How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age
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Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era: How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Aaron McKain Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee: James Phelan, Advisor Cynthia Selfe Wendy Hesford Copyright by Aaron McKain 2012 Abstract This dissertation begins with a question that sits – obstinately – at the crossroads of 21st century American politics and 21st century scholarship in rhetoric and composition: How do we make judgments about rhetoric when new media (social-networking, web 2.0, ease of audio/visual production) have rendered our long-standing public norms of ethos untenable? This is the dilemma lurking behind the daily parade of new media acts that we, as citizens, are expected to judge: From co-workers caught mid-kegstand on Facebook to politicians trapped in the YouTube minefield of decontextualized and mashed-up gaffes. But ethos points to a larger concern as well: At the precise moment where technology has given us, as a citizens, unparalleled power to act as rhetorical critics -- when anyone with a laptop and dial-up connection can effortlessly remediate, remix, and repurpose rhetorical acts from one context to another – we are uncertain about what the new rules of rhetoric are? How do we rethink ethos – in terms of character -- for a heavily surveilled, socially-networked age, where the distinctions between public and private are nebulous and all of our previous public performances are always only a Google search away? Concerned that our current, mass media age, standards for judging ethos as character (e.g., as authenticity, as the search for the “real” person) are both deadlocking our politics and providing no vocabulary of resistance to the new media era’s twin industries of information- gathering and surveillance, this dissertation proceeds in three stages in order to present a solution. First, using U.S. presidential campaigns in the new media era as a canonical political and pop cultural text, it zeroes in on two particular crises of ethos: the impossibility of maintaining a ii coherent public persona (e.g. Gov. Mitt Romney versus the internet archive) and the erosion of the line between what is public and what is private (e.g., Sen. John McCain). Second, it turns to an underexplored area of American politics – aesthetics – to consider how the continued embrace of now forty year old, postmodern political aesthetics (e.g., metafiction, the New Journalism) prevents us from updating and re-conceptualizing our notions of political ethos. Finally, drawing on these observations, Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era proposes a heuristic to rethink our judgments of ethos: A critical updating of the “Chicago School” narrative model of communication. Arguing for this narrative model academically (via debates within the digital humanities on the issue of posthumanism), politically (using Stephen Colbert as a test case of ethos and new media era American politics ), and pedagogically (as a method of teaching ethos in rhetoric and composition classrooms), this project lobbies for a rethinking of our judgments of ethos that (1) better navigates the complexities of our new rhetorical landscapes; (2) is more in sync with the post-postmodern aesthetics of the digital media age; and (3) triangulates, as a pedagogy of resistance for citizens and students, the legal, political, and ethical values of ethos that new media – through our judgments of even its most mundane acts – invite us to acquiesce to. iii To Jim, Cindy, and Danielle for, well, everything. iv Acknowledgments Wendy and Nan, Scott and Michael, John and Joy, David and Brian (and Paul), Gordon and Kate, Jan and Teemu, Jill, Bartley, and Karl: Ten years is a very long time. I owe you all more than you will ever know. v Vita 1998 ..................................................................... B.A. English, B.A. Political Science, University of Nebraska 2004 ..................................................................... M.A. English, Ohio State University 2011 ..................................................................... Assistant Professor of English, Hamline University Publications “Rhetoric.” In Peter Logan, Ed. Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel. Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011. “The Rhetoric of Narrative: What the Law as Narrative Movement Can Teach the Rest of the Narrative Turn.” In Deborah Journet, Ed. Narrative Action/Narrative Knowledge. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2010. “New Media, New English.” In Cheryl E. Ball and James Kalmbach, Eds. Reading and Writing New Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. With Jason Palmeri, Cormac Slevin, and Scott Lloyd DeWitt. Commonplace: A Citizen’s Guide to Persuasion (for an Age that Desperately Needs One). New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. With Michael Harker and Scott Lloyd DeWitt. “Re-Learning How to Argue.” In Cynthia L. Selfe, Ed. Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. “Made Actual Through Pain: A Literacy Documentary.” In Cynthia L Selfe, Ed. vi Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. With Michael Harker and Cormac Slevin. “Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show.” Journal of American Culture 28, no. 4 (2005): 415-430. Fields of Study Major Field: English vii Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………............ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………................iv Acknowledgement………………………………………………………………………................v Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………...vi List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..ix Introduction: Welcome to the New Media Era…………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1 (Exhibit B): Mitt Romney: Grey Flannel Martyr for the New Media Ethos?……........39 Chapter 2 (Theory Interlude): A Cyborg, Wayne Booth, and a Dissertation Walk Into a Bar.......63 Chapter 3 (Exhibit C): Losing to Win: Interpretive Restraint, McCain and Colbert……………105 Conclusion: Commonplace: Character, Community, and Agency in the Classroom…………...159 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….178 viii List of Figures Figure 1. Narrative Model of Communication…………………………………………………...81 Figure 2. Ethos as Producer/Produced…………………………………………………………....85 Figure 3. Narrative Model Redux………………………………………………………………...91 Figure 4. Narrative Model With Audiences……………………………………………………..135 Figure 5. Experiential Axis: Character………………………………………………………….139 Figure 6. Experiential Axis: Agency and Community…………………………………………..157 ix INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO THE NEW MEDIA ERA “Lester stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “God damn!” he said. “What a bummer. Why would anybody want to get hung up on a pile of shit like Politics?” – H.S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘721 We, the People, are really we, the rhetorical critics. This doesn’t sound like the familiar slogan of high school civics teachers and junior Congressmen, but it is true: American politics, at its best and worst, is the constellation of millions of rhetorical judgments. We are asked to decide whether to get angry when Rev. Jeremiah Wright rallies his congregation with “God Damn America,” or whether to get angry at our fellow Americans who got angry about it. We cry or cringe or cheer or hiss when we hear Sen. Obama tell 80,000 at Mile High Stadium that we are “the hope we’ve been waiting for,” or listen to Sen. McCain reveal, to another 45,00 in Minneapolis, the story of his captivity and torture and most private, in extremis moments. We laugh and groan and stare in slack-jawed disbelief when Chuck Norris endorses Mike Huckabee, or at Will.i.am’s YouTube oh-so-earnest- it-might-be-sickening celebrity sing-along. We nod or yell at the biases of Fox News and MSNBC and The Huffington Post, and screech or scratch our heads at the ideological clowning of Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart. At protests and rallies and town hall meetings, we fear the collapse of civil civic discourse, except when we are heartened by the resurrection of civic activism. And, at some point during the proceedings, we all feel proud and stupid and dumbstruck and awed all at once for having ever watched or participated in (or participated in by watching) a single second of the scary magnificent banal spectacle in the first place. 1 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ’72 (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1985), 31. 1 These are the moments – silly, powerful, stupid, momentous, and insignificant – that, for better or worse, comprise our political rhetoric, and, in particular, collated into the presidential campaign of 2008 (and we are watching it again, reanimated and with a different cast of characters – like a TV spinoff – in 2012). And Campaign 2008, for better or worse, is a fair measure of what constitutes and symbolizes political life in our representative democracy – a democracy in which we have (as commentators from Chomsky to Agamben to Glenn Beck take pains to point out) a fairly circumscribed and attenuated role. As citizens, we are typically neither asked nor expected to weigh in on the intricacies of micro-finance or the IMF, nor to lend a hand in unraveling the mysteries of municipal water lines or credit-default swaps. Rather, our assigned role – blueprinted in the Federalist Papers and, once upon a time not so long ago, perhaps an inevitable consequence