Rhetorical Analysis of Official Documents - Montana Rhetoric Project Final

     Government documents hold a place of particular respect for their contemporary and historical audience. Though it may be argued that governmental publications are not really public rhetoric their influence on public imagining and memory is undeniable. More importantly, when analyzing events which involve strong elements of country-wide emotion it becomes abundantly clear that official publications are as much shaped by public rhetoric as they do shape it. To remove them from analysis would be to omit a significant part of the subject of study.

     The first piece for analysis is 1942 “Executive Order Number 9066”. Signed by Roosevelt, this order authorized the internment of Japanese Nationals and Japanese Americans (Italians were more often interned under acts related to Espionage or stipulations of naval-law acts though this order did also apply).
     The act begins with a justification for its necessity, stating that in times of war the country must take “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities”. National-defense material, premises, and utilities, what the order calls for here is every possible protection of the premise of national defense. Unlike materials or utilities a premise is not tangible, it is a philosophical foundation for an argument or undertaking. Psychological studies show that for any list people are least likely to remember the middle element, did the writer of this order know that when they chose to put premise in between the other justifications? It could have been the unconscious choice of a well-practiced persuasive speaker. In either case, protection of a premise is a weak justification for the uprooting of thousands of people. The document emphasizes this by the placement of the phrase, as well as letting on, to the rhetorically inclined, how strong the anti-Japanese hysteria was for the government to order their internment to protect the very idea of national defense.
     Perhaps most interesting about this order is that despite its notoriety for the interment of the Japanese population, they are not mentioned once in the act’s entirety. This is not a virtue of all government documents, the U.S. congress has previously passed bills such as the “Chinese Exclusion Act” which unabashedly target a particular demographic. Since the order was used to intern a few German and Italian nationals and Americans it would not be a huge stretch to say that specific mention of the Japanese was left out in order to give the document more broad jurisdiction should another group appear threatening.

     “Conduct to be Observed by Alien Enemies” is simply a rules list for immigrants to keep away from anything which might be military, or might record military going-ons, or might have been invented by the military. These mandates are not out of the ordinary for the treatment of these nationals, nor is the rhetoric exceptional. It does serve as a good document from which to make a note on the use of the world “alien”. These documents refer to the interned Japanese and Italians exclusively as “alien” or “non-alien people of [descent]”, as they are further detained they become “alien enemies”. The rhetorical effects of labeling immigrants aliens is widely discussed by contemporary publics but the effect is even more noticeable, and potentially novel, in the primary documents. By choosing to refer even to American nationals as “non-aliens” the documents prime their audience to think of those populations not as fellow countrymen but as foreigners and intruders. This is further exacerbated with the addition of the word “enemy” which leaves little room for sympathetic interpretation. While these rhetorical choices may reflect cultural attitudes at the time, as official documentation they also create and validate those attitudes as the prevailing voice of the strong public.

     Next is the “Warrant Hearing In This Case of Hidenori Arima”, a court secretary’s transcript of a deportation case. The most revealing pieces of this text can be found in the body of the third question. It asks the man in question if he understands that his case has been reopened “to present documentary evidence or oral evidence by competent witnesses to substantiate your claims, if possible, of your entry into, and continuous residence within, the United States during the time that you claim to have resided in this country”. Particularly notable here is the phrase “competent witnesses”, although it appears innocuous it brings to question what sort of people would be considered good witnesses by this court. The man in question appears to be trying to show that he entered the country legally and remained in it respectably. He requires an official translator to interact with his english-speaking inspector suggesting that he has not yet mastered the language. It would not be out of the question to assume that any witnesses of his legal and well-behaved U.S. residence would be another Japanese person. Would their “oral evidence” be competent to this court? Like others, the document refers to Mr. Hidenori as “alien”, suggesting that the court might be less than welcoming to taking another alien’s testimony to support Hidenori’s.

