NOTE: This essay is being written online as we speak. It is currently in its developmental stages, so please forgive the mess.
It was late one summer afternoon, many years ago. I sat in an apartment hunter’s office, where he had spread open a large map in order to show me the neighborhoods in Austin where affordable housing could be found. “Of course,” he said, “you don’t want to live east of I-35.” He pointed to the highway on the map, and then to the neighborhoods running east of the thin line representing the massive freeway. “It’s just not a very nice place to live.” The phrase rang in my head immediately: east of I-35. It was such a concrete marker to observe. I would later hear the same kind of warning many other times throughout my life in Austin. Even after I rented a house on the eastside, friends
would take comfort in knowing that I was not living “too far east.”
First I want to consider the social imaginary of Austin’s eastside as the “bad” part of town. A “social imaginary” is theorized by Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor, and Castoridus. This rhetoric is embedded, implicit, and affectively spread through the kinds of distributed ecologies I discussed in the previous chapter. No signs announce this designation. No civic pronouncements dub east neighborhoods as dirty, crime ridden, or dangerous. However, this rhetoric works its way into the ordinary speech of many Austinites, whether or not they are working for or against such a description. As longtime resident Philip Smith put it, “East Austin has connotation that doesn’t have so much to do with directions. ‘East’ is not just in terms of the city itself, not as it used to be when the city originated” (Jackson 70). For white people, east Austin conjures up the place “where Blacks and Chicanos live” (Jackson 70). The eastside is not just a spatial demarcation, therefore, but a topos bursting at the seams with racial and class imaginaries. More than that, however, “east” suggests exactly what that apartment hunter tried to tell me in his small office: It’s not a very nice place to live. The enthymeme was left hanging in the air. East Austin is dangerous, dirty, and somehow less wholesome than other parts of the city.
Reading the rhetorical ecologies of the eastside already trouble the generic analytical methods found in some rhetorical pedagogies, since we cannot rely on the orienting elements of exigence, rhetor, audience, or even an identifiable central discourse. But, if we do not have a particular starting point of analysis in the form of a given discourse, then our analytical vocabularies become circulatory, driven by proximities of encounters. To engage this rhetorical context, we will have to begin in-the-midst-of-things and their specific impacts. We begin to conduct a reading by putting together the disparate fields of information.
Spatialized Pathos
Whether consciously or unconsciously, rhetorical theory has theorized the “places” of pathos in various ways. Some of our most popular ways of understanding pathos is in terms of spatialized discourse. Our rhetorical pedagogy and theory is loaded with language that turns pathos into a spatialized substance. The triangulated system of ethos-pathos-logos is usually credited to Aristotle, who most thoroughly developed the concept of artistic or artificial proofs (pisteis). While the three pisteis have been identified by different characteristics—most often corresponding to character, emotion, and reason—Aristotle differentiates them in terms of spatialization. That is, the proofs are distinct insofar as they exist in different spheres. As George Kennedy explains, “Aristotle’s system . . . divides the artificial proof into three types: that found in the character of the speaker, that found in the state of mind produced in the hearer, and that found in the speech itself insofar as it proves or seems to prove” (90). This spatialized explanation of the proofs likewise resonates in Kennedy’s translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. “Of the pisteis provided through speech there are three species: for some are in the character [ethos] of the speaker, and some in disposing the listener in some way, and some in the argument itself, by showing or seeming to show something” (Rhetoric 1.2; 37). Each individual proof (ethos, pathos, or logos) is found in a particular place—the speaker, the listener, or the speech.
This spatialized discourse makes it quite easy to conceptualize the proofs as distinctly located apart from one another. They are “like positions with a metaphorically spatial relationship to one another,” as Jimmie Killingsworth writes (251). Not surprisingly, modern rhetorical theory came to re/grid the proofs onto what we have come to identify as the “communications triangle,” popularized in James Kinneavy’s A Theory of Discourse. As Kinneavy proposed, the communications triangle is a spatialized representation of language that triangulates four components of any language: encoder, decoder, realty and (in the middle) the signal (19). Though Kinneavy is careful to add that this triangle should not be reduced to its artificially abstracted separations, he adds that these four elements form a kind of “grammar” of operation within language (20). That is, the operation of the decoder is different from the operation of the signal.
