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Abstract
This essay analyzes a local civic debate in which the purposive, referential, and deliberative structures of an argument by comparison are rendered inoperative. In so doing, it advances our understanding of the rhetoric of exemplarity, widens our conception of democratic political contention, and directs scholarly attention to local forums of civic life, where rhetorical motive often gives way to pure persuasion, reasoned debate commonly slips into everyday talk, democratic deliberation frequently verges on radical dissensus, and emotional investments routinely culminate in affective events.
Notes
[1] I would like to thank Karen Tracy for her willingness to share this transcript. For a broader, contextual analysis of the budget crisis that occasioned Bergstrom's address to the school board, see Karen Tracy, “The Discourse of Crisis in Public Meetings: Case Study of a School District's Multimillion Dollar Error,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 35, no. 4 (2007): 418–41.
[2] On classical rhetorical theories of comparison, especially as they intersect with ancient notions of example, see Samuel McCormick, “Argument by Comparison: An Ancient Typology,” Rhetorica 32 (2014): 148–64.
[3] This is not to suggest, of course, that Bergstrom's “little analogy” is representative of ordinary civic discussion and debate. But it is to suggest that a careful analysis of her “little analogy” can shed new light on some of the persuasive techniques, political relationships, and resistant practices characteristics of ordinary civic discourse.
[4] That reflections and reconsiderations of this sort are important to the advancement of contemporary rhetorical studies is well indicated in Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
[5] See, for instance, Greg Goodale, “The Sonorous Envelope and Political Deliberation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 218–24; Samuel McCormick and Mary Stuckey, “Presidential Disfluency: Literacy, Legibility, and Vocal Political Aesthetics in the Rhetorical Presidency,” Review of Communication 13, no. 1 (2013): 3–22; Greg Goodale, “The Presidential Sound: From Orotund to Instructional Speech, 1892–1912,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 2 (2010): 164–84; Joshua Gunn, “On Speech as Public Release,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 1–41; Joshua Gunn, “Speech is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 343–64; Joshua Gunn, “Gimme Some Tongue (On Recovering Speech),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 3 (2007): 361–64; Samuel McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 2 (2003): 109–31.
[6] Cicero, De Inventione, 1.31.51, as translated in Robert Gorman, The Socratic Method in the Dialogues of Cicero (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 45.
[7] These and other paralinguistic markers are also discussed in McCormick and Stuckey, “Presidential Disfluency”; McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance.”
[8] Jonathan Culpeper, Derek Bousfield, and Anne Wichmann, “Impoliteness Revisited: With Special Reference to Dynamic and Prosodic Aspects,” Journal of Pragmatics 35, no. 10–11 (2003): 1572–73. See also Antonio Hidalgo Navarro and Adrián Cabedo Nebot, “On the Importance of the Prosodic Component in the Expression of Linguistic Im/Politeness,” Journal of Politeness Research 10, no. 1 (2014): 5–27.
[9] Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 88.
[10] On the relationship between impoliteness and “voyeuristic pleasure,” see Jonathan Culpeper, “Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show: The Weakest Link,” Journal of Politeness Research 1, no. 1 (2005): 35–72.
[11] All of the following impoliteness strategies are detailed in Jonathan Culpeper, “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness,” Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996): 349–67. See also L. G. Lachenicht, “Aggravating Language: A Study of Abusive and Insulting Language,” Journal of Human Communication 13, no. 4 (1980): 607–87. Broader discussions of impoliteness are provided in Jonathan Culpeper, Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Derek Bousfield, Impoliteness in Interaction (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008).
[12] Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70.
[13] Karen Tracy, “‘Reasonable Hostility’: Situation-Appropriate Face-Attack,” Journal of Politeness Research 4, no. 2 (2008): 181.
[14] Brown and Levinson, Politeness, 101.
[15] Cp. Leslie M. Beebe's notion of “conversational management rudeness” in “Polite Fictions: Instrumental Rudeness as Pragmatic Competence,” in Linguistics and the Education of Language Teachers: Ethnolinguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Sociolinguistic Aspects, ed. James Alatis (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995), 154–68.
[16] On refusals to argue, specifically their prosodic aspects, see Culpeper, Bousfield, and Wichmann, “Impoliteness Revisited,” 1574.
[17] Tracy, “‘Reasonable Hostility,’” 175.
[18] Tracy, “‘Reasonable Hostility,’” 174.
[19] Cicero, de Inventione, 1.32.53–54.
[20] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 270.
[21] Burke, Rhetoric, 269. In this sense, we might say that her discourse occupies a liminal zone between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect. The breakdown of the specific force of her “little analogy” and the subsequent discussion of her “personnel issues” (illocutionary acts) becomes a condition of possibility for their antagonizing effects on the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the school board (perlocutionary acts). J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 101–31
[22] On the relationship between repetition and impoliteness, as well as combined impoliteness strategies, see Culpeper, Bousfield, and Wichmann, “Impoliteness Revisited,” 1560–62.
