The history of rhetoric is largely the history of its decline. After enjoying a brief halcyon period in Classical Greece, the word “rhetoric” is now used as a malediction. To be called “rhetorical” is perhaps only a small step above being vilified as a “fascist.” After the Enlightenment, scientism began to replace rhetoric and the art eventually fell into desuetude. In the 19th century, rhetoric became the purview of schoolmarms and grammarians, reduced to handbooks of style and precepts for composition. In the hands of Alexander Bain (also known as the “bane” of rhetoric) and Adams Sherman Hill, rhetoric became prescriptive grammar. Herbert Spencer injected a curious blend of xenophobic Darwinism and the workshop or factory model of efficiency into rhetoric and composition. But at the same time these men were writing, Europe and the United States were undergoing the most thorough process of urbanization in modern history. Simultaneously, there is a shift of emphasis from oral rhetoric to writing: the silencing of rhetoric. Just as medieval texts were read aloud in monasteries, novels are now read privately like interior monologues. An inverse ratio is observed: as cities expand and urbanization proceeds apace, rhetoric and dissenting political speech decline in the public forums.
The word “rhetorical” has become synonymous with “bombastic,” “grandiloquent,” “pretentious,” “ostentatious,” “verbose,” “florid” “fustian;” the list goes on. The English language is a veritable storehouse for such synonyms. Rhetoric may have tied its own noose when it was never able to settle upon a unified and non-contradictory definition of itself. While other disciplines were gerrymandering their territory with an iron fist, rhetoric was still debating whether or not it was rhetoric. Over the centuries, rhetoric has taken on many protean forms: dialectic, persuasion, stylistics, composition, persuasion again, rhetoric. Of course, part of the fun of rhetoric is debating just exactly what rhetoric is. There is little debate, however, in more empirically certain disciplines such as physics or chemistry, in which its practitioners have formulated a unified and coherent vision of what constitutes their subject of study. The strategy of this study is not to add one more definition of rhetoric to the Babel of lexical meanings of the word, but to demonstrate how a particular kind of rhetoric is suppressed by the structures of suburban space. Already, there is the sense that rhetoric as persuasion, or cerebral combat is somehow a dirty word. The superego of the democratic impulse has inculcated the naïve impression that such things are anathema, even odious. Members of civilized society do not resort to the legerdemain and parlor tricks of rhetoric. But if one does not seize the battlefield, the opponent will do it instead.
Historically, philosophy and rhetoric have been two words for the same thing, regardless of whether or not philosophers have been humble enough to admit this to themselves. Contemporary Analytic philosophers working in the Anlgo-American tradition have attempted to spurn rhetoric as much as possible, because “rhetoric” is associated with probabilistic propositions and not truth and knowledge (Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas”). In so doing, they have only revealed how deeply rhetorical their practice actually is. Genuine rhetorical practices are situationally grounded, whether in a place, or oriented towards a specific audience for a specific purpose. The emphasis, in rhetoric, has typically been upon the relationship between the speaker and the audience, often at the expense of place. But recently, practitioners of urban geography – a discipline with which rhetoric has much in common – have begun to consider the role of the audience in geographical rhetoric and the relationship between audience and geographical milieu: “there are multiple audiences, each with its own rhetorical standards, its own pantheons of exemplars, and its own susceptibilities to appeal” (Smith, 2). Specific types of spatial arrangements and geographies can condition those susceptibilities to appeal. The great classical rhetoricians and theorists of rhetoric were all located in cities, whether in Athens or Rome. Henri Lefebvre, in his study of philosophy, rhetoric and urbanism, writes that “Philosophy is thus born from the city, with its division of labour and multiple modalities. It becomes itself a specialized activity in its own right. But it does not become fragmentary” (Lefebvre, 88). After speculating about the necessary or casual relations between the beginnings of ancient urbanism and the inchoate formation of Western philosophy, Henri Lefebvre goes on to say that “The logos of the Greek city cannot be separated from the philosophical logos. The oeuvre of the city continues and is focused in the work of philosophers, who gather opinions and viewpoints, various oeuvres, and think them simultaneously and collect differences into a totality” (Lefebvre, 89). If philosophy was born in the city, as it most certainly was in Athens, then the essence of rhetoric, if there is one, must be urban as well.