Kinneavy himself argues that Aristotle’s structure “is consistently modeled on the communications triangle—to a much larger extent than is commonly recognized even by good commentators on the Rhetoric” (225). Kinneavy explains that the three appeals can be matched to the three points along the communications triangle: encoder, decoder, reality. He connects the “ethical” appeal to the encoder, the “pathetic” appeal the decoder, and the “logical” appeal to reality itself. In one of the most comprehensive recent histories of ethos and pathos, Jakob Wisse likewise bases his analysis on what he calls “a simple model of communication,” which begins with the speaker/sender who sends the speech/message to the audience/receiver (6). As Wisse explains, “there would seem to be a very simple connection between the rational arguments, ethos and pathos on the one hand, and the three entities of the model on the other” (6). Rational arguments are “bound up with the message,” he explains, just as ethos and pathos are respectively bound up with the speaker and the message’s effects.
Rhetorical pedagogies have helped to encourage a conflation of the three proofs with this triangulated system. Some textbooks even introduce the appeals as a communications triangle. For example, John Ramage and John Bean’s Writing Arguments ties the three appeals to the rhetorical triangle’s message, speaker, and audience. Ramage and Bean define the appeals according to where these appeals can be found. Logos, they write, “refers primarily to the internal consistency and clarity of the message and to the logic of its reasons and support” (61). They continue to explain that ethos “refers to the credibility of the writer/speaker” (61). And, finally, pathos appeals to the audience’s “capacity to feel and see what the writer feels and sees” (62). After this explanation, Ramage and Bean devote the next three chapters to logos, and one chapter to ethos and pathos.
If today we continue to think about and teach the appeals alongside the communications triangle, we are in good company. “[C]onsciously or unconsciously,” writes Kinneavy, “the major rhetoricians of our culture have used this scaffolding for their constructs. . . . [Edward] Corbett, attempting to summarize Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, uses this structure” (225). Indeed, in the introductory remarks to his influential text, Corbett suggests that the artistic proofs in Aristotle are located in three different “centers” of argument. For instance, Corbett positions logos in the very space of language itself: “In exercising the rational appeal, the speaker was appealing to his audience’s reason or understanding.” (23). The rational appeal is thus located or focused most strongly at the point of the language—its form, its content, its existence. Similarly, both the emotional and the ethical appeal are “located” at different points within the argument. The emotional appeal, according to Corbett, is concentrated in those places relating to the hearer’s body. “If the orator was to play upon man’s emotions, he must know what those emotions were and how they could be triggered off or subdued” (24). In order to make use of the emotional appeal, a rhetor presumably concentrates her argument less at the point of the argument itself (the rational shape of the argument) and more time at the point of the audience’s emotions—their bodily responses and reflexes. On the other hand, if the rhetor chooses to employ the ethical appeal, he must “create the impression that he was a man of intelligence, benevolence, and probity” (24). The speaker would focus greatest rhetorical resources at the point of his or her own character.
Likewise, Winifred Bryan Horner’s Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition presents students with material spaces in which to conceptualize (and distinguish among) ethos, pathos, and logos: “Writers who project themselves well (ethos) and appeal to their audience (pathos) must also consider the argument contained within the paper, itself (logos). This third kind of proof available to the orator or the writer is in the words themselves” (25). Horner’s presentation draws a very clear line of demarcation among the various appeals, almost literally spatializing pisteis in the writing that students produce. Insofar as they are located in different material spaces, they have different functions. That is, each appeal operates on a different (physical) object, which gives it an identity separate from the other two appeals.
