Chapter Two:  Ain’t Nobody’s Business?

Main Claim / Executive Summary

Welch engages a lot of issues in Chapter Two; however, her main concern seems to be the distinctions (and misrepresentations) of “public” and “private.”  Welch argues that because “private” matters aren’t to be discussed, the trend toward “privatization” in the public sphere is a strategic attempt to remove numerous issues from debate in a would-be democracy.  To illustrate her point Welch demonstrates how neoliberal privatization schemes of the past thirty years – instituted first by global economic policy makers and next by venture capitalist corporations –  have instituted ultra-capitalist free market reforms that require privatization of progressivist, coop or state-owned enterprises.  Welch’s claim is that these neoliberal market logics have not only damaged the third and second world economies of the Global South, but have also defined the way that publics in the US understand their agency with respect to most social issues.  In other words, public debates become privatized issues – and hence, no longer public debates – no longer arguable.  Furthermore, because success in the workplace is typically conceived of in terms of the individual in the neoliberal era, the personal (privatized) and the impersonal (also now privatized) are rendered off-limits.  This results in an individual laborer’s inability to represent herself in any manner that questions the market logic.  In turning to our students, Welch asks how we can move students from a stance of unawareness of public contestation to a more developed understanding of “discursive contestation” – or the “highly political questions of where (and by whom) public and private boundaries are drawn” (44).

Working With:

Brandt, Deborah.  2001a.  “Protecting the Personal.”  In “The Politics of the Personal:  Storying   Our Lives Against the Grain.”  The Symposium Collective.  College English 64: 41-62.

Fraser, Nancy.  1989.  Unruly Practices:  Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemp-orary Social Theory.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press.

Working Against:

Gee, James Paul.  1999.  “Learning Language as a Matter of Learning Social Languages within     Discourses.”  Annual Conference on College Composition and Communication.  Atlanta, GA.

Freidman, Milton.  1962.  Capitalism and Freedom.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Further Reading:

Frank, Thomas.  2000.  One Market Under God:  Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the   End of Economic Democracy.  New York:  Doubleday.

Klein, Naomi.  2007.  Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York:  Metropolitan Books.

Key Words/Phrases

private

privatization

public

neoliberalism

arguable

discursive contestation

Key Questions/Concerns/Ideas

1. To borrow directly from Welch, “If, for instance, it is collective confidence, organization, and creativity that most people need to create a bullying-free campus or to imagine a livable wage and a livable future on a livable planet, what literacy practices and rhetorical orientations can we match to these needs?” (53)
2. What can untenured academicians do in their classrooms to challenge the rise of corporatism between private interests and the state?  What systems of support are available to those agents of dissent?
3. I haven’t finished the book yet, so if this question is answered, please don’t read me the riot act! J  Anyhow, is Welch’s larger question in this work whether or not neoliberal social and economic policy is endangering the existence of Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics?
4. If neoliberal policy – as envisioned through the outsourcing of the US military’s activities  to Halliburton or the Chilean privatization movement of the 1970s– seeks to privatize, and hence render unarguable, contentious social issues, what can be gained by looking toward socialist regimes or other movements outside of the liberal order?  Is there a balance to be made between neoliberal privatization and state sponsored socialism?  Where does the “public” fit into this equation?
5. I have a copy of “Finally Got the News” (the film about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers) if anyone wants to borrow it.

Welch, Nancy. Living Room:  Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World. Portsmouth: Boynton Cook, 2008.

