At the 2003 "Rock the Vote" debate, one of the questions posed by a student to the eight Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination was "have you ever used marijuana?" Amazingly, all but one of the candidates voluntarily answered the question. Add to this example the multiple ways in which we now see public intrusion into private lives (security cameras, electronic access to personal data, scanning and "wanding" at the airport) or private self-exposure in public forums (cell phones, web cams, confessional talk shows, voyeuristic "reality" TV). That matters so private could be treated as legitimate-in some cases even vital-for public discourse indicates how intertwined the realms of private and public have become in our era. Reverse examples exist as well. Around the world, public authorities look the other way while individual rights are abused--calling it a private matter--or officials appeal to sectarian morés to justify discrimination in public policies.
The authors of The Private, the Public, and the Published feel that scholarship needs to explore and understand this phenomenon, and needs to address it in the college classroom. There are consequences of conflating public and private, they argue--consequences that have implications especially for what is known as the public good. The changing distinctions between "private" and "public," and the various practices of private and public expression, are explored in these essays with an eye toward what they teach us about those consequences and implications.
THE PRIVATE, THE PUBLIC, AND THE PUBLISHED
Reconciling Private Lives and Public RhetoricUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-577-9Contents
Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................................................viiPreface Thomas Kent.............................................................................................................................................ix1 Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric: What's at Stake? Barbara Couture...............................................................................12 Ain't Nobody's Business? A Public Personal History of Privacy after Baird v. Eisenstadt Nancy Welch...........................................................173 Virtuosos and Ensembles: Rhetorical Lessons from Jazz Gregory Clark...........................................................................................314 Keeping the World Safe for Class Struggle: Revolutionary Memory in a Post-Marxist Time John Trimbur...........................................................475 Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Speaking Picture Susan Wells.......................................................................................................596 The Collective Privacy of Academic Language David Bleich......................................................................................................797 The Essayist In-and Behind-the Essay: Vested Writers, Invested Readers Lynn Z. Bloom..........................................................................948 Upon the Public Stage: How Professionalization Shapes Accounts of Composing in the Academy Cheryl Geisler.....................................................1129 Ethical Deliberation and Trust in Diverse-Group Collaboration Geoffrey A. Cross...............................................................................12710 Identity and the Internet: The Telling Case of Amazon.com's Top Fifty Reviewers Douglas Hesse................................................................13911 The Influence of Expanded Access to Mass Communication on Public Expression: The Rise of Representatives of the Personal David S. Kaufer.....................15312 Private Witness and Popular Imagination Marguerite Helmers...................................................................................................16713 Mixing It Up: The Personal in Public Discourse Bruce Horner..................................................................................................18514 Cultural Autobiographics: Complicating the "Personal Turns" in Rhetoric and Composition Studies Krista Ratcliffe.............................................19815 Going Public: Locating Public/Private Discourse Sidney I. Dobrin.............................................................................................21616 Public Writing and Rhetoric: A New Place for Composition Christian R. Weisser................................................................................230References.......................................................................................................................................................249Contributors.....................................................................................................................................................264Index............................................................................................................................................................267
Chapter One
RECONCILING PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC RHETORIC What's at Stake? Barbara Couture
"I tried it, but I didn't inhale." It is hard not to smile at the irony of former president Bill Clinton's wan attempt to place himself on the right side of the law in public when disclosing his private use of marijuana. And the irony is doubly inflected for us, knowing-as we do now-about his duplicitous public admission that he never "had sex" with Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps there is no figure in American life for whom private life and public rhetoric are more intertwined than for our nation's president. This consequence of public life in America's most visible office is well known and well accepted.
Lately, the conflation of private life with public rhetoric has become the norm for many of us in far less visible positions, with interesting and perhaps problematic consequences. Some intrusions of public discourse into private life are legislated and involuntary: none of us who travel by air nowadays escape the public questions of a stranger about the contents of our baggage, questions often accompanied by a search of our most intimate personal belongings-including our persons!-amid a crowd of onlookers. Other such intrusions are voluntary: some of us cheerfully encourage the ubiquitous distribution of our private dalliances in public chat rooms on the Internet, for instance.
Whether by wish or by force, there is no question that private lives are increasingly becoming the subject of public expression. Consider the following (far from exhaustive) list of examples:
1. The rock star Ozzie Osbourne's family life, displayed on television twenty-four hours a day, became one of the most popular American shows.
2. A new illness, now treated by psychiatrists, is "Internet addiction"; it involves the obsessive desire of individuals to talk about themselves in public chat rooms to strangers online.
3. TV, radio, and Internet talk-show hosts invite individuals to review intimate details of their private lives in forums for public discussion.
4. Increased electronic access to personal data allows news services, consumer outlets, and government agencies to "learn" more about private citizens, with thousands of nameless employees tailoring services to private individuals, often without their direct knowledge, and contacting them by phone, mail, or e-mail.
5. Academics who teach online courses report exhaustive involvement in public e-mail discussions of individual students' responses-often personal-to classroom materials, discussions viewed by entire classes.
The increased forced and voluntary opportunities to make the private doings of many or most of us the subject of public rhetoric have consequences for its function, content, and form-consequences that not only provide topics of interest for scholars and challenges for teachers of writing and speech, but that also affect the potential utility of public rhetoric in the service of the common good.
One could argue, of course, that rhetoric, by definition, is not necessarily an art in service of the common good; by far, its most common interpreted function is "persuasion"-with no assumption made as to whether the goal is to persuade for good or ill. Yet in the grand tradition of classical humanistic education, the aim of teaching the rhetorical arts has always been and today remains to prepare students to contribute to the public good. James Zappen, for one, made the point convincingly over a decade ago, arguing for a "pluralistic rhetoric" in the teaching and writing of technical and managerial discourse that encourages writers to serve organizational goals while relating decision making to the greater good (Zappen 39).
The question for our contributors, responding in this volume to the growing tendency to confuse and conflate private lives with public rhetoric, is...
