A public rallied around the Sodders

Warning: Sad story ahead. One of my history-buff roommates told me about this strange occurrence.

To summarize, on the night before Christmas of 1945, a family’s home went up in flames. The Sodder parents managed to escape with four of their children, though five other children in the house never made it out. At first the parents thought those children must have died in the fire, but an investigation revealed no trace of the bodies. The family began to piece together any and all recollections of odd happenings prior to the tragedy; they concluded the children must still be alive and commenced on a nation-wide search for them. To date, no information has been found concerning the missing Sodder children. (Read here for the full account). 

One might say the Sodder’s story went public the moment they hung up a flyer, but this is inaccurate. According to Warner, it is not single texts that create publics but rather “the concatenation of texts through time” (62). I’m not sure when the newspapers really started to pick up the story, but the earliest “intertextual” newspaper clipping I found came from a 1968 article. Notice that this article references other news articles, the Sodder’s letters to the FBI, tips and leads from perhaps well-intentioned but misinformed people, and the billboard depicting the missing children (photo). Not only is the article itself intertextual/intergeneric, but it implies a pre-existing public discourse. I do want to acknowledge, however, that some of the referenced material in the article, such as the letters, were not public (unless they were published or printed in a different news article).

The knowability of the audience seems to also differentiate between “private” and “public” texts. If the scope and specific persons comprising the audience is known, then that discourse cannot be public, for “publics are different from persons, that the address of public rhetoric is never going to be the same as address to actual persons” (Warner 58). We might say that publics are made of an unbounded, half real and half imaginary-potential, audience. Habermas states, “[P]ublic opinion can by definition only come into existence when a reasoning public is presupposed” (50). Even he hints at the idea of the imaginary audience with the word, “presupposed.”

Fraser breaks down Habermas’s idea of “matters of general” into separate categories, one of which is “common concern.” She says that “what will count as a matter of common concern will be decided precisely through discursive contestation” (71). If you take another look at this Smithsonian article, scroll down to the comments section. You will find one of three recurring trends within those comments: 1) the desire to know what really happened 2) comments and advice for how to proceed with the (cold) case 3) personal recollections and stories regarding that event and/or subsequent search. I looked up multiple different websites and discussion forums about the Sodder case, and those trends remain pretty consistent throughout—and so I would call those trends “common concerns.” And though I don’t have earlier resources, I would guess these common concerns were present as well when the case first went public.

A struggle with conditions

In his article called “Publics and Counterpublics,” Michael Warner states that membership in a public “is constituted by mere attention” (60). My first reaction was to discount the claim; this membership criterion appears too broad, and it doesn’t seem to reflect the reality that we often assign names to particular publics. In other words, names indicate identity, and group identity usually revolves around a shared commonality, such as goals, interests, or values. So if publics are constituted through mere attention, does that mean I can be suckered into a public whether or not I agree with the majority of that public’s members? But really, how can a public have “majority consensus” if there’s no sort of filter for who becomes part of that public?

Warner anticipates my first question with this response: “Our willingness to process a passing appeal determines which publics we belong to and performs their extension” (Warner 62). Rather than being involuntarily “suckered” into a public, Warner argues that at some level, all members are “voluntary.”

Last week on the blog posts, Anjeli brought up the idea of voluntary and involuntary publics; she pointed to the public of this classroom as an example of an involuntary public. She added, “I mean, we *chose* to attend MSU for English, and that choice most likely (depending on where we're all at in our degree requirements) made taking WRIT 376 mandatory.” Warner would probably suggest that one’s choice to major in English suggests his or her willingness to be in the WRIT 376 public, at some level. If someone was absolutely not willing, they wouldn’t be in the class, right?

