Ekaterina Haskins

Civic Dialogue in Uncivil Times: Spectatorship, Space, and Co-presence in Public Argument

Ekaterina Haskins, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Our normative ideal of civic rhetoric has been long dominated by the fiction of the eloquent and virtuous orator, a modern version of the Roman ideal of vir bonus dicendi veritas. At the same time, the notions of spectacle and spectatorship have figured as antithetical to the spirit of active citizenship. From Plato’s attack on the poetic paideia in the Republic and the Athenian funeral oration in the Menexenus to Debord’s Marxist critique in Society of the Spectacle, spectatorship has been construed largely in negative terms. Spectatorship has been seen as submission to the spell of performance, as surrender of one’s critical rationality, or as interpellation by the siren voice of dominant ideology.

This presentation will argue for a reconsideration of spectatorship as a constitutive practice that is integral to civic dialogue. Drawing upon and extending recent attempts to theorize spectacle and rhetorical experience, I will sketch a theory of civic spectatorship and illustrate it by examining an ephemeral public display that emerged in Union Square in New York City in the aftermath of terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the days following the tragedy, Union Square Park was transformed from an ordinary city square into a charged space of public mourning and controversy. I reconstruct the background story of the so-called Union Square scrolls and the record of public expression they preserve. I show that in that time and space, participants' contributions in response to the tragedy and in response to others' words and gestures constituted a kind of spectacle where the interaction itself--its status as a series of enactments in the presence of others--was even more important than the propositional content of those acts.

For people who might have remained mere onlookers of the televised spectacle of devastation at Ground Zero, an opportunity to participate in the goings on in Union Square was a form of civic engagement. In the process, the participants not only had a chance to have their say but they also witnessed the diversity of acting and ways of being that, whether they realized it or not, constituted an alternative vision of civic engagement from the one urged by the country’s leaders.