Who knew that the twenty-first century might turn on a battle over the legitimacy of democracy? As norms of deliberation and legislative compromise erode, and as a global struggle between democratic and autocratic rule is waged both between and within nations, a strange form of political theater emerges: all sides claim to represent the will of the people, which is expressed in images of populist demonstrations that are seen by their opponents as dangerous embodiments of irrationality. It should be no surprise that violence is waiting in the wings.Despite the historical specificity of the present conflict, it is not new. Although focused on the French Revolution, Jason Frank’s carefully argued study of the aesthetics of popular assembly resonates with contemporary concerns regarding political spectacles, populist movements, and whether or how democracy might prevail. Frank’s objective is not to restore anything but to challenge left and right critiques of “the people” in order to recover a “lost radicalism of democracy” (xii). By reexamining one of modern democracy’s origin stories, Frank zeros in on popular assembly as “a distinctive—and distinctively powerful—mode of democratic representation” (xiv). One result can be more clarity about why populism—and its mix of democratic self-assertion and delegitimation—has such a hold on democratic regimes today. Another, and Frank’s hope, is that paying more attention to the aesthetic contours of “the people” can lead to a rebooting of the political imagination—a rebooting, I would add, that is desperately needed if democracy is to become more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable.Frank begins with the assumption that democracy depends on more than “enlightenment and education”: beyond rational-critical speech, it also requires distinctive illusions of collective belonging (see also, e.g., Allen 2004, chap. 2). “At the heart of modern democracy’s fantasy space,” he argues, “lies its enigmatic constituent subject: the people” (3). But where are the people? What do they look like? Democracy’s constituent subject has an image problem: the people can’t be seen as a whole. Thus, the problem of envisioning the people “haunts the history and theory of modern democracy” (5).Frank becomes something of a ghost hunter, working carefully through theory and history to see what has been lurking around the corners and in the attic, more felt than observed. Through careful parsing of Judith Butler, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, Carl Schmitt, and others, he constructs a theoretical framework for identifying a process of democratic belonging that is persistent, contested, and aesthetic. This dynamic field of political representation then is explored through his historical example.The French Revolution is taken up through its exponents, interpreters, and one of its visual figures. Rousseau is up first, as he comprehends both the historical transformation and its constitutive problem. Rousseau sees popular demonstrations as ritual performances essential to the transition to democracy and to the expression of democratic legitimacy. Instead of being props for the king or mobs of rebellion, the crowd becomes the people as the people become a self-aware actor in history. But there is a crucial deficiency that other actors don’t have: as a sovereign subject, the people are silent. The general will, beyond representation, is a spontaneous, authentic, and unmediated self-assertion that can be expressed only in part and must be enjoyed as sensate experience. This “mute eloquence” (64) of the assembly and a corresponding “collective self-absorption” (61) has obvious benefits for those who would usurp power, but it also opens a space for a more productive concept: the aesthetic resources that Frank labels the “democratic sublime.”The next chapter captures this aesthetic in the “living image of the people” as it involved “a dramatic transformation in the iconography of political power and rule” (69). The people came to be understood not as an incarnation of the general will but as “a surplus of democratic immanence, the physical manifestation of a fissure within prevailing forms of political representation” (71). Because democratic self-assertion was both embodied and beyond representation, it entered the aesthetic category of the sublime, which is sensed even as it exceeds a limit and can be evoked in multiple media and genres. A succession of images demonstrates how this transformation played out in visual culture, and most notably how “revolutionary iconoclasm was always entangled in, if not entirely superseded by, revolutionary iconophilia” (87). Thus, Jacques-Louis David redefined the mythical Hercules from a symbol of royal sovereignty to one of revolutionary power, and contempt for allegorical displays of kingship gave way to “spectacles of democratic self-witnessing” (91). Drawing on Benedict Anderson, Frank also widens a theoretical opening for reading political styles as modes of collective experience: “A particular style of imagining peoplehood is an unavoidable part of democratic theory, but one democratic theorists rarely explicitly engage. Confronting these questions helps us understand not only how the people is historically represented . . . but also how individuals come to experience and feel themselves as a part of this mobilized and empowered collectivity in the first place” (94–95).Like the revolution, however, the sublime also is a figure of terror. Frank takes up the challenge by turning to Edmund Burke, at once the foremost theorist of political aesthetics and the most passionate critic of the revolution. Frank’s careful tracing of Burke, his critics, and changes in political culture leads to a split decision. On the one hand, democracy’s aesthetic needs were for neither transcendence nor terror, but instead for more immanent sensations of collective belonging that could reside within ordinary social practices. Burke saw clearly that the people is not a “pre-political collective entity” (110) waiting to be mobilized, but rather something that has to be created as “first and foremost a community of sense” (112). On the other hand, democracy’s advocates resisted this awareness while its critics emphasized the dangers of transgression. Instead of bringing together the “molecular” relations of everyday life into a “unifying image” of collective authority (111, 112), political aesthetics was misrecognized in terms of either instrumental reason or conservative anxieties of disorder. Democratic engagement and the agency of the people would remain problems exceeding the available repertoires of political thought.Frank then explores two quite different paths to thicken understanding of the democratic sublime. The one of most interest to rhetorical scholars will be the “poetics of the barricade,” which documents “the most widespread and condensed symbol of popular collective action” (123) during the nineteenth century. As its tactical efficacy declined, its symbolic power as a “resonant historical manifestation of the democratic sublime” (126) increased, and for good reason, as Frank argues that it provided provisional solutions to deep problems of popular representation. The barricade emerges not out of a prior, unitary will, but through the act of resistance itself, an act synonymous with the people’s excessiveness: its surplus of bodies, desires, energies, and skills, and not least its ability to crowd and disrupt the space of political representation and create images of itself.For another approach to developing the sublime, Frank completes his integration of history and theory with a rereading of Alexis de Tocqueville. As with Burke, Frank explores an ambiguous relationship between a stinging critique of democracy (with Tocqueville, because of the danger it poses to freedom) and an appreciation of political aesthetics that challenges both liberal and illiberal critics of democracy. Tocqueville is read as a brilliant while transitional figure, and that might be the best way to think of Frank’s argument that Tocqueville’s call for “grandeur” in politics was not a look backward to civic republican “glory” or forward to fascist demagoguery, but something like a placeholder for a more aspirational and expansive conception of the democratic imagination.Although the book avoids analogies with the present, its relevance is both obvious and nuanced. A concluding afterword on “democratic appearance” takes up one line of application by discussing key elements of Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics, along with artworks by Glenn Ligon that articulate Black radical critique through depictions of the 1995 Million Man March. The basic movement of the chapter is not so much from past to present examples of democratic assembly but rather to highlight democracy’s radical promise. That promise exceeds the categories of contemporary progressive politics, and it depends on visual culture for both immanent critique and imaginative extension. Frank emphasizes how political aesthetics might work beneath or even against the grandest expressions of the democratic sublime to more effectively articulate “political capacities for collective refiguration” that “emerge from within the simple fabric of our everyday lives” (204).This observation should appeal to scholars in rhetoric, many of whom already are more interested in popular demonstrations, social movements, and political subjectivity than the inside baseball of governmental institutions. The more extensive relevance is that full realization of Frank’s argument would require bringing rhetorical perspectives and methods into political theory. (“Aesthetics” often is a convenient way for scholars in other disciplines to take up rhetoric without having to admit to it.) These corrections to what Frank calls a “blind spot” in political theory could include focusing more on actual political discourse (texts, images, performances); analyzing how collective attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and values are crafted; attending to the granularity of political interactions and the contingent relationships of ideology, political style, and locale in political subjectivity; and identifying moments of emergence or potential for distinctively or radically democratic schemes of representation and communicative action.At the same time, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how political theory can be used to improve rhetorical scholarship. Frank’s thoughtful engagements, which never recur to the idea of prudential balancing, suggest how much is needed to understand the complexity of democratic politics and any unrealized potential for change. The level of reciprocal engagement and sophisticated argument among political theorists is exceptionally high, and Frank is an exemplary scholar in that regard. He adds to this a combination of theoretical and historical study that can correct for conventional limitations on either side of that typical division of labor. The attention to constitutive problems and enduring tensions in democracy is important and might both restrain a tendency in public sphere scholarship to overvalue normative conceptions of liberal democracy and question assumptions in more radical critique regarding the functions of mediation and the process of historical change. In any case, more theoretical and critical attention could be given to a broader array of images of the people—visual and verbal, documentary and fictional—as they can articulate a just and beloved democratic community.I have only two criticisms of this fine book. One is that more could have been done with aesthetics, both as a framing device and in practical criticism. Popular assembly involves more than the sublime, and additional discernment can come, for example, from more extensive use of artistic terms and emotional responses, or by taking up additional arts and artistic modes of advocacy, or by shifting from representation to performance. This emphasis can work in tandem with a more explicitly rhetorical orientation, and Frank’s chapter on the barricades provides an excellent point of departure.Finally, I wish that Frank had taken a bolder approach to concluding the book. He certainly has earned the right to do so, and more risk taking is likely to be needed: first, to challenge the illiberal populisms that currently are serious threats to democracy in the United States and elsewhere; and second, to take up the daunting task of creating the political imagination needed to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. That said, by staying in his lane Frank provides a sound integration of history and theory for extension by others. Whatever else it is, scholarship, like democratic politics, should be collaborative.

