From Circus to Fasces: The Disciplinary Politics of Citizen and Citizenship

Abstract

In spite of the frequency of their use, the terms “citizen” and the related “citizenship” have been deployed with a casual imprecision in rhetorical studies, and the relatively few attempts to theorize these terms in a way that would resolve the confusion that attends their routine appearance have explicitly expanded the terrain of the political to the point where few, if any, actions could possibly be thought to be outside of the political domain. Through an examination of the use of these terms over the past dozen years, and a critical engagement with the “discourse theory” of citizenship, the authors suggest that the time has to come to ask whether rhetorical studies should concern itself less with the lack in and of the political per se and more with its excesses.

Keywords:

• Citizen
• Fascism
• Citizenship
• Public
• Discourse

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michael Hyde and Michelle Ballif who, unbeknownst to them and through no fault of their own, had a major influence on the argument herein. Generous thanks also to Pat Gehrke, Leslie Hahner, and the reviewers and editors at the Review of Communication, who provided suggestions and directions that greatly improved this project.

Notes

1. We are not suggesting this as the sole function of communication or rhetorical research, but there is little doubt about its prominence.

2. A simple search within the Communication and Mass Media database of EBSCOhost reveals that between 1970 and 1980 there were 1,155 articles that included the word “citizen.” For the period of 1981–1990, there were 1,389 articles that included the word “citizen.” For the period of 1991–2000, there were 2,479 articles that included the word “citizen.” For the period of 2001–2009, there were 7,556 articles that included the word “citizen.”

3. A note on our methodology is in order. Evaluating the disciplinary use of the terms “citizen” and “citizenship” required us to generate an approach that would enable us to see developments and trends over time. Rather than handpicking certain essays, we decided to trace the use of these terms by finding every use of the terms “citizen” and “citizenship” published between 2000 and 2010 in the following journals (in alphabetical order): Critical Studies in Media Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. In addition to these journals, we reviewed the use of the terms “citizen” and “citizenship” in several germinal books, including but not limited to Rosa A. Eberly's (2000) Citizen critics: Literary public spheres and Vanessa Beasley's (2004) You, the people: American national identity in presidential rhetoric. In total, we reviewed more than 500 essays and books. We categorized each use of the terms “citizen” and “citizenship” into a central database that allowed us to generate larger themes of common usage. Space limitations prohibit us from including the vast majority of these citations in this essay, so we have attempted to use representative samples from the categories that are relevant to our argument here. We were, for a long time, unsure of a venue for the research, until we learned about the new mission adopted by the Review of Communication. The journal's new direction offered a perfect opportunity to advance an argument about a particular insufficiency affecting communication scholarship in general regarding the terms citizen and citizenship.

4. Obviously, our contention is not that the field in any homogenizing sense think of citizen or citizenship in X way, where X is some absolute configuration. Rather, we are suggesting that citizen and citizenship, as used, reflect a rather astounding level of casual imprecision, at least relative to other terms in the rhetorical lexicon. Terms like hegemony, ideology, and critical rhetoric have all been frequent topics of theoretical conversation, and when they are deployed in the field, one can assume a base commonality in their usage, or a clear lineage by way of theoretical nods via citation, even while particular uses will of course have their own idiosyncrasies. This is rarely the case for the concept of citizen. There are also plenty of examples in which citizen is very clearly correlated with a relationship to the state or used as one facet or characteristic of subjectivity, uses with which we have nothing but admiration. For representative examples, see Biesecker (2007), Hauser (2008), and Von Burg (2010).

5. For a similar set of claims, see Heifferon (2006).

6. The phrase public engagement appears 13 times in the text of the essay, the word democracy 44 times.

7. There are some interesting alternatives to Asen's approach. Murphy (2005) is a wonderful and rare exception, operationally defining what he means by recourse to the citizen: “To be citizens is to share a public identity, and thus, the grounds for political judgment” (p. 665). Murphy's formulation's brilliance stems from its simplicity, defining the citizen by its shared capacity for judgment over issues of public concern, without necessarily suggesting that this capacity constitutes a horizon of political engagement. Preserved within Murphy's “citizen” is the capacity to make the judgment that one does not wish to engage in politics.

8. See also Nancy (2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth Rufo

Kenneth Rufo (Ph.D., University of Georgia, 2004) is a scholar, freelance writer, and social media consultant

R. Jarrod Atchison

R. Jarrod Atchison (Ph.D., University of Georgia, 2007) is an Assistant Professor and Director of Debate in the Department of Communication at Wake Forest University