Democratic Dissent

CMCL C705 Research Seminar in Rhetoric & Public Culture

Jointly Listed with Cultural Studies (C701) and American Studies (G751)

Professor: Robert Ivie

Class Meeting Time and Place: Friday, 9:30 – 12:00 noon; Wilkie 109

Office Hours: M, W 4:00-5:00 p.m. and by appointment; Mottier 203

Office Phone: (912) 855-5467; Email: rivie@indiana.edu; Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb

Intent of the Course:

This course is designed to facilitate original research by class members on the topic of democratic dissent considered as a necessity of healthy democratic culture. It focuses throughout the semester on each class member’s original research for the course.

Each student will develop a specific research project throughout the semester on a subject of his or her choice related to the focus of the seminar. Subjects for research can be historical or contemporary but in either case should focus on the practice of dissent within U.S. political culture or compared/contrasted to U.S. political culture.

Seminar meetings will feature discussion of ongoing student research projects preceded by, and intertwined with, discussion of common readings. Common readings provide grounded accounts of dissent to help us explore the confluence of political culture and rhetorical practice. Members of the class will report on their evolving research projects at various points throughout the term, culminating in a final research paper for each student.

The politics of agonistic pluralism extended to rhetorical constructions of identification and division provide the basis of a working notion of democratic dissent as a discourse of consubstantial rivalry [Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, in press)]. With the notion of consubstantial rivalry, I aim to focus critical attention on the constructive role to be played by perspective and rhetoric in the negotiation of necessarily hierarchical relations within and between diverse polities and perspectives. Consubstantial rivalry is a heuristic that gives us added purchase on the production of threatening images of domestic and foreign Others (images that stifle dissent by associating difference with deviance and malevolence while demanding consensus and quiescence as marks of allegiance, loyalty, and virtue). As a critical heuristic, the trope of consubstantial rivalry points to how democratic dissent can be privileged by constructing rivals as divided from but also identified with one another, that is, as simultaneously adverse and complementary, associated and dissociated, similar and dissimilar in varying degrees. Articulating appropriately flexible linguistic boundaries to produce intersecting attitudes rather than rigid categorical distinctions of identity and difference enables dissent to perform the democratic function of holding delimited perspectives accountable to one another.

As Steven H. Shiffrin argues, dissent and democracy usually run together in a generally progressive direction. Dissent is “part of the daily dialectic of power relations” that serves to challenge the orthodoxies of conventions, habits, and traditions where societal pressures to conform otherwise narrow and rigidify our perspective on a complex and changing world (The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance, pp. 83-85, 95-97).

We will begin our common readings with Lapham’s Gag Rule to get a quick overview of dissent’s relationship to democracy and the tendency to suppress dissent throughout U.S. history, especially during periods of crisis and war. Lapham’s book is itself an exercise in and a call for dissent, a sustained critique of the current attack on civil liberties and political protest under the guise of fighting the war on terror. We will turn next to Giroux and Giroux who link the current right-wing suppression of political dissent to an attack on higher education; Giroux and Giroux call for a critical public pedagogy to enrich democratic practice and culture, thereby envisioning the professoriat as dissenting citizen scholars. We will then consider Shiffrin’s ideas about dissent, the First amendment, and romancing democracy in America in the pursuit of social justice. Our next common reading will focus attention on antebellum America where Hartnett examines the cultural fictions and rhetorical nuances that both facilitated and complicated the practice of democratic dissent on issues of race, slavery, modernity, capitalism, and empire. This reading is supplemented by selections from Hughes’s critique of guiding myths, including the myth of American innocence, that shut down dissent but that might be re-appropriated to facilitate the pursuit of justice, equality, and liberty. Next, Honig explores the role of the foreigner as an exercise in symbolic politics that often turn toward scapegoating; she asks how ambivalence toward foreignness can be directed toward accommodating difference and solving problems of democracy’s foundation and renewal, suggesting that we think of democracy within the genre of gothic romance. After Honig, we will turn to Jensen’s short book calling for organized democratic resistance to empire, Palaima’s criticism of Jensen’s rhetorical strategy, and a selection from Schultz and Schultz’s account of the personal costs of dissent. Throughout the first six weeks, we will also consider my own developing perspective on these matters by discussing some of my recent essays on democracy and dissent.

