Students and Publics -- Beyond the Event Horizon
Some Publics are Not Spherical
Since Habermas (really, Dewey, with another lexicon), we've been talking about publics and publics spheres, and most people discuss the public sphere without considering both terms sufficiently to critique Habermas's basic metaphor -- that private individuals, coming together in informed, rational discourse, create a public that counters the state's discourse and engages through literacy to shape the democracy.But what if, instead of "sphere," the public is another shape, either two- or three-dimensional? Daniel Brouwer and his co-authors address the geometry of publicity in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life. Considering my own experience in a public education institution and engaged with students largely invisible in public, the question of the shape of public discourse becomes an essential one, because I see less spherical influence and something more wobbly, less perfect, less egalitarian. So the metaphor needs to be critiqued.
By examining various metaphors other theorists have used -- from spheres and webs, terministic screens, and (the too vague, for me) comments on culture, -- Brouwer demonstrates the limits of these metaphors, especially those which invite limits, something like an event horizon of a sphere, and in so doing, ask us to question whether a public actually has some definitive limit in its engagement and non-engagement with the private, the market, and the state (5). Though Habermas explains that his bourgeois sphere certainly was active in its literacy practices, the idea of sphere invites a visual and emotional termination of influence -- some are within, some are without. Fraser, of course, identifies those who were in and out, but the idea of sphere somehow gives us the emotional desire to see it expand, constantly, like an aging star. Yet time, space, and the reality of community literacy remind us that publics are ever-changing, and unfortunately, seem to be shrinking, even at my community college where students are silenced as institutional policy and invisible practice.
Seeing the sphere metaphor as a modality, on the other hand, focuses on its dynamism, echoing classical rhetoric's teachings of eloquence, invention, kairos, and judgement. Thus, modality's critical character relies on "the intervention and judgment of the scholar" to encourage and sustain the individual's participation (21). This becomes problematic with disenfranchised citizens such as my students, who, because of poverty, geographical boundaries, even documentation status, are excluded from intervention and lack exposure to judgement strategies to fully engage in the public. Unfortunately, FYW courses that emphasize "error" correction do little to prepare these students to understand dynamic genres and the kairotic questions.
On the other hand, if we see the public as a network, or a web, then we can see something closer to Fraser and Warner -- multiple publics rather than a single one. This is more the reality of working- and poverty-class community college students, who negotiate multiple publics on a daily basis.
by challenging claims to singularity and centrality, necessarily rejecting the position that only one group may express public opinion or provide a privileged public perspective (6). I feel this negotiation of challenge, however, is a stressful one -- especially first generation students who lack the parental/familial experience that empathizes with their academic public selves. The network metaphor, however, perhaps re-enfranchises the student by providing multiple perspectives of the participants themselves and provide greater consideration of relationality and temporality (7), if, the students are cognitively and affectively aware of this potential and bring their own native strengths to bear on their immediate, then extended networks. Again, a question of kairotic understanding.
Other metaphors discussed here, but more extensively addressed by Warner, Burke, Gee, and others, include publicity, screens, and culture.
Later in the same book, Pezzullo and Depoe, in "Everyday Life and Death in a Nuclear World: Stories from Fernald" foreground the possibility that we should reexamine the sphere metaphor to challenge perceptions of nature and environmental concerns as static, merely place-based, and easily divorced from questions of time, technology, or identity (87). I feel this approach may explain some of the limitations of my students who -- though often limited by geography because of economics -- simultaneously shift their environment because of those economics. In other words, though many of these students have hardly left Houston, they've lived in many neighborhoods around Houston because they rent or live in Section 8 housing. This still gives them a perspective of space and place, spots on a map, but ones with varying affect. If so, we can see how publics are not merely isolated spheres of rational-critical debate somehow suspended in space and time, but are networks of modalities that are constituted in part by space and time.
Pezzullo and Depoe list three patterns of everyday life as barrier to publicity: 1) constant and superficially innocuous presence, coupled with rhetoric of reassurance; this reminds us that the desire to critically question an institution is deterred when that institution has a constant presence in our lives and we are told that it is normal [argh!]; 2) the rhetoric of national security served to deflect attention away from sacrifices make; 3) latency of hazardous materials and imagining the health of our bodies as purely “natural” obscures our recognition of the preventability of crisis (102). Though we live and work on the north side of the city, away from most refineries, we take refineries and the ever-present air and water pollution of southeast Texas for granted, especially with a state discourse through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality [sic] which has consistently resisted Clean Air and Clean Water Acts regulation and has consistently sued the federal EPA, all in the name of neoliberalism private profiteering. But I digress. But I don't -- that most students are completely unaware of our poisoned water and air demonstrates this "latency" that infects our public discourse and ultimately discourages public reaction to state flouting of public health.
Techné and Re-enfranchisement
So this takes us back to the introductory essay, where we are reminded of that ancient skill, techné: a productive knowledge, and never a static "normative body of knowledge"; techné resists identification with a normative subject and marks a domain of "intervention and invention." Techné has a connection to ameliorative social action. Here is where our students bring their strength, because their street smarts are often unexpected and beyond the experience of the local authorities. If we can incubate the "cunning reason" of our students and help them recognize good timing to indicate a distinct mode of timely intelligence, then, as Atwill explains, that “knowing how” and “knowing when” help distinguish techné from “rule-governed activities that are less constrained by temporal conditions” (19). Emphasizing process and timing, techné stands against compulsion, force, necessity, and fate. Disenfranchisement then becomes a queering enfranchisement. But institutional silencing has to be overcome.Reference
Brouwer, Daniel. "Introduction." Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Print.
Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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