     The “Department of Justice; Alien Enemy Hearing Board” document is served to a man of Japanese descent notifying him of a hearing he must attend to discuss his continued detention in Fort Missoula. Two pieces of phrasing jump out on this page. First, that the board’s title includes the word “enemy” is notable. The board deals with already-interned persons, so perhaps it feels correct in its classification of them as enemies, still the phrasing is exceptionally harsh and must have primed its members to view their detainees through a certain light. Second, is the note at the bottom of the document that reminds detainees that while they may “bring a friend” as it were, they are not permitted anyone to act as an attorney for them. Contrary to many of the phrases analyzed from these documents, this one appears almost friendly in nature. Detainees may or may not have relatives with them in-camp, and were unlikely to benefit from the advocations of an attorney, but one can picture their fellow detainees observing their hearings with them, rooting for their early release. Unlike the title speech, this note seems to lack the strong negative rhetoric (imagine; “you are permitted to bring other alien and non-alien persons with you”) about the immigrants, as though by addressing them personally it loses some of that cultural aggression.

The Last Best Minute (Going Public Assignment)

I've finally completed my going public assignment. I wrote Erin a letter! Not personally of course, but in her official capacity as Editor in Chief of the Exponent. Eventually it will go up on the Exponent website and I'll post a link to it when that happens.

I particularly wanted to do some public writing for this assignment because I felt like part of the goal was to get a little out of your comfort zone and public speech is pretty well in mine. I did high school Speech and Debate, I do Model United Nations in college and I'm just generally the sort of outspoken person for whom giving a speech isn't all that special.

Writing my letter to the editor was not like that. Maybe it's because I have, I'm fairly certain, the minority political view in this state, but writing to my peers was daunting! I had a really tough time trying to come up with a tone that expressed my opinion without being too... nice, harsh, combative, apologetic, inclusive, or exclusive. There is something very personal about declaring your opinions to the world in such a public way.

Until I've got a real link to share, here is the letter:


Letter to the Editor: Don't Make Perfect the Enemy of Good

As a millennial and a feminist I support Hillary Clinton for president and Democratic nominee, enthusiastically. I understand many students on this campus do not feel the same. What I do not understand is the way in which we have gone about our disagreements. The amount of name calling and misinformation I have seen circulating has vastly outweighed the genuine respectful political disagreement. We have lived up the the worst parts of our millennial reputation, we are cyber-bullying our candidates and each other and we can do better.

If you genuinely believe that every issue on which you agree with Hillary is just a lie told to get elected and none of them will ever see the light of day, I don’t know what to say to you. I do not agree. It’s not a realistic depiction of how politics works (even with the acknowledgement of some corruption) and I don’t believe it's a realistic depiction of how people work.

If you disagree with her platform on fracking, or gun rights, or any other of a myriad of issues on which I myself do not completely agree with her, I respect that. However, even with some small (or great) disagreements on specific issues, Hillary is still a good candidate. She has experience working with a tumultuous international political sphere, she has the respect of her fellow senators and the foundations to compromise well with those across the aisle, and she has realistic and well-founded policy plans to help achieve positive change using that compromise. Clinton may not be your perfect candidate this election season, but it’s time to stop making “perfect” the enemy of “good”.

Finally, let’s all take a moment to remember that despite how we may feel about their policy platforms not one of the candidates running for nomination is literally Hitler, or even close. They may, in fact, just have genuine disagreements with each other about what exactly is the best way to lead a country bigger than Europe.

Sarah Rawlins

The Rhetorical Impact of Digital Surveillance

A study just came out talking about how digital surveillance affects online rhetoric and I thought it provided some insight into Kuebrich’s essay. The study was published in the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly by Elizabeth Stoycheff and she found that when people were “primed” (aka: reminded) that the government monitors digital communications they were significantly less likely to express minority political views, or really any views in contrast to the majority. We’ve talked in this class about how digital publics can be very polarizing and create an “echo chamber” effect when discussing political issues but this paper provides some evidence against that theory.

In his discussion of the surveillance cameras which were set to be installed in the Westside, Kuebrich stresses that the public outcry came not so much from the idea of the cameras but from how it was implemented without their input. They may not have been wildly fond of the idea, but the ‘real’ rhetorical issue was that the police opinion was being imposed on the community without its consent. However, this study (which was not out when Kubrich’s paper was written) suggests that there may be greater rhetorical consequences from the presence of the surveillance cameras themselves.