In that same thread of comments, Kristie said, “So, could belonging to certain kinds of counterpublics be considered involuntary? The Civil Rights Movement (or any racially formed publics) are an interesting example. We don't get to choose our ethnicity, so we are automatically assigned to racial groups.” I can just imagine Warner’s response: “Most social classes and groups are understood to encompass their members all the time, no matter what” (60). We don’t have a choice in which (racial) groups we were born to, but, as per Warner’s conception, “groups” and “publics” are different; publics are voluntary. Those people who participated in the Civil Rights Movement comprised a public because they demonstrated willingness through attention. People who refused to see or hear anything pertaining to the Civil Rights Movement discourse (which admittedly, would have been very difficult) were not part of that public, even if they belonged to the “group” which was the focus of the Civil Rights Movement. 

Now what about my second question posed at the beginning of this post? How can certain publics have identity markers if they are theoretically open to anyone (which seems to be a low threshold indeed)?

Warner observes that his theoretical definition does not always match the description of publics in practice. He says that a public “appears to be open to indefinite strangers, but in fact selects participants by criteria of shared social space (though not necessarily territorial space), habitus, topical concerns, intergeneric references, and circulating intelligible forms (including idiolects or speech genres)” (75).

In other words, a public is sort of pre-determined just based on the language of its discourse, area or medium of its circulation, etc. We have reached the chicken and egg conundrum Warner mentions earlier (check out Anjeli’s post on this). Perhaps when I presupposed publics guided by values, I was really misidentifying the chicken and egg concept; on a superficial level, the two appear the same.

“Public discourse circulates, but it does so in struggle with its own conditions” (Warner 76).

Definitions and Considerations

Prior to reading the texts for our Public Rhetoric & Writing class, I thought that “public” meant the people you’d interact with outside your familial arrangement and/or living space—that is, that location and relational familiarity dictated the bounds of public and private. However, I’ve come to realize that “public” is a much more complex concept.

In his “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” Habermas outlines the/a public as

1. Reasoned and well-informed citizens (50)
2. Who freely gather together, without recrimination from state (49)
3. To discuss matters of general interest (49)
4. Which could potentially challenge the state and determine political policies and decisions (49-50)

The authors of Rhetoric in Civic Life note that essential to Habermas's definition of public sphere is communication; the public sphere isn't defined merely by "a particular group of people, a location, or a set of topics" (238). Because communication intrinsically involves rhetoric, I decided to think about the public sphere in terms of the rhetorical situation model.

*Note: I realize that my graphic violates the “don’t use the word in your definition of the word” taboo; under the “Rhetors/Audience” section I have strong and/or weak public. However, as Nancy Fraser makes clear, a “public” isn’t created in a vacuum; rather, we can observe in democratic societies a multiplicity of publics, many of which are in conversation with the others.

Usually we construct something from the inside to the outside, but think of this graphic as being constructed from the outward-in; the outer parts must be established before the inner parts could become fully realized. Rhetors come up in response to an exigence (Palczewski et al. 261), and at least in the case of publics, the constraints determine who gets to be a rhetor or not.

You’re probably wondering why the word “power” is slapped clear across the graphic. Palczewski et al. sum it up well: “As with all communication, power plays a role” (237). If all (or most of) the power in the government is relinquished to one source, as in a monarchy, then publics (as we think of them) cannot form because people don’t have the freedom to assemble—much less have the authority to do anything about what they discuss or to “make political decisions subject to appeal” (Habermas 55).

“What counts as a general issue can change over time” (Palczewski et al. 240), but who decides what counts as a general issue? Who determines the validity of counterpublics? A public is composed of “informed individuals”—but of course, to the dominant public, the counterpublic may seem unreasonable. The possible answer to these questions: the people with power. But how do these people come to power? I think by discourse; Fraser describes how finding new language gave the women’s rights movement recognition and acceptance in some public spheres (67).

So power plays a role in establishing discourse—but discourse may also play a role in who gains power. Though power is not explicitly mentioned as a factor in Habermas’s definition of the public sphere, I think it is an “invisible” aspect worth further investigation.