Abstract The rhetoric of any academic discipline can involve epistemic distortions and blind spots, including a tendency to obscure systemic racism. The doctrine of political realism from the discipline of International Relations is an influential example. Realism relies on several rhetorical devices, including a structural distinction between rhetoric and reality, a modality of abstraction, and the trope of anarchy/hierarchy. These provide both a compelling theoretical framework and a discursive program that obscures race and racism. Realist discourse operates further through several dimensions of rhetorical salience that are modulated by changes in context. Foreground, background, ambient, and ontic salience provide multiple registers for inscribing realism. Realism's lack of reflexivity in disciplinary, governmental, and public arenas adds to its power and its defects. Exposing the rhetorical constitution of realism and its architecture of non-knowing raises challenges not only for realism but also for rhetoric. These include avoiding the inscription of realism and racism within rhetorical inquiry and avoiding epistemic hubris in the self-definition of rhetoric as a discipline.

Research Article| December 01 2019 Tribute to Robert L. Scott Robert Hariman Robert Hariman Robert Hariman is Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He had the privilege of delivering the after-dinner speech to honor Robert L. Scott at the Eighth Biennial Public Address Conference, University of Georgia, October 5, 2002. The text provided here has been edited slightly, but it remains a speech given as if the honoree were in the room. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (4): 657–662. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0657 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Hariman; Tribute to Robert L. Scott. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2019; 22 (4): 657–662. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.4.0657 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Public discourse in contemporary Western democracies is constructed, studied, and policed according to a general suppression or suspicion of emotional display, which then can become a mode of dissent. These tendencies are evident in the use of visual images in the public media. An icon of emotional public protest—the young woman screaming over the murdered Kent State student on the ground before her—reveals how visual practices and emotional display are important for democratic life. The iconic photograph constitutes citizenship as an emotional construct while it shapes emotions according to norms of public order. This representation of dissent provides resources for advocacy and change, but it also is vulnerable to narratives of fragmentation and control.

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