Rough draft for analysis project

***Please note: I'm hoping to present this project in video/audio format, so that may affect or inspire your insights and comments. Also, my apologies for not having specific examples for the rhetorical analysis (I spent too much time on the background), but I've included notes to show where I'm planning to go with a few particular ideas...

The WashingtonPost  reports, “President Obama on [January 25, 2016] announced a ban on solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in the federal prison system, saying the practice is overused and has the potential for devastating psychological consequences.”

Interestingly, Amy Fettig, senior staff counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the group’s Stop Solitary Campaign, stated, “We rarely have presidents take notice of prison conditions.” (Washington Post)

Okay, so why has Obama taken notice?

Well, my guess is that a discourse about solitary confinement in prisons has given rise to a public sphere—and one big enough to attract the President’s attention.

According to a PBS documentary, solitary confinement “began in America in the 1800s as a progressive experiment to see if isolation would reform criminals. It was soon largely abandoned because prisoners didn’t reform. They lost their minds. But in the 1980s, solitary reemerged as a way to stamp out prison violence” (17:15 min). Well, that and because of rehabilitation cuts and because the prisons were overcrowded (Wired).

Researchers have documented apparent symptoms of solitary confinement in prisoners, which include extreme anxiety, anger, hallucinations, mood swings and flatness, and loss of impulse control. In the absence of stimuli, prisoners may also become hypersensitive to any stimuli at all. Often they obsess uncontrollably, as if their minds didn’t belong to them, over tiny details or personal grievances. Panic attacks are routine, as is depression and loss of memory and cognitive function. (Wired)

The Post states, “An increasing number of studies show a connection between isolating prisoners and higher rates of recidivism.” Don’t gloss over the word connection. To put into scientific terms, this means correlation, and correlations, no matter how strong, can never prove a cause and effect relationship, even in the case of solitary confinement, where the evidence seems convincing. Some prison officers warn of inmates trying manipulation—faking mental illness—to get themselves out of solitary. Still other people argue that inmates who are already predisposed to mental illness wind up in solitary.

Despite the controversy, the overall public opinion towards inmates in solitary confinement seems to have shifted dramatically. The public awareness may have been caught by research findings, but its continued attention appears to be motivated through a changed representation of the inmates in public discourse, which evolved simultaneously with the publication of research.

Examples:

Prison Break television series (beginning in 2005)

The Shawshank Redemption movie, 1994

Prison Writers website, founded 2014, gives inmates a voice/opportunity to contribute to public discourse

***Explain Asen and role of representation/imagination. Also note how different language/terministic screening contributes to a particular representation

***Symbolic action displayed by inmates, as recorded in PBS documentary; along with Prison Writers, points toward a counterpublic. Or would they be actually in the dominant public, since that public seems to be in their favor?

“[T]o convince another person of an idea, purely rational and objective argument is not enough because communication occurs though language that has judgments embedded within it” (Palczewski et al. 54). Basically, language is pathetic by nature—not pitiful like wet-cat-in-the-rain pathetic, but pathetic in the rhetorical sense, relating to emotions. What’s underneath emotion is an expression of values, and we make judgments based on values.

***Explain ideographs referenced in the changing representations

Breaking into a Public

“Although inclusion is indispensable, exclusion is never total. Sometimes, people force their way into public forums and agendas.” Robert Asen, 346

So far I’ve been thinking about public discourse in terms of texts and the speeches, newscasts, and other texts surrounding those. But what about music—isn’t music involved in the discourse as well?

Music has historically been a means for people to communicate and/or make political and social statements—just check out Shostakovich’s protest against Stalin’s regime (such a huge statement even without the aid of lyrics!). If we move a little closer to home, however, we find past music publics that exemplified what Asen discusses regarding collective imagination and representation.

Consider the minstrel songs from the 1830s; when white musicians heard the work songs of plantation slaves, they returned north, painted their faces black with cork (a kind of shoe polish), and performed shows meant to mock African Americans. Asen states that “representation historically has meant both standing for something absent and making something present” (355); through a visual and lyrical discourse, the minstrels represented (inaccurately) a people physically absent from the shows.

