Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis

6. Inquiry as Social Action

| 163 Inquiry as Social Action I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them. —Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project There will always be a tension between what rhetoric makes and what “makes” or produces rhetoric. —Thomas Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric” I mentioned in chapter 1 that we needed to cultivate public subjects who are capable of imagining themselves as situated within many complex networks. Not only are we all located within a specific home-work nexus, but we are also located within regional, national, and global networks. Furthermore, each of us is situated within transhistorical and transspatial networks of place. The choices we make for ourselves have effects on future times and places that do not only parallel our own lives. Thinking through these networks demands an ability to imagine the incongruent and asymmetrical networks within which our agency is lodged. I pointed to the BP oil spill and the call for boycotting stations as an example of thinking in terms of networks. People were understandably outraged by the events that unfolded around the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion. Negligence by BP seemed to have contributed to the explosion and subsequent spill, and stopping the flow initially seemed to be out of anyone’s power. We watched helplessly as oil spewed into the water while BP unsuccessfully tried endless tactics to stop the spill. Of course, none of us wanted to 6 164 | INQUIRY AS SOCIAL ACTION feel helpless; we wanted to act. Not surprisingly, one of the most visible and organized calls to action was the national boycott against BP gas stations. Emails , Web sites, letters, and even flyers asked drivers to pass BP filling stations the next time they needed gas. No matter how good it feels to drive past a BP station, truly sustainable thinking demands that we think about this crisis across incongruent and asymmetrical networks. The gas sold in BP gas stations is actually extracted and refined by a number of other companies, with only a small amount of BP additives mixed in near the end of the process (Lieber). But, more importantly , driving past a BP station and into another gas station does not solve the problem of petroleum mining, which led to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Choosing Exxon or Mobile gas still supports the same system that causes problems over time (Begley). Boycotting BP does not consider how drilling is spread asymmetrically across many networks, including across international networks that often remain invisible. Although the Deepwater Horizon spill gained much attention at home, even greater oil spills in the Niger Delta have been happening for decades without much awareness in the United States. The popular call for us to boycott BP gas stations fails to place the event within multiple networks, which ultimately would call for us to consider much more dramatic changes than where we fill up next time. Sustainable futures demand that we think about ourselves as beings who exist in multiple and asymmetrical networks. Intervention must also happen within networks; public subjects are never single. Therefore, becoming oriented to the public sphere is never simply a matter of joining publics or counterpublics. Whether or not we know it, we are already part of multiple networks. We are already in a relation to others and to the world. Transformative rhetoric thus requires that we learn how to think of ourselves within these multiple networks, and also how they might be otherwise construed. One of the questions motivating me is how we can encourage public subjects who are capable of using the communicative moment to critically address changing landscapes. How can we encourage subjects who can make ethical judgments (krisis) about those changes, and who can work to rebuild and reimagine spaces for public discourse? We must pursue inquiry as a mode of publicness. My publics approach to place crisis means that I recognize an advantage to interrogating public discourse in order to investigate how it produces more or less effective subjects who can intervene in sustainable futures. But it also means that I see public talk itself as our best hope of making a change. By transforming the kinds of subjects that public talk makes, we can transform the kinds of rhetorical actions those subjects make. INQUIRY AS...