Kubrich’s paper later quotes Nancy Frasier when describing the meeting between police and Westside residents. There he observed a similar limitation of the residents minority opinions; “Meetings such as this are counterproductive when they become the bourgeois public sphere that Fraser critiques—a public sphere that superficially involves historically marginalized people, bracketing differences in power and becoming “the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new, hegemonic mode of domination”” (583). He talks about the softening of strong minority opinions when the weak community public interacts with the strong police public. Despite the presumably open forum for dialogue which was created when the police and the Westside met to address these issues, the introduction of the police into the Westside’s public space had an immediate effect on their rhetoric. Even when the topic of discussion was how the police power deprived Westside community members of their public rhetorical power they still felt implicitly that they could not voice those concerns.

If the effect of digital surveillance is as strong as Stoycheff suggests then the cameras which the Westside community so symbolically spoke out against could pose a tangible rhetorical threat. Installing surveillance cameras would extend that police strong public power to the entire neighborhood, subconsciously turning the Westside community’s home into a public sphere where their opinions are the minority. Simply the presence of surveillance cameras could cause the private transcript of the community to be silenced.

I think this study has some really unusual implications when thinking about broader political power structures and how they affect rhetoric. The typical conception of how political might changes public rhetoric is the 1984 example; the dominating political power actively chooses to silence minority dialogues and make counterpublics fearful of speaking out. But what if the actual process is much subtler? What if just the knowledge that our opinions are public causes us to oppress our own speech? A majority political power might take surveillance action benignly, without any intention of changing the minority dialogue (maybe even with the intent of being more welcome to, and more positively aware of said dialogue, knowing how difficult it is to hear private transcripts otherwise) and unknowingly cause it to conform itself to the power-majority rhetoric.

If you're interested here is The Independent article which discusses Stoycheff's study, and here is the study itself.

Assignment Update

For my Going Public assignment I've been working on a comprehensive defense of my candidate of choice for the Democratic primary, Hillary, with another friend of mine. We're trying to build up a really well sourced document that addresses the volume of arguments people have against her, and why we think she is still the best candidate. Then I want to try and get it out-and-about on the web and in the world, past just facebook shares and my blog, to the point where it actually gets read by people I don't know. I've looked into this some over break, and basically just found that it's very difficult. That will be my biggest focus going forward (and if anyone has suggestions I'm happy to take them!).

For our Montana Rhetorics project myself, Cherise, Crickett, Catlin(?), Jenni, and Andy are doing research on the Japanese internment camp that was in Missoula. We will hopefully be visiting the archives this Friday that we have off to go look at some primary documents.

State of the Union Address

My Brookings Brief title the morning after president Obama's most recent SOTU was "Obama Breaks Up with Congress". Because the SOTU is usually an argument from the president for why congress, and the American people, should support his agenda for the next year I thought it would be a good example for our analysis of argument.

Here is a link to the full SOTU transcript.

The Revolution will not be Televised (Final Draft)

“Public discourse says not only: ‘Let a public exist,’ but: ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.’” (Warner, 82)

Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution will not be Televised”, recorded in 1970, cites the popular slogan of the 60’s Black Power movement. It’s iconic tagline and call to action became an anthem for revolutionary counterpublics addressing more than just race, and continues to be used to criticize the consumerism of traditional media. Through its wry and mocking portrayal of white-dominated television, the piece facilitated the emergence of its black counterpublic into the rhetoric of a broader, “stronger” public.

The initial audience of Heron’s work was small and exclusive to the black community. He uses the term “brother” to refer to his audience, alluding to it’s black and close-knit nature. This is further solidified by the phrase near the end of the text “The revolution will not be right back / after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people”. Here he clearly defines that his audience is not “white people”. Distinctions like these allow Heron to define his audience from the television “public”. Unlike the tv audience, his public is clearly black, and clearly not included in the standard rhetorical imaginings of public television.

Secondarily, he defines his public as anti-consumerism and anti-establishment. References to Xerox, and shows in “four parts without commercial interruption”, mock the shallow and marketing-oriented nature of popular media. Repeated use of the phrase “revolution” as well as the single stand-out line in the song which states, “the revolution will put you in the driver’s seat” appeal to those listeners who see revolution and control as positive things. Later, he uses this to bridge the gap between his black (revolutionary, anti-consumer) counterpublic and broader counterpublics.

As an element of the counterpublic the piece draws attention to the gap of imagining of a presumably “comprehensive” media. Heron consistently contrasts the shallow nature of news commentary with the continued ideographic image of “the revolution”, solidifying his criticism. Repetition of the phrase “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay,” compared to the benign images of “Jackie Onassis blowing her nose” or scenes from soap operas clearly highlight the need for change. From this Heron establishes that the disconnect between television and the black public is not only an irony to be satirized but also a problem of discrimination and mis-representation.

