Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

This article argues that argumentation studies need to engage contemporary theories of new media technologies and culture in order to understand how public argument is empirically embedded. The article discusses the new media ecology with regard to contemporary scholarship and theory around digital cultural subjectivity and cognition, affect, professional political communication, information overload, diffusion, cybernetics and biopower — all arguably essential to understanding public argument today. It then demonstrates one way of studying popular forms of public argument by analyzing rumor bombs. Finally, it proposes that contemporary public argument has a new spatiality and temporality and is thus fundamentally different that what was considered public argument in pre-Web 2.0 culture.

The critically acclaimed WNYC program Radiolab found itself embroiled in a controversy for its recent podcast segment “Yellow Rain.” The intent of the segment was to indict the Reagan administration’s dubious pretenses for labeling yellow rain a chemical weapon. But Radiolab’s interview with survivor and historian Eng Yang took a harsh turn and concluded with one of Radiolab’s hosts, Robert Krulwich calling Yang’s experience hearsay. This essay uses the “Yellow Rain” controversy to highlight two important features of argumentation in the podcast context. First, podcasts feature what I call ‘the acoustics of strategic maneuvering,’ which describes the way sound itself acts as presentational force in the service of a standpoint. Second, podcasts ephemerality enables Radiolab to revise their arguments to incorporate audience expectations.

Focusing on the historical controversies surrounding the development of the print records of the U.S. congressional debates, this essay explores how human, technological, and discursive agencies come together to constitute institutional argumentative practice. Examining the U.S. Congressional Record through the lens of Bruno Latour’s concept of dingpolitik reveals that as a technology of representation print records work less as mediators and more as agents of institutional contextualization. Print records do more than translate arguments from oral to written form or transfer arguments from the public sphere to the state. Rather, they assemble the disparate elements that constitute the terrains of governance, the character of political issues, and the norms of congressional deliberation. Hence, the material dynamics of congressional deliberation prompt not only a reconsideration of what and who is being represented by Congress, but also a methodological reorientation from normative to constitutive perspectives on institutional argumentation.

Alabama House Bill (HB) 56 passed in 2011 and was written by Kris Kobach. The bill targets migrant groups, pressuring them to “self-deport”. Kobach’s language subjugates migrants in a way that defines their bodies with shame. I am interested in how Goodnight and Natanson conceive of risk in the practice of social argumentation. For that, I employ philosophical perspectives of affect to reconsider language as relational, and demonstrate how affective language moves bodies. I then consider the channeling of affect and the ways negative affects get strategically directed at defined subject-individuals, shifting presumption of not belonging onto those bodies exhibiting migrant characteristics within the state. Affect, modulated through language, creates affective boundaries, and I demonstrate how Kobach obliges citizens of Alabama to participate in both the shaming of the undocumented migrant and the maintenance of the affective boundary keeping the undocumented migrant body from citizenship.