Urban centers have also historically been the sites of revolutionary change. Cities feature prominently in the rhetoric of revolutionaries as various as Lenin, Che, Zapata and Castro. Even the agrarian revolutionaries, like Zapata and Che, had to at least engage the city as a battleground (Battle of Santa Clara), a site that must be won and seized from the enemy, and when the Cuban socialists setup shop, they did so in Havana, not the jungles of southern Cuba or the Sierra Maestra. The guerrillas followed a trajectory from the coast through the hinterland of Cuba. The city was their ultimate telos; after seizing the capital city, all else follows (ousting of Batista; the removal of American interests, etc.). Revolutionary rhetoric and cities have long had a close relationship: St. Petersburg and Moscow and the Bolsheviks; Paris and the French Revolution; and Boston and the American Revolution. I would propose then that the function of rhetoric is essentially a revolutionary one, promoting change in a multitude of directions, and on varying scales, whether local or global. But the processes of suburbanization, or de-urbanization have quelled the potentiality for a truly urban and thus revolutionary rhetoric. Rhetoric, of course, is only necessary in “democratic” societies, where an opponent must be persuaded of the truth or falsity of a proposition. In a totalitarian society, rhetoric is obviated altogether, since free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press are proscribed or otherwise snuffed out by thought police and secret police forces. But the processes of suburbanization, as they are delineated below, have made rhetoric as otiose as if it were under a totalitarian regime.
After the period of revolutionary rhetoric, which be said to have ended with the Cuban Revolution, there follows a period of what might be called the embourgeoisment of revolution, the gradual stilling and pacification of revolutionary rhetoric, which is nearly synchronous with many of the Post-WWII suburban developments. Recently, political pundits and analysts have referred to the electoral disputes in Iran as The Green Revolution. In reality, soccer match riots are closer to revolution than these media spectacles. A dispute over electoral fraud is not revolution. The same happened with the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. During the 2004 presidential election, reports of electoral fraud precipitated protests, noble acts of civil disobedience, riots and sit-ins. These events are incommensurate with the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, etc. For the events of the Green Revolution in Iran and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine left the original powder dynamics untouched, the dominant ideology unchanged, whereas the Bolshevik and French Revolutions (without romanticizing them, for horrors and crimes against the human spirit were undoubtedly committed) were systematic and wholesale upheavals that replaced the old structures and ideologies with new, but not necessarily better relations. A simple and singular criterion for revolution: a movement must not leave the original ideologies and social structures in place. But violence is not a necessary concomitant of revolution. A revolution can occur at the level of ideology alone. The Copernican Revolution: an upheaval in paradigmatic thinking from the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos to heliocentric theory. This type of scientific revolution requires a fundamental change in perception, consciousness, even social structures and relations (the consequences of this for religion are still felt today). Man’s conception of his place in the cosmos is no longer anthropocentric. He is now a displaced and wayfaring creature – the beginnings of Western nihilism. The Industrial Revolution. Not just a paradigmatic shift, but a shift in the way man produces and consumes, from agriculture and mining to transportation and the circulation of capital in free markets. These are revolutions whose consequences penetrated every orifice of the social.
Is there an interest in declawing the concept and the rhetorical practice of revolution? Is it perhaps advantageous for certain entities to nominate a dispute over electoral fraud as a “revolution,” and to thus short circuit the more revolutionary consequences of revolution? Nihilists, perhaps. In the United States, in which the only valid revolution was the American Revolution, after which all systemic change is effectively off limits, the rhetorical emphasis shifts from revolutionary rhetoric to the rhetoric of reform: American cities and their urban rhetorical opportunities become associated with Birmingham and the Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam protests in Washington; the WTO Riots in Seattle; the race riots of Chicago and Detroit; the televised Rodney King riots of Los Angeles. The fifties and sixties were seminal decades for movement of reform in the United States, but those decades also saw the unprecedented explosion of suburban development. Revolution and then reform degenerate into riots and adolescent violence, such as smashing storefront windows, because the citizenry has no viable public sphere any more in which to enact rhetorical protest.
