Obama in Selma: Deixis, rhetorical vision, and the “true meaning of America”

ABSTRACT

I argue that Barack Obama’s immediate, imaginary, and discursive deictic references to the actions and character of ordinary citizens, specific geographical markers within the “landscape of American history,” and sacred moments in U.S. history extended and enlarged the relational, spatial, and temporal contours of the national narrative in his 2015 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. In so doing, the president offered a compelling (re)definition of patriotism, civic responsibility, and “the true meaning of America.” More broadly, I argue for an expanded notion of deixis within rhetorical scholarship. Beyond a linguistic “pointing” to bodies, places, and objects within the audience’s immediate vicinity, I detail how indexicals bring various images before the eyes of the audience, link individual texts to their political, historical, social, and cultural contexts, and direct our attention to the most important parts of the national narrative even as they deflect our attention from other parts of the story. Ultimately, I suggest that deixis illuminates theories of rhetorical vision in ways that have gone unnoticed, and it is only when we recognize the psychological and cognitive effects of deictic speech that we can fully appreciate the central role phantasia plays in persuasion, deliberation, and moral judgment.

KEYWORDS:

• U.S. presidential rhetoric
• place
• phantasia
• narrative
• Bloody Sunday

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mary Stuckey, Dominic Manthey, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful engagement with this piece throughout the revision process. The author is also grateful to Karrin Vasby Anderson, Zoë Hess Carney, Jordin Clark, Doug Cloud, Greg Dickinson, Tom Dunn, Megan Irene Fitzmaurice, Ronald Walter Greene, Atilla Hallsby, Ned O’Gorman, Elizabeth Parks, Jason Prasch, and Emily Winderman for providing generous feedback at various stages of the project and Kristina Quynn, director of CSU Writes, for creating the space where this essay first took form.

Notes

1. Obama was the second sitting president to speak at Selma; Bill Clinton spoke there in 2000. See Vanessa B. Beasley, “Speaking at Selma: Presidential Commemoration and Bill Clinton’s Problem of Invention,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014): 267–89.

2. Barack Obama, “Remarks Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches for Voting Rights in Selma, Alabama,” March 7, 2015, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/311307.

3. Obama, “Remarks.”

4. Obama as quoted in Greg Jaffe and Juliet Eilperin, “Fifty Years after ‘Bloody Sunday’ March, Struggles Endure in Selma,” Washington Post, March 5, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fifty-years-after-bloody-sunday-march-struggles-linger-in-selma/2015/03/05/8ed7a9c6-c348-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html?utm_term=.475226910b5c; Jarrett as quoted in Colleen McCain Nelson and Carol E. Lee, “Obama Putting More Emphasis on Civil Rights,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-putting-more-emphasis-on-civil-rights-1425686907.

5. Obama, “Remarks.”

6. United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.

7. Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act,” New York Times, June 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html. The Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015 (HR 885) was introduced to the U.S. Congress in an attempt to address Chief Justice Roberts’s concerns as articulated in Shelby County v. Holder. See U.S. Congress, House, Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015, HR 885, 114th Cong., 1st sess., introduced in House February 11, 2015, https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/885.

8. Rudy Giuliani as quoted in Darren Samuelsohn, “Giuliani: Obama Doesn’t Love America,” Politico.com, February 18, 2015, https://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/rudy-giuliani-president-obama-doesnt-love-america-115309.

9. Karl Rove, “The President’s Apology Tour,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124044156269345357.

10. Mitt Romney as quoted in Kerry Picket, “Mitt Romney 2011 CPAC Speech,” Washington Times, February 11, 2011, https://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2011/feb/11/mitt-romney-2011-cpac-speech/.

11. Tim Pawlenty as quoted in Glenn Kessler, “Obama’s ‘Apology Tour,’” Washington Post, February 22, 2011, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2011/02/obamas_apology_tour.html.

12. See, for example, Herman Cain as quoted in “Transcript: Fox News-Google GOP Debate,” September 22, 2011, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/22/fox-news-google-gop-2012-presidential-debate.html and Mitt Romney as quoted in “Republican Candidates Debate in Des Moines, Iowa,” December 10, 2011, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/297836.

13. Barack Obama, “Address at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia: ‘A More Perfect Union’,” March 18, 2008, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/277610. For more on Obama’s use of “dream narratives,” see Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “One Dream: Barack Obama, Race, and the American Dream,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2011): 125–154.

14. Martin J. Medhurst, “Testing the Narrative Signature Perspective: The Case of Obama and Health Care Reform,” in Reconsidering Obama: Reflections on Rhetoric, ed. Robert E. Terrill (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 108.

