Iowa Journal of Communication 28.2 (Fall 1996): 74-101
by Gerald J. Biesecker-Mast
"The social only exists as the vain attempt to institute that impossible object: society. Utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice." Ernesto Laclau
Meaning, Context, and Movement Studies
For many years, scholars of social movement rhetorics sought to define movement rhetorics according to broadly generalizable yet historically nuanced categories of analysis. In both theoretical proposals and case studies, scholars attempted to classify aspects of the rhetorical situation that are particular to movements, including, for example, the resources (human, financial, political, etc.) available for mobilization, the stages (inception, crisis, consummation) encountered in development, and the functions (i.e. mobilizing, influencing, resisting) provided by rhetorical practices.2 Despite a great proliferation of studies and theories, no consensus ever emerged on proper classification schemes. As one article lamented, "Place two movement theorists in a room together and they are likely to emerge with at least three typologies" (Simons, Mechling, and Schreier 794). The debates among social movement scholars concerning proper modes of analysis and classification were often contentious and in many cases could be boiled down to the basic theoretical question of whether social movements shaped or were shaped by their contexts. Objectivists argued that social movements resulted more from economic, technological, and natural causes than from rhetorical practices. Interactionists insisted on the primary importance of rhetoric by arguing that material causes were given social meaning by rhetorical practices. Among the scholars who placed greater emphasis on the centrality of rhetoric were the functionalists. Even though they often disagreed on exactly how social movement rhetoric shaped its context, functionalists generally agreed that close attention to rhetorical practices and their effects was the key to social movement analysis. Typical of the functionalist school was the statement by Charles Stewart that "rhetoric is the primary agency available to social movements for satisifying a variety of functions" (301). Other functionalists, like Herb Simons, stressed that both historical situation and rhetorical practice were necessary in a thorough critical analysis of rhetorical functions of social movement rhetorics (Requirements 2-3). In any event, most functionalists assumed, along with other social movement theorists, that 1) the task of the critic was to find the generalizable characteristics of social movement rhetorics and 2) that the rhetorical practice and the historical situation were two distinctive types of phenomena. The former assumption was undermined (although not explicitly critiqued, as far as I can tell) by social movement theorists who took what came to be called the "meaning-centered" approach to rhetorical criticism. While the latter assumption remains as yet uncontested among social movement scholars in speech communication, the former assumption was undermined by social movement theorists in our discipline who took what came to be called the "meaning-centered approach to rhetorical criticism.3
In 1975, Michael McGee, an early advocate of the meaning-centered approach, challenged rhetorical critics of social movements "directly to study 'movement' as linguistic process contained in and defined by the rhetorical situation, not the rhetorical event" ("In Search" 235). Assuming that movements are "meanings, not phenomena," McGee wrote in a later essay that "the rhetoric of social movements may become a distinctive theoretical domain, but only as a theory of human consciousness" ("Social" 233). McGee's belief that a properly rhetorical analysis of movements should focus on the "movement" that is "in the public mind," rather than the material, physical, historical events associated, say, with agitation or picketing or civil disobedience, was also held by Robert Cathcart, who, even before McGee's influential essay on "the people," had argued for the analysis of movement rhetoric according to its formal characteristics, the most important of which for him was the dialectical form of confrontation. For Cathcart, the rhetorical critic's task was to describe the specific form of the tension that emerged between the movement and the countermovement that challenged it, either from within or without. While McGee focused on the creation of a "people," (through ideographs, for example) Cathcart focused on how this "people" was fragmented into movements and countermovements. By emphasizing that social movements were meanings rather than phenomena, McGee and Cathcart suggested that social movements were best treated as the historical products of human imagination and thus not subject to such generalizable laws as might be attributed to non-linguistic phenomena. Yet both theorists presumed a chasm between the meanings created in social movement discourse and the material historical realities the rhetorics sought to represent. Thus, both theorists understood movement rhetorics to "fool" audiences into conceiving of themselves as a "people" or a "movement," an identity to which McGee ascribed the Marxist label of "false consciousness." Consequently, neither McGee nor Cathcart was able to offer a compelling explanation of the relation between rhetorical meaning and "real" events, nor to suggest how movement rhetorics "moved" from one meaning to another, depending on the recalcitrance of the context to which the movement responded.
