Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2013
Copyright © 2013 e Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Talking (About) the Elite and Mass:
Vernacular Rhetoric and Discursive
Status
Chris Ingraham
abstract
e rhetorical tradition has long been concerned with how to negotiate the
discursive juncture between mass and elite audiences. Such a concern has contrib-
uted to what might be characterized as the rhetorical tradition’s anxiety with regard
to its own status. In this article I suggest that this anxiety parallels an ontological
conception of the elite as second-order in relation to the first-order mass. I use
the standoff between novelist Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey in 2001 as
a running example of status tensions in the public sphere, arguing for a theory
of vernacular as language that talks and of specialized language as language that
talks about. Finally, I suggest that the separate claims to status of vernacular and
specialized language might be resolved by thinking further about Bakhtin’s theory
of heteroglossia.
introduction
In his 2002 Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, distinguished profes-
sor and legal theorist Richard Posner laid out for an academic audience
his claim that intellectual engagement and conversation are increasingly
the province of the academy and no longer torches carried by intellec-
tual figureheads out into the public sphere. Two years later, in 2004, the
best-selling Swiss writer Alain de Botton published a work of accessible
nonfiction for a popular audience called Status Anxiety. In it, he argues
that anxiety about our status—our position in society—“possesses an