from those cir- cumstances how to look at the world differently: "Seeing system and medium together over a period of time, observers draw connections between cause and effect, past and future. "43 Globalization and new distributions of wealth and human communities provide us with rhetorical scenes as civic engage- ment with the imperative to learn how to comprehend them. This imperative gathers momentum and "expertise" through local communities, and in ways foreign to university life as the twentieth century has known it, although our universities are not idly standing by as the drama of globalization unfolds. In sync with globalization, they are responding to decades of diminished public funding by searching for new revenue streams, some of which translates into incentives for the "scholarship of engagement" as Ackerman explores.
The logic of this translation is known to most academic citizens: civic en- gagement at the university complements the corporate desire to conflate civic virtue with economic entrepreneurialism; it strengthens the political base of the university and ensures that the university has a key role to play in the redefinition of the polis and city-state. We realize that this raises more than one red flag, and so we begin this book with essays that interrogate the height- ened visibility of a discipline notoriously known for cloaking its own artifice (C. Miller); that challenge rhetoric to close the gap between obfuscation and the facts of injustice (Bruner); and that probe the underbelly of topoi like "justice" or "democracy" (Cintron, Rai).
The impetus for this book was the 2003 Alliance of Rhetoric Societies con- ference at Northwestern University that sought to recalibrate rhetoric's contri- butions to society by asking: What should be the institutional and social goals for academic rhetoric in the twenty-first century? And how can rhetoric best contribute to the social, political, and cultural environments that extend be- yond the university? The citizen-scholars in this collection have contributed as community teachers, ethnographers, Web designers, mediators, consult- ants, writers, and organizers. But just as important for our sense of disciplinary renewal, they have also contributed by reconceiving the classroom. David Fleming does this in his defense of the "artificial" setting of the classroom, as
Introduction 11
12 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
a reflexive space set apart from public life but in no way immune to its influ- ence. Diana George and Paula Mathieu do this by challenging classroom advice about style through a study of exemplary dissident journalists. Ellen Cushman and Erik Green show how traditional classroom routines were up- ended by a community partnership set up to navigate the new media. And Eric Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller show how university classrooms through conflict resolution can engage the politics of international borders and city identities.
Both in our forays out there as rhetors--Celeste Condit resisting the rheto- ric of race-based genetics at a forum filled with scientists--and in our class- room forays into the politics of common sense--M. Lane Bruner resisting essentialist identity politics and their role in globalization--we cannot escape what Thomas Farrell calls the "acute discomfort all around the room. "44 We will never achieve the outer limits of our desire in rhetoric. Farrell defines this middling, reflexive space as the "reciprocal middle," as "mediation," as "ago- nistic," and as proudly and publicly "deliberative. " We see it as a stage for what John Lucaites and Celeste Condit call rhetoric's "strategic liberation": "the possibility of improving life within one's community in temporary and incomplete, but nonetheless meaningful, ways. "45 This is the true grit and tumble of public life. This is where we find the space to work.
Notes
1. Obama, "Call to Service. " See also Obama, "New Era of Service," 33. 2. Leff, "In Search," 60.
3. Gaonkar, "Idea of Rhetoric," 34.
4. Miller, Rescuing the Subject.
5. Booth, "Scope," 114.
6. Ehninger, "Report of the Committee," 209.
7. Black, "Prospect," 24.
8. Bitzer, "Rhetoric," 91.
9. Wicheins, "The Literary criticism of Oratory," 3-28. Wallace, "The Fundamentals
of Rhetoric," 3-20. Becker, "Rhetorical Studies," 23. 10. Ibid. , 26.
11. Ibid. , 32.
12. Gaonkar, "Idea of Rhetoric," 300.
13. See Young, Becker, and Pike, Rhetoric; LeFevre, Invention; Lauer, Invention. 14. Flower and Hayes, "Cognitive Process. "
15. Lunsford and Ede, "Audience Addressed. "
16. Bruffee, "Collaborative Learning. "
17. Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double," 194.