Despite its limitations, the meaning-centered analysis of movements advocated by Cathcart and McGee inspired rhetorical critics to make their own distinctive contributions to the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on social movements, including, for example, Celeste Condit's exemplary work on abortion rhetoric and Maurice Charland's influential essay on Québécois narratives. In 1984, the work of rhetorical scholars in social movement studies was synthesized into a lengthy, magisterial article that appeared in the Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory (Simons, Mechling, and Schreier). Yet by the late 1980's "theorization about social movements ground to a halt in communication studies," as Harold Schlechtweg observed several years ago, "foundering on the shoals of definition" (1). Of course, critical studies of specific movements have continued, but with few exceptions these studies have not contributed to a rhetorical theory of social movements.4 Ironically, rhetorical scholars lost interest in social movements at precisely the moment when students of social movements in other disciplines turned their attention as never before to the relationship between language and social change (Darnovsky, Epstein, and Flacks xviii). Partly because poststructuralist accounts of cultural and linguistic practices emphasize the inherent instability of the symbolic world, social critics have turned their attention away from cultural continuity and succession to focus more on social ruptures and revolutions. Such accounts challenge the familiar assumptions among speech communication scholars that rhetorical patterns are generalizable across historical divides and that the rhetorical situation is fundamentally different from rhetoric itself. Consequently, any effort to revive social movement studies in speech communication will need to give attention to this "linguistic turn" in contemporary social theory, even as it brings the resources of the rhetorical tradition to bear on movement theory and practice.5
This essay argues that one way rhetorical studies of social movements can be freed from their current impasse of definitional pluralism is to collapse the ontological (but not necessarily the formal) distinction between the event and the situation maintained by Cathcart and McGee (and most other theorists) so that both context and meaning are understood to be given in discourse and thus vulnerable to rhetoric. Rather than force critics to seek an unlikely consensus on such generalizable factors as resources, stages, or functions, the approach I am advocating would enable critics both to historicize specific social movements according to the features of their public arguments and to explain shifts and changes in self-understanding among movement members over time and in response to both linguistic and non-linguistic exigences. Such an approach would acknowledge that people can be deceived about their interests without granting to the critic a simple access to a nondiscursive real that makes it possible to produce a patronizing analysis of popularly held meanings as merely "false consciousness." Most importantly, this approach would allow rhetorical critics to integrate into their analysis a broad variety of analytical tools, from historical materialism to structural linguistics and from literary theory to psychoanalysis, without giving up the central concern of speech communication research on social movements: public communication that shapes and is shaped by popular movements.
In what follows, I consider how the work of political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe might contribute to a rhetorical theory of social movements which accounts for both "linguistic" meaning and "material" event. More specifically, I suggest that their theorization of the functions of discourse in general and of social antagonisms in particular can help rhetorical theorists and critics read social movement rhetorics as discursive events, as constitutive social practices that make both meaning and history. Insofar as the discursive approach I am advocating seeks to understand how social movement rhetorics function in historically specific moments, this approach can be seen as an extension of the functionalist approach. Insofar as the discursive approach does not seek generalizable patterns of social movement rhetoric beyond the unstable binary structure of discourse itself nor does it maintain the ontological distinction between rhetoric and situation, this approach provides a significant point of departure from traditional functionalist approaches to social movement rhetoric.
Discourse, Antagonism, and the Rhetorical Situation
Following the lead of post-structuralist philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida and writing out of the traditions of Marxist thought, Laclau and Mouffe have offered a qualification of historical materialism that explains movements of resistance and revolution according to a theory of the discursive constitution of political hegemony, rather than through the science of material transformations in the mode of production. For them, stripping Marxist social theory of its foundationalist assumptions is warranted both because of the excesses of Stalinist totalitarianism (exercised on behalf of those uncontestible laws of history) and because of traditional Marxism's failure to explain the unanticipated contingencies of late capitalism. But their theoretical approach also offers important insights to rhetorical critics seeking to read movement texts in their social contexts while ignoring neither the data associated with "meaning" nor that associated with "phenomena" as aspects of the rhetorical situation.
Having given up on the "givenness" of class struggle as the privileged agency for historical transformation, or of the mode of production as a base that anchors an ideological superstructure, Laclau and Mouffe in their effort to posit the conditions for social transformation move beyond a description of the material conditions of social relations to the analysis of the discursive constitution of social identity. Central to their social theory is the rejection of the ontological distinction between discursive and nondiscursive practices, or as McGee would have it, between meaning and phenomena. For them, "every object is constituted as an object of discourse," and "any distinction between what is usually called the linguistic and behavioral aspects of a social practice, is either an incorrect distinction or ought to find its place as a differentiation within the social production of meaning" (Hegemony 107).6 In other words, both linguistic and non-linguistic events take place for humans within the broader horizon of discourse: the system of signs that is the condition of possibility for making sense of the world. Linguistic events are not less "real" than non-linguistic ones, since both are given "reality" by their constitution in what Foucault would call a discursive formation (Hegemony 105-106).
