Pained publics

Abstract

In her contribution to the Quarterly Journal of Speech’s centennial issue, “Pathologia,” Jenny Rice suggests, “pathology does not only or always reveal something broken. Rather, the experience of pathology also reminds us that rhetoric’s sensorium is working—really working” (p. 35). Yes, and in a time of pandemic turbulence, we are reminded that the sensorium of civic life works in ways that shape, even threaten, our collective modes of engagement and relationality. Rice offers “the wound” as a response to pathological publicness, noting, “I propose that we begin to theorize the wound itself as the beginning of dialogue. Only the wound can stand as pathology’s counterpart” (p. 40). Wounds focalize and materialize the pathogenic, opening up possibilities for redress while also remediating their own contaminants. Accordingly, our special issue aims to grapple with the ways contemporary publicness affects, and is affected by, civic wounds: how they are discursively produced, and productively discursive. What emergent forms of expression or composition do wounds make possible or foreclose? And, how might critical communication scholarship ad/dress the pathogenic constitution of civic wounds? Each of the essays in “Ad/Dressing Civic Wounds” thus situates particular ways in which wounds are “really working” to produce the conditions that open or foreclose possibilities in the never-finished work of finding shared grounds of togetherness we might call civic life.

In her contribution to the Quarterly Journal of Speech’s centennial issue, “Pathologia,” Jenny Rice suggests, “pathology does not only or always reveal something broken. Rather, the experience of pathology also reminds us that rhetoric’s sensorium is working—really working” (p. 35). Yes, and in a time of pandemic turbulence, we are reminded that the sensorium of civic life works in ways that shape, even threaten, our collective modes of engagement and relationality. Rice offers “the wound” as a response to pathological publicness, noting, “I propose that we begin to theorize the wound itself as the beginning of dialogue. Only the wound can stand as pathology’s counterpart” (p. 40). Wounds focalize and materialize the pathogenic, opening up possibilities for redress while also remediating their own contaminants. Accordingly, our special issue aims to grapple with the ways contemporary publicness affects, and is affected by, civic wounds: how they are discursively produced, and productively discursive.

Indeed, the discourse of woundedness—of transmission, susceptibility, infection, toxicity, and disease—has become nearly synonymous with public life itself: to contemplate publicness today is to contemplate literal death. This discourse of woundedness emerges from the felt conditions of being wounded. Kenneth Burke (1966) famously observed that there are no negatives in nature, where everything simply is what it is and as it is (p. 9). A biological agent like a virus simply is what it is and does what it does, with zero regard for personal feelings, political narratives, technological assurances, or stock market valuations. Yet we ought to emend Burke’s insight to account for the ways nature’s effects are negatively distributed, and differentially experienced, throughout the social. Wounds are deeply felt personal experiences, but they emanate from institutions and infra/structures that replicate inequality and foment division. The pathogenic signature of the Covid-19 virus has disproportionately ravaged the most vulnerable among us—“nationwide, Black people are dying at the rate of 2.5 times the rate of white people” (“The COVID Racial Data Tracker,” 2020)—adding untold new calamity to already precarious life circumstances. This new discourse of woundedness thus emanates from felt conditions of corporeal vulnerability and miasmatic negation. The pathogenic constituents of this discourse are fully “scenic,” to invoke Burke again, assuming ubiquitous forms (both material and immaterial). Viral infection constitutes woundings, woundings constitute pain, and pain constitutes its own public expression:

People are marching as a way of screaming, a way of exhaling pain, as an enormous group catharsis. . .. This isn’t only about the pain of police brutality, it’s about all the pain. This is about all the injustice and disrespect and oppression. This is about ancestry and progeny. . .. Black people are saying: “See me! See what you have done to me and continue to do to me. Stand naked in your sin, and stare, unflinching, at your reflection. You did this. (Blow, 2020)

From embodied pain, fear, and resentment come expressions of rage, mistrust, and paranoia. Pathogens and their wounds in turn become mutually contaminating: police brutality begets public expressions of anti-racist solidarity, which in turn begets public expressions of anti-masking, which only recycles the material conditions of precarity; meanwhile social trust erodes while vulnerability intensifies. For us scholars of public discourse and culture, urgent questions arise: What emergent forms of expression or composition do wounds make possible, or foreclose? How is civic life altered when pathology becomes a constitutive aspect of contemporary publicness? And, how might critical communication scholarship ad/dress the pathogenic constitution of civic wounds?

We are reminded of Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, which charts the explosive tensions between community members—racial tensions, sexual tensions, economic tensions, religious tensions; material tensions that become tensions of representation and identity—during a particularly nasty summer heatwave in Brooklyn. The movie illuminates the intensely fragile connections holding our deliberative commonness together, especially when lived conditions heat up to a boiling point. Radio Raheem delivers the central message: whatever might count as civic in this tale is spent managing the “static” that fills up the space between the fists of Love and Hate. The film thus showcases the expendibility of neighborliness when (already fraught) civic relations are pushed to extremes by intensifying scenic conditions of climatic and economic struggle. As Bruno Latour (2018) writes in Down to Earth,

the sense of vertigo, almost of panic, that traverses all contemporary politics arises owing to the fact that the ground is giving way beneath everyone’s feet at once, as if we all felt attacked everywhere, in our habits and in our possessions. (p. 8)

If we replace the weather in Do the Right Thing with the climate of Trump’s America, we might have something approximating a framework for understanding our irate times. Perhaps the rise of civic animosity is the surface expression of our more generalized climate emergency: heads are getting hotter just as temperatures are rising. Perhaps civic tensions are born, at least in part, from globally enmeshed ecosystems degraded by a few hundred years of capitalist extraction. How do we ad/dress civic wounds that are felt individually, yet emerge and take shape within global structures of exchange and accumulation?

