Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, 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 M (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Wendy Hesford (Advisor); Kay Halasek (Committee Member); Amy Shuman (Committee Member)
Subjects: Rhetoric