Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis

Epilogue

| 197 Epilogue WORKING IN THE EPI-LOGOS I struggled with what to call this short, concluding section. I could always call it a conclusion, but that designation may give the wrong impression that I will now tie up all the loose ends that have been unraveled in the last six chapters. Such a gesture would not only be artificial, it would be uninteresting . One of the claims driving this book is that we need to honor, cultivate, and revive a practice of inquiry. In exposing some of our common patterns of argumentation, as I have done here, I have not set myself up for conclusions. If anything, I have desperately sought for inclusions: an expanding archive of “vernacular voices” that helps us to understand the discourse we make and that makes us. I have included as many kinds of voices as I could find, yet there is always more to be said. When I asked friends what to call this section, Cara Finnegan suggested epilogue. Epi-logos has a strong rhetorical resonance , she remarked. I immediately agreed. This small chapter is very much an epi-logos, since it grows out of, or on top of (epi), the logoi that precede it. As I wrap up Distant Publics, I find myself asking what can or should emerge from the claims (the logoi) I made. If rhetoric is a process of knowing, doing, 198 | EPILOGUE and making, then I now face the question of what can be made and done with the knowledge generated from such analyses. Most obviously, a rhetorician can make and do discourses that cultivate stronger publics. David Zarefsky elegantly asserts that we rhetoricians have a duty to “engage in activities that respond to public issues and promote productive exchanges of ideas and participation in public discourse. These might include organizing and participating in town meetings, facilitating community-based deliberative groups such as the National Issues Forum, giving talks and writing essays on public issues, analyzing significant rhetorical texts or occasions for the benefit of public audiences” (37). In short, rhetoricians need to promote a culture of public discourse and exchanges. This is our charge. Not a bad mission. In fact, it is one that I adopt when thinking about my goals. However, in Distant Publics, I have argued that we suffer not so much from a lack of public discourse as from public discourse (very much in circulation ) that actually fosters distant, exceptional subjects. Promoting more public discourse is not necessarily our best means of making sustainable interventions . We need also to identify, analyze, question, and ultimately transform our most troubling patterns of public discourse. If we wish to change how people engage with crisis/krisis, it is this public subjectivity that must be transformed. We cannot force a change in people’s discourse habits, of course. That would be impossible. However, we can create alternative places for speaking and writing differently about problems. Instead of watching the ongoing cultivation of exceptional public roles, we can encourage ourselves and those around us to approach public problems through the guise of inquiry. These alternative spaces of writing and inquiry can help to promote a new way of being public, or of making and doing and knowing public krisis differently. In Lexington, Kentucky, I have begun a community writing space called the Pop Up Writing Project. The pop ups bring together University of Kentucky students and community groups for a brief period of time in order to record, digitize, archive, and write. The writing space itself literally “pops up” in any space or time. A pop-up event identifies specific communities, populations , organizations, sites, or happenings ahead of time and sets up a particular location and time to hold the writing event. Posters, flyers, and local media then announce the date and location of the writing event. Participants are invited to give their oral histories, tell stories, and bring artifacts (pictures, posters, and so forth) relating to this community or site. During the writing event, students set up media stations in order to record and interview the speakers, scan the artifacts, and collaboratively write de- EPILOGUE | 199 scriptions with participants. At the conclusion of each pop-up writing project , the oral histories, stories, written descriptions, and scanned media will be housed in a unique archive on the University of Kentucky’s digital humanities Web site. Each entry will be tagged...