THE PRIVATE, THE PUBLIC, AND THE PUBLISHED

Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-577-9

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................................................viiPreface Thomas Kent.............................................................................................................................................ix1 Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric: What's at Stake? Barbara Couture...............................................................................12 Ain't Nobody's Business? A Public Personal History of Privacy after Baird v. Eisenstadt Nancy Welch...........................................................173 Virtuosos and Ensembles: Rhetorical Lessons from Jazz Gregory Clark...........................................................................................314 Keeping the World Safe for Class Struggle: Revolutionary Memory in a Post-Marxist Time John Trimbur...........................................................475 Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Speaking Picture Susan Wells.......................................................................................................596 The Collective Privacy of Academic Language David Bleich......................................................................................................797 The Essayist In-and Behind-the Essay: Vested Writers, Invested Readers Lynn Z. Bloom..........................................................................948 Upon the Public Stage: How Professionalization Shapes Accounts of Composing in the Academy Cheryl Geisler.....................................................1129 Ethical Deliberation and Trust in Diverse-Group Collaboration Geoffrey A. Cross...............................................................................12710 Identity and the Internet: The Telling Case of Amazon.com's Top Fifty Reviewers Douglas Hesse................................................................13911 The Influence of Expanded Access to Mass Communication on Public Expression: The Rise of Representatives of the Personal David S. Kaufer.....................15312 Private Witness and Popular Imagination Marguerite Helmers...................................................................................................16713 Mixing It Up: The Personal in Public Discourse Bruce Horner..................................................................................................18514 Cultural Autobiographics: Complicating the "Personal Turns" in Rhetoric and Composition Studies Krista Ratcliffe.............................................19815 Going Public: Locating Public/Private Discourse Sidney I. Dobrin.............................................................................................21616 Public Writing and Rhetoric: A New Place for Composition Christian R. Weisser................................................................................230References.......................................................................................................................................................249Contributors.....................................................................................................................................................264Index............................................................................................................................................................267

Chapter One

RECONCILING PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC RHETORIC What's at Stake? Barbara Couture

"I tried it, but I didn't inhale." It is hard not to smile at the irony of former president Bill Clinton's wan attempt to place himself on the right side of the law in public when disclosing his private use of marijuana. And the irony is doubly inflected for us, knowing-as we do now-about his duplicitous public admission that he never "had sex" with Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps there is no figure in American life for whom private life and public rhetoric are more intertwined than for our nation's president. This consequence of public life in America's most visible office is well known and well accepted.

Lately, the conflation of private life with public rhetoric has become the norm for many of us in far less visible positions, with interesting and perhaps problematic consequences. Some intrusions of public discourse into private life are legislated and involuntary: none of us who travel by air nowadays escape the public questions of a stranger about the contents of our baggage, questions often accompanied by a search of our most intimate personal belongings-including our persons!-amid a crowd of onlookers. Other such intrusions are voluntary: some of us cheerfully encourage the ubiquitous distribution of our private dalliances in public chat rooms on the Internet, for instance.

Whether by wish or by force, there is no question that private lives are increasingly becoming the subject of public expression. Consider the following (far from exhaustive) list of examples:

1. The rock star Ozzie Osbourne's family life, displayed on television twenty-four hours a day, became one of the most popular American shows.

2. A new illness, now treated by psychiatrists, is "Internet addiction"; it involves the obsessive desire of individuals to talk about themselves in public chat rooms to strangers online.

3. TV, radio, and Internet talk-show hosts invite individuals to review intimate details of their private lives in forums for public discussion.

4. Increased electronic access to personal data allows news services, consumer outlets, and government agencies to "learn" more about private citizens, with thousands of nameless employees tailoring services to private individuals, often without their direct knowledge, and contacting them by phone, mail, or e-mail.

5. Academics who teach online courses report exhaustive involvement in public e-mail discussions of individual students' responses-often personal-to classroom materials, discussions viewed by entire classes.

The increased forced and voluntary opportunities to make the private doings of many or most of us the subject of public rhetoric have consequences for its function, content, and form-consequences that not only provide topics of interest for scholars and challenges for teachers of writing and speech, but that also affect the potential utility of public rhetoric in the service of the common good.

One could argue, of course, that rhetoric, by definition, is not necessarily an art in service of the common good; by far, its most common interpreted function is "persuasion"-with no assumption made as to whether the goal is to persuade for good or ill. Yet in the grand tradition of classical humanistic education, the aim of teaching the rhetorical arts has always been and today remains to prepare students to contribute to the public good. James Zappen, for one, made the point convincingly over a decade ago, arguing for a "pluralistic rhetoric" in the teaching and writing of technical and managerial discourse that encourages writers to serve organizational goals while relating decision making to the greater good (Zappen 39).

