POPULISM AND SPECTACLE

In On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau proposes that the reputedly ‘empty’ rhetorical excess of populism constitutes the ontological and aesthetic ground on which the existence of an entity called ‘the people’ depends. This essay considers the tensions and affinities between the particular set of aesthetic relations that Laclau attributes to populist rhetoric, on the one hand, and the set of apparently techno-economic relations that Guy Debord describes as the logic of spectacle in The Society of the Spectacle, on the other, arguing that Laclau's conception of populism compels us to recast the ontological problem of the relation that Debord describes between the social and the spectacular in expressly aesthetic terms. Beginning from this premise, the essay contends that the ‘empty’ aesthetic conventions likewise associated with spectacular entertainment – and in particular, the staging of the relation between audience and onstage spectacle that defines the variety showcase aesthetic in this account – enact a set of tropic relations that constitutes the audience as a generalized figure of ‘the people’ in much the same terms as Laclau's rhetoric. Tracing this aesthetic logic through an especially charged performance from the history of blackface minstrelsy, the essay concludes by considering how such a staging of the relation between populism and spectacle might challenge the dominant models for understanding what constitutes ‘popular’ aesthetic form within Cultural Studies, and in the process, afford new critical insights into the formal dimension of Laclau's political logic.     

THE IMPURITY OF REPRESENTATION AND THE VITALITY OF DEMOCRACY

This article compares the conceptions of democratic representation found in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Hanna Pitkin. Whereas Laclau takes Pitkin as his foil, I contend that her treatment of representation has much more in common with Laclau's than he gives her credit for. Pitkin made a bold critique of foundationalist notions of responsiveness and acknowledged representation's constitutive function. Yet, her antipathy to symbolic representation made Pitkin recoil from the most radical implications of her argument: she would see as a threat to democratic politics that which Laclau casts as its vitality. Laclau's work, then, does not merely refute Pitkin's but advances a line of argument that she set into motion.     

CAPITALIZING ON THE DIALECTICAL ECONOMY OF HEGEMONY

This essay offers a symptomatic reading of Laclau's On Populist Reason, arguing that his discursive theory of politics remains needlessly trapped within a restricted, recuperative economy of the signifier. As a result, Laclau is characteristically unable either to perform or to recognize precisely the sorts of rhetorical gestures that his theory specifies as paradigmatic of radical politics. The problem emerges with particular urgency and force in Laclau's encounter with the term ‘capitalism’, which in the context of this encounter comes to designate a historically distinctive discursive framework that functions as an unacknowledged precondition for, and blind spot within, the theory of hegemony.     

THE PRIMACY OF THE POLITICAL AND THE TROPE OF THE ‘PEOPLE’ IN ERNESTO LACLAU'S ON POPULIST REASON

If the proliferation of new social movements thematized in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was the key conjectural feature on the horizon of radical democratic politics in Euro-America in 1980s, the eruptions of the people in the streets and slums all over the world, and especially in the global south, is hauntingly present in the background of On Populist Reason. With the democratic imaginary now gone global, Laclau's positing of the people as the political subject par excellence and populism as the paradigmatic logic of the political acquires new pertinence. This double privileging is accompanied by a series of shifts in emphasis in the conceptual architecture of Laclau's theory of hegemony. Aside from the further radicalization two pivotal terms in Laclau's social ontology – heterogeneity and contingency – one can observe three other noticeable shifts in emphasis: First, on the plane of discursivity (or in the differential field of the meaningful) the articulatory practices are increasingly characterized in terms of their rhetoricity (i.e. the mode of braiding the rhetorical form with its function); and, furthermore, the tropological characterization of the articulatory practices progressively yields to an analysis of their performative emergence by way of ‘naming’. Second, there is a corresponding shift in the analytic interest from the discursive production of the nodal points (such as ‘free market’ or ‘law and order’) to the discursive production of empty signifiers (especially, of the ‘people’). Third, the conflictual social field is configured not only in terms of antagonisms but also in terms of dislocations.     

ON THE DEBATE AROUND IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

There has been a profound debate about new ways of looking on emancipatory politics among progressive political theoreticians. One of the most important consequences of this contemporary debate has been the emergence of three related controversies: transcendence versus immanence, the people versus the multitude and negative ontology versus positive ontology. Our argumentative strategy will be to present these controversies first, through Hardt and Negri's point of view, and then through a Lacanian lecture of Laclau's perspective, author who places the psychoanalysis where philosophy traditionally located ontology.     

ON BEING BOUND TO EQUIVALENTIAL CHAINS

Taking up the test case of radical anti-globalization protest, this essay addresses Ernesto Laclau's theory of the democratic demand, reading it against Lacan's and Freud's conceptions of demand. I argue, largely drawing from Lacan's conception of enjoyment that a theory of the democratic demand must take into account the risk that a subject's enjoyment in positing a demand can overwhelm the potential political of the demand itself. In response to this risk, I argue that a theory of democracy should shift from a demand-driven politics centred around enjoying a specific subject position tied to ‘resistance’ towards a desire-driven politics that productively incorporates the ‘no’ as a means of articulating collective political aspirations.     

