Speaking from the Heart: Mediation and Sincerity in U.S. Political Speech

Supp-Montgomerie, David

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March 20, 2019

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Supp-Montgomerie, David
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication

Abstract

This dissertation is a critique of the idea that the artifice of public speech is a problem to be solved. This idea is shown to entail the privilege attributed to purportedly direct or unmediated speech in U.S. public culture. I propose that we attend to the ethos producing effects of rhetorical concealment by asserting that all public speech is constituted through rhetorical artifice. Wherever an alternative to rhetoric is offered, one finds a rhetoric of non-rhetoric at work. A primary strategy in such rhetoric is the performance of sincerity. In this dissertation, I analyze the function of sincerity in contexts of public deliberation. I seek to show how claims to sincerity are strategic, demonstrate how claims that a speaker employs artifice have been employed to imply a lack of sincerity, and disabuse communication, rhetoric, and deliberative theory of the notion that sincere expression occurs without technology. In Chapter Two I begin with the original problem of artifice for rhetoric in classical Athens in the writings of Plato and Isocrates. Plato values immediate modes of speech because mediation, such as writing, is for him a fundamentally artificial construction of appearance. In contrast, Isocrates placed writing at the center of good thinking and defended the use of logography for the betterment of civil society. He presented a case for what I will call rhetorical literacy: the learned skill of creating and interpreting morally prudent persuasive discourse. In Chapters Three and Four, I turn to two contemporary cases beginning with a context considered to be rife with artifice: political campaigns. In Chapter Three, I discuss how the problem of artifice prompts both a crisis of ethos for political speakers and an opportunity for opponents to strategically point out the presence of artifice. Criticism of Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama often attended to the artifice of their speech, while President George W. Bush's speeches and the myth of unmediated speech indicate the tendency for some technologies to more successfully allow a speaker to conceal her or his rhetorical craft. Chapter Four examines how the appearance of unmediated communication in facilitated dialogue and deliberation requires active concealment and denial of technique. While Open Space Technology might appear to be less staged than National Issues Forums and, therefore, more natural, they both rely on the concealment of the artifice of their technique.

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