On Reading and Misreading the Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres

Abstract

The invitation to comment on these reviews of Vernacular Voices affords an opportunity to clarify basic themes and arguments of my project. The comments of Professors Cloud and Hogan raise questions inviting more detailed exploration than is possible in this brief response. While their questions and objections, at times, give me pause over what I thought I was arguing and the interpretations it has provoked, I celebrate the interesting insights they offer as prods for continuing a rich conversation. That conversation, from my point of view, must begin by recognizing the Enlightenment's paradigm shift in the organization of public life from the Greco-Roman model of civic virtue to that of civil society. Vernacular Voices argues that this shift, which is significant on a variety of fronts, marked the rise of a public engaged in open exchange in a public sphere (a discursive arena outside of the royal court) that produced a sense of public opinion (a prevailing tendency of opinion outside the seat of power and regulative of power). This set of terms--publics, public spheres, and public opinion--was, from the outset, inherently rhetorical, although that connection has become muddied, if not lost, today. My project was to recuperate each of these terms through theoretical reflections germane to their rhetorical character and to illustrate their efficacy as rhetorically based concepts through a series of case studies, each of which placed primary emphasis on one of them while bringing the others into play as appropriate. While executing this recuperation I attempted to avoid apriori judgments about what any particular public, public sphere, or public opinion should be. Instead, I adopted what I call an empirical attitude, by which I sought what actually engaged citizens and institutional actors said and did as evidence for characterizing the publics, public spheres, and public opinions that actually formed. Cloud and Hogan raise a number of concerns, some of which are more central than others for this discussion. For example, they both point to missing considerations, most of which would require a different project than the one I undertook. They also, in some cases, interpret specific claims and examples in ways that seem to stand my actual claims on their head, and in others marshal specific examples from the book that strike me as misreadings to support their points. More substantively, for different reasons each expresses concern that I have not provided rich resources for judging the quality of publics, public spheres, public opinion, or vernacular rhetoric in general. Furthermore, they worry that I espouse an uncritical populism, possibly adopt a neo-Luddite perspective, and perhaps prefer the ignorant mass opinion or confuse it with fantasy. In sum, they charge that I have failed to provide a rigorous analytic framework to distinguish democratic and emanciptory rhetoric from the undemocratic tendencies of reactionary rhetoric. I wish to make a few clarifying comments concerning these latter concerns. Hogan has interpreted the book primarily as a study of public opinion and objects that I have conceded survey research's claim to scientific status while not exploring it as a form of rhetoric. Cloud, wonders, in this regard, whether polling is not, in fact, a form of vernacular rhetoric. I certainly agree that polling is a form of rhetoric, and a study of its rhetorical characteristics certainly would be welcome. But that was not my project. I was interested in developing a rhetorical model of public opinion because liberal democracies invoke public opinion to legitimate official action. It is assumed to reflect the people's understanding of their interests and how they wish to have them advanced and protected. This conception, basic to liberal democratic forms of governance, presupposes that a public's judgment arises from discussion and deliberation. Unlike popular opinion or mood, public opinion's legitimating function rests on its discursive formation. …