18. Gross and Miller, Introduction, 7.
19. Culler, On Deconstruction.
20. Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double," 110. 21. Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality, 4.
22. Sloop, Cultural Prison, 193. 23. Stuckey, Violence of Literacy. 24. Bjiker, Of Bicycles, 45+.
25. Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 57+. 26. Wacquant, "Structure," 46.
27. Mailloux, "Places in Time. "
28. Lucaites, "McGee Unplugged," 8. 29. Smith and Low, Introduction. 30. Baskerville, "Responses," 152.
31. Johnstone, "Some Trends," 80. Samuel Becker in the same volume refers to the Democratic National Convention riots of 1968 and to when he heard of the assassina- tion of Martin Luther King Jr. from a cab driver in Chicago. For Barnet Baskerville in his "Responses, Queries, and a Few Caveats" (151-65), the "streets echo the angry voices of those who would usher in a new order by destroying the old" and thus as an assault on reason. It was noted in Prospects that Phillip Tompkins from Kent State University could not participate; the Pheasant Run conference occurred six days after the Kent State shooting on May 4, 1970.
32. Lefebvre, "Seen from the Window," 221.
33. Sheringham, Everyday Life, 375. Sheringham quotes from Lefebvre, Critique, 309. 34. Mathieu, Tactics, xiv.
35. See Soja, Thirdspace, 14.
36. Bitzer, "More Reflections," 201-2.
37. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 7.
38. Greene, "Orator Communist," 86.
39. Barnet and Cavanagh, Global Dreams, 17.
40. Ibid. , 21.
41. King, "Rhetorical Critic," 311.
42. See Hayden, Building Suburbia; Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. 43. Hales, How We Became, 136-37.
44. Farrell, "Elliptical Postscript," 57.
45. Lucaites and Condit, "Epilogue," 610-11.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun.
Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 2006.
Barnet, Richard J. , and John Cavanagh. Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Baskerville, Barnet. "Responses, Queries, and a Few Caveats. " In The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, 151-65. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1971.
Becker, Samuel. "Rhetorical Studies for the Contemporary World. " In The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, 21-43. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1971.
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Bitzer, Lloyd. "More Reflections on the Wingspread Conference. " In The Prospect of Rhet- oric: Report of the National Development Project, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, 200-207. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1971.
------. "Rhetoric and Public Knowledge. " In Rhetoric, Philosophy and Literature, edited by Don Burks, 67-93. West Lafayette, Ind. : Purdue University Press, 1978.
Bjiker, Weibe. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1997.
Introduction 13
14 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
Black, Edwin. "The Prospect of Rhetoric: Twenty-five Years Later. " In Making and Unmak- ing the Prospects of Rhetoric, edited by Theresa Enos and Richard McNabb, 21-128. Mahway, N. J. : Erlbaum Press, 1997.
Blair, Carole. "'We Are All Prisoners Here of Our Own Device': Rhetoric in Speech Com- munication after Wingspread. " In Making and Unmaking the Prospects for Rhetoric, edited by Theresa Enos and Richard McNabb, 29-36. Mahway, N. J. : Erlbaum Press, 1997.
Booth, Wayne. "The Scope of Rhetoric Today. " In The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, 93-114. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1971.
Brint, Steven. "The Rise of the Practical Arts. " In The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, edited by Steven Brint, 231-59. Stanford, Calif. : Stan- ford University Press, 2002.
Bruffee, Ken. "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind. " In Cross-talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 415-34. Urbana, Ill. : National Council of Teachers of English, 2003.
Culler, Jonathon. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1982.
Cushman, Ellen. "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change. " College Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 7-28.
de Certeau, Michel. "Walking in the City. " In The Practice of Everyday Life, 91-114. Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1984.
Ehninger, Douglass. "Report of the Committee on the Scope and Place of Rhetorical Studies in Higher Education. " In The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Devel- opment Project, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, 208-19. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1971.
Farrell, Thomas. "An Elliptical Postscript. " In Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Inter- pretation in the Age of Science, edited by Allan G. Gross and William M. Keith, 317-29. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
Flower, Linda, and John Hayes. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing. " In Cross-talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 273-98. Urbana, Ill. : National Council of Teachers of English, 2003.
