A New Kind of Party Animal: How the Young Are Tearing Up the Political Landscape , and: Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (review)

Abstract

510 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Maurice Charland's essay on "Property and Propriety" uses Lyotard's distinction between "litige" (a dispute that occurs within a consensual language game) and the différend (a dispute in which "the wrong one party claims to have suffered cannot be expressed in the language of the court and judge" [222] ). He analyzes a land dispute between the Mohawks and the Canadian government to illustrate the dynamics of Lyotard's concepts. The result is a provocative rethinking of the limits of republicanism when faced with "pagan" voices that do not share the rules of the republican language game. Charland's essay is a profound breakthrough in the rethinking of the civic republican heritage as the philosophical basis for the revival of rhetoric. Robert Hariman's afterword examines the biblical story of Esther as an act of judgment . He defines "judgment as an act of positioning oneself in respect to often incommensurable obligations" (246), and identifies the central role of communication in the practice of private and public judgment. This afterword would have been stronger had Hariman sought to weave the themes from the entire book into his essay. A few other cavils: actual political judgment in the book appears only connected to racial and, to a lesser extent, gender issues. The standard charge that postmodern theorists lack a vocabulary for discussing class and economic issues is demonstrated clearly by this volume. It seems bizarre that the one modernist figure who is most extensively cited in the book is Sigmund Freud (Marx gets one reference), despite the nearly universal rejection of Freud's theories everywhere but in literature departments. Finally, it is a pity that the book was not simultaneously offered in a paperback edition. $59 is awfully pricey, even for a graduate seminar. The greatest strength of this book is that all the essays are accessible and provocative. Most of the essays could be assigned even in an undergraduate class on cultural studies or rhetorical criticism. The book does make strong demands on the reader, but I cannot think of a better guide at present to the academic and political judgments facing rhetorical studies as we move into the next century. James Arnt Aune Texas A&M University A New Kind of Party Animal: How the Young Are Tearing Up the Political Landscape. By Michèle Mitchell. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998; pp. 224. $23.00; $13.00 paper. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. By Nina Eliasoph. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; pp. χ + 330. $64.95 cloth; $22.95 paper. During the 1996 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton fondly discussed the future and asked the public to join him in building a "bridge to the 21st Century." With the Book Reviews 511 approach of the new millennium one must question whether what is found on the other side of that bridge will be better, worse, or more of the same? The combined efforts of Nina Eliasoph and Michelle Mitchell go a long way toward advancing the proposition that public discourse in the twenty-first century may be filled with both continuity and change. Eliasoph provides an insightful explanation for how and why people turn off politics, the consequences of doing so, and the feasibility of various alternatives for re-energizing public discourse. Mitchell, on the other hand, attempts to defy the conventional wisdom that the young (age 18-35) are disenfranchised . She describes a group of up-and-coming political participants who, she claims, are in the process of changing American politics with new methods of participation and thus are poised to become prominent players in the political system. In Avoiding Politics Eliasoph expresses her concern over the future of the American experiment with a representative democracy. She writes, "For democracy to survive there must be a range of contexts that citizens recognize as appropriate places for broad political debate" (20-21). The focus of her research is the contextual setting in which citizens engage in political conversation in their everyday lives. She basically concludes that Americans work very hard at avoiding the creation and communication of political ideas in broad public settings. In fact, she writes that "apathy takes work to produce" (6...