15. Obama, “Remarks.”

16. Obama, “Remarks.” That Obama chose to make this national narrative a central focus of his speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday was not surprising. As numerous scholars have noted, Obama relied on the power of narrative form both as a presidential candidate and throughout his presidency. See, for example, David A. Frank and Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (2005): 571–93; Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Recasting the American Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama’s Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (2007): 425–48; David A. Frank, “The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’ Address, March 18, 2008,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 2 (2009): 167–94; Robert E. Terrill, “Unity and Duality in Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 363–86; James Darsey, “Barack Obama and America’s Journey,” Southern Communication Journal 74, no. 1 (2009): 88–103; Rowland and Jones, “One Dream: Barack Obama, Race, and the American Dream”; John M. Murphy, “Barack Obama, the Exodus Tradition, and the Joshua Generation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 387–410; David A. Frank, “Obama’s Rhetorical Signature: Cosmopolitan Civil Religion in the Presidential Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 4 (2011): 605–30; Martin J. Medhurst, “Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address: Narrative Signature and Interpretation,” in Making the Case: Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument, ed. Kathryn M. Olson et al. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 191–229; John M. Murphy, “Barack Obama and Rhetorical History,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 213–24; Kirt H. Wilson, “Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Barack Obama,” Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, National Communication Association (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2016).

17. Obama, “Remarks.”

18. Obama, “Remarks.”

19. Allison M. Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 169.

20. “δείκνυμι,” Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1889). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Ddei%2Fknumi.

21. Lawrence W. Rosenfield, “The Practical Celebration of the Epideictic,” in Rhetoric in Transition: Studies in the Nature and Uses of Rhetoric, ed. Eugene E. White (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 135.

22. Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9.

23. Megan Foley, “Time for Epideictic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 211.

24. There has been robust scholarly discussion of phantasia both within communication studies and outside of it. See, for example, Martha Craven Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 221–69; Deborah K. W. Modrak, “Phantasia Reconsidered,” Archiv für Geschicthe der Philosophie 68, no. 1 (1986): 47–69; Dorothea Frede, “The Cognitive Role of Phantasia in Aristotle,” in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 279–95; Sara Newman, “Aristotle’s Notion of ‘Bringing-Before-the-Eyes’: Its Contributions to Aristotelian and Contemporary Conceptualizations of Metaphor, Style, and Audience,” Rhetorica 20, no. 1 (2002): 1–23; Ned O’Gorman, “Aristotle’s Phantasia in the Rhetoric: Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Discourse,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 38, no. 1 (2005): 16–40; Michele Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 269–91; Debra Hawhee, “Looking Into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (2011): 139–65; Jessica Moss, Aristotle on the Apparent Good: Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Eve Rabinoff, Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2018).

25. “δεῖξις,” Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1940). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aalphabetic+letter%3D*d%3Aentry+group%3D12%3Aentry%3Ddei%3Dcis.

26. Holger Diessel, “Deixis and Demonstratives,” in Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, vol. 3, ed. Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012), 2407.

27. Diessel, “Deixis and Demonstratives,” 2407.

28. Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis,” 167.

29. This usage of “ocular demonstration” is a bit confusing for scholars of rhetoric, particularly because classical orators used the term to describe rhetorical techniques of speech that achieved vivid description or clarity. This is not what Bühler meant (although his second mode of deixis, “imagination-oriented deixis,” describes a similar phenomenon). For Bühler, “ocular-demonstration” describes what the audience can see physically. Karl Bühler, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin and Achim Eschbach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011), 117–57.

30. Jeanne Fahnestock uses “immediate deixis” to describe “ocular demonstration” and “imaginary deixis” to describe “imagination-oriented deixis.” I follow her lead here and throughout the rest of the essay. Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 325d–339.

31. In his original German work, Bühler used the Latin phrase “Deixis ad oculos” to describe this first mode; “ocular demonstration” is the English translation for this phenomenon. In Latin, oculos refers to the physical eye; ad oculos can be roughly translated “in/near our very eyes” or “in/near our eyeballs.” Oculos is a version of the same noun Quintilian uses when describing things seeming as if they appear “before our eyes” [est in oculis habebo]. See Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoriae, trans. D.A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.2.31.

32. Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis,” 166.

33. Bühler, Theory of Language, 141.

34. Lowell Edmunds, “Deixis in Ancient Greek and Latin Literature: Historical Introduction and State of the Question,” Philologia Antiqua: An International Journal of Classics 1 (2008): 85–86. Edmunds goes on to describe Bühler’s two senses of Deixis am Phantasma, “memories” (Erinnerungen) and “constructive fantasy” (Konstruktive Phantasie), writing that “[w]hat can be seen in the mind’s eye is either something remembered, i.e., something already seen in reality, or it is a construct.”

