Indeed, for Warner, the proper business of the public sphere is “poetic world making” (114). Warner contrasts his model of the public sphere with Habermas and those who view public-sphere practice as limited to “conversation.” In the liberal bourgeois model, publics “exist to deliberate and then to decide” and “require persuasion rather than poesis” (115). For Warner, however, “the perception of public discourse as conversation obscures the importance of the poetic functions of both language and corporeal expressivity in giving a particular shape to publics” (115).
Critique #4: The nature of public-sphere discourse. If diversity and difference demand that we speak of multiple publics and if these publics engender not just public opinion, but identity, consciousness, and culture, then the kind of discursive practices we should expect to find in the public sphere are themselves diverse, extending well beyond rational-critical deliberation. For Fraser, it is crucial that subordinated groups participate on their own terms, using their own “idiom and style” (69). To insist that groups adopt a single set of norms dictated by the dominant culture would amount to “discursive assimilation,” which would lead to “the demise of multi-culturalism” (69). Late twentieth-century feminism, for instance, was not limited to a narrow understanding of rational-critical deliberation, but included such things as “festivals” and “film and video distribution networks” (67). Fraser’s insistence on valuing participants native “idiom and style” is reminiscent of conversations in composition and rhetoric that led to and were fueled by CCCC’s “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language.”
In “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians,” John L. Brooke usefully reviews a range of historical research that explores the role of expressive practices that go far beyond the coffeehouse conversations Habermas examines. As summarized by Brooke, David Waldstreicher locates public-sphere practices of post-Revolution U.S. in such things as “celebrations, parades, toasts, songs” (50). Similarly, David Shields “finds the sociability of the eighteenth-century [colonial American] public sphere defined by wit, humor, theatricality, and satire” (53). Shields reveals a sociality formed out of “the pursuit of pleasure” that includes social, affective, and aesthetic dimensions (qtd. in Brooke 53).
For Warner, the radical potential of publics is linked precisely to the ability of groups to introduce their own forms of expressivity: their own styles, forms, and practices of semiotic exchange. Warner writes that counterpublics “might not be organized by the hierarchy of faculties that elevates rational-critical reflection as the self-image of humanity; they might depend more heavily on performance spaces than on print” (123). “A queer public,” writes Warner, “might be one that throws shade, prances, disses, acts up, carries on, longs, fantasizes, throws fits, mourns, ‘reads’” (124). One of the most striking examples Warner explores is a performance of “erotic vomiting” at a leather bar (206–08).
For Warner, identity is maintained through particular forms and styles of discourse. Therefore, embracing the terms of rational-critical discourse required by a mainstream public sphere amounts to sacrificing identity; as counterpublics seek political agency, they “adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse. For many counterpublics, to do so is to cede the original hope of transforming not just policy but the space of public life itself” (124). In contrast to “deliberation” or “conversation” Warner uses “poesis” to encapsulate all of the various forms of expression available to would-be participants in various and overlapping publics (115).
As we demonstrate in chapter 7, critiques #3 and #4 are crucial to our own argument about multimodal public rhetoric. If we limit the definition of the public sphere to the social space where rational-critical debate leads to public opinion, we are likely to dismiss multimodal public rhetoric as of very limited value indeed. In such a case, multimodality would be relegated to a supportive role: charts, graphs, diagrams, and figures meant to lend clarity to word-based arguments. But if the proper function of public-sphere practice is poetic world making that shapes consciousness and identity through the captivation of attention, multimodality becomes quite relevant indeed. Films, animations, fabricated objects, games, virtual reality compositions, and mixed media performances—these multimodal forms might play central role in public-sphere practices. Byron Hawk, for instance, explores the ways a punk rock album (Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come) functions as “both an example of and a call to create a public rhetoric through poetic world making . . .” (11).
Critique #5: The nature of agency. Habermas has been widely criticized for embracing a “modernist” understanding of the subject as an autonomous, rational agent. The philosopher Noëlle McAfee, for instance, draws on Julia Kristeva’s notion of “subject-in-process” to develop an alternative model of agency as relational (153–54; see also MacAvoy’s review). For Warner, agency is vexed, fragile, and problematic on several levels. Warner rejects the Habermasian model in which publics appear to derive agency through rational deliberation. Moreover, Warner is insistent that no single rhetorical act can bring a public into being. Texts never exist in a vacuum, but are read in relation to other texts, forming an intertextual network, much of which is beyond the control of single individuals or groups. “Every sentence,” Warner writes, “is populated with the voices of others, living and dead, and is carried to whatever destination it has not by the force of intention or address but by the channels laid down in discourse. These requirements often have a politics of their own, and it may well be that their limitations are not to be easily overcome by strong will, broad mind, earnest heart, or ironic reflection” (128).
In our discussion of kairos above, we began to explore the notion of agency as struggle within various local and global contexts. In chapter 5, we revisit the concept of agency in the context of ideology and technology. We synthesize conceptions of agency offered by Warner with models offered by postmodern conceptions of the subject and with actor-network theory.
Conclusion
In this book we describe a kairotic approach to public rhetoric, by which we mean an approach that seeks to discover in each situation what kind of rhetorical action is appropriate. In our deployment, kairos refers to a struggle between rhetors and their contexts. Many of the factors in this struggle are beyond the control of any one individual or group; all situations demand kairotic inventiveness from prepared rhetors.
Public-sphere theorists have outlined a wide range of practices that are available to rhetors. A kairotic approach to public rhetoric means being aware of available options, aware of possibilities and constraints that operate at any given moment of action. The work of Habermas, Warner, Fraser, and others helps increase awareness of some of those possibilities and constraints. In this book, we continue to use the term “public sphere” despite the problems that inhere in that term. We certainly do not mean to emphasize “formally elegant, inherently rational, self-completing and self-regulating entities” (qtd. in Brouwer and Asen 4). Indeed, in many ways even network or web are too neat, calling to mind the elegant symmetry of a spider web or the efficiency of information traveling through the Internet at the speed of light (Latour, “On Recalling” 15–16). We continue to use the term public sphere, as many scholars do, not as a zero institution, but self-consciously as a shorthand expression for a set of social practices that are complex, multifaceted, and dynamic—often chaotic and inelegant.
To exploit the potentials of multimodal public rhetoric, we need to move past a narrow model of the single, universal public sphere constituted by physically co-present interlocutors who engage each other in rational-critical debate for the purpose of forming public opinion. Synthesizing the post-Habermasian models described by Fraser, Warner, and others, we have sketched a version of the public sphere that accommodates multiple publics whose identities and desires lead them to exploit a wide range of expressive forms: erotic, corporeal, extravagant, performative. This notion of a public is consonant with DeLuca’s definition of rhetoric as “the mobilization of signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures” (17). Thus, we see the public sphere as inherently
