Form, Content, and the Rhetoric of Social Movements

In 1980, David Zarefsky warned that the way that rhetoricians studied social movements took for granted the agitations and discourses of a movement at their word. Namely, he said, what guaranteed that a social movement always existed outside the existing relays of power in a given political space besides its own claims to be a "social movement"? Rhetorical studies, he argued, risked deciding in advance what was and was not a social movement by assigning certain movement-specific content a transhistorical role indetermining the formal characteristics of what counted as a social movement.

Zarefsky's alternative was to always insist on historically situated studies of the rhetoric of particular controversies and demands. Through close historical analysis, one could presumably figure out at a given synchronic moment whether or not one was seeing an oppositional or hegemonic social movement. Zarefsky's form/content argument strikes me as absolutely correct: just saying you're a social movement doesn't make it so, and the left does not hold a monopoly on discourses of social agitation.

One is also tempted to fill out Zarefsky's objection through a recourse to post-structural theories of political space and identity. Namely, what is at stake in even announcing the existence of something like a "social movement" implies the existence of something like a total/fixed/settled field of the political and its constitutive discourses at a given moment. The danger, of course, is analagous to the recurrence of the "determination in the last instance" problem faced by those attempting to make critical gestures at the existence of structures without allowing those structures to pre-exist the political possibilities available to critics. That is, once you've established what a social movement is "against", that which it is "against" is thought to pre-exist the social movement and movements always occur in a kind of dialectical relationship on an existing political plane. The movements, however much they oppose what exists/is hegemonic, nevertheless have some of their radical oppositional potential drained by defining themselves oppositionally rather than producing their own independently intelligible discourse of appeal.

To contextualize through criticism: one might think about how, for example, how ineffective on a large scale pro-socialism discourses in America are today. This is not because there is anything inherently unpersuasive about socialism: indeed, America has a long and glorious history of federally and state enacted "socialist" policies. It is, instead, because the American political imaginary coheres through an understanding of socialism that displaces and marks its discourses as alien to discourses of "Americanness" in the abstract. We can think of this as needing a kind of rhetorical means-testing: until a socialist policy is calcified in the realm of the political the presumption lies against its normative desireability. All of this operates under the presumption that something like "Americanness" exists, that it is known, and that it does a kind of natural/guaranteed work in producing a coherent political space.

Back to Zarefsky: how can we even begin to claim to know the contours of political space before we investigate it? I think that we cannot. All we can do is to inquire (following Foucault) after the conditions of discourse's intelligible enunciation. To do otherwise risks stipulating in advance that a certain something already exists as the antecedent to the discourses that exist, and in so-doing we might naturalize the existences of the very hegemonic discourses to which we are opposed. If we map progressive political content onto the form of social movements generically, we are left always doing criticism that produces social movements as outside an already established system. Once they are outside, there is a kind of historicized presumption against them. McGee was, as always, onto something like this before most with his seminal work on social movements. For now, careful of form and content!

Political Incoherence

Been doing some remarkable reading--I strongly advise you check out Mark Lilla's recent New Yorker piece on the Tea Party movement. He has an amazing eye and ear for history, and the way in which he contextualizes the Tea Party movement as an extension of his 1998 article "A Tale of Two Reactions" is fascinating. Essentially, the argument is that the New Left of the 1960's shares with the Reagan democrats (and now, the confounding subjects of the Tea Party who want to defend their individual selves from governmental tyranny) a strong belief in the power of individuality to echo and exercise force for good.

Why this argument seems so precisely correct to me is that it explains how something like the Tea Party is capable not just of appearing in public but also maintaining its own internal coherence in the face of a rather sizeable amount of American history that contravenes a lot of the reductios circulated by the Tea Party in the name of limited government. I'm thinking particularly of the small rightist cottage industry set up around writing books about why the New Deal was bad, or the way a creeping form of originalism is beginning to do more than just legal work, rewriting the national imaginary in a way to prohibit anything like governmental involvement in social issues (ignoring momentarily the ways in which this government is supposed to intervene temporarily to return the country to how it was, in a form of regulation and intervention whose temporary acceptability is indexed by reaching into our past for a fictive shared fantasy of purity and natural greatness).

FDR was one of our greatest presidents. Nixon coopted George Wallace's voters and then enacted what amounted to progressive, liberal policy initiatives at the federal level. Dwight Eisenhower warned about the "military industrial complex". It's not all peachy keen for liberals--we're saddled with Woodrow Wilson, JFK (it seems like he was really bad, if attractive), and Clinton dispirited the former elements of the New Left as much as he pleased centrists. But as Frederic Jameson said, "history is what hurts". History, especially, must hurt the Tea Partiers, tethered as they are too a historical signifier of America's refusal to bow to something like "authority"--nevermind that what defines that authority, and one what terms, is ineffably contestable in a way that can point to the incoherence of the Tea Party's politics. Since they are for less government, and so much less of it that it would render an awful lot of our already existing political establishments, we need to account for how those arguments can appear. That, for now, can wait. But Lilla is right to point to something like a clash fostered by the contradictions of liberalism. More later.

