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Moving the Common Sensorium: A Rhetoric of Social Movements and Pathē

Jensen, Timothy Trier
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374079125

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Moving the Common Sensorium: A Rhetoric of Social Movements and Pathē contributes to the rhetorical theorization of how historical events, cultural institutions, and social practices are shaped through affect and emotion, and in turn, how they shape the very conditions of possibility for pathē. This project seeks a more precise account of and language for what Daniel Gross calls the “[emotional] contours of a dynamic social field” and what Martin Heidegger, in referring to Aristotle’s account of pathē, labels “the everydayness of Being with one another.” Although such phrases point toward theoretically fecund ground, they also indicate the terminological difficulty encountered at the intersection of rhetoric, pathē, and structures of the social. The common sensorium, theorized as an affective and emotional analogue to common sense, is advanced as a concept to help elucidate the dynamics occurring at this intersection. Whereas common sense refers to the tacit logics of everyday living, the common sensorium refers to a cultural ambient of emotional norms. In order to examine the contours of the common sensorium, I turn to social movements, which I argue are primarily attempts to shift collective affective and emotional orientations—in other words, attempts to move the common sensorium. The analysis of each chapter is organized around an apposite ideograph—a key term or slogan particularly potent in binding, defining, and mobilizing collectivities. Specifically, I perform rhetorical analyses of eco-friendly, local, and occupy. Chapter One, “What Moves in a Social Movement,” establishes the project’s methodology and argues that the ideograph can be rendered more conceptually robust and valuable to critics when integrated with insights from affect theory and critical emotion studies. Chapter Two, “A Rhetoric of Collective Guilt: Atonement and the Environmental Movement’s Development,” demonstrates how eco-friendly rhetorics present a ready-made guilt-redemption cycle. By positioning individual consumer acts as the solution for ecological ills, the desire to join collectivities of resistance and striving against political powers is significantly attenuated. Chapter Three, “Local Food’s Affective Advocacy,” reveals how Local Food movement rhetorics predominantly seek to sensitize others to the “feltness” of food and its contexts, thereby overcoming the numbness instilled through commodification. I introduce the notion of affective advocacy to identify this rhetorical strategy, one that places the body and its material dynamics as a primary locus for enacting social change. Chapter Four, “Occupy Anger,” explores the multiple valences of occupy within the context of Occupy Wall Street rhetorics and argues that because Occupy Wall Street rhetorics never coalesced around a single demand—as their model movement of Egypt’s Tahrir Square did—the movement’s collective anger never achieved resolution.
Wendy Hesford (Advisor)
Kay Halasek (Committee Member)
Amy Shuman (Committee Member)
225 p.
Rhetoric
rhetoric; social movements; affect; emotion; pathos; ideograph; activism; advocacy; rhetorical theory; critical theory; common sense; common sensorium; Environmental movement; Local Food movement; Occupy Wall Street;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Jensen, T. T. (2013). Moving the Common Sensorium: A Rhetoric of Social Movements and Pathē [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374079125

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Jensen, Timothy. Moving the Common Sensorium: A Rhetoric of Social Movements and Pathē. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374079125.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Jensen, Timothy. "Moving the Common Sensorium: A Rhetoric of Social Movements and Pathē." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374079125

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1374079125
574
© 2013, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.