Understood this way, the realm of the social cannot but be a radically contingent field of political struggle, ungrounded in any positive (non-discursive) essence that can guarantee its shape or outcome (such as economics and technology as the objectivists would argue or the relations of production as the orthodox Marxists would argue or a dispensational schedule as meaning-centered theorists might argue). In fact, according to Laclau and Mouffe, it is impossible for a discursive formation to ever fully constitute social relations. As Laclau describes it in a more recent essay, "any structural system is limited" and "is always surrounded by an 'excess of meaning' which it is unable to master"; thus, "'society' as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility" (New 90). Yet, although objectivity can never be fully achieved, it must always be provisionally or partly constituted. "The social is not only the infinite play of differences. It is also the attempt to limit that play, to domesticate infinitude, to embrace it within the finitude of an order" (New 91).
While Laclau and Mouffe do not provide an explicit theory of rhetoric, the rhetorical critic can read in their work an implied theory. Rhetoric can be seen as the temporal "wiggle room" granted humans in this discursive system or, put literally, as the means by which rhetors seek to "domesticate infinitude" according to a particular shape or design. By contrast, the constraints associated with a particular rhetorical situation include those associated with the discursive system that makes the rhetorical act both possible and determinate: the hegemonic ordering of what Foucault describes as "regularities" in the discursive formation (Hegemony 105-106). This discursive system includes the constitution of both linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena (for example, both social identities and economic conditions) as well as the failures or contradictions in the constitution of such phenomena. Unlike Foucault, who is concerned with monumental historical transformations, the rhetorical critic, of course, is especially concerned with the less monumental struggles by individual rhetors to resolve the contradictions (or gaps) in the discursive system according to particular rhetorical purposes, a struggle that more often than not involves a contest for meaning. This contest is usually an argument about the proper way to "fix" the failure of the discursive system to fully establish itself through "regularities" -- common sense habits of collective thought in which certain "truths" are constituted as following naturally from given assumptions.
Laclau and Mouffe go beyond Foucault in providing a vocabulary for explaining this struggle for social meaning, central to which is the notion of "antagonism", or the experience as discursive presence of the failure or limit of objectivity. Antagonism originates from that which cannot be integrated into a specific discursive system: the Other which cannot be assimilated into a discursive system of difference and identity. "If language is a system of differences, antagonism is the failure of difference"; thus, antagonism cannot really be grasped within language "since language only exists as an attempt to fix that which antagonism subverts" (Hegemony 125). In terms of the discursive constitution of selfhood, we could say that this Other prevents me from fully constituting myself. This Other is not merely different from me, but is the excluded basis around which my self-understanding is formed, a basis that both makes possible and renders incomplete my self-constitution. To speak of this in terms of collective identities, this Other is signified by that rift in a logic, that contradiction in values, that exception to the rule, which keeps social identities on the move, always attempting to cover over their unavoidable failures. Antagonism is that which prevents, say, neo-conservatism from ever completely establishing the autonomy of the self-sufficient individual, or feminism from ever producing an uncontested sisterhood, or the men's movement from finally settling on the "masculinity" to be celebrated at a Promise Keepers' meeting or a Robert Bly drum-beating. Antagonism is a constraint that rhetorical critics must take into account for it resists those who try to shore up a discursive system just as the discursive system itself constrains those who seek to challenge it by exploiting the system's inherent antagonisms.
At this point we can respond to one of the primary criticisms of Laclau and Mouffe: that they don't provide an adequate account of the role in rhetorical situations of non-linguistic phenomena such as economic conditions or biological realities or physical obstacles. While it is true that for Laclau and Mouffe such non-linguistic phenomena are not accesible except insofar as they are constituted as the objects of discourse, the critic can still describe phenomena like economic and social conditions as constraints. Additionally, although according to Laclau and Mouffe no concrete phenomenon (such as the economy) enjoys a privileged place by virtue of it being non-discursive and therefore more fundamental than discursive events, the critic can acknowledge the place held in any given historical moment and space by, say, job status or income level or economic cycle, as a more significant constraint than, say, gender or race or geographical location (if indeed this is the case within the given historical signifying system). What Laclau and Mouffe help us notice is that at certain historical moments and in certain places, a particular locus of identification (for instance, class fix) is the most important source of motive and loyalty while at other moments people are motivated by a different set of socially constituted realities (like religious devotion, or gender, or age). At any given time, the concrete relations of production provide constraints to rhetorical practices which the critic must identify (i.e. a particular change in an economic cycle or a shift in political climate or an improvement of the conditions in which the poorest classes live). But the task of the critic is to understand the place of such relations in the discursive formation, for it is only as such relations signify within a hierarchy of values that they have any social relevance.
