Tim Johnson

Mass Media, Constitutive Rhetoric, and The Public Sphere: A Bibliography

The central focus of this annotated bibliography is the conversation sparked by Jurgen Habermas’s articulation of the public sphere with more specific attention paid to the role images, as they are taken up in an increasingly visual mass media, play in forming a sense of public or civic identity and engagement. The texts are here broken into sections concerned with the origins of public sphere theory, subsequent scholarship nuancing the concept, works which interrogate the place of mass media in public formation, and finally works which identify the visual as a crucial piece of making sense of contemporary manifestations of the public sphere.

The Public Sphere—Foundational Texts

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press: Boston, 1991.

Habermas, often credited as the father of modern public sphere theory, takes as his subject the emergence of a bourgeois class capable of engaging in rational deliberation as the foundation for a civically active “public.” He explains, “the public sphere as a functional element in the political realm was given the normative status of an organ for self-articulation of civil society with a state authority corresponding to its needs” (72). While the project appears to be a geneology of the rise and fall of a functioning “bourgeois public,” his introduction of such a category of has had a profound impact on rhetorical scholarship. Specifically, the notion of a public sphere has given rhetorical studies a frame for discerning meaning, circulation, and direction of rhetorical acts.

In the broadest sense, Habermas kicks off the concept of considering “public spheres” a part of rhetorical and democratic work and does so by defining such a sphere through binary logic and mediation. For him, the “public sphere” marks off the space between states and subjects (hence the binary logic) as they articulate themselves collectively through social movement. Further, he suggests that any sense of this sphere is constructed through discourse and mediated through the cultural expressions of this discourse. Though much of his “public sphere” has been roundly critiqued, redirected, or appropriated, it appears that its binary logic and presence as a space of mediated identity have been retained.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago: Chicago, 1998.

In “The Human Condition,” Arendt defines the public sphere as a general counterpart to private and domestic interests. More specifically she claims that the “public sphere” relies on two phenomena: first, that “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity” and, second, it is made from “the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished

from our privately owned place in it” (50). It is then the uptake and circulation surrounding this social collective that begins to effect rhetorical employment.

Arendt’s goes further to suggest that the public sphere serves as a useful binary to both enact and limit individualized interests within a wider collective framework. For example, she declares that “what the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without…changing its essentially private character” (52). Here she suggests that even a percieved lack of uptake publicly can have a profound impact on how individuals associate with the world around them and build elements of public consciousness directly into what is typically considered their private lives and identities—they are interpellated.

For rhetorical scholars, the public as a space of infinite identification . For public sphere theory, this work compliments

Walter Lippman. Public Opinion. Harcourt, Brace, & Co.: New York, 1922.

In the introduction to this book, Lippman puts forward the claim that individuals simply cannot cognitively hold the amount of information needed to accurately comprehend public consciousness. He argues, instead that individuals construct a sense of the public through “the medium of fictions” (4). However, these fictions are always subjectively formed, and often distorted to fit whatever conscious or subconscious needs the user has. Because these “fictions” make up a fragmented social reality, he argues that a democratic government cannot work fully and, for it so do so, “personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs” (8).

Although his work is hamstrung by his elitism and commitment to unseen capital “T” Truths whose necessity is mitigated by later discursive theories of deliberation, Lippman’s pessimism toward individual capability or willingness to function globally is an important observation for public sphere theorists. Particularly, it strikes me as a usefully pragmatic reminder that although the public sphere could do a great deal for democracy in theory, there must still be a great deal of attention to how it will play out in everyday practice.

Dewey, John. The Public and its Problems . New York: Holt, 1927.

On the whole, Dewey’s book refutes Lippman’s claim that the average individual is incapable of comprehending enough issues to function in a productive public. He argues that the problem is less individual ability or willingness and more a matter of mass systemic failures to appropriately place individuals in a position to engage in useful public discourse. Further it is precisely the individualized logic and fictionalization that makes democratic deliberation an ideal for civic action. He suggests that bringing one’s fiction into the public sphere ‘is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the

power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association” (329).

In many ways, the debate between Lippman and Dewey is still being worked out by rhetorical and public scholars. Particularly, while most side with Dewey, there is still discussion as to whether the public sphere is being used to engage with collective decision making or being used to affirm entrenched “fictions” particularly, as we will see, with the emergence of politically leaning media outlets.

Warner, Michael. "Publics and Counterpublics." Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88.4 (2002): 413-425.

