The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement

By John M. Ackerman and Gerard A. Hauser

The Public Work of Rhetoric presents the art of rhetorical techné as a contemporary praxis for civic engagement and social change, which is necessarily inclusive of people inside and outside the academy. In this provocative call to action, editors John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, along with seventeen other accomplished contributors, offer case studies and criticism on the rhetorical practices of citizen-scholars pursuing democratic ideals in diverse civic communities—with partnerships across a range of media, institutions, exigencies, and discourses.

Challenging conventional research methodologies and the traditional insularity of higher education, these essays argue that civic engagement as a rhetorical act requires critical attention to our notoriously veiled identity in public life, to our uneasy affiliation with democracy as a public virtue, and to the transcendent powers of discourse and ideology. This can be accomplished, the contributors argue, by building on the compatible traditions of materialist rhetoric and community literacy, two vestiges of rhetoric's dual citizenship in the fields of communication and English. This approach expresses a collective desire in rhetoric for more politically responsive scholarship, more visible impact in public life, and more access to the critical spaces between universities and their communities.

The compelling case studies in The Public Work of Rhetoric are located in inner-urban and postindustrial communities where poverty is the overriding concern, in afterschool and extracurricular alternatives that offer new routes to literate achievement, in new media and digital representations of ethnic cultures designed to promote chosen identities, in neighborhoods and scientific laboratories where race is the dominant value, and in the policy borderlands between universities and the communities they serve. Through these studies and accounts, the contributors champion the notion that the public work of rhetoric is the tough labor of gaining access and trust, learning the codes and histories of communities, locating the situations in which rhetorical expertise is most effective, and in many cases jointly defining the terms for gauging social change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611173048

Gerard A. Hauser

Gerard A. Hauser is a College Professor of Distinction in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Editor of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric, Hauser is the author of Introduction to Rhetorical Theory and Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres.

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Introduction

The Space to Work in Public Life

DAVID J. COOGAN AND JOHN M. ACKERMAN

This collection illustrates how rhetoric is in the midst of discovering anew its usefulness. We live and work in times of economic confusion and injustice, of geopolitical strife and war, and of global environmental endangerment. We live and work, also, in times of renewed hope with emerging commitments in many quarters to democratic inclusion and to community engagement toward economic renewal. Our new president has asked all citizens to find ways to serve and thus to integrate our academic labor and our occasions for service into the fabric of our universities and communities, which themselves are caught up in moments of innovation and reflection that respond to shifts in regional economics and global uncertainty.¹ The discourse of service and civic engagement is on the rise at our colleges and universities as policies and practices that identify service learning, the scholarship of engagement, community outreach, public consultancy, and public intellectualism as the work before us to do. Yet these locutions as material locations are relatively nascent in our own talk about our home discipline and its place in the world. The premise upon which this book rests is that these locations and practices are vital to rhetoric's ongoing efforts to renew itself and to demonstrate our relevance locally and for a changing world.

As the contributors to this volume illustrate, to study and practice rhetoric out there is to embody the role of the rhetor by tapping into new streams of disciplinary life through an embodied practice that is guided by a critical reflexivity and community affiliation. To do rhetoric out there requires a shedding of academic adornments, a different professional disposition, new participatory and analytic tools, and a more grounded conception of public need. The Public Work of Rhetoric, we argue, is not shaped in our treatises and classrooms alone but in the material and discursive histories of communities outside of academe. These communities can benefit from the increased attention of rhetoricians in pursuit of democratic ideals, but rhetoric can also benefit from community partnerships premised on a negotiated search for the common good—from a collective labor to shape the future through rhetoric in ways that are mutually empowering and socially responsible.

Clearly there is work to be done both in rhetoric as it manifests in communication and in English if we are to rehabilitate the discipline for this civic role. Though the public remains a generative launching pad for scholarly studies in communication, for the general public doing rhetoric is akin to menacing our fellow citizens with lies and misdirection. In English, where rhetoric and composition are often paired, the public is often imagined as a landing pad for students, a literate place, where they can test what we have taught them with imaginary audiences. What this suggests to us is that our disciplinary achievements have not been earned through everyday contact with publics, but through a hard-earned insularity from them. We have grown strong in academe by becoming answerable to ourselves and to our institutions by putting publics, with their misunderstandings about manipulation and illiteracy, in their place. A closer look at our shared history with publics—those moments that arguably precede a turn toward community engagement—suggests that we have been haunted by the prospect of uselessness. In 1978 Michael Leff described it as a nagging irony of pure abstraction in a literature that keeps insisting that rhetoric is a practical discipline.² And in 1997 Dilip Gaonkar noted, in a withering and wicked assessment, that we place (somewhat frantically these days) things under the sign of rhetoric more to make rhetoric intelligible than the things subsumed under it.³ Susan Miller questioned if an art form oriented to the great man speaking on a great subject was even a suitable tradition to understand technologies of writing and the emergent subjectivity of the student writer.⁴ These concerns with too much abstraction, with a globalized Big Rhetoric, or with the seemingly irreconcilable differences between speech and writing, rhetoric and literacy—these are just a few of the twists and turns in our collective story of disciplinary achievement and anxiety, as many have said before us.