Furthermore, Laclau and Mouffe cannot be accused of believing that there is nothing outside of discourse. It is precisely because discourses cannot fully constitute the world -- compromised as they are by an inassimilable outside -- that they are characterized by antagonisms. Antagonisms, put differently, are symptoms of discourses' limits, of their thoroughgoing historicity. A transparent discourse that accounted for everything would constitute the end of history and the arrival of pure immanence -- and, thus, also the end of humanity. So long as we are in history, in other words, we are stuck with antagonisms that remind us of the partiality of our experience of the world, mediated as it is by discourse.
How do these antagonisms appear and how do they function? As Laclau and Mouffe describe it, the contents of a discursive terrain are given presence by their differentiation from one another as specific and unique "moments." In American society, for example, cultural differences such as musical genres, types of food, religious practices, and so on, signify on one register as a manifestation of American pluralism. Because, however, these differences function also on another register, American pluralism cannot fully establish itself. This second register that undermines the first, Laclau and Mouffe call equivalence. In an equivalence, terms that on one register signify differentiation are underwritten on a second register by what they together are assumed not to be. In American society, for example, certain clothing styles, language dialects, and musical genres are constituted within a racist chain of equivalence as the other of the white "mainstream," and are given common meaning by that which is external to them. At this point, according to Laclau and Mouffe, these differential "moments" are turned into floating "elements" whose meaning is now determined less by their positive content than by the "other" they share in common. Thus, the terrain of differences that constitutes American pluralism is subverted in this case by racial equivalences that pose white mainstream and non-white minority cultures against one another.
Thus, on this account, antagonism results from the articulation in a discursive field of a chain of equivalence that undermines the positive objectivity of the elements it includes. Elements that might at one time have appeared as different moments are identified with one another at a later time on the basis of what they are against.
We can illustrate this by reference to contemporary American political rhetoric. If a string of elements such as the following: single, mother, welfare recipient, poverty, big government, bureaucracy, waste, deficit, immorality, American decadence, and liberal welfare state, can be posed successfully (as they were for a time by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the neoconservatives) against another chain of discursive elements such as: two-parent families, self-sufficient, job-holding, middle-class, small government, efficiency, thrift, balanced-budget, morality, American civilization, and conservative opportunity society, then the elements in each chain come to have meaning only insofar as they share in common what they oppose. That is, the most significant meaning of each term is a negative one -- conservative is most importantly anti-liberal; two-parent families are most importantly not single parent families; welfare recipients are most importantly not job-holders; and so on.7 The condition of existence for the elements in one chain is now understood to be the eradication of the elements in the opposing chain. A conservative opportunity society must eradicate welfare assistance programs; a dramatic deficit must be replaced by a balanced budget; waste is replaced with thrift; two-parent families must prevail over single-parent ones; the middle class must subsume the poor; and so on.
In this sense, the 1994 Republican Contract with America was truly revolutionary even if its goals were thoroughly regressive. Any discourse that sought to extract these elements from the two chains of equivalence within which they found their meaning in order to return them as positively constituted objects to a field of differences (as illustrated, for example, by many Democrats' weak defense of the liberal welfare state) was seen as a counter-revolutionary discourse.
The rhetorical critic will give attention to other historical conditions for the Contract's rhetorical appeal, of course. The advocates of the Contract could not successfully pose the two chains of equivalence against one another except for an American version of Christianity and civil religion that granted legitimation to this "revolutionary" political construct (i.e. the Protestant work ethic, devotional and privatistic piety, personal rather than social salvation, etc). But, even here it is noteworthy that such rhetorical appeals are made to religious and moral discourses that are themselves ambiguous or even contradictory in meaning. For example, the Judeo-Christian tradition also includes teachings about compassion for the poor and challenges to individualism and selfishness that undermine the laissez-faire logic of the Contract. The tradition of American public philosophy includes both a respect for private interest derived from classical liberalism and a concern for the common good derived from early Puritanism and civic republicanism.8 It is this historic instability that Newt Gingrich and his allies sought to cover over by arguments that dismantling welfare programs constituted an act of caring (rather than caretaking, as Gingrich put it) for the poor.