There are no quick answers here. The dual questions of Grounding and of Belonging are hugely at stake; not only what does it mean to belong, and what new forms may belonging take, but where can these new forms take hold, among which social entities, encompassing what scale or order of composition, and according to what unifying story or rationale? As Latour (2018) writes, “all forms of belonging are undergoing metamorphosis—belonging to the globe, to the world, to the provinces, to particular plots of ground, to the world market, to lands or to traditions” (p. 16). He adds, “This is the meaning of the history that remains to be discovered: how can we reweave edges, envelopes, protections; how can we find new footing while simultaneously taking into account the end of globalization” (p. 11). Our special issue is a modest attempt to find some footing amid all this precarity, to seek forms of belonging that are also investments in reweaving the frayed edges of old wounds.

“Ad/Dressing Civic Wounds” seeks to critically examine what it might mean to address, (re)dress, or simply dress the wounding of contemporary civic life. In the Spring of 2019, nine prominent scholars in the areas of Rhetoric, Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies gathered for a 3-day symposium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to explore and critically examine these questions. In the intervening year, those participants have revisited their initial papers in light of the global ramifications surrounding COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests. Our issue assembles a mixture of voices ranging from full to associate to assistant professors to a doctoral candidate, boasting some of the most visible scholars in rhetorical theory today while cutting across Communication subdisciplines of media and cultural theory.

Jenny Rice leads off the issue focusing on how the wound’s temporality conditions the possibilities for future healing, opening up or closing down new manners of political redress. She asks, what is the future of the wound as a “tactical second life,” and how might rhetoric operate productively in relation to this virtual space? To this end, she offers an open-ended notion of descriptive deliberation to counter the foreclosing tendencies of prescriptive deliberation. Similarly troubled by the dynamics of prescription, Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves provide a robust account of the role that media technology has played, historically, in the naming/constituting of civic threats (“the enemy within”). They demonstrate how media technology deployed under the guise of “diagnosing” a threat ends up constituting that very threat: new tech produces new enemies, prescriptively. Packer and Reeves thus illustrate the recursive nature of wounds and their mediational compositions, raising the thorny question of where wounds end and their mediation begins. Justin Eckstein’s piece takes up this task of delimiting the wound by introducing Badiou’s “event” to the discussion of rhetoric’s “situatedness.” He turns to the shooting at Margery Stoneman Douglas High School, where the pathology of gun violence created an eventual wound that shattered the rhetorical sensorium. In the immediate aftermath, Emma Gonzales seized upon this shattering to forge a new figure, the Parkland Kid. Eckstein argues that the wound thereby delimits itself by affecting speakers with an intensity of conviction about the event qua event. To the extent that social movements are geared toward the production of identity, Eckstein’s wound-as-event provides an account for how new identities leap into being.

If, as Rice suggests, wounds give rise to dialogue, Misti Yang’s essay questions the therapeutic promise of automated “chatbots” and other new forms of digitized health care, in servicing wounds algorithmically. Her piece is premised on the notion that the personal experience of pain is indispensable to the civic life of pain; but she argues that while dialogue may grow from woundedness, not just any dialogue will do. When outsourced to Artificial Intelligence bots, conversation surrounding personal pain risks being commodified for potential profit or silenced in the service of personal improvement. Her piece thus illustrates how only human-human dialogue can heal “at scale.” Whereas Yang is concerned about the civic implications of digitized conversation (“diagnosis”) as a form of mediational capture (“prescription”), Diane Keeling’s essay is likewise troubled by discursive capture in the form of colonial myth-making. Advancing the notion of “colonizing cuts,” Keeling shows how the discursive practices of historians can wound through constitutive exclusion. As she writes, “colonizing cuts reduce the capacity for particular kinds of world making and historical memory and therefore iterate domination, oppression and violence on colonized communities” (p. 2). This engrossing analysis illuminates the messy entanglements whereby historical acts of colonial dominance reverberate through contemporary acts of history-making; thus, reproducing exclusionary sensibilities.

Nathaniel Rivers also takes on the messy entanglements of influence. Thinking less historically and more spatially, for Rivers, the wound functions as a generalized ambient condition that shapes consent and, by extension, challenges our very notion of democratic participation. His analysis raises tough questions about how wounds afford relational possibilities in an ambient, ecological sense. Donovan Conley extends this ecological approach and takes up similar questions of relational agencies, proposing to think of wounds as assemblages. He draws on the historical case of antebellum Cincinnati, where the physical contagion of cholera entangled with the social contagion of slavery. Conley’s piece reveals the ways rhetoric’s pharmakon (goods and bads) mediates the operations of delivery within wounds/assemblages through the intersecting figural movements of catachresis and metonymy. What follows from this historical analysis is the realization that both rhetoric and liberal democracy are necessarily contaminating enterprises in which goods and bads commingle in fateful ways.

Finally, picking up the various conceptual threads of the special issue as a whole, Nathan Stormer theoretizes the question of wounds and their critical responses. Stormer’s astute rendering of the contingent relations binding wounds to their social judgments spies a call to reorient our communal understandings of the pathological and the healthful, the abject and the normalized. Because they unsettle traditional stabilities, he argues, wounds amplify the ethical stakes of being together. Thus, the question of what to “do” about civic woundings calls forth the preliminary need to reorient our understandings of value in relation to ethical questions about health and sickness and their relevant articulations. Each of the essays in “Ad/Dressing Civic Wounds” thus situates particular ways in which wounds are “really working” to produce the conditions that open or foreclose possibilities in the never-finished work of finding new grounds of togetherness worthy of calling civic life.