The historical trajectory of these differences is well documented, and we do not mean to minimize differences in theoretical orientation, disciplinary history, or pedagogical priorities. Participatory democracy, however, tends not to care. While it remains true that most people, most of the time, in communities near and far, only know rhetoric through its most derogatory inflections, the enactment of rhetoric in public life is nondenominational; all is forgiven when we seek answers to their questions before ours, whenever and wherever scholars of rhetoric dirty their hands in actual controversy, as Wayne Booth proposed nearly forty years ago.⁵

We offer this introduction as salutation to our readers and as thanks to our contributors. We were inspired by their labors, and in kind we offer a disciplinary context in which this volume can be read. We begin by returning to rhetoric's pursuit of epistemic relevance but turn less inward toward academic expertise and more outward to the phronesis of the street, as a physical and figurative placeholder for publicity. The public work of rhetoric, as we imagine and then conduct it in everyday life, brings us closer to the material results of globalization and to opportunities for social change.

RHETORIC'S EPISTEMIC CRISIS

The signals and the steering corrections leading up to this moment can be read in our collective disciplinary history since the 1960s. What we find is a desire to make rhetoric answerable to something beyond itself. Naturally, that desire has manifested differently because composition claims student rhetors as its subject, while communication claims rhetors in a variety of publics. Still, we see more common ground than perhaps has been imagined in the way both fields have struggled to adjust the millennial tradition of rhetoric.

One of the overriding themes at the Wingspread Conference in 1970 was whether and how, under the aegis of a new rhetoric, that scholarship would become more politically relevant. At this moment in history, we are compelled to view with great foreboding the character of public communication regarding social and political issues.⁶ These words from Douglass Ehninger introduced the committee report on the scope and place of rhetorical study in higher education, and they were consonant with a disciplinary anxiety expressed at the conference and through its proceedings. In Edwin Black's retrospective, this was a response to the threat of disciplinary dissolution: the politics of the street in 1970 had reached such a fevered pitch that the discipline was forced to face its complicity in national events—society was falling apart: students were dying on campuses, the Vietnam War was ever raging, cities were burning, communication was failing right and left, and rhetoric had to enlist.

Yet to enlist in public life, to enter into the fray of political unrest and public controversy, comes with a cost, as voiced by Black, who feared the abrogation of the conventional distinction between the personal, internal life of the individual and the public and political life of that individual. If taken to its logical extreme of homogeneous consciousness, the discipline would cease to exist.⁷ Then and now, the measure of rhetoric's responsibility to and involvement in public and political life has always been a question of distance. How close do we get to political discourse when it is consumed with violence? How close do we get when solutions to social injustice transcend the limits of scholarly discourse and criticism? How close do we get when the interlocutor is our neighbor, and that neighbor is in trouble?

Not all saw the political and technological changes of the 1960s and 1970s as a challenge to create—or resuscitate—what Lloyd Bitzer, in 1978, described as the wisdom characterizing a universal public, but there was grave concern in communication for civility, peace, understanding, and reason; for making rhetoric relevant to a generation that appeared to the field to be uncoupling itself from society's center.⁸ Communication thus broadened its unit of analysis beyond the speech—beyond persuasion and the exalted status of famous orators—and headed into the wilds of political division, media proliferation, and social movements, all the while swimming upstream against the swelling behavioral science of communication studies.

The departure point in 1970 was the assertion that neo-Aristotlean methods, as laid out by Wilchens, valorized persuasion and made exemplary the political speech within the historical context of the state. The scholars at Wingspread endeavored to make sense of that tradition in relation to the cultural and political upheavals of the era. Wallace argued that rhetoricians needed a new set of rules to prepare rhetors in such an environment and a reaffirmation of the liberal arts, which alone could create the copiousness and phronesis that young rhetors needed. Samuel Becker sought a much larger definition of the message, a de-centering of attention on the speech, and an interest in rhetorical functions beyond persuasion (ego-defense, knowledge making, values expression).⁹