Equivalence and difference, then, are always precarious discursive forms, both because of the ambiguous legacies of historical meaning to which they are indebted for their rhetorical incarnations and because of their intrinsic limitations as discursive practices. Equivalence can never completely triumph over objectivity, and difference cannot completely displace negativity. This is illustrated by the fact that while neo-conservatism is prevented from fully establishing itself because of the welfare liberalism it opposes, it is also dependent for its existence on welfare liberalism. Welfare liberalism makes possible the political identity known as neo-conservatism insofar as welfare liberalism provides the negative presence shared in common by all of the elements comprising neo-conservatism. Welfare liberalism, of course, is far from a radical political practice. Seeking to maintain a docile reserve labor force that services the unstable economic cycles of late capitalism, welfare liberalism prevents the simplification of American social differences into a class antagonism by constituting even the poor as distinctive members of the American nation, or as part of one big national family, as Mario Cuomo described it at the 1984 Democratic National Convention and in many subsequent rhetorical occasions. As he put it: "We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems ... (t)he hunger of a woman in Little Rock, our hunger ..." and so forth (649). By contrast, the rhetoric of black nationalism has sought to challenge the stable differences of welfare liberalism by linking various black businesses, religious groups, and civil rights organizations in a chain of equivalence that oppose the civic institutions and political parties of white America: "I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American," as Malcom X put it in his "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech. "I'm one of the 22 million black people who are victims of Americanism" (Smith and Robb 216-217).9
Just as black nationalism was to a significant extent constituted by the common enemy of white oppression, so was the conservative movement in America knit together during the Cold War years by the common foe of communism. With the loss of this common enemy, the Republican party has had a difficult time keeping its diverse elements (from social conservatives to economic libertarians) together, as is demonstrated by new fights in the party over the abortion platform and free trade.
I should stress that social movements can challenge the status quo either by subverting social and cultural differences through the exploitation of an antagonism or by dismantling an antagonism that structures a feature of the status quo. Labor unions and Marxist revolutionary movements have often established themselves by simplifying social differences into two chains of equivalence organized around the antagonism between workers and capitalists. Many social movements that have emerged within postmodernity have resisted the status quo through an elaboration rather than a reduction of social differences. One thinks here of cultural feminism, gay liberation, and certain movements for freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe. These movements struggle against sexual, racial, and global antagonisms in order to create new forms of social and political autonomy (such as gay marriages or independent nation states for example) for specific groups within a democratically constituted public or international sphere.10
A society structured not by some underlying essence but by the open-ended struggle for meaning just described is characterized neither by an integrated totality nor by meaningless chaos but rather by the partially fixed yet historically contingent system of regularities that Laclau and Mouffe (following Gramsci) call a hegemonic formation. This system of regularities includes the equivalences and differences that structure the dominant common sense as well as the central figure or "nodal point" around which these regularities are established. This "nodal point" varies from one moment to the next, but in any given instance it is granted the power to organize a social-discursive field. For neo-conservatism, perhaps, the nodal point of the hegemonic bloc that won the 1994 congressional elections was the unbalanced budget. The success with which conservatives made the unbalanced budget a significant exigence in American public discourse shifted the whole terrain of argument to their advantage and to the Democrat's disadvantage, insofar as every social program (except for the military) was called into question, not in terms of its efficacy, but in terms of its cost.
This notion of a "nodal point" is somewhat similar to Lloyd Bitzer's description of a "controlling exigence" insofar as a nodal point, like a controlling exigence, shapes the rhetorical response. For Bitzer, "In any rhetorical situation there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions as the organizing principle: it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected" (7). The difference, however, between Bitzer's concept of exigence and Laclau and Mouffe's notion of "nodal point" is crucial. For Bitzer the exigence is given outside of discourse and therefore external to the rhetorical act, whereas for Laclau and Mouffe, the nodal point is produced in discourse.11 While for Bitzer, the exigence is an event external to discourse that can be transformed through rhetorical practices, for Laclau and Mouffe, the nodal point is an element given in discourse that is both constructed and transformed through rhetorical practices. The critical outcome is dramatically different, depending on which approach one takes. Following Bitzer's notion of exigence, for example, the critic would primarily focus on how Republicans responded rhetorically to a non-rhetorical fiscal crisis and turned this crisis to their advantage. Using the notion of nodal points, on the other hand, the critic would also search out the discursive means by which the fiscal crisis became constituted as a crisis to begin with (starting with the very notion of a deficit itself), as well as how these discursive means carried within themselves the seeds of their own deconstruction.
Laclau and Mouffe's social theory offers much to rhetorical critics who seek to understand the relation between movement rhetoric and social transformation and to avoid either valorizing an empirical truth against which they can reveal a false consciousness or reducing movement rhetorics to a series of stages or predictable forms. Conversely, the close attention rhetorical critics pay to specific historical texts can supplement Laclau and Mouffe's social theory by demonstrating how antagonism gets played out in actual practice -- how discourse is activated and made to move audiences. I suggest that rhetorical critics of social movements can significantly advance our understanding of the relation between rhetoric and social change by reading the historical-rhetorical situations addressed by movement rhetorics according to the limits and possibilities of discursivity as proposed by Laclau and Mouffe.