The goal of the piece is not only to mock what was broadly considered “public” rhetoric and how it misrepresented the black public, but also to incite action from the audience. Implicit in the phrase, “the revolution will not be televised” is the notion that the public can not wait for “The Revolution™” to be publicized to begin it. One can imagine Heron writing a line like “Organizers will not meet in the Civic Center to discuss an outline of the event”. Instead, he highlights his audience’s collective imagining of revolution to remind them that inherent in the black public’s image of revolution should be the understanding that it will not happen if dependant on such conventional, white, means. His scathing review of what forms public media for his black audience reminds them that they can not rely on it to represent their interests, revolutionary or otherwise.

Heron relies a lot on public imaginings of big ideographs like Revolution, and The News to illustrate the criticism he is making of convention, and to raise the action he looks for. Ansen cites a writer, Castoriadis, to “describe how imagining institutes society”. Castoriadis “maintains that some imagined concepts--he references terms such as “citizen,” “justice,” “money,” and others--serve a central role in structuring societies” (Ansen, 350). Here, “the revolution” and “the news” are similarly important imagined concepts for Heron’s public. His use of “the revolution” relies on existing collective imaginings of revolution. He utilizes the patriotic and romanticized connotations of revolution in American culture, particularly youth culture, to make the goal of his piece (action) more attractive to its audience. This approach is later abandoned when discussing “the news” where he instead wishes to modify current collective imagining. The news as Heron illustrates it is not just a single channel, it does not even reference only television, but the broader institution of media which proclaims to be “public” for everyone and yet clearly does not include Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, or the rest of the affected black community. He uses these illustrations to shift how his black counterpublic imagines the news. Ansen discusses this effect, describing how “...the “collective” modifying [the] collective imagining suggests that social dialogue enables the formation of opinions that did not exist prior to discursive engagement” (Ansen, 349). Heron’s piece intends to do just that, to take the existing imaginations of The News which his public has and to shape it in such a way that it re-enforces the necessity of his call for action.

This modification of the collective imagining is not limited to Heron’s original black counterpublic, it’s purpose is best served by reaching, and modifying the rhetoric of a broader public. Surrounded by the uproar of student protests across the country, including the events at Kent State, his message addresses not only the black public but youthful revolutionaries of all races. It is not hard to see the interpretation of Heron’s text which satires any older consumerist establishment of public discourse. The fact that it does this is what makes the song still relevant and still inspiring to contemporary counterpublics (of any race). Although it mainly addresses a black counterpublic, the call to action can be applied to a much broader audience. Satire makes the criticism more accessible. Allowing the original “weak” public to begin to transition into the larger, stronger (better able to affect change), broader revolutionary public. It is no longer the young black revolutionary counterpublic, it is simply the young revolutionary counterpublic.

If you want to make comments on specific wording or phrases *cough* professor *cough* I slightly prefer them to be on the google doc, which you can find here.

An Essay Begins

For this essay I'm expanding my earlier discussion of The Revolution will not be Televised into a full-fledged essay. You can view it's working form here, and leave any comments either there in the google doc or below in the comment section.

The Public [may] not be Televised

Earlier this week while I was on my way home Spotify played me Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution will not be Televised”. Heron’s wry way of pointing out the absences in “public television” at the time, immediately brought to mind the topics we’ve been discussing in this class. The poem is an example of the distinctions we have been making in class between publics and counterpublics or, as referenced by the textbook, enclaved counterpublics. I thought it was particularly interesting because there is an interplay of sorts between the publics this piece addresses.

In first glance the public of this text is certainly a counterpublic and most likely one which is isolated somewhat from the general U.S. population. Heron’s use of the word “Brothers” to refer to other black men, in addition to the more inclusive exclusive term of “revolution” immediately imply to the listeners that there are distinctions between themselves and those who do not hear the piece. Revolutions don’t happen without something or presumably someone to revolt against. The mocking tone the text takes towards traditional or standard commercial television culture further re-enforces the “us-not-them” address of the text. Heron’s public very much enclaved; black, revolutionary, and anti-consumer.