Required Books:

Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Stephen John Hartnett, Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Robert Jensen, Citizens of the Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004).

Lewis H. Lapham, Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004).

I recommend purchasing these five books; they are also available on closed reserve at the Kent Cooper Reading Room, IU Main Library, under CMCL C705.

Recommended Books:

Rather than a definitive bibliography of works on dissent, the following list is meant to direct your attention toward a sample of recently published readings that range from theoretical to historical and critical approaches.

Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Stephen L. Carter, The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Nancy Chang, Silencing Political Dissent (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002).

Saul Cornell, Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, ed., Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002).

Robert T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). (closed reserve, Kent Cooper Reading Room)

Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

Scott Lucas, The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000).

Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (Berkley: University of California Press, 1989).

Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Phil Scranton, ed., Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

Steven H. Shiffrin, Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999). (closed reserve, Kent Cooper Reading Room)

Steven H. Shiffrin, The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990). (closed reserve, Kent Cooper Reading Room)

Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Randall B. Woods, ed., Vietnam and the American Political Tradition: The Politics of Dissent (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Mary Ann Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

Schedule of Classes:

9/3 – Read for class discussion: (1) Lapham, Gag Rule, pp. 1-89; (2) Robert L. Ivie, “The Rhetoric of Bush’s ‘War’ on Evil,” KB Journal 1 (2004): http://www.kbjournal.org/ ; Robert L. Ivie, “Evil Enemy Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 25 (2003): 181-200 – “Evil Enemy” is available electronically through IUCAT.

Discussion Leaders: 1.

2.

9/10 – Read for class discussion: (1) Lapham, Gag Rule, pp. 90-171; (2) Robert L. Ivie, “Prologue to Democratic Dissent in America,” Javnost/The Public 11 (2004): Robert L. Ivie, “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (Summer 2002): 277-85 – “Rhetorical Deliberation” is available electronically through IUCAT.

Discussion Leaders: 1.

2.

9/17 – Read for one-hour class discussion: (1) Giroux and Giroux, Take Back Higher Education, pp. 1-125; (2) Robert L. Ivie, “A Presumption of Academic Freedom,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27 (Spring 2005): forthcoming.

Discussion Leaders: 1.

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Project report 1a: the subject of your study and its significance (5-minute report; 10-minute discussion)

Students Reporting: 1.

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9/24 –Read for one-hour class discussion: Giroux and Giroux, Take Back Higher Education, pp. 129-285; (2) Robert L. Ivie, “Democracy, War, and Decivilizing Metaphors of American Insecurity,” in Metaphorical World Politics: Rhetorics of Democracy, War, and Globalization, ed. Francis A. Beer and Christ’l de Landtsheer (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004).

Discussion Leaders: 1.

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Project report 1b: the subject of your study and its significance (5-minute report; 10-minute discussion)

Students Reporting: 1.

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10/1 – Read for one-hour class discussion: Steven H. Shiffrin on democracy and dissent in The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance, pp. 69-109 Steven H. Shiffrin, Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America, pp. 91-120; Robert L. Ivie, “Distempered Demos: Myth, Metaphor, and U.S. Political Culture,” in Myth: A New Symposium, ed. Gregory A. Schrempp and William Hansen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 165-179. These three of these readings are available on closed reserve at the Kent Cooper Reading Room.

Discussion Leaders: 1.

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Project report 1c: the subject of your study and its significance (5-minute report; 10-minute discussion)

Students Reporting: 1.

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Written review of Giroux and Giroux (following the CCCS book review guidelines that are posted at the end of the course syllabus) due in class.

10/8 – Read for one-hour class discussion: (1) Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, pp. 1-92; (2) Robert L. Ivie, “Democratic Dissent by Rhetorical Critique in a Time of War and Terror,” Poynter Center Fellowship Paper (2004).

Discussion Leaders: 1.

2.

Project discussion 2a: 1,000-word summary, outline, or introduction, plus preliminary bibliography of primary and secondary sources (papers distributed as e-mail attachments to all class members by 10/5; 15-minute discussion per paper, beginning with 5-minute opening response by designated student).

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10/15 – Read for one-hour class discussion: Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, pp. 93-182; Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, pp. 1-17, 163-95 (closed reserve, Kent Cooper Reading Room).