In this period, the lone-gunman syndrome in America becomes a phenomenon unto itself, utilized in the media in artistic forms such as Taxi Driver and Don DeLillo’s Libra. At the end of Taxi Driver, the former self-made militant and one-man army returns to driving a cab around New York City. The trajectory is circular, and nothing has really changed. The collective impulse for systematic change has been short-circuited, limited to a few neurotic and sociopathic individuals, such that the desire for substantive and systemic change becomes a neurosis in itself, as if to uphold the status quo were psychologically normal. Instead of a movement advocating wholesale change, we observe particularized interest groups fighting, litigating, marching and protesting for their civil rights. There is an argument to be made that violent revolution is superfluous in a nominally democratic society with a judicial system. On the whole, revolutions of this sort are only expedient in Third World countries. In a country with both a Constitution and the right of states to secede from the Union, this is not necessary. However, when even the possibility of urban rhetoric is stultified and enervated by the very structure of space itself, the result is that Lady Justice’s blindfold can never be taken off, and she will never see that her scales are empty, or that it probably is not prudent to blindfold a woman who is brandishing a sword.
The revolutionary seizure of power often culminates in a rhetorical spectacle: Lenin’s speeches in St.Petersburg and the marathon length of Castro’s speeches, such as History Will Absolve Me. Through sheer survivalism, they become reactionary. They must, if they are to endure. For this reason was Trotsky exiled and ultimately assassinated for advocating a “permanent revolution.” Permanent revolutionary change is suicide. Political rhetoric today is largely communicated via television or the internet. After being co-opted and reified by Baudrillard’s simulacra, it exists nowhere and has no site. James McLeod writes that “Political ritual and political rhetoric in modern cultural contexts are designed and organized events, created for mass consumption and orchestrated for quantitative effects” (McLeod, 360). In a country devoid of spaces that contribute to urban rhetoric, what else is there but a masquerade that cycles every four years? Even the attendees of a presidential inaugural address are like so many theatre props for the televised broadcast – a specious audience.
A system of “terministic spaces” could be extrapolated from Kenneth Burke’s observations in Terministic Screens. In the spirit of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and other epistemological relativists who investigate the sociology of the sciences, Kenneth Burke writes that “many of the ‘observations’ are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made” (Burke, 1341). The nature of the physical space which is observed determines the nature of the observations: a reciprocal and mutual production of meaning is established between space and observation, in which the system of nomenclature produced from these sets of observations ”necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others” (Burke, 1341). Suburban space, like urban space, has its own set of terministic screens. A complete catalogue of just what these terministic screens are would be as long as the DSM-IV. These suburban terministic screens direct the attention away from urban rhetoric – terminal, because with them all things ends. Suburbia’s terministic screens prevent us from discerning that other options have been available in the past and are still viable in the future.
Exponential suburban growth, with no definite end in sight, has effectively stultified the potential for revolutionary rhetoric in American cities. Suburban spatiality, which dominates the contemporary exurban landscape, negates the public sphere. In Raphael’s fresco painting, “The School of Athens” – the painter’s paradigm of the public sphere – we see Plato and Aristotle at the center of the architectural frame’s vanishing point. Plato is pointing up, towards the world of Forms, while Aristotle gestures towards the ground, the empirical world of concrete particulars. Plato’s feet are bare, as though he were a cloud-walker, whereas Aristotle’s feet have sandals as though he was ready to walk somewhere, the arch-rhetorical pedestrian. Plato, on the other hand, in the Gorgias, has little to say in favor of rhetoric or the Sophists who practice it. Thus Plato is portrayed without sandals. Because he derides rhetoric, he has nowhere to walk. The Forms will come to him. From the very beginning, as Raphael has shown, rhetoric involves a particular kind of movement through space: pedestrian movement. The ancient cities of rhetoric, like Athens, were constructed with pedestrianism in mind. In this way, pedestrianism and rhetoric developed a mutually beneficial relationship. In this idealization of the rhetorical situation as it was depicted by one of the most creative imaginations of the High Renaissance, rhetorical engagement relies upon opportunity for it to be realized and that opportunity must be subtended by a physical space that is congenial to it.