In one of the more thorough analyses of pedagogical treatment of pathos, Gretchen Moon confirms that the concept has been almost completely conflated with “emotion” in textbooks. Moon finds that when textbooks address pathos at all, it is usually in relation to the audience’s emotional responses to discourse. Teaching about pathos is thus a matter of what appeals to a particular audience’s sense of values, beliefs, or feelings. In her study of twenty-five composition textbooks, she concludes that well over half give a paragraph’s worth (or less) attention to pathos at all. Several only introduce pathos in relation to rhetorical fallacies. The remaining texts offer advice on how to take the audience’s emotion into account in order to create a more persuasive text.
Consider how the appeals are taught through one of the most common pedagogical examples in rhetoric and composition, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Often cited as a classic example of persuasive rhetoric, King’s letter is a canonical essay in composition and rhetoric textbooks. In fact, Lynn Bloom cites this piece as the eighth most canonical essay in textbook anthologies. Many composition textbooks discuss how King’s letter serves as illustration of the different modes of persuasion, including abundant examples of the three appeals. For instance, Nancy Wood’s Perspectives on Argument introduces King’s letter by challenging students to identify the way King uses logos, ethos, and pathos. Wood provides examples from the letter for each proof. In a paragraph filled with particularly emotional language, Wood asks students to “[i]dentify and analyze the emotional proof” and to explain “[w]hat human motives and values . . . King appeal[s] to” (376-377). Similarly, Horner’s textbook encourages students to note how King uses pathos by asking readers to put themselves in the positions of people who feel the sting of segregation. “By demonstrating how the family can be hurt be segregation,” explains Horner, “King appeals to his readers’ emotions. . .” (57). These examples are then contrasted with language that works through reason (logos) or an appeal to King’s personal character (ethos).
King’s letter is undoubtedly appealing to instructors for its generous distribution of the appeals. More than just a text loaded with pathos, the letter also reflects a good amount of ethos and logos, as well. For this reason, the authors of Motives for Writing ask students to consider questions about how King uses ethos: “How does King present himself in this letter? Is his own character a factor in the argument he makes? (475). Simon and Schuster’s Guide to Writing also follows a reprint of the letter with similar questions about authorial ethos:
Although Martin Luther King, Jr., was well known to the clergymen he was writing, they did not perceive him as a reasonable man who was acting wisely. Thus, King attempts in this letter to convince his readers he is credible. . . . How does King accomplish this goal? Does the fact he is in jail argue for or against his credibility? (262).
Questions like these suggest that the three appeals are materials that can be used in order to accomplish a given rhetorical goal. Students are expected to learn that their own texts need to employ a certain amount of logos, ethos, and pathos if they hope to be successful. In using the three appeals, therefore, a budding rhetor would need to advance a strong image of herself, reach the bodies of listeners, and care for the logical reasoning itself. Students are challenged to use the pathos of vivid and touching language that appeals to readers, much like King touched the hearts of his audience.
The problem with this take on pathos is that it suggests that pathos is like a substance that moves from the inside-out. That is, pathos is either a personal feeling that is expressed by the rhetor or a personal feeling in a listener that is “touched” or drawn out through the rhetor’s words. In this understanding of pathos, we risk damning the concept to the barest psychological terms. Critiques of this inside-out psychological take on pathos repeatedly show why this concept is too impoverished to fulfill any working function in rhetorical theory. For one thing, pathe are not substances, or things, used on someone in order to accomplish some goal. Rather, as Amelie Oksenberg Rorty explains, Aristotle true system conceptualized pathos as that which produces change in a body that would not otherwise experience such a change. In metaphysical terms, pathos is not part of a body’s essential being, which makes it an external cause. Rorty writes, “Pathe proper are not qualities (poiotetes): they are relatively impermanent alternations in a thing, whose causal explanation usually lies primarily outside its nature (526). Thus, a broken leg is pathos insofar as it gives rise to a limping walk that would not otherwise be natural to a body. Likewise, my dirty joke at the dinner table might be said to be a pathos when it causes my modest companion to blush. The pathos enacts a temporary change in this modest body that is in a normally non-blushing state. For this reason, Aristotle paints pathos as something that is undergone or suffered by beings. Rorty says that they are, for Aristotle, most often misfortunes—and we can see why. The passive or accidental undergoing of a changed experience has a ring of misfortune about it.