In response to traditional public sphere theory which focuses on the particular comings and goings of dominant discursive groups (states and classes), Warner redefines both public and counterpublics according to their broad theoretical possibilities. For Warner, publics are self organized (that is organized around something other than the state); “created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” and act historically according this circulation; require the presence of, and relations between, strangers; are made up of speech acts that are simultaneously personal and impersonal; are constituted through “mere attention” (62). Counterpublics are the formation of a public which “differ markedly in one way or another from the premises that allow the dominant culture to understand itself as a public” (81).

In effect, Warner’s work removes any historical specificity from the term “public” and “counterpublic” thereby making it as neutral a category as possible that can be deployed by scholars in critical work.

Roberts, John Michael and Nick Crossley. “Introduction.” After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Eds. Roberts, John Michael and Nick Crossley Blackwell:London, 2004.

While giving an overview of Habermas’s work, this introduction makes a few really interesting moves including separating out three “schools” of public-sphere scholarship that have developed out of its legacy. The “late-modern school” has taken up Habermas’s distinction between systems and lifeworlds revising his work to note that these collectives each contain both private and public dimensions. Within these more nuanced explanations of publics, each of these notions is made up of “institutionalized public communication wherein individuals can campaign for juridical rights whilst its private sphere relates to an intimate space with personal relationships” (13). That is, they fuse Habermas’s and Arendt’s theories of the public. Next, “The postmodern school” argues that any notion that a public can discuss their way into a “Truth” is troubling as this guise of “rational” Truth-making is more-often-than-not used to exclude marginalized populations and rhetorics. Finally, “the relational and institutional school” turns public sphere theory on itself, suggesting that the public sphere is called into being within very particular situations (for example, the World Cup, or UNESCO would call for a globalized public sphere, while a PTA would call for a much different kind of sphere.)

Everybody’s a critic: Resituating Habermas’s Public Theory

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually

Existing Democracy.” Social Text, 25/26 (1990): 56-80. Print.

In this essay, Fraser takes Habermas to task for using such a historically-specific group like emerging French, bourgeois populations to define a broad theory like the “public sphere.” The result of this reduced scope, she argues, is a theory of the public that has little accuracy in contemporary, late-capitalist, democracies as they “actually exist.” She also, in a shorter treatment, presses (indirectly) against Arendt’s distinction between private and public spaces by suggesting that in many cases the label “private” is used by dominant discourses to suppress what can and can’t be heard (her strongest example: the “private” labeling of domestic abuse as a silencing mechanism).

In order to more accurately place the public as a concept, she then attempts to form a post-bourgeois notion of the public using historiographic practices. By refocusing the conversation from a singular hegemonic public to “intrapublic relations” Fraser hopes to recognize the “subaltern counterpublics” that have been functioning, but mostly as marginalized figures, in notions of democratic and rhetorical work.

For the “public sphere” debate, Fraser’s work makes a few very strong claims, the first is recognizing such a sphere as the collective conflict between many publics rather than one unified group dealing with one unified state. The second notable contribution is her argument that theorizing about the public sphere is the best way to recognize the limiting potential for how a society defines “public” and thereby mitigate some of the limitations imposed by a hegemonic sense of the “public.”

Fraser, Nancy. "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere - on the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World." Theory Culture & Society 24.4 (2007): 7,+. Print.

In this article, Fraser suggests that the public sphere gains its critical force through two phenomena” normative legitimacy, and political efficacy. She then warns that public sphere theory is in danger of being depoliticized, which would effectively reduce its usefulness. Returning, then, to her 1991 critique of Habermas, she suggests that she overlooked a Westphalian framework and, in the process, did not get to the true center of current public sphere theorizing—defining spheres primarily through national or state-bound parameters. In an attempt to rectify this oversight, she presents transnational thought as a way to reinscribe the public sphere with new notions of legitimacy and efficacy that account for multiple global perspectives.

Taken collectively, Fraser remains a crucial voice for thinking about boundaries when defining a public and the rhetoric that creates and circulates within it. She is a constant reminder that rhetorical and public scholars must always remain conscious of who and what is included and excluded by any particular definition of what makes up the public.

Asen, Robert. "A Discourse Theory of Citizenship." Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. Print.

