Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

SECTION II: Public Deliberation as Rhetorical Practice

section ii public deliberation as rhetorical practice Robert Hariman’s observation that “democracy depends on crafting in speech and writing a distinctive form of consciousness that is simultaneously—and often awkwardly and even contradictorily—public and social” (2007, 222) might serve as a motto for this section, in which several scholarly approaches to deliberative democracy and vernacular rhetoric come together in a shared interest in exploring ways of bettering civic life by sustaining and improving communities through critical analysis. Part 1 of this section brings together studies that have as common themes the multifarious discursive challenges that meet a person wishing to participate in public debate, and the ways in which individuals and groups craft their rhetorical responses. From different disciplinary and theoretical starting points, the following four chapters discuss how participants in contemporary public debate meet the challenges of arguing effectively while also attending to other communicative tasks such as maintaining a tolerable atmosphere in spite of deep-seated disagreements or conflicts of interest. A recurring theme is finding constructive elements in communicative practices that ordinarily are considered unconstructive, such as being provocative or evasive. Considering Norms of Communicative Behavior In the first chapter, Italo Testa, a philosopher, challenges a commonly assumed norm of mutual respect in debate. He argues that an a priori respect for other debaters as persons is not a prerequisite for true deliberative debate, but that such respect might also have negative effects and lead to fallacious paths of thought. The demand for moral (equal) respect for persons per se as a necessary condition for public discourse could in fact hinder dialogue and prevent the search for some agreement between parties who may not respect one another as persons but nevertheless could respect as legitimate the values, beliefs, and preferences held by their counterparts. Testa argues that we must distinguish between respect as a static, a priori presupposition and respect as a dialogical achievement, and similarly between respect as equally due to persons and respect as potentially due to values, beliefs, and preferences we may not share but may still find legitimate. It is the second terms in these distinctions that should be seen as ground rules of deliberative discourse. Niels Møller Nielsen, like Testa, sees public debate from a general and theoretical angle. Coming from the field of pragmatic-functional linguistics, he examines it as a system in which dialectical exchanges are “embedded” in rhetorical exchanges. They represent a social, rule-governed form of behavior involving communicative roles such as protagonist and antagonist, but on a different level they serve an overarching, rhetorically oriented relationship between the media as an institution and the media audience. Whereas theories of pragmatics provide useful insights in understanding conversational negotiation of argument structure and general acceptability as a form of tacit acceptance of a cooperative norm at the dialectical level, these insights are only useful once the overlying rhetorical level is integrated into the analysis. Marie Lund Klujeff, a rhetorician and literary theorist, takes as her starting point the observation that everyday political debate often bears little resemblance to the ideals espoused by academic theorists and the norms considered to be in place. She looks to rhetorical forms often considered inappropriate in public deliberation and argues that provocation has important functions in a public debate and should not be discarded wholesale. Her case study of an Internet-based debate is grounded in Hauser’s notion of vernacular rhetoric and explores the way in which this contentious debate reflected norms of civic engagement. Applying Hauser’s terms activity/ engagement and tolerance and discussing their possible incompatibility at a practical level, she analyzes the Gaarder-Kristol controversy over Israeli policies. Klujeff identifies traits of the provocative style and argues that it can 62 rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation serve the functions of structuring argument, forming opinions, constituting an engaged and reflective audience, and creating presence. Gaarder’s discourse is characterized as parody functioning as “refutation by mockery” as it performs the idea it attacks. In the final chapter in part 1 of this section, Ildikó Kaposi highlights the fact that discursive communities should not be evaluated on their adherence to traditional norms of argumentative exchange alone, but that we would be well advised to recognize that a broad range of communicative action takes place, some of which has less to do with the development of political opinions and more with affirming and maintaining the existence of the...