This view of pathos is complex insofar as it turns pathos into more of an active agent than a unique substance that is used by an agent. In the case of my dirty joke, the pathos is not located solely in language or in my companion’s body. Rather, the pathos enacts a changed state in conjunction with her body. It is this combined enaction of a blushing body and dirty joke that is the pathos. Consequently, pathos does not exist “in” anything, but it enacts a changed state when linked with (other) bodies. Pathos is the (en)act(ment) of change.
One of the soundest critiques of the inside-out model comes from what might be called a “rhetorical” perspective, which argues that emotion is not based in some inner-psychology but in the social construction of language, discourse, and ideology. These theories follow what Sarah Ahmed calls the “outside in” model of emotion, which assumes that emotion resides in the social sphere and is later learned, or internalized, by an individual. This body of work deliberately responds to the psychological details of the inside-out models. Anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz critique the inside-out models for universalizing emotion by making it a condition of nature, rather than a culturally contextualized practice (“Introduction”). Not only do certain emotions emerge differently across cultures, but emotions are also deployed differently across gender, race, and class. Lutz argues, for example, that “any discourse on emotion is also, at least implicitly, a discourse on gender” (69). Insofar as emotionality is associated with the feminine, displays of emotion call up an articulation between “emotional bodies” and an aura of femininity.
Of course, not all anthropological theories cohere perfectly in the scope of their arguments. Michelle Rosaldo, one of the first anthropologists to explicitly tackle emotions as social constructions, is interested in the ways that “[emotional] innerness [is] shaped by culturally laden sociality” (1984, 140). She proposes culture as a solid wave of “information” that is transmitted to individuals, shaping certain emotional categories that are learned through habit. Abu-Lughod and Lutz, by comparison, are more interested in the social deployments of emotional discourses. They ask how “speech provides the means by which local views of emotion have their effects and take their significance” (11). How does emotion work in and through discourse and social interaction? Perhaps the major difference between these two anthropological approaches involves the point at which emotion is examined: Rosaldo emphasizes the cultural shaping of emotion, while Abu-Lughod and Lutz emphasize how emotion performs actions in social contexts.
Rhetorical studies has slowly turned away from inside-out models and moved toward outside-in models that highlight the ways that discourse shapes emotion. This approach seems logical since it reflects a “rhetorical” model of emotion; one that assumes emotions are built through discursive practices. In their introduction to A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies, Dale Jacobs and Laura Micciche argue that while emotions have held an ambivalent status in the sphere of rhetorical analysis, emotion belongs exactly within the purview of rhetorical studies. “One of the most useful ideas for us has been that emotion is not only individually experienced,” they write, “but is also socially experienced and constructed. . . . [E]motion is schooled through cultural institutions, such as the family, the media and all levels of the educational system” (4). Emotions, in other words, are thoroughly a matter of rhetoricity insofar as they are constructed discursively as meaningful social practices.
Emotion is “languaged” into being, at least according to this constructionist model. Ellen Quandahl makes this point quite plain in her argument about emotion and discourse: “[Emotion] is not merely an individual or natural phenomenon, but is rather culturally and historically shaped, and closely linked with discourse” (11). This shaping, moreover, occurs in the various pedagogical sites through which a body moves. “[F]orms of education, both formal schooling and the experience of life in a culture, address humans in ways that shape what is said to be deeply ‘within,’” Quandahl writes, “offering not only knowledge, perspective, and strategies of reason, but also the very forms of emotion” (11). Much like Jacobs and Micciche, Quandahl concludes that emotion is thickly implicated in the discourse of rhetoric and pedagogy. Emotion does not happen outside of language and the constant cultural instructions of how to feel.