Exigence, Audience, Constraints
What, then, are the specific tasks for the critic who seeks to read social movement rhetorics as discursive events? Before discussing the assumptions that will guide close readings of actual texts, I wish to elaborate how the critic will treat the three central historical components of the rhetorical situation that shape and are shaped by social movement texts: exigence, audience, and constraints.12
1. Exigence
First, the critic must describe the specific historical exigence that makes possible a movement rhetoric, and how that exigence is constituted as an unacceptably desperate and unnecessarily existent need. The critic will seek to understand how this event or circumstance comes to exceed the logic whereby the status quo had previously been understood as acceptable. In so doing, the critic must be attentive to the constitutive hope that defines the future for the movement, the imagined state of affairs in which the exigence would be missing and the movement's goal(s) accomplished. Considering that there may be numerous exigences that create identification with a movement, the critic should look for a "controlling exigence" that comes to function as a "nodal point" of a resistant discourse -- as that central element that gives meaning to other subsidiary concerns. Since the hegemonic formation that constitutes the status quo will also be organized around a nodal point, the critic should give attention to rhetorical strategies used by the movement to dislocate the nodal point for the status quo.
2. Audience
Second, the rhetorical critic should show how a movement rhetoric constitutes its audience as an oppressed or threatened people that is established over and against an oppressing or threatening people or institution. To do so will require attention to the myths and narratives that provide the basis for continuity with a specific past.13 Such analysis should explain how these narratives are invoked and/or rewritten so as to vindicate the movement's actions in the present and to invest the audience with a collective identity. Most importantly the critic will seek to understand the means whereby previously acceptable differences between the oppressor and the oppressed are subverted and turned into an unresolved antagonism that comes to constitute the basis of the audience's identity or, conversely, how harmful social antagonisms (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc) are disengaged for the sake of plurality and difference (and thus justice).
3. Constraints
Thirdly, critics will attend to the specific conditions of possibility for the emergence of an articulating subject, a rhetor (or rhetors) capable of rhetorically rearranging the elements of a social discourse so as to produce a movement whose constituents are opposed to a specific aspect of the status quo. Among these constraints will be the availability to rhetor-leaders of educational and ideological resources for critique, useable traditions of socialization, and media outlets for message dissemination. Additionally, the critic will need to consider what specific forms of ethos can render legitimate a rhetor's effective constitution in popular rhetoric of a movement-producing chain of equivalences or collection of differences.
For a brief illustration of how these categories of analysis might be applied to a specific movement, I turn to a religious movement that has recently emerged to challenge Newt Gingrich's Contract and to oppose the presumed egregious effects of the neoconservative agenda on both the country's safety net and on the nation's moral character. This religious movement to contest both welfare liberalism and neoconservatism is being led in the Jewish community by Michael Lerner and among evangelical Christians by Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. Importantly, these rhetor-leaders mean to offer a left-leaning and religious alternative to the neoconservative political program of the religious right, especially as it has been popularized by the Christian Coalition.14 Acknowledging the legitimacy of certain neoconservative themes such as personal responsibility, family values, and religious commitment, and repudiating certain traditional left-liberal premises as economic and social determinism, personal moral autonomy, and cultural relativism, Michael Lerner's plea for a "Politics of Meaning" and Jim Wallis's "Call to Renewal" have sought to gather into effective political coalitions people of different denominational backgrounds and from both lower and middle class locations who share a religious and political opposition to a common exigence: the agenda of neoconservatism. Arguably, the possibility of such coalitions rests to a significant extent with such constraints as the change in economic circumstances faced by the middle class in the wake of the shift to a service economy, the new corporate culture of downsizing, and the decline of middle class incomes in terms of real buying power. Yet, the left has had little luck in making use of economic injustice as a controlling exigence to anchor its broader political program. In the context of these constraints, the Politics of Meaning and the Call to Renewal seeks to underwrite a new set of equivalences (including concerns for economic injustice, racial prejudice, gender discrimination, environmental degradation, etc.) with the controlling exigence of spiritual decay. On this spiritual basis, it seeks to create an identification among different groups who share a common anxiety about the spiritual implications of the neoconservative agenda. As Michael Lerner wisely noticed, many working class Reagan Democrats were attracted to the Republican party because they identified with the language of family and moral values more than with the Democrats' language of economic empowerment and social equality. Lerner's analysis of this shift in loyalty owes much to the terms of psychoanalysis, which gives more attention to psychic and spiritual realities than to traditional left-Marxist categories of economics and material conditions. For those who have joined in these movements, the articulation of a spiritual exigence for political commitment (through popular periodicals, nationwide ethics conferences, and staged protests at the U.S. Capitol) has provided a motivation to struggle against neoconservative policies.15 Most significantly (and in an explicit appeal to the spiritual concerns made popular partly by the religious right) the exigence of troublesome neoconservative policies as constituted within these movements has become defined as a spiritual-moral problem more than an economic or political problem. Put differently, within the rhetoric of the Politics of Meaning and the Call To Renewal, the economic and political injustices perpetuated by the neoconservatives or the corrupted welfare state are symptomatic of a more fundamental spiritual crisis facing the country.