In this piece, Asen focuses on the state of “citizenship” as a critical term in how many theorists define public engagement in the American political sphere. Whether denigrating a “nation of spectators” or championing the greater public’s turn away from state-mandated structures to solve their problems, Asen suggests that public sphere theorists are often content to use “citizenship” as a singular factor for constituting a “public” when it only represents one mode of civic engagement. To avoid this singularity, he proposes a “need to recognize, appreciate, facilitate, and draw upon multiple subjectivities,” inherent to individual subjects through the observation of practices (“constitutive acts”) rather than conceptual relations (193). One of his strongest examples of how this works is a close-reading (of sorts) of voting as a civic act. He suggests that, if one considers the act of voting the fundamental quality of a citizen, a guise of equality emerges. However, focusing on “action” rather than an “act”—for example: seeing which individuals’ voices are heard more often, which are wooed, which engage in the “right” kind of deliberation—can begin to portray a more accurate and effective sense of public action to political ends.

In many ways, Asen seems to tiptoe between Habermas and Fraser suggesting that the plural nature of the public sphere must extend beyond just seeing broad differences in power, culture, and socioeconomic groups as issues of state. Instead, rhetorical and public scholarship needs to focus on particular acts of designed action to focus on how particular individuals and groups are using notions of the public to act rhetorically…a direction the field appears to have taken up.

---. "Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia." The Quarterly Journal of Speech 95.3 (2009): 263. Print.

Continuing in the same vein of his “citizenship” argument, here Asen complicates the notion of counterpublicity by suggesting that its tactics are not only available to “sub-altern” or marginalized groups. He argues that, “If we regard material (dis)advantage and ideological perspective as neutral, we risk ceding our critical judgment to the most transparent claims of the text, which reduces [scholars of the public’s] work to paraphrase and leaves us unable to pursue important normative questions” (264). By tracking wealthy, but deposed, businessman William E. Simon’s ability to appropriate the language and tactics of a marginalized individual, he reveals the danger of identifying anything as “counter-“ and therefore eligible for a different kind of identification just because its user sits on one side of the hegemonic fence.

He also, on an aside, refutes Warner’s “false choice” between “dialogue and circulation”—i.e. whether a text is meant to directly engage with its audience or proliferate generally for consumption—citing the blogosphere as one place where audiences both consume and engage (through comment functions) (269). This recursive

I think this piece really smartly pushes against the fit between rhetorical principles and issues of power, race, and/or materiality, by suggesting that public sphere scholars “assess privilege by seeking out textual markers that signal its existence” within the text itself (270). By taking the time to “foreground key values in texts,” like markers of social standing, and whether the speaker would “restrict or expand discursive space for others” rhetorical scholars and scholars of the public sphere can avoid bringing their own ideological and political leanings into the interpretive process of who is using what kind of rhetorical tactic (283).

Loewhing, Melanie and Jeff Motter. “Publics, Counterpublics, and the Promise of Democracy.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. 42:3 (2009), 220-241.

Loewhing and Motter’s work provides a direct counter to the arguments put forward by Nancy Fraser, arguing that by focusing so heavily on the historically specific subject chosen by Habermas (the bourgeois public sphere), she has undervalued his theories of the public sphere as a very useful study in the intersections of “democratic politics” and “rhetorical culture” (221). In order to reframe the conversation, they reframe the question by arguing that “the key question to ask is whether we understand public spheres as a means for expanded participation in decision making, or as a revitalizing force for creating a democratic culture in which problems might be approached, understood and hence judged differently” (232) or to paraphrase “what do we want public sphere theory to usher in—egalitarian utopia or an ideal deliberative democracy?”

In asking this question, they frame the overall discourse surrounding the goals of public sphere theory, explaining that ”whereas a Habermasian perspective understands democracy to thrive as the ongoing constitution of democratic culture from public spheres’ rational-critical debate, counterpublic studies views democracy both as the setting in which counterpublics operate (actually existing democracy) and at the level of optimally universal access to participation (democratic treatment of publics)” (231). Returning to their critique of Fraser, they argue rhetoricians must take up Habermas’s perspective for its ability to elevate rhetoric to a level of social praxis that can enact real change.

Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. "Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture. Jurgen Habermas and His Critics." New German Critique, 16 (1979): 89-118.

Hohendahl also comes to the defense of Habermas, arguing that those scholars focusing on what isn’t contained in his theories of the public sphere are missing its crucial “double function.” For Hohendahl, Habermas’s work “provides a paradigm for analyzing historical change, while also serving as a normative category for political critique” (92). That is, Habermas’s conception of analyzing the “public sphere” is transferrable according to cultural, social and political circumstances (he’s of the postmodern school).

