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Abstract
Dissent, in its distinctive contribution to democratic practice, neither reduces to protest nor advances toward consensus. It is a double-sided discourse with both a solid footing in public culture and a sharp edge for cutting through political orthodoxies. Rhetorical invention is its dynamic. Dissenters must maneuver, like mythical tricksters, to sustain the vitality of democracy. The viability of their democratic interventions depends on the invention of legitimizing gestures. The topos of complementary differences—a pivotal term for articulating points of interdependency between dissenters and the broader public—illustrates the kind of inventive resource to which the field could productively turn its attention.
Notes
[1] Stephen John Hartnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
[2] Dale M. Smith, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012).
[3] John W. Bowers, Donavon J. Ochs, Richard J. Jensen, and David P. Schulz, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, 3rd ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2009).
[4] Haig A. Bosmajian, Dissent, Symbolic Behavior and Rhetorical Strategies (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1972).
[5] Robert L. Ivie, Dissent from War (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007).
[6] Jules Boykoff, “Framing Dissent: Mass Media Coverage of the Global Justice Movement,” New Political Science 28, no. 2 (2006): 201–28. Boykoff takes issue with the argument that street violence, understood as symbolic violence, is a step toward better coverage and recognition of the ideas of the global justice movement. He disagrees specifically with Andrew Rojecki, “Modernism, State Sovereignty, and Dissent: Media and the New Post-Cold War Movements,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 152–71; and Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51.
[7] In Noemi Marin, After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2007), dissent is formulated as protest fostered in exile and explicitly opposed to the state.
[8] J. Michael Hogan, “Managing Dissent in the Catholic Church: A Reinterpretation of the Pastoral Letter on War and Peace,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75, no. 4 (1989): 400–15.
[9] Jeremy Engels, “Reading the Riot Act: Rhetoric, Psychology, and Counter-Revolutionary Discourse in Shays's Rebellion, 1786–1787,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 1 (2005): 66.
[10] Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Infiltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 1 (2008): 23–43. See also Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009).
[11] Ralph R. Smith and Russell R. Windes, “The Progay and Antigay Issue Culture: Interpretation, Influence and Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1 (1997): 38.
[12] Dana L. Cloud, “The Matrix and Critical Theory's Desertion of the Real,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 4 (2006): 329–54.
[13] Dana L. Cloud, We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
[14] Herbert W. Simons, “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56, no. 1 (1970): 1–11. Simons defines the social movement as “an uninstitutionalized collectivity that mobilizes for action to implement a program for the reconstitution of social norms or values” (3). For another good example of dissent understood as radical resistance from the perspective of a movement study, see J. Robert Cox, “Perspectives on Rhetorical Criticism of Movements: Antiwar Dissent, 1964–1970,” Western Speech 38 (1974): 254–68.
[15] Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 2 (1952): 184–88; Leland M. Griffin, “A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements,” in Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1922–1966, ed. William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 456–78.
[16] Theodore O. Windt, Jr., “The Diatribe: Last Resort for Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 1–14.
[17] Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith, “The Rhetoric of Confrontation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55, no. 1 (1969): 1–8.
[18] John C. Hammerback, Richard J. Jensen, and John A. Gutiérrez, A War of Words: Chicano Protest of the 1960s and 1970s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).
[19] Robert S. Cathcart, “New Approaches to the Study of Movements: Defining Movements Rhetorically,” Western Speech 36 (1972): 87.
[20] Catherine H. Palczewski, “Cyber-Movements, New Social Movements, and Counter-Publics,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 161–86.
[21] Robert Cox and Christina R. Foust, “Social Movement Rhetoric,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, eds. Andrea A. Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, and Rosa A. Eberly (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), 605–27.
[22] Kendall R. Phillips, “The Spaces of Public Dissension: Reconsidering the Public Sphere,” Communication Monographs 63 (1996): 242.
[23] Erik W. Doxtader, “Characters in the Middle of Public Life: Consensus, Dissent, and Ethos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, no. 4 (2000): 339.
[24] Doxtader, “Characters,” 357.
[25] Kevin Cummings and James K. Stanescue, “Argumentation and Democratic Disagreement: On Cultivating a Practice of Dissent,” Controversia 5 (2007): 55–76; on dissent's contribution to democracy, see Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
[26] On the tendency of mainstream news media to marginalize dissent from war by rendering it unpatriotic, see Dustin Harp, Jamie Loke, and Ingrid Bachmann, “Voices of Dissent in the Iraq War: Moving from Deviance to Legitimacy?” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 87, nos. 3–4 (2010): 469–70.