In the Greek city-states, the agora was open to all free-born, land-owning males. Insofar as one met these requirements, it worked quite while. But our suburban communities, with their drawn blinds and hidden drives and privacy fences, seem to have developed agoraphobia. In ancient Rome, the forum served a similar function as the Greek agora. The forum was bifunctional, in that it was both a marketplace and political gathering place in the middle of Roman cities. Today, the middle of many of America’s cities has been eroded by suburban infrastructure like parking decks and surface lots, and no forum can be built there. Then there is London’s Trafalgar Square: although the large fountain was designed with the express intent of limiting available space for large and riotous protests, it became a site for political dissent nonetheless. In Boston, which has not been as depopulated by suburbanization as many other American cities, the Boston Commons and many other stops along the way of the Emerald Necklace greenbelt serve similar functions as the Greek agora and the Roman forum.
In suburban space, rhetorical opportunities such as these are thwarted by methods of design and thus the possibility of a revolutionary rhetoric is undermined. The urban is practically coterminous with crime and corruption. The suburban imagination caricatures the city as a place polluted with particulate matter and noise. One emphasis among suburban home construction has historically been on its remoteness from heavy industry (Shades Valley and Mountain Brook, Alabama were marketed as communities “free of smoke and dust”) and the quietude and tranquility of its subdivisions: the silencing of the urban logos. Removed from the city perhaps by tens of miles, the suburban community – if it is a community at all – is composed primarily of detached, single-family dwelling units that separate us from one another, obviating the need for speech or neighborliness.
This is not a place for revolutionary change to occur. Many cities, particularly in the Sunbelt, have been so depopulated and disenfranchised by White Flight, that there are few denizens even left in the city between whom rhetorical practice could occur. The pigeons become better practitioners of Chaim Perelman’s communion than the urban residents. One of the defining characteristics of man is that he speaks. He articulates his thoughts and feelings in a symbolic system to his fellow man. But this becomes increasingly difficult in suburban spaces, where the only human interaction is perhaps at the checkout counter of a box grocery store, or at the drive-through of a fast food chain.
Automobility and private vehicular ownership are two defining features of suburban space. The phenomenological effect of the private automobile is to isolate the driver from his surroundings, to disconnect him from other commuters. It silences you. Even on a subway, one is jostled among other commuters and the opportunity for communication, for rhetoric presents itself at every turn. At every subway stop new commuters arrive and depart and the opportunity is continually renewed. Obviously, every city does not require subway infrastructure, but the same is true of heavily utilized bus system or a light passenger rail. When Lenin returned to Russia from Finland, he returned on a train (now known as Lenin’s Locomotive). He did not drive there.
But once the automobile became mass produced and widely available under Fordism, its use unremittingly demanded more and more lanes, to accommodate more and more vehicles. Kenneth Jackson, in his book Crabgrass Frontier, which chronicles the history of the growth of the suburbs, describes this vicious positive feedback loop thus: “highway engineers were wrong in constantly calling for more lanes of concrete to accommodate yet more lines of automobiles…motorcars actually created the demand for more highways, which in turn increased the need for more vehicles, and so on ad infinitum” (Jackson, 270). Not only more lanes, but wider lanes: as vehicle size increases, the width of the lanes must increase accordingly. Pedestrians, when they perambulate at all, are reluctant to cross wide streets teeming with dense traffic. The highway system and the automobiles on it have become a system like the stock market which has spiraled out of control, and no one knows how to close Pandora’s box after it has been opened.
