A modest phenomenology of democratic speech

Abstract

Democratic speech is not the altogether orchestrated and well-regulated affair that deliberative democrats and others describe it as being or capable of becoming. In democratic speech we encounter not only oases of genuine public deliberation but rhetoric, desire, struggle, will to power, mythology, and communicative incompetence. All of this is no less of the essence of democratic speech than its nobler aspect and is found everywhere that democratic institutions exist or have ever existed. This modest phenomenology undertakes a broad and impressionistic account of democratic discourse, highlighting themes that are at once fundamental and largely unremarked. My aims in doing so are both critical and reconstructive: the critical aim is to expose the unreality of democratic idealism in both its theoretical and popular manifestations, while the reconstructive aim is to sketch the outline of a democratic ontology in which speech holds center stage. If speech is the lifeblood of democratic politics, we shall misunderstand our own democratic commitment for as long as we misconceive the real workings, dynamics, and conditions of democratic speech. I shall argue that the rhetorical dimension of political speech is not a contingency, but belongs to its fundamental structure.

Notes

Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 173.

Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 478, 484–5.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), sec. 53, 171–2.

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. J. Wilkonson and P. Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).

Gary B. Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 106. Madison here cites Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 474; and Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 187.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique,” trans. G. B. Hess and Richard E. Palmer, in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in our Time, ed. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 318.

Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and its Application (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 9.

Ronald H. Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 1.

Joshua Foa Dienstag, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3.

Louis Mink, “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,” in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 133.

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1367b7, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).

Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique,” 318.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), 411.

Dienstag, Dancing in Chains, 52.

Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 99–100.

Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 166.

Richard Kearney, On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002), 125.

Torben Bech Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power: Politics, Identity, Community (New York: Verso, 1997), 217.

Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy: A Defence of the Rules of the Game, trans. Roger Griffin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 37.