 Now, Asen asserts that collective imagining entails “social dialogue [which] enables the formation of opinions that did not exist prior to discursive engagement” (349). The white popular collective imagining of African Americans was turned upside down when confronted with black social/musical “dialogue”:

Most folks in the north had never heard Black music performed by Black musicians. That would change and have dramatic effect when the Fisk University Jubilee Singers  performed in the northern United States in 1867 and then on formal tour with just nine singers in 1871. While people were at first angered that the music wasn’t “minstrel show” style but rather profoundly moving concert music, the impact of actual Black music performed by Black musicians would change everything. (Funk 34)

Not only did black musicians “force their way into public [music] forums,” but they did so with profound effect. White music publics realized that this “new” music was actually quite sophisticated and enjoyable. In fact, Scott Joplin’s ragtimepiano music was a hit in most households across the country, especially after the Stock Market Crash of 1908. Both sheet music and records of the rags were available for purchase. Musicians in military bands even transcribed Joplin’s music into band arrangements (Funk 35).

Interestingly enough, even within the developing jazz scene, the counterpublic of women musicians was still barred from “manly” instruments like trumpet and clarinet and encouraged only to pursue vocals or piano. Hmm—could there be counterpublics to counterpublics? At any rate, it wasn’t until WWII when all-female swing bands swept the country and wrestled with “seeking to advance self-fashioned interpretations of their interests and needs against interpretations imposed by others” (Asen 346). (Perhaps I’ll post more on this later).

The question at the forefront of my mind while reading Asen was, “How do you change people’s minds?” In response to that question, I think Asen would once again emphasize the importance of inclusiveness within publics—even if that inclusiveness was forced from the outside.

Sources:

Asen, Robert. "Imagining in the Public Sphere." Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002): 345-67.

Funk, Eric. Sound Thinking: It's ALL Music--How Music Connects With Everything. Kendall Hunt Pub, 2015. Web.

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.

A World of Pizzazz

According to Annie Dillard, “the creator loves pizzazz” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 139). In context, the phrase refers to whatever deity Dillard imagines created the physical world. But out of context, I think her words can be used to make another significant point: the creators of text should love pizzazz since the audience is drawn to it.

The synonyms of “pizzazz” include style, glamour, zest, flair, interest, and excitement. But really, I think the word “pizzazz” is highly abstract, depending less on actual definition than the sort of reaction experienced by the hearer/reader. When I hear or read “pizzazz,” I think of oil paintings by Leonid Afremov. One of the most noticeable differences between his paintings and others is the presence of such bright colors—but then again, some other painters also use similar vivid hues. Since I don’t know much about art technique, all I can say is that Afremov’s paintings are set apart because of his…pizzazz.

So how does one write with pizzazz if we can’t even fully describe what it means? Dillard, Hancock, Kunzig, and Shreeve all offer us clues. “Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time. Landscape is the texture of intricacy” states Dillard. Similarly, the “landscape” of our writing is composed of all sorts of textures, or intricate details. This type of texture is exactly what Hancock refers to when she advises writers to “put in all your raisins (i.e., fun facts, great quotes, and interesting comparisons)” (97). The raisins are borrowed glimmers of brilliance; “you may not be able to turn a brilliant phrase yourself, but if you can recognize brilliant material when you see it, you can come close to a brilliant effect” (97). These raisins—borrowed, brilliant quotations, facts, and the like—create part of the texture. And according to Hancock, just as you can’t mess up the texture of bread pudding by adding too many raisins, so also you can’t mess up your writing by adding too much “texture.” Perhaps we may then infer that the “texture” of our writing has something to do with “pizzazz.”