Here I need to pause for a slight correction to my oversimplifications above. Just as the inside-out model can easily become an easy target for critique, the outside-in model can also become a strawman. Micciche offers a slightly more complex version of rhetoric and emotions in her book Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, where she theorizes “emotions as technologies for doing” (14). Micciche addresses the limitations of both models and writes that she is instead interested in “what emotions perform/embody/enact/generate and in how naming emotions affects our relation to the situation in and for which they are named” (14). Micciche’s emphasis mirrors Abu-Lughod and Lutz’s desire to move away from the strict constructionist views of emotion that focus only on the pedagogical (rhetorical) shaping of cultural emotions.
Material of Pathos
I would like to stop here and consider what is missing from all of these perspectives on pathos. My critique boils down to this: pathos outside of an isolated context (a personal argument or other discrete situation) does not have a neat beginning, middle, or end. To be sure, some rhetorical scenes do have clear exigencies to which particular discourse responds to a particular group for purposes that have clear aims. Rhetoric is somewhat like a unit, in this instance. (Think of departmental meetings where job candidates are hotly debated, or the hiring priorities are being haggled over for the coming year.) But, other examples of public rhetoric are less neat. Although we see a situation with “emotions” at work, it would be difficult to draw neat lines between a rhetorical agent who is using pathos for particular means.
In many instances of public rhetoric, we experience something more akin to what Heidegger calls a “mood.” Mood is a good term for this situation because it articulates the hazy edges of public rhetorics. Moods have no beginning, middle, or ending, yet neither are they ahistorical, asocial, or acontextual. There is only a public mood, in one sense. Mood does not have an internal life. Even if we could suppose that a mood is internal, it still clearly leaks out. Being in a bad mood “spreads” to others. Hubert Dreyfus writes: “As Heidegger uses the term, mood can refer to the sensibility of an age (such as romantic), the culture of a company (such as aggressive), . . . as well as the mood in a current situation (such as the eager mood in the classroom). . .” (169). Moods are not personal colorations for Heidegger. Rather, publics have moods. (So, as Dreyfus points out, it is quite appropriate to say that we are in a mood, rather than having a mood or experiencing a mood 171). Examples of public moods are as readily available as the evening news. Reports talk about consumer moods as high or low confidence. There are moods about the war, the President, or the general state of things. Likewise, academic departments are infamous for their moods: bitter, unhappy, or maybe pleasant enough.
Mood is a difficult thing to capture and study. Perhaps this is because it is not properly located in any particular place. No single person can describe a social mood with the thoroughness that moods need. Nor can it be located externally in any particular text or artifact. More importantly, public moods obviously exist although the pathos is not isolated to the words of any particular rhetor or the body of any particular listener. Instead, pathe seem to be “in the air” for all to feel. Locating the source of that pathos, however, is a nearly impossible task.
Why? Why is it impossible to locate the source of pathos for something like East Austin’s rhetoric? This is a trick question, in some senses. It is an impossible task to locate a discrete rhetorician or moment where someone persuaded a crowd to view east Austin in this way. No single body is responsible for persuading a group through pathos of this line. But, nevertheless, those of us who have lived in the city carry this public rhetoric around like a virus–even if we are doing our best to fight it. Few people are unaware of this circulating line around the eastside.
In another sense, however, we can point to all kinds of different instances of that rhetoric: jokes, political practices, newspaper letters, city council legislation, etc. These things might seem to be reflections of pathos; they capture the rhetorical deployment of pathos-in-action, much like a snapshot captures evidence of an event unfolding in actuality. However, I would like to suggest that this view of public pathos and its materials is slightly off-track. Pathos is actually distributed and archived in public materials (texts, images, topoi, zonings, etc.). Together, these “things” enact what we know as pathos in public. They are the sources, rather than the effects or reflections, of public pathos.
This essay seeks to define “public pathos” as the total archive itself, rather than a substance “carried” by texts and practices. I will examine east Austin’s zoning archives as one archive that enacts a “mood” that is equivalent to a public pathos.