The section that seems to add the most to the post-Habermas public sphere conversation is his attention to some of the follow-up discussions Habermas put forward in his late work, particularly as Habermas begins to work through the place scientific (or non-discursive) knowledge takes in the workings of discursively set up publics. In this section, he notes that Habermas sees the public and discursive uptake of generally empirical truths as evidence that the public sphere is a process through which individuals are attuned to an issue at hand, not excluded from its discussion.

Antonio, Robert J., and Douglas Kellner. "Communication, Modernity, and Democracy in Habermas and Dewey." Symbolic Interaction 15.3 (1992): 277-97. Print.

Kellner, in a move akin to Fraser’s, attempts to bring Habermas’s theory of the public sphere into present, actually existing democracies. Notably, the essay itself primarily consists of a very thorough overview of Habermas’s career in full (rather than its legacy built out of “Structural Formations”) which is really useful in balancing Habermas as a theorist who said more than one thing about the public. His act of modernizing Habermas’s work is constructed—like Deluca and Peeples—on the grounds that technological advancement has reshaped civic discourse. What he suggests is that Habermas “does not adequately delineate the normative character of the media in democracy and does not develop a notion of radical democracy in which individuals organize to democratically transform the media, technology, and the various institutions of social life” (12).

What he suggests, then, is that scholars of the public must consider the media as an extension of the recursive nature of state and private interests. In short, these days, the very technologies and media outlets aren’t just neutral forums, they are rhetorically employed tactics activated by their users to attempt to shape public opinion. It is this argument that frames the next turn in public scholarship, which takes a closer look at contemporary mass media as a rhetorically deployed factor that shapes and is shaped by conceptions of the public.

The Public and Mass Media.

Oliver, Pamela E. and Daniel J. Meyers. “How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location, and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events.”

In this article, Oliver and Meyers argue that “the link between public events and the public sphere is the mass media” and as such a crucial link it is of the utmost importance to note how the mass media picks and chooses what traverses the gap (38). Taking as their focus the media coverage of a series of local protests in Madison, Wisonsin, they take Asen’s call to focus on actions to the extreme, quantitatively breaking down who covered what, when, and how.

Out of this study, they note a series of criteria that help to articulate what makes up the mass media’s contributions to the public sphere. These criteria are “organizational predispositions” (political leanings, social implications, financial affiliations, etc.), “news

value” (a rather imprecise criteria existing somewhere between ethical importance and overall juiciness), and “news routines” (material factors—deadlines, whether the event was announced ahead of time, access, and capturability). I see these categories as really useful tools that can be put into the hands of rhetorical scholar to consider and articulate how information is being disseminated.

Thieme, Katja. “Constitutive Rhetoric as an Aspect of Audience Design: The Public Texts of Canadian Suffragists.” Written Communication January 2010 27: 36-56.

Thieme’s work explores “how public utterances aim to affect social and political change by imagining different groups of listeners and readers and calling them to action in different ways” (38). Specifically, she analyzes noun phrases (the use of “gentle lady,” “unwed mother,” or “platform woman”) as they circulated in texts (both “private” letters and “public” newspaper articles) concerned with women’s suffrage in Canada to note not only the intentions of the writers, but the ways in which these noun phrases can help the audience to identify with a particular cause and the subject positions that accompany that cause. In short, these phrases “created groups of people” for the writer, addressee, and any spectators of the discourse itself. For rhetorical scholarship, this attention to the constitutive nature of formal choices

She provides one possible method for analyzing the kind of analysis called for by Asen as he looks to see issues of power as they are articulated within the utterances themselves and takes up the mass media outlet for these utterences outlined by Kellner. Like Kellner, her work highlights the ways in which media outlets are not neutral public palates, but rhetorical forms which are formed by private interests that are articulated through the very language choices these outlets use to present an issue to the public. However, she adds to these accounts a concern for how audiences engage with and use public utterances.

Delicath, John W. and Deluca, Kevin Michael. Argumentation; 2003, Vol. 17 Issue 3, p315, 19p.

Like Oliver, Delicath and Deluca are interested in the mass media as a crucial mediator in the process of public formation. What they suggest is that the “image event”— “a form of oppositional argument uniquely capable of generating social controversy in that they challenge norms of public participation as well as widen the possibilities for argumentation and deliberation”—is being used as an act of visual enthymeme. That is, these “events” create counterpublics by putting the onus of interpretation onto the audience. So, where Oliver notes the way texts position their readers, “image events” force readers to position themselves, often in a manner which causes them to reconsider the situation at hand.

Stein, Sarah R. “The ‘1984’ Macintosh Ad: Cinematic Icons and Constitutive

Rhetoric in the Launch of a New Machine.” Quarterly Journal of Speech. 88:2 (2002), 169-192.