A rhetorical analysis of these movements as discursive events would need to examine how this assumption of spiritual decay is established as the most compelling exigence thrown up by the Gingrich revolution. The analysis would consider the movements' appeals to religious narratives, including the Torah and other Scriptures, as well as the respective historical appropriations of those narratives by modern Judaism and evangelical Christianity. Furthermore, the critic would need to give attention to the obstacles that undermine the establishment of these movements' identities. Within the Call to Renewal (the evangelical counterpart to the Politics of Meaning) for example, a recent rift has emerged between opposing factions regarding the movement's positions on homosexuality and abortion (Call). In the context of evangelical Christianity -- a religious terrain dominated by the hegemony of the traditional, middle class, male-headed, heterosexual family -- the establishment of a new set of equivalences that extends from the poor to women to sexual minorities on the basis of moral principle cannot but encounter serious difficulty. The critic must give attention to how these movements finesse (or fail to finesse) such disruptions in the establishment of strategic collective identities.
To summarize, each of the constituents of the rhetorical situation ought to be read as managing or exploiting the antagonisms that constitute society's limit. That is to say, the rhetorical critic must not only demonstrate the rhetorical means by which a movement rhetoric works, but also expose the discursive constraints which it seeks to transcend. This dual concern for both success and failure should also guide the critic's close readings of the actual texts of the movement, as we will now see.
Utopian Texts and Social Movements
Implicit thus far has been the assumption that social movement rhetorics are by definition utopian texts. By this I mean that such texts seek to construct a world that is otherwise than the present and to create audience identification with this world that is otherwise. Far from simply reacting to situational controlling exigences, social movement texts actually narrativize the context to which they are responding even as they place that context in tension with that something other toward which they are striving. Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech provides a good example of how a movement text both narrativizes the specific exigence that demands resolution (through metaphors of poverty amidst plenty, oppression amidst freedom, and injustice amidst justice, and so on) and a world that is otherwise than the present (I have a dream, etc.) (Washington 217-220). Furthermore, Martin Luther King's speech challenged American racial injustice in terms that have underwritten most historic American hegemonic formations. In other words, King spoke inside not outside what Frederic Jameson has called "the general unity of a shared code" (84). In the case of King's speech, this included American values of liberty, justice, equality, as found in the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and patriotic hymns.
The rhetorical critic can thus locate in specific movement texts the historical antagonisms of the larger discursive formation within which the texts operate. The critic's job is to describe how the movement text subverts the shared hegemonic code by using the available means of persuasion -- the elements of that very code -- against a status quo that is also legitimated by that code. The movement text, in other words, is to be read as the transformative link between social identity and political-economic interests, as the roadmap to a better world, as the transportation by which selves and bodies are together moved to a new place.
The rhetorical text, then, far from simply providing a consciousness of movement in people's minds, constitutes the world in such a way that the movement can be experienced as a transformative event. The form of resistance to the consciousness altering work of such movements is not merely a countermovement that challenges from without or within but is that which constitutes the very limit of the movement's logic, the specific shape of the antagonism upon which the movement has constituted itself. The critical practice I am proposing here is, in other words, one which looks at social movement rhetorics as utopian narratives that are themselves riven by the mutual dependence of what they oppose and what they hope for, a relation that both moves history forward and produces new exigences which must be rhetorically managed and exploited. The critic can read, for example, Martin Luther King's exploitation of capitalist metaphors in the "I Have A Dream Speech" as signifying the limits of King's critique of American racism; for if American justice is likened unto a bank, why should we believe that all will have equal access to its resources? The failure of this reworking of the master code both figuratively and literally signifies the recognition of another exigence, namely the maintenance of racism on the register of the economic, to which King's later rhetoric responded with a more elaborate critique of capitalism itself (Washington 245-252).