Communitas/Corporatas Tensions in Organizational Rhetoric: Finding a Balance in Sports Public Relations

Sports public relations always serves two masters—both corporatas and communitas. In this article, a close textual analysis of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA's) Stay in Bounds community relations program reveals that the NCAA is both a defender of amateur, communitas values, and a participant in professionalized, corporatas organizational rhetoric. This article offers a typology of the specific competing commitments of communitas and corporatas in sports rhetoric and argues that all sports rhetoric, from little league to big league, must negotiate with publics a balance between these extremes.     

“Its Own Kind of Torture”: Denial,Acknowledgment, and the Debate About Force Feeding at Guantánamo Bay

Social science research has revealed how U.S. political and media elites, as well as U.S. citizens, downplayed and denied allegations of torture during the country's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This research effectively applies and extends Stanley Cohen's ( 2001 ) typology of the rhetoric of denial. We lack, however, a typology of the rhetoric of acknowledgment. In this article, I synthesize studies of discourse of torture to develop just such a typology. I propose three rhetorical forms of acknowledgment, which parallel Cohen's forms of denial. Literal or factual acknowledgment includes claims to convince audiences that alleged incidents indeed occurred. Interpretive acknowledgment consists of claims to affirm that those allegations constitute serious human rights violations, such as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or torture. Implicatory acknowledgment includes efforts to delegitimize torture. I then illustrate the use of the rhetoric of acknowledgment through a qualitative content analysis of newspaper coverage of force feeding at the United States' detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This case allows me to extend our understanding of the rhetoric of denial and acknowledgment by revealing ways in which discourse around force feeding deviates from that around the United States' use of “enhanced interrogation” and torture.     

Producing Family Problems: Organization and Uses of the Family Perspective and Rhetoric in Family Therapy

This article applies and extends literature on the micropolitics of trouble and family rhetoric perspectives by analyzing how therapists in a family therapy agency practicing the brief model used family rhetoric in defining and responding to client problems. Family rhetoric is the use of images of family (the family perspective) to (1) persuade others to one's preferred orientation to issues of mutual concern and (2) attribute identities to one's self and others. The article focuses on how the therapists rhetorically enacted and applied the family perspective in interactions with colleagues and clients to define and remedy client troubles. In general, troubles were defined and remedied by treating them as products of clients' family systems, defined as enduring roles, relationships, and perspectives. The therapists sought to remedy client troubles by initiating changes assessed as appropriate for their troubles and family systems. The article concludes by considering some of the implications of the findings and analysis for the sociological study of human service work.     

Redress for old wounds: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology for the Chinese head tax

This essay examines how political leaders apologize for historical injustices. Specifically, we analyze Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology for the head tax imposed upon Chinese immigrants. The prime minister's apology was historic in that it marked the first time a Canadian Prime Minister formally apologized for the head tax. We argue that Harper used a combination of the frontier myth and collective apology rhetoric in his expression of remorse toward the Chinese-Canadian community. While controversial, this rhetoric created a discursive space for a constructive and strengthened relationship between the Chinese-Canadian community and the Canadian government.     

Fiji Indians and Political Discourse in Fiji: from the Pacific Romance to the Coups

Abstract Why did Fiji Indian political rhetoric shift, at Fiji's independence, from Gandhian political grievance to nation, development and harmony? The Indians were brought to Fiji as plantation labor in order to protect the indigenous Fijians from wage labor. A romantic vision of the indigenes guided colonial policy, and became law at Fiji's independence, in a constitution giving indigenous Fijians and their chiefs special privileges. Despite the appeasing rhetoric, an electoral defeat of the indigenous chiefs was followed by military coups, for protection of indigenes against Indians and consolidation of chiefly power. Fiji has proved difficult to ‘imagine’ as a nation.     

Remembering disaster: Since the media do,so must public relations

Only recently has research begun concerning the longer-term aftermath of organizational crisis. This essay presents the genre of disaster rhetoric as a viable strategy to address the problems and opportunities that arise when the media write about crisis anniversaries or news stories that refer to any crisis or disaster, past or present. After a brief review of genre theory, the authors outline the seven functions of the “rhetoric of disaster” and provide multiple examples of their application to public relations activity and its news coverage. The essay concludes with questions that practitioners may use proactively in the development of copy points to address each of the rhetoric of disaster's functions.     