In many ways Stein’s work takes up one instance of an “image event” that also mirrors Asen’s claims about the tropes of counterpublicity being equally accessible to figures in power. That is, her reading of Apple’s 1984 computer commercial displays that “tropes of freedom and revolution” both defined the company and harnassed the social energy of the time in order to get people to buy computers.

For public theory, specifically as it becomes increasingly concerned with the visual, this piece is a reminder that the sphere itself is manipulatable and the same principles that allow it to harnass collective deliberation also allow for corporate interest to mobilize (for the lack of a better term) street cred. by tapping into the collective unconscious of a generation.

The Rhetorical Contributions of the State and Individual on Public and Private.

Ivie, Robert L., and Oscar Giner. "Hunting the Devil: Democracy's Rhetorical Impulse to War." Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2007): 580. Print.

Echoing (indirectly) Asen’s claims about focusing on “actions” rather than an “act”, Ivie and Giner explain that “democracy is an attitude articulated within the polity and configured by rhetoric, especially by conventions of discourse that treat relations of similitude as relations of equivalence or virtual sameness” (582). However, in a more discursive spirit, they focus this observation on the constitutive power of Presidential speeches, specifically as they have constructed a “mythos for war” against external “evil” within the American public’s consciousness. Through this evocation of an “other,” it is suggested, the then president simultaneously creates a space for national identification and a legitimization of status quot power and subsequent agendas (the ensuing Gulf War conflict).

Although they seem to ignore the mass-media-as-mediator argument, Ivie and Giner provide a compelling analysis of a state power using the homogenizing potential of a concept like the “public sphere” to direct private acts of identification. As such their work becomes an account of how, what Habermas would call, the “state” attempts to use constitutive rhetoric in the media to shape the perception of a public to fit their own ends.

Zagacki, Kenneth S. “Constitutive Rhetoric Reconsidered: Constitutive Paradoxes in G.W. Bush’s Iraq War Speeches.” Western Journal of Communication. 71:4, 272-293.

In this article, Zagacki focuses on a set of Presidential addresses which he sees as failed acts of constitutive rhetoric and, in the process, interrogates the very possibility for a rhetoric to limit its possible publics. As a speaker, he explains, President George W. Bush “assumed and presumed the existence of a fundamental collective identity for his audience” that simply did not exist (274). The result of these assumptions was a set of speeches which erased the material realities of the public he was trying to rally and

thereby threw its listeners into a set of constitutive paradoxes (for example, his drawing on democracy as something intrinsic to the human spirit—a notion that may not have been shared by his entire audience). These paradoxes, then, undermined his rhetorical project to invite an audience to identify with the ideologies and agendas put forward by the speech-maker.

Zagacki’s work is important within this conversation as it articulates that public address can fail at becoming a normative or constitutive act if the rhetor doesn’t take into account the materiality of his or her audience. It also confirms Fraser’s arguments about the importance of accounting for “transnational” perspectives when thinking about both defining the “public sphere” and in creating effective utterances.

Hauser, Gerard. “Vernacular dialogue and the rhetoricality of public opinion.” Communication Monographs. 65: 2, 83 — 107.

In this essay, Hauser promotes a notion of “vernacular rhetoric” or, in the terms of the public sphere conversations—the talk developed by the private/non-state/”actually existing” populous. In effect, his arguments appear to be a linguistic equivalent to Nancy Fraser’s, however, it is in the makeup of his arguments that some interesting contributions to the overall discussion emerge. Specifically, he reiterates the place of public opinion (once a public has been identified) and begins to deconstruct some ways that public opinion is formed, how it circulates, and where it is situated in national, political, and social formations. He explains that

“A rhetorical construction of public opinion begins, then, with an understanding of opinion itself as the result of deliberation over an indeterminate matter. It becomes a public opinion when a pattern of sentiment-thoughts, beliefs, and commitments to which a significant and engaged segment of the populace hold attachments that are consequential for choices they are willing to make and actions they are prepared to support in shaping their collective future-emerges from deliberative exchanges among those in the public sphere” (95).

Taken alongside the Presidential speech work by Zagacki and Ivie, rhetorical can begin to see the negotiations that actually go into how publics can become rhetorically contested spaces. That is, he suggests that what makes a public is not just “presence” but an understanding that something is in flux that requires discussion and decision making.

Asen, Robert. "Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13.1 (2010): 121-43. Print.

