Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do we Want From Public Writing?

1. Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do we Want From Public Writing? By Susan Wells

2. Importance of the Public • We have a desire and urge to turn toward the public • But there is difficulty in identifying exactly what, where or who this public is • “Local civic spaces” as we currently imagine them are imaginary leftovers from our understanding of the Greek agora • Which is why composition frequently overlooks public writing – we recognize a need, but we don’t know how to fill it.

3. Habermas & The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere • Public sphere: “discursive domain where private individuals, without the authority of state office, debate the general conduct of social and political business, holding official bodies accountable at the bar of reason” • Public discourse is “a complex array of discursive practices, including forms of writing, speech, and media performance, historically situated and contested.”

4. Composition and the Public Sphere • “Public” topics are frequently targeted to addressed audiences, which effectively means noaudience. • Likewise, no audience and writing in a vacuum means there is little concern for exigence • Wells argues that we must construct public audiences, in part because our public sphere is “attenuated, fragmented, and colonized”

5. Constructing a Public Audience • It is difficult! Even Clinton struggled to construct a public audience in his health care speeches in the ‘90s. • A “representative citizen” is a common trope for including the public in a debate like the one over health care. How do we see this happening now? • “Representative citizen” tropes work on a few different levels: • Citizens see/hear themselves in official debate • Prevent the “silent majority” problem • Serve as persuasive examples for identification and illustration • Define limits/terms of discourse (politeness, etc.) • Frames public discourse as inclusive

6. Some Alternatives • Wells shows that Clinton’s attempts to construct a cohesive public audience for health care reform didn’t work, much like composition classes’ attempts to construct public audiences don’t work either. Wells examines some possible alternatives: • Cultural studies: student writers “explore their situatedness as writers and the politics of literacy” • Doesn’t work because it doesn’t actually attend to a public audience or how a writer can attend to that audience • “Cultural studies has made invaluable contributions to political pedagogy, but it does not answer the question of how students can speak in their own skins to a broad audience, with some hope of effectiveness.”

7. Some Alternatives • Prison visiting room: “allows communication between inside and out. It represents the prisoner’s participation in both worlds. [It’s] not a free space, let alone a safe house, but a space in which boundaries are put in play for both prisoner and guest” • Doesn’t work because public writing isn’t face-to-face, and writing doesn’t always abide by the same rules that conversation or verbal discussion do

8. Public Writing as an Orientation to Action • No more solitary writer alone in his room • Collaboration between writers and readers to “coordinate plans, to come to agreement, to ‘make up the concert’” • One requirement: an “agreement to undertake reciprocal action, based on shared problems and possible solutions” • No longer about making discussion easier but about valuing the difficulty of discussion and finding ways of moving from discussion to action

9. Composition Classrooms and the Public Sphere • Treat classroom as a public space • Analyze public discourse • Write for public spaces • Look for ways that students’ disciplines intervene in the public arena