The Tea Party and Violence

In a recent dust-up between David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg, the two went the rounds over the true character of the Tea Party movement. Brooks took the position that the movement represented a radical break with the existing system, in much the same way that the student led New Left of the 1960's demanded radical social justice based on the existing system's inequality. Goldberg comes back at Brooks to make the point that what distinguishes the Tea Partiers is that the "New Left had no interest in restoring America's founding vision."

The clash, then, is between interpreting the Tea Partier's relationship to American history--Goldberg seems intent on reading for a continuity, seeing the parties emrgencies as a natural reaction to a Leftist political agenda that has taken the country away from its founding principles, while Brooks wants to interpret the group as sharing with the New Left a radical distance from on-going politics. Indeed, I hope I am not stretching to say that Brooks attempts to pull off an argument that would make Foucault proud--he points to the Rousseauian optimism at the heart of both the New Left and the Tea Parties in his view. Of course, this optimism generates different policy suggestions--the New Left wants an increased governmental role in the social so that forms of equality might be produced that let this basic human goodness flourish, while the Tea Party view wants the government out of markets especially, holding that a world unencumbered by heavy governmental regulation will produce the greatest good for the greatest number, owing to the way that market forces testify to man being "born free".

Why does this matter? Well, few political movements (and even fewer successful ones) publicly mark themselves as being against the words and principles upon which their public is founded. Witness, for example, Obama's attempt to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric of "God damn America!" It is bad politics to set yourself up as being against the political structures you inhabit. The Tea Partiers certainly do not do anything like this in their rhetoric, which is peppered with words like freedom, the Constitution, liberty, and of course the signifier "Tea Party" which we tend to imagine is articulated to what America stands for. However, it is a messy business to disentangle this "Tea Party" signifier from its association with revolution and violence. This is why, while I largely think Goldberg's analysis is more persuasive than Brooks's, I find myself recalcitrant in the face of the former's suggestion that the Tea Party movement proposes no break with the American tradition. After all, the Tea Party most commonly might signal for one of two things: the slogan "no taxation without representation", or the beginning of a revolution. Certainly the Tea Partiers consistently claim that they are not represented in Washington but this lack of representation is of a different character than that experienced by the colonists--it is temporary, democratically authorized, and legitimate, even if it is not experienced as such.

It requires some interpretive charity to believe that the "Tea Party" as a signifier floats around with absolutely no affective or signifying force linked to its associations with revolution have an effect on the subjects within the movement. In 1988, Gustainis and Hahns pointed to what they called a "negative reference group" problem, which posed issues for 60's era war protestors. The risk was that the more moderate elements of the group risked being linked in the public imaginary with the worst and more excessive elements of the anti-war movement, delegitimating the entire group effort. The Tea Partiers are conscious of this problem as well--a recent New Yorker article depicts participants at a rally kicking out people for bringing racist signs and being on the lookout for radicals who would promote a negative image. I am quite sincere when I say that a major motive for kicking these people out is also the participants taking offense at offensive messaging--I do believe that the Tea Partiers as a whole are well intentioned individuals (for more on this point see Jonathan Raban's piece in the New York Times Review of Books from a few months back).

Nevertheless, I cannot shake the suspicion that the historical event of the "Boston Tea Party" hints at a threat of violence. After all, we could settle on any number of different signs around which to organize our anger with the government--conservative PAC "Freedom Works" gathers constituents around the less revolutionary and depoliticized "freedom", "Americans for Prosperity" gathers folks around with a message of optimism in the market, and "The Next Right" is another conservative PAC that could produce a new political movement that insists on its continuity with the past. No, there is something in the notion of a Tea Party that makes it a vibrant rhetorical site around which to constitute a movement. It ineffably signifies not only dissatisfaction with a contemporary state of affairs, but also a willingness to promote action to change that state of affairs.

All well and good, you might say, but are not political protests a legitimate way to promote action through legitimate political channels to contest the status quo? Quite right. And we've seen a number of conservative movements that protested publicly over certain issues (abortion and gay right, for example). Those groups often united themselves with a rhetoric of defending "their way of life" or "defending their country and values" against a force externally constituted. And indeed the Tea Partiers continue this tradition, demanding often that they "take their country back." Besides some isolated incidents, however (Eric Rudolph and the Eightmaps controversy over Proposition 8 in California come to mind because of the work of my colleague Sarah Spring) these movements mostly appeared in public as movements defending a certain already American status quo (Lauren Berlant elegantly details this in her collection of essays The Queen of America Goes to Washington City). Because social space was already configured with a presumption or hegemony in favor of the conservative arguments, there was little need to associate the movement with revolutionary imagery (and the privilege of being an unmarked public plays into this as well). So for me, the move to the Tea Party as a signifier of conservative discontent represents not just continuity with America's past, but also a tacit acknowledgment that when things get bad, resistance and recalcitrance are legitimate. Why else move to this imagery that secures the legitimacy of revolutionary violence in a polity that spent much of the 20th century using rhetorical strategies to delegitimze violent resistance and depoliticize political space itself? Words like "freedom" and "liberty" do not quite do enough work right now for conservatives, because while everyone is for them, they are fundamentally hegemonic terms whose possible rearticulation is made concretely threatening to conservative privilege through the electoral victory of Barack Obama. Subjects need a vocabulary to disagree not just with the content of the President's policies but also a means of symbolic compensation to assert that no matter how much the government does not represent their views, they will always have some kind of voice, even if it is a violent one.