Gaonkar, Dilip. "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science. " In Rhetorical Herme- neutics, edited by Alan Gross and William Keith, 25-88. Albany: SUNY, 1997.
------. "Rhetoric and Its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences. " In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Condit, and Sally Caudill, 194-212. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge, 2001.
Greene, Ronald. "Orator Communist. " Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 85-95.
Gross, Alan, and William Keith. Introduction. In Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan Gross and William Keith, 1-24.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
Hales, Kathryn. How We Became Post Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Hauser, Gerard. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. New York:
Vintage Books, 2004.
Johnstone, Henry. "Some Trends in Rhetorical Theory. " In The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black, 78-92. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1971.
King, Andrew. "The Rhetorical Critic and the Invisible Polis. " In Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Allan G. Gross and William M. Keith, 299-314. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
Lauer, Janice. Invention in Contemporary Rhetoric: Heuristic Procedures. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan Press, 1967.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1. Translated by J. Moore. 1947. Reprint, London: Verso, 1991.
------. "Seen from the Window. " In Writings of Cities, translated and edited by Eleonore LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer- sity Press, 1987.
Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 219-27. Malden, Mass. : Blackwell, 1996.
Leff, Michael. "In Search of Adriadne's Thread. " In Landmark Essays on Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, edited by Thomas Farrell, 43-63. Mahwah, N. J. : LEA Hergamoras
Press, 1998.
Lucaites, John. "McGee Unplugged. " In Rhetoric in Postmodern America: Conversations
with Michael Calvin McGee, edited by Carol Corbin, 3-26. New York: Guilford Press,
1998.
Lucaites, John, and Celeste Condit. "Epilogue: Contributions from Rhetorical Theory. "
In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John L. Lucaites, Celeste M.
Condit, and Sally Caudill, 610-11. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. "Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked. " In Cross-talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 77-96. Urbana, Ill. : National
Council of Teachers of English, 2003.
Mailloux, Steven. "Places in Time: The Inns and Outhouses of Rhetoric. " Quarterly Jour-
nal of Speech 92 (2006): 53-68.
Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth, N. H. :
Boynton/Cook, 2005.
McKerrow, Raymie. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. " Communication Monographs
56 (1989): 441-63.
Miller, Susan. Rescuing the Subject. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Obama, Barack. "Barack Obama: A Call to Serve. " Time/CNN.
Introduction 7
8 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
concatenations of acts and operations she effectuates as part of her work and on the collective unconscious inscribed in them. . . . Epistemic reflexivity . . . informs a conception of the craft of research to strengthen its epistemologi- cal moorings. "26
Rhetoric may provide the moment, the acuity, and the discursive terrain for translations of discourses criss-crossing the university and public life, as proposed by Steve Mailloux,27 but when we hear the call to participate, we are hearing those "concatenations" comprised of participants, events, artifacts, and territories that over time and through practice aggregate (and then dis- aggregate) as meaningful concordances. If rhetoric occurs routinely in public life, as work, it is through routines that establish, in their aggregate, something like a postmodern paidiea. We are not all building the same things for the same reasons with the same tools in the same public. And yet we believe this shift toward a common labor with others outside of academe is, in fact, a major shift for rhetoricians who have long claimed to speak for "the public. " True, rhetoricians have already worked as policy analysts, critical ethnogra- phers, public teachers, rogue historians, advocates, and community organizers. But rhetoric has not, by and large, positioned these avocations as vocations for disciplinary renewal in English and in communication. As the story goes, throughout the twentieth century rhetoric has been "plagued by feelings of academic and intellectual inferiority and an almost perpetual identity cri- sis. "28 This collection presents an alternative narrative, a rhetoric of the "lost geographies" of public life that hold within them the political and ethical dimensions of real events and social relations that make our disciplinary identity newly possible. 29
Citizen-Scholars and Community Engagement
