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Abstract
This essay considers the ways that iconoclasm, or the will to control images and vision, appears in canonical and contemporary public sphere theory. John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas enact a paradoxical relation to visuality by repudiating a mass culture of images while preferring “good” images and vision. Yet even when advocating for good vision, both theorists activate a subtle iconoclasm that operates as a perennial tension in their work. The essay concludes by considering the ways in which iconoclasm manifests itself in more recent scholarship in rhetorical studies and suggests circulation as an analytic concept with some promise for helping public sphere theorists develop a more iconophilic relationship to images and vision.
Notes
Cara A. Finnegan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. Jiyeon Kang is a doctoral student in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. Correspondence to: Department of Speech Communication, 702 South Wright Street, MC‐456, Urbana, IL 61801. Email: [email protected] and [email protected]. The authors thank the editor, two anonymous reviewers, and Rob Asen for their generous feedback on earlier versions of this essay.
Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 87.
G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 18 (1982): 253.
Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Sphere (Columbia, SC: University of South California Press, 1999), 61.
On proceduralism, see Benhabib, 81–5.
On counterpublics, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42; Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Robert Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics,” Communication Theory 10 (2000): 424–46.
On reductionism, see Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’.” See also Robert Asen, “Toward a Normative Conception of Difference in Public Deliberation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1999): 115–29; Erik Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Hauser, Vernacular Voices.
Doxtader, 61–2.
Hauser, 65.
Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’,” 441.
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 90.
John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 62.
The literature engaging these concepts in relation to the public sphere is too voluminous to list here. A useful bibliography that traces the development of these topics, among others, is Arthur Strum, “A Bibliography of the Concept of Öffentlichkeit,” New German Critique 64 (1994): 161–202. Discussions of these concepts that have become almost canonical include Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics; Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972/1993); and the Black Public Sphere Collective, The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Fraser argues that some conception of a public is necessary in order to theorize democracy. See Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.”
An incomplete list of such work includes the following. On the hybrid genre of documentary, see Thomas Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). Lester Olson takes up a multiplicity of visual forms in Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). See also Sonja Foss's work on rhetorical criticism of visual communication: Sonja K. Foss, “Visual Imagery as Communication,” Text and Performance Quarterly 12 (1992): 85–96; Sonja K. Foss, “A Rhetorical Schema for the Evaluation of Visual Imagery,” Communication Studies 45 (1994): 213–24. Bruce Gronbeck's work on televisual spectacle has sorted out the impact of media on politics. See Bruce Gronbeck, “Reconceptualizing the Visual Experience in Media Studies,” in Communication: Views from the Helm in the 21st Century, ed. Judith Trent (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), 289–93; Bruce Gronbeck, “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Tele‐Spectacle in the Post‐Everything Age,” in Postmodern Representations: Truth, Power, and Mimesis in the Human Sciences, ed. Richard Harvey Brown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 216–38. In a related field, the debate in argumentation studies about the nature and function of visual argument has been productive; see David S. Birdsell and Leo Groarke, “Toward a Theory of Visual Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 33 (1996): 1–10; J. Anthony Blair, “The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Arguments,” Argumentation and Advocacy 33 (1996): 23–39; David Fleming, “Can Pictures Be Arguments?” Argumentation and Advocacy 33 (1996): 11–22; and Cara A. Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the ‘Skull Controversy’,” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001): 133–49. Recent relevant case studies in visual rhetoric include Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 31–55; Kevin M. DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999); Kevin M. DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 241–60; Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003); Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm’,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 35–66; John Louis Lucaites, “Visualizing ‘The People’: Individualism vs. Collectivism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 269–88; and Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Thomas O. Sloan and others, “Report of the Committee on the Advancement and Refinement of Rhetorical Criticism,” in The Prospect of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1971), 221–2.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth‐Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Chris Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
See the special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy on John Dewey, vol. 39 (Winter 2003).
Mitchell, Iconology, 157.
Mitchell, Iconology, 121.
Mitchell, Iconology, 151.
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 15.
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 14.
W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art: Do The Right Thing,” in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 33.
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 13.
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 13.
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 41.
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 405.
Mitchell, Iconology, 198.
Art historian David Freedberg chronicles violent acts of iconoclasm, events in which individuals physically assaulted great works of art with knives, acid, and other destructive tools. Because of “the tendency to conflate image and prototype,” that is, the danger of mistaking the representation for some embodiment of the thing itself, “when critical pressures are brought to bear on this tension, men and women break images, as if to make clear that the image is none other than just that: it is not living, no supernatural embodiment of something that is alive. We fear the image which appears to be alive because it cannot be so; and so people may evince their fear … by breaking or mutilating the image.” David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarsten: G. Schwartz, 1985), 35. See also Freedberg, The Power of Images, 378–428.
Mitchell, Iconology, 165.
Mitchell, Iconology, 197.
Mitchell, Iconology, 165.
Bruno Latour observes playfully that there are five types of iconoclasts, which he terms “Type A” through “Type E”. All in various ways participate in the dialectic of bringing down “bad” images and raising up “good” ones. See Bruno Latour, “What is Iconoclash? Or is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?,” in Iconoclash, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (London: MIT Press, 2002), 26–30.