[27] Robert L. Ivie, “Prologue to Democratic Dissent in America,” Javnost—The Public 11 (2004): 19–36.
[28] Christian Kock, “Constructive Controversy: Rhetoric as Dissensus-Oriented Discourse,” Cogency: Journal of Reasoning and Argumentation, 1 (2009): 102, 106. See also Christian Kock, “Choice is Not True or False: The Domain of Rhetorical Action,” Argumentation 23, no. 1 (2009): 61–80.
[29] Robert L. Ivie, “Toward a Humanizing Style of Democratic Dissent,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 3 (2008): 454–58.
[30] Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
[31] John Louis Lucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, “Reconstructing <Equality>: Culturetypal and Counter-Cultural Rhetorics in the Martyred Black Vision,” Communication Monographs 57, no. 1 (1990): 18. Emphasis in original.
[32] Steven Shiffrin, The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
[33] Robert L. Ivie, “Democratic Dissent and the Trick of Rhetorical Critique,” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 5, no. 3 (205): 276–93.
[34] Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 269.
[35] Robert L. Ivie, “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 2 (2002): 277–85.
[36] On trickster and dissent, see Ivie, “Democratic Dissent.” On metaphoric re-description, see Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London, UK: Verso, 1993).
[37] On metaphor as a master trope of perspective, see Kenneth Burke, “The Four Master Tropes,” in A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 503–17.
[38] On perspective by incongruity, see Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965). “Piety,” Burke emphasizes, “is the sense of what properly goes with what” (74). Accordingly, “an attempt to reorganize one's orientations from the past would have an impious aspect” (80). Metaphor juxtaposes incongruous words to reveal “hitherto unsuspected connectives” and to exemplify “relationships between objects which our customary rational vocabulary has ignored” (90).
[39] Zoltan P. Majdik, Carrie Anne Platt, and Mark Meister, “Calculating the Weather: Deductive Reasoning and Disciplinary Telos in Cleveland Abbe's Rhetorical Transformation of Metereology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97. No. 1 (2011): 74–99.
[40] Katie L. Gibson, “In Defense of Women's Rights: A Rhetorical Analysis of Judicial Dissent,” Women's Studies in Communication 35, no. 2 (2012): 129.
[41] Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Dangerous Supplements, Inventive Dissent, and Military Critiques of the Bush Administration's Unitary Executive Theories,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2007): 693–716.
[42] Stephen P. Depoe, “Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s ‘Middle Way Out of Vietnam’: The Limits of ‘Technocratic Realism’ as the Basis for Foreign Policy Dissent,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 52, no. 2 (1988): 147–66.
[43] Doxtader, “Characters,” 362.
[44] Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xiii; Susan Herbst, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010), 9.
[45] Ivie, “Rhetorical Deliberation.”
[46] Karen Tracy, Challenges of Ordinary Democracy: A Case Study in Deliberation and Dissent (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 202–03.
[47] Steven R. Goldzwig, “Demagoguery, Democratic Dissent, and ‘Re-visioning’ Democracy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 3 (2006): 471–78.
[48] Aaron Dimock, “Styles of Rejection in Local Public Argument on Iraq,” Argumentation 24, no. 4 (2010): 423–52.
[49] On the tendency to demonize political dissenters, see Tom De Luca and John Buell, Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005).
[50] Heidi Hamilton, “Can You Be Patriotic and Oppose the War? Arguments to Co-opt and Refute the Ideograph of Patriotism,” Controversia 8 (2012): 14.
[51] Tracy, Challenges of Ordinary Democracy, 203–7.
[52] Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London, UK: Routledge, 2005), 21. See also Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, UK: Verso, 2000), 104.
[53] Iseult Honahan, Civic Republicanism (London, UK: Routledge, 2002).
[54] John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35.
[55] Lisa Schirch, The Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004), 15–16.
[56] Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 16.
[57] Robert L. Ivie, “Hierarchies of Equality: Positive Peace in a Democratic Idiom,” in The Handbook on Communication Ethics, ed. George Cheney, Steve May, and Debashish Munshi (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), 374–86; Robert L. Ivie, “Depolarizing the Discourse of American Security: Constitutive Properties of Positive Peace in Barack Obama's Rhetoric of Change,” in Philosophy After Hiroshima, ed. Edward Demenchonok (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 233–61.
[58] David Cortright, “Winning Without War: Nonmilitary Strategies for Overcoming Violent Extremism,” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 21:197 (2012): 215, 218–19, 220, 225.
[59] Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, What's Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2004).