The "street" that the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conference participants invoked was a geographical marker for the political discourse rattling the windows of the university in 1970 and a figuration of what "shouts, obsceni- ties, sit-ins, and interruptions of lectures" portend for utility of political dis- course in society as a whole. 30 As topoi, these material sites were outside of rhetoric, but nonetheless painfully real: public protest had gotten very per- sonal, and it violated the sanctity and common areas of the university, repli- cating protest in the public streets of major cities. 31 The street as a figurative device, from Breton and Baudelaire to more recent scholarship, configures much more than an angry display of political unrest. The street materializes as it represents the prospects of a radically inclusive democracy of human expe- rience. For Henri Lefebvre, it was the location of the "inexorable rhythm" of everyday life32 and is its "almost total figuration. "33
And so in Paula Mathieu's aside, "the university and other institutions do not have strategic control over the streets," she too anticipates a scene for public discourse and community engagement in everyday life that is open to
the plentitude of rhetorical events and participants and without predetermi- nation of which boundaries matter more than others and of which public actions count as civility. 34 There is no shortage of such rhetorical geographies, no limit to their number or constellation. In this book, they include
City residents facing off over gentrification (Rai)
Public commemoration and planning in the context of tragic
events (Ackerman)
The reinvention of democracy in post-Cold War Kosova (Cintron) Geneticists and doctors arguing the value of race in medicine (Condit) Inner-city teens writing to resist the values of the "street" (Coogan) High school students with learning disabilities "going public" with
their labels (Flower)
The Cherokee Nation and the university conjuring a counternarrative
(Cushman and Green)
Communities organizing to protect public health (Grabill) Dissident journalists advocating for homeless persons (George
and Mathieu)
Rural residents using literacy to reverse economic decline (Jolliffe)
The disciplinary "anxiety" of rhetoric within the academy pales in com- parison to the anxieties in these scenes from public life, as well as the specific "crises" that would lead us to enter and to engage. The geography of the rhetorical event depends very little on the intellectual home for rhetorical scholarship, and the scenes tend to gather their "social energy," as Ralph Cin- tron calls it, partly through their close proximity to the wealth and influence of the university and other social and jurisprudential institutions or their comparative lack. Our scenes gather their energy from cultural and economic forces that have worked for decades if not centuries to trouble the bonds of wealth, health, progress, and community. These scenes exist without us; they are rhetorical without our say-so; but we join them in a "third space," a space that is open, hybrid, resistant, and marginal. 35
Thus the rhetorical exigencies in these public scenes do not gather force solely through the affinity of like-minded audiences, working deliberatively as discourse communities. We find instead a powerful desire for public assem- bly that gains its legitimacy well beyond the comfortable imaginations and accoutrements of academic life. Though we enter into these scenes as citizen- scholars, and in fact we often use our academic training sometimes as a moral compass and discursive divining rod, in most of our narratives we discover a preexisting conspiracy against the common good in public life that cannot be determined through the intellectual prism of the hermeneutic interpretation. At Pheasant Run in 1970, Lloyd Bitzer proclaimed that our age was a "rhetori- cal age" because of the pressure of new media upon civic life and new de- mands on rhetoric to diminish the atrocities of war, hunger, urban decline,
Introduction 9
10 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
and environmental squander. The practical mission for rhetoric is to pursue the "great aspirations of the human community. "36 The scenes that we fea- ture in The Public Work of Rhetoric, and the labor that drives our engagement, require in many cases both a return to the street, as the location and figura- tion of public life, and an awareness of the conspiracies against democracy that coalesce there.
Globalization is fabricating a new category of "the people" as resident and citizen, transcendent of national boundaries and identities, and we are caught up in the drama of how civic life unfolds in these times. For a rhetoric of pub- lic works, there can be no safe difference between us and them; as Arjun Appadurai points out, "where the lines between us and them have always, in human history, been blurred at the boundaries and unclear across large spaces and big numbers, globalization exacerbates these uncertainties. "37 One rea- son to locate rhetorical practice in local communities, and to use these com- munities as a theoretical frame, is because these "uncertainties" now escape no one. The reason why we present rhetorical practice as "work" in our essays is because, as Ronald Greene has argued, it is fundamentally naive to presume that "rhetorical agency exists outside the domain of capitalist command" and therefore outside the reach of globalization. 38 If the question is genuine as to how rhetoric can best respond to the great aspirations of the human com- munity, then the effects of globalization will be one of our most profound measures of the kinds of labor required to enter into public life for the rhetori- cal good.