[23] On strategies of refusal, in which officials respond to emotional appeals with calm resolve, see Culpeper, Bousfield, and Wichmann, “Impoliteness Revisited,” 1574–75. A broader discussion of the relationship between impoliteness and emotional intensity, specifically “destructive emotional arguments,” is provided in Manfred Kienpointner, “Impoliteness and Emotional Arguments,” Journal of Politeness Research 4 (2008): 243–65.
[24] This shift from argument to evidence, from demanding the board's resignation to demonstrating its “gross incompetence,” is in keeping with Bergstrom's shift from deliberative to epideictic discourse. From the Greek verb epideiknumi, meaning “to reveal” and even “to show off,” epideictic discourse has always trafficked in rhetorics of display.
[25] Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 269.
[26] Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 274. In this sense, it is tempting to read her discourse as that of the hysteric, as defined by Lacanian psychoanalysis. A spit subject (Bergstrom) calls the master signifier (the school board) into question, commanding it to fess up (i.e., to acknowledge its incompetence) and deriving enjoyment from its inability to do so, but not without herself appearing, and continually reappearing, as conflicted, inconsistent, and otherwise bollixed. As we shall see, however, there is more at work in Bergstrom's address than the discourse of the hysteric, and thus more at stake in its analysis than the recovery of this historically sexist construct.
[27] See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 27.
[28] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1978), A 134 / B 173.
[29] Alexander Gelley, “Introduction,” in Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity, ed. Alexander Gelley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 13–14.
[30] Samuel McCormick, “Mirrors for the Queen: A Letter from Christine de Pizan on the Eve of Civil War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 273–96.
[31] Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D'Isanto with Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 12. On the Aristotelian distinction between hypothetical comparison and historical example, especially as it informs subsequent rhetorical theory, see McCormick, “Argument by Comparison.”
[32] In this sense, Bergstrom's “little analogy” challenges ethical and deliberative democratic theories that are anchored in rhetorics of exemplarity and reflective judgment—for example, those of Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
[33] Ben Anderson, “Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of ‘Total War,’” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 162. See also Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 91.
[34] Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1996), 135–36.
[35] Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 88, 85, 87.
[36] This argument is developed more fully in Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cf. Joshua Gunn and Jenny Edbauer Rice, “About Face / Stuttering Discipline,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 215–19.
[37] Jenny Edbauer Rice, “The New ‘New’: Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 2 (2008): 211
[38] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 134.
[39] Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary Review, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 97, 80.
[40] Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 71–73. See also Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 129–34, 145–64.
[41] As quoted in Showalter, The Female Malady, 154.
[42] Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 91–92. See also Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992), notably her “feminist folklinguistic profile of women's speech” (45). On the “feminine style,” features of which comport with Cameron's folklinguistics, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn, “‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79, no. 3 (1993): 286–302; Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, “Gendered Politics and Presidential Image Construction: A Reassessment of the ‘Feminine Style’,” Communication Monographs 63, no. 4 (1996): 337–53.
[43] Dale Spender, Man Made Language (London: Routledge, 1980); Marjorie L. Devault, “Talking and Listening from Women's Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis,” Social Problems 37, no. 1 (1990): 96–116.
[44] Robin Lakoff, “Language and Woman's Place,” Language in Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 48.
[45] Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), xii.
[46] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paul Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93; Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). See also Gabrielle Dane, “Hysteria as Feminist Protest: Dora, Cixous, Acker,” Women's Studies 23, no. 3 (1994): 231–56.
[47] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 211.
[48] Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 99–100, 97.
[49] Heidegger, Being and Time, 212–13.
[50] Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 145.
[51] Fenves, “Chatter,” 1–2.
[52] Gunn and Edbauer Rice, “About Face / Stuttering Discipline,” 218.
[53] See McCormick and Stuckey, “Presidential Disfluency,” 15–16.
[54] Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 77.
[55] Cf. Barbara A. Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century: Speculations on Evental Rhetoric Ending with a Note on Barack Obama and a Benediction by Jacques Lacan,” in Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric: Current Conversations and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Mark J. Porrovecchio (New York: Routledge, 2010), 16–36.
[56] Fenves, “Chatter,” 16.
[57] Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 59.
[58] Fenves, “Chatter,” 236.
[59] Heidegger, Being and Time, 211, 213.
[60] Karen Tracy, “Introduction,” in The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy, eds. Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce E. Gronbeck (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 8, 7. See also Karen Tracy, Challenges of Ordinary Democracy: A Case Study in Deliberation and Dissent (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).
[61] For a broader discussion of this standard public format, see John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 105–7.
[62] This audience design framework is developed more fully in Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 6–7.
[63] See Footnotenote 5 above.
[64] McCormick and Stuckey, “Presidential Disfluency.”
[65] Robert Hariman, “Amateur Hour: Knowing What to Love in Ordinary Democracy,” in The Prettier Doll, 239. See also Tracy, Challenges to Ordinary Democracy, 19.
[66] See Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 185.
[67] Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 26, 35.