Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship

Bibliographic Data

ID7093574
AuthorsRobert Asen (corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume101
Issue1
Pages132-144
Publication date2015-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueQuarterly Journal of Speech (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0033-5630 • E-ISSN: 1479-5779
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00335630.2015.999983
OpenAlexW1982735975
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Pursuing a melioristic turn in rhetorical scholarship, this essay considers public sphere scholarship as a mode of critical engagement. Addressing the generative work of Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, and G. Thomas Goodnight, I discuss how each theorist, in different ways, develops projects that resonate with the spirit of critical theory by recognizing the mutually informative relationship of theory and practice and by seeking emancipatory alternatives to the established order. I then explicate how rhetorical scholars have deployed counterpublic theory to produce critical analyses of the dynamics of multiple publics, inclusion–exclusion, and equality–inequality. Looking forward to future scholarship, I issue a methodological call for fieldwork as a complement to textual analysis as well as explorations of locally and transnationally situated publics.Keywords: Critical TheoryPublic SphereCounterpublicFieldworkMeliorism Notes[1] Forbes I. Hill, “Reply to Professor Campbell,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 4 (1972): 454–60; Forbes Hill, “A Turn against Ideology: Reply to Professor Wander,” Central States Speech Journal 34, no. 2 (1983): 121–26.[2] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Conventional Wisdom—Traditional Form: A Rejoinder,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 4 (1972): 453. See also Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Response to Forbes Hill,” Central States Speech Journal 34, no. 2 (1983): 126–27.[3] Campbell, “Conventional Wisdom,” 454.[4] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 184.[5] Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (1968; New York, NY: Continuum, 1992), 208.[6] Horkheimer, “Critical Theory,” 224.[7] Horkheimer, “Critical Theory,” 229, 240.[8] Della Pollock and J. Robert Cox, “Historicizing ‘Reason’: Critical Theory, Practice, and Postmodernity,” Communication Monographs 58, no. 2 (1991): 172.[9] Pollock and Cox, “Historicizing ‘Reason,’” 172, 173.[10] Pollock and Cox, “Historicizing ‘Reason,’” 177.[11] Slavko Splichal, “Why Be Critical?” Communication, Culture, and Critique 1, no. 1 (2008): 25.[12] Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989), 88.[13] Habermas, Structural Transformation, 56.[14] Pollock and Cox, “Historicizing ‘Reason,’” 176.[15] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 27–28.[16] John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 14: 1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 226.[17] Dewey, Public, 174.[18] G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 18, no. 4 (1982): 215.[19] Goodnight, “Public Spheres,” 225, 227.[20] Dale E. Brashers and Sally Jackson, “‘Politically-Savvy Sick People’: Public Penetration of the Technical Sphere,” in Argument in Controversy: Proceedings of the Seventh SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Donn W. Parson (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1991), 287. On ACT UP members' testimony to Congress, see Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACT-ing UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 87–110.[21] Valeria Fabj and Matthew J. Sobnosky, “AIDS Activism and the Rejuvenation of the Public Sphere,” Argumentation and Advocacy 31, no. 2 (1995): 164.[22] Cindy L. Griffin, “The Essentialist Roots of the Public Sphere: A Feminist Critique,” Western Journal of Communication 60, no. 1 (1996): 21–39.[23] Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1992), 111.[24] Fraser, “Rethinking,” 123. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (1972; Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).[25] Daniel C. Brouwer, “Communication as Counterpublic,” in Communication as ...: Perspectives on Theory, ed. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 197.[26] Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003): 349.[27] Erik Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation: The Faith and Works of Counterpublicity,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 65–66.[28] Catherine Helen Palczewski, “Argument in an Off Key: Playing with the Productive Limits of Argument,” in Arguing Communication and Culture, ed. G. Thomas Goodnight (Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association, 2002), 4.[29] Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterpublic Memories,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13, no. 4 (2010): 628–29.[30] Darrin Hicks, “The Promise(s) of Deliberative Democracy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 2 (2002): 230.[31] Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (2002): 448.[32] Stacey K. Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “Reconceptualizing Rhetorical Activism in Contemporary Feminist Contexts,” Howard Journal of Communications 17, no. 1 (2006): 62.[33] Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 345–67.[34] Karma R. Chávez, “Counter-Public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition Building,” Communication Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2011): 1–18.[35] Pezzullo, “Resisting,” 350.[36] Colin Gordon, “Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality,” 16 July 2014, http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/index[37] See, e.g., Joel Penney and Caroline Dadas, “(Re)Tweeting in the Service of Protest: Digital Composition and Circulation in the Occupy Wall Street Movement,” New Media and Society 16, no. 1 (2014): 74–90.[38] U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2013), 11, 14.[39] Daniel C. Brouwer and Marie-Louise Paulesc, “Counterpublic Theory Goes Global: A Chronicle of a Concept's Emergences and Mobilities,” unpublished manuscript, 2014; Melanie Loehwing and Jeff Motter, “Cultures of Circulation: Co-Cultures and Counterpublics in Intercultural New Media Research,” China Media Research 8, no. 4 (2012): 29–38

Critical theory · Epistemology · Ideology · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Scholarship · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Law · Philosophy

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