Freedberg, The Power of Images, 388.
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 14–15.
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1927/1954), 219.
John Dewey, Art As Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, and Co, 1934), 105.
See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922) and The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925).
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 27, 77.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 109.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 137, 139.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 168–9.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 155.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 180.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 188.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 134.
Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), viii.
Emily Fourmy Cutrer, “A Pragmatic Mode of Seeing: James, Howells, and the Politics of Vision,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth‐Century Art and Literature, ed. D. C. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 261.
Cutrer, 260–1.
Dewey, Art As Experience, 52–4.
Dewey, Art As Experience, 52.
Dewey, Art As Experience, 53.
Dewey, Art As Experience, 53.
Dewey, Art As Experience, 324.
See Mark Mattern, “John Dewey, Art and Public Life,” Journal of Politics, 61 (1999): 54–75; Martin Jay, “Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 36 (2002): 55–69.
James Carey is prominent among communication scholars who advocate largely Deweyan theories of communication; see James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). By contrast, Ronald Greene offers a critique of Dewey that contends that scholars should question their use of Dewey to ground aesthetic‐moral theories of communication; see Ronald Walter Greene, “John Dewey's Eloquent Citizen: Communication, Judgment, and Postmodern Capitalism,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39 (Winter 2003): 189–200.
See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. 1. Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1984); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. 2. Lifeworld and System, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989); and Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
John Durham Peters, “Distrust of Representation: Habermas on the Public Sphere,” Media, Culture, and Society 15 (1993): 563. See also Miriam Hansen, “Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” New German Critique 29 (1983): 147–84; Benjamin Lee, “Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 402–18; Dana Polan, “The Public's Fear: Or, Media as Monster in Habermas, Negt, and Kluge,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 33–41.
Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 29.
Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 249.
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 377.
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 375.
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 378–9.
See Ortilia B. F. Arantes and Paulo E. Arantes, “The Neo‐Enlightenment Aesthetics of Jürgen Habermas,” Cultural Critique 49 (2001): 43–57; David Ingram, “Habermas on Aesthetics and Rationality: Completing the Project of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 53 (1991): 67–103.
Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975), 78.
Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 78.
Arantes and Arantes, 45.
Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 84.
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 2 (1981): 9.
Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” 9–10.
Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” 11.
Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” 7.
Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” 12.
Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” 12.
Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” 11–12.
Ingram, 87.
Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counter‐Questions,” Praxis International 4 (1984): 235.
Habermas, “Questions and Counter‐Questions,” 237.
Peters, “Distrust of Representation,” 563.
Fraser, 109.
Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 130.
DeLuca and Peeples, 131.
DeLuca and Peeples, 129.
DeLuca and Peeples, 130.
On image events, see Kevin M. DeLuca, Image Politics; Kevin M. DeLuca and John W. Delicath, “Image Events and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Ecology,” in Argument at Century's End: Selected Papers from the Eleventh NCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Thomas A. Hollihan (Annandale, VA: NCA, 2000), 244–52.
DeLuca and Peeples, 134.
DeLuca and Peeples, 131.
DeLuca and Peeples, 131.
Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 347.
Asen, “Imagining,” 357.
Asen, “Imagining,” 357.
Asen, “Imagining,” 357.
Asen, “Imagining,” 351.
Asen, “Imagining,” 360.
See “The Forum: Publics and Counterpublics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 410–54, edited by Dilip Gaonkar. The forum includes a truncated version of Warner's essay, “Publics and Counterpublics,” originally published in Public Culture 14 (2002): 49–90. We cite the Public Culture version.
Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Culture of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 192.
Lee and LiPuma, 192.
Warner, 62.
Warner, 63.
Warner, 63.
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 364.
Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects through Michael Warner's ‘Publics and Counterpublics’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 435.
Greene, “Rhetorical Pedagogy,” 440.
Greene, “Rhetorical Pedagogy,” 435–6.
Melissa Deem, “Stranger Sociability, Public Hope, and the Limits of Political Transformation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (November 2002): 444–54.
David Wittenberg, “Going Out in Public: Visibility and Anonymity in Michael Warner's ‘Publics and Counterpublics’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 426–33.
Warner, 75–6.
Warner, 62.
Warner, 64.
Warner, 75.
Warner, 66.
Warner, 75.
See Bruno Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?” in Picturing Science Producing Art, ed. C. A. Jones and P. Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 418–40; Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash (London: MIT Press, 2002). Latour's key term is “mediation”; however, given Latour's interest in mediation as movement, what he describes as mediation can, in our estimation, be termed “circulation.” Latour hints at as much when he describes the mediation of art as “a circulation … which provides meaning not only for a painting but for the whole setting—theological, institutional, cultural—in which the mediators are gathered, reshuffled, and assembled” (“How to Be Iconophilic,” 436).
Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic,” 418–9.
Latour, “What is Iconoclash?” 7.
Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic,” 421.
Latour, “What is Iconoclash?” 26.
Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic,” 421.
Lee and LiPuma, 191.
For rhetorical studies of visual culture that explicitly address the question of circulation, see Finnegan, Picturing Poverty; Janis Edwards and Carol Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Images in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 289–310; and Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography.”