The landscape of our superhighways has become a metaphorical model for advanced stages of capitalist competition: driver’s cutting each other off and honking, aggressive competition for space, running of lights, Ayn Randian individualism at its most egregious; all activities which are hostile to pedestrianism and Aristotelian sandal-walkers. Even introspection and interiority are nullified by the constant demands that driving makes upon attention. Through a lack of form-based code and clear urban planning, we have enforced silence upon ourselves. Rhetorical practice presupposes an interlocutor, an audience, no matter how large or small, but there is no audience here, only a windshield bifurcating the driver from the endless black ribbon of asphalt that stretches out before and behind him. Against the American romantic mystification of the automobile as a facilitator of personal freedom and mobility (fictionalized by novelists such as Kerouac in On the Road), Paul Virilio, one of France’s leading cultural and urban theorists, writes that, “In reality, the driver’s seat of the automobile is only a simulator of landscapes” (Virilio, 103). The rapport between landscape and rhetoric is one that has not been sufficiently mined. In Negative Horizon, Virilio offers a phenomenology of the automobile experience, which is the primary experiential mode of suburban movement:
“In going and returning, the journey is only a tunnel where the significance of distance is overturned…the comfort of the passengers is assured…when the illusion comes to its brutally violent cessation in a collision, it is as if the voyeurs-voyagers are projected like Alice through the looking glass windshield, a death jump but above all a death jump into the truth of their trajectory where the gap between theatre hall and the stage collapses, the spectators becoming actors: it is this fleeting insurrection that the seat belt is designed to prevent” (104).
It is significant that Virilio uses revolutionary rhetoric – “insurrection” – to describe an event in which the moment of truth is realized simultaneously with the shattering of the vehicular illusion and the driver’s death by automobile. The trouble is that the driver realizes the truth only too late.
The separation of uses compartmentalizes and partitions the needs of daily life in suburban space, whereas urban places are usually characterized by mixed-used developments: retail on the ground floor with several storeys of apartments or lofts above is one common permutation. Instead of planning the day’s shopping around a few densely clustered, ground-level stores, as in an urban space, one must instead drive all over town for very simple things. This separation of uses not only wastes time, but also alienates one from potential rhetorical situations, and that is its insidious genius. When low density development prevails, one must travel a greater distance to accomplish the same task, whether it’s buying groceries or going to the dentist. The density of urban space facilitates the velocity of money and the distribution of information, but in suburban space this density is lacking. Vehicular ownership, separation of uses and low density development all result in a lack of pedestrianism. And as we saw in Raphael’s fresco painting, pedestrianism and rhetoric go hand in hand.
The privatization of space and land is another conundrum from the perspective of the public sphere and urban rhetoric. There are few truly public spaces in suburban developments, and those that do exist are often oriented around athletics. There is nothing wrong with athleticism per se. Greek philosophers were probably also consummate athletes. But Greek athleticism was not the sole proprietor of space. Ali Madaniour, an urban theorist, explains the link between privatization and the diminishment of public space:
“Large-scale developers and financiers expect their commodities to be safe for investment and maintenance, hence their inclination to reduce as much as possible all the levels of uncertainty which could threaten their interests. This trend is parallel with the increasing fear of crime, rising competition from similar developments, and the rising expectations of the consumers, all encouraging the development of totally managed environments. What has emerged is an urban space where increasingly large sections are managed by private companies…Examples of these fragmented and privatized spaces are gated neighborhoods, shopping malls, and city centre walkways, under heavy private surveillance and separated from the public realm by controlled access and clear boundaries” (Madanipour, 187).