Both Wallace and Becker struggled to adjust the tradition—and themselves within it. There was in Becker's piece that pressure cooker of messages that he sought some sort of purchase on, personified in the figure of this man with his wife telling him to mow the lawn and his children…pushing him to play and the media telling him to use deodorants and to wear a seat belt.¹⁰ Becker then recounts his experience at the Central States Communication Conference in Chicago two days after Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, where it is not the blur of messages about the subsequent rioting that stands out, but the context in which Becker receives those messages as a scholar on lock-down, wondering whether it was safe to go out of the hotel for dinner.¹¹ The disciplinary dilemma framed at Wingspread, of course, is not limited by what Dilip Gaonkar later described in reference to the first passage as Becker's sympathy for the besieged patriarchy in the fragmented space of late capitalism.¹² What made Becker uneasy—what makes all of us uneasy—were publics that could not be contained by (or easily explained by) the rhetorical tradition, either in substance, style, or medium.

Rhetoricians in composition saw the challenge of the 1960s and 1970s differently: to broaden beyond the old rhetorical treatises with their limited appeal to correctness and form, their authoritative sense of what collects us as a public. Against current-traditional rhetoric and its conduit theories of communication, rhetoricians in English rallied around the neglected canon of invention.¹³ Linda Flower and John Hayes's early research into the cognitive process of composing took Lloyd Bitzer's theory of exigency as a point of departure. Writers, like the speakers in Bitzer's work, are seen here responding with discourse to a need in the world. Flower and Hayes employed a tool from psychology—protocol analysis of writers composing-aloud—to theorize the formation of goals, the construction of a rhetorical situation, and the translation to text: making thought visible.¹⁴ The public tended to function in writerly terms here, even when the civic was invoked. Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede's influential article, Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked, constituted student writers in relation to audiences beyond the classroom, at one point, through the effort of one student writer, struggling to conjure like-minded citizens who would not protest the building of a mental health facility in her community.¹⁵ But the primary concern in Flower and Hayes's and Lunsford and Ede's work was not with the formation of publics deliberating about particular social issues but with students learning the heuristic of audience.

What is remarkable is not that English and communication would respond differently in a time of crisis, but that they would soon exhaust themselves in their respective efforts to adjust the rhetorical tradition. The individualism that emerged from the process revolution in English can be read as a turn away from the public that scholars in rhetoric and communication wanted to reconceive. But both efforts to generalize the public and the student writer—the twin forces of common good and agency—did not survive increased scrutiny.

In composition, this second crisis came in the form of questions, which in turn raised the problem of boundaries: Can an education in rhetoric during the first year of college enable rhetorical performance in disciplinary and professional work? If so, how? Kenneth Bruffee elaborated this as a social process of composing; of entering into the conversation of mankind, which he based on his readings of Richard Rorty and Thomas Kuhn, among others.¹⁶ If thought is internalized language, then writing is internalized language reexternalized. This later move globalized rhetoric, inserting it into the disciplinary, workplace, and professional settings where genres, vocabularies, modes of reasoning, values, and knowledge differed, but where writers' needs and skills could be studied and taught. Though the epistemic turn did not take up publics per se, it arguably reconceived the writer's relation to them through the acquisition of professional status; that public role, say, of an architect. Within the orbit of the social constructivist turn, knowledge claims were contestable, but in Kuhnian fashion, always ameliorating, accelerating toward or within a paradigm. The student's burden was to decode that process.

In communication, the anxiety over the public translated, however indirectly, into the rhetoric of inquiry, the rhetoric of the human sciences—into the epistemic turn. Instead of descending farther into the embodied realms of the political, it moved swiftly toward questions of epistemological relevance. The latter has coalesced around the writings of Dilip Gaonkar, who begins his oft-quoted and debated article, Rhetoric and Its Double, with the essay's summation, rhetoric cannot escape itself.¹⁷ It cannot, as Alan Gross and William Keith restate, because once rhetoric enters through the doorway of literary supplementation, it has left behind the limits of Aristotelian proof for the uncharted waters of textual globalization through rhetoric's extension to every instance, text, artifact, or communication.¹⁸ Rhetoricity ad infinitum will not completely erase rhetoric from discourse and communication—it joins the class of logocentric, theoretical tropes that include limitless signification, interconnectivity in the heteroglot, and literariness.¹⁹ In doing so, rhetoric does not cease to exist, but it becomes awfully thin because rhetoric must percolate (within its resources) through every discursive utterance and act.