The question for our contributors, responding in this volume to the growing tendency to confuse and conflate private lives with public rhetoric, is this: Does this blending of the private and the public in speech and writing contribute to the public good? Or is increased confusion over the boundaries of the public and the private in communication a bad thing? In the discussion that follows, I suggest that this increased fusing of the private and public does not bode well for public rhetoric; it does not lead to expression that contributes to the public good. In making this argument, I will define the consequences of conflating private life with public expression, giving contemporary examples of how public expression that is confused with private life obliterates the possibility of public rhetoric-that is, communication for the public good. Referring to the scholarship of philosophers and rhetoricians, I will argue further that public expression that functions effectively as public rhetoric requires a reconciliation of private concerns with the ethical demand of relating to others, concluding with some examples of approaches to the study and teaching of rhetoric that meet this aim.

CONFLATING PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC EXPRESSION

We have many amusing and some pathetic examples of the tendency of some individuals to make their private lives the subject of ubiquitous public expression. Cited earlier was the "glass house" example of Ozzie Osbourne and his family, whose public exposure of their private lives has led many to conclude that the rich and famous-at least those who appear to have grown up on the same side of the tracks as we-are not all that different. They argue, curse their spouses and children, do goofy things, have disgusting personal habits, and harbor questionable prejudices-just like us. As Internet users, we have daily access to the twenty-four-hour "Webcams" of persons who have invited us into their rooms, the personal Web pages and diaries of yet others, and the dominators of public chat rooms who reveal their personal likes and dislikes to hundreds.

Such voluntary exposs of private life on the public scene are not new: we are all familiar with the appeals of the lovelorn and love-happy in newspaper want ads and with the occasional ebullient suitor who skywrites a declaration of love or proposal of marriage. All of these public expressions of private business appear quite harmless, though perhaps annoying. Yet even voluntary "harmless" exposure of private life in the public forum can have deleterious consequences. Many find worrisome, for instance, the talk-show exposs of Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones, where individuals choose to reveal personal secrets before millions of onlookers whose prurient interest is piqued by the emotional trauma that enfolds before their eyes when the speaker's relatives and friends learn as we do about the speaker's faults and transgressions.

What is common to these examples of private life revealed in public expression is the effort to use identity as a way to reach and influence someone else. The aim is either to erase the distinction between the communicator and the audience-there being nothing private about me that is not shared with you-or to confront an audience with one's identity, as does the talk-show guest, revealing secrets that effectively reduce the significance of someone else in public.

In short, this conflation of private life with public expression demands that the audience absorb, deny, refuse, or obliterate difference, specifically what is different from the identity of the speaker. Ozzie Osbourne's family and the twenty-four-hour Webcam hosts have imposed their lives on the public, giving us the options of finding ourselves to be the same as Ozzie or the Webcam host, denying or refusing affiliation with the likes of them, or obliterating them by simply "turning them off." Such communication of one's private life as an expression to the public does not contribute to a development of some shared understanding of what it is to be human because there is no shared effort on the part of either the exposer or the voyeur to reach a mutual understanding of this communication.

Private life that functions as public expression in the modes just described poses no unavoidable threat: we can always choose not to participate in the imposed assimilation of or conflict with the private identity being thrust upon us. But what happens when private lives conveyed through public expression become representative-exclusively-of the interests and welfare of others? In short, when a public expression of private life becomes the standard for public participation? This phenomenon has been treated by a number of prominent scholars lately, notably by Jacques Derrida in his philosophical treatise on the ancient concept of friendship as a form of identity politics that was opposed to democracy. In composition studies, Dianne Rothleder similarly has explored private identity as a substitute for public expression as this substitution figures in rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy.

In Politics of Friendship, Derrida tells us that the classical valorization of personal friendship as a virtuous activity-one that assumes accepting a person as a friend, unconditionally, despite his or her faults and regardless of reciprocal devotion-had a dark side that intruded upon public political life. He explores what he claims to have been Nietzsche's nagging question about the nature of friendship, that is, how does one maintain a friend without having enemies, without identifying those who are excluded from the circle of friendship? Derrida extends this concern to the framework of public policy: to define the bonds between compatriots as friendship is to assume that those outside this bond are enemies of the state. The classical concept of friendship held these consequential political overtones.