It is of interest to note that developers and financiers wish to limit “all the levels of uncertainty,” for uncertainty and probability are precisely the language of rhetoric, which does not deal in apodeictic truth claims. The only incontrovertible truth of rhetoric might be that nothing is incontrovertible: the law of non-contradiction does not hold. The privatization of space, which is quite common in suburban areas, thus eliminates the uncertainty of rhetoric. Developers and finance capital control land use patterns. These land use patterns have indirect, but profound consequences for the performance of rhetorical practices. Gated communities under video surveillance are no place for rhetorical encounters, especially when certain groups are spatially excluded by “controlled access and clear boundaries.”
Subdivisions are often built upon previous pasturelands or farmland. They are the exurbs that modify our understanding of the past through the erasure of its physical artifacts. In Anniston, Alabama, there was recently some contention and even rancorous debate over siting a Sam’s Club and a municipal sports complex where an Indian burial ground had been identified (neither is this an isolated phenomenon; indeed, Westward expansion and Manifest Destiny were both predicated upon such erasures). In Ireland, the IRA famously blew up Nelson’s Pillar as an act of insurrection against British occupation. When the physical remains of the past are obliterated wholesale, as they frequently are in suburban spaces, such symbolic acts of dissent are impossible. Rhetorical practice does not exist in a vacuum, but relies upon an historical and temporal understanding of the discourses that have preceded it. It should be of little surprise then that revolutionary rhetoric and communication are unable to flourish in a space that is deliberately designed to suppress history, as if it was simply a creatio ex nihilo.
The demographic composition of most outer-ring American suburbs tends to be predominantly white, and where they are not uniformly white, they are often unofficially segregated and partitioned along racial lines as if a Berlin Wall ran through them. This feature – known as an ethnoburb – occurs across the United States, but is most characteristic of Southern cities, such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Jackson, Nashville, etc. Birmingham’s northside, for example, is almost totally African-American, while its affluent suburbs south of Red Mountain are so racially and ethnically homogenized that they begin to resemble Aryan encampments. Only urban neighborhoods possess the racial, ethnic and cultural diversity to generate a healthy rhetorical practice. There exists an entire armory of methods of property demarcation, such as privacy fences. Fences have the effect of saying, “If we must speak, then let’s at least have a fence between us.” In “The School of Athens,” there is no privacy fence between interlocutors, no property line between Aristotle and Plato, despite their deep philosophical differences. These methods of property demarcation are a corporeal embodiment of the homogenization of rhetorical practices, as if to keep the Other out.
There are, of course, different types of suburban spaces that exist on a continuum. Suburban space and its rhetorical practices are not enclosed, discrete entities, but can be taxonomized into a menagerie of species – edge cities; bedroom communities; exurbs; urban-rural fringe; first, second and third ring suburbs; streetcar suburbs – depending upon their aesthetic and function in relation to the urban center. A rhetorical analysis of the spatiality unique to each of these would be beyond the scope of this essay. Suburban and urban spaces can also become imbricated, the one usurping the space of the other: many nominally urban areas will have pockets of developments that are aesthetically and functionally suburban. If the physical features of Boston’s North End are examined from a rhetorical viewpoint, then the differences between urban and suburban territories and the rhetorical practices they engender will be clearer.
The streets of the North End are narrow, labyrinthine and thus hostile to vehicular traffic, almost medieval. But rhetoric flourished in the medieval universities, and for good reason. This medieval aspect is precisely why it was decried as a slum during Boston’s urban renewal period: it was felt to be too much like a city. It had, therefore, to be “de-slummed,” or de-urbanized. This myth of the urban as a slum has no empirical basis, except in the paranoid delusions of Victorian city planners under the influence of Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, Jacob’s Island, etc.) and William Blake’s poetry featuring chimney sweepers. Both Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement and the City Beautiful Movement were reactions of this sort. If cities were industrial nightmares, with company housing intermingled with heavy industry, this is because of the lack of proper zoning, not the intrinsic nature of urban spaces. Boston’s orthodox urban planners succumbed to the same myths. The North End was too crowded, they said. It needed some breathing room (parking lots). Lacking any sociological evidence for it, they averred that crowding inevitably facilitates crime. The buildings were too old. Its uses were mixed: dwelling units stacked on top of commercial and retail storefronts. The North End was too chaotic (any healthy urban space will appear chaotic when it is forced into the straitjacket of neo-classicism, rationalism and linear order). Rather than having superblocks, the North End had small, European-sized blocks (meaning they didn’t take up a quarter of an acre). The streets were too narrow, which made it difficult to navigate by car. The building density – among the highest in the United States – was too dense. As far as orthodox, top-down rationalistic planning was concerned, the place was a disaster. The North End had, therefore, to be “de-slummed.”