We return in conclusion to Cathcart's notion of confrontation, something that I contend should remain central to the critic's reading of movement texts. So far, I have suggested that we can expand the usefulness of this notion of confrontation by extending its meaning to include not only the clash of movement and countermovement, but also the tension within any movement between difference and equivalence. Expanding "confrontation" thus entails broadening the job of the critic to include the analysis of several confrontations: between meaning and antagonism, between hegemony and subversion, and between a movement's promise and its inherent limits. It is in these confrontations that one can locate the discursive conditions for the existence of countermovements that are identified with the dominant reading of the master code and thus with the status quo. The story that the movement critic seeks to tell is that of the adaptation of movement rhetorics to the ongoing crisis of their own limits, of the exploitation of these limits by countermovement rhetorics, and of the stubborn human refusal to give up the struggle.
Notes
1. This paper is the revised version of a presentation given on November 21, 1995 during the 81st Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association in San Antonio, TX. I am grateful to Susan Biesecker-Mast for her many helpful suggestions about how to improve the argument of the essay.
2. For a good survey of these numerous approaches see the articles that appeared in the Winter 1980 and Spring 1983 issues of Central States Speech Journal (Griffin, McGee, Zarefsky, Lucas, Cathcart, Andrews, Smith, Stewart, and Simons).
3. While some theorists have gone so far as to say that rhetoric defines or creates its context, no one has sought to challenge the ontological distinction between rhetoric and reality.
4. One important critical study that employed Gramsci's notion of hegemonic blocs to describe the discursive exigences faced by contemporary Native American movements for cultural autonomy was the essay by Richard Morris and Philip Wander on Ghost Dance rhetoric.
5. For a good analysis of the relationship between rhetorical studies and social theory, see Maurice Charland's article, "Rehabilitating Rhetoric: Confronting Blindspots in Discourse and Social Theory." According to Charland, "The corrective that critical and cultural theory, including 'cultural studies,' can bring to rhetorical studies is an adequate theorization of the place of discourse, the forces that put it in place, the ideological and affective grounds from which it proceeds, and the silences that are imposed" (263).
6. This is not to say, of course, that there is nothing outside discourse. To clarify Laclau and Mouffe's understanding of the relation between discourse and that which is outside it, I quote them at length: The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of 'natural phenomena' or 'expressions of the wrath of God', depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence" (Hegemony 108).
7. A recent investigative article in The New Yorker reveals that the Gingrich "revolution" had its rhetorical origins in a 1980 post-election conservative strategy session led by Newt Gingrich: It was there ... that Gingrich's slogan 'Conservative Opportunity Society' was formulated; its rhetorical opposite was 'Liberal Welfare State.' A Gingrich handout from that time puts those two phrases at the top of the page; under each are listed the simplistic, shorthand polar opposites that he has since promulgated in thousands of speeches, in his televised college course, and in his two non-fiction books (Bruck 55-56).
8. See William A. Schambra's essay, "The Roots of the American Public Philosophy," for a compelling account of the multiple origins and conflicting assumptions of American political ideology.
9. Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech is a classic case of the construction of a chain of equivalences in opposition to a common enemy. The speech explicitly asked blacks to put aside their internal differences in order to effectively challenge white America: Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must learn to forget our differences. If we have differences, let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the (white) man. If the late President Kennedy could get together with Khrushchev and exchange some wheat, we certainly have more in common with each other than Kennedy and Khrushchev had with each other (215).
10. For a good discussion of numerous historical transformations in the types, goals, and strategies of new social movements, see the book Transforming the Revolution. Social Movements and the World-System by Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
11. Barbara Biesecker's essay on "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation From Within the Thematic of Differance" has challenged Bitzer on this point by making exigence itself a rhetorically produced constituent. See also Richard Vatz on this point.
12. I am relying here on the categories provided in Lloyd Bitzer's classic essay on "The Rhetorical Situation," but with the qualifications offered by Richard Vatz in his essay on "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation." Vatz correctly insists that in order for a situation to be rhetorical, it must be so inscribed by a rhetorical act. For Vatz, rhetoric doesn't simply reflect a situation, but has much to do with creating it in the first place (158-159). My essay seeks to follow Vatz's lead by providing a detailed explanation of how the rhetorical practices of social movements actually construct specific historical situations along certain lines.
13. A good analysis of social movement rhetorics according to how they constitute a "people" is provided by Maurice Charland in his "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Pueple Québécois."
14. Both Michael Lerner and Jim Wallis have been writing and working as activists since the glory days of the New Left in the 1960's. But their voices have taken on new relevance and gained newly receptive audiences since the dramatic takeover by neo-conservative and far-right Republicans of both chambers of the U.S. Congress in the 1994 elections. For a popular statement of Lerner's political and religious philosophy, see Jewish Renewal. Jim Wallis's recent argument for religious involvement in politics is called The Soul of Politics.
15. See the May/June 1996 issue of Tikkun for a description of the unusual varieties of religious people congregating at a Summit on Ethics and Meaning held in Washington D.C. in April 1996 (7-12).
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