Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres.

• Author: Phillips, Kendall R.
• Position: Book Reviews

Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. By Gerard A. Hauser. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999; pp. xiv + 335; $45.00.

Gerard Hauser's Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres is an important book. Anyone interested in the general notion of the public and its relationship to the functioning of democracy should attend to this work. Further, those interested in rhetoric and argumentation will find here an interesting if at times frustrating book.

In Vernacular Voices, Hauser continues his work on the notion of public opinion and his crusade to have the concept of public opinion rendered in terms of rhetorical interactions rather than numerical aggregates. Here, however, Hauser goes further, seeking to reconfigure not merely the notion of public opinion but the very notion of the public sphere. His critique of Habermas is refreshing. In a series of "counterassumptions," Hauser problematizes the notion of a single idealized public sphere populated by rational, disinterested individuals discussing common issues. While these critiques are by no means new, Hauser uniquely grounds each critique in classical notions of rhetoric.

In recent years, numerous efforts to rehabilitate the notion of rhetoric by turning to Habermas's ideal communication situation have appeared. Vernacular Voices turns the tables, seeking to rehabilitate Habermas's (and Arendt's) sense of the public sphere by grounding this concept on the practice of rhetoric. Hauser imagines the public sphere as a web-like structure providing for interaction between numerous vernacular publics. This interaction, in turn, provides for both a common sense of the world and shared judgments. The overriding norm of consensus, a la Habermas, is abandoned in favor of common social referents. As Hauser puts it, "A public's emergence is not dependent on consensus but on the sharing of a common world, even when understood and lived differently by different segments of society" (p. 69).

The public sphere thus reconceptualized, Hauser returns to his concern for public opinion. If, as he has argued, the public sphere is a permeable network of vernacular publics, then public opinion can only be understood in terms of vernacular rhetorics. Hauser summarizes, "The vernacular rhetoric model shifts analysis from preconceived notions of 'the public' as a political ideal and from objectivist conceptions ... to the communicative and epistemic...