Instead of being bulldozed, like Boston’s West End, The North End was quarantined form the rest of the city by I-93 and the Big Dig project, which create a psychological and physical buffer zone between the North End and the rest of the city. The same quarantining or segregation can be observed in Birmingham, Alabama with the use of I-65 to quarantine the West End and I-20/59 to quarantine the northside neighborhoods such as Norwood. Where the North End and Boston once composed a seamless and organic whole, there is now a highway corridor tunnel that runs beneath the city. But despite this, as Jane Jacobs notes in her landmark study The Death and the Life of Great American Cities, the North End retained one of the most vibrant sidewalk cultures anywhere in the US: “The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking. Had it not been a cold January day, there would surely have been people sitting. The general street atmosphere of buoyancy, friendliness, and good health was so infectious that I began asking directions of people just for the fun of getting in on some talk” (Jacobs, 13). Although Jacobs was not a rhetorician, what she is actually describing here is a rhetorical situation. But this type of communication, the gaiety, amiability and neighborliness of what Jacobs describes is seldom seen in suburbia, because there are so few spaces in which it can take root. Furthermore, The North End was also a community that was not uprooted wholesale, as the West End in Boston was. Urban rhetoric and communication require a certain modicum of persistence and continuity through time to flourish. Most suburban developments are too new for this.
Jacobs even cites the streets of the North End as among the safest on earth. Having lived in Boston myself, I would anecdotally agree with her. To this day, aside from containing one of the oldest standing colonial structures in North America (the Paul Revere House, circa. 1680), it is also the most active Italian ex-pat community in the United States. It still draws people from Italy. Thus, the North End – an prototypical urban neighborhood – has both a sense of historicity and an active transient population that is ethnically diverse. Not only did the North End have the lowest infant mortality rates and the lowest ratio of rent to income at the time Jacobs was writing, but it also has precisely the physical features and rhetorical practices that suburban space prohibits from the very beginning.
All of the aforementioned characteristics of suburban space contribute, in various polymorphous and often indiscernible ways, to thwarting what Habermas’ called communicative action. Jane Jacobs’ book is a practical study in how to make Habermas’ quixotic ideal of communicative action a reality. But as Jacobs amply demonstrates, it is not an unachievable utopian pipedream, but can be accomplished through smart planning oriented around communication and a rhetorical understanding of space. If our cities are wastelands it because we have made them that way (the Federal Highway Program and FHA loans are examples of this), not because of an inexorable logic in the decay of cities. And if they are wastelands because of human agency, it follows that they can be reinvigorated by that same human agency, if we are not to succumb to the same fatalism of Boston’s orthodox planners who wanted to bulldoze the North End. “Communicative action,” Habermas tells us, “relies on a cooperative process of interpretation in which participants relate simultaneously to something in the objective, the social and the subjective worlds” (Habermas, 120). Habermas has been impugned for what some critics identify as his “idealist” tendencies, but this is to miss the point. Communicative action is a lodestar, a compass to guide us through the winedark sea. The problem, for Habermas, is not that he is too idealistic – perhaps he is not idealistic enough – but in the ambiguity he leaves in just how communicative action is to be brought to fruition if it is to have any pragmatic import whatsoever: that “something in the objective, the social and the subjective worlds” can be filled with “anything.” It is a vacuous placeholder, and if communicative action is at all to flourish, it must be filled with the “right” something; “right,” from the perspective of the conditions of possibility of communicative action. That “something” is none other than urban rhetoric, which can be synthesized with Habermas’ theories of communication to produce what Grabill called “communicative planning.” Communicative planning was a reaction against the scientistic and rationalistic top-down planners who basically planned cities like arm-chair philosophers and disregarded the rhetorical aspects of space.