35. Hawhee, “Looking Into Aristotle’s Eyes,” 144.

36. Bühler, Theory of Language, 138.

37. Buhler, Theory of Language, 138 and footnote 3.

38. Rabinoff, Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics, 39.

39. For example, scholars have questioned Bühler’s linkage of anaphora with deixis, stressing instead that anaphors function as a type of indexical, one that points the audience to and heightens the reader’s awareness of a specific place within the text – not outside of it. See Deborah Schiffrin, “Between Text and Context: Deixis, Anaphora, and the Meaning of Then,” Text 10, no. 3 (1990): 245–70; Francis Cornish, “How Indexicals Function in Texts: Discourse, Text, and One Neo-Gricean Account of Indexical Reference,” Journal of Pragmatics 40, no. 6 (2008), 997–1018; Francis Cornish, Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding: Evidence from English and French (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

40. Charles J. Fillmore, Lectures on Deixis (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1997), 103.

41. Cornish, Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding, 19–20.

42. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan, “Introduction: Writing Worlds,” in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text, and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, ed. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (London: Routledge, 1992), 8.

43. Kenneth Burke, “Language as Action: Terministic Screens,” in On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 114–25.

44. Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).

45. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 25.

46. Cornish, Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding, 20.

47. Obama, “Remarks.”

48. Obama as quoted in Keenan notes in Greg Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism,” Washington Post, June 3, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/06/03/obama-and-american-exceptionalism/?utm_term=.a86ceb27328d.

49. Obama quoted in Keenan notes in Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

50. Obama as quoted in Keenan notes in Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

51. Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

52. Obama as quoted in Keenan notes in Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

53. Obama as quoted in Keenan notes in Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

54. Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

55. Obama, “Remarks.”

56. Obama, “Remarks.”

57. John Lewis, “Introductory Remarks,” March 7, 2015, www.c-span.org/video/?c4530498/john-lewis-barack-obama-selma.

58. Obama, “Remarks.” All successive quotations taken from this text unless otherwise noted. Deictic indicators are bolded and italicized.

59. Richard A. Lanham, Analyzing Prose, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), 34.

60. Barack Obama edits on draft of his Bloody Sunday speech, no date, contributed by Washington Post reporter Danielle Rindler, http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2648539-Remarks-by-the-President-at-the-50th-Anniversary.html#document/p1/a267755.

61. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise,” March 15, 1965, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/242211.

62. Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

63. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on East-West Relations at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin,” June 12, 1987, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/252499.

64. Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation Address at Cape Town University,” June 6, 1966, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rfkcapetown.htm.

65. Rabinoff, Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics, 41; Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, 19.

66. Barack Obama, “Remarks on Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo,” December 10, 2009, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/287562; Barack Obama, “Remarks at a Memorial Service for Victims of the Shootings in Tucson, Arizona,” January 12, 2011, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/289463; Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm. For a brilliant analysis of Obama’s Tucson speech, see Jamie Landau and Bethany Keeley-Jonker, “Conductor of Public Feelings: An Affective-Emotional Rhetorical Analysis of Obama’s National Eulogy in Tucson,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 166–88.

67. The three men mentioned by Obama include Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Jackie Robinson; the four women were Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer and Susan B. Anthony. The 25 distinct groups of people are: farmers (1), miners (2), entrepreneurs (3), hucksters (4), immigrants (5), Holocaust survivors (6), Soviet defectors (7), the Lost Boys of Sudan (8), immigrants who cross the Rio Grande (9), slaves (10), ranch hands (11), cowboys (12), countless laborers (13), fresh-faced GIs (14), Tuskegee Airmen (15), Navajo code talkers (16), Japanese Americans (17), firefighters on 9/11 (18), military volunteers (19), gay Americans (20), storytellers (21), writers (22), poets (23), artists (24), musicians (25). I do not count his mention of Langston Hughes or Emerson because Obama quoted both authors to describe the overall character of the U.S. public rather than listing Hughes and Emerson as representative of a larger whole.

68. This discursive deictic referred the astute audience member to a line from Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The New Colossus,” which was later inscribed in the Statue of Liberty. See “The New Colossus,” Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., no date, https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/the-new-colossus.

69. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, 115–20.

70. “accumulatio,” Charleton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Daccumulatio.

71. Lanham, Analyzing Prose, 130, 131, 132.

72. John Blake, “How the Obama Era Gave Use a Dangerous Patriotism,” CNN.com, October 18, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/18/politics/obama-dangerous-patriotism/index.html.

73. James Fallows, “Finally I Hear a Politician Explain My Country Just the Way I Understand It,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/finally-i-hear-a-politician-explain-my-country-the-way-i-understand-it/387178/.

74. Greg Jaffe, “Which Barack Obama Speech is the One for the History Books?,” Washington Post, July 22, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/22/which-barack-obama-speech-is-the-one-for-the-history-books/.

75. Jaffe, “Obama’s New Patriotism.”

76. Barack Obama as quoted in Philip Galanes, “Barack Obama and Bryan Cranston on the Roles of a Lifetime,” New York Times, May 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/fashion/barack-obama-bryan-cranston-table-for-three.html?_r=1.

77. Obama as quoted in Galanes, “Barack Obama and Bryan Cranston on the Roles of a Lifetime.”

78. Obama, “Remarks.”

79. Michael Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G. P. Mohrmann,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72, no. 4 (1986): 385.

80. Foley, “Time for Epideictic,” 211.

81. Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, 17.

82. Obama, “Remarks.”