Abstract
This chapter constructs an original performative theory of how status dynamics unfold in situ at contentious gatherings. Reception fields refer to the situational socioemotional relationships between salient speakers and their joint-attentive audiences. Building upon the growing interest in movement audiences, the theory incorporates differences in the moral emotions of onlookers and antagonists in addition to movement members. In reception fields, the microsociology of protest rhetoric and charisma hooks up with political process theory when considering how the perceived relationships between challengers, opponents, and onlookers evolve temporally at the concrete sites of protest. But, Lamb-Books shows the relational nexus of threats and opportunities is emotionally constituted by the rhetorical drama of status claimsmaking. Turning to evidence for the theory, the chapter reconstructs audience emotions by examining the nineteenth-century newspaper transcriptions of antislavery meetings.
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Notes
- 1.
Alexander (2010, 2006) does the same thing to some extent: working the binaries is a status process with cultural and affective dimensions. Here though I am actually affirming the wider insight of Alexander (2003) and cultural sociology that even ‘social structures’ are culturally and performatively constituted.
- 2.
Peter Simonson deserves credit here for uncovering the Coleridge and Winthrop connection.
- 3.
For instance, Kemper (2011) has applied the status-power theory of emotion to analyze rhetorical situations of formal oratory and the production of charisma and/or eloquence. In this setting, the ‘emotional energy’ of an audience is most shaped by the speaker’s symbolic maneuvers in the status-power game. The phenomena of charisma are dependent upon pre-existing reference groups. An orator has high charisma if they can heighten the status-power prospects of a present shared reference group. Kemper writes, “To interest and excite the crowd, the speaker focuses on the common status-power issues. Knowledge of the crowd’s status-power interests is a sine qua non. Oratorical technique, rhetorical flourishes, turns of phrase that succinctly, boldly, assertively cast the crowd’s status-power concerns into flashy talk—thereby accenting those concerns—exaggerations and innuendos that reach for hidden, maybe greedy, vengeful or other low and shameful motives, but legitimated through being enunciated and endorsed by a public figure—all these cater to the crowd’s deepest status-power interests and concerns” (2011:168). In this account of formal oratory, the semiotics of status, based on shared reference group affiliations, are the key factor of charisma and emotional experience more generally.
- 4.
Even logos requires some deference to the status of the audience’s shared doxic beliefs. In this fashion, reference group attachments and status claimsmaking penetrate the internal ethos–pathos–logos structure of rhetoric.
- 5.
Collins would view the rhetorical occasion as a formal type of interaction ritual. Protest rhetoric, for instance, usually occurs within ritual assemblies of movement participants. Rhetoric is successful if it heightens group solidarity and generates emotional energy in the ritual practitioners. Such emotional energy is generated through several ritual ingredients, including the elements that Kemper downplays like joint attention, exclusion of outsiders, rhythmic entrainment, common moods, and other short-term emotions (Collins 2004). Formal features of rhetoric are highlighted for their entrainment effects. Unfortunately, neither Collins nor Kemper take cultural sociology seriously enough, though sacred symbols once ritually constructed by group solidarity come to serve an attentional and emotional function for Collins.
- 6.
In The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter writes, “Phillips was the most valuable acquisition of the New England abolitionists. He brought to the movement a good name, an ingratiating personality, a great talent for handling mobs and hecklers, and, above all, his voice. He was probably the most effective speaker of his time. Chauncey Depew, when over 90, declared that he could recall hearing all the leading speakers from Clay and Webster to Woodrow Wilson, and that Phillips was the greatest” (1989:183).
- 7.
James Brewer Stewart. 2000. “Phillips, Wendell.” American National Biography Online; http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00548.html; Access Date: Fri Jul 05 2013.
- 8.
- 9.
“The only liberty the Publisher has taken with these materials has been to reinsert the expressions of approbation and disapprobation on the part of the audience, which Mr. Phillips had erased...This was done because they were deemed a part of the antislavery history of the times, and interesting, therefore, to every one who shall read this book...” (Publisher’s note in Phillips, 1863:iv). Public address scholar Willard Hayes Yeager (1960) notes that Phillips did take advantage of the chance to revise the text of the speeches before their final published form in his two-volume anthology. This could introduce some historical inaccuracy if one wanted to know exactly what he said and how he put it. For the purposes of analyzing the indications of audience approbation or disapprobation, which Phillips tried to delete, the potential distortion is less.
- 10.
Collins’s critique of Kemper’s status-power theory brings to issue to a head (in Collins 1990). In Kemper’s efforts to de-mythologize ritual theory, he also mechanizes it. He takes what Collins usefully calls first-order emotionality out of the dramaturgical triad. It is worth remembering that for Kemper emotions are ‘sociologically uninteresting’ in themselves. This could not be further from the truth for Collins who laminates the two together into one temporal–spatial medium of the social. Humans are naturally desirous of emotional energy and the solidarity that rituals give (cf. Turner 2007). Emotions bring people together in (rhetorical) rituals, which produce new emotions. Emotional energy is one of three primary resources that are being constantly exchanged through everyday interaction rituals (with cultural capital and social reputation being the other two, see Collins 1987). Emotions are not merely an epiphenomenal physiological reward for successful ‘status-power’ bids. Rather it is the motivational microfoundation from which power and domination dynamics emerge. In particular, Kemper’s reference groups cannot be assumed to be pregiven. They are in fact secondary outcomes of socioemotional microprocesses. Therefore, status cannot always be the theoretical prime mover, that is, in explaining away affective experiences and rhetorical eloquence, contra the position that status receives in Kemper’s writings.
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Lamb-Books, B. (2016). How Charisma and Pathos Move Audiences. In: Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31346-7_7
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