Chapter One:  A Public World is Possible
In the first chapter, Welch doesn’t commit to the oft-repeated notion that folks in the US are subject to “stupidification”; rather, she claims that instead we are suffering from a loss of democratic voice.  She traces this loss to the rise and full implementation of neoliberal economic and social politics.  In the face of such a large, almost insurmountable evil, she positions her work as one of hope and despair (3).  To frame her study, she intends to put to work a “revitalized interest in teaching public writing” as well as a reinvestigation (a la Royster, Jarratt, et. al.) of “itinerant teachers” instead of canonized figures and institutional elites.  In considering these two factors, she hopes to put back into discussion two rhetorical cannons that she considers neglected: delivery and memory (5).  When discussing neoliberal economic policies, Welch notes that the “social turn” in comp/rhet. coincided with the private turn in economic and social areanas (think Thomas Frank or Naomi Klein).  As corporatism took root in the Reagan era and grew full bloom through the Clinton/Bush presidencies, market logic also began to strongly effect educational theory.  In effect, these neoliberal attitudes effectively made some topics “off limits” or atleast outside the realm of what was arguable.  Welch will, in her work, attempt to demonstrate historical case studies that call into question many of the principles about what we teach as effective communication in light of the neoliberal redefinitions about “what” is arguable.  In so doing, Welch thinks that “Though we can’t call a strike or launch a social movement from a classroom, we can teach and learn the attitudes, relationships, and practices that are the preconditions for imagining oneself and others as participants in social polity making and agents of social change” (15).
In the interlude, Welch illustrates how social linguistics are both right wrong concerning discourses of power.  According to Welch, it is true that WHO you are matters a great deal when attempting to enter or appropriate a discourse of power.  This idea is in keeping with Gee’s; however, the “What to Do?” cannot be answered by Gee’s sociolinguistic mapping.  Welch notes that this “What to Do?” is an especially difficult question to answer because, under neoliberal systems, it really doesn’t matter.  Market logic will dictate the “What to do with you.”  This privatization of authority and advocacy is tough to take, but a fuller awareness of the “rhetorics of power” can address this issue (or at least according to Welch).

Chapter Three:  Taking Sides
In chapter three Welch discusses the role of activism in the academy and illustrates how two strands of feminism can help folks get toward more productive acts of dissent.  In illustrating her argument, Welch traces how broader cultural events created the current attitudes toward argument and public critique.  In considering maternalist feminisms, Welch argues that the idea that women are naturally pacifists or peacemakers is wrong.  Yet, she concedes that the maternalist position will allow feminists, if they can get beyond the “peacemakers” label, to form strong coalitions.  In considering the third-sophistics, she criticizes how this strain of pomo “eschews any solid ground on which to stake a claim” (59); however, she sees the good in this form of thinking because the third sophistic can allow for a resisting of too quick of a settlement upon problematic arguments – in other words, if assertion and exposition can be taken into account, third sophistic rhetoric can let us rethink binary assumptions.

Chapter Four:  Making Space
In this chapter Welch argues for a reaccounting of the kinds of rhetorical histories and discourses we use inour classrooms.  There are a ton of money quotes in this section, but I’m going to hit this with a list of bullets:
1.    She wants to conceive of rhetoric not as a techne, but as mass, popular art (89).
2.    She claims that rhetorical space isn’t the result of good planning, but rather people “make” rhetorical space through a concerted, often protracted struggle for visibility, voice, and impact against powerful interests that seek to render them invisible” (93).
3.    In discussing exclusion of some voices, Welch extends her analysis to a treatment of “atmosphere.”  In discussing how some groups are excluded from “atmosphere,” Welch articulates the double-edged sword of liberalism.  While on the one hand liberalism preferences indivudal freedoms and liberty, it also extends those freedoms to corporate entities.  Because of this, the corporate “individual” gets the same treatment as the solitary individual. .. .. .. not the same, but actually far better because of influence.
4.    Welch advocated using the “rhetoric from below” to demonstrate how the “working class” and marginalized have fought for the rights to free expression and self-determination.  In so doing, Welch hopes students will begin to study a “contentious history of rhetoric” that illustrates the tensions between rhetorics from below and rhetorics from above.
5.    In order to more justly realize the “public,” students should study rhetorics of dissent in order to revision the long history of public space.
6.    By using the pomo definitions of a complicit working class, rhetorical scholars have missed out on the rich and varied histories of expression in the period since May 1968.
7.    By using these reclaimed rhetorical histories of the working class, Welch and her students can more effectively conceive of the public.

Chapter Five:  So What Gives You Authority?
Welch’s book ends with a meditation on ethos.  In considering large-scale problems, Welch claims that we have been taught to defer in these issues to the opinions of the “experts” because we lack the authority to discuss them.  Welch terms this a neoliberal privatized ethos in that we have been taught that it’s “just not our place” to consider the big issues like healthcare, war, the economy, and so on.  The mass media, because they have been consolidated into 5 or so organizations, further reifies this belief in experts by always deferring to the same pundits and “experts” in TV interviews.  This reduction in available forums of expression – including the spheres of the internet and other electronic communication – has not explicitly taught us “what” to think, but “what to think about.”  This privatization of ethos works on two levels – the material and the ideological.  On the material, we find the privatization of the public – land, services, resources, etc.  On the ideological, we find the authoritative experts that push these material transfers forward.  During this entire process of privatization, we are being sold – according to Welch – apathy.  This section reminded me of Foucault’s ideas about technocracies and biopower.