The Discourse of Dress and Appearance: Identity Talk and a Rhetoric of Review

This article examines how identities are constructed and maintained via talk about personal dress and appearance. In this article, we introduce the concept of rhetoric of review, which is defined as the taken-for-granted rules that guide the evaluations of the appearances of self and others. Three basic components of a rhetoric of review are identified: moral precepts, program neutralizations, and review neutralizations. Data were derived from eight in-depth interviews with eighteen sorority members from a single university in the Southeastern United States. These data were used to expand Stone's (1962) conceptual framework of program and review by including Sykes and Matza's (1957) neutralization techniques. The purpose of this article is to bridge the interactionist perspectives on appearance and identity talk so as to augment our understanding of the discourse of appearance.     

Uncertainty and the Rise of the Work‐Family Dilemma

Existing research argues that women's wages, consumerism, and changing attitudes dismantled the male bread‐winner system. Families' economic need is dismissed with the suggestion that mothers' rhetoric of “need” was a smoke screen to defend against social stigma for working mothers. Drawing on biennial data from 1965 to 1987, I suggest that consumptive certainty of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to economic uncertainty in the 1970s and beyond. Economic uncertainty provided impetus, legitimacy, and justification for young families to adopt new work‐family arrangements. Hence, economic uncertainty is conceptualized as a real circumstance that substantiates families' reasonable perceptions of need.     

Sea change: Santa Barbara and the eruption of corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs have proliferated among the world's largest corporations. While the lion's share of scholarly attention has been devoted to the competitive advantage of CSR as a branding strategy, very little notice has been taken of CSR's history, particularly the emergence of CSR programs during the politically turbulent l960s and l970s. The paucity of historical attention has led to several distortions, including the failure to recognize CSR's origins as a survivalist reaction to crisis, and the resulting overemphasis of CSR as an unambiguously ethical model of managerial proactive effectiveness. Based on an examination of newspaper records of a politically crystallizing oil spill in the waters off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and an analysis of CSR's market penetration and rhetoric, this paper offers an alternative framework for reexamining corporate social responsibility.     

Communicating for the good of the state: A post-symmetrical polemic on persuasion in ethical public relations

As inarguably one of the most influential theories in public relations scholarship, the symmetrical theory devalues the most common public relations objective, persuasion. This article deconstructs Grunig's work and re-constructs classic rhetoric to provide a post-symmetrical direction for public relations scholarship devoted to influencing behavior. By viewing the practice of persuasion from the perspectives of Aristotle, Plato, Isocrates, Burke, Nietzsche and others, this paper provides ethical and procedural guidelines on how today's public relations scholars can refocus the public relations agenda to focus more on real-world issues.     

A Burkean analysis of China Is Not Happy: a rhetoric of nationalism

As a sequel to China Can Say No, China Is Not Happy is the bestseller of 2009 in China. The book praises China's post-80s generation for their act of patriotism, condemns the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, for exploiting the Chinese and for causing a global economic crisis. It also criticizes the Chinese liberal elite and overseas returnees for being Western-influenced mental slaves and traitors. The authors of the book call for an abandonment of “literary tone”, advocate a tough stand against Western countries, and envision China as the leader of the world through its economic and military power. This paper examines the major themes and belligerent rhetoric employed in the book through an application of Kenneth Burke's rhetorical concepts of identification, terministic screens, and representative anecdotes. The author of this paper contends that such use of rhetoric demonstrates the language habit of China's political discourse in its modern history, escalates blind nationalism, and widens the gap in intercultural understanding between China and the US.     

The Spirit and the Flesh: The Rhetorical Nature of The Last Temptation of Christ

In this article I examine the rhetoric of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Using Kenneth Burke's (1962) concept of "consubstantiality," I argue that the film exceeds traditional notions of character–viewer identification by constructing a spectatorial dilemma that resembles the character's dilemma in limited but consequential ways. I then suggest that this dynamic may be why so many Christian viewers were drawn to a character they understood to be in conflict with the biblical Jesus.     

Morality and aspiration in Bourgeois Dignity

Deirdre McCloskey's book, Bourgeois Dignity, sets out to refute the most reputable explanations of what she calls the Great Fact—that over the last few centuries, the wealth of industrialized nations has increased by a factor of at least sixteen. She also presents a positive thesis, namely that the Great Fact occurred when Western societies began to ascribe dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie by changing their rhetoric. I argue that McCloskey's positive thesis can benefit from an illuminating moral psychological distinction between what Peter Strawson has called “social morality” and “individual ideal” or what I shall refer to as moral rules and personal ideals or aspirations. McCloskey's positive thesis can be mapped onto these two categories and thus separated into two distinct theses: the Imperatival Thesis and the Aspirational Thesis. The former holds that societies that stopped blaming and ostracizing the bourgeoisie for their characteristic activities were the first to develop, whereas the latter holds that societies stopped ostracizing the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie started innovating because they took on new aspirations and ideals. These twin theses help to explain how the ideas of dignity and rhetoric operate in Bourgeois Dignity. I also argue that the distinction connects McCloskey's positive thesis to a large field of empirical and theoretical work in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science.