WHICH VOICES? WHOSE DEMOCRACY?

• Author: Cloud, Dana L.
• Position: Review

To a field that tends to privilege the hegemonic and strategic voices of elites, Gerard Hauser's Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (1999) offers a pioneering contribution in its close attention to the everyday voices of ordinary people as they negotiate their social relationships with elected leaders and official institutions and spaces. The book raises philosophical and methodological questions of significant interest to scholars and teachers of rhetorical criticism, political rhetoric, publics theory, and social movements. Hauser's commitment to critical, scholarly engagement with the real practices of democratic life sustains the book despite some significant definitional opacity and theoretical inconsistency, which I will address below.

The review of public spheres literature in the opening chapters of Vernacular Voices culminates in a "conversational model of society" (p. 67) whose features are at odds with either the norm of the rational-critical public or the shallow abstracted aggregate of the kind represented in public opinion polls. Then follow close analyses of specific instances of the vernacular: the 1985 election campaigns in Greece, the emergence of civil society in Poland and in the former Yugoslavia after Communism's collapse, the 1986 Meese Commission on pornography, the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, and letters written by ordinary Americans to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the eve of his third term. The book concludes with a treatise on theory and method that reiterates the project's aim to give "credence to discourse as it actually occurs in existing democracies and asking what these very social practices of formal and vernacular exchange may tell us about our public life" (p. 280).

These case studies are guided by important questions both about the specific cases (What were the discursive seeds of the fall of Communism? What are partisan street demonstrations in Greek elections about? Why did Carter lose the 1980 presidential election? What kind of agency did FDR's correspondents demonstrate? Why didn't the Meese Commission lead to a richer public discussion about pornography?), and about the theory and practice of public sphere studies (Where do we find publics? What is the best way to measure public opinion? How do publics form, and what is the character of their discourses?).

Another question that the book implicitly raises and answers is, "In what kind of democracy do we live?" In response, Hauser argues emphatically that we do not live in the "sanitized" (p. 280) homogeneous, rational, deliberative discursive world idealized by Habermas and other lamenters of the public's transformation-cum-decline. Hauser's publics are, by contrast, untidy, heteroglossic, sometimes irrational, and imperfect in their discursive execution. Hauser also describes the reticulate (netlike) public sphere as resistant to description in terms of the shallow technocratic rationality of contemporary opinion polls. Rather, he argues, we need detailed attention to the discourses of vernacular publics in order to describe public opinion adequately. This effort to "go to the ground" of public discourse against the abstractions of the pollsters is the book's most...