Politics and Pop Culture

As we discussed in class today, Jones' "Forums for Citizenship in Popular Culture" raises several interesting questions about the convergence of politics and popular culture, revealing, ultimately, that civic engagement largely depends on public trust; how that trust is established, or violated, is particularly intriguing when the notion of the informed citizen participant is complicated by competing assumptions, interests, and expectations. Jones argues, and you observed, that while popular culture provides an access point for engaging political discourse, the assumptions and types of appeals traditionally ascribed to each discursive realm may differ. For example, Aristotle notes in the Politics that "the law is reason unaffected by desire"(III.1287a32)--quoted in popular culture in the Reese Witherspoon film Legally Blonde as "The law is reason free from passion"; likewise, we observed (vis-a-vis Jones' argument) that politics is concerned with governance and governance ostensibly relies on logos/logical appeals in making and negotiating policy (text)and in advancing public arguments. By contrast, popular culture is comprised of and concerned with audience; it relies primarily on pathos and multifaceted pathetic appeals.

These distinctions often hold . . . until, that is, a scandal, a heated or evocative issue, or an election campaign emerges. Presidential campaigning, as we have seen in examining historical and current campaign ads, is one unique site where we see the explicit convergence of the political and the popular. This seems to suggest that the popular is more persuasive, keeping in mind the intellectual/rhetorical distinction between argument and persuasion we read in Lunsford, a notion worthy of further investigation.

In the vernacular of our class, this convergence of politics and popular culture shifts the rhetorical situation and reframes the way we experience and understand whatever it is at stake, whatever public argument is being advanced or challenged. Further, the assumptons that ground the political often differ from those which ground the popular, which Jones illustrates nicely through his contrastive examples from This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts and Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect and their respective analyses of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In understanding the rhetorical significance of the political and the popular, then, it is important to explore the implications for bringing together the popular and the political . . . for governance and for public trust, for civic participation and for democracy.