In Global Dreams, Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh dispose of the belief that academics as citizens are protected somehow from "a stark reality: A huge and increasing proportion of human beings are not needed and will never be needed to make goods or to provide services because too many peo- ple in the world are too poor to buy them. "39 This dire conclusion was drawn nearly fifteen years ago, and it reminds us that there are pressures upon fami- lies, communities, and institutions that accumulate faster than books can be written about them. Yet the counterpart to globalization is "the pull of local- ism in all its forms. " As Barnet and Cavanagh continue, "place and rooted- ness are as important as ever," and the communities where we live and to whom we serve "cannot conceive of living anywhere else, for they are depen- dent on a piece of ground for their livelihood and on a particular culture and language for their sense of well being. "40
Thus The Public Work of Rhetoric must reject the idea that public life is dead, that it has been stripped of agitation, assembly, and deliberation, and that it is devoid of political discourse beyond shouts of anger. The polis is not "miss- ing" as Andrew King declares, so much as rhetoric, in the intellectual prac- tices it has acquired, reveals a learned hesitation to engage. 41 For King, civic discourse cannot now exist because the city and the nation are in disarray, and he is half right. Numerous authorities on urban life, offering histories of urban
sprawl and studies of urban networks, make the same observation--without our extrapolation into public discourse. 42 They offer us a history of the mate- riality of urban life culminating in newly global distributions of transportation, housing, information, energy, and jurisprudential power. Our neighborhoods are becoming autopoietic, making rhetorical practice all the more relevant in comprehending how this moment came to pass and how the resident best responds.
As Kathryn Hales points out, the circuitry of daily living in a global com- munity may evolve in ways that appear to make it more self-regulating and homogeneous, and require a "a new and startling account of how we know the world. " We have a choice to make as critics: we can limit our analyses to the attributes of the circumstance before us, or we can learn from those cir- cumstances how to look at the world differently: "Seeing system and medium together over a period of time, observers draw connections between cause and effect, past and future. "43 Globalization and new distributions of wealth and human communities provide us with rhetorical scenes as civic engage- ment with the imperative to learn how to comprehend them. This imperative gathers momentum and "expertise" through local communities, and in ways foreign to university life as the twentieth century has known it, although our universities are not idly standing by as the drama of globalization unfolds. In sync with globalization, they are responding to decades of diminished public funding by searching for new revenue streams, some of which translates into incentives for the "scholarship of engagement" as Ackerman explores.
The logic of this translation is known to most academic citizens: civic en- gagement at the university complements the corporate desire to conflate civic virtue with economic entrepreneurialism; it strengthens the political base of the university and ensures that the university has a key role to play in the redefinition of the polis and city-state. We realize that this raises more than one red flag, and so we begin this book with essays that interrogate the height- ened visibility of a discipline notoriously known for cloaking its own artifice (C. Miller); that challenge rhetoric to close the gap between obfuscation and the facts of injustice (Bruner); and that probe the underbelly of topoi like "justice" or "democracy" (Cintron, Rai).
The impetus for this book was the 2003 Alliance of Rhetoric Societies con- ference at Northwestern University that sought to recalibrate rhetoric's contri- butions to society by asking: What should be the institutional and social goals for academic rhetoric in the twenty-first century? And how can rhetoric best contribute to the social, political, and cultural environments that extend be- yond the university? The citizen-scholars in this collection have contributed as community teachers, ethnographers, Web designers, mediators, consult- ants, writers, and organizers. But just as important for our sense of disciplinary renewal, they have also contributed by reconceiving the classroom. David Fleming does this in his defense of the "artificial" setting of the classroom, as
Introduction 11
12 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
a reflexive space set apart from public life but in no way immune to its influ- ence. Diana George and Paula Mathieu do this by challenging classroom advice about style through a study of exemplary dissident journalists. Ellen Cushman and Erik Green show how traditional classroom routines were up- ended by a community partnership set up to navigate the new media. And Eric Juergensmeyer and Thomas P. Miller show how university classrooms through conflict resolution can engage the politics of international borders and city identities.
