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Abstract
Popular discourse and advocacy efforts characterize homelessness as a social problem bound by the present-centered concerns of physical affliction and material deprivation. Wayne Powers's documentary film Reversal of Fortune exemplifies this tendency by performing a “social experiment” to investigate how giving a homeless man $100,000 would change his life: the film chronicles the intervention in terms of an ever-fleeting opportunity that the man ultimately fails to utilize. Such discourses deny the future-oriented grounds for identification between homeless and housed as citizens sharing a common political destiny. Discourses of homelessness thus provide an important opportunity for questioning how the rhetorical tenses of democratic citizenship can be cultivated or suppressed, and how such rhetorical work can contribute to a more dynamic democratic culture.
Acknowledgments
She sincerely thanks John Louis Lucaites, Debra Hawhee, the anonymous reviewers, and Bryan Walsh for their astute critiques and support in developing this essay.
Notes
1. Reversal of Fortune, DVD, directed by Wayne Powers (Santa Monica, CA: PB&J Television, 2005). In subsequent citations of the documentary, I will include the time stamp of the footage corresponding to the material quoted in text.
2. Ted Rodrigue and Wayne Powers, interview by Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Winfrey Show, http://www.lexisnexis.com.
3. Jenna, comment on “A Homeless Man Blows $100,000 of Free Money as Seen on Oprah,” Associated Content, comment posted on April 3, 2007, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/95216/a_homeless_man_blows_100000_of_free.html?cat=9&com=5#comments.
4. Shane Schleger, “Review: Reversal of Fortune,” You Can't Miss What You Can't Measure Weblog, http://shaniaconline.blogspot.com/2006/08/review-reversal-of-fortune.html.
5. William Dwyer, comment on “A Homeless Man Blows $100,000 of Free Money as Seen on Oprah,” Associated Content, comment posted on March 24, 2007, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/95216/a_homeless_man_blows_100000_of_free.html?cat=9&com=5#comments.
6. Bryan Caplan, “The Power of Personality: What Happens When You Give a Homeless Man $100k?” Library of Economics and Liberty, http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/08/the_power_of_pe.html.
7. Michele, comment on “A Homeless Man Blows $100,000 of Free Money as Seen on Oprah,” Associated Content, comment posted on September 11, 2007, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/95216/a_homeless_man_blows_100000_of_free.html?cat=9&com=4#comments.
8. John Corner and Kay Richardson, “Documentary Meanings and the Discourse of Interpretation,” in Documentary and the Mass Media, ed. John Corner, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), 141.
9. Despite the overwhelming data compiled by advocates that attributes homelessness in the main to problems of growing poverty and dwindling affordable housing, perceptions persist that people experiencing homelessness are “lazy, uneducated, alcoholics and drug addicts, and that they want to live on the street.” Michael O'Neill, quoted in Jeff Gelman, “Don't Give the Homeless Money, Give Them Your Heart,” National Coalition for the Homeless, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/faces/article1.html. Notable advocacy efforts to counter misperceptions about homelessness include “Library: Fact Sheets,” National Alliance to End Homelessness, http://www.endhomelessness.org/section/library/?type=20; and “Why Are People Homeless?” National Coalition for the Homeless, July 2009, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html.
10. David Chaney and Michael Pickering, “Authorship in Documentary: Sociology as an Art Form in Mass Observation,” in Documentary and the Mass Media, ed. John Corner, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), 30.
11. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9.
12. Tagg, Burden of Representation, 12.
13. Eyal Chowers, “The Physiology of the Citizen: The Present-Centered Body and Its Political Exile,” Political Theory 30 (2002): 650.
14. Kathleen R. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1.
15. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity, 163.
16. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 196–97.
17. Leonard C. Feldman, Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 15.
18. Mitchell, Right to the City, 2.
19. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 649.
20. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 651.
21. Gerard A. Hauser, “Incongruous Bodies: Arguments for Personal Sufficiency and Public Insufficiency,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 2.
22. Paul Achter, “Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First-Century Veterans of War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (2010): 49.
23. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 655.
24. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 655.
25. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 656.
26. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 658.
27. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 661.
28. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 665.
29. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 669.
30. Eyal Chowers, “Gushing Time: Modernity and the Multiplicity of Temporal Homes,” Time and Society 11 (2002): 240, 234.
31. Consider the various explanations for homelessness as the result of mental illness, addiction, handicap, or social maladjustment: each presumes the homeless body is one that is stuck in the present, unable to overcome either the physical or mental conditions in which personal instabilities consume all resources and compel all action. Whether such a characterization is used to justify assistance to people suffering homelessness or excuse a housed public from compassionate response matters less than the common impulse to seek an explanation that understands the causes and consequences of homelessness solely in terms of the present tense. For various perspectives, see John Allen, Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism, and Testimony (New York: Routledge, 2004); Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Lisa Orr, The Homeless: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1990); Don Mitchell and Lynn A. Staehelli, “Clean and Safe? Property Redevelopment, Public Space, and Homelessness in Downtown San Diego,” in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2006), 143–75; Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Ken Kyle, Contextualizing Homelessness: Critical Theory, Homelessness, and Federal Policy Addressing the Homeless (New York: Routledge, 2005); Eungjun Min, ed., Reading the Homeless: The Media's Image of Homeless Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999); and Randall Amster, Street People and the Contested Realms of Public Space (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004).
32. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 650.
33. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 659.
34. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 665.
35. Erlenbusch's meeting with Ted is hardly typical of homeless assistance work because of Ted's unusual circumstances, but Erlenbusch's counsel closely resembles typical strategies employed broadly by the social work community. Most homeless advocates direct their energies toward helping their clients navigate the bureaucratic channels that will grant them access to existing resources, but in the process, they frequently encourage clients “to act and think in terms of self-industry, responsibility, sociability, and independence,” operating under the assumption that the problems of homelessness stem, in large part, from a present-centered mindset that prevents such personal characteristics. Robert Desjarlais, “The Office of Reason: On the Politics of Language and Agency in a Shelter for ‘The Homeless Mentally Ill,’” American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 883; see also J. William Spencer and Jennifer L. McKinney, “‘We Don't Pay for Bus Tickets, but We Can Help You Find Work’: The Micropolitics of Trouble in Human Service Encounters,” Sociological Quarterly 38 (1997): 185–203.
36. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 662.
37. Roger Stahl, “A Clockwork War: Rhetorics of Time in a Time of Terror,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 81.
38. Chowers, “Physiology of the Citizen,” 664.
39. John Lynch, “AIDSTimes: Representing AIDS in an Age of Anxiety,” Time and Society 9 (2000): 250–51. Both Lynch and Stahl (“Clockwork War,” 73–99) demonstrate the powerful pervasiveness of chronologies/countdowns in authoritative and disciplining rhetorics of social control, but Robert E. Terrill considers the inventional potential of resisting the chronological in his essay on Frederick Douglass's “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” oration. Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 216–34.
40. Tagg, Burden of Representation, 77.
41. Tagg, Burden of Representation, 81–87; 117–83.
42. Oprah Winfrey's television program and public persona have been critiqued for transforming “histories of race- and gender-based oppression” into evidence for “the liberal discourse of individual success” (Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance,” 117). With her dramatic and well-publicized rise to extraordinary international acclaim, she “reigned supreme as the paradigmatic instance of the enduring efficacy of American dreaming” (Lofton, “Practicing Oprah,” 602). A central feature of this discourse of self-disciplined individual achievement is a reliance on a therapeutic model in which individual suffering is alleviated through victims’ public confession, the audience's compassionate response, and a resulting personal transformation. Ted, presented as inescapably present-centered, disrupts this typical formula of therapeutic redemption. See Dana L. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in ‘Oprah’ Winfrey's Rags-to-Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (1996): 115–37; Kathryn Lofton, “Practicing Oprah; or, the Prescriptive Compulsion of a Spiritual Capitalism,” Journal of Popular Culture 39 (2006): 599–621; Janice Peck, “The Secret of Her Success: Oprah Winfrey and the Seductions of Self-Transformation,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34 (2010): 7–14; for a more general discussion of therapeutic rhetoric, see Dana L. Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetoric of Therapy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).
43. Wayne Powers, interview by Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Winfrey Show.
44. Ted Rodrigue, interview by Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Winfrey Show.
45. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 2nd ed. (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1953), 31.
46. Brenda R. Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 2.
47. Weber, Makeover TV, 5.
48. Laurie Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself’: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 232.
49. Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself,’” 247–48. See also Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); Dana Heller, ed., Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); and Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).
50. Chowers, “Gushing Modernity,” 246.
51. Leslie A. Hahner, “Working Girls and the Temporality of Efficiency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 304.
52. Tony Fitzpatrick, “Social Policy and Time,” Time and Society 13 (2004): 201.
53. See, for example, Edwin Black, “Electing Time,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 125–29; Megan Foley, “Serializing Racial Subjects: The Stagnation and Suspense of the O.J. Simpson Saga,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (2010): 69–88; Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Rhetorical Timing in Public Communication,” Communication Studies 25 (1974): 84–94; Debra Hawhee, “Kairotic Bodies,” in Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 65–85; Steven Mailloux, “Places in Time: The Inns and Outhouses of Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 53–68; Michael William Pfau, “Time, Tropes, and Textuality: Reading Republicanism in Charles Sumner's ‘Crime against Kansas,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 385–414; Hans Rämö, “An Aristotelian Human Time–Space Manifold: From Chronochora to Kairotopos,” Time and Society 8 (1999): 309–28; J. Blake Scott, “Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry's Response to Bioterrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 115–43.
54. Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 11.
55. Michael L. Butterworth, “‘Katie Was Not Only a Girl, She Was Terrible’: Katie Hnida, Body Rhetoric, and Football at the University of Colorado,” Communication Studies 59 (2008): 261.