The internment of rhetoric within its own mereness is, for Gaonkar, a philosophically necessary and timely corrective to contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism that espouses a rhetorical turn in all disciplines, beginning first with science; and as science goes, the rest will follow. The globalization of rhetoric should result in a form of disciplinary composure and confidence, but, for Gaonkar, rhetoric is condemned to a form of epistemological purgatory because the anxiety that breathes life into rhetorical consciousness is born out of someone else The emergence of a rhetorical consciousness is directly related to a crisis within a special discourse…. The sheer possibility of a rhetorical consciousness, the possibility that rhetoric is a permanent though unrealized opening for man, does not by itself induce a crisis, but it is something always waiting to be exploited when the crisis comes. In short, rhetoric is the medium and not the ground of discursive and cultural crises.²⁰ For different reasons and from different vantage points, communication and composition took an epistemic turn, inserting rhetoric into the knowledge-making process, raising ethical questions about treating knowledge claims rhetorically.

But with great power comes great responsibility: If rhetoric is the medium and not the grounds of crisis, toward whose ends would rhetoric work? What responsibilities did critics and teachers take on when taking up this tool? As James Berlin argued, rhetoric is not a neutral techne but a part of social and political structures that articulate the nature of the individual within those structures, and the distribution of power in society.²¹ Rhetoric, in this context, does not simply help a student arrange an argument but appropriate a place within a contested, discursive framework. That such engagement was itself framed by classrooms and assignments—by the authority of teachers of rhetoric—did not escape Berlin and other proponents of critical pedagogy. Much the same dilemma emerged in communication among proponents of critical rhetoric. John Sloop, for example, argued that it must be my task, and the task of critics in general, to increase the impact of criticism by finding outlets that increase its prominence as a cultural fragment.²² But this link between our work as rhetoricians and social change remains vexed, writes J. Elspeth Stuckey, because schools, like other social institutions, are designed to replicate, or at least not disturb, social division and class privilege, including those privileges that we enjoy (123). Criticism and change remains vexed, as vexed as it is in critical pedagogy. Our universities, J. Elspeth Stuckey explains, are designed to replicate, or at least not disturb, social division and class privilege, including those privileges that we enjoy as critics and teachers.²³ If we have, in our ethnographic studies of literacy and our rhetorical criticism of publics, tended to propose linguistic solutions to social divisions that are more properly material or economic in nature, it is because we have, in English and communication, tended to see disciplinary prerogatives more easily than others.

One guiding principle that we have shared in compiling The Public Work of Rhetoric is that rhetoric should not deny itself: it will never dissolve into itself by entering into the fractious world of political action or by implicating itself in the discourse of others. Our motivations to act are not premised on a particular agenda, a set of social issues, or the settler's itch to unfurl our flag. We are motivated by the embodied practices that we have cultivated in relationship 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 authority 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 discover the coordinates of anxiety in its locally and globally material manifestations, 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 rhetoric 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 ‘universalized,’ ‘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 epistemological regress when rhetoric accepts its supplementary role within the discursive regime but founds its claims on civic engagement in what Gerard Hauser describes as the reticulate public sphere.²⁵ Loïc Wacquant's exegesis of Pierre Bourdieu's theories of reflexive sociology concludes with a similar, recuperative (we would say rhetorical) point of view: [Reflexivity] is neither egocentric, nor logocentric.…It fastens not upon the private person…but on the 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 epistemological 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 disaggregate) 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 ethnographers, 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 crisis.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, obscenities, sit-ins, and interruptions of lectures portend for utility of political discourse in society as a whole.³⁰ As topoi, these material sites were outside of rhetoric, but nonetheless painfully real: public protest had gotten very personal, and it violated the sanctity and common areas of the university, replicating 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 experience. 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 predetermination 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 comparison 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 Cintron 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 assembly 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 rhetorical age because of the pressure of new media upon civic life and new demands on rhetoric to diminish the atrocities of war, hunger, urban decline, and environmental squander. The practical mission for rhetoric is to pursue the great aspirations of the human community.³⁶ The scenes that we feature 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 figuration 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 public 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 reason to locate rhetorical practice in local communities, and to use these communities 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 community, 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 rhetorical 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 people 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 families, communities, and institutions that accumulate faster than books can be written about them. Yet the counterpart to globalization is the pull of localism in all its forms. As Barnet and Cavanagh continue, place and rootedness 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 dependent 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 missing as Andrew King declares, so much as rhetoric, in the intellectual practices 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 materiality 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 community 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 circumstances 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 engagement 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 engagement 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 heightened 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 conference at Northwestern University that sought to recalibrate rhetoric's contributions 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 beyond the university? The citizen-scholars in this collection have contributed as community teachers, ethnographers, Web designers, mediators, consultants, 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 a reflexive space set apart from public life but in no way immune to its influence. 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 upended 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 rhetoric of race-based genetics at a forum filled with scientists—and in our classroom 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 agonistic, 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 assassination 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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