Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)

Rating:
Summary: Partisan, rhetorical politics, but still a 'common good.'
Review: In Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, Gerald Hauser hopes to rethink the discrepancy between what the political and media elite abstract as the "public sphere" and what ordinary people consider it to be. Hauser surveys political and rhetorical scholarship in an attempt to theorize a more rhetorical politics, rather than an idealistic one. By mapping the trajectory of the discourse around such cases as the Polish Solidarity movement, the Meese Commission on Pornography, and Jimmy Carter's framing of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Hauser crafts a "vernacular rhetorical model" in which partisanship is assumed and embraced rather than bracketed out.

Hauser places Juergen Habermas as his theoretical foil. Habermas proposes a notion of the public sphere as an Enlightenment ideal: the public sphere is concerned with a common good which is outside of private and partisan interests and where irrationality and inequalities can be dismissed in order to act. Like most rhetorical scholars, Hauser, however, disagrees with Habermas' ideal public sphere. According to Hauser, Habermas' Enlightenment take on public deliberation conceals the marginalized and multiple publics, excludes the citizens with a stake in the political process, frustrates the democratic notion of open access, and defies any privileging of diversity. Hauser's "rhetorical model" of the public sphere is a discourse-based, reality-based, and diversified take that encourages shared judgments. He grounds his theory in actual political discourses which prove that interest, rather than disinterest, is crucial to a vital public sphere.

While I appreciate Hauser's privileging of rhetoric as the life-blood of politics and am thrilled to read his thorough defense of partisan rhetoric, I am uncomfortable with his notions of "common good." He seems to be as goaded by his ideal of the "common good" and "dialogue" as much as Habermas' is limited by his ideal speech situation. In a summary statement, Hauser describes the "vernacular rhetoric model" as "assum[ing] that publics emerge insofar as interested citizens, often out of concern for the common good, engage in dialogue on the issues that touch their lives" (189). Looking even at early issues in Campaign 2000, for instance, the "common good" itself was hotly debated and "dialogue" was not the method of deliberation. How can the "vernacular rhetorical model" account for the most fundamental disagreements in which most citizens are the most interested? Thus, I would prefer that Hauser took a more agonistic approach in this model rather than a deliberative, dialogic one.