Suburban spaces and bedroom communities were constructed under the auspices of technical rationality; they are built for cars and commerce, not people, or at least not people capable of rhetorical practice in a community. John Dewey said it best, in his typically pithy way, that “Communication can alone create a great community” (Dewey, 142). But, as has been demonstrated above, successful communication and communicative action are nullified and rendered impotent by suburban space, which privileges commuting, not communication.
In Theodor Adorno’s Dialetic of Enlightenment, Adorno decries technical rationality and the Enlightenment for not delivering upon its promises, for becoming a reactionary force of oppression. To extend Adorno’s critique, the processes of suburbanization might also be a consequence of technical rationality, a symptom of rhetorical decadence, a new and improved form of the concentration camps that Adorno depicted as the culmination of the Enlightenment project gone wrong. Technical rationality must be counteracted by communicative rationality, which is the type of rationality eventuating from successful communication. As we have seen, successful communication is nigh impossible in suburban space. That suburban and urban spaces were designed with different models of rationality in mind can be seen in aerial photographs of their layouts, forms, development patterns and land uses. To champion communicative rationality is to oppose the type of pseudo-rationality that led to suburban developments in the first place. Suburban land use patterns are deeply problematic from an ecological standpoint, and are generally agreed upon to be unsustainable at current levels. Any development pattern that actually subverts the conditions of its own possibility is deeply irrational.
The human cost of the decline in revolutionary rhetorical practice, or even the rhetoric of reform for that matter, in suburban spaces is most poignantly illustrated in the great anti-suburban novels of 20th century American fiction. In Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, the road of revolution has led to the road of conformity: themes of alienation, ennui and marital strife, all the existential contents of an Edward Hopper painting. The Wheelers are no longer revolutionary, but thoroughly suburban, domestic, bourgeois. Having moved from New York City, where they enjoyed a bohemian life in the Village, the Wheelers relocate to suburban Connecticut. As soon as they relocate, the dysfunction begins. After the death of April Wheeler from a botched abortion, and her husband Frank Wheeler is left to become one of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men, the novel depicts the total breakdown of communication that results from the structure of suburban space: at the denouement of this emotionally brutalizing novel, the Wheeler’s neighbor turns off his hearing aid, and is submerged “in a welcome, thunderous sea of silence” (Yates, 355), effectively blocking out not just the obnoxious voice of his loquacious wife, but the voice of any speaker at all, as he retreats into the hermitic and Cartesian solitude of his unrelatable inner world.
In Carpenter’s Gothic by William Gaddis – a great American novelist who, like many rhetors, never found a great American audience – the plot too ends not only with the tragic death of the female protagonist Elizabeth Booth, who is trapped inside of the Great American Dream gone wrong, but with silence absolute and punctuated only by the ringing of a telephone she cannot answer: as she lays bleeding to death on the kitchen floor, “it rang again and was silent, and then it rang again, and it kept ringing until it stopped” (Gaddis, 253). Both fictional narratives of the impact of suburban space on communicative action end in death and silence.
These fictional tableaux portray the total collapse of rhetoric, identification, communion and communicative action. This is because the city is the origin of philosophy and rhetoric, which cannot prosper anywhere else. We must re-urbanize and de-suburbanize our cities, they must be re-radicalized. Historically, past civilizations are known and remembered by the ways in which they formed and built their cities: will America be remembered for suburbanizing them? For systematically and institutionally debilitating the survival chances of urban rhetoric, and replacing it with suburban rhetoric. In a suburban nation, urban rhetoric is seditious by default. All we must do is put the Aristotelian sandals on and point to the ground upon which we walk and speak.
Authorship: Amos Wright
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