Discussion Leaders: 1.

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Project discussion 2b: 1,000-word summary, outline, or introduction, plus preliminary bibliography of primary and secondary sources (papers distributed as e-mail attachments to all class members by 10/12; 15-minute discussion per paper, beginning with 5-minute opening response by designated student).

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10/22 – Read for one-hour class discussion: Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner.

Discussion Leaders: 1.

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Project discussion 2c: 1,000-word summary, outline, or introduction, plus preliminary bibliography of primary and secondary sources (papers distributed as e-mail attachments to all class members by 10/19; 15-minute discussion per paper, beginning with 5-minute opening response by designated student).

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10/29 Read for class discussion: Robert Jensen, Citizens of the Empire; Thomas G. Palaima, “The Texas Professoriate and Public Political Discourse Before and After 9/11,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (March 2004): 89-99; Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, The Price of Dissent, pp. 265-367. The Palaima and the Schultz and Shultz readings are available on closed reserve at the Kent Cooper Reading Room.

11/5 Project discussion 3a: draft of research paper (papers distributed as e-mail attachments to all class members by 11/2; 25-minute discussion per paper, beginning with 5-minute opening response by designated student).

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11/12 (NCA)

11/19 Project discussion 3b: draft of research paper (papers distributed as e-mail attachments to all class members by 11/16; 25-minute discussion per paper, beginning with 5-minute opening response by designated student).

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11/26 (Thanksgiving)

12/3 Project discussion 3c: draft of research paper (papers distributed as e-mail attachments to all class members by 11/30; 25-minute discussion per paper, beginning with 5-minute opening response by designated student).

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12/10 Project discussion 3d: draft of research paper (papers distributed as e-mail attachments to all class members by 12/7; 25-minute discussion per paper, beginning with 5-minute opening response by designated student).

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12/13 Final revised papers due to me as e-mail attachment (papers should be 8,000-9,000 words total, including main text and endnotes or sources cited if using parenthetical documentation style).

Graded Assignments:

Discussion Leadership: 10%

Respondent (5%, 10%): 15%

Book review of Giroux and Giroux: 15%

Project Oral Report: 10%

Project Summary, Outline, or Intro: 10%

Draft of Research Paper: 25%

Final revised paper: 15%

Follow Chicago Manual of Style, MLA or other style sheet used in your field of study; use either endnote documentation for sources and content notes or parenthetical documentation with list of sources cited.

Guidelines for CCCS Book Reviews

Robert L. Ivie, Editor

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

CCCS publishes occasional book reviews.

The books reviewed are current, that is, published within a year of the date they are reviewed in CCCS. Thus, a book reviewed in CCCS in calendar year 2005, for example, should have a publication date of 2004.

The books reviewed in CCCS should be important, intellectually provocative works that are directly relevant to the journal’s editorial mission. The mission of the journal is to publish scholarship for an international readership on communication as a theory, practice, technology, and discipline of power. CCCS features critical inquiry that cuts across academic boundaries to focus on social, political, and cultural practices from the standpoint of communication. It promotes critical reflection on the requirements of a more democratic culture by giving attention to subjects such as, but not limited to, class, race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality, polity, public sphere, nation, environment, and globalization. Essays are selected to be academically sound, rhetorically self-reflexive, intellectually innovative, and conceptually relevant to democratic concerns in their orientation toward communication and culture. Collectively, they analyze historical contexts, material and economic conditions, institutional settings, political initiatives, practices of resistance, and the theoretical significance of discursive formations in everyday life. The books it reviews should speak to the mission.

Reviews should be written to engage books constructively in fair, nuanced, and spirited critiques that go beyond reporting the contents of the books.

The length of these reviews should be approximately 2,000 - 2,500 words.

Publication information should be placed at the top of each review as follows:

Smith, William Z. A Critical Ethnography of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ix + 257 pp. $21.95 paper. $75.00 cloth.

Authors should identify themselves by name and institutional affiliation at the bottom of their reviews as follows:

James J. Jones

Rutgers University

Contact the editor before writing a review to determine if the journal is interested in reviewing the book in question. Reviews should be sent as a Word attachment by the specified deadline to cccs@indiana.edu.

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