Both in our forays out there as rhetors--Celeste Condit resisting the rheto- ric of race-based genetics at a forum filled with scientists--and in our class- room forays into the politics of common sense--M. Lane Bruner resisting essentialist identity politics and their role in globalization--we cannot escape what Thomas Farrell calls the "acute discomfort all around the room. "44 We will never achieve the outer limits of our desire in rhetoric. Farrell defines this middling, reflexive space as the "reciprocal middle," as "mediation," as "ago- nistic," and as proudly and publicly "deliberative. " We see it as a stage for what John Lucaites and Celeste Condit call rhetoric's "strategic liberation": "the possibility of improving life within one's community in temporary and incomplete, but nonetheless meaningful, ways. "45 This is the true grit and tumble of public life. This is where we find the space to work.
Notes
1. Obama, "Call to Service. " See also Obama, "New Era of Service," 33. 2. Leff, "In Search," 60.
3. Gaonkar, "Idea of Rhetoric," 34.
4. Miller, Rescuing the Subject.
5. Booth, "Scope," 114.
6. Ehninger, "Report of the Committee," 209.
7. Black, "Prospect," 24.
8. Bitzer, "Rhetoric," 91.
9. Wicheins, "The Literary criticism of Oratory," 3-28. Wallace, "The Fundamentals
of Rhetoric," 3-20. Becker, "Rhetorical Studies," 23. 10. Ibid. , 26.
11. Ibid. , 32.
12. Gaonkar, "Idea of Rhetoric," 300.
13. See Young, Becker, and Pike, Rhetoric; LeFevre, Invention; Lauer, Invention. 14. Flower and Hayes, "Cognitive Process. "
15. Lunsford and Ede, "Audience Addressed. "
16. Bruffee, "Collaborative Learning. "
17. Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double," 194.
18. Gross and Miller, Introduction, 7.
19. Culler, On Deconstruction.
20. Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double," 110. 21. Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality, 4.
22. Sloop, Cultural Prison, 193. 23. Stuckey, Violence of Literacy. 24. Bjiker, Of Bicycles, 45+.
25. Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 57+. 26. Wacquant, "Structure," 46.
27. Mailloux, "Places in Time. "
28. Lucaites, "McGee Unplugged," 8. 29. Smith and Low, Introduction. 30. Baskerville, "Responses," 152.
31. Johnstone, "Some Trends," 80. Samuel Becker in the same volume refers to the Democratic National Convention riots of 1968 and to when he heard of the assassina- tion of Martin Luther King Jr. from a cab driver in Chicago. For Barnet Baskerville in his "Responses, Queries, and a Few Caveats" (151-65), the "streets echo the angry voices of those who would usher in a new order by destroying the old" and thus as an assault on reason. It was noted in Prospects that Phillip Tompkins from Kent State University could not participate; the Pheasant Run conference occurred six days after the Kent State shooting on May 4, 1970.
32. Lefebvre, "Seen from the Window," 221.
33. Sheringham, Everyday Life, 375. Sheringham quotes from Lefebvre, Critique, 309. 34. Mathieu, Tactics, xiv.
35. See Soja, Thirdspace, 14.
36. Bitzer, "More Reflections," 201-2.
37. Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 7.
38. Greene, "Orator Communist," 86.
39. Barnet and Cavanagh, Global Dreams, 17.
40. Ibid. , 21.
41. King, "Rhetorical Critic," 311.
42. See Hayden, Building Suburbia; Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. 43. Hales, How We Became, 136-37.
44. Farrell, "Elliptical Postscript," 57.
45. Lucaites and Condit, "Epilogue," 610-11.
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