Available Means of Persuasion, The. David M. Sheridan
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“Christian ethics”). I am referring, rather, to rhetorical ethics—a set of implicit understandings between writer and audience about their relationship. Ethics in this sense is not an answer but is more a critical inquiry into how the writer determines what is good and desirable. Such inquiry necessarily leads toward a standpoint about what is good or desirable for a given situation. (68)
An understanding of ethics as situated becomes important to us in chapters 6 and 7, when we connect multimodal public rhetoric with models of the public sphere. We examine a multimodal composition used by the prosecution in the Michael Skakel trial to explore the ways multimodality potentially undermines the ethical goals of making reasoning transparent to an audience. We do not offer these goals as universal and transcendent, but rather as particular goals rhetors might want to embrace in certain situations. In chapter 7, we examine a different tradition of the public sphere that is not based on rational deliberation and that privileges goals aside from transparency of reasoning.
Publics, Publicity, and Public Spheres
If kairos allows us to characterize the inventiveness of the prepared rhetor, public sphere allows us to frame the broader social contexts within which rhetors operate. A highly contested and thoroughly vexed term, the public sphere is commonly defined as the space in which “the citizens of a pluralistic polity speak from and across their differences productively” (Ivie, “Rhetorical” 278). The term owes its popularity, in no small degree, to the work of Habermas, especially The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in English in 1989. We agree with Kevin Michael DeLuca that something akin to the “concept of the public sphere is indispensible for theoretical and practical reasons” (21; see also Fraser 57). In the remainder of this chapter, we review contemporary conversations about the nature of publics and publicity in order to establish what we have in mind when we use the concept of the public sphere. We begin with a brief outline of the defining features of Habermas’s original model and then trace five broad areas of critique that public-sphere scholars have offered in response.
Habermas and the Liberal Bourgeois Public Sphere
In Habermas’s original model, the liberal bourgeois public sphere is a social space in which private citizens (as distinct from state actors) come together to address issues of “common concern.” Public-sphere activity could be witnessed in the salons of France, the coffee houses of Great Britain, and the “table societies” and “literary societies” of Germany (31–34). These institutions “organized discussion among private people” in such a way that social status was “disregarded altogether” (36). Not social status, but “the authority of the better argument” ruled the day (36). The “rational-critical debate” (160) that took place in coffeehouses and salons resulted in “public opinion” which in turn exerted political force on the state (52–55). The public sphere, in this conception, mediates between the private lives of ordinary citizens and the state.
Critical Responses to the Liberal Bourgeois Public Sphere
The model of the public sphere offered by Habermas in Structural Transformation has been critiqued along many lines. For the purposes of our exploration of multimodal public rhetoric, five broad areas of critique are particularly relevant.
Critique #1: The ontology of publics. The first set of critiques concerns the fundamental nature of the public sphere: What is the manner of its existence? Is it a sphere? Network? Rhizome? (Brouwer and Asen 1–23). The question is so vexing that some theorists recommend giving up the search for a definitive answer. Borrowing a term from Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean recommends treating the public sphere as a “zero institution”: “an empty signifier that itself has no determinate meaning but that signifies the presence of meaning” (105). We find the approach of Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen more productive. Brouwer and Asen begin the introduction to their recent collection, Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life by observing that
The public organizes through metaphor. Both its practitioners and theorists employ a rich range of metaphors when enacting and analyzing public activity. Spheres, lines, networks, screens—these terms render distinctly intelligible the qualities, realms, collectivities, or processes signified by multiple meanings of public. (1)
Brouwer and Asen resist the temptation to assert a single metaphor as superior. Instead, they consider multiple metaphors, reviewing the possibilities that each one opens up and forecloses.
As Brouwer and Asen note, the metaphor of the “sphere” has been criticized by a number of scholars. Hariman and Lucaites complain that spheres are “abstract, formally elegant, inherently rational, self-completing and self-regulating entities imagined to be freestanding in abstract space and seen from a macroscopic perspective” (qtd. in Brouwer and Asen 4). Moreover, the insistence on spatiality that is implied by a sphere (as a geometrical shape) can be both productive and counterproductive (Brouwer and Asen 3–5). If we’re not careful, we begin to speak of “entering” the public sphere, as if one could physically move in and out of it in the same way one enters and leaves a coffeehouse (for critiques of space- and place-based metaphors, see Calhoun, “Rethinking” 4; Edbauer Rice, “Unframing” 9–12; Mah). It will become clear in subsequent chapters that the metaphor of the network or web has a special resonance for us. As Brouwer and Asen observe, “Network and web metaphors invite greater consideration of relationality and temporality” (7). Network is consonant with our understanding of kairos as involving a complex configuration of relationships between rhetors, audiences, places, and contextual resources and constraints at a particular moment in time. We are also attracted to Brouwer and Asen’s use of modality, which “foregrounds productive arts of crafting publicity,” though we avoid this term because of possible confusion with “multimodality” as it is used in this book (17).
A danger of metaphors like “sphere” and “network” call to mind entities that exist (like a geophysical places) independently of the performances that occur “in” them, in the same way a theater exists even when there is no performance occurring there. But several theorists take issue with the implication that the public sphere exists independently of rhetorical performances. Warner, for instance, emphasizes the way a public is coaxed into existence via the operation of multiple texts circulating in relationship with each other over time:
It’s the way texts circulate, and become the basis for further representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and duration. A text, to have a public, must continue to circulate through time, and because this can only be confirmed through an intertextual environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual, even intergeneric. (97)
Audience and attention, in this model, become crucial: “Because a public exists only by virtue of address, it must predicate some degree of attention, however notional, from its members” (87). In Warner’s conception, the public sphere has a fragile quality. It is always in danger of evaporating. Should channels of textual circulation become blocked or attention be diverted, the public will fade away. In this sense, a public is different from other forms of sociality, such as a “nation,” which “includes its members whether they are awake or asleep, sober or drunk, sane or deranged, alert or comatose” (87). This emphasis on circulation and attention drives much of the subsequent discussion in our book. In chapters 3–5, we offer a revised model of rhetorical invention based on links between the composing process and considerations of circulation, of what happens when the composition is done.
Critique #2: The nature of access to the public sphere. The second critique concerns how publics are accessed. The liberal bourgeois public sphere is founded on the idea that participation is not reliant on social status. One did not need to be a duke to enter the coffeehouse and introduce arguments. But as many have pointed out, and as Habermas himself concedes, the allegedly egalitarian nature of this public had severe limitations: It only applied to white male property owners. The ideal model of the public sphere described by Habermas insists on what Seyla Benhabib calls a “symmetry condition,” which includes the related tenets that “each participant must have an equal chance to initiate and to continue communication” and “each must have an equal chance to make assertions, recommendations, explanations, and to challenge justifications” (87). Likewise, Craig J. Calhoun writes that “[i]n a nutshell, a public sphere adequate