Zoning the Eastside
In 1928, the city of Austin commissioned a private consulting group to create a “master plan” for designing and planning Austin’s future urban growth. The consultants developed the 1928 City Plan, which addressed a number of issues, including education, zoning, transportation, and parks. The plan also made recommendations on how to effectively zone the “negro population” away from the more desirable areas of Austin and into a concentrated part of the city.” In the language of the master plan itself:
In our studies in Austin, we have found that the negroes are presen in small numbers, in pratically all sections of the city, excepting the area just east of East Avenue and south of the City Cemetary. This area seems to be all negro population. It is our recommendation that the . . . district [be designated] as a negro district; and that all facilities and conveniences be provided the negroes in this district, as an incentive to draw the negro population to this area. (quoted in Jackson 85)
The City Plan created the framework for a means of segregation through utilities and other necessary facilities. Both black secondary schools were located in east Austin, as were the city’s few black-only parks. More importantly, Austin’s eastside was the first area to be included in the city’s municiple sewer system. Services to blacks in other parts of Austin were withheld, delayed, or simply refused. As one east Austin resident remembers, “For Blacks, it (East Austin) was the only place where anything was convenient” (quoted in Jackson 87).
Such stategic deployment of city utilities for the control over urban growth is nothing new. Cities across the country used similar tactics in order to segregate black communities. Austin was no different than any other American town when, in 1939, it constructed public housing designated “for Negroes” solely on the eastside. Likewise, Austin mirrors other civic practices of selective targeting when it withheld sewer services from the Clarksville and Wheatsville neighborhoods, which were black enclaves outside of east Austin. When white residents began to move into these neighborhoods, they demanded that blacks be forced out. The city effectively “starved” black residents in these neighborhoods in order to force their relocation. All of these tactics were taken directly from the recommendations of the 1928 City Plan, which emphasized using such facilities as “incentive” to create the eastside as a “Negro” district. Not surprisingly, the plan worked quite well.
It is obvious that feelings of racism, hatred, and fear led to the creation of the eastside. In this sense, the plan mirrors a pool of emotions that were already in circulation across the city and the country as a whole. The plan is an “archive of feeling” insofar as it archives the emotion in operation at the point in which it was written. Yet, the plan became more than a reflection of public emotion, for it also served to generate and circulate emotion in public. For example, the decision to designate the eastside as a “Negro” district was partly due to the fact that east Austin was less developed than other areas. Roads were un(der)developed, curbs did not exist, and utilities often came long after residents had built their houses on land purchased without help of bank loans. This lack of development on the eastside made the area less attractive for white residents, who desired more developed areas with working utilities and municiple services already established. As a result of east Austin’s underdevelopment, however, the eastside often looked dirtier, less smooth, and more dangerous to the white public. This perception was not always incorrect, for east Austin was notorious for poor drainage and abysmal street maintenance (Jackson 104).
Going back to my original experience with the public mood–a pathos that was shared throughout the Austin public–that east Austin is “not a very nice place to live.” If we were to ask how this public rhetoric was created, we would perhaps begin with the 1928 City Plan and its attempt to create the eastside exactly as it stands today: minority enclaves and segregated facilitites and housing. Yet, the more specific creation of pathos, or the feeling that this area “isn’t very nice,” can actually be traced back to the materiality of the unfolding eastside. The beginnings of this public rhetoric and its pathos is actually “archived” in the things themselves.
“LOOKING AT” PUBLIC ARCHIVES [Things] OF PATHOS
Lanham talks about looking at/looking through as a way of drawing attention to the fact that print (or type) are not just transparent or neutral containers for thought. The same can be said for the materials that lodge or archive public emotion.
[It seems like I'm pointing to something like "the materiality of pathos." But that concept is too hazy, even for me. Instead, I am looking to describe "public pathos" as an experienced effect of those materials. So, I guess I'm sort of reversing the order of thinking about pathos. Rather than saying "first comes an exigence, then comes pathos/pathetic discourse, then comes the discourse that lodges that pathos," I am saying: "the materials and discourses converge and accrete in order to built that perception of pathos, or the public mood." The archive creates mood.]
Bill Brown asks us to consider not what things represent, but “what claims on your attention and on your action are made on behalf of things” (9).
The masterplan itself was circulated over the years as a document of hate. One east Austin resident publicly decried it as the “Yes, Master document.”