According to Shreve, coupling intricate details with narrative structure is “essential” (140). Details are meant to show rather than to tell. For example, Shreve claims that “Gawande’s cool, unadorned style conveys the horror and intensity of the fire that night much better than if he were to start throwing around words like ‘horror’ and ‘intensity’” (141). Suppose I were a medical student writing about my mother, who inspired me to pursue the medical field. Rather than writing something like “My mom was very passionate about her work and enjoyed it immensely,” I would describe “Even after a full day of long hours at the hospital, I could ask my mom about her patients and still her face would light up; all the weariness seemed to fall off her as she talked about her various clients. She was like a little kid bubbling with all the news of the school day and hardly able to express it in an intelligible manner.” Again, details should show rather than tell; what does an exciting, breaking science discovery look like? “It’s a challenge, but you can construct narratives that are based almost entirely on ideas and how they developed” writes Kunzig (129). We have no excuse—we can use detailed, textural, narrative structure in our science writing for that little bit of “pizzazz” that will cause readers to exclaim, “Gee whiz!” (127).

At any rate, these texts definitely got me thinking about the strange, indescribable quality of “pizzazz” and how I might attain it in my own writing. But at least their suggestions seem especially fitted for a science feature. Perhaps the hardest part is simply opening our eyes and seeing the pizzazz already in the world—then we’d have only to transcribe that pizzazz rather than inscribe it. Dillard appropriately says, “This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz” (148).

Searching for innocence in color-patches

*Note: Sorry this post is a day late. I was really sick yesterday and was unable to finish it.

“How can an old world be so innocent?” asks Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 43). Read out of context, one would have strong grounds to argue with her. “Haven’t you glanced at a newspaper headline or flipped on a news station lately? You don’t have to look far to conclude that the world is very much not an innocent place.” And yet, Dillard asks this question after perusing the newspaper and noting the annual photographs of cute animals, the cliché Valentine or proposal, and child waiting for a push down the hill on a sled. Perhaps Dillard means that the world is not so much “innocent” as that it looks for innocence, or a fresh take and angle on something that would give respite from all the drudgery and gloom.

One of my favorite bands is Switchfoot, and they wrote a song called “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine.” (The chorus is basically the title, ha). But after watching this music video that some of Switchfoot’s fans created, I was reminded of Dillard’s chapter titled “Seeing” and her mention of the experiences of previously-blind people when they gained their sight. If you watch this video, try to watch it in terms of the “color-patches” that Dillard describes. At least for me, the video really did seem to illustrate a confusing mass of color-patches and disorienting lack of spatial reference points—which helped me better sympathize with those people who newly received their sight.

 

I promise I’m not mindlessly rambling; here’s my point: we can interpret Dillard’s story of the “color-patches” and “seeing” as a metaphor for people’s search for innocence. If shadows prove the sunshine, then perhaps we can seek hope behind the seemingly unending scenes of hopelessness. Dillard writes, “But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them” (32). We’re so used to encountering articles which are swelled with “meaning”—with agendas of all sorts. What is more agenda-less than a picture of “an utterly bundled child crying piteously on a sled at the top of a snowy hill” and captioned “‘Needs a Push’”? At first glance, maybe not much. But then again, what if the photographer means to spread awareness about parental abandonment or to promote familial values? How might we interpret the photo as a symbol for a political statement or issue? What if the photo implies the changing trends of technology and how most children entertain themselves nowadays?

And so we search for the sunshine casting the shadows, for the color-patches free from agenda, for a reversion back to our nostalgic idea of idyllic, childhood “happiness.”  But “[y]ou have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it” (C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain). We search anyway. I think perhaps this is why science features on animals are so popular. Yes, these animals are fascinating, but the features don’t often have a “so what” in terms of how this information affects people personally. Case in point: when trying to YouTube a video of the “giant water bug” Dillard writes about (8), I discovered a video on the sidebar called “Biggest Snakes in the World! SnakeBytes TV.” Upon finishing that video, I seriously watched probably four or five other videos from the same channel (this is why I typically don’t go on YouTube). The entire time I was thinking, “What am I doing? I am wasting so much time! All these videos are basically about the same thing: showing the viewer different snakes and explaining the genetics behind each. And besides, I’m scared of snakes!” But I kept watching. Why? Well…the snakes were pretty cool-looking. And maybe I was drawn to the color-patches which weren’t really color-patches at all. At any rate, I thought the “search for innocence” might be yet another reason (among the myriads) why people are drawn to science writing.