At the same time, Warner notes the importance of how publics and their rhetorics must be continually affected by the progress of time.“It is not texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time. Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and a responding discourse be postulated, can a text address a public.” (p 82). Now, this song is ubiquitously known as a rebel anthem and a powerful contributor to the 70s Black Power movement. As a young, white, female college student of no exceptional revolutionary tendency, I am now also in its public. It has become a part of, and shaped, the broader public discourse of the U.S.

Its meaning has also changed. It is viewed mostly with historical context now. I would presume that listeners who felt the message resonated too perfectly with contemporary times would be thought a bit affected by the rest of their peers. However, the continued discussion of failed representation of black publics, in the Oscars, or in police arrests, or in the coverage of terrorism, all suggest that the message is not entirely out of place. It is quite likely that in shaping how we view issues of underrepresentation of certain publics, Heron’s piece may have been the first to point out the lack of minority interests represented in television and other media.

Here is a link to a bit about Heron, and also the lyrics to “The Revolution will not be Televised”

Quotes from Warner, I & II

"Indeed, a public might almost be said to be stranger-relationality in a pure form, because other ways of organizing strangers—nations, religions, races, guilds, and so on—have manifest positive content. They select strangers by criteria of territory or identity or belief or some other test of membership. One can address strangers in such contexts because a common identity has been established through independent means or institutions (e.g., creeds, armies, parties). A public, however, unites strangers through participation alone, at least in theory. Strangers come into relationship by its means, though the resulting social relationship might be peculiarly indirect and unspecifiable." p 56

"Our subjectivity is understood as having resonance with others, and immediately so. But this is only true to the extent that the trace of our strangerhood remains present in our understanding of ourselves as the addressee." p 57

"No single text can create a public. Nor can a single voice, a single genre, or even a single medium. All are insufficient to create the kind of reflexivity that we call a public, since a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse. It is not texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time. Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and a responding discourse be postulated, can a text address a public."  p 62

"Public discourse, in other words, is poetic. By this I mean not just that a public is self-organizing, a kind of entity created by its own discourse, or even that this space of circulation is taken to be a social entity. Rather, I mean that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address." p 81

"Public discourse says not only: “Let a public exist,” but: “Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.”" p 82

Selected quotes from the Chapter

"Encapsulating the role of the counterpublic and the need for an oppositional discourse, African-American cultural critic bell hooks'? explains: "The most important of our work-the work of liberation-demands of us that we make a new language, that we create the oppositional discourse, the liberatory voice plays a central role in counterpublics. People cannot challenge the way things are unless they can see another way to be, and develop a language to articulate that alternative vision. Examples of enclaved counterpublic discourse include the consciousness-raising groups of second-wave feminism, the discussions in black churches about the immanent humanity of all people that fed into the activism of the Civil Rights movement, and the identity formation and needs identification in the farmworkers' organizations" p. 245

"For this reason, she argues, "there is no public sphere in the contemporary United States, no context of communication and debate that makes ordinary citizens feel that they have a common public culture, or influence on a state that holds itself accountable to their opinions."73 US citizenship has been privatized by "rerouting the critical energies of the emerging political sphere into the sentimental spaces of an amorphous opinion culture, characterized by strong patriotic identification mixed with feelings of practical political powerlessness." p. 249

Habermas Response

Habermas's article was very unusual in style. Maybe it was just all the "bourgeoisie" but it came off like this almost Marxist critique of politics and public discourse. What an odd approach to the topic of public speech.

Public, according to Habermas, seems to be function of the democratic freedom of the people; something that exists only in an unrepressed society. While "public rhetoric" may have been limited prior to democracy by overwhelming political powers, to say that it existed only after the rise of democracy seems unfair. Satire was not invented after the writing Magna Carta. Criticism and open speech were available long before that, in public spaces even, and I think that those must be counted amongst "public rhetorics".

The public sphere now involves less "formal" media than ever before. I think a lot of support can be found saying that traditional media outlets- television newscasts and newspapers -are less representative of the public thought than they used to be. Often, social movements are reported on by these media after the fact. The public sphere is so much online, and as result, far more able to be directly affected by the public than ever before (see: #blacklivesmatter, Kony 2012, etc). Our current public sphere is very oriented towards "viral" rhetoric. This, in particular, is very related to the democratic values Habermas discusses, what is more democratic than public comment via overwhelming hashtags of the masses?