Asen’s intentions in “Rhetoric in Public Policy” are to flesh out policy making as the intersection between rhetorical practice and political maneuvering—an instance of “mediation of rhetorical and material forces” (124). In many ways, he is responding to what he terms “unnecessary ontological arguments” about the place of rhetoric in the public when the primary focus should be on local material factors (money, goods, and services) that frame these public debates. Moreover, he suggests that state and national

policy debates function as massive acts of constitutive rhetoric as inherently embody and order the values and identities of the polity it regulates and are battled over using a number of modes and discourses. Within the more immediate conversation then, he sees debates over policy as one place where the state maneuvers outlined by Ivie and Zagacki’s work intersects with the local or private use of the public sphere outlined by Thieme.

This work presents what may be the clearest articulation of how exactly a “public” can move beyond the kind of self-constituted and directionless being outlined by Warner, to becoming a rhetorically employed and functioning body that connects sovereignty and subjects. He argues that policy debates mobilize a public as “discourses implicate circulating bodies of rhetoric that serve as publicly articulated ways of collectively understanding and evaluating our world, and propagate and enforce social norms with material consequences” (134). These policy directed “publics are polysemic” thereby leaving room for the kind of recursive meaning making needed for productive and fair action to take place.

Flower, Linda

Flower’s work draws a great deal on public theory (albeit indirectly for the most part) through her discussions of community building discourses. Taking the notion that publics are discursive creatures and flipping it on it head, she suggests that communities can be actively built and maintained using communally situated inquiries as central binding factors. That is, both a public and a community can be called into being and then called into action through the very articulation of a problem (the disjunction between student and teacher, perceived racism in the police force, “catcalling”). What she suggests, then, is that an inquiry-driven public can become the basis for a more inclusive deliberative democracy which relies less heavily on the workings of the state to organize a polity.

Her key contribution is that she calls for the act of deliberation to be built directly into what defines the public. That is conversation isn’t what comes after a public is formed, it is through conversation that publics come into being. For this reason the goals of rhetorical educators, politicians, and policy makers to keep in mind how texts demand and create further conversation.

Visuality and the Public Sphere

Gamson, William A. et. Al. “Media Images and the Social Construction of Reality.” Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992), 373-393.

Gamson et.al. take a more in depth look at the circulation side of meaning making in the public sphere—that is they study the contexts surrounding media outlets. What they argue is that the media, to increase viewership, has neutralized any images that might be construed as “an event.” By using borders, captions, voiceovers, framing within

expert commentary, they manage to “operate in ways that promote apathy, cynicism, and quiescence rather than active citizenship and participation” (391). By directly locating context as a crucial part of public reception, Gamson et. al. reiterate the materiality that frames an argument itself and how this materiality allows for the public sphere to obscure rather than promote deliberation.

DeLuca, Kevin Michael, and Jennifer Peeples. "From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the "Violence" of Seattle." Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002): 125. Print.

Deluca and Peeples work carries two main observations. First, they note the emergence of corporate and capitalist interests as major players in shaping publics and public action. Second, they hope to introduce the term “public screen” to discussions of the public to better articulate the changing “rules and roles of participatory democracy” in an increasingly technocratic society. In each case, their point is direct—traditional conceptions of public space and the rhetoric that constitutes it have been significantly shaken by the explosion of cultural and technological changes.

In many ways, the most powerful punch of this article comes in its sobering framing of the place both rhetoric and public formation must take, and have not taken, in the political and social climate of the United States. They suggest that “publics,” in whatever sense they appear, aren’t engaged in a meaningful way. Further, they note, if rhetorical scholarship can’t fully grasp the new circulation of publicity, the dismal national communicative and civically engaged habits will continue to dilapidate.

Finnegan, Cara A., and Jiyeon Kang. ""Sighting" the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory." The Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.4 (2004): 377. Print.

In “Sighting the Public” Finnegan and Kang redirect the discussion of the “public sphere” to focus more squarely on the “discursive” nature of these “public spaces.” Further, they suggest that to fully understand the kind of modern public sphere laid out by DeLuca and Peebles, public sphere scholars must account for images and vision as crucial factors in what makes up “discursive publics.” They seem to also follow up on a vision of how mass media could have gotten it right in suggesting that modern publics have the opportunity to (borrowing from Dewey) “

In many ways, this text presents the most comprehensive justification for how a history of iconophobic thought has led to a less healthy understanding of what it means for a public to be discursive and, in the process, opened the door for visual scholarship to inform those gaps and misgivings that a purely rational/written/embodied speaker debate (in short—Aristotelian) sense of discourse have created in understandings of public.