Nietzsche, claims Derrida, was also troubled by the classical conception of friendship, seeing there a contradiction that calls into question not only the antithesis of friendship and enmity, but also by extension all antitheses, including good and evil, truth and error. Nietzsche was obsessed with a comment on friendship often repeated by Aristotle, and later noted by Montaigne, that Aristotle had attributed to a sage who lay dying: the old wise man whispers to a young friend, "O my friend, there is no friend." Derrida claims that Nietzsche found this comment so intriguing because it disguises a truth about friendship as classically conceived.

The sage says to his friend that there is no friend because friendship cannot exist without the possibility of enemies. To believe in enemies is to hold the possibility of friendship. But a deeper truth concealed in this phrase, suggests Nietzsche, is one far more maddening: friendship, unconditional friendship, hides from truth. True friends ignore the faults of one another, keeping a silence that is required to keep friends, to close a circle against a presumed enemy. The closed classical conception of friendship involves, as Derrida tells us, "making each other laugh about evil. Among friends" (56). We do not need to look far for contemporary examples of this kind of friendship, a friendship closed to truth. Abuse of others handily persists in the name of friendship, by those who count one another as friends against others: be they a nation such as Nazi Germany, a faction such as the ultraconservative Right, or a family that disowns a son or daughter for living a life to which its other members cannot subscribe.

What defines this kind of friendship is a closed and singular identity, a private circle of like minds, exclusive of others. This is what friendship means when self and others are linked through an exclusive bond of identity. Because it is based in loving, this kind of friendship has the moral force of virtue-yet it is a love that categorically excludes difference. It is a love that, when practiced by many, obliterates the possibility of democracy and a public forum that acknowledges and respects difference.

The forced or voluntary display of private life as public expression can have the same exclusionary effect as "classical friendship" when practiced by those who claim to represent others through this display. A striking example is the now famous spectre of Osama Bin Laden, who has addressed the public on tape while among friends and devotees from his home or other protected site. The chilling power of these messages lies in their presentation of his private identity as the emblematic representation of a virtuous friendship of the faithful that excludes nonbelievers as the enemy. It is not insignificant that these presentations, meant to be broadcast publicly, were made in his home or barracks, exclusive of any site where a public other may reside or be acknowledged. Through this private communication in public he has imposed an identity on the public that speaks to and acknowledges no one but himself and those who have become as himself. For Bin Laden-who remains hidden or dead as I write-this private life or identity expressed in public but not interacting with the public is the standard for public interaction in the closed society he advocates; on his terms, private life as public expression is the model for public rhetoric.

For public expression to function as public rhetoric requires a reconciliation of private identity with the ethical demand of relating to others. This movement cannot occur if we merely substitute private identity for public expression. And it cannot occur if we hold that our identity is defined and preserved through excluding rather than acknowledging others. In short, to transform private life as public expression into a public rhetoric is to transform private identity.

FROM PUBLIC EXPRESSION TO PUBLIC RHETORIC

It is important to elaborate at this point what is at stake in distinguishing public expression from public rhetoric, that is, in distinguishing a "private life made public" from the reconciliation of private life with the ethical demand of relating to others. I have already noted that the imposition of private life through public expression can only be accepted, rejected, or obliterated by the audience responding to such display. Such public expression of private life allows no opportunity for a shared understanding of identity developed through acknowledging or listening to others, a conversation that may result in the speaker reconsidering his or her identity in light of what is learned about others and vice versa.

One could argue that a reconsideration of identity is not needed-or desired-in a community of speakers who are already satisfied with their shared identity and interactions among their members. One can imagine, for instance, a small town, an industry, or an academic department where like minds have created tight friendships based on shared identity-places where presumably no one feels excluded. Public expression in these domains easily can be relegated to a mayor, executive, or department head whose private desires, beliefs, and affiliations expressed in public are assumed to be-and, in fact, are-representative of the group. We can imagine, for instance, a mayor who speaks for everyone when he talks of the dangers of building a public housing unit that will attract jobless immigrants "not like us," an executive who strikes in her board of directors a single chord when she calls a family-leave plan "bad for business," or a department chair receiving nods of approval when he rejects a job candidate's scholarship as lacking the test of rigor as applied to himself and, of course, others already in the department. We can draw a picture here of an ideal social group in which conflict does not exist about the identity the group shares.

The problem with limiting public expression to such displays of singular identity, as these examples suggest, is not so much that the speech reflects the homogeneous identity of the speaker with the group as that it does not leave an opening for debate about that identity. And why is this important? It is important because private identity accepted as public without debate poses a threat to an open society and this in turn threatens pursuit of an ancient value that stands above identity, affiliation, and social politics-truth itself.

(Continues...)

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